Shrimad Rajchandra

• 1. Introduction

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  Shrimad Rajchandra was seven years old when a neighbor named Amichand died suddenly of a snakebite. He had never seen death before. He asked his grandfather what it meant, but the old man tried to steer the boy back to his meal. Rajchandra insisted. His grandfather told him that death means the separation of the soul from the body. A dead body is burned to ashes near a river-bank, the old man said. The boy slipped away to the cremation ground and climbed a Babul tree to watch. Looking down at the burning body, he felt that the men below were cruel. A chain of thoughts about death began, and out of it came something he had not expected. He remembered who he had been before he was born.

  Born on the 9th of November 1867 in Vavaniya, a port village near Morbi in Gujarat, he would live only thirty-three years. A poet, philosopher, and Jain mystic raised between two faiths, he drew the spiritual interest of Mahatma Gandhi and left teachings that reached Jain communities far beyond India. His disciples added the title Param Krupalu Dev, meaning Lord of the Highest Compassion. The honorific Shrimad was given posthumously. How did a child caught between two religions find his own path? What kind of mind can perform a hundred simultaneous tasks and then turn away from the fame they earn? And what does it mean to be a mystic who is also running a business?

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• 2. A Prodigious Memory

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  Rajchandra joined school at the age of seven and a half, but mastered the preliminaries of arithmetic in a single month. He completed seven grades in two years. By age eight he was composing poems. By nine, he had written verse synopses of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. At ten he took up public speaking. At eleven he was publishing articles in magazines including Buddhiprakash, winning prizes for his essays. At twelve he wrote a poem of three hundred stanzas on the subject of a watch.

  By the early 1880s he had mastered several subjects and earned the informal title Kavi, meaning poet. He occasionally visited the court of the ruler of Kutch and was praised for his penmanship. At thirteen he began working in his father's shop, composing poems about the lives of Rama and Krishna while managing the counter.

  In 1884, he saw something that pointed his abilities in a new direction. Watching Shastri Shankarlal M. Bhatt perform eight Avadhana simultaneously in Morbi, he studied the technique closely. Avadhana requires a performer to maintain full attention across multiple complex tasks at once, without losing the thread of any. Two days after the performance, Rajchandra replicated it himself in front of friends, and shortly after in public.

  He performed twelve Avadhana publicly in Morbi, then sixteen before an audience of two thousand in Wadhwan Camp. In a private session in Botad with his friend Harilal Shivalal Sheth, he reached fifty-two. Those tasks included playing chess; playing cards and the Chopat game with three players each; tracking gong strikes; and computing arithmetic. He also composed sixteen verses in meters chosen by the audience, on topics selected at that moment. He reordered four hundred words drawn from twelve languages, among them Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Bengali, and Marathi.

  On the 22nd of January 1887, at Sir Framji Cowasji Institute in Bombay, he performed a hundred simultaneous Avadhana. National newspapers covered the event. He received gold medals from institutes and the public, and was given the title Sakshat Saraswati, meaning Incarnation of the Goddess of Knowledge. Rajchandra believed the publicity these performances attracted could become an obstacle to spiritual life. He stopped by age twenty. At the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, in September 1893, Virchand Gandhi described the feat to a global audience. By then, Rajchandra had already turned toward a question no performance could answer.

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• 3. Choosing Jainism

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  Rajchandra's mother Devbai was a Svetambara Sthanakvasi Jain, while his father Ravjibhai Mehta and grandfather Panchan Mehta followed Vaishnava Hinduism. He moved between both traditions from childhood. A Sadhu named Ramadasji initiated him in Vaishnavism, and he went on to study Vedanta. He continued reading across India's religious traditions without settling at any one.

  What drew him most was Ahimsa, the principle of non-violence, and a concept called bheda-vijnana. Bheda-vijnana is the practice of discriminating the soul from the transient activities and substances that surround it. Both were central to Jain teaching. He came to believe that Jainism offered what he called "the best path to salvation."

  Drawing on the works of Anandghanji Maharaj, he argued that Jain philosophy incorporated the partial truths of other traditions into one comprehensive perspective. Its grounding lay in the knowledge of the omniscient Tirthankars. Where other Indian philosophical schools addressed individual questions, whether about creation, karma, the soul, or liberation, Jainism addressed all of them together. He illustrated this with the image of rivers flowing into an ocean. Just as all rivers reach the ocean, so the insights of single-sighted traditions converge within Jainism.

  Citing the sacred Sthananga Sutra, he taught that liberation was available to all, regardless of caste, creed, gender, or sect. A monk and an ordinary householder stood on the same path. In a letter to Gandhi, he argued that the Tirthankars had revealed knowledge of a thousand times deeper import than what the Vedas contain. The philosophical case he built for Jainism was not merely theoretical. He believed the path he described was one he could walk himself, and by 1890 he would claim he had reached its first landmark.

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• 4. The Inner Life

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  In 1890, while living in Bombay, Rajchandra experienced what he called shuddh samyak darshan: direct self-realization, or clear right perception. He described his state in a letter known as Patrank 133. In it he wrote: "Day and night, reflection upon the supreme reality alone prevails, that alone is the food, that alone is the sleep, that alone is the bed, that alone is the dream, that alone is the fear, that alone is the pleasure, that alone is the possession, that alone is the walking, that alone is the sitting. What more do I say? Bones, flesh and their marrow are only coloured in the colour of that alone."

