The story

The seventeenth name in the Ashtottara of Sri Ramanujacharya is Praṇatārti-vināśana — "destroyer of the sorrow of those who bow down before him." In the life of Bhagavad Ramanuja this name is not an abstraction. It is the plain record of how he received every soul who sought shelter at his feet.

The Guruparamparai Prabhavam preserves the account of Pillai Urangavilli Dasar — Dhanurdasa — a wrestler of Uraiyur whose heart was wholly captured by the physical beauty of his wife Ponnachi. Walking behind her with a parasol raised to shade her eyes and a cloth laid to soften the ground beneath her feet, he was a man consumed by an earthly passion.

Sri Ramanujacharya, seeing him, did not scold, and did not turn away. He asked a single question: if a beauty were shown to him greater than this, would he surrender to it? The answer was yes. The acharya led him to the sannidhi of Sri Ranganatha at Srirangam, and there the Lord's eyes met Dhanurdasa's. The account says his attachment was not destroyed but transfigured — the same capacity for total devotion now turned toward Sriman Narayana. Both Dhanurdasa and Ponnachi took refuge at the acharya's feet.

Dhanurdasa came to be called Uranga-villi — "he who does not sleep" — for the vigil he kept in service of the Lord and the acharya. When, in later years, some questioned whether it was fitting for Ramanujacharya to accept the hand of one outside the learned communities, the Guruparamparai records that the couple's bhagavata-nishtha, their devotion to the Lord's devotees, silenced every objection.

This was the acharya's way. Alavandar's grandsons, a wrestler and his wife, forest-dwellers at Melkote, learned Brahmins, simple cowherds — sharanagati, the surrender of the whole being to Sriman Narayana, was offered as the one path open to all. He turned no one away.

Contemplation

To call upon Bhagavad Ramanuja as Praṇatārti-vināśana is to remember that every grief laid at his feet is already being undone. The acharya did not wait for the soul to become worthy; he received the soul and let sharanagati itself do the purifying. This is the courage at the heart of our tradition: to bow, exactly as we are, trusting that the one who bows will be carried the rest of the way to Sriman Narayana. Chant the Ashtakshara — Om Namo Narayanaya — one hundred and eight times, and lay the burden down.