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REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
SISTER CHRISTINE

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA AS I SAW HIM

Now and then, at long intervals of time, a being finds his way to this planet who is unquestionably a wanderer from another sphere; who brings with him to this sorrowful world some of the glory, the power, the radiance of the far distant region from which he came. He walks among men, but he is not at home here. He is a pilgrim, a stranger, he tarries but a night.

He shares the life of those about him, enters into their joys and sorrows, rejoices with them, mourns with them, but through it all, he never forgets who he is, whence he came, or what the purpose of his coming. He never forgets his divinity. He remembers that he is the great, the glorious, the majestic Self. He knows that he came from that ineffable, supernal region which has no need of the sun or moon, for it is illumined by the Light of lights. He knows that he was, long before the time when “all the sons of God sang together for joy”.

Such a one, I have seen, I have heard, I have revered. At his feet I have laid my soul’s devotion.

Such a being is beyond all comparison, for he transcends all ordinary standards and ideals. Others may be brilliant, his mind is luminous, for he had the power to put himself into immediate contact with the source of all knowledge. He is no longer limited to the slow processes to which ordinary human beings are confined. Others may be great, they are great only as compared with those in their own class. Others may be good, powerful, gifted, having more of goodness, more of power, more of genius than their fellowmen. It is only a matter of comparison. A saint is more holy, more pure, more single-minded than ordinary men. But with Swami Vivekananda, there could be no comparison. He was in a class by himself. He belonged to another order. He was not of this world. He was a radiant being who had descended from another, a higher sphere for a definite purpose. One might have known that he would not stay long.

Is it to be wondered at that nature itself rejoices in such a birth, that the heavens open and angels sing paeans of praise?

Blessed is the country in which he was born, blessed are they who lived on this earth at the same time, and blessed, thrice blessed are the few who sat his feet.

THE MASTER AND THE MESSAGE

There are times when life flows on in a steady deadly stream of monotony. Eating, sleeping, talking — the same weary round. Commonplace thoughts, stereotyped ideas, the eternal tread-mill. Tragedy comes. For a moment it shocks us into stillness. But we cannot keep still. The merry-go-round stops neither for our sorrow nor our happiness. Surely this is not all there is to life. This is not what we are here for. Restlessness comes. What are we waiting for? Then one day it happens, the stupendous things for which we have been waiting — that which dispels the deadly monotony, which turns the whole of life into a new channel, which eventually takes one to a far away country and sets one among strange people with different customs and a different outlook upon life, to a people with whom from the very first we feel a strange kinship, a wonderful people who know what they are waiting for, who recognize the purpose of life. Our restlessness is stilled for ever.

After many incarnations, after untold suffering, struggle, and conquest, comes fruition. But this one does not know until long, long after. A tiny seed grows into the mighty banyan. A few feet of elevation on a fairly level plain, determine whether a river shall flow north and eventually reach the icy Arctic Ocean or south, until it finds itself in the warm waters of the Black or Caspian Sea. Little did I think when I reluctantly set out one cold February night in 1894 to attend a lecture at the Unitarian Church in Detroit that I was doing something which would change the whole course of my life and be of such stupendous import that it could not be measured by previous standards I had known. Attending lectures had been part of the deadly monotony. How seldom did one hear anything new or uplifting! The lecturers who had come to Detroit that winter had been unusually dull. So unvarying had been the disillusion, that one had given up hope and with it the desire to hear more. So that I went very unwillingly to this particular lecture to hear one “Vive Kananda, a monk from India”, and only in response to the pleading of my friend Mrs. Mary C. Funke. With her beautifully optimistic nature, she had kept her illusions and still believed that some day she would find “That Something”. We went to hear this “Man from India”. Surely never in our countless incarnations had we taken a step so momentous! For before we had listened five minutes, we knew that we had found the touchstone for which we had searched so long. In one breath, we exclaimed — “If we had missed this… !”

To those who have heard much of the personal appearance of the Swami Vivekananda, it may seem strange that it was not this which made the first outstanding impression. The forceful virile figure which stepped upon the platform was unlike the emaciated, ascetic type which is generally associated with spirituality in the West. A sickly saint everyone understands, but who ever heard of a powerful saint? The power that emanated from this mysterious being was so great that one all but shrank from it. It was overwhelming. It threatened to sweep everything before it. This one sensed even in those first unforgettable moments. Later we were to see this power at work. It was the mind that made the first great appeal, that amazing mind! What can one say that will give even a faint idea of its majesty, its glory, its splendour? It was a mind so far transcending other minds, even of those who rank as geniuses, that it seemed different in its very nature. Its ideas were so clear, so powerful, so transcendental that it seemed incredible that they could have emanated from the intellect of a limited human being. Yet marvellous as the ideas were and wonderful as was that intangible something that flowed out from the. mind, it was all strangely familiar. I found myself saying, “I have known that mind before“. He burst upon us in a blaze of reddish gold, which seemed to have caught and concentrated the sun’s rays. He was barely thirty, this preacher from far away India. Young with an ageless youth and yet withal old with the wisdom of ancient times. For the first time we heard the age-old message of India, teaching of the atman, the true Self.

The audience listened spellbound while he wove the fabric as glowing and full of colour as a beautiful Kashmir shawl. Now a thread of humour, now one of tragedy, many of serious thought, many of aspiration, of lofty idealism, of wisdom. Through it all ran the woof of India’s most sacred teaching: the divinity of man, his innate and eternal perfection; that this perfection is not a growth, nor a gradual attainment, but a present reality. “That thou art.” You are that now. There is nothing to do but to realize it. The realization may come now in the twinkling of an eye, or in a million years, but “All will reach the sunlit heights.” This message has well been called. “The wondrous Evangel of the Self”. We are not the helpless limited beings which we think ourselves to be, but birthless, deathless, glorious children of immortal bliss. Like the teachers of old he, too, spoke in parables. The theme was always the same — man’s real nature. Not what we seem to be, but what we are. We are like men walking over a gold mine thinking we are poor. We are like the lion who was born in a sheepfold and thought he was a sheep. When the wolf came he bleated with fear quite unaware of his nature. Then one day a lion came, and seeing him bleating among the sheep called out to him, “You are not a sheep. You are a lion. You have no fear.” The lion at once became conscious of his nature and let out a mighty roar. He stood on the platform of the Unitarian Church pouring forth glorious truths in a voice unlike any voice one had ever heard before, a voice full of cadences, expressing every emotion, now with a pathos that stirred hitherto unknown deeps of tragedy, and then just as the pain was becoming unbearable, that same voice would move one to mirth only to check it in a midcourse with the thunder of an earnestness so intense that it left one awed, a trumpet call to awake. One felt that one never knew what music was until one heard that marvellous voice.

Which of us who heard him then can ever forget what soul memories were stirred within us when we heard the ancient message of India. — “Hear ye, Children of Immortal Bliss, even ye who dwell in higher spheres. I have found the Ancient One, knowing whom alone ye shall he saved from death over again.” Or the story of the lion and the sheep. Blessed Truth! In spite of your bleating, your timidity, your fear, you are not the sheep, you are and always have been the lion, powerful, fearless, the king of beasts. It is only an illusion that is to be overcome. You are THAT now. With these words came a subtle force or influence that lifted one into a purer and rarer atmosphere. Was it possible to hear and feel this and ever be the same again? All one’s values were changed. The seed of spirituality was planted to grow and grow throughout the years until it inevitably reached fruition. True, this sublime teaching is hoary with age. It may even be true that every Hindu man and woman knows it, many may be able to formulate it clearly, but Vivekananda spoke with authority. To him, it was not a speculative philosophy but the living Truth. All else might be false, this alone was true. He realized it. After his own great realization, life held but one purpose — to give the message with which he was entrusted, to point out the path and to help others on the road to the same supreme goal. “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.”

All of this one sensed more or less dimly in that first unforgettable hour while our minds were lifted into his own radiant atmosphere. Later, slowly and sometimes painfully, after much effort and devotion, some of us found that our very minds were transformed. Great is the guru!

Those who came to the first lecture at the Unitarian Church came to the second and to the third, bringing others with them. “Come,” they said, “hear this wonderful man. He is like no one we have ever heard”, and they came until there was no place to hold them. They filled the room, stood in the aisles, peered in at the windows. Again and again he gave his message, now in this form, now in that, now illustrated with stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, now from the puranas and folklore. From the Upanishads he quoted constantly, first chanting in the original Sanskrit, then giving a free poetic translation. Great as was the impression which his spoken words made, the chanting produced an even greater effect. Unplumbed deeps were stirred; and as the rhythm fell upon the ear, the audience sat rapt and breathless. Our love for India came to birth. I think, when we first heard him say the word, “India”, in that marvellous voice of his. It seems incredible that so much could have been put into one small word of five letters. There was love, passion, pride, longing, adoration, tragedy, chivalry, heimweh, and again love. Whole volumes could not have produced such a feeling in others. It had the magic power of creating love in those who heard it. Ever after, India became the land of heart’s desire. Everything concerning her became of interest — became living — her people, her history, architecture, her manners and customs, her rivers, mountains, plains, her culture, her great spiritual concepts, her scriptures. And so began a new life, a life of study, of meditation. The centre of interest was shifted.

After the Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda was induced to place himself under the direction of Pond’s Lecture Bureau1 and make a lecture tour of the United States. As is the custom, the committee at each new place was offered the choice of several lectures — “The Divinity of Man”, “Manners and Customs of India”, “The Women of India”, “Our Heritage” … .Invariably, when the place was a mining town, with no intellectual life whatever, the most abstruse subjects were selected. He told us the difficulty of speaking to an audience when he could see no ray of intelligence in response. After some weeks of this, lecturing every evening and travelling all night, the bondage became too irksome to bear any longer. In Detroit he had friends who had known him in Chicago and who loved and admired him. To them he went, and begged, “Make me free! Make me free!” Being influential they were able to get him released from his contract, though at a financial loss which seemed unfair. He had hoped to begin his work in India with the money earned in this way, but this was not the only reason for engaging in this public work. The impulse which was urging him on and which was never entirely absent from his mind was the mission with which his Master had entrusted him. He had a work to do, a message to give. It was a sacred message. How was he to give it? By the time he reached Detroit, he knew that a lecture tour was not the way, and not an hour longer would he waste his time on what did not lead towards his object. For six weeks he remained in Detroit, his mind intent upon his purpose, and he would give an occasional lecture. We missed no opportunity of hearing him. Again and again we hard the “wondrous Evangel of the Self”. Again and again we heard the story of India, now from this angle, now from that. We knew we had found our Teacher. The word guru we did not know then. Nor did we meet him personally. but what matter? It would take years to assimilate what we had already learnt. And then the Master would somehow, somewhere, teach us again!

