The works of Sunyata Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 1 Comment

The works of Sunyata Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen – By coincidence I yesterday learned about Alfred Julius Emmanuel Sorensen, who was better known by his Buddhist name Sunyata, as the ‘janam-siddha’ or simply as the ‘rare born mystic’ as Ramana Maharshi called him.

He was born on a farm in a village just outside Aarhus in Denmark, my hometown, in 1890. By a series of strange events, initiated by a meeting in England with Rabindranath Tagore, he ended up in a cave in Indian Himalaya, where he as a Sadhu lived in solitude, meditated and received guests. In 1973 Sunyata met with people from the Allan Watts Society who asked him to come to California, though he insisted that he had nothing to teach or sell. He went and spent his last years in the US, where he held weekly sessions for the public. Read the Wikipedia article about him here.

Sunyata met with Gandhi, Ramana Maharshi, Anandamayee Ma, Yashoda Ma (Mirtola), Swami Ramdas and Neem Karoli Baba. He died in a car accident in California in 1984. There is a couple of books about Sunyata  out there. They are all based on this raw 486 typewritten manuscript. The document is unfortunately in a very bad shape and it is more than 92 Mb. It is only here for the nerds, preservation and scientific reference:

Sunyata – The typewritten manuscripts

For a more readable version choose this carefully retyped version:

Nectar of Sunyata

This stone was raised in the arboretum in the hometown of Sunyata. It has the Danish inscription: “Stilhed er det virkeliges sprog” meaning:

“Silence is the language of Reality”

“Stilhed er det virkeliges sprog” Sunyata

Comments