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Sathya Sai Baba: Questionable Stories and Claims. Part 1

11 May 2008

John Hislop: “Is it wrong to criticise a person?”

Sai: “It is not wrong to criticise a person if the evaluation has been arrived at slowly and carefully.” (John Hislop. Conversations with Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, Section XLIV, p.145)

What do you really know, if anything, about Sathya Sai Baba? Where did you discover this information? Was it via the thousands of repetitive written and word of mouth descriptions by his devotees and others? If so, you may have missed something basic. If that arouses your curiosity, as it should in view of the snowballing controversies associated with SSB, try the following simple experiment: put to one side for today the teachings, the intense charisma exerted and widely reported for the past 60 years. Put aside the spectacular allegations of sexual misconduct which attract so much media attention and fevered debates. And also put aside the hundreds of devotee books and articles extolling and endorsing SSB’s divinity and special psychic and paranormal powers. Ignoring all this familiar belief-centred information, concentrate, for a change, on valuable insights into SSB’s self presentation to his devotees and the world, mainly in the 35 volumes of his translated and edited Telugu Discourses (Sathya Sai Speaks), published and widely marketed amongst devotees by the Sathya Sai Organisation over the past 50 years. You may be surprised – as I was when I belatedly switched my attention to this new focus nine years ago.

SSB’s frequent Discourses have been one essential means of promoting himself and his Mission. The teaching content of the Discourses is widely read (in many languages) and discussed, and widely reproduced and propagated in devotee writing. Until recently, due to a widespread firm belief in SSB’s Divine nature and infallibility, and a major interest in his spiritual teachings, little serious critical attention had been paid to other anecdotal evidence in the Discourses. A closer look at the first 35 volumes of SSB’s Discourses, unblinkered by religious faith, reveals an important series of basic factual discrepancies and errors which cast serious doubt on SSB’s general credibility, particularly with reference to his claims of Divinity and its trappings.

Basic References:

Sathya Sai Baba as Storyteller

Sathya Sai Baba’s Divine Claims

Flaws in SSB’s general storytelling

The major types of Sathya Sai Baba stories are about:

* Hindu deities, beliefs and scriptures

* SSB’s own biography and spiritual development

* his allegedly Divine Mission and avataric powers

* Jesus Christ

* his views and comments on the contemporary world (especially on scientific matters)

* his idiosyncratic word etymologies

* inappropriate references and ‘name-dropping’

It is a lamentable indication of the lack of independent research on SSB carried out in India that, apart from six errors mentioned by SSB apologist Ra. Ganapati, no attention has yet been paid to SSB’s Hindu stories. Eventually, when Indian scholars and journalists realise the need for such research, interesting results may appear.

As a tiny contribution to this missing research, I can only offer the following quotation by SSB: “Shankaracharaya, in the fifth century A.D., went on foot from Kaanchi to Kaashi, Badhri, Kashmir, Kedhaarnath, Kailash or Puri, Shringeri and Kaaladi! And he only lived until the age of thirty-two!” (Sathya Sai Speaks, XI, 8:55) According to three reference books consulted, there is an error of three centuries here, since Shankara, or Shankaracharya, lived in the eighth century A.D. and established monasteries at the four cardinal points of India.

Childhood stories

There is a long series of varied stories about SSB’s schooldays, involving two of his classmates, an examination in which he claims to have cheated on their behalf, and other elements and permutations. Although SSB proudly proclaims his dishonest support of his friends by using his alleged powers to write their answer papers in their own handwriting, he takes pains to disguise the cheating by claiming that “none could accuse us of copying”, on the basis that their three examination seat numbers (which amusingly vary from version to version of the story) were far apart. The full series of anecdotes, with its bewildering permutations of details, is too long for this article but can be perused here:

Sathya Sai Baba as Storyteller

However, of all the SSB self-promotional childhood stories, the following is probably the most detrimental to SSB’s credibility:

Since mid-1999, some of the popular public Sunday satsangs for College boys by SSB’s current interpreter and popular spokesperson, Professor Anil Kumar, have been made available to a world audience of devotees (in English and several other languages) on his web pages.

