Contrary to popular belief saints of all stripes have always been a pretty irascible lot. As the great Swami Vivekananda once said, "The man who has no temper has nothing to control." The saintly list of curmudgeons, grouchers and astringent holiness is always impressive but the hands-down champion has to be Swami Dayananda Saraswati. If there was ever a man who was the Wrath of God Incarnate it was he. Only the Jewish prophets of denunciation could have approached near him and they would have to have a very good day indeed. He erupted upon an India that in the nineteenth century seemed to be the very definition of slackness. India never had any equivalent of the Church Militant, but Dayananda almost made up for that single-handed. He had a simple rule of thumb. If it was not the Veda, he was against it. The caricature of the meek and mild Hindu, eternally at the mercy of fate and foreign invaders was blown usp forever by this one man, and if nothing else his country owes him a vote of thanks for that.

This founder of the extremely influential reform organization the Arya Samaj should have been a pillar of orthodoxy if the parental script had worked out. He was born in 1824 to a father who was a prominent citizen of the Gujarathi state of Kathiawar, a veritable Brahmin of Brahmins, who had no doubts because the scriptures had all the answers and tradition took care of the rest. His self-confidence was of the obnoxious bullying sort, the kind that tolerates no deviance or the slightest inquiry. The young boy, Moolashankar Tiwari, had however all of his father's grim will and he applied it to keeping his mind his own. His crisis came soon enough. On the great festival night of Shivaratri (see our festivals section for details) the fourteen year old Moolashankar was the only person still awake in what was theoretically a sleepless vigil as a votive act for the God. Suddenly he saw a little mouse run up over the Shivalinga and nibble at the offerings made to the god. Not being of the imaginative sort, he could not reconcile this as being a pretty picture and indicative of how god provides for all living things. In the hot intolerance of youth, this was a desecration and what use was a god who could not protect himself? His faith in all idol worship and rituals was smashed at once, a unique situation for a Hindu to be in. He never became an atheist however; he merely ceased to believe what everybody else around him accepted as the nature of god.

Nonconformist beliefs are fine in India. You can believe whatever you want as long as you do not rock the boat and refuse to perform the social rituals that are so important for reasons of face. Moolashankar was having no truck with such hypocrisy and he instantly became a problem child. By the norms of the time that meant many physical chastisements, but unlike other Indian children he never accepted it as part of his karma. He bitterly hated his father for his behavior towards him and in a sense this hatred was the most hopeful thing about him. It meant he had a sense of individuality and could resent any affronts to it, unlike most Indians of the time who lived submerged in a collective consciousness of the caste group and its traditional behaviors - of which such cruelty to children was one. They tried to marry him off, he ran away but was caught and returned to the ungrieving and angry fold. His instinctive chastity was unshakable, and all his life he kept a carefully pious distance from women. When the persecution to get married became too much, he made a bolt for it again and this time, in 1845, he succeeded.

He became a sadhu, a wandering renunciate who seeks god. He learnt many things about India, its customs, it scriptures, it beliefs and none of them pleased him. Debates and debaters of religion bored him their unimaginative and redundant arguments. The Yoga attracted him but he soon realized it had accumulated so many accretions upon it that it was almost buried under the weight of foolishness and stupidity. Regular practice of the Hatha yoga and the Pranayama (the breath techniques of yoga) made him as strong as a martial artist and for the same reasons. His strength would save his life many times over later in life. In 1860 he found his guru in Mathura, an old blind Grim-Mind called Swami Virajananda Saraswati. This prickly guru refused to teach the young man until he had flung all his carefully accumulated treasure of religious scripture into the river! Moolashankar was given the name Dayananda Saraswati by this guru and he confirmed Dayananda in his belief that India had gone wrong in swerving from the original source of spirituality, The Veda. Virajananda had no patience with the multiplicity of gods and endless legends, which India delighted in. There was one supreme god, period. The Veda tells you all you need to know. That's it.

It is not as if Dayananda did not know other scriptures. As discomfited opponents in debates were to learn only too soon, the man was a veritable genius in learning. He knew their points and texts better than they ever could, but he learnt only to prove they were mistaken. If he had been treated with kindness he may have tempered his harsh opinions later. However the Hindu religion was already under attack from the missionaries and this seemed too much like a betrayal to the citadels of orthodoxy. Dayananda's preaching inspired either instant worship or furious rejection. There was no middle ground, and when he seemed to be sweeping all of India, the assassination attempts began.

It is then that Dayananda began to take on the qualities of a great shark. Like the shark, which never sleeps, his life was a ceaseless vigilance against murder. And like the shark that rules the ocean, woe betide anybody foolish enough to oppose and attack him. His debating style was a holy terror and he would rend all arguments against him until there was not a scrap of reputation or self-respect left. Dayananda had no patience with fools, and he saw fools everywhere! Once a scoffing maharaja asserted that he had no time to waste with yoga and breath control, as he was a practical man and a warrior to boot. When the time came for him to ride away in his elegant six-horse carriage the blessed equipage of rank would not budge. The rough humor of Dayananda had been aroused and he was holding back the entire carriage with one hand! On a less amusing occasion a critic threw a king cobra at him. Like Hercules, the swami crushed the snake to death with his hands. Somebody decided to bring a cutting edge to theological debate by swinging a sword at the swami. The angry Dayananda grabbed the weapon and splintered it. And he was poisoned all the time. Each time he would use his Yogic prowess to either vomit out the poison or by rapid and furious breath control (which fanned the digestive fires) beak down the poison before it could affect him. Such experiences are not conducive to making a man mild mannered and he became more unyielding than ever.

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