THE DISCIPLES AT THOUSAND ISLAND PARK

It happened sooner than we expected, for in a little more than a year, we found ourselves in Thousand Island Park in the very house with him. It must have been the 6th of July 1895, that we had the temerity to seek him out. We heard he was living with a group of students. The word “disciple” is not used very freely in these days. It implies more than the average person is willing to give. We thought there would be some public leaching which we might attend. We dared not hope for more. Mrs. Funke has told of our quest in her preface to the Inspired Talks of Swami Vivekananda.

Of the wonderful weeks that followed, it is difficult to write. Only if one’s mind were lifted to that high state of consciousness in which we lived for the time could one hope to recapture the experience. We were filled with joy. We did not know at that time that we were living in his radiance. On the wings of inspiration, he carried us to the height which was his natural abode. He himself, speaking of it later, said that he was at his best in Thousand Islands. Then he felt that he had found the channel through which his message might be spread, the way to fulfil his mission, for the guru had found his own disciples. His first overwhelming desire was to show us the path to mukti (freedom), to set us free. “Ah,” he said with touching pathos, “if I could only set you free with a touch!” His second object, not so apparent perhaps, but always in the under-current, was to train this group to carry on the work in America. “This message must be preached by Indians in India, and by Americans in America”, he said. On his own little veranda, overlooking the tree tops and the beautiful St, Lawrence, he often called upon us to make speeches. His object was, as he said, to teach us to think upon our feet. Did he know that if we could conquer our self-consciousness in his presence, could speak before him who was considered one of the great orators of the world, no audience anywhere would dismay us? It was a trying ordeal. Each in turn was called upon to make an attempt. There was no escape. Perhaps that was why certain of our group failed to make an appearance at these intimate evening gatherings, although they knew that often he soared to the greatest heights as the night advanced. What if it was two o’clock in the morning? What if we had watched the moon rise and set? Time and space had vanished for us.

There was nothing set or formed about these nights on the upper veranda. He sat in his large chair at the end, near his door. Sometimes he went into a deep meditation. At such times we too meditated or sat in profound silence. Often it lasted for hours and one after the other slipped away. For we knew that after this he would not feel inclined to speak. Or again the meditation would be short, and he would encourage us to ask questions afterwards, often calling on one of us to answer. No matter how far wrong these answers were, he let us flounder about until we were near the truth, and then in a few words, he would clear up the difficulty. This was his invariable method in teaching. He knew how to stimulate the mind of the learner and make it do its own thinking. Did we go to him for confirmation of a new idea or point of view and begin, “I see it is thus and so”, his “Yes?” with an upper inflection always sent us back for further thought. Again we would come with a more clarified understanding, and again the “Yes?” stimulated us to further thought. Perhaps after the third time, when the capacity for further thought along that particular line was reached, he would point out the error — an error usually due to something in our Western mode of thought.

And so he trained us with such patience, such benignity. It was like a benediction. Later, after his return to India, he hoped to have a place in the Himalayas for further training of Eastern and Western disciples together.

It was a strange group — these people whom he had gathered around him that summer at Thousand Islands. No wonder the shopkeeper, to whom we went for direction upon our arrival, said, “Yes, there are some queer people living up on the hill, among whom is a foreign-looking gentleman.” There were three friends who had come to the Swami’s New York classes together — Miss S.E. Waldo. Miss Ruth Ellis, and Doctor Wight. For thirty years, they had attended every lecture on philosophy that they had heard of, but had never found anything that even remotely approached this. So Doctor Wight gravely assured us, the new-comers. Miss Waldo had during these long years of attendance at lectures acquired the gift of summarizing a whole lecture in a few words. It is to her that we owe Inspired Talks. When Swami Vivekananda went to England that same year, he gave her charge of some of the classes, and on his return she made herself invaluable. It was to her that he dictated his commentary on the Patanjali’s Aphorisms. She assisted too in bringing out the different books Karma-Yoga, Raja-Yoga, Jnana-Yoga, Bhakti-Yoga. Her logical, trained mind and her complete devotion made her an ideal assistant. Ruth Ellis was on the staff of one of the New York newspapers. She was gentle and retiring and seldom spoke, yet one knew that her love and devotion were unbounded. She was like a daughter to “little old Docky Wight”, as we all called him. He was well over seventy but as enthusiastic and full of interest as a boy. At the end of each class there was usually a pause, and the little old “Docky” would sloop down and rub his bald head and say, with the most pronounced nasal twang, “Well, Swami, then it all amounts to this, ‘I am the Absolute!’ “We always waited for that, and Swamiji would smile his most fatherly smile and agree. At times like this. the Swami’s thirty years in the presence of seventy seemed older by countless years — ancient but not aged, rather ageless and wise with the wisdom of all times. Sometimes be said, “I feel three hundred years old.” This, with a sigh.

In a room below lived Stella. It was several days before we saw her, for she seldom came up to the classes, being, as we were given to understand, too deeply engrossed in ascetic practices to break in upon them. Naturally our curiosity was excited. Later we came to understand much. She had been an actress. Past samskaras are not so easily wiped out. Was this only another play which would restore her fast fading beauty and bring back her lost youth? For strange as it may seem, the demonstration of youth, beauty, health, prosperity is considered the test of spirituality in America in these benighted days. How could Swami Vivekananda understand that anyone could put such an interpretation upon his lofty teaching? How much did he understand, we wondered. And then one day he said, “I like that Baby. She is so artless.” This met with a dead silence. Instantly his whole manner changed, and he said very gravely, “I call her Baby hoping that it will make her childlike, free from art and guile.” Perhaps for the same reason, for her ishta (chosen ideal), he gave her Gopala, the Baby Krishna. When we separated for the summer, she went to live on a small island in Orchard Lake. There she built a tiny one-roomed house and lived alone. Strange stories began to be circulated about her. She wore a turban; she practised uncanny rites, called yoga. No one knew the meaning of yoga. It was a strange foreign word that had to do with India — the mysterious, and with occultism. Newspaper men came to interview her. One well-known writer tells the story of his first success. He was a lad engaged in running an elevator (lift) for his living. He wrote the story of this young woman practising yoga on an island not far away. He sent it to the Detroit Free Press and to his astonishment it was accepted. Long afterwards when his position was assured, he said. “After that I expected that everything I wrote would be accepted at once.” Alas, the road to fame is not so easy. It was a long up-hill struggle. It was years before his name became so well-known and his manuscripts received respectful attention. Since then he had learnt the true meaning of yoga, and India has become for him the “Holy Land” to which one goes, not as a tourist but as a pilgrim. The scene of his first novel was laid largely in India. With what feeling and what rare insight he depicted the Indian village to which his hero comes at dusk! The homesick wanderer who reads the book lives in India again for a few hours. Who shall say that this career was not inspired in part at least by Swami Vivekananda, especially since the writer came to know him personally? It was he who said, “There is a glow about everyone who was in any way associated with Vivekananda. “Stella went back to live the ordinary human life, and none of us knew anything of her afterwards until news came of her death a few months ago. What life had held for her during those thirty years in which she voluntarily cut herself off from all connection with us, even from him who had planted and watered the seed, who can say? One can only believe that the seed so planted bore fruit worthy of the planting.

Of Mrs. Funke Swamiji said, “She gives me freedom.” He was seldom more spontaneous than in her presence. “She is naive,” he said on another occasion. This amused her, for she did not spare herself in her efforts to meet his moods. Perhaps more than any of us she realized how much he needed rest and relaxation. The body and mind should not be kept at so great a tension all the time. While others were afraid of losing even a word, she thought how she could amuse him. She would tell funny stories, often at her own expense, and talk lightly and entertainingly. “She rests me,” he said to one. To the same one, she said, “I know he thinks I am a fool, but I don’t care as long as it amuses him.” Is it because of her attitude of not wanting to gather anything from one who had so much to give, that she most of all retains the impress of his personality undistorted? Her sunny disposition, her optimism, her enthusiasm, were refreshing. Nor was she less attractive in other ways, possessing beauty, grace, and charm to an unusual degree. Even today, in spite of her physical disability, the old charm is there. Nothing rekindles the flame and brings the fire of enthusiasm to such a glow as conversation about the Swami, He lives. One actually feels his presence. It is a blessed experience. Who can doubt that when the time comes for her to drop the body which has now become such a burden, she will find the darkness illumined and in that luminous atmosphere a radiant presence who will give her that great gift — Freedom.

The Swami’s choice of two others grew out of the theory which he then held that fanaticism is power gone astray. If this force can be transmuted and turned into a higher channel, it becomes a great power for good. There must be power. That is essential. In Marie Louise and Leon Landsberg, he saw that there was fanaticism to a marked degree, and he believed that here was material which would be invaluable. Marie Louise was, in some respects, the outstanding personality in this small community. A tall, angular woman, about fifty years of age, so masculine in appearance that one looked twice before one could tell whether she was a man or a woman. The short, wiry hair, in the days before bobbed hair was in vogue, the masculine features, the large bones, the heavy voice and the robe, not unlike that worn by men in India, made one doubtful. Her path was the highest, she announced, that of philosophy — jnana. She had been the spokesman for ultra-radical groups and had learning and some degree of eloquence, “I have magnetism of the platform,” she used to say. Her vanity and personal ambition made her unfit for discipleship, and useless as a worker in Swami Vivekananda’s movement. She left Thousand Islands before any of us, and soon after organized an independent centre of Vedanta in California, and later, one in Washington.

One of the most interesting, as well as the most learned of the group was Leon Landsberg, an American by citizenship and a Russian Jew by birth. He had all the great qualities of his race — emotion, imagination, a passion for learning, and a worship of genius. For three years, he was Swami Vivekananda’s inseparable companion, friend, secretary, attendant. His intimate knowledge of Europe, its philosophies, its languages, its culture, gave him a profundity and depth of mind which are rare. He was fiery and picturesque. His indifference to his personal appearance, his fanaticism, his pity for the poor, which amounted to a passion, drew Swamiji to him. He often gave his last penny to a beggar, and always he gave not out of his abundance, but out of a poverty almost as great as the recipient’s. He had as well a position on a New York paper which required but little of his time and gave him a small income. While he and Swamiji lived together in 33rd Street in New York, they shared what they had. Sometimes there was sufficient for both and sometimes there was nothing. After the classes were over at night, they would go out for a walk, ending with a light meal which was inexpensive, as the common purse was often empty. This did not trouble either of them. They knew that when it was needed, money would find its way into the purse again.

Landsberg was an epitome of Europe, its philosophies, its literature, its art. Swamiji found greater delight in reading a man, than a book. Then, too, he was a revelation of the Jewish race — its glory, its tragedy. In this companionship, two ancient races met and found a common basis.

