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Chief of intellectual passions with the Swami, was his reverence for Buddha. It was perhaps the historical authenticity of this Indian life that was the basis of the delight it roused in him. “We are sure of Buddha and Mohammed, alone amongst religious teachers,” he was wont to say, “for they alone had the good fortune to possess enemies as well as friends!”

Again and again he would return upon the note of perfect rationality in his hero. Buddha was to him not only the greatest of Aryans, but also “the one absolutely sane man” that the world had ever seen. How he had refused worship! Yet he drew no attention to the fact that it had been offered. ‘Buddha,’ he said, ‘was not a man, but a realisation. Enter, all ye into it! Here receive the key!’

He had been so untouched by the vulgar craving for wonders, that he coldly excommunicated the lad who had by a word brought down a jewelled cup from the top of a pole, in the presence of the crowd. Religion he said, had nothing to do with jugglery!

How vast had been the freedom and humility of the Blessed One! He attended the banquet of Ambapali the courtesan. Knowing that it would kill him¹, but desiring that his last act should be one of communion with the lowly, he received the food of the pariah, and afterwards sent a courteous message to his host, thanking him for the Great Deliverance. How calm! How masculine! Verily was he the bull in the herd and a moon amongst men!

And perfect as he was in reason, he was at least as wondrous in compassion. To save the goats at Rajgir, he would have given his life. He had once offered himself up, to stay the hunger of a tigress. Out of five hundred lives renounced for others, had been distilled the pity that had made him Buddha.

There comes to us a touch of his humour across the ages when he tells the tale of the youth, sobbing out his love for one he has never seen, whose very name he does not know, and likens his plight to the iterations of humanity about God. He alone was able to free religion entirely from the argument of the supernatural, and yet make it as binding in its force, and as living in its appeal, as it had ever been. This was done by the power of his own great personality, and the impress it made on the men of his own generation.

For some of us, one evening, the Swami sat reconstructing the story, as it must have appeared to Jasodhara, the wife of Buddha, and never have I heard the dry bones of history clothed with such fullness or convincingness of life.

Hindu monk as he himself was, it seemed to Vivekananda natural enough that a strong personality should have what he conveniently described as “European ideas about marriage,” and should insist, as did Buddha, on seeing and choosing his bride for himself. Each detail of the week of festivities and betrothal was dwelt on tenderly.

Then came the picture of the two, long wedded, and the great night of farewell.

The gods sang, “Awake! thou that art awakened! Arise! and help the world!” and the struggling prince returned again and again to the bedside of his sleeping wife. “What was the problem that vexed him? Why! It was she whom he was about to sacrifice for the world! That was the struggle! He cared nothing for himself!”

Then the victory, with its inevitable farewell, and the kiss, imprinted so gently on the foot of the princess that she never woke. “Have you never thought,” said the Swami, “of the hearts of the heroes? How they were great, great, great, and soft as butter?”

It was seven years later, when the prince, now Buddha, returned to Kapilavastu, where Jasodhara had lived, – clad in the yellow cloth, eating only roots and fruits, sleeping in no bed, under no roof, – from the day he had left her, sharing the religious life also, in her woman’s way. And he entered, and she took the hem of his garment, “as a wife should do,” while he told, to her and to his son, the Truth.

But when he had ended, and would have departed to his garden, she turned, startled, to her son, and said “Quick! go and ask your father for your patrimony¹!”

And when the child asked “Mother, which is my father?” She disdained to give any answer, save “The lion that passes down the street, lo, he is thy father!”

And the lad, heir of the Sakya line, went, saying “Father, give me my inheritance!”

Three times he had to ask, before Buddha, turning to Ananda, said “Give it!” and the gerrua cloth was thrown over the child.

Then, seeing Jasodhara, and realising that she, too, longed to be near her husband, the chief disciple said “May women enter the Order? Shall we give to her also the yellow cloth?”

And Buddha said “Can there be sex in knowledge? Have I ever said that a woman could not enter? But this, O Ananda, was for thee to ask!”

Thus Jasodhara also became a disciple. And then all the pent-up love and pity of those seven years, welled forth in the Jataka Birth-stories! For they were all for her! Five hundred times each had forgotten self. And now they would enter into perfection together.

“- Yes, yes, so it was! For Jasodhara and for Sita, a hundred years would not have been enough to try their faith!”

“No! No!” mused the teller, after a pause, as he ended the tale, “Let us all own that we have passions still! Let each one say ‘I am not the ideal!’ “Let none ever venture to compare another with Him!”

During the years of our Master’s boyhood at Dakshineshwar, the attention of the world had been much concentrated on the story of Buddhism. The restoration of the great shrine of Bodh-Gaya was carried out about this time* under the orders of the English Government, and the share taken in this work by Rajendra Lala Mitra, the Bengali scholar, kept Indian interest intense throughout the country. In 1879, moreover, the imagination even of the unlearned classes in English-speaking countries was deeply stirred, by the appearance of Sir Edwin Arnold’s “Light of Asia,” said to be in many parts an almost literal translation from the ‘Buddha Charita’ of Ashwa Ghosh.

But the Swami was never satisfied with taking things at second-hand, and in this too could not rest contented until in 1887 he, with his brethren, contrived to read together, not only the ‘Lalita Vistara,’ but also the great book of the Mahajana school of Buddhism, the ‘Prajna Paramita,’** in the original.*** Their knowledge of Sanskrit was their key to the understanding of the daughter-language.

The study of Dr. Rajendra Lala Mitra’s writings and of the ‘Light of Asia,’ could never be a mere passing event in the Swami’s life, and the seed that thus fell on the sensitive mind of Sri Ramakrishna’s chief disciple, during the years of his discipleship, came to blossom the moment he was initiated into sannyas, for his first act then was to hurry to Bodh-Gaya, and sit under the great tree, saying to himself ‘Is it possible that I breathe the air He breathed? That I touch the earth He trod?’

* The excavations round the great shrine were first commenced by the Burmese Government in 1874.The British Government took them in hand in 1879 and completed the work in 1884.

At the end of his life again, similarly, he arrived at Bodh-Gaya, on the morning of his thirty-ninth birthday; and this journey, ending with a visit to Benares, was the last he ever made.

At some time in the years of his Indian wanderings, the Swami was allowed to touch the relics of Buddha, probably near the place where they were first discovered. And he was never afterwards able to refer to this, without some return of that passion of reverence and certitude which must then have overwhelmed him. Well might he exclaim, to someone who questioned him about the personal worship of the Avatars, “In truth, Madam, had I lived in Judaea in the days of Jesus of Nazareth, I would have washed His feet, not with my tears, but with my heart’s blood!”

“A Buddhist!” he said, to one who made a mistake about the name of his faith, “I am the servant of the servants of the servants of Buddha!” as if even the title of a believer would seem, to his veneration, too exalted to claim.

But it was not only the historic authenticity of the personality of Buddha that held him spellbound. Another factor, at least as powerful, was the spectacle of the constant tallying of his own Master’s life, lived before his eyes, with this world-attested story of twenty-five centuries before. In Buddha, he saw Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: in Ramakrishna, he saw Buddha.

In a flash this train of thought was revealed, one day when he was describing the scene of the death of Buddha. He told how the blanket had been spread for him beneath the tree, and how the Blessed One had lain down, “resting on his right side, like a lion,” to die, when suddenly there came to him one who ran, for instruction.

The disciples would have treated the man as an intruder, maintaining peace at any cost about their Master’s death-bed, but the Blessed One overheard, and saying “No, no! He who was sent* is ever ready,” he raised himself on his elbow, and taught. This happened four times, and then, and then only, Buddha held himself free to die. “But first he spoke to reprove Ananda for weeping. The Buddha was not a person, he said, but a realisation, and to that, anyone of them might attain. And with his last breath he forbade them to worship any.”

The immortal story went on to its end. But to one who listened, the most significant moment had been that in which the teller paused, – at his own words “raised himself on his elbow and taught,” – and said, in brief parenthesis, “I saw this, you know, in the case of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa!”

And there rose before the mind the story of one, destined to learn from that Teacher, who had travelled a hundred miles, and arrived at Cossipore* only when he lay dying. Here also the disciples would have refused admission, but Sri Ramakrishna intervened, insisting on receiving the new-comer, and teaching him.

The Swami was always deeply pre-occupied with the historic and philosophic significance of Buddhistic doctrine. Sudden references and abrupt allusions would show that his thoughts were constantly with it. “’Form, feeling, sensation, motion, and knowledge are the five categories,’” he quoted one day, from Buddha’s teachings,** “’in perpetual flux and fusion. And in these lies Maya. Of anyone wave, nothing can be predicated, for it is not. It but was, and is gone. Know, O Man, thou art the sea!’ Ah, this was Kapila’s philosophy,” he went on, “but his great Disciple brought the heart to make it live!”

And then, as the accents of that Disciple himself broke upon the inner ear, he paused a moment, and fell back on the deathless charge of the Dhammapada to the soul:

“Go forward without a path!

Fearing nothing, caring for nothing,

Wander alone, like the rhinoceros!

Even as the lion, not trembling at noises,

Even as the wind, not caught in a net,

Even as the lotus-leaf, unstained by the water,

Do thou wander alone, like the rhinoceros!”

“Can you imagine what their strength was?” he said one day, as he dwelt on the picture of the First Council, and the dispute as to the President. “One said it should be Ananda, because He had loved him most. But someone else stepped forward, and said no! for Ananda had been guilty of weeping at the death-bed. And so he was passed over!”

“But Buddha,” he went on, “made the fatal mistake of thinking that the whole world could be lifted to the height of the Upanishads. And self-interest spoiled all. Krishna was wiser, because He was more politic. But Buddha would have no compromise. The world before now has seen even the Avatar ruined by compromise, tortured to death for want of recognition, and lost. But Buddha would have been worshipped as God in his own lifetime, all over Asia, for a moment’s compromise. And his reply was only ‘Buddha-hood is an achievement, not a person!’ Verily was He the only man in the world who was ever quite sane, the only sane man ever born!”

* Sri Ramakrishna entered into Mahasamadhi at the garden-house of Krishna Gopal Ghosh in Cossipore, 1886.

** Vide Vinaya Pitaka, Part I, Sacred Books of the East Series.

Indian clearness of thought spoke in the Swami’s contempt for our Christian leaning towards the worship of suffering. People had told him in the West that the greatness of Buddha would have been more appealing, had he been crucified! This he had no hesitation in stigmatising as “Roman brutality.” “The lowest and most animal liking,” he pointed out “is for action. Therefore the world will always love the epic. Fortunately for India, however, she has never produced a Milton, with his ‘hurled headlong down the steep abyss’! The whole of that were well exchanged for a couple of lines of Browning!”

It had been this epic vigour of the story, in his opinion, that had appealed to the Roman. The crucifixion it was, that had carried Christianity over the Roman world. “Yes Yes!” he reiterated, “You Western folk want action! You cannot yet perceive the poetry of every common little incident in life! What beauty could be greater than that of the story of the young mother, coming to Buddha with her dead boy? Or the incident of the goats? You see the Great Renunciation was not new in India! Gautama was the son of a petty chieftain. As much had been left many times before. But after Nirvana, look at the poetry!

* “It is a wet night, and he comes to the cowherd’s hut, and gathers in to the wall under the dripping eaves. The rain is pouring down, and the wind rising.

“Within, the cowherd catches a glimpse of a face, through the window, and thinks ‘Ha, ha! Yellow Garb! stay there! It’s good enough for you!’ And then he begins to sing.

‘My cattle are housed, and the fire burns bright. My wife is safe, and my babes sleep sweet! Therefore ye may rain, if ye will, O clouds, to-night!’

“And the Buddha answers from without, “My mind is controlled. My senses are all gathered in. My heart is firm. Therefore ye may rain, if ye will, O clouds, to-night!’

“Again the cowherd – ‘The fields are reaped, and the hay is all fast in the barn. The stream is full, and, the roads are firm. Therefore ye may rain, if ye will, O clouds, to-night!’

“And so it goes on, till at last the cowherd rises, in contrition and wonder, and becomes a disciple.

“Or what could be more beautiful than the Barber’s story?

** ‘The Blessed One passed by my house,

my house – the Barber’s!

* The Swami was here making a rough paraphrase, from memory, of Rhys David’s metrical rendering of the Dhaniya Sutta, from the Sutta Nipata, in Fausboll’s translation of the Dhammapada. See Rhys Davids’ American Lectures.

** The original form of this anecdote, as it appeared in the Buddhist texts in old times, under the name of Upali Prichcha (The Questions of Upali, the Barber) has been lost; but the fact that there was such a writing in existence, is known from its mention in other Buddhist books e. g. The Vinaya Pitaka.

‘I ran, but He turned and awaited me.

Awaited me – the Barber!

I said, ‘May I speak, O Lord, with thee?’

And He said ‘Yes!’

‘Yes!’ to me – the Barber!

And I said ‘Is Nirvana for such as I?’

And He said ‘Yes!’

Even for me – the Barber!

‘And I said ‘May I follow after Thee!’

And He said ‘Oh yes!’

Even I – the Barber!

‘And I said ‘May I stay, O Lord, near Thee?’

And He said ‘Thou mayest!’

Even to me – the poor Barber!’”

He was epitomising the history of Buddhism one day, with its three cycles – five hundred years of law, five hundred of images, and five hundred of tantras, – when suddenly he broke off, to say, “You must not imagine, that there was ever a religion in India called Buddhism, with temples and priests of its own order! Nothing of the sort! The idea was always within Hinduism. Only the influence of Buddha was paramount at one time, and made the nation monastic.”

And the truth of the view so expressed can only, as I believe, become increasingly apparent to scholars, with time and study. According to it, Buddhism formed complete churches only in the circle of missionary countries, of which Kashmir was one.

And an interesting morsel of history dwelt on by the Swami, was that of the adoption of the Indian apostolate in that country, with its inevitable deposition of the local Nags, or mysterious serpents living beneath the springs, from their position of deities. Strange to say, a terrible winter followed their disestablishment, and the terrified people hastened to make a compromise between the new truth and the old superstition, by re-instating the Nags as saints, or minor divinities of the new faith, – a piece of human nature not without parallels elsewhere!

One of the great contrasts between Buddhism and the Mother-church lies in the fact that the Hindu believes in the accumulation of Karma by a single ego, through repeated incarnations, while Buddhism teaches that this seeming identity is but illusory and impermanent. It is in truth another soul which inherits what we have amassed for it, and proceeds, out of our experience, to the sowing of fresh seed. On the merits of these rival theories, the Swami would often sit and ponder.

By those to whom, as to him, the great life of super-consciousness has ever opened, as also in a lesser degree to those who have only dwelt in its shadow, the condition of the embodied spirit is seen as an ever-fretting limitation. The encaged soul beats wings of rebellion ceaselessly, against the prisoning bars of the body, seeing outside and beyond them, that existence of pure ideas, of concentrated emotion, of changeless bliss and unshadowed light, which is its ideal and its goal. To these, then, the body is a veil and a barrier, instead of a means to mutual communing. Pleasure and pain are but the Primal Light seen through the prism of personal consciousness. The one longing is to rise above them both, and find That, white, undivided, radiant.

It was this train of feeling that expressed itself now and then in our Master’s utterances of impatience at current conceptions, as when he broke out with the words “Why, one life in the body is like a million years of confinement, and they want to wake up the memory of many lives! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!”

Yet this question, of the relation to one another of the different personalities in a single long chain of experience, never failed to interest him. The doctrine of re-incarnation was never treated by him as an article of faith. To himself personally, it was ‘a scientific speculation’ merely, but of a deeply satisfying kind. He would always bring it forward, in opposition to our Western educational doctrine that all knowledge begins with the senses, pointing out, on his side, that this beginning of knowledge is often lost in the remote past of the given person. Yet when all had been said, the question still remained whether in the end Buddhism would not be proved philosophically right. Was not the whole notion of continuous identity illusory, to give way, at the last, to the final perception that the many were all unreal, and the One alone Real? “Yes! he exclaimed one day, after long thought in silence, “Buddhism must be right! Re-incarnation is only a mirage! But this vision is to be reached, by the path of Advaita alone!”

Perhaps it gave him pleasure, thus to play off Sankaracharya against Buddha, as it were, by calling in Advaita to the aid of Buddhism. Perhaps it was the unification of history involved, that so delighted him; since the one idea was thus shown to be imperfect, apart from the other. “The heart of Buddha and the intellect of Sankaracharya” was always his definition of the highest possibility of humanity. In this vein was the attention he gave to the argument of a certain Western woman, against the Buddhistic view of karma.

The extraordinary sense of social responsibility involved in that rendering,* had escaped this particular mind. “I find,” she said, “no motive for doing good deeds, of which someone else, and not I, will reap the fruit!”

The Swami, who was himself quite incapable of thinking in this way, was greatly struck by the remark, and a day or two later said to someone near him -“That was a very impressive point that was made the other day, that there can be no reason for doing good to people, if not they, but others, are to gather the fruit of our efforts!”

