By: D. Sankaraiah
Various are the paths that lead to Truth. Lord Sainath highlights three paths: Bhakti, Jnana, and Karma. But each of these highways has countless lanes. Musicians like Thyagaraja and Purandara took the music route to God. Baba’s associate, Radhakrishna Mai, like legendary Meera, chose bhajan; Adi Shankara, philosophy; The Apostle of Sai Baba Narasimha Swamiji chose the path of activism through Sai Satcharita and Sri Radhakrishna Swamiji through Vishnu Sahasranama. What was common in these legends? Their search for God was to find the essence of Creation that unifies all beings and things. This essence, or God, has various names. It is Omnipresent and Infinite. It is also minute and invisible. It is the One, the Infinite, and the Zero.
On Dec 22, 1887, born in Erode, in Tamil Nadu, Srinivasa Ramanujan charted a novel route to God: Mathematics! Like all sciences, math is of two kinds: pure and applied. Ramanujan had no interest in applied math; he was devoted, head and heart, to pure mathematics.
Human calculators are those gifted with brains that can multiply or divide large numbers. True mathematicians, however, are a different tribe. They probe patterns in creation, which they later express as mathematical theorems. There is a spiritual undercurrent to their math. Pythagoras, Newton, Einstein, and Srinivasa Ramanujan were such mathematicians.
In his work ‘Life of Sai Baba,’ Narasimha Swamiji states that Pure mathematicians engage with the Infinity, ‘Ananta.’ They may or may not be pious in the conventional sense. Ramanujan’s piety was explicit. He was devoted to his family deity, Namagiri, consort of Narasimha, the man-lion avatar of Mahavishnu. Ramanujan had no formal degree and was jobless in 1910 when he received an invitation from Cambridge University. Ramanujan spent three nights in vigil in the courtyard of Devi’s shrine in Namakkal, seeking guidance on whether he, a Brahmin, should cross the seas to study in England, risking spiritual pollution. At the third midnight, a column of bright light flashed, which he took as Devi’s consent. Ramanujan sailed to Cambridge. The rest is history.
He attributed to God his intuitions into mathematical truths. While still a lad, he indulged in mystical monologues laced with math, which his listeners often found bizarre. Once, he held a local audience in Kumbakonam spellbound with his monologue on the ties he saw between God, zero, and infinity. He often said that an equation for him had no meaning ‘unless it expresses a thought of God’.
We have parallels from Sai Satcharita to Ramanujan’s life. Infinity – ‘Ananta’, is one among the thousand names of Mahavishnu in the Vishnu Sahasranama. The bulk of Ramanujan’s discoveries in mathematics related to the infinite series. It was intriguing, almost embarrassing, for his Western ‘rational’ friends to be told that many of his findings were revealed to him in dreams by God. References to dream visions are plenty in Sai Satcharita and ‘Devotees Experiences. The flip side of this was that his theorems often jumped steps. Like the instances narrated in Sai Satcharita, they were cryptic and packed to the point of appearing abstruse.
Western mathematicians have had to toil hard at working out proofs to make Ramanujan’s theorems conform to academic discipline. They would marvel at the brilliance of Ramanujan, as much, perhaps, as at the way of God who inspired such intuition in someone who otherwise appeared so ordinary.
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