In his posting for 10 March 2002, Kumar narrates an extraordinary SSB story, allegedly told recently to some students and teachers, in Kumar’s presence.

“And then Swami went on to say a few things about His own experience. “You know, I got a license. I could drive My car. You know at what age I got the license? At the age of nine!”

Kumar goes on to quote SSB as saying that he got the (premature) licence from two transport Officers, Seshagiri Rao and Hanumantha Rao, who granted it to him at the tender age of nine – in Kumar’s lively rendering, SSB sounds quite pleased with himself about details like this – after a perfunctory examination consisting of merely satisfying themselves that Sathya Narayana was able to steer the car between two lines marked on the ground. This astonishing revelation is followed by more boastful details about young Sathya’s exploits with the car. The new ‘driver’ decided to drive the two Transport Officers to Madras. Although terrified of his driving, they bowed to his will and 9 year-old Primary School speed ace Sathya Narayana allegedly made the 8 hour trip in a record four and a half hours! Kumar adds that SSB finished the story with the following miraculous flourish: he had driven that car for 15 years but since it was wartime and petrol was rationed, he economised by using water from the well instead.

Religion

During the following 1978 discussion between prominent US SSO official John Hislop and SSB, a surprising fact was brought up: SSB was unaware that Jews and Christians do not belong to the same religion. In view of the number of prominent Jewish devotees drawn to SSB from the late 1960s on, and their closeness to SSB, it is both amazing and revealing that none of them had brought up this fundamental question about their faith before.

In the reported group dialogue, SSB asked, “Does the Cross fail to symbolize the Jewish faith to a substantial degree?”

MG: “Yes, Swami. There is a substantial difference.” [MG = Michael Goldstein?]

In spite of this clarification, eighteen years later, the Christmas 1996 Discourse contained several breathtakingly incorrect “stories” about Judaism and Christianity. The official version in Sathya Sai Speaks (Volume XXIX, page 393) coyly glosses them over: “[Bhagavan gave a brief account of the Jewish concept of the creation of the cosmos and referred to the birth of Jesus as the son of Mary and Joseph.]” Readers of the SSO version (which, remember, is the ONLY official printed version of SSB’s Discourses – in several languages) will never know that SSB made many major errors like those which follow, but James Redmond’s commercial video captured them in Telugu and in the simultaneous English translation. (See my Bibliography) Here are two revealing paragraphs:

a) “Three hundred and fifty years B.C., before Christ, Jews lived. However, among Jews, there were religions such as Islam and Christianity. People of that land, they are all Jews. That land is the birthplace of both the religions, Islam and Christianity. The Hebrew language was very prominent. This Hebrew language is more or less equal to our Sanskrit. …”

b) “The name and the fame of Jesus Christ have spread far and wide. Here, at this moment, there are two schools of thought. The first group of thought – Roman Catholics. There is another group that fought with this group. This group is called Protestants. As they protested, they are Protestants. So among Jews there are these two groups: Catholics and Protestants.”

One of my subsequent discoveries was an equally astonishing assertion involving Alexander the Great and the Qur’an. In 1992, a colossal historical error of SSB’s had been pointed out by Dale Beyerstein in his e-book. In spite of its enormity, and because of the unconditional faith of devotees, most (including myself at the time) took NO notice!

In his Discourse for 21 August 1986 (Sathya Sai Speaks, XIX , pp. 137-8), SSB tells this story:

“A king from Greece [later identified as Alexander the Great] came to India to study the conditions here …” (p. 137) “He made a study of the Bible, the Quran and Buddhist texts and found that all of this laid emphasis on Truth, … In the Quran he found that only by adherence to the Truth can one be a real man.” (p. 138-9)

But at least one part of this story is utter nonsense. Alexander the Great could not have made a study of the Qur’an because he predated Muhammad by nearly a THOUSAND years! (Alexander the Great – 4th Century B.C.E. Muhammad and the Qur’an – 6th to 7th Century C.E.)

