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About Shankaracharya
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Sankara was a Nambudri Brahmin who took sanyasa at the age
of eight and went all over India. He had many marvelous achievements before the age of 32
when he disappeared from this world of mortals. His village home was Kaladi on the
outskirts of Travanacore. He had promised his mother that at the time of her death, she
had only to think of him, and he would be there at her bedside. The tragic day came and
the mother prayed for her son's return. |
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Sankara was there as if by a miracle. Then the old woman died. His fellow
Nambudris would not help in the disposal of the dead. That was because they mistakenly
thought that sanyasa amounted to heterodoxy. So Sankara by his own hands removed the
corpse of his mother to the backyard of the house. There was no fuel available. So he cut
a plantain tree and arranged its sheaths to cover the body.
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A sanyasin is not permitted to make use of fore. So by his
yogic power, he produced fire which burnt the plantain tree and the corpse. He could not,
however, suppress his anger. So he cursed the Nambudris that thereafter, as in his
mother's case, their house and crematorium would be identical.
The Nambudris who had by now realized the mystic powers of Sankara, repented their
original impudence and begged of him not to curse them. |
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Tradition says that Sankara promised the Nambudris that in a later incarnation as
the high pontiff of Sringeri, he would release them from their curse.
Sachindananda Sivabhinava Narashima Bharati, who in 1911 visited Kaladi and installed the
image of Sankara on the very spot where he was born, released the surrounding Nambudri
villages of the curse that had overtaken them. |
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