Mul Shankar was hardly twenty-two when his parents determined to correct his heterodox views on religion, by saddling him with the duties of married life. For some years previously, he had taken asylum with a kindly uncle who sympathised with his point of view and let him do things in his own way. But on his death, he was compelled to revert to the vigilant supervision of the father, who ever since the memorable Shivaratri, was alarmed at the boy's persistent refusal, bordering on obstinacy, to pay homage to the tribal divinity. His grief over the uncle's death was intensified on the loss of a dear sister and filled his mind with eagerness to try and unravel the mysteries of life and death and to attain Moksha, i.e., release from the continuous cycle of births and rebirths. It was at the psychological moment when his mind was fired with the ambition to learn the Vedas and grasp their original intention ; to renounce the pleasures of life, to bear hardness as a faithful soldier of Bharatvarsha ; to prepare himself for the spiritual upliftment of his country : it was at this crisis that the father wanted to upset his plans, by marrying him off and thus killing his fine enthusiasms by the hum-drum routine which such a married life would impose on him. But not willing to submit to this ordeal, the boy ran away from home.
The next twenty-five years i.e., 1845-187o form a prolonged probation during which he met various Sannyasis of established repute for learning and piety. He voraciously devoured their teachings, only accepting them with certain mental reservations. It may be noted that on his first flight he was caught. But he had made up his mind to break away from the trammels of home, and so ran away again, this time effectively evading pursuit and burning all the traces behind him. One of the ascetics called Brahmananda convinced him, for a season, of the truth of the Vedantic teaching that the soul is an emanation from the divine and individual souls as so many self-expressions of the Divine substance, that the soul and Brahma are one ; that Brahma is the immanent life of the Universe, and not a trans cendent God or Creator who created the worlds out of nothing. But this teaching was soon given up by Dayananda as unhealthy and unpractical.
The reality of this world, the trustworthiness of the senses, the reality of human experience and struggle was too visibly imprinted on his mind to allow of his accepting the temporal order as illusory in its character. Mill Shankara was not, by nature, a subtle metaphysician, fond of logical casuistry and wordy debate. He was a practical idealist. He was keen on arriving at some simple philosophy of life that could be strictly defined, and whose terms would bear a simple and unsophis ticated statement. He was interested more in life ; in the practical difficulties of life, in the means of escape from the perplexities that beset every-day life ; more than in some sublime synthesis which from the metaphysical standpoint, might throw ample light on theoretical problems suggested by the ultimate issues in philosophy.
He next met Swami Parmananda, after some years, who was a sannyasi of the Saraswati order, and who, after continuous refusal recognised Mill Shankara as a sannyasi of his order, being struck by the latter's originality in ideas and deep scholarship. From that moment Mill Shankara became Swami Dayananda Saraswati. His one great object in asking for recognition as recluse of an established order was that he might thereby escape the pressure that might yet be exerted by his parents to get him married should they come to know of his whereabouts. A recluse renounces, for all time, caste, home, marriage and all other mundane attachments and obligations.
Throughout all his wanderings he was seized with a consuming desire to come upon ascetics who would expound to him the mysteries of the Yoga philo sophy. Perhaps he felt that through the exposition of yoga (i.e., communion with the Infinite) he might attain to emancipation from the ceaseless round of transmigration that haunted his imagination.
In 186o, Dayananda met Swami Virjananda, a great authority on Panini's grammar, in Muttra ; an exceedingly able pundit, but very irritable and overbearing. He refused to initiate Dayananda into his teachings till he threw all the books he had on him into the river Jumna. But Dayananda sat at his feet, patiently, submissively, drinking in his teachings, once even bearing corporal punishment without demur. This pupilage lasted for two years and-a-half. Swami Virjananda was absolutely convinced of the veracity and reliability of the Vedas, but indignantly rejected all later accretions as so many lies manufactured by ignorant and mis leading priests, to serve their personal ends. On the day of leave-taking, in May, 1863, Virjananda asked Dayananda for the customary fee paid as a token of appreciation, knowing that Swami Dayananda had none to give. He asked Dayananda to go and proclaim the pure Vedic faith and combat Puranic errors. Never was pledge more loyally redeemed.
Daya Nand was essentially a reformer, not a great original thinker. His commentaries on Vedic texts are " more ingenious than ingenuous," to use the words of the last Census report concerning his work. But he felt that, living in the modern world, it was necessary that certain pernicious customs ought to be given up and a progressive mentality acquired. He was constantly in touch, when he began his public career, with educated Hindus who discussed with him how the Reformation and the Renaissance were made possible in Europe. So, being a shrewd practical man, he proclaimed to the conservative masses that the germs of science, medicine, art, literature, philosophy and religions were to be found in the Vedas only awaiting maturity and fruition. There was, indeed, a certain degree of conviction that the Vedas were the of all knowledge, but the feeling must also have been strong in his mind that an appeal to the past was the way in which the masses could be weaned from idol-worship and veneration of mere formalism.