“But that was not the argument!” ungraciously answered the person addressed. “The point was that someone else than myself would reap the merit of my deed!”

“I know, I know,” he replied quietly, “but our friend would have done greater justice to her own idea, if she had put it in this other way. Let us suppose it to stand, that we are deceived in doing service to those who can never receive that service. Don’t you see that there is but one reply – the theory of Advaita? For we are all one!”

Had he realised that the distinction between the mediaeval and modern Hindu minds lay precisely here, that in the modern idea of India there would always be a place accorded to Buddhism and Buddha? Had he told himself that the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which had dominated Indian education since the Guptas, were henceforth to be supplemented, in the popular mind, by the history of the Asokan and Pre-Asokan periods? Had he thought of the vast significance to Asia of such a generalisation, of the new life to be poured from Hinduism into the veins of Buddhist countries, and of the vigour and strength to be gained by India herself, from the self-recognition of the Mother-church, feeding with knowledge the daughter-nations? However this be, we must never forget that it was in Hinduism that he saw the keystone of the arch of the two faiths. It was this mother, and not her daughter, that he found all-inclusive.

Great and beloved Mother-church as she is, she has room to all time for the glorious form of the first and most lion-hearted of all her Avatars. She has place for his orders; understanding and reverence for his teachings; mother-love for his flock; and sympathy and welcome for the young he brought to her. But never will she say that truth is confined to his presentment; that salvation is only to be found through the monastic rule that the path to perfection is one and one alone.

That was perhaps the greatest of the Swami Vivekananda’s pronouncements on Buddhism, in which he said: “The great point of contrast between Buddhism and Hinduism lies in the fact that Buddhism said ‘Realise all this as illusion,’ while Hinduism said ‘Realise that within the illusion is the Real.’

* There is surely a sense in which the motive for doing right is much strengthened if we are to feel that another, and not oneself, will bear the punishment for our sin. We may compare with this our own sense of responsibility for the property, children, or honour of another.

Of how this was to be done, Hinduism never presumed to enunciate any rigid law. The Buddhist command could only be carried out through monasticism; the Hindu might be fulfilled through any state of life. All alike were roads to the One Real. One of the highest and greatest expressions of the Faith is put into the mouth of a butcher, preaching, by the orders of a married woman, to a sannyasin. Thus Buddhism became the religion of a monastic order, but Hinduism, in spite of its exaltation of monasticism, remains ever the religion of faithfulness to daily duty, whatever it be, as the path by which man may attain to God. “

Some of the deepest convictions of our lives are gathered from data which, in their very nature, can influence no one but ourselves. The instantaneous estimate of a motive or a personality, for instance, cannot be communicated, in its vividness, to any other, yet remains irresistible to the mind that makes it.

It may be either true or false, that is to say, it may be based on a subtle species of observation, possible only to a few; or it may be only a vagrant impulse of emotion. Be this as it may, the strong subjective impression will colour much of the subsequent thought of him who has experienced it, and will appear to others as wisdom or caprice, according to its good or ill-luck, in coinciding with fact.

In the same way, if, for the sake of the argument, we grant the truth of the theory of reincarnation, it immediately becomes conceivable that some minds may enjoy occasional access within themselves to stores of sub-conscious memory, in which others have no share. If so, it is just possible that the results of such an excursus might furnish clues of some value, even though the difference between it and pure imagination could only be appreciated by the exploring mind itself.

Some such train of thought is necessary, if one is to visualise no less than three striking subjective experiences, which exerted an undoubted influence over my Master’s mind and thought.

Chief of these probably, was that vision of an old man on the banks of the Indus, chanting Vedic riks, from which he had learnt his own peculiar method of intoning Sanskrit – a method much closer to that of Gregorian plainsong than is the ordinary singing of the Vedas.

In this, he always believed himself to have recovered the musical cadences of the Aryan ancestors. He found something remarkably sympathetic to this mode in the poetry of Sankaracharya, and this fact he expressed, by saying that that master must have had a vision like his own, in which he had caught “the rhythm of the Vedas.”

The Swami Saradananda says that this vision occurred about two years after Sri Ramakrishna had passed away, probably in January 1888. The passage which he heard was that Salutation to Gayatri which begins “O come, Thou Effulgent!”

It is a great happiness to know that the Swami Abhedananda has learnt and can reproduce this Sanskrit intoning, of the Swami Vivekananda.

Another similar experience had come to him, when he was quite young. It was in the days of his discipleship at Dakshineswar. He was seated at home, in the little room that formed his study, meditating, when suddenly there appeared before him a man tall and largely built, in whose face was a calm so deep and so established, that it seemed to the lad, looking up at him, as if both pain and pleasure had been forgotten during infinite time. The devotee rose from his seat, and prostrated himself before his visitant; then he stood still, lost in an awestruck gaze.

Suddenly it seemed as if the form before him were about to speak. But at this, a fit of terror overcame the boy, and without waiting to hear, he slipped quietly out of the room, and closed the door behind him!

This was the vision to which he had referred, when he spoke of the entrance of Buddha into his room, in his youth. “And I fell at his feet, for I knew it was the Lord Himself.” Nor would it be easy to measure how much of the throbbing energy of his feeling about Buddha, – the conviction of his overwhelming ‘sanity,’ the realisation of his infinite sacrifice and compassion, – was born of that hour in his boyhood, when he had felt that He stood revealed before him.

The third and last of these determining visions, – in so far, at least, as is known to those about him – occurred to the Swami on his way home to India, in January of the year 1897. One gathers that during his travels in Catholic Europe, he had been startled, like others before him, to find the identity of Christianity with Hinduism in a thousand points of familiar detail.

The Blessed Sacrament appeared to him to be only an elaboration of the Vedic prasadum. The priestly tonsure reminded him of the shaven head of the Indian monk; and when he came across a picture of Justinian receiving the Law from two shaven monks, he felt that he had found the origin of the tonsure. He could not but remember that even before Buddhism, India had had monks and nuns, and that Europe had taken her orders from the Thebaid. Hindu ritual had its lights, its incense, and its music. Even the sign of the cross, as he saw it practised reminded him of the touching of different parts of the body, in certain kinds of meditation. And the culmination of this series of observations was reached, when he entered some cathedral, and found it furnished with an insufficient number of chairs, and no pews! Then, at last, he was really at home. Henceforth he could not believe that Christianity was foreign.

Another train of thought that may have prepared him, unconsciously, for the dream I am about to recount, lay in the fact that he had, in America, had a Jewish disciple, by whom he had been introduced into orthodox Jewish society, and led to the more or less careful study of the Talmud. Thus he had a clearer sense of the background of thought, against which S. Paul stood forth, than is at all common.

Still an added factor in his study of Christianity, that is worth remembering, was his familiarity, in America, with the movement known as Christian Science. In examining the birth of religions, he said once, afterwards, that there were three elements of which he thought we must always take account, – doctrine, ritual, and a third, of the nature of magic, or miracle, which most commonly appeared as a movement of healing. The grounds for his inclusion of the last member of this triad, I find partly in his observation of Christian Science and the allied movements, – coupled as this would be with his own conviction that we are now on the eve of a great new synthesis in religion – and partly in his vision itself, which was stamped so vividly on his brain-fibre as to stand in his memory amongst actual living experiences.

It was night, and the ship on which he had embarked at Naples, was still on her way to Port Said, when he had this dream. An old and bearded man appeared before him, saying “Observe well this place that I show to you. You are now in the island of Crete. This is the land in which Christianity began.” In support of this origin of Christianity, the speaker gave two words – one of which was Therapeut& – and showed both to be derived direct from Sanskrit roots.

The Swami frequently spoke of this dream in after years, and always gave the two etymologies; but the other seems* nevertheless, to be lost, beyond recovery. Of therapeut&, the meaning advanced was, sons of the theras, from thera, an elder amongst the Buddhist monks, and putra, the Sanskrit word for son. “The proofs are all here,” added the old man, pointing to the ground, “Dig, and you will find!”

* It is my own belief that the second word was Essene. Bat alas. I cannot remember the Sanskritic derivation! – N.

The Swami woke, feeling that he had had no common dream, and tumbled out on deck, to take the air. As he did so, he met a ship’s officer, turning in from his watch.

‘What is the time?’ he asked him.

“Midnight,” was the answer.

“And where are we?”

“Just fifty miles off Crete!”

This unexpected coincidence startled the Swami, lending inevitable emphasis to the dream itself. The experience now seemed to precipitate elements, that without it, would have lain in his mind meaningless and un-related. He confessed afterwards that up to this time it had never occurred to him to doubt the historic personality of Christ, and that after this, he could never rely upon it. He understood all at once that it was S. Paul alone of whom we could be sure. He saw the meaning of the fact that the Acts of the Apostles was an older record than the Gospels. And he divined that the teaching of Jesus might have originated with the Rabbi Hillel, while the ancient sect of the Nazarenes might have contributed the name and the person, with its beautiful sayings, reverberating out of some unknown antiquity.

But while his vision thus exercised an undeniable influence over his own mind, he would have thought it insanity to offer it as evidence to any other. The function of such an experience, if admitted at all, was to his thinking, subjective alone. He might be led by it to doubt the historic character of Jesus of Nazareth; but he never referred to Crete as the probable birth-place of Christianity. That would be an hypothesis for secular scholarship alone, to prove or disprove.

The admitted historic spectacle of the meeting of Indian and Egyptian elements at Alexandria was the only geographical factor of which he ever spoke. Nor did this intellectual dubiety in any way dim the brightness of his love for the Son of Mary. To Hindu thinking, it is the perfection of the ideal, as ideal, that matters, and not the truth of its setting in space and time.

To the Swami it was only natural, therefore, to refuse, out of reverence, to give his blessing to a picture of the Sistine Madonna, touching the feet of the Divine child, instead; or to say, in answer to an enquirer, “Had I lived in Palestine, in the days of Jesus of Nazareth, I would have washed His feet, not with my tears, but with my heart’s blood!” In this, moreover, he had the explicit sanction of Sri Ramakrishna, whom he had consulted anxiously, in his boyhood, on a similar question, to be answered, “Do you not think that they who could create such things must themselves have been the ideal that they held up for worship?”

The Temple of Dakshineshwar was built by the wealthy Rani Rashmani, a woman of the Koiburto caste, and in the year 1853, Sri Ramakrishna took up his residence there, as one of the Brahmins attached to its service.

These were facts which had impressed the mind of Vivekananda even more deeply, perhaps, than he himself ever knew. A woman of the people had been, in a sense, the mother of that whole movement of which all the disciples of his Master formed parts. Humanly speaking, without the Temple of Dakshineshwar there had been no Ramakrishna, without Ramakrishna no Vivekananda, and without Vivekananda, no Western Mission. The whole story rested on the building, erected on the Ganges side, a few miles above Calcutta, just before the middle of the nineteenth century. And that was the outcome of the devotion of a rich woman of the lower castes, – a thing that under a purely Hindu government, bound to the maintenance of Brahmin supremacy, would never have been possible, as the Swami himself was not slow to point out. From this he inferred the importance of the noncognisance of caste, by centralised governments in India.

Rani Rashmani, in her time, was a woman of heroic mould. The story is still told, of how she defended the fisher-folk of Calcutta against wrongful taxation, by inducing her husband to pay the enormous sum demanded, and then insist on closing the river against the heavy traffic of the foreigners.

She fought a like good fight over the right of her household to carry the images of the gods along the roads she owned, on the lordly Maidan, or Park. If the English objected to the religion of the Indian people, she said in effect, it was a small matter to build walls at the disputed points, to right and left of the procession-path. And this was done, with the result of breaking the continuity of the grand pleasure-drive, the Rotten Row of Calcutta.

Early in her widowhood, she had to bring all her wits to bear on her bankers, in order to get into her own hands the heavy balance which she required for working-capital. This she accomplished, however, with the greatest tact and adroitness, and was mistress of her own affairs thenceforth. Later, a great law-suit, in which the ready-wit of her replies through counsel carried all before her, became a household word in Hindu Calcutta.

The husband of Rani Rashmani’s daughter, ‘Mathur Babu’ as he was called, bears a name that figures largely in the early history of Sri Ramakrishna. It was he who protected the great devotee, when all around held him to be religion-mad. It was he who continued him in the enjoyment of residence and allowances, without permitting duties to be demanded of him. In these things, Mathur Babu acted as the representative of his wife’s mother. Rani Rashmani had recognised the religious genius of Sri Ramakrishna, from the beginning, and proved unfaltering in her adhesion to that first insight.

And yet, when Ramakrishna, as the young Brahmin of Kamapukur, had first come to Dakshineshwar, so orthodox had he been, that he could not tolerate the idea of a temple, built and endowed by a low-caste woman. As the younger brother of the priest-in-charge, he had to assist, hour after hour, in the religious ceremonies of the opening day. But he would eat none of the prasadam. And late at night, it is said, when all was over, and the guests had dispersed, he broke his fast for the first time, with a handful of fried lentils bought in the bazaar.

Surely this fact deepens the significance of the position which he subsequently occupied in the Temple-garden. It was by no oversight that he became the honoured guest and dependent of the Koiburto Rani. We are justified in believing that when at last he found his mission, he recognised it as subversive, rather than corroborative, of the rigid conservatism to which his childhood in the villages had accustomed him. And we may hold that his whole life declares the conviction of the equal religious importance of all men, whatever their individual rank in the social army.

Our Master, at any rate, regarded the Order to which he belonged as one whose lot was cast for all time with the cause of Woman and the People. This was the cry that rose to his lips instinctively, when he dictated to the phonograph in America, the message that he would send to the Rajah of Khetri. It was the one thought, too, with which he would turn to the disciple at his side, whenever he felt himself nearer than usual to death, in a foreign country, alone, “Never forget!” he would then say, “the word is, ‘Woman and the People!'”

It is of course in moments of the formation of groups that the intensity of social power is at its greatest, and the Swami brooded much over the fact that the ‘formed could no longer give life or inspiration. ‘Formed’ and dead, with him, were synonyms. A social formation that had become fixed, was like a tree that had ceased to grow. Only a false sentimentality (and sentimentality was, in his eyes, selfishness, ‘the overflow of the senses’) could cause us to return upon it, with expectation.

Caste was an institution that he was always studying. He rarely criticised, he constantly investigated it. As an inevitable phenomenon of all human life, he could not look upon it as if it had been peculiar to Hinduism. It was on seeing an Englishman hesitate to admit, amongst gentlemen, that he had once killed cattle in Mysore, that the Swami exclaimed, “The opinion of his caste is the last and finest restraint that holds a man!” And with a few quick strokes he created the picture of the difference between those standards which differentiate the law-abiding from the criminal, or the pious from the unbelieving, on the one hand, and on the other, those finer, more constructive moral ideals, that inspire us to strive for the respect of the smaller number of human beings whom we regard as our peers.

But remarks like this were no indication of partisanship. It was for the monk to witness life, not to take sides in it. He ignored all the proposals that reached him, which would have pledged him to one party or another, as its leader. Only let Woman and the People achieve education! All further questions of their fate, they would themselves be competent to settle. This was his view of freedom, and for this he lived. As to what form that education should take, he knew enough to understand that but little was as yet determined. With all his reverence for individuality, he had a horror of what he called the crime of the unfaithful widow. “Better anything than that!” he said, and felt. The white un-bordered sari of the lonely life was to him the symbol of all that was sacred and true.

Naturally then, he could not think of any system of schooling which was out of touch with these things, as ‘education.’ The frivolous, the luxurious, and the de-nationalised, however splendid in appearance, was to his thinking not educated, but rather degraded. A modernised Indian woman, on the other hand, in whom he saw the old-time intensity of trustful and devoted companionship to the husband, with the old-time loyalty to the wedded kindred, was still, to him, “the ideal Hindu wife.” True woman-hood, like true monkhood, was no matter of mere externals. And unless it held and developed the spirit of true womanhood, there could be no education of woman worthy of the name.

He was always watching for chance indications of the future type. A certain growth of individualism was inevitable, and must necessarily bring later marriage, and perhaps a measure of personal choice, in its train. Probably this, more than anything else, would tend to do away with the problems created by child-widowhood. At the same time, it was not to be forgotten that early marriage had, in its time, been a deliberate attempt, on the part of the community, to avoid certain other evils which they had regarded as incidental to its postponement.

He could not foresee a Hindu woman of the future, entirely without the old power of meditation. Modern science women must learn: but not at the cost of the ancient spirituality. He saw clearly enough that the ideal education would be one that should exercise the smallest possible influence for direct change on the social body as a whole. It would be that which should best enable every woman, in time to come, to resume into herself the greatness of all the women of the Indian past.

Each separate inspiration of days gone by had done its work. The Rajput story teemed with the strength and courage of the national womanhood. But the glowing metal must flow into new moulds. Ahalya Bae Rani had been perhaps the greatest woman who ever lived. An Indian sadhu, who had come across her public works in all parts of the country, would naturally think so. Yet the greatness of the future, while including hers, would be no exact repetition of it. The mother’s heart, in the women of the dawning age, must be conjoined with the hero’s will. The fire on the Vedic altar, out of which arose Savitri, with her sacred calm and freedom, was ever the ideal background. But with this woman must unite a softness and sweetness, as of the south winds themselves.

Woman must rise in capacity, not fall. In all his plans for a widows’ home, or a girls’ school and college, there were great green spaces. Physical exercise, and gardening, and the care of animals, must form part of the life lived there. Religion, and an intensity of aspiration more frequent in the cloister than outside it, were to be heart and background of this new departure. And such schools, when the winter was over, must transform themselves into pilgrimages, and study half the year in the Himalayas. Thus a race of women would be created, who should be nothing less than “Bashi-Bazouks of religion,”* and they should workout the problem, for women. No home, save in their work; no ties, save of religion; no love, but that for guru, and people, and motherland.

Something after this sort was his dream. He saw plainly enough that what was wanted was a race of women-educators, and this was how he contemplated making them.

Strength, strength, strength was the one quality he called for, in woman as in man. But how stern was his discrimination of what constituted strength! Neither self-advertisement nor over-emotion roused his admiration. His mind was too full of the grand old types of silence and sweetness and steadiness to be attracted by any form of mere display.

At the same time, woman had as large an inheritance as man, in all the thought and knowledge that formed the peculiar gift of the age to India. There could be no sex in truth. He would never tolerate any scheme of life and polity that tended to bind tighter on mind and soul the fetters of the body. The greater the individual, the more would she transcend the limitations of femininity in mind and character; and the more was such transcendence to be expected and admired.

* The Bashi-Bazouks were the bodyguard of the Caliph. For many centuries, the members of the Turkish Guard consisted of soldiers who had been kidnapped in early childhood from all races and countries, and brought up in Islam. Their religion was thus their passion, and the service of their land and sovereign, their only bond of union. They were renowned throughout Europe for their fierceness

He looked, naturally enough, to widows as a class, to provide the first generation of abbesslike educators. But in this respect, as in all others, he made no definite plans. In his own words, he only said ” ‘Awake! Awake!’ Plans grow and work themselves.” Yet he would have welcomed material, wherever it might have come from.

He knew of no reason why it should be impossible to any woman – by strong and simple character and intellect, and uprightness of living – to make herself a vehicle of the highest ideals. Even burdens of the conscience must be held redeemable by sincerity. “All great ends must be freely pursued,” says a recent writer on feminist movements, and the Swami had no fear of freedom, and no distrust of Indian womanhood.

But the growth of freedom of which he dreamt, would be no fruit of agitation, clamorous and iconoclastic. It would be indirect, silent, and organic. Beginning with a loyal acceptance of the standards of society, women would more and more, as they advanced in achievement, learn to understand both the commands and the opportunities, which characterised the national life. By fulfilling those demands, and availing themselves to the full of their opportunities, they would grow more Indian than ever before, even while they entered on a grandeur of development, of which the past had never dreamt.

In nothing, perhaps, did the personal freedom of Vivekananda show itself more plainly than in his grasp of the continuity of the national life. The new form was always, to him, sanctified by the old consecration. To draw pictures of the goddess Saraswati was, according to him, “to worship her.” To study the science of medicine was “to be down on one’s knees, praying against the demons of disease and filth.” The old bhakti of the cow showed how receptive was the spirit of Hindu society of new and scientific methods of dairy-farming, and the pasturing and care of animals. The training of the intellect to its highest perfection, he believed essential to the power of religious concentration. Study was tapasya, and Hindu meditativeness an aid to scientific insight. All work was a form of renunciation. Love, even of home and family, was always capable of being wrought into a grander and more universal passion.

He delighted to point out that to the Hindu all written words were sacred, English and Persian to the full as much as Sanskrit. But he hated the tinkling sound of foreign manners and foreign accomplishments. He could not bear to listen to a criticism that concerned itself merely with the readjustment of externals. When comparisons had to be made, he dealt always with the ideal as differently expressed by different societies and measured either failure or achievement, whether in modern or mediaeval, by this central aim.

Above all, his conception of love was one that admitted of no differentiation between the speaker and him of whom he spoke. To refer to others as “they” was already, to his ears, almost hatred. He always united himself with the criticised or the condemned. Those about him realised that if the universe had indeed been resolvable into an ultimate formula of dualism, his own part would have been chosen, not with Michael the Archangel, but with him, eternally defeated, over whom he triumphed. And this was with him no expression of an inner conviction that he could teach or aid. It was simply the passionate determination to share the hardest lot to which any might be driven without escape, to defy the powers of the universe, if need be, by himself suffering the utmost to which any single consciousness anywhere might find itself irretrievably doomed.

Well might he point out, as he does in certain of his published letters, that even compassion was not motive enough, on which to build the service of others. He would have no such patronage. Compassion, he said, was that which served others with the idea that they were jivas, souls: love, on the contrary, regarded them as the Atman, the very Self. Love, therefore, was worship, and this worship the vision of God. “For the Advaitin, therefore, the ONLY motive is love.”

There was no privilege to be compared with the trust of a great service. “It is the Saviour,” he says, in one of his letters, “who should go on his way rejoicing; not the saved!” As priests purifying themselves for the service of the altar, with eager awe, and the will to endure all, and yet be steadfast, must they come forward, who were chosen for the sacred task of woman’s education. He remembered, and often repeated, the words of Mataji Maharani, the Mahratta woman who founded in Calcutta, the Mahakali Pathshala. “Swamiji!” she said, pointing to the little girls whom she taught, “I have no help. But these blessed ones I worship, and they will take me to salvation!”

A like intensity of chivalry spoke, in his attitude towards those whom he called “the People.” Education and knowledge were the right of these, as much as of their brothers, higher in the social scale. Having this, they would work out their own destiny, freely, from within.

In this view of the task before him, the Swami was only continuing the tradition of all the great Indian teachers, from Buddha downwards. In the age when the philosophy of the Upanishads had been the exclusive privilege of the Aryans, the Tathagatha arose, and taught to all alike the Perfect Way, of Nirvana by Renunciation. In a place and a period where the initiation of the great Masters was the cherished culture of the few, Ramanuja, from the tower of Conjeeveram, proclaimed the mystic text to all the pariahs. It is now the dawn of the modern age, – with its realisation of manhood by secular knowledge – in India. Naturally then, to Vivekananda the absorbing question was, how to give secular knowledge to the People.

He saw, of course, that the energy and co-operation of the whole nation was necessary, if material prosperity was ever to be brought back to India. And he knew well enough that the restoration of material prosperity was an imperative need. A God, he said, with his accustomed vigour, who could not in this life give a crust of bread, was not to be trusted in the next for the kingdom of heaven! He also felt, probably, that only by the spread of knowledge could the country as a whole be kept steadfast in its reverence for the greatness of its own inherited culture, intellectual and religious.

In any case, new life could only be poured into the veins of the higher classes, by a great movement of forth-reaching to the democracy. He believed that the one thing to be renounced was any idea of birth as the charter of leadership. The sublimated common-sense that men call genius, was to the full as likely to occur in the small shopkeeper, or in the peasant taken from the plough, as in the Brahmin or the Kayasth. If the Kshatriya had had any monopoly of courage, where would Tantia Bhil have been? He believed that the whole of India was about to be thrown into the melting-pot, and that no man could say what new forms of power and greatness would be the result.

He saw plainly that the education of the Indian working-folk was properly the task of the Indian lettered classes, and of no others. The infinite danger that attended the introduction of knowledge by foreign minds from foreign sources, was never for one moment hidden from him. This is the meaning of his constant plea, in his published correspondence, for the teaching of the villages, by wandering students, who would carry the magic lantern, the camera, and some means for simple chemical experiments. Again he begs for the inclusion of some secular instruction in the intercourse of the begging friars, with the humbler classes. All this, of course, would be little more than a support and attractive invitation, to the New Learning. For that learning itself every man would have to struggle, alone or in combination. But there can be no doubt that to bring home to a large population the idea that there is a world of thought and knowledge unattained by them, is the first step in the popularising of new culture. In such schemes, therefore, the Swami was emphatically right.

As befitted a religious teacher, however, the work that he himself initiated and consecrated was almost always some special service of the hungry or the sick. It was he who found the money that started the special sanitation missions, first undertaken by the Order, as a measure for plague-prevention, in 1899, and never since abandoned. Throughout his years in the West, he was seeking for workers “to devote themselves to the Indian pariahs,” and nothing caused him such exultation in 1897 as to see his Brahmin disciples nursing low-caste patients through cholera. “We see again,” he said, referring to this, “what happened before, in the days of Buddha.” And those who knew him best, feel a peculiar reverence and affection for the little hospital in Benares, that was the last-born child of his love and pity.

But his heart was not less bound up in other undertakings, which, though less directly his, were more purely educational. The well-being of the various magazines in which the Order was interested, and the industrial education carried on by the Orphanage at Murshidabad, were matters of the deepest import in his eyes. Under present circumstances in India, the magazine is often a kind of peripatetic school, college, and university, all in one. It has a marvellous degree of influence. It carries ideas on the one hand, and offers a means of selfexpression on the other, and it was an instinctive perception of this educational value that made the Swami so eager about the fate of various papers conducted by his brethren and disciples.

The same number of a periodical will sometimes combine the loftiest transcendental abstractions on one page with comparatively faltering secular speculations on the next, and in this affords an exact index to the popular mind of the Transition. The Swami himself said, referring to this paradox, “The Hindu’s idea of the means of knowledge is meditation, and this serves him well, when the subject is mathematics. Unfortunately, however, his instinct would lead him to the same method in the case of geography, and not much geography comes that way!”

Vivekananda’s passion of pity, however, did not concern itself with the Indian people only. True to his Oriental birth, he would always defend the small farmer or the small distributor, against those theorists who seem to consider that aggregations of business are justified in proportion to their size. He held that the age of humanity now dawning would occupy itself mainly with the problems of the working-folk, or, as he expressed it, with the problems of the Sudra.

When he first landed in the West, he was greatly attracted, as his letters show, by the apparent democracy of conditions there. Later, in 1900, he had a clearer view of the underlying selfishness of capital and the struggle for privilege, and confided to someone that

Western life now looked to him “like hell.” At this riper stage of experience, he was inclined to believe that China had gone nearer to the ideal conception of human ethics than newer countries had ever done, or could do. Yet he never doubted that for man, the world over, the coming age would be “for the People.” “We are to solve the problems of the Sudra,” he said, one day, “but oh, through what tumults! through what tumults!” He spoke like one gazing direct into the future, and his voice had the ring of prophecy; but, though the listener waited, hoping eagerly for more, he only became silent, lapsing into deeper thought.

I have always believed that it was for the guiding and steadying of men through some such age of confusion and terror, that in our Master’s life and that of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the worship of the Mother has sounded such a mighty Udbodhan. She it is who unites in Herself the extremes of experience. She shines through evil as through good. She alone is the Goal, what-ever be the road. Whenever the Swami would chant Her salutation, one would hear, like the subdued music of some orchestra behind a single melody, this great chorus of the historic drama. “Thou art the welfare and happiness in the homes of the virtuous,” he would recite, “And Thou art the misery and wretchedness, in those of the quarrelsome and wicked!” And then, as the mingling of oppressor and oppressed in a common hope and terror, as the trampling of armies, and turmoil of nations, grew louder and clearer to the mental ear, one would hear the thunder of the great Ascription rise above it all:

“Thou Mother of blessings,

Thou the Giver of desires,

Thou the Doer of all good,

To Thee our salutation.

Thee we salute, Thee we salute, Thee we salute.

Thou terrible dark Night!

Thou the Night of Delusion!

Thou the Night of DEATH -To THEE our salutation!

Thee we salute. Thee we salute. Thee we salute.”

The Swami had once asked Pavhari Baba of Ghazipur, “What was the secret of success in work?” and had been answered, “To make the end the means, and the means the end.”

This is a saying that one penetrates now and again for a moment at long intervals. But if it signifies that the whole energy of the worker should be concentrated on the means, as if these were the end, while that end itself is for the time being forgotten or ignored, then it may be only another way of preaching the great lesson of the Gita, “To action man has a right: he has no right to the fruits of action.”

Our Master possessed, in a wonderful degree, the secret of inspiring his disciples to attempt this ideal. He had his own reasons – which every Hindu will perhaps understand – for feeling that a European who was to work on his behalf for India must do so in the Indian way. And in this demand, while he never confused essentials and non-essentials, he regarded no detail as too trivial to be important.

To eat only of approved foods, and to do this with the fingers, to sit and sleep on the floor, to perform Hindu ceremonies, and bind oneself strictly by the feelings and observances of Hindu etiquette, were all, to his thinking, means of arriving at that Indian consciousness which would afterwards enable one to orientate oneself truly to the Indian aspects of larger questions. Even so trifling a matter as the use of lime-juice and powdered lentils, instead of soap, appeared to him worthy of thought and effort. Even the caste-feelings that seemed crude must be appreciated and assimilated. It was tacitly understood that the time might someday come, when one would be free of all these, even as he was free; but the emancipation won by going through an experience is very different from the blindness that ignores or despises!

The Swami was remarkable, however, in his power of imparting the ideal with a custom. To this day, one shudders at the impurity and roughness of blowing out a light; while to put on a sari, and veil the head, is always to strive for the mood of passive sweetness and acceptance, rather than that of self-confident aggression. For in how far this symbolism of externals is a fact of common Indian perception, we are not, perhaps, quite prepared to understand. “Never neglect to lower it!” said the monk Sadananda to me once, of this particular garment. “Remember that in that white veil lies the half of saintliness!”

In all this, one was led along the path that one knew already to be right. If the student was to solve any problem of Indian education, it was essential that there should first be experience of the humbler routine of teaching; and for this the supreme and essential qualification was to have looked at the world, even if only for a moment, through the eyes of the taught. Every canon of educational science proclaims this fact. ‘From known to unknown,’ from simple to complex,’ ‘from concrete to abstract,’ and the very term ‘education’ itself, are all words only, on the lips of those who can form no idea of the world as the pupil sees it, or the aims to which he would fain be aided to climb. To teach against the aspirations of the taught, is assuredly to court ill results instead of good.

What was startling in the Swami’s discipline was his instinctive assumption that the Indian consciousness was built up on the thousand and one tiny details of Indian daily life. Looking closer, one saw that this had been the method pursued by Sri Ramakrishna. Whenever he desired to apprehend a new idea, he had adopted the food, clothes, language, and general habits of those who held it. He had not merely attempted to approximate to them in the use of a few religious formula.

But Vivekananda was too great an educator to disregard the freedom of the disciple, even in such matters as these. The aim was revealed only little by little, and always on the basis of some attempt already made. It was true that he was perpetually testing purity of motive, always on his guard against the possible intrusion of self-interest, in himself or in others. “I trust no one,” he said, “because I do not trust myself. How do I know what I may become, tomorrow?” But it was also true that it was not in his nature, as he said once, to interfere with liberty, even to prevent mistakes. It was for him to point out the source of an error, only when it had been committed.

During the first six months of 1899, I dined occasionally with people of various classes, both Indian and European, in Calcutta. This fact always caused the Swami uneasiness. He feared a revulsion, probably, against the extreme simplicity of orthodox Hindu life. Undoubtedly also he thought a strong reaction possible, in favour of the associations of one’s birth. He had seen a great religious movement shattered in the West, by the petty social ambition of a woman of over-much refinement. Yet he never interfered with me in this matter, though a single word of authority would have been enough at any time to have ended it. Nor did he ever show his disapproval. He took an interest, on the contrary, in every experience that one brought to his notice. He would in a general way express his fear, or utter a grave warning, not at the time understood, about ‘loaves and fishes.’ But seeing, perhaps, that there was a genuine need to form a concept of the whole synthesis of classes and interests in Modern India, he gave way completely to his disciple, and allowed the course of enquiry to pursue its own path.

It was only on the ship, during the voyage to England, that he fully expressed the ideal that was in him. “You must give up all visiting, and live in strict seclusion,” he said one day, as he discussed the future of the women’s work. “You have to set yourself to Hinduise your thoughts, your needs, your conceptions, and your habits. Your life, internal and external, has to become all that an orthodox Hindu Brahmin Brahmacharini’s ought to be. The method will come to you, if only you desire it sufficiently. But you have to forget your own past, and to cause it to be forgotten. You have to lose even its memory!”

Never was monk more passionately monastic than Vivekananda, for all his apparent ease and fearlessness. Yet here, in the case of a worker, he knew how to substitute for the walls of a convent, the Indian people and their life. This has sometimes appeared to me the greatest manifestation he gave, of his genius. “We shall speak to all men,” he said once, “in terms of their own orthodoxy!” and went on to picture a branch of the Indian Orders in the English Church, wearing the yellow garb, going barefooted, practising the extreme of asceticism, and standing always for the supreme truth of the inter-relatedness of all religions.