Comment

For any public speaker’s credibility, the above collection of confusion, discrepancies and errors would be damaging; for an allegedly omniscient God on Earth, such a variety of stattements should have been a public relations disaster. However, most devotees are so absorbed by SSB’s charisma and their faith in his healing powers and his teachings that they do not even notice anything is amiss – and simply refuse requests to look at the overwhelming evidence, which must be wrong because SSB is Omniscient and therefore cannot make errors (except as deliberate leelas to test devotees’ faith). Other more open-minded people, after reading the above body of basic evidence of SSB’s talent and compulsion for storytelling may feel more inclined to examine the claims of Avatarhood and Divine Omniscience made by SSB and his devotees. Prima facie, there are no limits to SSB’s imagination and his impulsiveness, nor to his capacity for getting things muddled or wrong. That this strong propensity has not been curbed in 60 years indicates that he is either blissfully unaware of it or is supremely confident in his own charismatic powers over devotees.

In Part 2 SSB’s Divine claims will be reviewed in the light of a hypothesis drawn from this basic evidence, which, like the explicit claims themselves, is feeely available in the official Sathya Sai Speaks volumes.

(To be concluded in Part 2)

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Etymology, and False Etymology as a Rhetorical Device

13 April 2008

Etymology: “An account of, or the facts relating to, the formation or development of a word and its meaning; the process of tracing the history of a word. The original meaning of a word as shown by its etymology” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). For the English language, a majority of etymologies refer to origins in Old English, Germanic Languages, French, Latin and Greek. The origins of the word ‘etymology’ itself are to be found in two Greek roots: ‘etymon’ (true) and logos (word).

It is not essential to know anything at all about etymologies. Most people survive and prosper without even knowing what the word means. Nevertheless, such knowledge (or where to find it: in reliable dictionaries) often proves to be very useful or indispensable to those who deal closely with (or are interested in) the words of a language. An etymological consultation can also help to avoid serious errors and misunderstandings (and sometimes misleading pronunciations). For example, the differences in meaning between the visually and orally similar ‘manually’, ‘manly’ and ‘manic’ are easily explained by their etymologies: respectively from a) the Latin word for hand, b) ‘man’, and c) Greek ‘mania’. Similarly, any suspicion of a common relationship between eschatology / eschatological and scatology / scatological can quickly and safely be dispelled by noting the different Greek roots from which the eschat- (last) and scat- (dung) parts are derived.

The Spreading of False Etymologies

In about 630 CE, a Catholic Archbishop named Isidore of Seville published an important encyclopedic series of books in Latin. This reference work continued to be consulted by European Latin scholars for several centuries. In The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, a recent English translation of this major ecclesiastical work by Stephen A. Barney and three other scholars (Cambridge University Press, 2006), the legendary poor quality of many of the etymologies offered is stressed and suitable samples are offered:

“Horses (equus) are so called because when they were yoked in a team of 4 they were balanced (aequare).” and “Humus (humus) was the material from which the human (homo) was made.” (I quote from a review by Emily Wilson.)

Another excellent example of how badly Isidore dealt with this minor aspect of his magnum opus (because of unreliable sources and, perhaps, lapses in research rigour) is offered by Adrian Murdoch on his typepad blog:

“The walking stick [baculus in Latin] is said to have been invented by Bacchus, the discovered of the grapevine, so that people affected by wine might be supported by it.”

Isidore’s, er, habit has nevertheless prospered in recent eras and in specific areas. There is some interesting evidence that etymological explanations seem attractive as a rhetorical device to prove a point, particularly in preaching, but also in other areas. If the promoters of beliefs are trusted by their readers or audience, impressive-sounding etymological proof will usually be accepted without demur, even if demonstrably false (‘false etymology’). In his book on cults, the Reverend Stephen Wookey refers to research which demonstrates the use of inaccurate quotations and false etymologies used to make a point by such preachers and orators. He quotes a blatant example by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

“The word Adam is from the Hebrew adamah, signifying the red color of the ground dust, nothing new. Divide the name Adam into two syllables [in English!] and it reads, a dam, or obstruction … it stands for obstruction, error, even the supposed separation of man from God and …” (Wookey, p. 338, from line 12 on). Baker Eddy goes on in similar vein, telling us all the negatives that poor Adam “stands for” for half a page. As Rev. Wookey comments: the Hebrew meaning is simply: man.

