Segment the Eighteen Steps to Reach Lord Ayyappa in Sabarimalai

 

Segment the Eighteen Steps to Reach Lord Ayyappa in Sabarimalai

In my school days and through my college days too, I survived on my powers to memorize lists. Give me six, seven, as many as ten items even, I could repeat flawlessly, from memory. One of the tricks I used was to fragment the list. The first three goes into the first segment, the next four into the second and so on.

Yet, I must defend myself: I understood what I was memorizing, always. This helped my memory in ways I did not understand then, but I do now. More synapses, more pathways in the brain. They are all gone now.

This came in handy when I went through the ceremony of entering true Brahmin bachelorhood, through the sacred thread ceremony, Upanayanam when I was maybe 12 years old. The evening before, I was sitting with a Brahmin acharya who told me the way I should introduce myself to my male elders after falling at their feet in obeisance (the only female entitled to this is the mother; hence son preference?) and getting up. I had to tell them that I am in the line of so and so schools of thought (though it was at that time given to me as lineage). I memorized and as I knew the meaning of each segment of the relatively short recitation, I did not stutter or stammer. There were no cues from backstage, so to say.

That was a long introduction to trying to answer the question in the title. I felt intuitively that the eighteen steps to reach Lord Ayyappa at Sabari Malai, must have, or have been infused with, eighteen specific items, all within the folds of religion and spirituality.

I got this inkling from the sixty steps in the main stairs reaching up to Lord Subrahmanya at Swami Malai (there are other steps at the top and bottom that do not count). Each step denotes one of the 60 years in the sacerdotal calendar of TamBrahm almanac. You may check this if and when you visit this temple, and also refer to the above referred almanac.

But 18 and 60 occupy different mind spaces. Eighteen can be easily segmented, 3 x 6, 5+4+4+5, 5+8+3+2, 6+8+2+2 and other combinations, if there are any. Then, to get my mind on track of what these segmentations could mean, if anything at al, I Googled “Significance of the 18 steps in Sabari Malai” and I hit pay dirt!

Human senses – the bottom most five; sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch

Emotions – the next eight emotions; anger, love, greed, lust, jealousy, boastfulness, unhealthy competition, and pride [healthy competition is OK! Who defines? Do not ask]

Human qualities – above the bottom thirteen, the three qualities that represent a human; goodness or purity, passion, inertia or dullness

Knowledge and Ignorance – (I don’t think these are given in the correct order, which in my opinion should be first ignorance, and then knowledge that shoos off ignorance) anyways, these two, in the correct order (whatever it may be) to get you to Lord Ayyapa.

So, there it is, in all its glorious segmentation, 5+8+3+2! Had I known this early in my life and had committed it to my memory, I could have reeled them off nonchalantly! Alas, that ain’t the case.

The point I am making is that memorization has been a part and parcel of the process of evolution, including the development of the human brain, I believe. That is why when the villain is left out in the desert of Bolivia in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, we see the featureless expanse of sand; oh, there were the shifting sands but ephemeral they are and of no benefit to the villain who looks out and sees nothing. This could not have been so when “Lucy” trekked through what is now Ethiopia. (?)

Then, suddenly, your edupreneur comes in and says that memorization is all wrong. This is unadulterated nonsense. Look at the 18 steps – they are not merely segmented, as 5+8+3+2, but infused with meaning (though I disagree with the meaning and importance attached to them). Without these meanings, the steps are merely steps, even for the believers (devotees).

 In teaching too, one of the best mnemonic I learned that has stayed in my mind and which I have repeated to my students is the following:

(M/I) = (f/y) = (E/R)

May I Follow You Elizabeth Rani! Mnemonics are good for your mental health! I still think it is neat. I was not forcing it on my students, and now, on you. Leave it or take it. But, recognize that, even in the days of electronic calculators, if you want done something fast, you could do worse than remembering your multiplication tables.

Memorization is not an unalloyed poison!

Raghuram Ekambaram