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characterizes Sathya Sai Baba is an ‘avatār (incarnation, descent) of Shiva’, later in
the same article, he expounds a key feature of Sathya Sai Baba’s persona in terms
of the above-mentioned doctrine of the līlā (“play”) of the gods—albeit that he
does not comment upon its predominantly Vaiṣṇava pedigree.
Babb refers to David Kinsley (1979:5-6)—who does cite some Śaiva analogues
to this doctrine in which the term līlā is sometimes used, but the dominant motifs
in these are “dance” and/or “sport” (etc.) rather than the primarily Vaiṣṇava sense
of the miraculous “prank’s” or “play” (of a child-deity) that Babb shows to reso-
nate with Sathya Sai Baba’s persona. And indeed Babb (1987:179), in one of his
several subsequent articles (which largely overlap—even with his first article),
does draw out this connection, indicating that idea of līlā testifies to an important
place for Kṛṣṇa (the most popular avatar of Viṣṇu) in Sathya Sai Baba’s persona:
Baba’s unpredictable, surprising, and often generous but sometimes mischievous
acts are his play-as-display. Here is the youthful Krishna, Sathya Sai Baba the child-
deity, still preserved as a fundamental part of his sacred demeanor.
The fact that Kṛṣṇa, regarded by many as the most recent of the traditional avatars,
is supposed to have lived in a previous “epoch”, some five thousand years ago,
gives another indication as to the extraordinary nature of Sathya Sai Baba’s claim.
Whilst there is little, if any, historical evidence to support this far-flung traditional
date, ideas of the avatar, as we will see, certainly date back many hundreds of
years, and in so doing provide a vast fund of traditional material upon which
Sathya Sai Baba is able to draw in aligning himself with them.
This is something that, as we have seen, he does with aplomb, and for signifi-
cant purposes—including deflecting some of the criticisms of those who doubt his
divinity or accuse him of wrongdoings. Indeed, he sometimes puts the very fact of
the diverse history of traditional avatar accounts to this end:
Some time or other at some place or other, in some world or other, the inscrutable
Divine incarnates… It takes a recognisable form which is related to the occasion, the
time, the place and other circumstances determining Its advent. Do the idle gossip-
mongers who indulge in atheistic propaganda make any earnest and sincere effort to
find out the nature of the Divine? Without such effort how can the sacred character
of the Divine be discovered? [(22-11-1980) S14 55:355-356]
Since, he (implicitly) argues, the Divine takes a great variety of forms, with each
variation fitting a particular historical context, his own (perhaps unusual) form is
of a kind with this variety and is merely a result of the Divine conforming itself, of
necessity, to contemporary circumstances. He implies that, because of this variety,
1
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and the complexities of circumstantial needs (time, place etc.), spiritual effort is
necessary in order to understand that what might not appear to be sacred—the
form, character, actions of the Divine (i.e. of himself)—is, on the contrary, so.
And, in general, his devotees seem to have taken this type of reasoning on board,
Palmer (2005:100) sees in Sathya Sai Baba apologetics ‘a consistent theme in re-
sponse to those who disbelieve: If some human beings do not recognize his true
nature, it is pitiable and due to their ignorance, blindness, or faithlessness’.
Like the idea of the avatar itself, this type of argument is nothing new. Par-
rinder (1970:122) suggests that a major function of traditional avatar concepts was
to allow for ‘the inclusion of mythical beings of the past, and heroes of the pre-
sent, within the same system’, and this is surely akin to what Sathya Sai Baba is
doing above. Moreover, Parrinder (1970:38,46) observes that the Bhagavad-Gītā,
one of the earliest traditions to focus on avatar-like ideas, holds that: ‘Critics of the
incarnation of Krishna are ignorant of the divine nature that is behind it’; ‘critics of
the Avatar are vain and ignorant, deluded by nature… except his devotees, for
they adore him with resolution’. And this resonates with Sathya Sai Baba’s views.
To give another example, Sathya Sai Baba states that:
Persons who cannot tolerate the Glory of the Avathaar have indulged in such cam-
paigns, in every Age! …Just as devotees remained unruffled in the Age of Krishna,
you too must stand firm and be unaffected. …do not lend your ears or mortgage
your minds to purveyors of scandals or lies [(10-6-1974) S12 36:216,217].
And his line of reasoning has evidently had an effect upon (at least some of) his
devotees, for Klass (1991:161) notes that: ‘Devotees express amusement at the
charges against Sai Baba; they cite scriptural accounts of the rejection of [the two
most prominent traditional avatars] Rama and Krishna’.
In a more direct sense also, Sathya Sai Baba’s avatar persona has evidently fa-
cilitated his sexual interactions with his devotees—Conny Larsson, a Swedish ex-
devotee who was one of the first persons to claim to have been sexually abused by
Sathya Sai Baba, even says: ‘Because he was God… I let it happen’
36
. On the other
hand, in the context of the sexual abuse claims, Sathya Sai Baba’s supporters prof-
fer the idea that ‘SSB’s actions, no matter how sexual, cannot be equated with
those of a normal human being’—the implication being that he should not be
judged by ordinary (legal) standards
37
. Indeed, in the quotation at the head of this
36
http://www.sokaren.se/INDEX135.HTML [6-8-2005]
37
http://www.saisathyasai.com/baba/Ex-Baba.com/A-AlayaRahm/alaya-rahm-testimonies.html [26
-7-2006]