  Despite this inner transformation, he continued his householder life for six more years. In 1887, he had married Jhabakben, daughter of Popatlal, from the Zaveri merchant family. They had two sons and two daughters. He remained active in the pearl and diamond trade and succeeded in it. His in-laws had wanted him to establish himself more firmly in Bombay, but his interest lay elsewhere.

  At thirty, he retired from business and householder life and withdrew to Gujarat with his disciples. He spent three months in Idar, seated on a stone called the pudhvi shila, giving religious instruction to seven monks. A memorial temple and a prayer hall were later built at that site. He would later say that 1897 was the year he had developed complete resignation and detachment from his mortal body and the rest of the world.

  Colitis struck in his final years, and by 1900 he had lost a large amount of weight. Doctors recommended he move to the coastal region of Gujarat. He never recovered from an illness contracted during a stay in Dharampur. In 1901, accompanied by his mother and wife, he stayed at Aga Khan's bungalow in Ahmedabad before moving to Wadhwan Camp. He died on the 9th of April 1901 in Rajkot, surrounded by family, friends, and disciples. The room where he died is now a prayer hall dedicated to his memory. A small photograph taken after his death is on display in a library in Khambhat that he himself had established.

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• 5. Gandhi's Guide

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  The two men first met in Mumbai in 1891. Gandhi was a young barrister preparing to leave for South Africa, and the encounter made a deep impression. Their relationship developed largely through letters, exchanged while Gandhi was abroad. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi described Rajchandra in direct terms. He called him his "guide and helper" and his "refuge in moments of spiritual crisis."

  Rajchandra advised Gandhi to be patient and to study Hinduism carefully. His teaching on Ahimsa, the principle of non-violence, fed directly into the philosophy Gandhi would carry through his campaigns. "Hey Prabhu! Hey Prabhu! Shu Kahu" was among Gandhi's favourite bhajans. It was included in the Ashram Bhajanavali, the collection of hymns sung at Gandhi's ashram.

  In 2002, India Post published a special cover on Gandhi Jayanti featuring both Rajchandra and the poet Rabindranath Tagore. The cover commemorated a bond forged a century earlier through letters.

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• 6. The Written Record

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  Rajchandra wrote Stri Niti Bodhaka in 1884, advocating women's education as essential to national freedom. He published Sad-bodh-shatak in the same year, a work on ethical topics. In 1885 he produced Shurvir Smarana, which described the brave warriors of the past. It compared them with their descendants, who had not freed India from British rule. Mokshamala followed in 1887, written in a plain style accessible to young readers and addressing Jainism and self-liberation. When delays held up Mokshamala's publication, Rajchandra composed Bhavna Bodh instead. It was a fifty-page book offering instructions for cultivating twelve sentiments that lead toward non-attachment.

  His largest verse work was Namiraja, running to five thousand stanzas on the four purusharthas, the classical goals of human life. Atma Siddhi, written in Gujarati, laid out six fundamental truths about the soul in a structure Rajchandra called satpada, meaning the six steps. It places special emphasis on right perception, which he called samyaktva, on personal effort, and on the guidance of a true teacher. A popular translation was published by Brahmachari Govardhandas in 1957. The poem was later adapted into a musical bhajan form by Shefali Shah.

  Rajchandra also wrote more than nine hundred letters over the course of his life. They chart his spiritual journey and his teaching to disciples at every stage. He edited a newspaper called Vairagya Vilas. His complete works, including the letters, are preserved in a collection known as Shrimad Rajchandra Vachanamrut.

  He also translated the Panchastikaya of Acharya Kundkunda in full and wrote commentary on works by Upadhyay Yashovijayji Maharaj. The breadth of his output is the more remarkable given that he composed much of it while also running a business. Studio photographs taken just a month before his death show him in various meditation postures. They became the source for almost every portrait of him displayed in temples around the world.

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• 7. Reaching Forward

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  Rajchandra's teachings influenced a number of religious figures after his death, including Kanji Swami, Dada Bhagwan, Lalluji Maharaj, and Atmanandji. Several of them founded temples and institutions dedicated to spreading his work. His followers refer to his path by three names: Raj Bhakta Marg, Kavipanth, and Shrimadiya. Like Rajchandra himself, most of his followers have been lay practitioners rather than monks.

  Jain communities in East Africa, the United Kingdom, and North America became important centres of his following. One scholar notes a convergence between the Kanji Swami Panth and the Shrimad Rajcandra movement in recent years. It is part of a broader trend toward a more ecumenical and less sectarian Jainism among educated, mobile Jains living overseas.

  On the 17th of February 2017, the University of California, Riverside announced the establishment of the Shrimad Rajchandra Endowed Chair in Jain Studies. The Government of India marked the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Rajchandra's birth on the 29th of June 2017. At the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, it released ten coins, one hundred and fifty souvenir coins, and stamps.

  In November 2017, a thirty-four-foot statue described as the world's tallest of Shrimad Rajchandra was inaugurated at Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Dharampur. Rakesh Jhaveri, who founded the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur, presided alongside Sri Sri Ravishankar. The Mission, headquartered in Dharampur, carries out social and spiritual activities in his name. On the 4th of August 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a hospital in Dharampur named for Rajchandra. He also opened a women and childcare center bearing the same name.

  In 2007, Manoj Shah produced a biographical Gujarati play called Apurva Avsar, based on Rajchandra's life. In November 2016, Shrimad Rajchandra Mission staged Yugpurush, a play in Gujarati depicting the spiritual relationship between Rajchandra and Gandhi. An animated biographical Gujarati film directed by Bhairav Kothari was released in 2021. It drew on a life that ended in Rajkot in 1901, but whose questions had outlasted the century.

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