The Master of Animals

My edition of this curious book is titled "Sri Ramana, Friend of Animals: Nondi & the Monkeys of Arunachala". Nondi and Hobbler seems to be the same guy. Or, rather, the same monkey... Sri Ramana is none other than Ramana Maharshi, the famous Hindu holy man who spent most of his life living at or immediately below Arunachala, a mountain in southern India considered to be an incarnation of the god Shiva.

While the book isn't explicitly said to be a children's book, it comes across that way, with its colourful illustrations and easy-to-read text. There are also a number of black-and-white photographs, most of them of quite good quality, some of them showing Ramana together with monkeys...

The text consists almost entirely of anecdotes about Ramana's encounters with a "monkey tribe" living at Arunachala. Ramana's main friend among the monkeys was a certain Nondi, who eventually became "the monkey king". Monkeys are considered holy in Hinduism, being associated with the monkey-god Hanuman. Ramana let the annoying creatures roam freely around his ashram, and sometimes even inside the ashram buildings, much to the consternation of his relatives and devotees. At one point, a devotee was chasing monkeys with a pole spouting the national flag of India, something Ramana apparently found highly amusing!

Most of the stories are more or less within the realm of the believable, but sometimes they smack of miracle stories, as when Ramana convinces a cobra to give up his fight against a peacock, or a story about monkey's meditating and being deep into samadhi. Naturally, all of the sage's animal friends are said to attain liberation after death, including the cow Lakshmi, to which another book in this series is devoted.

Not sure how to rate this product, brought to us by Sri Ramanasramam at Tiruvanmalai, but eventually I give it three stars.