[2015년 4월호] A Week with Amma at Amritapuri Ashram in India /Saddharma Frank M. Tedesco, Ph.D.

[파란연꽃]

 A Week with Amma at Amritapuri Ashram in India

Saddharma Frank M. Tedesco, Ph.D.




In our March 2015 article we wrote about our participation in the Fifth Conference of the ICCS -International Center for Cultural Studies and Gathering of Elders at the Ganapati Sachchidananda Ashram in Mysuru (Mysore), India. After those intense four days with spiritual leaders, we traveled south to the Kalpetta area, in the town of Meenangadi, Wayanad, Kerala where we spent a few nights as guests of a family of Ayurvedic doctors (traditional Indian medical practitioners). They were generous and gracious hosts and served us delicious home-made vegetarian meals made from vegetables and rice they grow on their own land as well as milk from their own cows. We both received Ayurvedic oil massages in their Ayurveda hospital and yoga center. I recommend anyone who is ailing or in need of relief to go there for deeply relaxing medical treatment for a few weeks. The food is organic and tasty and room and care inexpensive by Western standards. See www.purnayoo.com. Just one warning! Keep away from walking on the fringe of the national wildlife forest preserves nearby. A tiger may be hungry for you! See the article in the morning paper we read while there.  http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/woman-killed-in-tiger-attack-in-wayanad/article6897904.ece





From Kalpetta in Kerala, Jenny and I took an air-conditioned bus all night to Kollam where the Amritapuri Ashram of the world-famous hugging saint Ammi makes her home in India. Arriving at the ashram by auto-rickshaw before dawn, we were given our own room with bath on the tenth floor of a fifteen story high-rise dormitory with elevators. We had a view of the Arabian Sea from our window and could hear the waves breaking on the beach nearby night and day. We were only charged $8 a day for a private room including breakfast, lunch and dinner! It was fun to look down from our window and see fishing boats on the ocean and all sorts of people practicing hatha yoga on the rooftops of lower buildings near ours. Ours was the highest in the ashram complex. A few thousand people, most from India but many from all parts of the world gathered to live at the ashram when Amma was in residence. All these guests and devotees have to be fed and housed. Most longer-term residence perform seva or volunteer service in the kitchens, working in recycling centers for collecting plastics, paper, metals, etc. and preparing compost for the ashram's farms that provide most of the fvegetables, rice and milk that we consumed. Some devotees ran the shops and did administrative tasks to keep operations running smoothly with the thousands of  people visiting to have darshan or a “spiritual look” and hug with Amma.

Amma travels most of the year over northern India, all over Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas so the local people crowd into the ashram to speak with her in their own languages when she is home at Amritapuri. Amma's life is extraordinary; she is exceptionally spiritually gifted and she transforms the lives of people she meets very profoundly like the great saints we read about in history. Amma was born and raised with her parents and siblings in a poor fishermen's village where the ashram is now. She only went to the fourth grade in elementary school. She was forced to drop out to work as a domestic servant for her family or earn money as a seamstress. Amma's mother was ill most of the time when she was growing up so she had extra burdens at home. Amma was very different from her siblings. She has dark brown skin that sometimes looks blue-black like the Hindu god Krishna when she called to Him. Amma was prone to spiritual ecstasy from childhood and her family and neighbors thought she was very strange and did not respect her until she began performing miracles. Now she is beloved all over the globe, speaks at the United Nations with world leaders, builds hospitals and universities and gives away millions of dollars in humanitarian relief efforts and long-term projects across six continents. Not bad for short, fat, black, uneducated female!

Her family language is Malayalam, the local tongue, but she sings bhajans or devotional songs in many other Indian languages. It seems as if Amma sings and recites mantras and prayers all the time, from early in the morning to late at night. The constant singing in the ashram auditorium which is as big as an aircraft hangar creates a sweet and harmonious atmosphere throughout the community. Amma takes little time out to sleep or eat or what we might call “relaxation”. She is busy all the time listening to the sad stories, complaints and worries of all the people who line up, waiting for hours to spend a few moments with her and receive a warm hug. Her closest disciples have tallied that she has met and hugged 34 million people around the world so far.

Jenny and I received our hugs from Amma the first day we arrived at Amritapuri. Her feeling of warmth and complete acceptance is still with us. One night after we had gone to bed exhausted from a full day of walking and yoga in the intense heat, I rose from sleep two in the morning and followed the angelic sound of of bhajan singing down into the auditorium and onto the stage where Amma was still hugging visitors. I waited on line to receive a second hug and to confess to Amma my discouragement with my hospice and prison service in Florida. I felt quite disillusioned with my True Dharma work. Through an interpreter Amma sensed my pain immediately and hugged me close to her heart. Looking at me directly in the eyes, she said in English “make happy”.

Her two simple words struck me deeply. I immediately understood what she said. It was not sweet but passive encouragement to “be happy”. Rather make others happy more vigorously,  not to accept their long prison sentences passively but to make the most of the difficult challenge. Not to die soon in hospice despondently and depressed but to be proactive with good cheer, planning for a better future life. Make happy with humor, energy, hope, music, to be fully alive and not glum, not sad, with some kind of sombre and unenlightened Buddhist “wisdom” about “dukkha” (suffering).  To be more light-hearted about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. See joy in emptiness and interdependence of all things! My Dharma name in Korean is Jin Boep which is “Saddharma” in Sanskrit (as in the Sanskrit title of the Lotus Sutra, Saddharmapundarika- “lotus of the true law or teachings (dharma)”. But Saddharma is not “sad dharma”  but True Dharma. May Jin Boep True Dharma be happy. May True Dharma be well and happy! Ever-loving and ever-joyful Amma embodies the bodhisattva spirit of empathy for all beings like Avalokiteshvara (Gwanseum) and active assistance to healing the world on physical and spiritual planes like Samantabhadra (Bo Hyeon)! She has re-enlivened my commitment to Buddha's teachings. I have become more emotionally devoted to True Dharma because of her.