The story

Tradition places Sri: Ramanujacharya's span on earth at one hundred and twenty years — from the Ardra nakshatra of the Chaitra month in the Kali year 4119 (commonly dated 1017 CE) to his departure in the Pingala year 1137 CE. By the final year he had returned from his twelve-year Melkote sojourn to Srirangam, had completed his great works, and had guided the Sri: Vaishnava order through two generations of disciples.

The Guruparampara Prabhavam preserves the account of his final discourse. Sensing his departure, Sri: Ramanujacharya gathered his senior disciples in the Thayar sannidhi at Srirangam and formally appointed the cha:thuhsapthathi-simha:sana:dhipathis — the seventy-four seats of teaching authority. To each he assigned a region, a temple, or a family lineage, and to each he gave a specific responsibility: the Tamil commentaries to some, the Sanskrit bhashyas to others, temple utsava-reforms to still others. The Ashtottara records this moment in the naama chathuhsapthasishya:dhya:ya — "rich with seventy-four disciples" (#41).

His last charge, the sources record, was simple. He named Sri: Embar as his immediate successor in the stewardship of the order. He spoke of sarana:gathi — surrender — as the one practice that held all others together, warning his disciples against pride of learning. He asked them to remember three things: the Bhashyakara (his own works remained a responsibility of the order), the Dravida-veda (the Tamil Prabandham was to be expounded in every generation), and their own a:cha:ra (conduct as devotees was itself a form of preaching).

In the final moments, tradition holds, Sri: Kuresha's son Para:sara Bhatta — the child Sri: Ramanuja himself had named and raised — sat near him reciting. The acharya is said to have fixed his gaze on the archa-vigraha of Sri: Ranganatha, repeated the name Na:ra:yana, and departed to Paramapada. The closing naamas of the Ashtottara — vishnulo:kaprada:yaka:ya (#105, "giver of Vishnu's realm"), avya:hathamahadhvarthmane: (#106, "the unobstructed great path"), yathira:ja:ya (#107), and jagadgurave (#108, "teacher of the worlds") — read, in sequence, as a map of his departure.

His body was enshrined at Srirangam itself, within the Sri: Ranganathaswamy Temple precincts, where it remains — tradition holds, uncorrupted — as the Thama:r Thirume:ni, the "own-form sacred body." The order he left behind has survived over nine hundred years without institutional rupture.

Contemplation

A life of one hundred and twenty years, gathered in the final hour into a single act of sarana:gathi. Sri: Ramanujacharya did not leave his disciples a federation to be managed; he left them a pattern to be lived. Seventy-four seats, each a responsibility, none a throne. The last sound he heard was a prabandham verse and the name of Sri: Ranganatha. The contemplation for the devotee is that a good departure is the fruit of a surrendered life — that what one offers in the final hour will echo the posture of all the hours before it. Offer the 108-chant of this naama as an antima-smarana for those dear to you who have departed, and as a rehearsal for the surrender that will, one day, be asked of each of us.