In the special case of the Indian consciousness, however, his ideal was by no means limited to a strenuous aspiration. Step by step, point by point, he gave, as details of Hindu etiquette, those instructions which it is customary in Europe to offer the religious novice. It was in this way that he laboured to overcome that restlessness and emphasis of Western manners, which appears to the Eastern mind so crude.

The constant expression of feeling, whether of pain, admiration, or surprise, was to him shocking. It was not necessary to stigmatise it as irreligious, for it was ill-bred. The oriental expects of a man that he should feel, and keep his feeling to himself. Any constant pointing-out of the curious or the beautiful appears to him an unwarrantable intrusion on the privacy and self-directedness of thought. Yet that the desired repose of manner is not conceived of as merely idle, is seen in the case of that sage who was asked by a certain king to tell him about God. “What is He like? What is He like?” And the saint replied, “All this time I was telling you, O king! For silence is His name!”

This was a point on which the Swami was exacting. He would impose on the European disciple long periods of severe restraint. “Struggle to realise yourself,” he said on a certain occasion, “without a trace of emotion!”

Watching the fall of dead leaves once, in the stillness of an autumn evening, he did not deny that there was poetry in the sight, but he declared that mental excitement, roused by what was merely an event of the external sense-world, was childish and out of place. All Western people, he said, had to learn the great lesson, of holding experience and emotion apart. “Watch the fall of the leaves, but gather the sentiment of the sight from within, at some later time!”

This is neither more nor less than the conventual doctrine of recollectedness and peace, as known in Europe. Is it also a subtle method of evoking creative faculty? Does it point to a poetry which holds the world as a vast symbol, yet thrones the intellect high above the senses?

Carrying the question out of the sphere of mere good-breeding, and mental discipline, and framing the same truth again in terms of the spiritual life alone, the Swami would speak with horror of that bondage which shows itself in the quest of subtle meta-physical pleasures. In all idealism, he would say, lies the danger of idealising merely what we have reached. Such “covering of a corpse with flowers” would sooner or later mean, when realised in practice, the abandonment of the People, and the destruction of the work. Only they could be faithful who were beyond temptation, followers of the pure idea, regardless of self.

“Mind!” he said, as he talked of future methods, ‘No loaves and fishes! No glamour of the world! All this must be cut short. It must be rooted out. It is sentimentality, – the overflow of the senses. It comes to you in colour, sight, sound, and associations. Cut it off. Learn to hate it. It is utter poison!”

Thus the common routine of the Hindu home became eloquent, on the Swami’s lips, of a world of deeper truths, characteristically apprehended by the Hindu mind. He himself had been interested, from his baby-hood, in monastic organisation. He had once had a copy of the Imitation, in which there was a preface describing the monastery and the rule followed by Jean de Gerson, the supposed author, and this preface, to his imagination, had been the jewel of the book. Not contented with reading it over and over till he knew it off by heart, it filled the dreams of his boyhood; till with a kind of surprise he awoke, in middle age, to find himself organising another monastic order, on the banks of the Ganges, and realised that the fascination of his childhood had been a foreshadowing of the future.

Yet it was not the conventualism of authority, or of the school, but that of the Hindu widow, following her rule freely, in the midst of the family, that he held up to a European disciple for a model. “An orthodox Hindu Brahmin Brahmacharini” was his ideal for the woman of character, and no words can convey the delight with which his voice lingered over the phrase.

“Lay down the rules for your group, and formulate your ideas,” he said once, dealing with this very point, “and put in a little universalism, if there is room for it. But remember that not more than half a dozen people in the whole world are ever at any one time ready for this! There must be room for sects, as well as for rising above sects. You will have to manufacture your own tools. Frame laws, but frame them in such a fashion that when people are ready to do without them, they can burst them asunder. Our originality lies in combining perfect freedom with perfect authority. This can be done, even in monasticism. For my own part, I always have an horizon.”

He broke off here to follow another line of thought, which always interested him, and always appeared to him fruitful of applications. “Two different races,” he said, “mix and fuse, and out of them rises one strong distinct type. This tries to save itself from admixture, and here you see the beginning of caste. Look at the apple. The best specimens have been produced by crossing, but once crossed, we try to preserve the variety intact.”

A few days afterwards, the same reflection came uppermost again, and he said with great earnestness, “A strong and distinct type is always the physical basis of the horizon. It is all very well to talk of universalism, but the world will not be ready for that for millions of years!”

“Remember!” he said again, “if you want to know what a ship is like, the ship has to be specified as it is, – its length, breadth, shape, and material. And to understand a nation, we must do the same.

India is idolatrous. You must help her as she is. Those who have left her can do nothing for her!”

The Swami felt that there was no task before India which could compare in importance with that of woman’s education. His own life had had two definite personal purposes, of which one had been the establishment of a home for the Order of Ramakrishna, while the other was the initiation of some endeavour towards the education of woman. With five hundred men, he would say, the conquest of India might take fifty years: with as many women, not more than a few weeks.

In gathering widows and orphans to be trained, he was of opinion that the limitations of birth must be steadfastly ignored. But it was essential to success that those who were chosen should be young and unformed. “Birth is nothing!” he would say, “Environment is everything!” But above all else, he felt that impatience was inexcusable. If in twelve years any result were visible, this fact would constitute a great success. The task was one that might well take seventy years to accomplish.

For hours he would sit and talk of details, building castles in the air of an ideal school, dwelling lovingly on this point and that. None of it would ever, perhaps, be carried out literally, yet all of it, surely, was precious, since it showed the freedom he would have given, and the results that, from his standpoint, would have appeared desirable.

It was natural – if only in view of my own pre-occupation at the time with the religious ideas of Hinduism – that all these plans should wear a religious colour. They were more conventual than scholastic. The temper of the teaching was more the burden of his thought than the learning to be imparted.

Except for a sudden exclamation once, “We must turn out the greatest intellects in India!” I scarcely remember that he ever said anything directly affecting the secular side of the woman’s education scheme. He took for granted that anything deserving of such a name must needs be measured in terms of depth and severity. He was no believer in that false idealism which leads to modification of knowledge or dilution of truth, in the name of sex.

How to make the home-background against which the work of education must be carried on, at once thoroughly progressive and thoroughly Hindu, was the problem that engrossed him. There was the task of so translating the formula of the old regime, moreover, that they might continue to command the reverence of the modernised.

The moral and ethical failures which result from too easy an adoption of foreign ideas, without regard to their effects on social continuity and cohesion, were ever before his eyes. He knew instinctively that the bonds by which the old society had been knit together, must receive a new sanction and a deeper sanctification, in the light of modern learning, or that learning would prove only preliminary to the ruin of India.

But he never made the mistake of thinking this reconciliation of old and new an easy matter. How to nationalise the modern and modernise the old, so as to make the two one, was a puzzle that occupied much of his time and thought. He rightly saw that only when it had been pieced together, could national education be in a fair way to begin.

The way in which the existing obligations of Hindu life might be re-interpreted to include the whole of the modern conception of duty to country and history, suddenly struck him one day, and he exclaimed “How much you might do, with those five Yajnas!* What great things might be made of them!”

The light had broken in a flash, but it did not leave him. He took up the thread of the idea, and went into every detail. “Out of that old ancestor-pu/a, you might create Hero-worship.”

“In the worship of the gods, you must of course use images. But you can change these. Kali need not always be in one position. Encourage your girls to think of new ways of picturing Her. Have a hundred different conceptions of Saraswati. Let them draw and model and paint their own ideas.”

“In the chapel, the pitcher on the lowest step of the altar, must be always full of water, and the lights – in great Tamil butter-lamps – must be always burning. If, in addition, the maintenance of perpetual adoration could be organised, nothing could be more in accord with Hindu feeling.”

“But the ceremonies employed must themselves be Vedic. There must be a Vedic altar, on which at the hour of worship to light the Vedic fire. And the children must be present to share in the service of oblation. This is a rite which would claim the respect of the whole of India.”

“Gather all sorts of animals about you. The cow makes a fine beginning. But you will also have dogs and cats and birds and others. Let the children have a time for going to feed and look after these.”

“Then there is the sacrifice of learning. That is the most beautiful of all. Do you know that every book is holy, in India? Not the Vedas alone, but the English and Mohammedan also? All are sacred.”

“Revive the old arts. Teach your girls fruit-modelling with hardened milk. Give them artistic cooking and sewing. Let them learn painting, photography, the cutting of designs in paper, and gold and silver filigree and embroidery. See that everyone knows something by which she can earn a living, in case of need.”

“And never forget Humanity! The idea of a humanitarian man-worship exists in nucleus in India, but it has never been sufficiently specialised. Let your women develop it. Make poetry, make art, of it. Yes, a daily worship of the feet of beggars, after bathing and before the meal, would be a wonderful practical training of heart and hand together. On some days, again, the worship might be of children, of your own pupils. Or you might borrow babies, and nurse and feed them. What was it that Mataji said to me? ‘Swamiji! I have no help. But these blessed ones I worship, and they will take me to salvation!’ She feels, you see, that she is serving Uma in the Kumari, and that is a wonderful thought, with which to begin a school.”

* These are: (1) to the Rishis, by learning; (2) to the Ancestors, by family honour (3) to the Gods, by religion; (4) to the Animals; and (5) to Mankind. These five sacrifices are to be performed daily by every Hindu

But while he was thus prepared to work out the minuti& of the task of connecting old and new, it remained always true that the very presence of the Swami acted in itself as a key to the ideal, putting into direct relation with it every sincere effort that one encountered. It was this that made evident to the crudest eye the true significance of ancient rites. It was this that gave their sudden vividness and value to the fresh applications made spontaneously by modernised Hindus.

Thus the reverence of a great Indian man of science for the heroes and martyrs of European science, seemed but the modern form of the ancient salutation of the masters. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake without regard to its concrete application, seemed an inevitable greatness in the race that had dreamt of Jnanam. Serene indifference to fame and wealth proved only that a worker was spiritually the monk, though he might be playing the part of citizen and house-holder.

Of this element in his own life, by which all else that was noble and heroic was made into a recognition, a definite illustration, of an ideal already revealed, the Swami was of course unconscious. Yet this was, as one imagines, the very quintessence of his interpretative power. With regard to the details of his educational suggestions, their pedagogic soundness had always been startling to me.

Nor did I feel that this had been accounted for, even when he told me of a certain period of hardship and struggle, when he had undertaken to translate Herbert Spencer’s ‘Education’ into Bengali, and had gone on, becoming interested in the subject, to read all he could find about Pestalozzi also, ‘though that was not in the bond.’

In fact so deeply is the Hindu versed in psychological observation, and so perfect an example of the development of faculty has he always before him, in the religious practices of his people, that he enters the field of educational theory with immense advantages. Nor is there any reason why the very centre of scientific thought on the subject should not someday be found with him.

Meanwhile, the first step towards so desired a consummation will lie in apprehending the vast possibilities of existing formula. Indian educators have to extend and fulfil the vision of Vivekananda. When this is done, when to his reverence and love for the past, we can add his courage and hope for the future, and his allegiance to the sacredness of all knowledge, the time will not be far distant that is to see the Indian woman take her rightful place amongst the womanhood of the world.

To the conscience of the Swami, his monastic vows were incomparably precious. To him personally – as to any sincere monk marriage, or any step associated with it, would have been the first of crimes. To rise beyond the very memory of its impulse, was his ideal, and to guard himself and his disciples against the remotest danger of it, his passion. The very fact of un-married-ness counted with him as a spiritual asset.

It follows from all this, that he was accompanied not only by the constant eagerness for monastic perfection, but also by the equally haunting fear, of loss of integrity. And this fear, however salutary or even necessary to his own fulfilment of the ideal, did undoubtedly, for many years, come between him and the formulation of an ultimate philosophy, on this most important subject.

It must be understood, however, that his dread was not of woman, but of temptation. As disciples, as co-workers, and even as comrades and playfellows, he was much associated with women, the world over. It happened almost always that he followed the custom of the Indian villages with these friends of his wanderings, and gave them some title of family relationship. In one place he found a group of sisters, elsewhere a mother, a daughter, and so on.

Of the nobility of these, and their freedom from false or trivial ideas, he would sometimes boast; for he had in its highest degree that distinction of fine men, to seek for greatness and strength, instead of their opposites, in women. To see girls, as he had seen them in America, boating, swimming, and playing games, “without once,” in his own phrase, “remembering that they were not boys,” delighted him. He worshipped that ideal of purity which they thus embodied for him.

In the monastic training, he laid constant emphasis on the necessity of being neither man nor woman, because one had risen above both. Anything, even politeness, that emphasised the idea of sex, was horrible to him. The thing that the West calls ‘chivalry’ appeared to him as an insult to woman. The opinion of some writers that woman’s knowledge ought not to be too exact, nor man’s to be too sympathetic, would have sounded, in his neighbourhood, like a pitiful meanness. The effort of all alike must be the overcoming of such limitations, imposed on a defiant human spirit by our physical constitution.

The ideal of the life of the student, with its mingling of solitude, austerity, and intense concentration of thought, is known in India as brahmacharya. “Brahmacharya should be like a burning fire within the veins!” said the Swami. Concentration upon subjects of study, incidental to student-hood, was to him only one form of that negation of personal in impersonal, which to his thinking formed so inevitable a part of all great lives, that for its sake he was even tempted to admire Robespierre, in his fanaticism of the Terror.

The worship of Saraswati, – by which he meant perfect emotional solitude and self-restraint -he believed with his whole heart to be an essential preparation for any task demanding the highest powers, whether of heart, mind, or body.

Such worship had been recognised in India for ages, as part of the training of the athlete, and the significance of this fact was that a man must dedicate all the force at his disposal, if he were now and again to reach that height of superconscious insight, which appears to others as illumination, inspiration, or transcendent skill. Such illumination was as necessary to the highest work in art or science, as in religion. No man who was spending himself in other ways selfish or ignoble, could ever have painted a great Madonna, or enunciated the Laws of Gravitation.

The civic ideal called as loudly for monastic devotion as the spiritual. The vows of celibacy meant renunciation of the private for the public good. Thus he saw that true manhood could not be, without control of manhood; that the achievement of real greatness, by whatever path, meant always the superiority of the soul to the personal impulse; and finally, that the great monk was also potentially the great worker or great citizen.

That he was equally clear as to the converse of this, – as, for instance, that great wifehood or great citizenship can only be, where nunhood or monasticism might have been – I cannot say. I think that perhaps his own life, of monk and guide of monastic aspirants, hid from him this great truth, except in flashes, until the end came, and his summary of conclusions was complete. “It is true,” he said once, “that there are women whose very presence makes a man feel driven to God. But there are equally others, who drag him down to hell.”

At his side, it was impossible to think with respect of a love that sought to use, to appropriate, to bend to its own pleasure or good, the thing loved. Instead of this, love, to be love at all, must be a welling benediction, a free gift, “without a reason,” and careless of return. This was what he meant, by his constant talk of “loving without attachment.”

Once, indeed, on his return from a journey, he told some of us that he had now realised that the power to attach oneself was quite as important as that of detachment. Each must be instantaneous, complete, whole-hearted. And each was only the complement of the other. “Love is always a manifestation of bliss,” he said in England, “the least shadow of pain falling upon it, is always a sign of physicality and selfishness.”

Furthest of all from his admiration were the puling literature and vitiated art that see human beings primarily as bodies to be possessed, and only in the second place as mind and spirit, eternal in self-mastery and inner freedom. Much, though not all, of our Western idealism, seemed to him to be deeply tainted with this spirit, which he always spoke of as “hiding a corpse beneath flowers.”

The ideal of wifehood he thought of, in Eastern fashion, as an unwavering flame of devotion to one alone. Western customs he may have regarded as polyandrous, for I find it difficult otherwise to account for his statement that he had seen women as great and pure amongst polyandrous peoples, as in the home of his birth. He had travelled in Malabar, but not in Thibet; and in Malabar, as one learns by enquiry, the so-called polyandry is really only matriarchal marriage. The husband visits the wife in her own home, and marriage is not necessarily for life, as in the rest of India; but two men are not received on an equal footing, at the same time. In any case, he had learnt, he said, that “custom was nothing,” that use and wont could never altogether thwart or limit human development. He knew that in any country and any race the ideal might shine forth through individuals in all its fullness.

He never attacked a social ideal. He told me, a day or two before I landed in England, on my return there in 1899, that I must take back while in the West, as though I had never dropped them, the social ideals of Europe. To him, in Europe or America, the married woman was not less in honour than the unmarried. Some missionaries on board the ship, during this voyage, were displaying silver wedding-bracelets bought from Tamil women in the stress of famine; and the talk ran on the superstitious dislike of wives, East and West, to the removal of the wedding-ring from finger or wrist. “You call it a superstition?” exclaimed the Swami, in low pained tones of astonishment, “You cannot see the great ideal of chastity, behind?”*

The institution of marriage, however, was always seen by him in its relation to the ideal of spiritual freedom. And freedom, in the Eastern sense, must be understood, not as the right to do, but the right to refrain from doing – that highest inaction which transcends all action. “Against marriage, in order to rise beyond marriage,” he admitted one day, in argument, “I have nothing to say.”

The perfect marriage was, to his thinking, of the type that he had seen in his Master, in his brother Yogananda, and in his disciple Swarupananda. And these were what would in other

* The chastity of the wife, as Hindus think of it, is a word that connotes not only faithfulness to one alone, but also unwearying faithfulness. In this ideal, there is no room for the slightest fluctuation of distaste.

countries have been regarded as merely nominal. “You see there is a difference of outlook on this point!” he said once, discussing the question. “The West regards marriage as consisting in all that lies beyond the legal tie, while in India it is thought of as a bond thrown by society round two people, to unite them together for all eternity. Those two must wed each other, whether they will or not, in life after life. Each acquires half of all the merit of the other. And if one seems in this life to have fallen hopelessly behind, it is for the other only to wait and beat time, till he or she catches up again!”

Sri Ramakrishna, it was said, had always referred to marriage as a special, and to the monastic life as a universal, service. In this he was, one supposes, alluding only to marriages of the very highest type. And this was clearly the determining concept of celibacy or brahmacharya, in the Swami’s own mind. He called souls to take this vow as if he were calling them to the most honourable of warfare. He regarded a monastic order as “an army” behind a leader, and the teacher whose followers were all citizens and house-holders, as without an army. There could be no comparison, in his mind, between the strength of a cause that had, and one that had not, this support.

Yet in marriage itself, he was not wholly unable to see a career for the soul. I can never forget his story of an old couple who were separated, after fifty years of companionship, at the doors of the workhouse. “What!” exclaimed the old man, at the close of the first day, “Can’t I see Mary and kiss her before she goes to sleep? Why, I haven’t missed doing that at night, for fifty years!”

“Think of it!” said the Swami, glowing with the thought of an achievement so high, “Think of it! Such self-control and steadiness as that, ARE mukti! Marriage itself had been the path for those two souls!

He held with unfaltering strength, that the freedom to refrain from marriage, if she wished, ought to be considered as a natural right of woman. A child, whose exclusive leaning to the devotional life was already strongly marked before she was twelve, had once appealed to him for protection against proposals of alliance that were being made by her family. And he, by using his influence with her father, and suggesting increased dowers for the younger daughters, had been successful in aiding her. Years had gone by, but she was still faithful to the life she had adopted, with its long hours of silence and retirement; and all her younger sisters were now wedded. To force such a spirit into marriage would in his eyes have been a desecration.

He was proud, too, to count up the various classes, – of child-widows, wives of kulin Brahmins, rare cases of the undowered and so on – who represent the unmarried woman in Hindu society.

He held that the faithfulness of widows was the very pillar on which social institutions rested. Only he would have liked to declare as high an ideal for men as for women in this respect. The old Aryan conception of marriage, symbolised in the fire lighted at marriage, and worshipped morning and evening by husband and wife together, pointed to no inequality of standards or responsibilities as between the two. Rama, in the epic of Valmiki, had been as true to Sita, as Sita to him.

The Swami was not unaware of the existence of social problems, in connection with marriage, in all parts of the world. “These unruly women,” he exclaims, in the course of a lecture in the West, “from whose minds the words ‘bear and forbear’ are gone for ever!” He could admit, also, when continuance in a marriage would involve treachery to the future of humanity, that separation was the highest and bravest course for husband or wife to take. In India he would constantly point out that Oriental and Occidental ideals needed to be refreshed by one another. He never attacked social institutions as such, holding always that they had grown up out of a desire to avoid some evil which their critic was possibly too headstrong to perceive. But he was not blind to the over-swing of the pendulum, in one direction or the other.

“There is such pain in this country!” he said one day in India, speaking of marriage by arrangement instead of by choice. “Such pain! Some, of course there must always have been. But now the sight of Europeans, with their different customs, has increased it. Society knows that there is another way!”

“We have exalted motherhood, and you wifehood,” he said again, to a European, “and I think both might gain by some interchange.”

Again, there was the dream that he recounted on board ship, “in which I heard two voices discussing the marriage-ideals of the East and the West, and the conclusion of the whole was, that there was something in each, with which as yet, the world could ill afford to part.” It was this conviction that led him to spend so much time examining in- to differences of social ideals, as between East and West.

“In India,” he said, “the wife must not dream of loving even a son as she loves her husband. She must be Sati. But the husband ought not to love his wife as he does his mother. Hence a reciprocated affection is not thought so high as one unreturned. It is ‘shopkeeping.’ The joy of the contact of husband and wife is not admitted in India. This we have to borrow from the West. Our ideal needs to be refreshed by yours. And you, in turn, need something of our devotion to motherhood.”

But the overwhelming thought that his very presence carried home to the mind was of the infinite superiority of that life which seeks only the freedom of the soul and the service of all, to that which looks for comfort and the sweetness of home. He knew well enough the need that great workers may feel of being encircled by subordinated human lives. “You need not mind,” he said once, turning to a disciple with great tenderness and compassion, “You need not mind, if these shadows of home and marriage cross your mind sometimes. Even to me, they come now and again!” And again, hearing of an expression of intense loneliness on the part of a friend, he exclaimed. “Every worker feels like that at times!”

But infinite danger lay, to his thinking, in a false exaltation of any social ideal at the risk of jeopardising the eternal supremacy of the super-social. “Never forget to say to all whom you teach,” he charged one of his disciples solemnly, “that like a little fire-fly beside the brightness of the sun, like a grain of sand beside the vastness of Mount Meru, SO is the life of the citizen compared with that of the Sannyasin!”

He knew the danger that lay here, of spiritual pride, and his own means of overcoming this lay in bowing himself down to any one, whether monk or householder, who was disciple and devotee of his own Master, Sri Ramakrishna. But to abate the dictum itself, would have been, in his eyes, to have minimised the ideal, and this he could not do. Instead, he felt that one of the most important responsibilities lying, in the present age, upon the religious orders, was the preaching of monastic ideals even in marriage, in order that the more difficult might always exercise its compelling and restraining force upon the easier, path; and that the false glamour of romance, – obscuring the solitary grandeur and freedom of the soul, as the ultimate aim, in the name of an interesting and absorbing companionship, – might be utterly destroyed.

All the disciples of Ramakrishna believe that marriage is finally perfected by the man’s acceptance of his wife as the mother; and this means, by their mutual adoption of the monastic life. It is a moment of the mergence of the human in the divine, by which all life stands thenceforward changed. The psychological justification of this ideal is said to be the fact that, up to this critical point, the relation of marriage consists in a constant succession of a two-fold impulse, the waxing followed by the waning, of affection. With the abandonment of the external, however, impulse is transcended, and there is no fluctuation. Henceforth the beloved is worshipped in perfect steadfastness of mind.

Yet in dealing with his views on this question, one cannot but remember his utterance on the contrast between Hinduism and Buddhism, that Sunday morning in Kashmir, when we walked under the avenue of poplars, and listened to him as he talked of Woman and of Caste.

“The glory of Hinduism,” he said that day, “lies in the fact that while it has defined ideals, it has never dared to say that any one of these alone was the one true way. In this it differs from Buddhism, which exalts monasticism above all others, as the path that must be taken by all souls to reach perfection.

The story given in the Mahabharata of the young saint who was made to seek enlightenment, first from a married woman, and then from a butcher, is sufficient to show this. ‘By doing my duty’ said each one of these when asked, ‘by doing my duty in my own station, have I attained this knowledge.’ “There is no career then,” he ended, “which might not be the path to God. The question of attainment depends only, in the last resort, on the thirst of the soul.”

Thus the fact that all life is great, only in proportion to its expression of ideal purity, was not, in theory, outside the Swami’s acceptance, however much, as a monk, he shrank from interpretations which might lead to the false claim that marriage was chosen as a means to spirituality. That self-love constantly leads us to such subtle exaltation of our own acts and motives, he was well aware. He had constantly, he told us, met with persons, in Western countries, who urged that their own lives, though indolently passed in the midst of luxury, were without selfishness; that only the claims of duty kept them in the world; that in their affections, they were able to realise renunciation without a struggle.

On all such illusions, he poured out his scorn. “My only answer was,” he said, “that such great men are not born in India! The model in this kind was the great king Janaka, and in the whole of history he occurs but once!” In connection with this particular form of error, he would point out that there are two forms of idealism; one is the worship and exaltation of the ideal itself, the other is the glorification of that which we have already attained. In this second case, the ideal is really subordinated to self.

In this severity, however, there was no cynicism. Those who have read our Master’s work on Devotion, or Bhakti Yoga, will remember there the express statement that the lover always sees the ideal in the beloved. “Cling to this vision!” I have heard of his saying – to a girl whose love for another stood newly-confessed – “As long as you can both see the ideal in one another, your worship and happiness will grow more instead of less.”

Amongst the friends of our Master there was, however, one middle-aged woman who was never satisfied that, in his intensity of monasticism, he was able to do full justice to the sacredness and helpfulness of marriage. She had herself been long a widow, after an unusually blessed experience of married life. Very naturally, therefore, it was to this friend that he turned, when, a few weeks before the end, he arrived at what he knew to be his crowning conviction on this whole subject; and his letter was brought to her in her distant home by the same hand that was carrying also the telegraphic announcement of his death.

In this letter, so solemnly destined, he says: “In my opinion, a race must first cultivate a great respect for motherhood, through the sanctification and inviolability of marriage, before it can attain to the ideal of perfect chastity. The Roman Catholics and the Hindus, holding marriage sacred and inviolate, have produced great chaste men and women of immense power. To the Arab, marriage is a contract, or a forceful possession, to be dissolved at will, and we do not find there the development of the ideal of the virgin, or the brahmacharin. Modern Buddhism, – having fallen among races who have not even yet come up to the evolution of marriage – has made a travesty of monasticism. So, until there is developed in Japan a great and sacred ideal about marriage (apart from mutual attraction and love), I do not see how there can be great monks and nuns. As you have come to see that the glory of life is chastity, so my eyes also have been opened to the necessity of this great sanctification for the vast majority, in order that a few life-long chaste powers may be produced.”

There are some of us who feel that this letter has an even wider-reaching significance than he himself would have thought of ascribing to it. It was the last sentence in the great philosophy which saw “in the Many and the One the same Reality.” If the inviolability of marriage be indeed the school in which a society is made ready for the highest possibilities of the life of solitude and self-control, then the honourable fulfilment of the world’s work is as sacred a means to supreme self-realisation, as worship and prayer.

We have here, then, a law which enables us to understand the discouragement of religious ecstasy, by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and his great preference for character, in his disciples. We understand, too, the inner meaning of Vivekananda’s own constant preaching of strength. The reason is very simple. If “the Many and the One be the same Reality, seen by the same mind at different times, and in different attitudes,” then, in three words, Character is Spirituality. “Greatness” really is, as a deep thinker has affirmed, “to take the common things of life, and walk truly amongst them; and holiness a great love and much serving.”

These simple truths may prove after all, to be the very core of the new gospel. And in endorsement of this possibility, we have the Master’s own words “The highest truth is always the simplest.”

INDIA is undoubtedly the land of the understanding of psychology. To Hindus, more than to any other race, it may be said that men appear as minds. Concentration of mind is to them the ideal of life. Such differences as between talent and genius, between ordinary goodness and the highest sainthood, between moral weakness and power, are by them understood as simple differences in degree of concentration. This pre-occupation of the race is partly cause, and partly effect, doubtless, of the fact that the study of psychology has been organised in India as a science, from the earliest times.

Long before the value of writing, for the notation of knowledge, was even suspected, the quiet registration of phenomena in the communal consciousness, had begun, by the interchange of ideas and observations. Millenniums before instruments and laboratories could be thought of, as having any bearing on scientific enquiry in general, the age of experiment was fully developed amongst the Indian people, with regard to this most characteristic of their sciences.

It is not surprising that in the singularly wide range of knowledge thus accumulated in India, many phenomena of the mind, which appear to the less informed West as abnormal or miraculous, should be duly noted and classified. Thus hypnotism, and many obscure forms of hyper&sthesis and hyperkinesis, – the most familiar of these being healing, thoughtreading, clairvoyance, and clairaudience – offer no overwhelming difficulty to the student of the ancient Indian psychology, or Raja Yoga, as it is called.

We all know that the great value of scientific thought lies in enabling us to recognise and record phenomena. It matters little that a disease is rare, if only it be once noted as within the field of medical practice. It has a place thenceforth, in the human mind. It is no miracle, only because, sooner or later, it will be classified. It has a name. The conjunction of diagnosis and treatment is now a question of time only.

Something of the same sort applies to the trustworthy fraction of what are commonly referred to as “psychic phenomena.” Occurrences falling under this head, when authentic, are obviously no more supernatural than the liquefaction of air, or the extraction of radium.

Indeed the propriety of the word ‘supernatural’ is always open to dispute, inasmuch as if once a thing can be proved to occur, it is clearly within nature, and to call it supernatural becomes by that very fact, absurd.

In India the phenomena in question are regarded as cases of extension of faculty, and their explanation is sought, not in the event, but in the state of the mind witnessing it, since it is to be supposed that this will always, under given conditions, register a perception different from the accustomed.

In Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, living in the garden of Dakshineshwar, his disciples had been familiar, for years, with many of those mental characteristics which are noted in the books as distinctive of the highest degree of concentration. He was so responsive that he would meet them at the door on their arrival, and begin at once to answer, without being told of them, the questions that the boys carried written in their pockets.

His perceptions were so fine that he could tell by touch the character of anyone who might already have come in contact with his food, his clothes, or his mat. It “burnt” him, he said, of an impress from which he shrank; or, on another occasion, “Look! I can eat this. The sender must have been some good soul!” His nervous system, again, had been so charged with certain ideas that even in sleep he shrank from the touch of metal, and his hand would, apparently of its own accord, restore a book or a fruit, whose return to its owner the conscious mind had failed to prompt.

No Indian psychologist would say of one of the world-seers that he had talked with angels, but only that he had known how to reach a mood in which he believed himself to talk with angels. Of this condition, the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna saw plentiful examples. Stories are still current amongst them, regarding the strangeness of the sensations with which they would listen to one side of a dialogue, or one part in a conversation, which might seem to be carried on for hours at a time; while their Master, resting quietly, evidently believed himself to be holding communion with beings invisible to them.

Behind all these manifold experiences of Ramakrishna, binding them into one great life, was always the determination to serve mankind. Vivekananda spoke of him in after years as ‘writhing on the ground’ during the hours of darkness, in the agony of his prayer that he might return to earth again, even as a dog, if only he might aid a single soul. In moments less intimate and hidden than these, he would speak of the temptation of the higher realisations, to draw the soul away from conditions of service. And his disciples connected with this such odd utterances as they would sometimes hear, at the end of a deep entrancement, when their Master seemed to be like a child coaxing his Mother to let him run away from Her to play. ‘Just one more’ act of service, or ‘one more’ little enjoyment would be urged, on such an occasion, as a motive for returning to common consciousness.

That return, however, always brought with it the infinite love and insight of one who had been lost in God. When the Swami Vivekananda, on the occasion of his Harvard Address, defines this as the differentia between the unconsciousness of Samadhi, and the unconsciousness of catalepsy, we may take it that the assurance which breathes in every syllable, arose from his having constantly witnessed the transition, in his Master.

There were still other remarkable traits in Sri Ramakrishna. He had his own nervous force so entirely under control that he could remove all consciousness from his throat, for instance, during his last illness, and allow it to be operated on, as if under a local anaesthetic. His faculties of observation, again, were quite unique. The smallest detail of the physical constitution had a meaning for him, as casting light on the personality within. He would throw the disciple who had just come to him into an hypnotic sleep, and learn from his subconscious mind, in a few minutes, all that was lodged there, concerning the far past. Each little act and word, insignificant to others, was to him like a straw, borne on the great current of character, and showing the direction of its flow. There were times, he said, when men and women seemed to him like glass, and he could look them through and through.

Above all, he could by his touch give flashes of supreme insight, which exercised a formative and compelling power over whole lives. In the matter of Samadhi this is well-known, especially in reference to women-visitors at Dakshineshwar. But beyond this, a story was told me by a simple soul, of a certain day during the last few weeks of Sri Ramakrishna’s life, when he came out into the garden at Cossipore, and placed his hand on the heads of a row of persons, one after another, saying in one case, “Aj thak!” “To-day let be!” in another, “Chaitanya houk!” “Be awakened!” and so on.

