The shopkeeper-sage
Born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli in 1897 in Maharashtra, Nisargadatta moved to Bombay as a young man and earned his living rolling and selling bidis — the Indian leaf-wrapped cigarette. He met his guru, Siddharameshwar Maharaj of the Inchagiri Sampradāya, in his early thirties. Within three years, he reported, the recognition was complete. He continued to live and work in the same modest flat in the Khetwadi district for the rest of his life. The teaching loft was a converted attic above the shop, reached by a steep ladder, holding perhaps fifteen people at a time.
I Am That
The dialogues collected as *I Am That* — recorded between 1970 and 1973, translated from the Marathi by Maurice Frydman, published a year before Nisargadatta's first wave of Western visitors arrived — are the most direct non-dual teaching in print. Nisargadatta's method is not gentle. He cuts through philosophy, autobiography and emotional appeal with the same patience: the I-am is the only door; everything before it is mind; everything after it is silence. The dialogues are arranged not by topic but by sitting, so the same questions return at different angles across hundreds of pages, and the reader's resistance is met from every direction in turn.
Where Ramana Maharshi's instruction was trace the I-thought back to its source, Nisargadatta's was abide as the sense 'I am' until the sense itself drops away. The methods converge; the rhetorical temperatures do not. Ramana's transmission was largely silent. Nisargadatta argued, scolded, joked, and occasionally threw seekers out. The contrast is part of what makes the two figures complementary in the lineage rather than redundant.
His position in the lineage
Almost every contemporary Western teacher of non-duality acknowledges I Am That as a foundational reading. Mooji cites Nisargadatta as a primary influence alongside his direct teacher Papaji. Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira, and the broader stream represented by Spira's *Being Aware of Being Aware* sit in conversation with Nisargadatta's work even when their direct lineages run elsewhere. Ramesh Balsekar — Nisargadatta's principal English-language interpreter and a close disciple — taught a generation of Westerners directly until his death in 2009.
His final teaching
Nisargadatta died of throat cancer in September 1981. In the last two years he refused most visitors and spoke only with the inner circle, saying repeatedly that the earlier teaching — abide in the I-am — had been preliminary. The final pointing was prior to consciousness — to what is, before even the sense of being arises. The transcripts of these late talks, collected as Prior to Consciousness and Consciousness and the Absolute, remain less widely read than I Am That but are, in the view of his closest students, the more uncompromising teaching.
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