Nisargadatta Maharaj lived an unremarkable life as a small businessman in the Khetwadi neighbourhood of Mumbai before encountering his teacher Siddharameshwar Maharaj in 1933. Within three years he was awakened. He continued running his bidi-cigarette shop until late in life, receiving visitors in the small upper room of his apartment where the conversations later collected as I Am That were recorded.
His teaching is uncompromisingly direct. Neither the world nor the body is what you take it to be, and the person is a temporary appearance in awareness rather than the awareness itself. Investigate the I-am, find what is prior to it, and the question of liberation no longer arises.
He belonged to the Inchagiri branch of the Navnath Sampradaya, the same lineage that produced his teacher Siddharameshwar and, through him, Ranjit Maharaj. What he received from that lineage he passed on stripped of nearly all its devotional setting: sit with the sense I am, refuse every identification it offers, and stay until the question answers itself. He taught from that small upstairs room in Khetwadi until a few weeks before his death in 1981.
Where to start
- I Am That: the Maurice Frydman translation of the recorded talks, the book that carried this teaching around the world. Start anywhere; the chapters are self-contained.
- Self Knowledge and Self Realisation (Atmagnana ani Paramatmayoga): his early, more devotional writing, for the fuller picture of where the teaching came from.
- The teachers he formed: Sailor Bob Adamson, Ramesh Balsekar, and Wayne Liquorman each carried a different register of the teaching forward; their pages trace the lineage.
