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Who is a Guru? What is he made of? Who is a disciple? Excerpt from Talks with Ramana Maha Rishi: Talk 398, page 385-386
Disciple: Swami Vivekananda says that a spiritual Guru can transfer spirituality substantially to the disciple.
Maha Rishi: Is there a substance to be transferred? Transfer means eradication of the sense of being the disciple. The master does it. Not that the man was something at one time and metamorphosed later into another.
Disciple: Is not Grace the gift of the Guru?
Maha Rishi: God, Grace and Guru are all synonymous and also eternal and immanent. Is not the Self already within? Is it for the Guru to bestow it by his look? If a Guru thinks so, he does not deserve the name.
The books say that there are so many kinds of diksha (
initiations hasta diksha, sparsa diksha, chakshu diksha, mano diksha, etc.) , They also say that the Guru makes some rites with fire, water, japa, mantras, etc., and call such fantastic performances dikshas, as if the disciple (sishya) becomes ripe only after such processes are gone through by the Guru.
If the individual (Guru) is sought he is nowhere to be found. Such is the Guru.
Such is Dakshinamurti. What did he do? He was silent; the disciples appeared before him. He maintained silence, the doubts of the disciples were dispelled, which means that they lost their
individual identities. That is jnana and not all the verbiage usually associated with it.
Silence is the most potent form of work. However vast and emphatic the sastras may be, they fail in their effect. The Guru is quiet and peace prevails in all. His silence is more vast and more emphatic than all the sastras put together. These questions arise because of the feeling, that having been here so long, heard so much, exerted so hard, one has not gained anything. The work proceeding within is not apparent. In fact the Guru is always within you.
Thayumanavar says: "Oh Lord! Coming with me all along the births, never abandoning me and finally rescuing me!" Such is the experience of Realization.
Srimad Bhagavad Gita says the same in a different way, "We two are not only now but have ever been so."
Disciple: Does not the Guru take a concrete form?
Maha Rishi: What is meant by concrete? Because you identify your being with your body, you raise this question. Find out if you are the body.
The Gita says: param bhavam ajanantah (Bh. Gita IX - II) that those who cannot understand the transcendental nature (of Sri Krishna) are fools, deluded by ignorance.
The master appears to dispel that ignorance. As Thayumanavar puts it, he appears as a man to dispel the ignorance of a man, just as a deer is used as a decoy to capture the wild deer. He has to appear with a body in order to eradicate our ignorant "l-am-the-body" idea.
Talk 35. Identification with the body is Dvaita. Non-identification is Advaita.
Dakshinamurti, the south-facing Siva-Guru is God, Guru, Self, and teacher. He is a very young teacher with aged students at his feet; he teaches Advaitic principles by silence and Cin-Mudra, apposition of thumb and forefinger which indicates the identity of the Supreme Self and the individual self. His face is suffused in Bliss. Advaitic principle says that the Self appears as the teacher, the taught, god and the self. Sankaracharya, the propounder of Advaita, brings four elements together in one advaitic unity in the following hymns: Jiva, the individual soul and the enjoyer; the universe, the object enjoyed; the Supreme Siva, the grantor of enjoyment, and the Guru, the leader in the path of release.
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