Landsberg was one of the first to come to Thousand Islands and to be initiated. He was given a new name as was customary at that time. Because of his great compassion, he was named Kripananda. His path was Bhakti, worship, devotion. In this his fiery emotional nature could most easily find its true expression. He was the first to be sent out to teach.

After leaving Detroit, Swamiji had gone to New York hoping that there, in the cultural metropolis of America, he might find an opening to begin the work he felt destined to do. He was soon taken up by a group of wealthy friends who loved and admired him and were attracted by his personality, but cared nothing for his message. He found himself in danger of becoming a social lion. He was fed, clothed, and housed in luxury. Again there came the cry for freedom: “Not this! Not this! I can never do my work under these conditions.”

Then he thought the way might be found by living alone and teaching in classes, open to all. He asked Landsberg to find inexpensive rooms for both of them. The place which was found (64 West 33rd Street) was in a most undesirable locality, and it was hinted that the right sort of people, especially ladies, would not come to such a place; but they came — all sorts and conditions of men and women — to these squalid rooms. They sat on chairs, and when chairs were filled, anywhere — on tables, on washstands, on the stairs. Millionaires were glad to sit on the floor, literally at his feet. No charge was made for the teaching and often there was no money to pay the rent. Then Swamiji would give a secular lecture for which he felt he could accept a fee. All that winter, he worked as he could. Often the last penny was spent. It was a precarious way of carrying on the work and sometimes it seemed as if it would come to an end.

It was at this time that some of those with means offered to finance the undertaking. But they made conditions. The “right place” must be selected and the “right people” must be attracted. This was intolerable to his free sannyasin-spirit. Was it for this that he had renounced the world? Was it for this that he had cast aside name and fame? A little financial security was a small thing to give up. He would depend upon no human help. If the work was for him to do, ways and means would come. He refused to make a compromise with the conventional outlook and worldly methods. A letter written at this time is revealing:

” . .wants me to be introduced to the ‘right sort of people’. The only ‘right sort of people’ are those whom the Lord sends — that is what I understand in my life’s experience. They alone can and will help me. As For the rest, Lord bless them in a mass and save me from them….. Lord, how hard it is for man to believe in Thy mercies!!! ‘Shiva! Shiva! Where is the right kind? And where is the bad? It is all He!! In the tiger and in the lamb, in the saint and in the sinner, all He!! In Him I have taken my refuge, body. soul, and atman, will He leave me now after carrying me in His arms all my life? Not a drop will be in the ocean, not a twig in the deepest forest, not a crumb in the house of the God of wealth, if the Lord is not merciful. Streams will be in the desert and the beggar will have plenty if He wills it. He seeth the sparrow’s fall — are these but words, or literal, actual life?

“Truce to this ‘right sort of presentation’. Thou art my right, Thou my wrong, my Shiva. Lord, since a child, I have taken refuge in Thee. Thou wilt be with me in the tropics or at the poles, on the tops of mountains or in the depths of oceans. My stay — my guide in life — my refuge — my friend — my teacher — and my God — my real self — Thou wilt never leave me, never…. My God, save Thou me for ever from these weaknesses, and may I never, never seek for help from any being but Thee. If a man puts his trust in another good man, he is never betrayed. Wilt Thou forsake me. Father of all good — Thou who knowest that all my life. I am Thy servant, and Thine alone? Wilt Thou give me over to be played upon by others or dragged down by evil? He will never leave me, I am sure.”

After this, a few earnest students took the financial responsibility for the work. and there was no further difficulty. Again he wrote: “Was it ever in the history of the world that any great work was done by the rich? It is the heart and brains that do it, ever and ever, and not the purse.”

All that winter the work went on and when the season came to an end, early in the summer, this devoted group was not willing to have the teaching discontinued. One of them owned a house In Thousand Island Park on the St. Lawrence River, and a proposal was made to the teacher that they all spend the summer there. He consented, much touched by their earnestness. He wrote to one of his friends that he wanted to manufacture a few “yogis” out of the materials of the classes. He felt that his work was now really started and that those who joined him at Thousand Islands were really disciples.

In May 1895, he writes to Mrs. Ole Bull:

“This week will be the last of my classes. I am going next Saturday with Mr. Leggett to Maine. He has a fine lake and a forest there. I shall be two or three weeks there. From thence, I go to Thousand Islands. Also I have an invitation to speak at a Parliament of Religions at Toronto, Canada, on July 18th. I shall go there from Thousand Islands and return back.”

And on the 7th of June:

“I am here at last with Mr. Leggett. This is one of the most beautiful spots I ever saw. Imagine a lake surrounded with hills and covered with a huge forest, with nobody but ourselves. So lovely, so quiet, so restful. You may imagine how glad I am after the bustle of cities. It gives me a new lease of life to be here. I go into the forest alone and read my Gita and am quite happy. I shall leave this place in about ten days or so, and go to Thousand Islands. I shall meditate by the hour and day here and be all alone by myself. The very idea is ennobling.”

Early in June three or four were gathered at Thousand Island Park with him and the teaching began without delay. He came on Saturday, July 6, 1895. Swami Vivekananda had planned to initiate several of those already there on Monday. “I don’t know you well enough yet to feel sure that you are ready for initiation,” he said on Sunday afternoon. Then he added rather shyly, “I have a power which I seldom use — the power of reading the mind. If you will permit me, I should like to read your mind, as I wish to initiate you with the others tomorrow.” We assented joyfully. Evidently he was satisfied with the result of the reading, for the next day, together with several others, he gave us a mantra and made us his disciples. Afterwards, questioned as to what he saw while he was reading our minds he told us a little. He saw that we should be faithful and that we should make progress in our spiritual life. He described something of what he saw, without giving the interpretation of every picture. In one case, scene after scene passed before his mental vision which meant that there would be extensive travel apparently in Oriental countries. He described the very houses in which we should live, the people who should surround us, the influences that would affect our lives. We questioned him about this. He told us it could be acquired by anyone. The method was simple at least in the telling. First, think of space — vast, blue, extending everywhere. In time, as one meditates upon this space intently, pictures appear. These pictures must be interpreted. Sometimes one sees the pictures but does not know the interpretation. He saw that one of us would be indissolubly connected with India. Important as well as minor events were foretold for us nearly all of which have come to pass. In this reading the quality of the personality was revealed — the mettle, the capacity, the character. Having passed this test, there can be no self-depreciation, no lack of faith in one’s self. Every momentary doubt is replaced by a serene assurance. Has the personality not received the stamp of approval from the one being in the world…?

Thousand Island Park, nine miles long and a mile or two in width, is the largest of the Thousand Islands. The steamers land at the village on the river. At that time the remainder of the island was practically a solitude. The house to which we were directed was a mile above the village. It was built upon a rock. Was that symbolic? It was two storeys high in the front and three behind. A dense forest surrounded it. Here we were secluded and yet within the reach of supplies. We could walk in all directions and meet no one. Sometimes Swamiji went out only with Landsberg. Sometimes he asked one or two of us to accompany him. Occasionally the whole party went out together. As we walked, he talked, seldom of controversial subjects. The solitude, the woods seemed to recall past experiences in Indian forests, and he told us of the inner experiences during the time he wandered there

We in our retirement seldom saw anyone except now and then someone who came for the view. The conditions were ideal for our purpose. One could not have believed that such a spot could be found in America. What great ideas were voiced there! What an atmosphere was created, what power was generated! There the Teacher reached some of his loftiest flights, there he showed us his heart and mind. We saw ideas unfold and flower. We saw the evolution of plans which grew into institutions in the years that followed. It was a blessed experience — an experience which made Miss Waldo exclaim. “What have we ever done to deserve this?” And so we all felt.

The original plan was that they should live as a community, without servants, each doing a share of the work. Nearly all of them were unaccustomed to housework and found it uncongenial. The result was amusing; as time went on it threatened to become disastrous. Some of us who had just been reading the story of Brook Farm felt that we saw it re-enacted before our eyes. No wonder Emerson refused to join that community of transcendentalists. His serenity was evidently bought at a price. Some could only wash dishes. One whose work was to cut the bread, groaned and all but wept whenever she attempted the task. It is curious how character is tested in these little things. Weaknesses which might have been hidden for a lifetime in ordinary intercourse were exposed in a day of this community life. It was interesting. With Swamiji the effect was quite different. Although only one among them all was younger than himself, he seemed like a father or rather like a mother in patience and gentleness. When the tension became too great, he would say with the utmost sweetness. “Today, I shall cook for you.” To this Landsberg would ejaculate in an aside, “Heaven save us!” By way of explanation he said that in New York when Swamiji cooked he, Landsberg, would tear his hair. because it meant that afterwards every dish in the house required washing. After several unhappy experiences in the community housekeeping, an outsider was engaged for help, and one or two of the more capable ones undertook certain responsibilities, and we had peace.

But once the necessary work was over and we had gathered in the class room, the atmosphere was changed. There never was a disturbing element within those walls. It seemed as if we had left the body and the bodily consciousness outside. We sat in a semicircle and waited. Which gate to the Eternal would be opened for us today? What heavenly vision should meet our eyes? There was always the thrill of adventure. The Undiscovered Country, the Sorrowless Land opened up new vistas of hope and beauty. Even so, our expectations were always exceeded. Vivekananda’s flights carried us with him to supernal heights. Whatever degree of realization may or may not have come to us since, one thing we can never forget: We saw the Promised Land. We, too, were taken to the top of Pisgah and the sorrow and trials of this world have never been quite real since.

He told us the story of the beautiful garden and of one who went to look over the wall and found it so alluring that he jumped over and never returned. And after him another and another. But we had the unique fortune of having for a Teacher one who had looked over and found it no less entrancing; but out of his great compassion he returned to tell the story to those left behind and to help them over the wall. So it went on from morning until midnight. When he saw how deep the impression was which he had made, he would say with a smile. “The cobra has bitten you. You cannot escape.” Or sometimes, “I have caught you in my net. You can never get out.”

Miss Dutcher, our hostess, was a conscientious little woman, a devout Methodist. How she ever came to be associated with such a group as gathered in her house that summer would have been a mystery to anyone who did not know the power of Swami Vivekananda to attract and hold sincere souls. But having once seen and heard him, what could one do but follow? Was he not the incarnation of the Divine, the Divine which lures man on until he finds himself again in his lost kingdom? But the road was hard and often terrifying to one still bound by conventions and orthodoxy in religion. All her ideals, her values of life, her concepts of religion were, it seemed to her, destroyed. In reality, they were only modified. Sometimes she did not appear for two or three days. “Don’t you see” , Swami said, “this is not an ordinary illness? It is the reaction of the body against the chaos that is going on in her mind. She cannot bear it.” The most violent attack came one day after a timid protest on her part against something he had said in the class. “The idea of duty is the midday sun of misery scorching the very soul, “he had said. “Is it not our duty?” she began, but got no farther. For once that great free soul broke all bounds in his rebellion against the idea that anyone should dare bind with fetters the soul of man. Miss Dutcher was not seen for some days. And so the process of education went on. It was not difficult if one’s devotion to the guru was great enough, for then, like the snake, one dropped the old and put on the new. But where the old prejudices and conventions were stronger than one’s faith, it was a terrifying, almost a devastating, process.

