SHUNYATA

Shunyata (sometimes "Sunyata," "Shunya," or "Sunyabhai." Birth name Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen) was a Danish "natural born mystic" who lived unknown in India for 40 years before being induced to go to California and replace Alan Watts.

Shunyata never advertised himself and always said that he was not a teacher. He came from no lineage and left no successor. Yet he affected many people (while making no effort to do so). One of them compared him to a Chinese landscape painting in that he implied so much more than he said.

Sorensen was born in northern Denmark in 1890, the son of a peasant farmer. He went to school but says that he escaped "headucation." He preferred nature, his own company and silence. When he was 14 his father sold the farm and as a result, he was uprooted -- his word -- and left school. He trained as a horticulturist and then went abroad. He had jobs in France and Italy for a while but ended up in England where he worked as a gardener for 20 years. No record of this time exists. But in 1929 he met Rabindranath Tagore when Tagore was visiting Dartington Hall, near Tones in Devon (where Shunyata was working). They got on well and Tagore invited Shunyata (still known as Alfred Sorensen) to visit him at Santiniketan, his centre near Calcutta. "Come to India to teach silence." Shunyata says that he had no problems or questions, but went to India to see if the consciousness he was already aware of "was a living thing still".

He remained in India for 18 months during the years 1929-31, traveling on his own after staying with Tagore for only a short while -- and found that travel suited him. Sometime within those 18 months (or possibly just after his second return) he was befriended by a young American that was in the process of returning to the United States after many years in India. In a final pilgrimage on the sub-continent before leaving for the U.S. the American was on his way to Swami Ramdas to pay homage and his respects as well as offer his thanks and gratitude for sending him to the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi several years earlier. The young American was to become famous anonymously some years later in a book by British author W. Somerset Maugham titled The Razor's Edge. The meeting was a turning point for Shunyata because the man, basically no different than himself, had Awakened to the Absolute under the auspices of a sage Shunyata was later to say was his "most significant spiritual encounter." Shunyata returned briefly to the West, possibly traveling with the anonymous American, to tie up some loose ends, then went back to India and stayed there for the next 40-odd years. (source)

At the beginning of those 40 years he lived in a tree on a small island in the Ganges near Hardwar. Students from the college in the town would swim out to the island and he would climb down from the tree to talk to them. But eventually he ended up near Almora, about 7,000 feet up in the mountains near the borders of Nepal and Tibet, reportedly the new stompping grounds for the recently resurfaced Aziz Kristof. The Nehru family had a house in the area, Shunyata was their gardener for a time and remained a friend of the family for the rest of his life. After a few years, he was given a piece of land on the estate of an Anglo-Indian family and built himself a stone hut where he lived on his own.

He never had a job from that moment on. The Indians accepted him as a sadhu and he could live on what he was given to supplement what he grew in his garden. He never asked for anything; it was always given. He was once offered 20 rupees a month but would only accept five. After living in this way for 20 years, he was offered 100 rupees a month by the mega-wealthy Birla Foundation but accepted twenty. This was his only source of income until he went to California 25 years later. It is evident from what people say about him that he was fundamentally uninterested in money and could not understand why people wanted it. Even in California, the land of plenty, he never asked for a donation

Cranks Ridge

Shunyata put up a sign outside his hut: NO VISITORS. SILENCE. But over the years he did meet quite a few well-known teachers of various persuasions (sometimes at his place, sometimes at their's): Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Anirvan, Krishnamurti, Yashoda Mai (Sri Krishna Prem's guru; her ashram was also near Almora). He knew Krishna Prem as well but thought him rather earnest and "too mental" -- not qualities that Shunyata rated very highly. In fact, Almora attracted a number of Western pioneers who lived, quite independently of each other, along what came to be called Crank's Ridge. W.Y. Evans-Wentz had a house there, which he lent to Lama Anagarika Govinda when he was away (which was often). Shunyata knew them both. Perhaps the best known visitors to his tiny hut were Anandamayi Ma and Neem Karoli Baba (Ram Dass's guru). (no dates for any of these meetings.) There is some indication that he knew or met Wei Wu Wei (Terrence Gray) as well.