One of the clumsiest attempts at etymology for religious indoctrination purposes must surely be the one reported by William J. Petersen (Those Curious New Cults, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1973, p. 115). According to Petersen, one of the beliefs subscrtibed to by members of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that the British and the Americans are descended from the so-called Lost Tribes of the ancient Jewish people.’ As one of his ‘proofs’ of this peculiar assertion, Armstrong suggested that the word ‘Saxon’ was derived from ‘Isaac’s sons’.

Armstrong’s false etymologies are also dealt with in an easily accessible article, ‘The “Lost Tribes” of Herbert W. Armstrong’, in Catholic Answers Magazine: www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/LOSTRB.htm.

Apparently, to further his thesis that the Lost Tribes settled in Britain and America, the preacher wrote a further piece of blatant ‘etymological’ indoctrination:

“The House of Israel is the ‘covenant people’. The Hebrew word for ‘covenant’ is brit. And the word for ‘covenant man’ or ‘covenant people’, would therefore sound, in English word order, ‘Brit-ish’ (the word ish means ‘man’ in Hebrew, and it is also an English suffix on nouns and adjectives). And so, is it mere coincidence that the true covenant people today are called the ‘British’? And they reside in the ‘British Isles’!”

And Armstrong’s disciples swallowed the false etymologies.

The Indian guru, Sathya Sai Baba, has also made frequent use of etymologies as a teaching tool. Many of these are unconvincing except to his unquestioning devotees, who consider him to be Omniscient (and he himself has made that claim). For example, SSB has offered his devotees an idiosyncratic etymology of the ‘Sai’ part of the name that he assumed in 1943: ‘Sai Baba’, from Sai Baba of Shirdi – the Muslim/Hindu saint who died 1918 – whose reincarnation he claimed to be:

“Sa means ‘Divine’, ai or ayi means ‘mother’ and Baba means ‘father’. The Name indicates Divine Mother and Father …” (Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. XII, 38:229. These Discourses are translated from Telugu and edited by the Sathya Sai Organisation)

On the real etymology of the original Sai Baba, scholars seem to be agreed. As Kevin R. D. Shepherd writes: “Sai is not a Hindu name, but a Persian word indicative of a holy man. It seems to bear an affinity with the Arabic sa’ih, which in the early medieval era of Islam was used to designate itinerant ascetics of sufi background. It appropriately reflects the Muslim background of the subject. ….” (KRDS, 1986, Chapter 2). See also Sathya Sai Baba’s Claim to be the Reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba

In addition to other inventive Sanskrit etymologies for words like Bhagavan, Guru, Hindu, Krishna, etc., Sathya Sai Baba, the alleged polyglot, has occasionally exercised his imagination on foreign terms. For example, here is one of his etymological explanations of Salaam (which most people know as the Arabic greeting: ‘Peace’).

“The Muslims use the term Salaam as a form of greeting. What does the word mean? ‘Sa’ refers to Sai, the Lord who is the embodiment of Truth, Awareness and Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda); ‘la’ means ‘layam’ (mergence). Salaam means merging in the Supreme, who is also the embodiment of Truth and Bliss.” (Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. XVIII, 30:187)

Notice that in this example, SSB arbitrarily reduces ‘Salaam’ to ‘Sa’ plus ‘la’ (= ‘Sala’) to fit in with his extraordinary self-promotional interpretation.

(I have reported his different etymologies for Allah elsewhere on the Internet.)

More recently, a few writers of highly controversial works on history and archaeology (especially on the Internet) have also shown a preference for creative etymologies and other plays on words and names in order to support their contentious theses. (For the use of False Etymology in politics and propaganda, see the corresponding article in Wikipedia, to which this blog piece may be considered a supplement, at least by non-Wikipedians who do not reject the fruits of personal research.)

