ART-1206 The Life of Sahajanand Swami

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Sahajanand Swami, also known as Swaminarayan, was born in April 1781 in the small village of Chapaiya north of Ayodhya in the State of Uttar Pradesh India. In accordance with Indian custom on the sixth day after birth he was given his name, Ghanshyam. The boy’s father was Dharmdeva and his mother Bhaktimata. Both were religious and highly respected

From a very early age the boy demonstrated extraordinary genius and religious devotion. By the age of 10, he had mastered the Hindu scriptures. At the age of 11, upon the death of his parents, he renounced home. He assumed the name of Nilakanth, and as a brahmachari embarked on an arduous 7-year sojourn on foot across the length and breadth of India. By the age of 14, he became accomplished in ashtanga-yoga, and had matered the teachingsd of all the major philosophical traditions. Eventually, at the age of 18 he settled in Gujarat. On the 20th October 1800, in a village called Piplana, he was initiated buy a guru called Shri Ramanand, an ascetic in the line of the Vaishnava tradition coming from Ramanuja. Nilakanth received the new name Sahajanand Swami.

He spent the remaining three decades of his life transforming the lives of countless people. He ushered in a moral and spiritual renaissance in Gujarāt and had over 3000 sannyasi disciplesHe and his disciples campaigned against the custom of sati, female infanticide and other vices then prevalent in Gujarati society. . He introduced the chanting of the Swaminarayan mahamantra as a means to attaining samadhi, spiritual trance. He wrote the Shikshapatri, moral codes of conduct for His disciples. Today, the sannyasis are very strict about their dealings with women. One of the early copies of the Shikshapatri (all copied by hand) is in the Bodlean Library in Oxford. His teaching he wrote down in a book called the Vachanamritam. After having invested his authority in two nephews, Swaminarayan passed away in 1830. His mission continues through his sampradaya, which teachers the theology of nava-vishishtadavita, a reformed version of Ramanuja’s teachings. Today there are a number of different bracnches of the sampradaya. Most consider Swmainarayana to be an incarantion of God himself.