Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nisargadatta Maharaj was an Indian guru of nondualism, belonging to the Inchagiri Sampradaya, a lineage of teachers from the Navnath Sampradaya and Lingayat Shaivism. The publication in 1973 of I Is That, an English translation of his talks in Marathi by Maurice Frydman, brought him worldwide recognition and followers, especially from North America and Europe.

Nisargadatta was born on 17 April 1897 to Shivrampant Kambli and Parvati bai, in Bombay. The day was also Hanuman Jayanti, the birthday of Hanuman. Hence the boy was named 'Maruti' after him. His parents were followers of the Varkari sampradaya, an egalitarian Vaishnavite bhakti tradition that worships Vithoba. His father, Shivrampant, worked as a domestic servant in Mumbai and later became a petty farmer in Kandalgaon.

Maruti Shivrampant Kambli was brought up in Kandalgaon, a small village in the Sindhudurga district of Maharashtra, with his two brothers, four sisters, and deeply religious parents. In 1915, after his father died, he moved to Bombay to support his family back home, following his elder brother. Initially, he worked as a junior clerk at an office, but he quickly opened a small goods store, mainly selling beedis (leaf-rolled cigarettes), and soon owned a string of eight retail shops. In 1924 he married Sumatibai, and they had three daughters and a son.

In 1933, he was introduced to his guru, Siddharameshwar Maharaj, the head of the Inchegiri branch of the Navnath Sampradaya, by his friend Yashwantrao Baagkar. His guru told him, "You are not what you take yourself to be...". Siddharameshwar initiated him into the Inchegiri Sampradaya, giving him meditation instruction and a mantra, which he immediately recited. Siddharameshwar gave Nisargadatta instructions for self-inquiry, which he followed verbatim, as he recounted later:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am.' It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!

Following his guru's instructions to concentrate on the feeling of "I Am," he spent all his spare time looking at himself silently. He remained in that state for the coming years, practicing meditation and singing devotional bhajans.

My Guru told me: "...Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am.' Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all." My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine; your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God; your will alone is done." I did believe him and soon realized his words were wonderfully true and accurate.

 I did not condition my mind by thinking, "I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond." I simply followed his instruction: to focus the mind on the pure being "I am" and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the "I am" in my mind, and soon, the peace and joy and deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it, all disappeared—me, my guru, my life, and the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence. (I Am That, Dialogue 51, April 16, 1971).