TEACHING AT THOUSAND ISLAND PARK

We all attended our class lectures. To a Hindu the teaching itself might have been familiar, but it was given with a fire, an authority, a realization which made it sound like something entirely new. He too “spake like one having authority”. To us of the West to whom it was all new it was as if a being from some radiant sphere had come down with a gospel of hope, of joy, of life. Religion is not a matter of belief but of experience. One may read about a country, but until one has seen it, there can be no true idea. All is within. The divinity which we are seeking in heaven, in teachers, in temples is within us. If we see it outside, it is because we have it within. What is the means by which we come to realize this, by which we see God? Concentration is the lamp which lights the darkness.

There are different methods for different states of evolution. All paths lead to God. The guru will put you on the path best suited to your development. With what sense of release did we hear that we not only may, but must follow reason. Before that it had seemed that reason and intuition are generally opposed to each other. Now we are told that we must hold to reason until we reach something higher — and this something higher must never contradict reason.

The first morning we learnt that there is a state of consciousness higher than the surface consciousness — which is called samadhi. Instead of the two divisions we are accustomed to, the conscious and the unconscious — it would be more accurate to make the classification, the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious. This is where confusion arises in the Western way of thinking, which divides consciousness into the subconscious or unconscious and the conscious. They cognize only the normal state of mind, forgetting that there is a state beyond consciousness — a superconscious state, inspiration. How can we know that this is a higher state? To quote Swami literally, “In one case a man goes in and comes out as a fool. In the other case he goes in a man and comes out a God.” And he always said, “Remember the superconscious never contradicts reason. It transcends it, but contradicts it never. Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the Ultimate, an illumination.”

Truth is for all, for the good of all. Not secret but sacred. The steps are: hear, then reason about it, “let the flood of reason flow over it, then meditate upon it, concentrate your mind upon it, make yourself one with it.” Accumulate power in silence and become a dynamo of spirituality. What can a beggar give? Only a king can give, and he only when he wants nothing himself.

“Hold your money merely as custodian for what is God’s. Have no attachment for it. Let name and fame and money go; they are a terrible bondage. Feel the wonderful atmosphere of freedom. You are free, free, tree! Oh blessed am I! Freedom am I! I am the Infinite! In my soul I can find no beginning and no end. All is my Self. Say this unceasingly.”

He told us that God was real, a reality which could be experienced just as tangibly as any other reality; that there were methods by which these experiences could be made which were as exact as laboratory methods of experiment. The mind is the instrument. Sages, yogis, and saints from prehistoric times made discoveries in this science of the Self. They have left their knowledge as a precious legacy not only to their immediate disciples but to seekers of Truth in future times. This knowledge is in the first instance passed on from Master to disciple, but in a way very different from the method used by an ordinary teacher. The method of religious teaching to which we of the West have become accustomed is that we are told the results of the experiments, much as if a child were given a problem in arithmetic and were told its answer but given no instruction as how the result was reached. We have been told the results reached by the greatest spiritual geniuses known to humanity, the Buddha, the Christ, Zoroaster, Laotze, and we have been told to accept and believe the result of their great experiments, If we are sufficiently reverent and devotional, and if we have reached that stage of evolution where we know that there must be some Reality transcending reason, we may be able to accept and believe blindly, but even then it has but little power to change us. It does not make a god of man. Now we were told that there is a method by which the result may be obtained, a method never lost in India, passed on from guru to disciple.

For the first time we understood why all religions begin with ethics. For without truth, non-injury, continence, non-stealing, cleanliness, austerity, there can be no spirituality. For many of us in the West ethics and religion are almost synonymous. It is the one concrete thing we are taught to practise and there it generally ends. We were like the young man who went to Jesus and asked. “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said, “Thou hast read the prophets. Do not kill. Do not steal, do not commit adultery.” The young man said. “Lord, all these have I kept from my youth up.” Now we wanted to hear about yoga, samadhi, and other mysteries. This emphasis upon things which were by no means new to us was something of a surprise. But soon we found it was not quite the same, for it was carried to an unthought-of length. The ideal must be truth in thought, word, and deed. If this can be practised for twelve years, then every word that is said becomes true. If one perfect in this way says. “Be thou healed”, healing comes instantaneously. Be blessed, he is blessed. Be freed, he is released. Stories were told of those who had this power, and who could not recall the word once spoken. To the father of Shri Ramakrishna this power had come. Would that explain why such a son was born to him? Then there was the life of Shri Ramakrishna himself. “Come again Monday,” he said to a young man. “I cannot come on Monday. I have some work to do; may I come Tuesday?” “No,” answered the Master, “these lips have said ‘Monday’; they cannot say anything else now.” “How can truth come unless the mind is perfected by the practice of truth? Truth comes to the true. Truth attracts truth. Every word, thought, and deed rebounds. Truth cannot come through untruth.” In our time we have an instance in the case of Mahatma Gandhi, regarded by some as the greatest man in the world, of how far the practice of truth and non-injury will take a man. If he is not the greatest man in the world today, he is certainly one of the greatest characters.

Non-injury in word, thought and deed. There are sects in India which apply this mainly to the taking of life, Not only are they vegetarians, but they try not to injure still lower forms of life. They put a cloth over their mouth to keep out microscopic creatures and sweep the path before them so as not to injure whatever life may be underfoot. But that does not go far, even so there remain infinitesimal forms of life which it is impossible to avoid injuring. Nor does it go far enough. Before one has attained perfection in non-injury he has lost the power to injure. “From me no danger be to aught that lives” becomes true for him, a living truth, reality. Before such a one the lion and the lamb lie down together. Pity and compassion have fulfilled the law and transcended it.

Continence — Chastity: This subject always stirred him deeply. Walking up and down the room, getting more and more excited, he would stop before some one, as if there were no one else in the room, “Don’t you see,” he would say eagerly, “there is a reason why chastity is insisted on in all monastic orders? Spiritual giants are produced only where the vow of chastity is observed. Don’t you see there must be a reason? The Roman Catholic Church has produced great saints, St. Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, the two Catherines, and many others. The Protestant Church has produced no one of spiritual rank equal to them. There is a connection between great spirituality and chastity. The explanation is that these men and women have through prayer and meditation transmuted the most powerful force in the body into spiritual energy. In India this is well understood and yogis do it consciously. The force so transmuted is called ojas and is stored up in the brain. It has been lifted from the lowest centre of the kundalini — the muladhara to the highest. “To us who listened the words came to our remembrance: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.”

In the same eager way he went on to explain that whenever there was any manifestation of power or genius, it was because a little of this power had escaped up the sushumna. And did he say it? Or did we come to see for ourselves the reason why the avataras and even lesser ones could inspire a love so great that it made the fishermen of Galilee leave their nets and follow the young Carpenter, made the princes of the clan of Shakya give up their robes, their jewels, their princely estates? It was the divine drawing. It was the lure of divinity.

How touchingly earnest Swami Vivekananda was as he proposed this subject! He seemed to plead with us as if to beg us to act upon this teaching as something most precious. More, we could not be the disciples he required if we were not established in this. He demanded a conscious transmutation. “The man who had no temper has nothing to control,” he said. “I want a few, five or six who are in the flower of their youth.”

Austerity! Why have the saints in all religions been given to fasting and self-denial, to mortification of the body? True, there have been those who foolishly regarded the body as an enemy which must be conquered and have used these methods to accomplish their end. The real purpose however is disciplining the will. No ordinary will-power will carry us through the great work before us. We must have nerves of steel and a will of iron, a will which is consciously disciplined and trained. Each act of restraint helps to strengthen the will. It is called tapas in India and means literally, to heat the inner or the higher nature gets heated. How is it done? There are various practices of a voluntary nature, e.g. a vow of silence is kept for months, fasting for a fixed number of days, or eating only once a day. With children it is often the denial of some favourite article of food. The conditions seem to be that the vow must be taken voluntarily for a specific time. If the vow is not kept, it does more harm than good. If it is kept, it becomes a great factor in building up the character so necessary for the higher practices.

Beyond a few directions in meditation there was very little set instruction, yet in course of these few days our ideas were revolutionized, our outlook enormously enlarged, our values changed. It was a re-education. We learnt to think clearly and fearlessly. Our conception of spirituality was not only clarified but transcended. Spirituality brings life, power, joy, fire, glow, enthusiasm — all the beautiful and positive things, never inertia, dullness, weakness. Then why should one have been so surprised to find a man of God with a power in an unusual degree? Why have we in the West always associated emaciation and anaemic weakness with spirituality? Looking back upon it now one wonders how one could ever have been so illogical. Spirit is life, shakti, the divine energy.

It is needless to repeat the formal teaching, the great central idea. These one can read for himself. But there was something else, an influence, an atmosphere charged with the desire to escape from bondage — call it what you will — that can never be put into words, and yet was more powerful than any words. It was this which made us realize that we were blessed beyond words. To hear him say, “This indecent clinging to life,” drew aside the curtain for us into the region beyond life and death. and planted in our hearts the desire for that glorious freedom. We saw a soul struggling to escape the meshes of maya, one to whom the body was an intolerable bondage, not only a limitation, but a degrading humiliation. “Azad, Azad, the Free,” he cried, pacing up and down like a caged lion. Yes, like the lion in the cage who found the bars not of iron but of bamboo. “Let us not be caught this time” would be his refrain another day. “So many times maya has caught us, so many times have we exchanged our freedom for sugar dolls which melted when the water touched them. Let us not be caught this time.” So in us was planted the great desire for freedom. Two of the three requisites we already had — a human body and a guru, and now he was giving us the third, the desire to be free.

“Don’t be deceived. Maya is a great cheat. Gel out. Do not let her catch you this time,” and so on and so on. “Do not sell your priceless heritage for such delusions. Arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached.” Then he would rush up to one of us with blazing eyes and fingers pointing and would exclaim, “Remember. God is the only Reality.” Like a madman, but he was mad for God. For it was at this time that he wrote The Song of the Sannyasin. We have not only lost our divinity, we have forgotten that we ever had it. “Arise, awake. Ye Children of Immortal Bliss.” Up and down, over and over again. “Don’t let yourself be tempted by dolls. They are dolls of sugar, or dolls of salt, and they will melt and become nothing. Be a king and know you own the world. This never comes until you give it up and it ceases to bind. Give up. give up.”

