Devarat: The Shadow of the Master

Sri Ramanujacharya and his exemplary disciples, like Govinda, passed their days in divine discourses, divine events, and divine work. In an earlier chapter we left Yajna-murti, renamed Arulalapperumal Emberumanar, after his becoming a disciple. Around this time certain incidents befell this sage.

A number of Srivaishnavas from a distant land came on a visit to Srirangam and asked passers-by where the monastery of Emberumanar was. "Which Emberumanar?" came the reply. The travellers were surprised. Were there two sages of that name in the faith? "No," they were told, "but here is Arulalapperumal Emberumanar, who bears that name in honor of Ramanuja. That is why we ask. If you mean Sri Ramanujacharya himself, there is his monastery." So directed, the travellers found their way to Sri Ramanujacharya.

This conversation accidentally reached the ears of Arulalapperumal Emberumanar, and it grieved him that he should be confused with Sri Ramanujacharya. "This confusion," he thought, "would never have arisen if I had not lived apart from him in a separate monastery, and with his name, as though I were some rival set up against him! My dwelling therefore must not stand." He at once pulled it down, and hastened to Sri Ramanujacharya. Clasping his feet he cried, "O my Holiness! Was it not enough that this sinful soul of mine should have been estranged from your holy feet through all the past eternity? Why should that separation persist even now?"

"Beloved," said Sri Ramanujacharya, "you are speaking in riddles. What is the matter? Why are you in such distress?" "Holy Sire," he said, and then recounted the travellers' conversation and how it had affected his standing. "I can no longer live apart from you, with all the risk of such mistakes, which harm the well-being of my soul and endanger its eternal interests. My soul can thrive only by being allowed to live with you always, to move about as the marks of the soles of your feet and as your shadow, and to do every service for you." "Be it as you wish," said Sri Ramanujacharya, graciously raising the prostrate form of Devarat.

For Devarat, Sri Ramanujacharya composed a work called the Nityam, the method of daily worship of God, and appointed him to the daily worship duty in the matha (monastery). From that day on, he never left his master's side, and drank deeply of all the precious truths of philosophy and religion that flowed like honey from Sri Ramanujacharya's holy lips.

These sterling truths of the Vedanta he set down in two short Tamil verse-treatises of his own, the Jnana-sara and the Prameya-sara. Their essence is: