David Godman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Godman (born 1953) has written on the life, teachings and disciples of Ramana Maharshi, an Indian sage who lived and taught for more than fifty years at Arunachala, a sacred mountain in Tamil Nadu, India. In the last 30 years Godman has written or edited 16 books on topics related to Sri Ramana, his teachings and his followers.
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David Godman was born in 1953 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. His father was a schoolmaster and mother a physiotherapist who specialised in treating physically handicapped children. He was educated at local schools and in 1972 won a place at Oxford University.[1]
It was sometime in his second year there that he became interested in Ramana Maharshi after reading about his teachings in a book that had been compiled by Arthur Osborne. Godman has said:
It wasn't that I had found a new set of ideas that I believed in. It was more of an experience in which I was pulled into a state of silence. In that silent space I knew directly and intuitively what Ramana's words were hinting and pointing at. Because this state itself was the answer to all my questions, and any other questions I might come up with, the interest in finding solutions anywhere else dropped away. I suppose I must have read the book in an afternoon, but by the time I put it down it had completely transformed the way I viewed myself and the world.[1]
Godman first visited the Tiruvannamalai ashram of Ramana Maharshi in 1976.[2] For eight years, between 1978 and 1985, he was the librarian of the ashram.[3] In the 1970s, Godman frequented Nisargadatta Maharaj’s satsangs in Mumbai.[4]
In the early 1980s Godman started to visit Lakshmana Swamy, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, in his ashram in Andhra Pradesh. At the instigation of Lakshmana Swamy he wrote No Mind – I am the Self,[5] about the lives and teachings of Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma, the latter being Lakshmana Swamy's own disciple.[6] When Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma moved to Tiruvannamalai in the late 1980s, Godman looked after and helped to develop their new property, which was located close to Sri Ramanasramam.[7]
In 1985 his edited anthology of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, Be As You Are, was published by Penguin.[8]
In 1987 Godman conducted extensive interviews with Annamalai Swami, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi who worked at Sri Ramanasramam between 1928 and 1938. The interviews were the primary source for his book, Living by the Words of Bhagavan, a biography that chronicled Annamalai Swami's relationship with Sri Ramana.[9]
Godman has contributed to a scholarly debate on the true identity of Larry Darrel, a character who appeared in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.[10][11] Maugham visited Ramanasramam in 1938 and later wrote an essay entitled "The Saint" about his visit. Maugham used the character of Darrel as a follower of a Hindu guru featured in the novel; the guru's physique and teachings were based on those of Ramana Maharshi.[12]
In 1993 Godman moved to Lucknow at the invitation of H. W. L. Poonja,[13][page needed] Poonja, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi who subsequently became a well-known spiritual teacher. In his later years Poonja was more generally known as ‘'Papaji’'. Godman made a documentary on Poonja’s life and teachings,[14] edited a collection of interviews[15] that various visitors had had with Poonja in the early 1990s, and compiled an authorised three-volume biography entitled Nothing Ever Happened.[16] In 2006, he edited a collection of conversations that had taken place in Poonja’s home in the early 1990s.[17]
After the death of Poonja in 1997, Godman returned to Tiruvannamalai.[citation needed] A year later he edited and published a collection of dialogues that had taken place between Annanalai Swami and visitors to his ashram in the 1980s.[18]
Between 2000 and 2002 Godman brought out The Power of the Presence, a three-volume anthology of mostly first-person accounts that chronicled the experiences that visitors had had with Ramana Maharshi between 1896 and 1950.[19]
Between 2004 and 2008, in collaboration with T. V. Venkatasubramanian and Robert Butler, he translated, edited and published three books of Tamil poetry,[20][21][22] composed by the Tamil poet Muruganar, which recorded the teachings of Sri Ramana along with Muruganar’s own experiences.
In 2012, Venkatasubramanian, Butler and Godman translated and published a bilingual (Tamil and English) edition of Sorupa Saram, a Tamil philosophical work composed several hundred years ago by Sorupananda.[23] The three have also collaborated on translations of other Tamil mystic poetry. Among their subjects were Manikkavachakar,[24] Thayumanuvar,[25] and Tattuvaraya.[26]
In 2014, in collaboration with the Whole Life Foundation, Godman filmed a twenty-seven episode, 15-hour series of talks on Ramana Maharshi's life, teachings and followers.
In 2017 Venkatasubramanian and Godman collaborated on The Shining of my Lord, a published anthology of verses composed by Muruganar. These originally appeared in Sri Ramana Jnana Bodham, a nine-volume collection of Muruganar's Tamil verses.
Godman is married to Miri Albahari,[27][28] a philosophy lecturer who is based in Perth, Australia.[29]
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