"God gives us 24 hours a day, can’t we give Him fifteen minutes of quiet meditation?”

Sri Anandamayi Ma

Throughout Indian history, this pattern of instruction ensured the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. In the case of Anandamayi who did not herself have a Guru, but was self-initiated, the traditional model of the teacher and the taught has, in certain respects, taken on new life, but in other equally important respects she radically departed from tradition.

Her role as a revered Brahmin divine was by no means orthodox since this was a departure from the traditional status parameters of the married woman; further, for some 50 years as a widow and thus a member of the lowliest rank of Indian society, she was at the same time one of the most sought after of all spiritual teachers.

She lived for 86 years, had an enormous following, founded 30 ashrams, and travelled incessantly the length and breadth of the land. People of all classes, castes, creeds, and nationalities flocked to her; the great and the good sought her counsel; the doctrine which she expounded came as near to being completely universal as is attainable by a single individual.

Though she lived for the good of all, she had no motive of self-sacrifice in the Christian sense: “there are no others,” she would say, “there is only the One”. She came of extremely humble rural origins, though from a family respected over generations for its spiritual attainments.

The fact that she was a woman certainly accentuates the distinctive features of her manifestation. Female sages as distinct from saints capable of holding sustained discourse with the learned are almost unheard of in India. Her femininity certainly imparts to the heritage of Indian and global spirituality certain qualities of flexibility and common sense, lyricism and humour not often associated with its loftiest heights.

Her quicksilver temperament and abundant lila sacred play are in stark contrast with the serenity of that peerless exemplar of Advaita Vedanta, Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai, the quintessence of austere stillness. That a woman of such distinction and wide-ranging activity should emerge in India in the 20th century, the century of world-wide feminism and reappraisal of feminine phenomenology hardly seems a coincidence.

Source: Richard Lannoy, Anandamayi, Her Life and Wisdom, pages 7 & 8.