The most significant spiritual encounter in Shunyata's eyes was the one with Sri Ramana Maharshi mentioned above. Shunyata visited him at his ashram in Arunachala in 1936 and was introduced to the Maharshi by the author Paul Brunton who had noticed him as a westerner "gone native squatting along the wall" amongst the crowd. Afterwards, Brunton wrote to him to say that Ramana had said that Shunyata was "a rare born mystic." Shunyata was fond of telling this story, and also the one about his silent communion with Ramana. This happened a year after the first visit when Shunyata was sitting, along with other visitors, in front of Ramana. He had not asked a question nor made his presence known in any particular way:

"We (that is, Shunyata, became aware of) a special effulgence specially radiated and directed towards our form . . .five English words came suddenly upon us out of Silence. These were totally unsolicited but we took them as recognition, initiation, name and mantra:

"WE ARE ALWAYS AWARE, SUNYATA."

The above event at the Ramana Ashram was the origin of Shunyata's name. Now, while it is true, because of the same or a similar event, Sri Ramana had said that Shunyata was "a rare born mystic" and even though Shunyata may have been such, the special effulgence specially radiated and directed towards our form that Shunyata refers to was not totally an unusual event. For certain, a high level of one's spiritual attainment similar to Shunyata while before the Maharshi was never a requirement nor a factor in positive end results. Many a regular person experienced the full light and grace of the Maharshi. For example as found in the following, a recounting of a young boy's nearly instant transformation into the Absolute during his only Darshan with the Maharshi, a young boy that grew up to eventually meet Shunyata:

SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI

For more on the aforementioned meeting between Shunyata and the young boy as a grown up, please refer to the bottom of page two of ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds. It should be noted that Adam Osborne, who, as a young boy grew up at the Ramana Ashram and the son of one of the foremost Ramana biographers Arthur Osborne, played a prominent role in the Last American Darshan as linked above.

In 1973, some members of the Alan Watts Society arrived at Shunyata's door high in the mountains, sent there by his neighbor, Lama Anagarika Govinda, and ended up asking him to come to California. "I have nothing to teach, nothing to sell," was his reply. When the Watts contingent got back to Sausalito, they found that Watts had died in their absence. So they renewed their invitation -- one of them said later that they saw in him what Watts had been writing about all his life -- and in 1974 Shunyata set out on a four-month, all-expenses-paid visit to California (during which he 'gave darshan' at Esalen and Palm Springs amongst other places). Finally, in 1978, he moved to California for good -- at the age of 88 and after spending nearly half a century leading a life of the utmost simplicity in a remote corner of India.

It is easy to see that he was not really a teacher, as he said himself. Even so, there were people who were influenced by him and in a sense considered themselves his followers. Once, Shunyata appeared on a radio program and evidently made a considerable impression on the host, who said, "I'm experiencing something non-verbal coming from you right now." "I'm not aware of it," was Shunyata's reply. "I don't try. No trying." And when the host said that Shunyata seemed to embody the quality of sunyata (which Shunyata had just defined as "full solid emptiness, no-thingness"), Shunyata simply said, "I speak Out of it in a way."

According to the report by Fairfax, California police department, on Sunday morning August 5, 1984, at 9:14 a.m. Shunyata was hit by a car at the corner of Azalea Avenue and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. He was transported to the Ross Valley Hospital all the while slowly slipping into a coma. After a continuing series of strokes and visible signs of brain damage doctors placed him on life support. Five days after the accident, for unstated reasons, hospital staff removed him from the machines and his death recorded as 9:27 a.m. Monday August 13th.

Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.

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AWAKENED TEACHERS FORUM

This article, except for some minor editing and updating, has been adapted primarily from THE BOOK OF ENLIGHTENED MASTERS: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions, by Andrew Rawlinson, Open Court, 1997, ISBN 0-8126-9310-8.

The book relates to the reader the lives and teachings of nearly 200 influential Masters. Drawing a background for understanding these teachers as part of a phenomenon, Rawlinson presents his version of the story of the blooming of Western Teachers, and then looks at their meaning and significance in terms of comparative religion and spiritual psychology, all of which is presented in a separate section that may be left unread if one merely wishes to gain entrance into the life and work of any one Master/Teacher.

The opening quote as well as some additional information is from DANCING WITH THE VOID: The Innerstandings of a Rare-Born Mystic Sunyata, edited by: Betty Camhi & Guru Baksh Rai, Blue Dove Press, ISBN: 1-884997-19-8.

SEE:

THE AWAKENING EXPERIENCE IN THE MODERN ERA

THE DANGERS OF PSEUDO ADVAITA

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