Gene D. Matlock, in yet another book on the lost Atlantis, puts forward the theory that there was an Atlantis in or close to Mexico. Part of his proof seems to be that there were Mexican “Sanskrit” place names like Atlán, Tlan or Tollán and that their inhabitants were called Atlantecas. (Those ‘Sanskrit’ names look like ordinary Mexican indigenous names.)

The author of a sensational best-selling book about a putative Chinese fleet which circumnavigated the globe in 1421-1423 (Gavin Menzies) offers as one of his exhibits news of an alleged inscription found in the Cape Verde islands. Menzies apparently attributes this to the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, but a critic (www.1421exposed.com) reveals (among many other inconvenient details) that Menzies himself admits that the inscription turned out to be written in the southern Indian language, Malayalam.

And finally, for now, a much-argued Internet thesis that there is a connection between Abraham and his wife Sarah and Hindu God Brahma and his consort Saraswati (“Sarai-svati” in this case) seems to have foundered on Wikipedia for lack of solid evidence and partly because “a major hole in this hypothesis is that Hebrew is not an Indo-European language, and that the etymologies for each word [offered as proof] are fairly different.”

(See Wikipedia Discussion page for ‘Brahma’; User: ‘Gizza’.)

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Fuzzy Dates in the Official Biography of Sathya Sai Baba. A Re-examination

6 April 2008

Some of the strong assertions made by Sathya Sai Baba’s hagiographers, as well as by the Sathya Sai Organisation and by spokespersons and devotees, are highly controversial, in particular claims of SSB’s Divinity and Avatarhood. Internet and other coverage of these controversies is already substantial and easy to find. This short essay, which is addressed to researchers and other open-minded readers, sheds light on two details of the controversy surrounding his official biography (hagiography).

As stated in my ‘Dossier 4’ and in earlier articles of mine, new evidence offered by the (devotee) researchers who published Love is My Form, Volume 1 in 2000 draws attention to the circumstantial uncertainties surrounding SSB’s declared official date of birth (1926) and the date of his alleged Declaration of Mission – as “Sai Baba” (1940).

On the first point, since the official biography, which gives SSB’s year of birth as 1926, has always linked the two numbers ‘1940’ and ‘nearly 14’ to SSB’s first declarations that he was “Sai Baba”, the strong recent LIMF evidence that leads to the inevitable conclusion that these Declarations took place in 1943 shows that one of these official figures (14 or 1926) must be incorrect. If SSB was 14 in 1943, as is possible, then he was born in 1929; if he was born in 1926, then he was nearly 17 at the time of the Declarations in Uravakonda in 1943, which is also possible.

To my knowledge, the Sathya Sai Organisation has never refuted (or even mentioned) the LIMF evidence which points to 1943, or my Internet articles about it. There has been no official adjustment to to SSB’s stated age when he undertook his Mission nor to the date of that alleged event. When the SSO does decide to address this question, there are other pieces of information relating to his date of birth which they will need to consider.

In LIMF (pp.132-133) the 1943 Register pages (apparently from Uravakonda High School) give Sathya Narayana’s date of birth as 4-10-39. This is an obvious clerical error. However, the later correction to “4-10-29”, with a signed clarification, “fourth October Nineteen Twentynine” (dated, as far as the writing is legible, 11-8-76). (Note that the same date of birth, in 1929, is also given – with an intricate disclaimer caption (plausible but also defensive), which needs to be taken into consideration – on the transfer certificate from distant Kamalapuram School to neighbouring Bukkapatnam School, in 1941, LIMF, p. 68.) However, before too much is made of the 1929 date ‘discrepancy’, we have been informed, in LIMF (p. 68), and by other experts on Indian culture, that such errors were quite common in rural India in those days. Equally relevant, therefore, is the hypothesis that, in such a remote Indian village in the 1920s, no one would have remembered the exact birth date and the date in the register is an approximation. It is also possible, of course, that the date of birth will never be proved one way or the other, but in the light of demonstrable discrepancies, all the evidence should be considered.