And after this, a different gift came to each one thus blessed. In one there awoke an infinite sorrow. To another, everything about him became symbolic, and suggested ideas. With a third, the benediction was realised as over-welling bliss. And one saw a great light, which never thereafter left him, but accompanied him always everywhere, so that never could he pass a temple, or a wayside shrine, without seeming to see there, seated in the midst of this effulgence, – smiling or sorrowful as he at the moment might deserve – a Form that he knew and talked of as “the Spirit that dwells in the images.”

By such stimulating of each man to his own highest and best, or by such communication of experience as one and another could bear at the time, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa built up the rigorous integrity and strong discrimination that one sees in all who were made by his hand. “We believe nothing without testing it,” says one – Ramakrishnananda by name “we have been trained to this.”

And when I enquired from another of the disciples what particular form this training took, he answered, after deep thought, that it lay in some experience given of the Reality, from which each gained a knowledge that could never be deceived. “By our own effort,” says Vivekananda, in one of his earlier lectures, “or by the mercy of some great perfected soul, we reach the highest.”

Now the life of the guru is the disciple’s treasure in hand; and it was undoubtedly by an instantaneous analysis of all that he had seen and shared, of the extensions possible to human faculty, that the Swami was able, on his arrival in the Western sphere of psychical enquiry, to classify all knowledge as sub-conscious, conscious, and super-conscious.

The two first terms were in common enough use, in Europe and America. The third, he himself added to the psychological vocabulary, by a masterly stroke of insight, authenticated by his own personal knowledge. “Consciousness,” he said on one occasion, “is a mere film between two oceans, the sub-conscious and the superconscious.”

Again he exclaimed “I could not believe my own ears, when I heard Western people talking so much of consciousness! Consciousness? What does consciousness matter! Why, it is NOTHING, as compared with the unfathomable depths of the sub-, and the heights of the super-conscious! In this I could never be misled, for had I not seen Ramakrishna Paramahamsa gather in ten minutes, from a man’s sub-conscious mind, the whole of his past, and determine from that his future and his powers?”

The certainty of the dictum laid down in Raja Yoga that intuition, when genuine, can never contradict reason, is also indisputably due to the same comprehensive range of experience.

The ascetic of Dakshineshwar might be capable of unusual modes of insight, but he was no victim of the vanity born thereof, to be seeking for uncommon ways of arriving at facts that were accessible enough by ordinary methods. When a strange religious came to visit the garden, professing to be able to live without food, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa attempted no clairvoyant mode of testing him, but simply set shrewd observers to watch and bring him word as to what and where he was in the habit of eating.

Nothing was to be accepted, unproven, and the Swami Vivekananda, to his dying day, had a horror of those dreams, previsions, and prophecies by which ordinary folk are so apt to try to dominate one another. These things, as was inevitable, were offered to him in abundance, but he invariably met them with defiance, leaving them to work themselves out, if they were true, in spite of him. Whether a given foretelling would eventually be verified or not, it was impossible for him, he said, to know: the one thing of which he was sure was, that if he once obeyed it, he would never again be allowed to go free.

In the case of Sri Ramakrishna, it invariably happened that visions and intuitions were directed to things of the spirit; gipsy-like prognostications were far from him; and in the opinion of his disciples, such prognostications are always indicative of a greater or less misusing of energy. “All these are side-issues,” said the Swami, “they are not true Yoga. They may have a certain usefulness, in establishing indirectly the truth of our statements. Even a little glimpse gives faith that there is something beyond gross matter. Yet those who spend time on such things run into grave dangers.” “These are frontier questions!” he exclaimed impatiently, on another occasion, “there can never be any certainty or stability of knowledge, reached by their means. Did I not say they were ‘frontier-questions’? The boundary-line is always shifting!”

In all that might come before us, the attempt at discrimination was to be maintained. ‘I shall accept it when I have experienced it,’ was to be the reply to statements of the extraordinary. But our own experience was to be sifted thoroughly. We were not to run away with the first explanation of a phenomenon that might occur to us.

In spite of his reluctance to accept easy conclusions, however, the Swami became convinced, in the course of years, of the occasional return of persons from the dead, “I have several times in my life seen ghosts,” he said once, with great deliberateness, “and once, in the week after the death of Sri Ramakrishna, I saw a luminous ghost.”

But this did not imply the smallest respect on his part, for the bulk of the experiments known as spiritualistic seances. Of a famous convert whom he met on one such occasion, he said that it was sad to find a man of extraordinary intelligence in matters of the world, leaving all his intelligence behind him at the doors of a so-called medium.

In America he had been present at a number of seances as a witness, and he regarded the great majority of the phenomena displayed as grossly fraudulent. “Always the greatest fraud by the simplest means,” he said, summing up his observations. Another large fraction of the total, he thought, were better explained by subjective methods,* than as objectively true. If, after all these deductions had been made, any residuum remained, it was possible that this might be genuinely what it, professed.

* Thus a well-known thought-reader in Southern India claimed that an invisible female figure stood beside him, and told him what to say. “I did not like this explanation,” said the Swami, “and set myself to find another.” He came to the conclusion that the source of information was subjective.

But even if so, knowledge of the phenomenal could never be the goal of effort. The return of wandering wills from one plane of physical tension to another could throw but little light on any true concept of immortality. Only by renunciation could this be reached. Any dwelling upon the occult led inevitably, in the Swami’s opinion, to increase of desire, to increase of egotism, and to the fall into untruth.

If the ordinary good of life was to be given up, for the sake of the soul, how much more assuredly so, these vanities of supernatural power! Even Christianity would have seemed to him a higher creed, if it had had no miracles. Buddha’s abhorrence of wonders was the eternal glory of Buddhism. At best their value could only be to give a little confidence, and that only for the first steps. “If there be powers, they shall vanish away; charity alone remaineth.” Only to the soul that is strong enough to avoid these temptations does the door stand open. In the words of Patanjali, “To him who is able to reject all the powers, comes the cloud of virtue.” He, alone attains the very highest.

ONE of the most impressive forms of teaching practised by our Master was a certain silent change wrought in the disciple unawares, by his presence. One’s whole attitude to things was reversed; one took fire, as it were, with a given idea; or one suddenly found that a whole habit of thought had left one, and a new opinion grown up in its place, without the interchange of a single word on the subject.

It seemed as if a thing had passed beyond the realm of discussion, and knowledge had grown, by the mere fact of nearness to him. It was in this way that questions of taste and value became indifferent. It was in this way that the longing for renunciation was lighted, like a devouring flame, in the hearts of those about him. And to nothing could this statement be more applicable, than to the idea of death that one seemed to imbibe from him.

In his own life-time, he became more and more averse to any definite laying-down of the law, on this subject. “I suppose so, I do not know,” would be his answer, to one who was striving to piece out the eternal puzzle. He probably felt that one of the subtlest forms of selfinterest lay in delightful dreams of a future happiness, and he dreaded adding to the ignorance of desire, by any emphasis laid on the conditions of life outside the body.

In death, as in life, for himself, God was the only means, and Nirvana was the goal. ‘The highest Samadhi was all that counted: all the rest was wild oats.’ Yet this very fact sheds all the brighter light on the way in which one’s thought of death changed under him; and makes the more precious, those two or three letters, in which personal experience and sympathy strike from him a definite expression of opinion.

For my own part, when I first met the Swami, I had felt driven, for many years past, to hold that, whatever our wishes might be, we had no actual reason to imagine any survival of personality, beyond the death of the body. Such a thing was either impossible or unthinkable. If we had no personal experience of body without mind, – the experiencing medium, – it was equally true that we knew nothing whatever of mind without body. Hence, if mind were not actually the result of body – “a note struck upon the harp-strings” – we must suppose it, at best, to be only the opposite pole of a single substance. The two – body and mind, not matter and mind – were one, and the idea of the persistence of personality was a mere shadow, born of animal instinct. Ethical conduct, rising even to supreme self-sacrifice, was determined at bottom, by our personal preference for gratifications that were socially beneficent.*

These positions were undermined, in my own case, by the weight and emphasis which the Indian thinker habitually threw on MIND, as the pivot of life. What the modern really believes is that man is a body. Here the Oriental stands in sharp and instinctive contrast to him. As the Swami pointed out, “Western languages declare that man is a body, and has a soul: Eastern languages declare that he is a soul, and has a body.”

As a result of the new hypothesis, I began to speak to people, first postulating to myself experimentally, that I was addressing the mind within, not the ear without. The immense increase of response that this evoked, led me from step to step, till twelve months later, I suddenly found that I had fallen into the habit of thinking of mind as dominant, and could no longer imagine its being extinguished by the death of the body! Every new practice deepened this conviction, and I became gradually possessed of a conception of the world about us as mind-born, while the occurrence of any great and sudden change in our thought-world, at a definite physical moment, began to seem absurd.

The Swami’s thought on the question went, however, much deeper than this. His was the perpetual effort to avoid slipping into any identification of himself with the body. He would never even use the word “I” in any sense that might be so construed, preferring, rather quaintly to an English ear, to give a slight gesture, with the words ”all this.”

But he also fought shy of the danger of admitting that the life of the senses, limited as this is by the alternating opposites, was ‘life’ at all. Victory or defeat, love or hate, efficiency or ineffectiveness, being each only a partial apprehension, could never, amongst them, make up absolute existence. Hundreds of lives like the present, each bound in its own time to have an end, could never, as he expressed it, satisfy our hunger for immortality. For that, nothing would do but the attainment of deathlessness, and this could never be interpreted as in any sense the multiplication or exaltation of life within the senses. To be of any security, it must be possible to realise such deathlessness during this present life, for how else could the transcendence of bodily experience be assured?

* Something like this may be taken as the characteristic thought of Europe about death, during the second half of the nineteenth century. “Is the soul,” said one thinker, “a note struck upon the harpstrings, or the rower seated in a boat?”

Recent talk of the disintegration of matter has now made it easy, even for scientific workers, “to conceive of a cycle – call it mind – in which matter practically is not.” But even so, there remains yet to be worked out, as far as the west is concerned, the transition, from the individual mind and body to this sum of mind and matter into which both may be resumed.

It is not intended, here, to imply that ethical conduct ultimately rests, in any creed, on a belief in the immortality of the soul; but only to contrast the agnostic view of a spiritual life built up from below, and the Hindu idea of a physical consciousness, which is after all, merely an expression and mask of the spiritual life, with its insatiable thirst, not for self-preservation, but for self-immolation. The modern reasons from seen to unseen; from detail to general; the Hindu reasons from universal to particular, and maintains that in this specific case that is the true method of reasoning, the life of the soul being, in fact, the only known.

Western people were in the habit of saying that ‘the soul comes and goes’, thus betraying their own tendency to identify themselves with the body, watching the entrance and exit of a higher entity. The speech of the Kentish Druid who welcomed Augustine was typical of all who held this world to be the warm and lighted hall, and the soul a sparrow, taking brief refuge there, from the wintry storms without.

Yet in this concept, there were to the full as many assumptions, as in its opposite. To one who was impelled irresistibly upon the hypothesis that we are not an aggregate of physical units at all, but a hyper-physical unity, holding these in suspension, to such a one it was equally clear that we really know only that “the body comes and goes.”

By this constant insistence on man as mind, not body, those with whom the Swami was associated were brought to see death as no terminal fatality, but only a link from the midst of a chain, in the experience of the soul. Our whole centre of vision was thus shifted. Instead of the lighted hall, this life became for us the prison of hypnotic trance, a broken somnambulistic dream.

What! was utterance to be for ever limited and conditioned by human language? Were there not flashes, even as it was, of something that transcended this, something that compelled without words; that illuminated without teaching; communion direct, profound? Must knowledge remain for ever relative, for ever based on the dim and common-place perceptions of the senses, for ever finding expression, in the hard and narrow issues of conduct? Well might the Swami exclaim, as he did in the course of a New York lecture, almost with a groan, “Man, the infinite dreamer, dreaming finite dreams!”

By his scorn of such, by his own passionate longing to wander off, silent and nude, along the banks of the Ganges, by his constant turning to the super-conscious as the only content of consciousness to be desired, by his personal attitude to the relationships of life as so many fetters and impedimenta to the freedom of the soul, Vivekananda built up in those about him some sort of measure of Real Existence, and the idea that the mere fall of the body could seriously interrupt this, became impossible.

We were saturated with the thought that the accessories of life were but so many externals of a passing dream, and it seemed obvious that we should go onwards, after death, much as we were doing before it, with only such added intensity and speed as might be due to the subtler medium in which we should find ourselves. It seemed obvious too, that, as he declared, an eternal heaven or hell, based on the deeds of this present life, was an absurdity, since a finite cause could not, by any means, have an infinite effect.

Yet the Swami laid down no hard and fast conclusions on these subjects, for others to accept. He carried those about him at any given time, as far as they could go, by the force of his own vision, by the energy of his effort to express in words the thing he himself saw. But he would have nothing to do with dogma, and he was exceedingly averse to making promises about the future. As already said, “I do not know” became more and more his answer, as years went on to questions about the fate of the soul in death. Each one, to his thinking, must work out his own belief, basing it on the data of his own experience. Nothing that he should say must ever interfere with the free growth of personal conviction.

Some things, however, were noticeable. He appeared to share the common assumption that after death we meet again and ‘talk things out’, so to speak, with those who have preceded us. “When I stand before the old man,” he would say with a smile of whimsical tenderness, “I must not have to tell him so and so!” Nor did I ever see in him any struggle against this assumption. He appeared to take it simply, as one of the facts of life.

A man who has once reached the Nirvikalpa Samadhi must have passed through many psychological conditions on the way, correspondent to disembodiment. He must be accessible, during such phases, to experiences from which we are ordinarily debarred.

Now and again, as the Swami believed, he had met and held converse with the spirits of the dead. To someone who spoke of the terror of the supernatural, he said “This is always a sign of imagination. On that day when you really meet what we call a ghost, you will know no fear!”

There is a story told, amongst his brethren, of certain suicides who came to him at Madras, urging him to join them, and disturbing him greatly by the statement that his mother was dead. Having ascertained by enquiry that his mother was well, he remonstrated with these souls for their untruthfulness, but was answered that they were now in such unrest and distress that the telling of truth or falsehood was indifferent to them.

They begged him to set them at peace, and he went out to the seashore at night, to perform a Shraddh for them. But when he came to that place, in the service, where offerings should be made, he had nothing to offer, and knew not what to do. Then he remembered an old book that said, in the absence of all other means of sacrifice, sand might be used, and taking up great handfuls of sand, he stood there on the shore casting it into the sea, and with his whole mind sending benediction to the dead. And those souls had rest. They troubled him no more.

Another experience that he could never forget, was his glimpse of Sri Ramakrishna, in the week succeeding his death. It was night. He, and one other were sitting outside the house at Cossipore, talking, no doubt, of that loss of which their hearts at the moment were so full. Their Master had left them, only some few days before. Suddenly, the Swami saw a shining form enter the garden, and draw near to them…. “What was that? What was that?” said his friend, in a hoarse whisper, a few minutes later. It had been one of those rare cases in which an apparition is seen by two persons at once.

Experiences like these could not fail to create a body of belief in the mind that went through them, and in a letter written from Thousand Island Park, dated August 1895, the Swami gives expression to this conviction.

He says: “The older I grow, the deeper I see into the idea of the Hindus that man is the greatest of all beings. The only so-called higher beings are the departed, and these are nothing but men who have taken another body. This is finer, it is true, but still a man-body, with hands and feet and so on. And they live on this earth, in another akasha,* without being absolutely invisible. They also think, and have consciousness, and everything else, like us. So they also are men. So are the devas, the angels. But man alone becomes GOD, and they have all to become men again, in order to become God.”

To those who believe in our Master as a “competent witness,” all this will have its own value. They will feel, even where he expresses what is only an inference, only an opinion, that it is yet an opinion based upon unique opportunity of experience.

By the time his first period of work in America was finished, on the eve of coming to England in 1896, he seems to have felt the necessity of systematising his religious teaching. Having at first given forth his wealth of knowledge and thought without stint, we may suppose that he had now become aware of the vastness of his output, that he saw its distinctive features clearly and that he felt the possibility of unifying and condensing it, round a few leading ideas.

Once started on this attempt, he would realise, in all probability, that some statement regarding the fate of the soul was essential to a universal acceptance of the Vedanta. A letter written to an English friend, during his first visit to England, in October 1895, showed plainly enough that he was awake to the question of the definite-area to be covered by a religious system.

On this particular occasion, a visit from a couple of young men who belonged to a “class philosophically religious, without the least mystery-mongering,” had called his attention to the need of ritual. “This,” he wrote, “has opened my eyes. The world in general must have some form. In fact religion itself, in the ordinary sense, is simply philosophy concreted, by means of symbols and ritual. A mere loose system of philosophy takes no hold on mankind.”

The constructive imagination thus roused was seen in two or three subsequent letters to the same friend; and in one of these, while still under the mental stimulus of conversation with a distinguished electrician, he attacks the whole problem of the relation between force and matter, making at the same time a brief but pregnant epitome of what he regards as significant, in Hindu lore about death.

