"A beedi cigarette seller in a Mumbai slum who became one of the most uncompromising teachers of non-dual awareness in the 20th century. His conversations — raw, direct, occasionally brutal — cut through spiritual concepts like nothing else."
Maruti Shivrampant Kambli was born in 1897 in Mumbai (then Bombay) into a poor family. He received little education, worked as a domestic servant and then as a small trader, eventually settling in the Khetwadi district of Mumbai where he ran a small shop selling bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes) and other goods. By conventional standards he was an ordinary, poorly educated working man with no obvious qualifications for spiritual authority.
In 1933, at the age of 36, he met his guru — Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj — of the Navnath Sampradaya lineage. His guru's instruction was simple: hold the sense of 'I Am' — the bare sense of existence — and don't let go of it. Nisargadatta followed this instruction with extraordinary single-mindedness. Three years later, the realisation came: the 'I Am' sense itself dissolved into the awareness in which it appeared, and what remained was the recognition that he was not the person, not the body-mind, not even the sense of existence — he was prior to all of it.
He continued to run his shop, raise his family and live an apparently ordinary life. But from the late 1960s onward, as his reputation spread through the work of Western seekers who had found their way to his door, a steady stream of visitors began appearing at his tiny tenement apartment in Mumbai. He received them in a small loft, usually sitting cross-legged, bidi in hand, and engaged in conversations of extraordinary directness and depth. He died of throat cancer in 1981.
Nisargadatta's teaching is uncompromising non-duality — closer to Ramana Maharshi than to any other teacher, but expressed with a directness and even roughness that is entirely his own. Where Ramana was serene and gentle, Nisargadatta was urgent, challenging and sometimes impatient with what he saw as spiritual games.
The teaching moves in two phases. First: abide as the 'I Am' — the sense of pure existence before it becomes 'I am this person, this body, this mind.' Hold that sense of simple being, without object, without story. This is the Saguna (with qualities) phase — consciousness knowing itself. Second, and more radical: even the 'I Am' is not what you are. You are the awareness in which the 'I Am' appears. Prior to consciousness, prior to existence, prior to the sense of being — that is what you are. The Nirguna (without qualities) absolute.
What makes Nisargadatta's recorded conversations so valuable is the way he works with individual questioners — cutting through spiritual concepts, refusing to allow the questioner to settle into any comfortable position, pointing again and again to what is already present. He had little patience for spiritual seeking as a lifestyle and consistently directed attention back to the one who seeks.
Nisargadatta could be genuinely harsh with questioners — dismissive, impatient and occasionally insulting to those he felt were using spiritual seeking as entertainment or evasion. Several visitors recorded difficult, even humiliating encounters. Whether this was skillful means (upaya) designed to cut through conceptual defences or simply his personality expressing itself is debated among those who knew him.
He smoked heavily throughout his life — the bidis that he sold and that eventually killed him with throat cancer. This contradiction between his extraordinary spiritual realisation and his inability to stop smoking was something he acknowledged with characteristic directness: the body has its conditioning, realisation does not automatically eliminate it.