A calm close portrait

He is unambiguous on this and has been for years, which matters, because a saint with a serious illness is exactly the figure people invent contrary teachings for. Nothing he says treats faith as a replacement for treatment. When devotees describe symptoms at satsang he tells them to go to a doctor, and the instruction is ordinary and practical rather than reluctant.

His own situation is the strongest thing he has on this. He has long-standing kidney disease, has spoken about it openly from the asan for years rather than concealing it, and has not presented it as something devotion was supposed to have prevented or something medicine should be refused for. A man who took the opposite view would have had every opportunity to demonstrate it.

He also refuses the framing where illness is a verdict. Devotees ask what they did wrong to deserve a diagnosis, and he does not encourage the search. Bodies fail; they have always failed; a person with a serious practice and a person without one both develop the same conditions, and reading a scan as a moral report is a way of adding guilt to something that is already difficult.

What the name does in his account is specific and modest, and he does not inflate it. It does not shrink a tumour or repair a kidney. It occupies the part of the mind that would otherwise spend the waiting hours rehearsing the worst version of the results, which is a real benefit for a real problem and is not the same claim as a cure.

He is also blunt about the industry that grows around illness. Anyone selling a remedy, a puja or a guaranteed recovery in his name is committing fraud, and this is one of the few subjects where he lets impatience show. Nothing connected with the ashram is sold, no ritual is performed to order, and no outcome has ever been promised to anybody for money.

What it asks of you is straightforward and unspiritual. Keep the appointment, take the medicine as prescribed, follow the treatment through even when it is unpleasant, and take the name alongside all of it rather than instead of any of it. Nothing on this site should ever be read as a reason to delay seeing a professional.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.