It is easy, as one reads this Letter, to see how he has been thrilled by the congruity of ancient Indian thought with modern science. “Our friend,” he writes, “was charmed to hear about the Vedantic prana and akasa and the kalpas, which, according to him, are the only theories modern science can entertain. Now both akasa and prana again, are produced from the cosmic mahat, the universal mind, the Brahma, or Iswara. He thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy. I am to go and see him next week, to get this new mathematical demonstration. “

“In that case, the Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations. I am working a good deal now, upon the cosmology and eschatology* of the Vedanta. I clearly see their perfect unison with modern science, and the elucidation of the one will be followed by that of the other. I intend to write a work later on, in the form of questions and answers. The first chapter will be on cosmology, showing the harmony between Vedantic theories and modern science.

The eschatology will be explained from the Advaitic standpoint only. That is to say, the dualist claims that the soul after death passes on to the Solar Sphere, thence to the Lunar Sphere, thence to the Electric Sphere. Thence he is accompanied by a purusha to Brahmaloka. (Thence, says the Advaitist, he goes to Nirvana). “

“Now on the Advaitic side it is held that the Soul neither comes nor goes, and that all these spheres or layers of the universe are only so many varying products of akasa and prana.

** Eschatology means doctrine of the last things; according to Christianity, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. In other words, the fate of the soul.

That is to say, the lowest or most condensed is the Solar Sphere, consisting of the visible universe; in which Prana appear as physical force, and akasa as sensible matter. The next is called the Lunar Sphere, which surrounds the Solar Sphere. This is not the moon at all, but the habitation of the gods, that is to say, Prana appears in it as psychic forces, and Akasa as Tanmatras, or fine particles. Beyond this is the Electric Sphere, that is to say, a condition in which the Prana is almost inseparable from Akasa, and you can hardly tell whether Electricity is force or matter.

Next is the Brahmaloka, where there is neither Prana nor Akasa, but both are merged into the Mind-stuff, the primal energy. And here – there being neither Prana nor Akasa – the jiva contemplates the whole universe as Samashti, or the sum-total of Mahat, or mind. This appears as a Purusha, an abstract universal Soul, yet not the Absolute, for still there is multiplicity. From this, the jiva finds at last that Unity which is the end.

Advaitism says that these are the visions which arise in succession before the jiva, who, himself, neither goes nor comes, and that in the same way this present vision has been projected. The projection (Shrishti) and dissolution must take place in the same order, only one means going backward and the other coming out.”

“Now as each individual can only see his own universe, that universe is created with his bondage, and goes away with his liberation, although it remains for others who are in bondage.

Now name and form constitute the universe. A wave in the ocean is a wave, only in so far as it is bound by name and form. If the wave subsides, it is the ocean, but that name-and-form has immediately vanished forever. So that the name and form of a wave could never be, without the water that was fashioned into the wave by them, yet the name and form themselves were not the wave. They die as soon as ever it returns to water. But other names and forms live on, in relation to other waves. This name-and-form is called Maya, and the water is Brahman. The wave was nothing but water all the time, yet as a wave it had the name and form.

Again this name-and-form cannot remain for one moment separated from the wave, although the wave, as water, can remain eternally separate from name and form. But because the name and form can never be separated, they can never be said to exist. Yet they are not zero. This is called Maya.”

“I want to work all this out carefully, but you will see at a glance that I am on the right track. It will take more study in physiology, on the relations between the higher and lower centres, to fill out the psychology of mind, chitta and buddhi, and soon. But I have clear light now, free from all hocus-pocus.”

Once more in this Letter, as so often elsewhere, we see the reconciling and organising force of the Swami’s genius. The standard of Sankaracharya shall not be moved. That “the soul neither comes nor goes” remains to all time the dominant truth. But the labours of those who began their work at the opposite end shall not be wasted either. The Advaitin, with his philosophic insight, and the Dualist, with his scientific observation of successive phases of consciousness, – both are necessary, to each other and to the new formulation.*

Death, however, is pre-eminently a matter which is best envisaged from without. Not even under personal bereavement can we see so clearly into the great truths of eternal destiny, as when depth of friendship and affection leads us to dramatise our sympathy for the sorrow of another. The comfort that we dared not lean on for ourselves becomes conviction clear as the noonday sun, when we seek it for others.

To this rule, the Swami was no exception, and many of us, it may be will think the greatest of all his utterances on this subject, a certain letter which he wrote to that American woman whom he called “Dhira Mata, the Steady Mother,” on the occasion of the loss of her father. In this we have the very heart of his belief, made warm and personal, and are made to apprehend its bearing, on the fate of our own beloved dead.

“I had a premonition,” he writes from Brooklyn, to his bereaved friend, in January 1895, “of your father’s giving up the old body, and it is not my custom to write to any one when a wave of would-be inharmonious maya strikes him. But these are the great turning-points in life, and I know that you are unmoved. The surface of the sea rises and sinks alternately, but to the observant soul, the child of light, each sinking reveals more and more of the depth, and of the beds of pearl and coral at the bottom. Coming and going is all pure delusion. The soul never comes nor goes. Where is the place to which it shall go, when all space is in the soul? When shall be the time for entering and departing, when all time is in the soul?”

“The earth moves, causing the illusion of the movement of the sun; but the sun does not move. So Prakriti, or Maya, or Nature, is moving, changing, unfolding veil after veil, turning over leaf after leaf of this grand book, – while the witnessing soul drinks in knowledge, unmoved, unchanged.

All souls that ever have been, are, or shall be, are all in the present tense, and – to use a material simile – are all standing at one geometrical point. Because the idea of space does

* The Swami’s plan, of writing a book in the form of questions and answers, was never carried out. But in studying the lectures he delivered in London in the year 1896, it is easy to see that his mind was still working on the ideas here announced. See especially his lectures – “The Absolute and Manifestation”; “The Cosmos: the Macrocosm”; and his American lectures, “The Real and the Apparent Man”; and “Cosmology.”

not occur in the soul, therefore all that were ours, are ours, and will be ours; are always with us, were always with us, and will be always with us. We are in them. They are in us.

 

“The cloud moves across the face of the moon, creating the illusion that the moon is moving. So nature, body, matter, moves on, creating the illusion that the soul is moving. Thus we find at last that that instinct (or inspiration?) which men of every race, whether high or low, have had, to feel the presence of the departed about them, is true intellectually also.”

“Each soul is a star, and all stars are set in that infinite azure, that eternal sky, the Lord. There is the root, the reality, the real individuality, of each and all. Religion began with the search after some of these stars that had passed beyond our horizon, and ended in finding them all in God, and ourselves in the same place. The whole secret is, then, that your father has given up the old garment he was wearing, and is standing where he was, through all eternity.

Will he manifest another such garment, in this or any other world? I sincerely pray that he may not, until he does so in full consciousness. I pray that none may be dragged anywhither by the unseen power of his own past actions. I pray that all may be free, that is to say, may know that they are free. And if they are to dream again, let us pray that their dreams be all of peace and bliss”.

He who crosses a chasm on a narrow plank, is liable at any moment to an abrupt accession of all his ordinary associations and sensations, with a sudden fall from his giddy height. Very like this, seem the stories that we come across in sacred literature, of man’s occasional attainment of the mind-world that lies beyond our common experience.

Peter, walking on the sea, begins to sink, the moment he remembers where he is. A few weary men, sleeping on a mountain-side, wake to behold their Master transfigured before them. But again they descend into the world, and already the great vision has died away, and become an echoing memory alone. Seated in the fields, watching their flocks by night, and talking in hushed voices on high themes, the shepherds become aware of the presence of angels. The moments pass, and with them the exaltation of hour and place, and lo, the angels have all faded out of the sky! Their hearers are driven to the common-place expedient of a journey on foot into the neighbouring village, to see what great thing has come to pass.

In contrast to these, the Indian ideal is that man whose lower mind is so perfectly under his own control that he can at any moment plunge into the thought-ocean, and remain there at will; the man who can be swept along, on irresistible currents of absorption, without the least possibility of a sudden break and unexpected return to the life of the senses!

Undoubtedly this power comes nearer, with depth of education and intensity of experience. But the only thing that can make it a man’s own, is a self-command so strict that he can, at will, transcend thought itself. To him who can so concentrate himself as to be able even to suppress it when he will, the mind becomes an obedient servant, a fleet steed, and the body, in its turn, the loyal subject of the mind. Short of such power, there is no perfect, no unwavering self-control.

How few must be the persons born to it, in any single generation! There is a luminousness, an assuredness, about the deeds and words of such, which cannot be mistaken. ‘They speak as those having authority, and not as the scribes.’

We cannot question that Sri Ramakrishna recognised such a soul, “a Brahmajnani from his birth,” in the lad Noren, when he first saw him; recognised too, like a skilled engineer measuring the force of a stream, the height to which his thought-transcendence had already mounted.

“Tell me, do you see a light when you are going to sleep?” asked the old man eagerly. “Doesn’t everyone?” answered the boy, in wonder. In later life, he would often mention this question, and digress, to describe to us the light he saw. Sometimes it would come as a ball, which a boy was kicking towards him. It would draw near. He would become one with it, and all would be forgotten. Sometimes it was a blaze, into which he would enter. One wonders whether sleep, thus beginning, is slumber at all, in the ordinary sense.

At any rate, it is told, by the men who were young with Vivekananda, that when he would throw himself down to sleep, their Master, watching his breathing, would often tell the others that he was only apparently resting, and would explain to them what stage of meditation had now been reached.

On one such occasion, while Sri Ramakrishna lay ill in the house at Cossipur, Noren had seemed, to one who was about him, to have been sleeping for some hours, when suddenly, towards midnight, he cried out. “Where is my body?” His companion, now known as the old monk Gopal Dada, ran to his aid, and did all he could, by heavy massage, to restore the consciousness that had been lost, below the head.

When all was in vain, and the boy continued in great trouble and alarm, Gopal Dada ran to the Master himself, and told him of his disciple’s condition. He smiled when he heard, and said ”Let him be! It will do him no harm to stay there for a while. He has teased me enough, to reach that state!”

Afterwards he told him and others, that for Noren the Nirvikalpa Samadhi was now over, and his part would henceforth lie in work. The Swami himself described the early stages of this experience, later, to his gurubhai, Saradananda, as an awareness of light, within the brain, which was so intense that he took it for granted that someone had placed a bright lamp close to him, behind his head. Then, we may understand, the moorings of sense-consciousness were cut, and he soared into those realms of which none speaks.

In order to concentrate the mind, it will be understood, it is first of all necessary that we should be able to forget the body. It is for this purpose that asceticism is practised, and austerities undertaken. Throughout his life, a period of strict tapasya was always a delight to the Swami, who was constantly returning upon this, in spite of the seeming fearlessness with which he took possession of the world. Like a practised rider, touching the reins, or a great musician, running his fingers over the keys, he loved to feel again the response of the body to the will, rejoiced to realise afresh, his own command of his instrument. “I see that I can do anything!” he said, when, at the end of his life, having undertaken to go through the hot season in Calcutta without swallowing water, – and being allowed to rinse out the mouth, – he found that the muscles of his throat closed, of their own accord, against the passage of a single drop, and he could not have drunk it, if he would. In his neighbourhood when he was keeping a fast-day, food always seemed to another unnecessary, and difficult to conceive.

I have heard of an occasion when he sat, seeming as if he scarcely heard, surrounded by persons who were quarrelling and disputing. Suddenly an empty tumbler in his hand was crushed into fragments, the only sign he ever gave, of the pain this discussion had caused him!

It is not easy to realise the severity of the practices on which such a power of self-control had been developed; the number of hours spent in worship and meditation; the fixity of the gaze; the long-sustained avoidance of food and sleep. With regard to this last, indeed, there was one time when he had spent twenty-five days, allowing himself only half-an-hour’s sleep, out of every twenty-four hours. And from this half-hour, he awoke himself! Sleep never afterwards, probably, was a very insistent or enduring guest with him.

He had the ‘Yogi’s eyes’ – as Devendra Nath Tagore had told him, in his childhood, when he climbed into his house-boat on the Ganges, to ask “Sir, have you seen God?” – the ‘Yogi’s eyes,’ which are said never to shut completely, and to open wide, at the first ray of light.

In the west, those staying in the same house with him, would hear the chant of ‘Para Brahman,’ or something of the sort, as he went, in the small hours of the morning, to take his early plunge. He never appeared to be practising austerity, but his whole life was a concentration so profound that to anyone else, it would have been the most terrible asceticism.

The difficulty with which he stopped the momentum that would carry him into meditation, had been seen by his American friends, in the early days of his life, in that country of railroads and tramways and complicated engagement-lists. “When he sits down to meditate,” one of his Indian hosts had said, “it is not ten minutes, before he becomes insensitive, though his body may be black with mosquitoes!” This was the habit he had to control. At first, his lapses into the depths of thought, when people were perhaps waiting for him at the other end of a journey, caused him much embarrassment. On one occasion, teaching a New York class to meditate, it was found at the end, that he could not be brought back to consciousness, and one by one, his students stole quietly away. But he was deeply mortified, when he knew what had happened, and never risked its repetition. Meditating in private, with one or two, he would give a word, by which he could be recalled.

Apart altogether, however, from meditation, he was constantly, always, losing himself in thought. In the midst of the chatter and fun of society, one would notice the eyes grow still, and the breath come at longer and longer intervals; the pause; and then the gradual return. His friends knew these things, and provided for them. If he walked into the house, to pay a call, and forgot to speak; or if he was found in a room, in silence, no one disturbed him; though he would sometimes rise and render assistance to the intruder, without breaking his silence. Thus his interests lay within, and not without.

To the scale and range of his thought, his conversation was of course our only clue. His talk was always of the impersonal. It was not always religious, as that word goes, any more than his own Master’s had been. It was very often secular. But it was always vast. There was never in it anything mean or warped or petty. There was no limitation of sympathy anywhere. Even his criticism was felt merely as definition and analysis. It had no bitterness or resentment in it. “I can criticise even an avatar”, he said of himself one day, “without the slightest diminution of my love for him! But I know quite well that most people are not so; and for them it is safest to protect their own bhakti!” No sentiment of dislike or contempt remained from his analysis, even in the mind of the listener.

This largeness and sweetness of outlook, was firmly based on his reverence for his own guru. “Mine is the devotion of the dog!” he exclaimed once. “I don’t want to know why! I am contented simply to follow!” and Sri Ramakrishna, in his turn, had had a similar feeling for Tota Puri – that great master, who had left his own disciples, at Kaithal, near Umballa, one day, “to go into Lower Bengal, where I feel that a soul needs me.” He had gone back to his people again, when his work was done at Dakshineswar, and his grave in the North-West is honoured to this day. But he whom he had initiated felt for him, ever after, a reverence so great that he would not even utter his name. “Nangta, the Naked One, said unto me -” was his customary way of referring to him. Perfect love for the world and perfect faith in man are only possible, to that heart which has once seen its ideal realised.

But power to transcend the consciousness of the body is not the only condition of a development like our Master’s. It is the Hindu belief that for the evolution of supreme force, it is necessary first to evoke intense energy of emotion, and then to hold this in absolute restraint. This points to a cycle of experience beyond the imagination of most of us, yet an incident in the life of the disciple Noren, gives us a glimpse of it.

He was still young, when a sudden death brought about a crisis in the fortunes of his family. Day after day, as the eldest son, he was racked with anxiety on their behalf. The sufferings of those who were dear to him tore his very heartstrings, and the sudden reversal, from ease and prosperity, filled him with perplexity. He could hardly believe in the extent of their disaster.

At last, unable longer to bear the anguish, he fled to his Master, and overwhelmed him with reproaches. The old man listened patiently, and said, with a tender smile, “Go yonder, my lad, and pray, before the image of Mother. AND WHATEVER YOU ASK HER FOR, SHE WILL ASSUREDLY BESTOW.”

Looked at even from the most ordinary point of view, there was nothing wild or extravagant in the promise thus made; for Sri Ramakrishna was surrounded by wealthy disciples, of the Marwarri caste, who would have thought no cost too great, to have redeemed his word. The boy, somewhat soothed by the quietness and assurance of the direction, left his presence and went to pray before the image. It was some time before he returned, and when he came, he had a dazed look, say those who were present, and seemed to speak with some difficulty.

“Well, did you pray?” asked Sri Ramakrishna.

“Oh yes!” answered his disciple.

“And what did you ask Mother to give you?” said the Master.

“The highest bhakti and Gnanam!” replied Noren,

“Go again,” said Sri Ramakrishna, briefly, without further comment, and again he went.

But there was no change. Three times he was sent, to ask for what he would; and three times he came back, with the same reply. Once before the Mother, he had forgotten all else, and could not even remember the cause that had brought him there. Have any of us risen at times to the height where we lose the memory of self, in intensity of prayer for the beloved? If so, we have perhaps gained some measure of the infinitely greater remoteness of this experience, from our common world of relativity and difference.

