Mahasamadhi of Gnananandagiri Swamigal

Swami attained Mahasamadhi in the year 1974 (January). While Swami’s idol at Manimandapam is itself the symbol of the Swami as Dakshinamurti, the Mahalinga consecrated on top of Swami’s Samadhi per his instructions (to devotees well before his Samadhi) is the symbol of God’s coming into His creation and equally the symbol of the creatures passing, his departure into God. The Shivalinga stands between form and non-form, rupa and arupa, between manifestation and what can never be manifested.” The Swami had expressed a desire that the deepastamba — a column of lights’— which stood in front of the idol should be moved ahead a little further to a point from which one can pay obeisance to both the idol at Manimandapam and the Mahalinga at the samadhi.

The column of lights is the symbol of the Knowable, the self-luminous Brahman which is the inmost Self of everything, the Light even of lights, eulogised in the Gita as ‘Jyotisharriapi Tajjyotih’, By Its light, Its radiance, everything is lighted, illumined .

The Swami is wholly present in these signs “which are utterly ‘beyond’; yet at the same time and for that very reason most intimately within, the absolute of both transcendence and immanence”. His transcendence is the very source of immanence; “transcendence and immanence being no more than two of man’s words by which he tries to indicate simultaneously the beyondness and the withinness of the supreme mystery, both the rupa and the arupa of Being.