Anandamayi: Her life and Wisdom

by Richard Lannoy

A delightful and high-quality photographic book with a large text section by the renowned photographer and writer Richard Lannoy. Drawing extensively on Anandamayi Ma’s own words and advice to followers, the author reveals a personality at once both breathtakingly simple and an enigma of fathomless complexity.

His high-speed action photography captures her essence while his text recounts her dramatic spiritual metamorphosis from youthful ecstatic to venerable sage.

The author writes: Preferably, the face of the holy, even in a photograph, should be depicted like an icon, transubstantiated. Whereas, I would portray the highest attain-able state of grace not as a quasi-divine being but as someone who is nothing special.

It is said that the universe has its origin in love, and the chaos is systematised into the cosmos through the bond of love.

There is love between fire and air, between earth and water; without this love neither heaven, nor earth, nor the nether world would have originated at all.

There is love between heaven and the skies, between heaven and earth, between hell and the nether world in which it lies, and thus are the three worlds supported in love.

There is love between the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars and in love they are all fixed into the sky above.

There is love between the sea and its water, between the moon and the night and the sun and the day; - the tree is fixed to the earth by its roots, the black bee is attached to the lotus, fish is bound to the water, man is bound to the woman - and all in love.

The body is in love with the mind and the mind with the vital prana.

In love does the mother conceive the child, in love does the earth hold fast the root of the tree, in love does the tree hold fast the branches and the flowers and fruits, in love does the fruit accumulate juice in its kernel - thus is the whole creative process supported in love.