The struggle for existence, or the effort to acquire wealth and power, or the pursuit of pleasure, takes up the thought, energy, and time of human beings. We seemed to be in a different world. The end to be attained was Freedom — freedom from bondage in which maya has caught us, in which maya has enmeshed all mankind. Sooner or later the opportunity to escape will come to all. Ours had come. For these days every aspiration, every desire, every struggle was directed towards this one purpose — consciously by our Teacher, blindly, unconsciously by us, following the influence he created.

With him it was a passion. Freedom not for himself alone, but for all — though he could help only those in whom he could light the fire to help them out of maya’s chains:

“Strike off thy fetters! Bonds that bind thee down.
Of shining gold, or darker, baser ore;…
….Say — ‘Om Tat Sat. Om‘.” (The Song of the Sannyasin)

IN LIGHTER VEIN

But it was not all Vedanta, and deep serious thought. Sometimes after the classes were over, it was pure fun, such gaiety as we had never seen elsewhere. We had thought of religious men as grave all the time, but gradually we came to see that the power to throw off the burden of the world at will and live for a time in a state of childlike joy is a certain sign of detachment and comes only to those who have seen the Great Reality. For the time being, we were all light-hearted together.

Swamiji had a stock of funny stories, some of which he told again and again. One was about a missionary to the cannibal islands who, upon his arrival, asked the people there how they liked his predecessor and received the reply, “He was delicious!” Another was about the Negro preacher, who in telling the story of the creation of Adam. said, “God made Adam and put him up against de fence to dry”, when he was interrupted by a voice from the congregation. “Hold on dere, brudder. Who made dat fence?” At this, the Negro preacher leaned over the pulpit and said solemnly, “One more question like dat, and you smashes all teology!” Then Swamiji would tell about the woman who asked, “Swami, are you a Buddhist?” (pronounced like bud), and he would say wickedly but with a grave face. “No, Madam, I am a florist.”

Again, he would tell of the young woman, cooking in the common kitchen of the lodging house in which he lived with Landsberg. She had frequent disputes with her husband, who was a spiritualistic medium, and gave public seances. Often she would turn to Swamiji for sympathy after one of these differences. “Is it fair for him to treat me like this,” she would say, “when I make all the ghosts?”

He would tell about his first meeting with Landsberg. It was at a Theosophical meeting where Landsberg was giving a lecture on “The Devil”. Just in front of him sat a woman who was wearing a scarlet blouse. Every now and then, Landsberg said the word “devil” with great emphasis, and when he did, he invariably pointed a finger at the woman with the scarlet blouse.

But soon we found ourselves in an entirely different mood for he was telling the story of Shakuntala. With what poetic imagination! Did we think we knew something of romance before? It was but a pale, anaemic thing — a mere shadow of real romance. Nature became a living thing when the trees, flowers, birds, deer, all things lamented, “Shakuntala has departed!” “Shakuntala has departed!” We too were bereft. Then followed the story of Savitri, the wife whose faithfulness conquered even the dread Lord of Death, Not “faithful unto death”, but with a love so great that even death retreated before it. Then Sati, the wife, who fell dead when she inadvertently heard someone speak against her husband. Uma, who remembered even in another body. Of Sita, he never spoke at length at any one time. It seemed to touch him as not even the story of Savitri did. It was too deep and precious for expression, Only now and then, a phrase, or sentence, at most a paragraph. “Sita, the pure, the chaste.” “Sita, the perfect wife. That character was depicted once for all time.” “The future of the Indian woman must be built upon the ideal of Sita.” And then he usually ended with “We are all the children of Sita”, this with a melting pathos. And so was built up in our minds the ideal of Indian womanhood.

Sometimes he would tell us of his life in India — how even when he was a little child the gerua cloth exercised upon him such a spell that he would give away everything he could lay hands on when a holy man came into the courtyard. His family would lock him up when one of these men appeared. Then he would throw things out of the window. There were times when he would sit in meditation until he was lost to all outer consciousness. But the other side was there too — when he was so naughty that his mother would hold him under the tap, saying, “I asked Shiva for a son and he has sent me one of his demons!” The power which was to shake India could not be so easily harnessed! When a tutor came and poured out his knowledge, he sat like an image with his eyes closed. The enraged teacher shouted. “How dare you go to sleep when I am instructing you?” at which he opened his eyes and, to the amazement of the man, recited everything that had been said. It was not difficult to believe this story, for his memory was phenomenal. Once when someone commented on it, he said, “Yes, and my mother has the same kind of memory. After she hears the Ramayana read, she can recite what she has heard.” One day, he was speaking on some point of Swedish history when a Swede, who was present, corrected him. Swamiji did not defend his position, so sure was he of the facts that he made no comment. The next day the Swede came looking rather shamefaced and said, “I looked up the matter and I find you are right, Swami.” Time after time came such confirmation. He considered a good memory one of the signs of spirituality.

Many were the stories he told of his mother — the proud. little woman who tried so hard to hide her emotions and her pride in him. How she was torn between disapproval of the life he had chosen and her pride in the name he had made for himself. In the beginning she would have chosen a conventional life for him, perhaps marriage and worldly success, but she lived to see the beggar exalted and princes bowing before him. But in the meantime, hers was not an easy task. Asked, many years later, what kind of a child he was, she burst out with, “I had to have two nurses for him!”

Those of us who were privileged to see his mother, know that from her he inherited his regal bearing. This tiny woman carried herself like a queen. Many times did the American newspapers in later years refer to her son as “that lordly monk, Vivekananda”. There was a virginal purity about her which it seems she was able to pass on, and which was perhaps her greatest gift. But could a soul so great find a perfect habitation? India and such parents gave him one that was a fairly satisfactory vehicle. How he loved his mother! Sometimes when he was in other parts of India the fear would come that something had happened to her, and he would send to inquire. Or perhaps he was in the monastery in Belur, in which case he would send a messenger post-haste. To the very end her comfort and her care was one of his chief considerations.

And so perhaps for days we re-lived his childhood in his father’s house in the Simla quarter of Calcutta. His sisters for whom he had a special love and his father for whom he had a son’s devotion, flitted across the picture. “To my father.” he said, “I owe my intellect and my compassion.” He would tell how his father would give money to a drunkard, knowing for what purpose it would be used. “This world is so terrible, let him forget it for a few minutes, if he can,” the father would say, in self-defence. His father was lavish in his gifts. One day when he was more recklessly extravagant than usual, his youthful son said, “Father what are you going to leave me?” “Go, stand before your mirror,” was the father’s reply, “and you will see what I leave you.”

As he grew to boyhood, his energy was turned into other directions. There came a time when he would gather his companions together and hold religious services in which preaching played an important part. “Coming events cast their shadows before.” Years afterwards, Shri Ramakrishna said, that if he had not interfered. Naren would have become one of the great preachers of the world and the head of a sect of his own.

EARLY ADVENTURES OF THE SPIRIT

As he grew towards young manhood, he became an ag- ….. whom he also carried on some correspondence. But agnostic or devotee, the search for God was always uppermost in his mind. It was touching to hear him tell how he went from one religious teacher to another, asking, “Sire, have you seen God?” and not receiving the answer he hoped for, until he found Shri Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar. With that began a new chapter in his life, but that is a long story, often told.

He spoke of his struggles to accept this priest of Kali who worshipped the Terrible One. He, the unorthodox agnostic, product of Western education, to sit at the feel of a superstitious worshipper of idols! It was unthinkable! And yet, in this simple man and in him alone, he found what he had been seeking — living spirituality. If the worship of Kali could produce such purity, such troth, such flaming spirituality, one could only stand before it in reverence. One was compelled to reverse all one’s former opinions. The intellect surrendered, but the instincts did not submit so easily. There was a long struggle and many arguments with Shri Ramakrishna after he had accepted him as his guru. At last, he was conquered by an experience of which he never spoke. It was too sacred!

His devotion to his Master was unique. Such words as love and loyalty acquired a new meaning. In him he saw the living embodiment of Divinity, whose very body changed with the realization of his ideas. Although he was illiterate, Vivekananda said of him, “He had the greatest intellect of anyone I ever met.” This from one whose scintillating intellect amazed men of outstanding intellectual achievements.

The process of re-education into Hinduism began. He was among those who had stormed against idol worship, but in this priest of Kali, who worshipped the image of Dakshineswar as his Mother, he found a character greater than any he had met before — a being of shining radiance, the very embodiment of love, of Divinity, “If idol worship can produce such a character,” he thought, “I bow down before it.” He saw one who practised each religion in turn and found that all led to the goal. He learnt the truth of the Sanskrit verse, “Many rivers flowing in various directions, all lead to the one ocean,” or “Whether we call it water, aqua, pani, jal, it is all one water.” Best of all, he learnt that religion may be experienced, not merely believed, and that there are methods which give this experience; that man may here and in this body become divine-transmuted, from the human into the superhuman. In Shri Ramakrishna, he saw one who lived “God is the only Reality”.

The time with the Master was drawing to an end. All too soon, this God-intoxicated one left a little band of disconsolate disciples who at first felt like sheep without a shepherd. After a time, this feeling of helplessness and desolation gradually gave way to the knowledge which amounted to a certainty of the presence of the Master. From that time on, there was always a centre, however humble, where the Master was worshipped. However far many of them might wander, one was there to keep the altar-fire burning.

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S WANDER-YEARS

And now began years of wandering for them. From Dakshineswar to the Himalayas, from the Himalayas to Rameswaram, they travelled: by foot, by bullock cart, by camel, by elephant, by train, these children of Shri Ramakrishna would wander. Some went into Tibet, some lived in caves in the Himalayas. The palaces of Rajas knew them as well as the huts of peasants. It was not until many years had passed that they were all gathered together again, in the monastery on the other side of the Ganga from Dakshineswar. Vivekananda too became a wanderer, driven by an overwhelming desire to find some means of help for his country. It was not strange that he went first to Bodh Gaya to worship under the Bodhi-tree where 2500 years ago the “Enlightened One” in this jungle of the world had found the way out.

