He is Swami Amritaswarupananda Puri, aka "Big Swami," Amma's most senior disciple and her main translator, and he collects my questions with an amusingly world-weary, businesslike air. Then another fellow in orange robes squeezes through, his hippie glasses and windblown black hair calling to mind a mid-'70s Jerry Garcia. Only love is exchanged."ĭayamrita gets a call on his cell and departs. Shingles, chicken pox, infectious diseases - she does not get them. "Poor or sick, it doesn't matter, she embraces them. "That changed my whole life," the swami says. Amma embraced him and, in her mad compassion, licked his sores and sucked the pus out of his wounds, which she then covered with sacred ash. When her village ashram was just starting out, a local leper came in for a hug. While following Amma about he witnessed an event that has since become central to Amma lore. As a young man, Dayamrita was an atheist and a filmmaker, and he decided to shoot a damning exposé about his region's most famous god-person. Kerala is a traditional center of tantra and goddess worship, but it is also a progressive and well-educated state with a strong, if waning, left-wing culture. A sober, no-nonsense fellow, Dayamrita hails from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where Amma was born to a Dalit fisherman's family in 1954 and where her principal Indian ashram now lies. We stand crammed together just to the side of Amma's nest.
While I am waiting for an audience with Amma herself, I speak with Swami Dayamrita, the orange-robed manager of the Castro Valley ashram. After half a minute or so, the devotees are plucked out of Amma's arms, and the guru hands them flower petals, sacred ashes or maybe a foil-wrapped Hershey's kiss. The endless flow of huggees are first asked to kneel, remove any glasses, and mop up their sweaty brows with a Kleenex before being guided into the enveloping embrace of the Mother. Years of spiritual tourism have taught me that the magic often lies with the devotees rather than the object of devotion, and the scene before me is deeply charming - the spiritual equivalent of comfort food, like a sweet rice pudding scented with rose water. Amma is embracing her flock, many of whom believe that she is literally a goddess.
The hugging saint herself, a full-bodied woman as brown as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is plopped down in a comfy, low-key thronelike thing at the foot of the large stage that lies at the far end of the hall. Roughly two-thirds of the folks are white, with the rest largely South Asian like Amma, most are wearing white. Charitable booths lie on one side of the space, with a well-stuffed shop of clothes, books and geegaws on the other. Scores of devotees wait in line, while hundreds more mill about the center's large meeting hall. I show up a little after noon, and Amma has already been at it for hours. For a couple of weeks, thousands of devotees come to sing and meditate and stand in Disneyland-worthy lines to receive Amma's signature blessing: a great big bear hug. But twice a year, the Mother herself sweeps through, and the place is transformed. For most of the year, it serves as the sleepy North American outpost for the empire of good works that surround the superstar Indian guru it's named after, who is best known as Amma. The Mata Amritanandamayi Center is a cluster of gardens, ponds and institutional buildings nestled in the dry and rolling hills of Castro Valley, a rural area that lies about an hour east of San Francisco.
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