India is the land of sages. From the times when history is not even recorded to the present times, in nooks and corner of this punyabhumi, several persons realised very early in their life that the sole purpose of human life is to realise God and then help others to do so. This happened time and again. In the words of Swami Vivekananda, ‘The sages of India have been almost innumerable, for what has the Hindu nation been doing for thousands of years except producing sages?’
The earliest times when the Vedas and Upanishads were seen by the seer rishis, there is a peculiarity of this culture. That we do not even know the names of those seers and their lives, but we do have a long legacy of some mahavakyas, not utterances, sayings and writings, but the nuggets of truth seen and heard by the seers. It is thus called Shruti, the perpetual truths heard. On the other hand ‘ to save noble people, to destroy evil, to reestatblish Dharma,’ there were sages and great men appearing almost organically and reinterpreting as well as proclaiming the truths in the format suitable to their time and place. They are known by names and much is known about their lives as well. Whether it is Chaitanya, Kabir, Dadu, Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa, Nanak, Jnaneshwar, Ramdas, Mira, or innumerable others, there was never a shortage of sages. There are several paramparas of sages like Bhagvata, Vaishnavas, Alvar, Naynar, Sufi, Tirthkaras, etc. However, they all told Smriti or time bound truths which have to have a final sanction of the perennial truths of Vedas. Most of them are said to have done pilgrimages across India and during that process visited Rameshwaram.