What Buddha meant to Swamiji, it would not be easy to say. The very name stirred profound depths. For days together this would be his theme. With his dramatic genius, he was able to bring before us the story with such intimacy that we not only saw it, but re-lived it as scene after scene was depicted. It seemed as if it had happened to us — and that only yesterday. We saw the young prince, his palaces, his pleasure gardens, the beautiful Yashodhara with her wistful intuition — “Coming events cast their shadows before!” Then the birth of the child, and with it the hope that was born in her heart. Surely this son would hold him to the world and to her! But when Siddhartha named him Rahula, the fetter, what a sinking of the heart there must have been! Even this could not hold him, and the old fear came over her again. The shadow of the fear came over us too. We suffered as she suffered. Not until long afterwards did we remember that in the telling of this story never once did Swamiji suggest a struggle in Siddhartha’s mind between his duty to father, kingdom, wife, and child and the ideal that was calling him. Never did he say to himself, “I am my father’s only son. Who will succeed when he lays down the body?” Never once did such a thought seem to enter his mind. Did he not know that he was heir to a greater kingdom? Did he not know that he belonged to a race infinitely greater than the Shakyas? He knew — but they did not, and he had great compassion. In listening, one felt the pain of that compassion and through it all the unwavering resolution. And so he went forth, and Yashodhara, left behind, followed as she could. She too slept on the ground, wore the coarsest cloth, and ate only once a day. Siddhartha knew how great she was. Was she not the wife of the future Buddha? Was it not she who had walked the long, long road with him?

Then came the story of the years of heart-breaking struggle that followed. One teacher after the other Gautama followed, one method after the other he tried. He practised the greatest asceticism, spent long days in fasting and torturing the body to the point of death — only to find that this was not the way. At last rejecting all these methods he came to the pipal tree at Bodh Gaya and called to all the worlds: “In this seat let the body dry up — the skin, the bone, the flesh go in final dissolution. I move not until I get the knowledge which is rare, even in many rebirths.”

He found it there. And again, he lifted up his voice, this time in a shout of triumph:

“Many a house of life hath held me,
Ever seeking him who wrought this
prison of the senses

Sorrow-fraught, sore was my strife.
But now thou builder of this tabernacle— thou,
I know thee. Never shalt thou build again
these walls of pain.

Nor raise the ridge-pole of deceit,
Nor lay fresh rafters on the beams.
Delusion fashioned thee.
Safe pass I thence, deliverance to obtain.”

Then the return to his father’s kingdom; the excitement of the old king: the orders for the decorations to welcome the wanderer; the capital in gala attire. All is expectancy — the prince is coming! But it was a beggar who came, not a prince. Yet such a beggar! At the head of the monks he came. Watching from her terrace Yashodhara saw him. “Go, ask your father for your inheritance,” she said to little Rahula at her side. “Who is my father?” asked the child. “See you not the lion coming along the road?” she announced in quick impatience. Then we see the child running towards that majestic figure and receiving his inheritance — the yellow cloth. Later, we see the same Rahula walking behind his father and saying to himself, “He is handsome, and I look like him. He is majestic and Hook like him.” and so on until the Blessed One, having read his thought, turns and rebukes him; and Rahula, as a penance, does not go out to beg his food that day, but sits under a tree and meditates upon the instructions he has received. But that first day the king and the nobles of the Shakyas listened to the teaching of the Buddha and one by one entered the path. Yashodhara, too, found peace and blessedness. Scene after scene, day after day it went on. We re-lived the life of the Buddha from before his birth until the last hour at Kusinagara, when like the Mallas, we, too, wept — “The Blessed One”.

Swamiji spent long months in Varanasi in the company of holy men and Pandits, questioning, studying, learning. Here one day, one of the best known and oldest of the sadhus, enraged at what he thought the presumption of a mere lad, all but cursed him, only to be met with the response, “I shall not return to Varanasi until I have shaken India with the thunder of my voice.” And Varanasi knew him no more until 1902 when he had long made good his assertion.

He always thought of himself as a child of India, a descendant of the rishis. While he was a modern of the moderns, few Hindus have been able to bring back the Vedic days and the life of the sages in the forests of ancient India as he did. Indeed, sometimes he seemed to be one of the rishis of that far-off time come to life again, so living was his teaching of the ancient wisdom. Asked where he had learnt to chant with that marvellous intonation which never failed to thrill the listener, he shyly told of a dream or vision in which he saw himself in the forests of ancient India hearing a voice — his voice — chanting the sacred Sanskrit verses. Again, another dream or vision, of this same time in which he saw the sages gathered in the holy grove asking questions concerning the ultimate reality. A youth among them answered in a clarion voice, “Hear, ye children of immortal bliss, even ye who dwell in higher spheres. I have found the Ancient One, knowing whom alone ye shall be saved from death over again!”

He told of his struggle against caste prejudices in the early years of his wandering life. One day just after he had been thinking that he would like to smoke he passed a group of mehtars who were smoking. Instinctively, he passed on. Then, as he remembered that he and the lowest chandala were one Self, he turned back and took the hookah from the hands of the untouchable. But he was no condemner of caste. He saw the part it had played in the evolution of the nation, the purpose it had served in its day. But when it hardens the heart of the observer towards his fellowman, when it makes him forget that the chandala as well as he is the one Self, it is time to break it — but never as a matter of mere indulgence. It was during these wanderings that Vivekananda made his first disciple. On the train that came to Hathras one day, the young station-master of that place saw among the third class passengers, a sadhu of his own age with a marvellous pair of eyes. Only a few nights before, he had dreamt of these very eyes. They had haunted him ever since. He was startled and thrilled. Going up to the young Sannyasin, he begged him to leave the train and go with him to his quarters. This the wanderer did.

Later, when the station-master’s duties were finished, and he was free to sit at the feet of the stranger in devotion, he found him singing a Bengali song to the refrain of: “My beloved must come to me with ashes on his moon face.” The young devotee disappeared — to return divested of his official clothes and with ashes on his face. The train which took the Swami Vivekananda from Hathras, carried with it the ex-station-master, who later became the Swami Sadananda. In after years he often said that he did not follow Swami Vivekananda for religion, but followed “a devilish pair of eyes”.

And now began for Sadananda the life of the wanderer. The hardships of the road might have made him miss the ease of his former life, but his travelling companion exercised such a spell that he forgot the body. The tender care of the guru made him forget how footsore he was. To the last day of his life, Sadananda could not speak of this time without emotion. “He carried my shoes on his head!” he cried.

They were blessed, never-to-be-forgotten days. Both were artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in appearance. Artists raved about them.

Then he told of his life alone in the caves of the Himalayas trying to find the solution within. But he was not left in peace and undisturbed for long. The vicissitudes of life drove him forth once more to the deserts of Rajputana and the cities of Western India. During this time he had deliberately cut himself off from his brother-disciples, for he felt a great need to be alone. Once after long search, one of them saw him driving in a carriage somewhere in the Bombay Presidency. “His face shone,” he reported, “like the face of a god. It was the face of a knower of Brahman.” This witness describes how he came before his adored brother-disciple, but, although kindly received, was sent away again at once.

Vivekananda stopped for some time in Khetri, at the court of the Maharaja who became his disciple. One day while he was sitting in Durbar, a nautch-girl made her appearance and was about to sing. He rose to leave the assembly. “Wait Swamiji.” the Maharaja said. “you will find nothing to offend you in the singing of this girl. On the contrary you will be pleased.” The Swami sat 2 down and the nautch-girl sang:

O Lord, look not upon my evil qualities!
Thy name, O Lord, is Same-sightedness,
Make of us both the same Brahman!
One piece of iron is in the Image in the Temple,
And another the knife in the hand of the butcher,
But when they touch the philosophers’ stone Both alike turn to gold!
So Lord, look not upon my evil qualities!
Thy name, O Lord, is Same-sightedness,
Make of us both the same Brahman!
One drop of water is in the sacred Jamuna,
And another is foul in the ditch by the roadside,
But when they fall into the Ganga,
Both alike become holy. (So, Lord etc.)

The young Sannyasin was inexpressibly touched. He blessed the singer who from that day gave up her profession and entered the path leading to perfection.

During these years when Vivekananda travelled from one end of India to the other as a mendicant monk, his constant thought was how to solve the problems of India. Problem after problem presented itself — the poverty, the condition of the masses and the depressed classes; the duties of the privileged classes towards them; malaria, plague, cholera, and other diseases; early marriages, the condition of women, of widows, illiteracy, diet, caste, sanitation, the whole dark brood.

The value of pilgrimage grew upon him, “To help India, one must love her; to love her, one must know her.” To this day groups of ardent young students, following in his footsteps, make pilgrimages all over India, often travelling hundreds of miles on foot. Not only did it foster spirituality, it made for the unity of India. Pilgrims came to know and love their Motherland. They came with one faith, one hope, one purpose. This vast country has one sacred language, from which all the northern languages are derived; one mythology, one set of religious ideas, one supreme goal. What the Holy Sepulchre was to the crusaders, what Rome is to the Catholic, what Mecca is to the Moslem, this and more is the pilgrimage to the Hindu. If one could draw a map showing the pilgrim routes, it would be seen that they cover the face of India, from the Himalayas to Rameswaram, from Puri to Dwarka. What is it that these pilgrims seek? “Whither winds the bitter road?” Their faces are set to the eternal goal of humanity; they seek something we have lost, they go in quest of the Holy Grail.

Is it a wonder that men like these love India, understand her problems and needs, as no other can, and devote their lives to her service? These are men who do not make the mistakes of mere reformers. For the work that they do is born of reverence for all that has gone before, together with an understanding for the present need, and great faith and love. They realize that all growth is organic. They do not destroy; their work is constructive.

Swamiji himself was not a reformer. He believed in growth, not destruction. He studied the history of Indian institutions and found that in the beginning they invariably fulfilled a need. As time went on, the need passed away, the institutions remained, while evil after evil had been added to them. He saw poverty wide-spread and dire. He saw famine and pestilence. The ancient glories of India were only a memory. The race with its great heritage appeared to be passing. Out of the emotions stirred by these sights there grew up later a form of service which still persists. When there is an epidemic of cholera or any other disease, where plague decimates the population, there, serving the suffering, regardless of their own health or life, you will surely find the spiritual descendants of Vivekananda. In times of famine they are there to distribute food to the starving, clothing to the naked, In times of flood, they are there to administer relief. For these purposes money comes in from all pans of the country, for it is now well known that every pice will be accounted for, and that the money will be spent to the best possible advantage.

It was while he was in the Bombay Presidency that the Swami perfected his knowledge of Sanskrit, paying particular attention to pronunciation. He considered the accent of the Deccan particularly good. From there he wandered on from place to place, staying a night here, a few weeks there, until he finally reached Madras, where he met the band of devoted young men who hailed him as a true mahatma. These orthodox Brahmins accepted him as their guru, feeling that he was one with authority from on high, which placed him beyond the limitations of caste or any human restrictions. Poor as they were, they raised a sum of money which was to help towards his passage to America.