The Swami’s thought soared, as he talked. Is thought itself but one form of expression of the inner Self, the Adhi Sakti? And is the force spent in it to be reckoned as lost, from the point of view of the thinker’s own good? First, a circle of phenomena; then a circle of thought; lastly, the Supreme! If so, surely there can be no greater unselfishness than the sharing of their mind-treasure by the great souls, the Maha-purushas. To enter into their dream, must in itself be redemption, for it is the receiving objectively, of a seed that cannot die, till it has become, subjectively, the Beatific Vision!

Ideals were the units of our Master’s thought, but ideals made so intensely living that one never thought of them as abstractions. Men and nations alike, were interpreted by him through their ideals, their ethical up-reaching.

I have sometimes thought that two different grades of mind are distinguishable, according to their instinct for classification under two heads or three. The Swami’s tendency was always to divide into three. Recognising the two extremes of a quality, he never failed to discriminate also that point of junction between them, where, being exactly balanced, both might be said to be non-existent. Is this a universal characteristic of genius, or is it a distinction of the Hindu mind?

One never knew what he might see in a thing, never quite knew what might appeal to him. He would often speak in answer to thought, or respond to a thought more easily and effectively than to words. It was only gradually, from a touch here, and a hint there, that one could gather the great pre-occupation, that all words and thoughts were designed to serve.

It was not till the end of our summer in Kashmir, that he told us how he was always conscious of the form of the Mother, as a bodily presence, visible amongst us. Again, in the last winter of his life, he told his disciple Swarupananda that for some months continuously, he had been conscious of two hands, holding his own in their grasp.

Going on a pilgrimage, one would catch him telling his beads. Seated with one’s back to him in a carriage one would hear him repeating an invocation over and over. One knew the meaning of his early-morning chant, when, before sending a worker out to the battle, he said, “Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used to begin every day by walking about in his room for a couple of hours, saying ‘Satchidananda!’ or ‘Sivoham!’ or some other holy word.” This hint, publicly given, was all.

Constant devotion, then, was the means by which he maintained his unbroken concentration. Concentration was the secret of those incessant flashes of revelation, which he was always giving. Like one who had plunged his cup into a deep well, and brought up from it water of a sparkling coldness, was his entrance into a conversation. It was the quality of his thought, quite as much as its beauty or its intensity, that told of the mountain-snows of spiritual vision, whence it was drawn.

Some measure of this concentration was afforded by the stories he would tell of his lecturing experiences. At night, in his own room, a voice, he said, would begin to shout at him the words he was to say on the morrow, and the next day he would find himself repeating, on the platform, the things he had heard it tell. Sometimes there would be two voices, arguing with each other. Again the voice would seem to come from a long distance, speaking to him down a great avenue. Then it might draw nearer and nearer, till it would become a shout. “Depend upon it,” he would say. “Whatever in the past has been meant by inspiration, it must have been something like this!”

In all this, however, he saw no miracle. It was merely the automatic working of the mind, when that had become so saturated with certain principles of thought, as to require no guidance in their application. It was probably an extreme form of the experience to which Hindus refer, as the ‘mind becoming the guru.’ It also suggests that, almost perfectly balanced as the two highest senses were in him, the aural may have had a slight preponderance over the visual. He was, as one of his disciples once said of him, “a most faithful reporter of his own states of mind,” and he was never in the slightest danger of attributing these voices to any but a subjective source.

Another experience of which I heard from him, suggesting the same automatic mentality, perhaps in less developed form, was that when any impure thought or image appeared before him, he was immediately conscious of what he called ‘a blow’ – a shattering, paralysing blow, – struck from within upon the mind itself, as if to say ‘no! not this way!’

He was very quick to recognise in others those seemingly instinctive actions, that were really dictated by the higher wisdom of super-consciousness. The thing that was right, no one could tell why, while yet it would have seemed, judged by ordinary standards, to have been a mistake, – in such things he saw a higher impulsion. Not all ignorance was, in his eyes, equally dark.

His Master’s prophecy that again he would eat his mango, of the Nirvikalpa Samadhi, when his work was done, was never forgotten, by the brethren of his youth. None at any time knew the moment when the work might be ended, and the mounting realisation some may have suspected. During the last year of his life, a group of his early comrades were one day talking over the old days, and the prophecy that when Noren should realise who and what he had already been, he would refuse to remain in the body, was mentioned. At this, one of them turned to him, half-laughing, “Do you know yet, who you were, Swamiji?” he said, “Yes,

I know now,” was the unexpected answer, awing them into earnestness and silence, and no one could venture at that time to question him further.

As the end came nearer, meditation and austerity took up more and more of life. Even those things that had interested him most, elicited now only a far away concern. And in the last hour, when the supreme realisation was reached, some ray of its vast super-conscious energy seemed to touch many of those who loved him, near and far.

One dreamt that Sri Ramakrishna had died again that night, and woke in the dawn to hear the messenger at his gate. Another, amongst the closest friends of his boyhood, had a vision of his coming in triumph and saying “Soshi! Soshi! I have spat out the body!” and still a third, drawn irresistibly in that evening hour, to the place of meditation, found the soul face to face with an infinite radiance, and fell prostrate before it, crying out ‘Siva Guru!’

Late in the year 1900, the Swami broke off from the party of friends with whom he was travelling in Egypt, and went home suddenly, to India. “He seemed so tired!” says one of those who were with him at this time. As he looked upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and the rest of the great sights in the neighbourhood of Cairo, it was in truth like one who knew himself to be turning the last pages in the book of experience! Historic monuments no longer had the power to move him deeply.

He was cut to the quick, on the other hand, to hear the people of the country referred to constantly as “natives,” and to find himself associated, in his visit, rather with the foreigner than with them. In this respect, indeed, it would seem that he had enjoyed his glimpse of Constantinople vastly more than Egypt, for towards the end of his life he was never tired of talking about a certain old Turk who kept an eating-house there, and had insisted on giving entertainment without price to the party of strangers, one of whom came from India. So true it was, that to the oriental, untouched by modern secularity, all travellers were pilgrims, and all pilgrims guests.

In the winter that followed, he paid a visit to Dacca, in East Bengal, and took a large party up the Brahmaputra, to make certain pilgrimages in Assam. How rapidly his health was failing at this time, only those immediately around him knew. None of us who were away, had any suspicion. He spent the summer of 1901 at Bellur, ‘hoping to hear again the sound of the rains, as they fell in his boyhood!’ And when the winter again set in, he was so ill as to be confined to bed.

Yet he made one more journey, lasting through January and February 1902, when he went, first to Bodh-Gaya and next to Benares. It was a fit end to all his wanderings. He arrived at Bodh-Gaya on the morning of his last birthday, and nothing could have exceeded the courtesy and hospitality of the Mahunt.

Here, as afterwards at Benares, the confidence and affection of the orthodox world were brought to him in such measure and freedom that he himself stood amazed at the extent of his empire in men’s hearts. Bodh-Gaya, as it was now the last, had also been the first, of the holy places he had set out to visit. And it had been in Benares, some few years later that he had said farewell to one, with the words, “Till that day when I fall on society like a thunderbolt I shall visit this place no more!”

Many of his disciples from distant parts of the world gathered round the Swami on his return to Calcutta. Ill as he looked, there was none, probably, who suspected how near the end had come. Yet visits were paid, and farewells exchanged, that it had needed voyages half round the world to make. Strangely enough, in his first conversation after coming home from Benares, his theme was the necessity of withdrawing himself for a time, in order to leave those that were about him a free hand.

“How often,” he said, “does a man ruin his disciples, by remaining always with them! When men are once trained, it is essential that their leader leave them, for without his absence they cannot develop themselves!”

It was as the result of the last of those foreign contacts that had continued without intermission throughout his mature life, that he realised suddenly the value to religion of high ideals of faithfulness in marriage. To the monk, striving above all things to be true to his own vows, not only in word and deed, but still more earnestly and arduously, in thought itself, the ideals of social life are apt to appear as so much waste material.

Suddenly the Swami saw that a people to whom chastity was not precious, could never hope to produce a faithful priesthood, or a great monastic order. Only where the inviolability of marriage was fully recognised, could the path that lay outside marriage be truthfully held. By the sacredness of the social ideal, was the holiness of the super-social rendered possible.

This realisation was the crown of his philosophy. It could not but mark the end of “the play of Mother.” The whole of society was necessary, with its effort and its attainment, to create the possibility of the life of Sannyas. The faithful householder was as essential to the Sanathan Dharmma as the faithful monk. The inviolability of marriage and the inviolability of the monastic vow, were obverse and reverse of a single medal. Without noble citizenship, there could be no mighty apostolate. Without the secular, no sacerdotal, without temporal, no spiritual.

Thus all was one, yet no detail might be wilfully neglected, for through each atom shone the whole. It was in fact his own old message in a new form. Integrity of character, as he and his Master before him, had insisted, was a finer offering than religious ecstacy. Without strength to hold, there was no achievement in surrender.

For the sake of the work that constantly opened before him, the Swami made a great effort, in the spring of 1902, to recover his health, and even undertook a course of treatment under which, throughout April, May, and June, he was not allowed to swallow a drop of cold water. How far this benefitted him physically, one does not know; but he was overjoyed to find the un-flawed strength of his own will, in going through the ordeal.

When June closed, however, he knew well enough that the end was near. “I am making ready for death,” he said to one who was with him, on the Wednesday before he died. “A great tapasya and meditation has come upon me, and I am making ready for death.”

And we who did not dream that he would leave us, till at least some three or four years had passed, knew nevertheless that the words were true.

News of the world met but a far away rejoinder from him at this time. Even a word of anxiety as to the scarcity of the rains, seemed almost to pass him by as in a dream. It was useless to ask him now for an opinion on the questions of the day. “You may be right,” he said quietly, “but I cannot enter any more into these matters. I am going down into death.”

Once in Kashmir, after an attack of illness I had seen him lift a couple of pebbles, saying, “Whenever death approaches me, all weakness vanishes. I have neither fear, nor doubt, nor thought of the external. I simply busy myself making ready to die. I am as hard as that’ – and the stones struck one another in his hand – “for I have touched the feet of God!”

Personal revelation was so rare with him, that these words could never be forgotten. Again, on returning from the cave of Amarnath, in that same summer of 1898, had he not said, laughingly, that he had there received the grace of Amar Nath – not to die till he himself should will to do so? Now this, seeming to promise that death would never take him by surprise, had corresponded so well with the prophecy of Sri Ramakrishna – that when he should know who and what he was, he would refuse to remain a moment longer in the body – that one had banished, from one’s mind all anxiety on this score, and even his own grave and significant words at the present time did not suffice to revive it.

Did we not remember, moreover, the story of the great Nirvikalpa Samadhi of his youth, and how, when it was over, his Master had said, “This is your mango, Look! I lock it in my box. You shall taste it once more, when your work in finished.”

“- And we may wait for that,” said the monk who told me the tale. “We shall know when the time is near. For he will tell us that again he has tasted his mango.”

How strange it seems now, looking back on that time, or realise in how many ways the expected hint was given, only to fall on ears that did not hear, to reach minds that could not understand!

It would seem, indeed, that in his withdrawal from all weakness and attachment, there was one exception. That which had ever been dearer to him than life, kept still its power to move him. It was on the last Sunday before the end that he said to one of his disciples, “You know the WORK is always my weak point! When I think that might come to an end, I am all undone!”

On Wednesday of the same week, the day being Ekadasi, and himself keeping the fast in all strictness, he insisted on serving the morning meal to the same disciple. Each dish as it was offered – boiled seeds of the jack-fruit, boiled potatoes, plain rice, and ice-cold milk – formed the subject of playful chat; and finally, to end the meal, he himself poured the water over the hands, and dried them with a towel.

“It is I who should do these things for you Swamiji! Not you, for me!” was the protest naturally offered. But his answer was startling in its solemnity – “Jesus washed the feet of His disciples!”

Something checked the answer “But that was the last time!” as it rose to the lips, and the words remained unuttered. This was well. For here also, the last time had come.

There was nothing sad or grave about the Swami, during these days. In the midst of anxiety about over-fatiguing him, in spite of conversation deliberately kept as light as possible, touching only upon the animals that surrounded him, his garden, experiments, books, and absent friends, over and beyond all this, one was conscious the while of a luminous presence, of which his bodily form seemed only as a shadow, or symbol.

Never had one felt so strongly as now, before him, that one stood on the threshold of an infinite light. Yet none was prepared, least of all on that last happy Friday, July the 4th, on which he appeared so much stronger and better than he had been for years, to see the end so soon.

He had spent hours of that day in formal meditation. Then he had given a long Sanskrit lesson. Finally he had taken a walk from the monastery gates to the distant highroad.

On his return from this walk, the bell was ringing for evensong, and he went to his own room, and sat down, facing towards the Ganges, to meditate. It was the last time. The moment was come that had been foretold by his Master from the beginning. Half an hour went by, and then, on the wings of that meditation, his spirit soared whence there could be no return, and the body was left, like a folded vesture, on the earth.

Towards Christmas of the year 1902, a few of the Swami Vivekananda’s disciples gathered at Khandagiri near Cuttack to keep the festival. It was evening, and we sat on the grass, round a lighted log, while on one side of us rose the hills, with their caves and carven rocks, and all around us whispered the sleeping forest.

We were to keep Christmas Eve, in the old-time fashion of the order of Ramakrishna. One of the monks held a long crook, and we had with us a copy of the Gospel of St. Luke, wherewith to read and picture the coming of the angels, and the singing of the world’s first Gloria.

We lost ourselves in the story, however, and the reading could not be stopped at Christmas Eve, but must needs drift on from point to point. The Great Life as a whole was passed in review; then the Death; and finally the Resurrection. We turned to the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel, and read incident after incident.

But the tale sounded as never before, in our ears. Instead of a legal document, dated and attested, whose credibility must stand or fall by the clearness and coherence of its various parts, it read now like the gasping, stammering witness of one who had striven to put on record the impalpable and the intangible.

The narrative of the Resurrection was no longer, for us, an account of an event, to be accepted or rejected. It had taken its place for evermore as a spiritual perception, which one who experienced it had striven, not always successfully, to put into words. The whole chapter sounded fragmentary, cumulative, like some longing attempt to convince, not the reader only, but even, to some extent, the writer himself.

For had we not had our own glimmerings of a like back-coming to put beside it? One remembered and understood suddenly, the clear and deliberate statement of our Master himself – “Several times in my life I have seen returning spirits; and once – in the week after the death of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa – the form was luminous.”

We were face to face, not merely with the longing of the disciples to see once more the master who had gone from them, but with the far deeper yearning of the Incarnation, to return again, to comfort and bless the disciples He had left.

“Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?” – How many moments of such exaltation had we ourselves not known, in the first weeks after the passing of the Master, when we would fain have believed that his actual presence had been with us!

“He was known unto them in the breaking of bread’ – Even so. Only a touch here, a word there, a moment of sweetness, or a flash of inner clearness and knowledge, any of these had been sufficient, at various times in those early weeks, to bring back the throbbing awareness of the beloved presence, with the mingling of doubt and assurance in its poignant longing.

We passed over, that night at Khandagiri, those features of the Resurrection that would seem to have been added later by minds that believed in the hard and fast, black and white, character of the story. It was the older record, shining through this palimpsest, on which our thoughts were fastened, that simple old record, full of the pathos of sudden sights and vanishings, with its gatherings of the Eleven, whispering amongst themselves “The Lord is risen indeed!” with its tale, at the last, of a parting in the midst of a benediction.

It was not of any re-appearances of the body at all, as it seemed to us reading, that this older story had told, but of sudden and unforeseen meetings of the will, returns of thought and love, brief upliftings of prayer, from One who in the Vedic phrase, had been ‘resumed into His shining Self,’ and moved now on subtler and more penetrative planes of action than we, entangled amidst the senses, could conceive.

Nor were they so objective that all alike might be equally conscious of these fleeting gleams, half-seen, half-heard. The grosser perception they passed by altogether. Even to the finest, they were matters to be questioned, to be discussed eagerly, to be pieced together in sequence, and cherished tenderly in the heart. Amongst the closest and most authoritative of the apostles, there might well be some who doubted altogether. And yet, in the midst of the caves and forests of Khandagiri that night, we who followed the Christian story of the Resurrection, could not but feel that behind it, and through it, glistened a thread of fact; that we were tracing out the actual footsteps left by a human soul somewhere, somewhen, as it trod the glimmering pathway of this fugitive experience. So we believed, so we felt, because, in all its elusiveness, a like revelation, at a like time, had made itself evident to us also.

May God grant that this living presence of our Master, of which death itself had not had power to rob us, become never, to us his disciples, as a thing to be remembered, but remain with us always in its actuality, even unto the end!

THE END