Word: narayan
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...handsome Hindu named Narayan Acharya left a wife, a five-year-old child and a promising political career, to follow "an inner urge to do penance and bring peace to the world." Wandering through the Himalayas, he practiced the mystic arts of yoga, learned to do without food and water for long periods at a time. According to one admirer, Narayan even mastered the trick of levitation, and once flew for three miles through a Nepalese jungle. In the same jungle Narayan had himself buried alive for 24 hours, and survived to tell newsmen of the milky white "soul light...
...skills and sufferings, Narayan failed in his first purpose. Recently he got to thinking that if he performed a really long penance, God might be pleased enough to bring "peace to the world." A fortnight ago, frail, black-bearded, 56-year-old Narayan let himself down to the bottom of a deep, six-foot-square pit outside of New Delhi. He spread the skin of a deer on the pit's wooden floor, placed his sandals carefully by his side, sat down and assumed the cross-legged "lotus position." Then he passed out a signed statement: "If anything wrong...
...nine days, sophisticates in New Delhi's clubs and coffee houses argued over whether Narayan was a fake or not. There was probably a secret tunnel leading into the tomb, said some. But in a hut near the pit, Narayan's sole disciple, faithful Wamana Acharya, sat praying day after day. Last week, as the tenth day of the ordeal dawned, sightseers from all over New Delhi streamed to the burying place afoot and on camelback to watch Narayan's disinterment. Cymbals and harmoniums clanged and wheezed, hucksters did a land-office business...
...times by the British (once along with Nehru), set up a camp on the banks of the River Ganges to study the Hindu epics, and wrote the first 60 volumes of a 180-volume biography of the Hindu god Krishna. One day last October he cried out: "He nath Narayan!" (meaning, "Oh, Lord God," the holy man's only departure from silence). An attendant brought him his Shaeffer fountain pen and paper. He wrote: "If today I participate in an election, it's because my innermost voice bids...
...morning last week, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the young fanatic who shot Gandhi (TIME, Feb. 9, 1948), drank his last cup of prison coffee. While jailers waited, Godse and his accomplice, Narayan Dattatraya Apte, recited from the Hindu Holy Writ, the Bhagavad-Gita ("Fight, and have no fear. The foe is yours to conquer"). They walked to the scaffold, clutching their Gitas between the palms of their tied hands...