Shedding Ego Gives Greater Happiness

Sri Ramana Maharshi

30-5-1946

G.V.S. asked Bhagavan about his early days and whether he ever went about accepting alms. Then Bhagavan related how it was T.P. Ramachandra Aiyar’s father who first took him by mere force to his house and fed him, and how the first time he begged for food was from Chinna Gurukal’s wife. He went on to tell how after that he freely begged in almost all the streets of Tiruvannamalai. 

He said: “You cannot conceive of the majesty and dignity I felt while so begging. The first day, when I begged from Gurukal’s wife, I felt bashful about it as a result of habits of upbringing, but after that there was absolutely no feeling of abasement. I felt like a king and more than a king. I have sometimes received stale gruel at some house and taken it without salt or any other flavouring, in the open street, before great pandits and other important men who used to come and prostrate themselves before me at my Asramam, then wiped my hands on my head and passed on supremely happy and in a state of mind in which even emperors were mere straw in my sight. You can’t imagine it. It is because there is such a path that we find tales in history of kings giving up their thrones and taking to this path.”

In illustration of this, Bhagavan told us a story of a king who renounced his throne and went begging, first outside the limits of his State, then in his own State, then in its capital city, and finally in the royal palace itself, and thus at last got rid of his ego-sense. After some time, when he was wandering as an ascetic in another State, he was chosen to be its king and accepted because now that he had completely lost the sense of ‘I’ he could act any part in life as a mere witness and the cares of kingship no longer worried him. When his own former State heard of it, they also asked him to resume his kingship, and he did so, because however many kingdoms he might rule over, he realized now that he was not the doer but simply an instrument in God’s hands.

Actually, Bhagavan did not finish the story, because when he was in the middle of it Mrs. Ranga Aiyar began to sing and he broke off and told us apologetically, “She is leaving tonight and wants to finish all her songs before she goes.” I asked him for the rest of the story next day.