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He felt that he should do so only for the real
Siva.
This incident
turned out to be a major turning point in his life. Later, he lost
his sister and uncle within a close span of time. The two deaths
forced the young boy to ask the unanswered questions about
the life and death. When he was 22 he abandoned the comforts
of his home and left in search for "the true
Siva
and the secret
of immortality."
Next 15 years he (now Svami Dayananda, after getting initiated
into the
sariznyasa
tradition in due course) wandered throughout
the country from high mountains of Himalayas to the deep
forests along the river Narmada in search for the right teacher.
Finally, it was Virajananda, a great grammarian in the Panini
school of Sanskrit grammar whose scholarship and ascetic life
got him glued to Mathura for the next 33 months. There he got
the taste of the difference between the
arsa
literature (meaning,
authored by a
rsi,
(a seer) and the modern literature. He began
to fully understand that
arsa
literature brings one to the truth
in a concise and efficient manner while the later authors have
sometimes had narrow motives in writing books. Also, the
scholarship of the later authors turns out to be superficial when
compared with the brilliance of the sages and pis in classical
India. It takes much greater efforts and time for a student to
understand the same truth from the modern
ancirsa
literature.
Towards the end of his education, very unexpectedly, the blind
old Guru refused to accept the cloves that Svami Dayananda
brought to him as
daksiry7.
Instead, the Guru painted the gloomy
picture of the country and convinced the young Dayananda to
devote his life for the crusade of spreading the teachings in
the true
arsa
literature based on the Vedas. He, though ill-
prepared for this great responsibility, promised to do so. This
was an unexpected development so much so that he camped in
nearby Agra for the almost next 30 months chalking out his
next plan of action. Occasionally, he would leave early morning
for the 50 km journey to Mathura and discuss something with
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