Filled with the message that he had to give and the work he had set himself, his mind had turned to America. There he hoped to find the solution. There, in the richest country in the world, he hoped to find help for his needy people. “You cannot expect people to be spiritual.” he said, “when they are hungry.” Although he went with the purpose of asking help, yet when he found himself there, this royal soul could only give. What did he give? A mendicant — what had he to give? He gave regally the most precious thing he possessed, the one priceless gift which India still has to offer the world — the teaching of the atman.

Alone, unheralded, he went to that distant continent. In telling of his experience at the Parliament of Religions, he said, “I had never given a lecture before. True, I had spoken to small groups of people sitting around me, but in an informal way, usually only answering questions. Moreover I had not written out my speech as the others had done. I called upon my Master, and upon Saraswati, giver of vak, and stood upon my feet. I began:’Sisters and Brothers of America’ — but I got no further. I was stopped by thunders of applause.” It seems the audience broke all bounds. He described the emotions which this amazing reception stirred in him — the thrill amounting to awe. He felt as never before the power behind him. From that time not a shadow of doubt assailed his mind as to his commission from on high. He was the pioneer, the first preacher of Vedanta. His spirituality caused astonishment. People began to ask, “Why send missionaries to a country which produces men like this?”

SOME IPSE DIXITS

Some great ideas stand out, not because they are the most important, but rather because they are new and startling. As when Swamiji told the story of Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi and ended with: “Verily it is not the husband who is loved, but the Self who is loved in the husband.”

Love. It was a new idea that all love is one; that we love child, father, mother, husband, wife, friend, because in them we see the Self. It is the bliss shining through. The mother feels the divinity in her child, the wife sees it in the husband, and so in all other relations. We have put it into compartments and called it: mother’s love’, child’s love, friend’s love, lover’s love, as if they were different kinds of love instead of one love manifesting in various forms.

Bliss — Joy. “In Joy were we born, in joy do we live, and unto joy do we return.” Not born and conceived in sin. but in joy. Joy is our nature, not something to be attained or acquired. “Thou art That.” In the midst of sorrow, of tragedy, still it is true: still I must say: “I am the Blissful One. I am the Radiant One. It depends upon nothing. Nothing depends on It.” It is at once a terrible and a beautiful Truth.

Growth. Hitherto we had believed that final emancipation and enlightenment were a matter of growth, a gradual advance towards something higher and better, until at last the goal was reached. But from this great Master of the Ancient Wisdom we learnt that the process is not one of growth but of uncovering, of realization. The real nature of man is perfection, divinity, now. Nothing to be attained. The Truth is only to be realized. It is a hallucination to think that we are imperfect. limited, helpless. We are perfect, omnipotent, divine, We are that now. Realize it and you are free at once.

Incarnations. He believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, a divine incarnation. He worshipped and adored him, but not as the only incarnation. In other ages and in other climes God had vouchsafed this mercy to others also.

The Parsees. He told the story of the Parsees, a remnant of the followers of Zoroaster, who were saved by flight to India when Mohammedan hordes overwhelmed Persia a thousand years ago. These children of fire are still faithful to their ancient rites, which they have practised in undisturbed freedom in the land of their adoption. Although a comparatively small community, they have made an honoured place for themselves and have produced great men. If there be anything to criticize in them, it is perhaps that they have kept themselves too aloof, for even after living in this country for a thousand years, they do not identify themselves with India, do not look upon themselves as Indians.3

Christianity. Christianity, he told us. was first introduced into India by the Apostle Thomas, about twenty-five years after the Crucifixion. There has never been any religious persecution in India, and there are even to this day descendants of the first converts to Christianity living in Southern India. Christianity in its purest form was practised in India at a time when Europe was in a state of savagery. They now number scarcely one million though at one time there were almost three times as many.

Sameness. At one time Swamiji’s effort was to attain sameness, he told us, and often quoted: “He who sees the Supreme Lord dwelling alike in all beings, the Imperishable in things that perish, sees indeed. For, seeing the Lord as the same, everywhere present, he destroys not the Self by the Self. He then goes to the highest goal.” One was reminded of the lines he had lately written:

“Love, hate — good, bad — and all the dual throng.”
. . . “No praise or blame can be
Where praiser praised, and blamer blamed, are one.”

It was given to us to see how he practised this in the little details of life. Not until long long afterwards did we understand how great was the sensitiveness and pride which made this practice for him particularly difficult. When asked why he did not defend himself against the machinations of a family of missionaries long connected with Calcutta, who threatened to “hound him out of Detroit”, he said. “The dog barks at the elephant, is the elephant affected? What does the elephant care?” The one with whom he lived had a violent temper. “Why do you live with him?” some one asked, “Ah,” he replied, “I bless him. He gives me the opportunity to practise self-control.” What a revelation to us with the Western outlook demanding comfort at any cost! Thus daily, hourly, we saw the great ideals of the Gita put into practice in the actual experience of daily life. To see the Self in a foe as well as in a friend, in the one who blames as well as in the one who praises, to be unmoved by honour or dishonour, this was his constant sadhana.

Seldom has it fallen to the lot of one at his age, to achieve fame overnight, or rather in a few minutes, but this is what occurred to Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions. It was not merely fame, but the enthusiasm he inspired rose at times to frantic adulation. In the midst of the wildest popular emotion, he remained as calm as it he were alone in a cave of the Himalayas. This, for which other men pay by a lifetime of struggle, he put aside and referred to as the “filthy rags of name and fame”.

Sometimes he was in a prophetic mood. as on the day when he startled us by saying, “The next great upheaval which is to bring about a new epoch will come from Russia or China. I can’t quite see which, but it will be either Russia or China,” This he said thirty-two years ago, when China was still under the autocratic rule of the Manchu Emperors, from which there was no prospect of release for centuries to come, and when Czarist Russia was sending the noblest of her people to the Siberian mines. To the ordinary thinker those two countries seemed the most unlikely nations in the world to usher in a new era.

In answer to our questions, he explained that in the beginning society was a theocracy under the rule of the Brahmin, or priestly caste. This was followed by the military caste, the Kshatriya. Now we were under the sway of the Vaishya, and commercial interest ruled the world. Economic considerations are all important. This phase is nearing its end, and would be followed by the ascendancy of the Shudra, the labourer.

Still the question arose: how did he know that the commercial era was nearing its end? and, a still greater mystery, how could he foresee that Russia or China would be the countries that would bring it about? With him it was never an expression of opinion, begging with, “I think, “but an authoritative statement about something he knew with certainty.

A little later he said, “Europe is on the edge of a volcano. Unless the fires are extinguished by a flood of spirituality, it will blow up. “This of Europe in 1895, when it was prosperous and at peace. Twenty years later came the explosion!

THE MOGULS

The Moguls seemed to have cast a spell over Swami Vivekananda. He depicted this period of Indian history with such dramatic intensity, that the idea often came to us that he was perhaps telling the story of his own past. We often wondered whether we saw before us the re-incarnation of the mighty Akbar. How else could he have known the thoughts, the hopes, the purposes of the greatest of the Moguls?

One of his beliefs was that, before one reached the life in which the enlightenment was to be achieved, one must have run the whole gamut of experiences — suffered every tragedy and the direst poverty, and enjoyed to the utmost all that the world has to offer — wealth, adulation, fame, power, ecstatic happiness, dominion. “Millions of times have I been emperor.” he would say in his exuberant fashion. Another idea was that, after lives of effort in which complete success had not been reached, there came a final life of worldly attainment, in which the aspirant became a great emperor or empress. This precedes the last life in which the goal is reached. Akbar, it is believed in India, was a religious aspirant in the incarnation before he became emperor. He just failed to reach the highest and had to come back for one more life in which to fulfil his desires. There was only one more re-incarnation for him.

So vividly did Swami depict these historic figures for us — rulers, queens, prime ministers, generals — that they seemed to become for us real men and women whom we had known. We saw Babar, the twelve-year old King of Ferghana (Central Asia), influenced by his Mongol grandmother, and living a hard rough life with his mother. We watched him later as King of Samarqand for one hundred days, still a boy and delighted with his new possession as though it were some super-toy; his chagrin and dismay when he lost the city of his dreams; his struggles, defeats, and conquests. The time came when we saw him and his men booted and spurred, crossing the great mountain passes and descending on to the plains of India. Although an alien and an invader, as Emperor of India, he identified himself with the country, and began at once to make roads, plant trees, dig wells, build cities. But his heart was always amongst the highlands of the land from which he came and where he was buried. He was a lovable, romantic figure, founder of one of the greatest dynasties within the history of man.

After his death the kingdom fell into other hands and Babar’s heir, Humayun, became a fugitive. In the deserts of Sind, with only a handful of followers, he fled from place to place, in danger of his life. Here he met the exquisite young Mohammedan girl Hamida, married her, and shared with her his most unhappy fate. We saw him giving up his own horse to her while he walked at her side. And in the deserts of Sind was born her only son, later to become the Emperor Akbar. So reduced in circumstances was Humayun at that time, that he had no gifts for his followers with which to celebrate the event, except a ped of musk. This he divided among them with the prayer: “May my son’s glory spread to all parts of the earth. even as the odour of this musk goes forth!”

Humayun regained the empire, but he was not to enjoy it long; for in the forty-eighth year of his age he met with a fatal accident in his palace at Delhi and died, leaving his throne to his only son, Akbar, then little more than thirteen years old. From that time until his death at the age of sixty-three Akbar was the undisputed master of India. There have been few figures in history with such a combination of qualities. His nobility and magnanimity put even his great general, Bairam, to shame. While still a boy, when his enemy was brought before them, and Bairam, putting a sword into his hand, told the young King to kill him, he said. “I do not kill a fallen foe.” His courage was unquestioned and won the admiration of all. Few excelled him in sports: no one was a better shot, a better polo player, or a better rider. But with it all, he was severely ascetic in his habits. He did not take meat, saying “Why should I make a graveyard of my stomach?” He slept only a few hours every night, spending much time in philosophic and religious discussions. Mohammedan though he was, he listened to teachers of all religions — listened and questioned. Whole nights he spent in learning the secrets of Hindu yoga from the Brahmin who was pulled up to his Kawa Khana (buzh).

In later years he conceived the idea of establishing a new religion of which he was to be the head — the Divine Religion, to include Hindus, Christians, and Parsees as well as Mohammedans.