Additional Notes:
1. On this document, the other boys in Sathya Narayana’s class have birthdates ranging from 1933 to 1938, and leaving dates from 1946 and 1949. Sathya Narayana’s early leaving date (suggesting a younger than usual termination of studies), although not recorded, is assumed (according to the LIMF evidence) to have been October 1943, when he made his second Mission Declaration.
2. Still to be investigated is the note by prominent SSB proselytiser, M.N. Rao (A Story of God as Man, 1985, p. 28). It states that after Sathya left, there was an entry in the Uravakonda High School records to that effect. “In the fourth form (ninth class) attendance register of 1940, the entry against the name Rathnakaram Sathyanarayanaraju read as follows: “Discontinued – no T.C. claimed.”

An additional relevant consideration is that the 1926 date of birth is inextricably linked with the claim by SSB and the SSO that Shirdi Sai Baba predicted before his death (in 1918) that he would return in 8 years – a claim not supported, as far as I am aware, by the official Shirdi Sai Association literature. (The two Associations are totally separate.) Equally dependent on the official 23rd of November 1926 date of birth is the confident assertion by SSB writers and devotees that Sri Aurobindo’s declaration on 24 November 1926 about the descent of Krishna into the physical on the preceding day was really an acknowledgement of SSB’s divine Advent. In other words, it is one of a series of unsupported (and often demonstrably unconvincing) official (and devotee) claims that SSB’s birth was foretold by many important sages and leaders. This particular claim was never recognised by Aurobindo (who died in 1950) or by his followers. The latter have always interpreted this special announcement as the arrival of the Divine spirit into Aurobindo’s consciousness, for which he had prayed for years.

The voluminous (partisan) literature on SSB offers a few further pieces of circumstantial evidence for solving this biographical puzzle. First of all, innocent quotations offered in veteran devotee Smt. Vijayakumari’s memoirs seem to provide a degree of independent support for the possibility that SSB’s date of birth may not have been in 1926 but in 1929. In 1945 the little girl’s cousins were strolling in the affluent Bangalore suburb of Malleswaram when they heard bhajans being sung. They entered the house to listen. Sai Baba, who was present there, invited them to go to Puttaparthi (whose name they had never heard). When they returned to their town of Kuppam (south-east of Bangalore, but in today’s Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh), the cousins told the girl’s mother about their meeting. The latter was keen for them all to go, but the idea was vetoed by the father, who said: “You tell me He is sixteen years old and claims to be a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai. This is all humbug” (Vijayakumari, p. 12). That night the mother had a dream of SSB and they were immediately given permission by the father to visit the ashram for three days. This first visit allegedly took place during Dasara, in October 1945 (p.13). The family soon became very close to SSB and visited for long periods.

However, since the fortuitous assistance of the research behind LIMF has enabled us to establish that SSB was (allegedly) nearly 17 when he made his October 1943 Declaration, Vijayakumari’s words quoted above indicate that, two years later, in 1945, SSB was not nearly 19, as would be expected, but 16. If true, this would make his year of birth 1929 (as indicated by the register entries in LIMF). What is also interesting about this possibility is that at the time of the (alleged) Mission Declarations of 1943, he would have been almost 14 years old – as he and his biographers have always claimed!
…….
**
The rest of this essay is to be found HERE.

References:
Padmanaban, R. et al , Love is My Form. Vol. 1 The Advent (1926-1950). Prasanthi Nilayam, Sai Towers, 2000. [Often referred to as LIMF]
Vijayakumari, Smt., Anyatha Saranam Nasthi. Other than You Refuge is There None, Chennai, [n.p.], 1999. [Available from the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust]
For an introduction to the alleged forecasts of Sathya Sai Baba’s birth and their prominence in the official promotion of SSB: ‘Counter-Evidence to the Sathya Sai Baba Divinity Myth and Related Topics. A Basic Source Guide’

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