King of kings though he was, he had the faculty of making real friends. There were three who were worthy to be the friends of this Shadow of God: Abul Fazl, his Prime Minster; Faizi the poet laureate; Birbal the Brahmin minstrel; and his brother-in-law and Commander-in-chief, Man Singh. Two Hindus and two Mohammedans, for there were two brothers Fazl. His friends shared not only his lighter moments but stood by his side in the Hall of Audience and followed him into battle. We see them making a line of swords for him when his life is in danger in a battle with the Rajputs. They, Mohammedan and Hindu alike, become adherents of the new religion and support him loyally in all his undertakings. Never was a man blessed with truer friends. This is rare enough in ordinary life, but almost unheard of regarding one in so exalted a position. His empire extended from Kabul to the extreme parts of Southern India. His genius as an administrator enabled him to pass on a united empire to his son Salim, later known as the Emperor Jehangir. Under this “Magnificent son of Akbar” the Mogul court reached a splendour before which all previous ideas of luxury paled.

Now appears the fascinating figure of Nur Jehan, the Light of the World. Empress of Jehangir and, for twenty years, the virtual ruler of India. The influence of this remarkable woman was unbounded. To her great gifts of wisdom and tact were due the stability, prosperity and power of the empire, in no small degree. Her husband had coins struck in her name bearing the inscription: “Gold has assumed a new value since it bore the image of Nur Jehan.” The Great Mogul’s trust and faith in her were unbounded. To the protest of his relatives that he had delegated his power to her, he replied, “Why not, since she uses it to much better advantage than I could?” When he was ill, he preferred her treatment to that of all his physicians. She was the only one who had power to check his habits, limiting him to three cups of wine a day.

It was during the supremacy of Nur Jehan that the new style of architecture was introduced, a feminine type of architecture in which the virile red sand-stone of Akbar’s buildings was supplanted by white marble inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones. Jewelled walls instead of rough stone ones. The delicacy and effeminacy of Persia replaced the vigour and strength of the Central Asian Highlands. Its gift to posterity was the Taj Mahal and the marble palaces of Agra, Delhi, and Lahore. The exquisite building known as the tomb of Itmad-ud-daulah on the other side of the Jamuna, was built by Nur Jehan in memory of her father, the Lord High Treasurer, and later Prime Minister to Jehangir. It was one of the first buildings in the new style of architecture. It is believed that the stones were inlaid by the slaves of Nur Jehan. It is interesting to compare this first imperfect attempt with the perfection attained in the Taj Mahal where 44 stones of different shades of red are used to reproduce the delicate shades of one rose petal. The progress in efficiency is striking.

Nur Jehan’s own apartments in the Agra Palace, the Saman Burg, were also decorated under her personal supervision. She was truly a great patroness of the arts, and her charity was boundless.

In a man like Vivekananda, with a genius for seeing only what was great in an individual or a race, such understanding of the Mussulman was nothing strange. To him India was not the land of the Hindu only, it included all. “My brother the Mohammedan” was a phrase he often used. For the culture, religious devotion, and virility of these Mohammedan brothers, he had an understanding, an admiration, a feeling of oneness which few Moslems could excel. One who accompanied him on one of his voyages tells how passionately thrilled Vivekananda was, when their ship touched at Gibraltar, and the Mohammedan lascars threw themselves on the ground, crying: “The Din, the Din!”

For hours at a time his talk would be of the young camel driver of Arabia, who, in the sixth century after Christ attempted to raise his country from the degradation into which it had fallen. He told of the nights spent in prayer, and of the vision that came to him after one of his long fasts in the mountains of the desert. By his passion for God, and the revelation granted to him, he became one of the Illumined Ones, destined to rank for all time with the very elect of God. There have been few of these Great Ones; of each, one may say with truth, “Of his kingdom there shall be no end.”

We realize that, whether in Arabia, in Palestine, or in India, the children of God speak one language when they are born into the new life. He felt the loneliness of the Prophet who, to the average person, seemed a madman. For years, a mere handful believed in him and his message. Little by little we understood the patience, the compassion, the burden of the mission laid upon this Prophet of Arabia.

“But he advocated polygamy!” protested one with a Puritanical turn of mind. Vivekananda explained that what Mohammed did was to limit a man to four wives: polygamy in a far worse form was already practised in Arabia.

“He taught that women have no souls.” said another with an edge to her voice. This called forth an explanation regarding the place of woman in Muhammedanism. The Americans who listened were somewhat chagrined to find that the Moslem woman had certain rights not enjoyed by the so-called free American woman.

From this trivial questioning we were again lifted into an atmosphere of wider sweep and more distant horizons. However limited and ignorant his outlook may seem, it cannot be denied that Mohammed was a world figure, and that the force which he set free has shaken this world and has not yet expended itself.

Did he deliberately found a new religion? It is easier to believe that the movement evolved without conscious thought on his part; that in the beginning he was absorbed in his great experience and burning with the desire to share this precious attainment with others. Was the form which it took during his lifetime in accordance with his wishes? It is certain that the conflicts which soon ensued were no part of his plan. When a great force is let loose, no man can harness it. The Moslem hordes swept over Asia and threatened to overrun Europe. After conquering Spain, they established there great universities which attracted scholars from all parts of the then known world. Here was taught the wisdom of India and the lore of the East. They brought refinement, courtliness, and beauty into the everyday life. They left behind them Saracenic buildings — structures of surpassing beauty — a tradition of learning, and no small part of the culture and wisdom of the East.

TRAINING A DISCIPLE

The training Swamiji gave was individualistic and unique. Unless the desire for discipleship was definitely expressed, and unless he was convinced that the aspirant was ready for the step, he left the personal life of those around him untouched. To some he gave absolute freedom and in that freedom they were caught. When speaking of some of those whom we did not know, he was careful to explain,”He is not a disciple; he is a friend.” It was an altogether different relation. Friends might have obvious faults and prejudices. Friends might have a narrow outlook, might be quite conventional, but it was not for him to interfere. It seemed as if even an opinion, where it touched the lives of others, was an unpardonable intrusion upon their privacy. But once having accepted him as their guru, all that was changed. He felt responsible. He deliberately attacked foibles, prejudices, valuations — in fact everything that went to make up the personal self. Did you, in your immature enthusiasm, see the world as beautiful, and believe in the reality of good and the unreality of evil? He was not long in destroying all your fine illusions. If good is real, so is evil. Both are different aspects of the same thing. Both good and evil are in maya. Do not hide your head in the sand and say. “All is good, there is no evil.” Worship the terrible even as now you worship the good. Then get beyond both. Say, “God is the only Reality,” Shall we have the courage to say that the world is beautiful when disaster comes upon us? Are not others the prey of disaster now? Is not the world full of sorrow? Are not thousands of lives overshadowed by tragedy? Are not disease, old age, and death rampant upon the earth? In the face of all this anyone who lightly says. “The world is beautiful”, is either ignorant or indifferent to the sorrows of others — self-centred.

Terrible in its sternness was this teaching. But soon there came glimpses of something beyond, an unchanging Reality. Beyond birth and death is immortality; beyond pleasure and pain is that ananda which is man’s true nature; beyond the vicissitudes of life is the changeless. The Self of man remains serene in its own glory. As these great ideas became part of our consciousness, we “saw a new heaven and a new earth”. “For him, to whom the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what pain, can there be, once he has beheld that Unity?” Without once saying. “Be sincere, be true, be singleminded”, he created in us the most intense desire to attain these qualities. How did he do it? Was it his own sincerity, his own truth, his own straightness which one sensed?

“This world is a mud puddle,” was received with shocked protest, doubt, and a tinge of resentment. Years after, driving along the Dum Dum Road in the suburb of Calcutta one glorious Sunday morning, I saw some buffaloes wallowing in a pool of mire. The first reaction was a feeling of disgust. It seemed that even buffaloes should find delight in something more beautiful than mire. But now they felt physical pleasure in it. Then suddenly came a memory, “This world is a mud puddle.” We are no better than these buffaloes. We wallow in the mire of this mud puddle of a world and we too find pleasure in it. We, who are meant for something better, the heirs of immortal glory.

He refused to solve our problem for us. Principles he laid down, but we ourselves must find the application. He encouraged no spineless dependence upon him in any form, no bid for sympathy. “Stand upon your own feet. You have the power within you!” he thundered. His whole purpose was — not to make things easy for us, but to reach us how to develop our innate strength. “Strength! Strength!” he cried, “I preach nothing but strength. That is why I preach the Upanishads.” From men he demanded manliness and from women the corresponding quality for which there is no word. Whatever it is, it is the opposite of self-pity, the enemy of weakness and indulgence. This attitude had the effect of a tonic. Something long dormant was aroused and with it came strength and freedom.

His method was different with each disciple. With some, it was an incessant hammering. The severest asceticism was imposed with regard to diet, habits, even clothing and conversation. With others his method was not so easy to understand, for the habit of asceticism was not encouraged. Was it because in this case there was spiritual vanity to be overcome and because good had become a bondage? With one the method was ridicule — loving ridicule — with another it was sternness. We watched the transformation of those who put themselves into line with it. Nor were we ourselves spared. Our pet foibles were gently smiled out of existence. Our conventional ideas underwent a process of education. We were taught to think things through, to reject the false and hold to the true fearlessly, no matter what the cost. In this process much that had seemed worth while and of value was cast aside. Perhaps our purposes and aims had been small and scattered. In time we learnt to lift them into a higher, purer region, and to unite all little aims into the one great aim, the goal which is the real purpose of life, for which we come to this earth again and again. We learnt not to search for it in deserts, nor yet on mountain tops, but in our own hearts. By all these means the process of evolution was accelerated, and the whole nature was transmuted.

So is it any wonder that we shrank from the first impact of so unusual a power? Nor were we alone in this. Some time afterwards a brilliant American woman, in speaking of the different Swamis who had come to the United Stales, said. “I like Swami… better than Swami Vivekananda.”To the look of surprise which met this statement she answered. “Yes, I know Swami Vivekananda is infinitely greater, but he is so powerful he overwhelms me.” Later almost the same words came from the lips of a well-known teacher of one of the new cults whose message was so obviously influenced by Vedanta that I asked him whether he had ever come under the influence of Swami Vivekananda. “Yes, I knew him and heard him,” he said. “but his power overwhelmed me. I was much more attracted to Swami…,” mentioning a preacher of Vedanta from Northern India who had spent some time in the United States. What is the explanation? Is it that we are temperamentally attracted by certain qualities and personalities and repelled by others? Even for that there must be an explanation. Is it the fear that the little personal self will be overwhelmed and nothing will be left? “Verily, he that loseth his life shall find it.” Still those who feared to be caught in the current of this great power were but few; the others by thousands were drawn with the irresistible force, even as iron filings to a magnet. He had a power of attraction so great that those who came near him, men and women alike, even children, fell under the magic spell he cast.

Far from trying to win us by expediency and by fitting into our conceptions of what the attitude of a religious teacher towards his disciples should be, he seemed bent upon offending our sensibilities and even shocking us. Others may try to hide their faults, may eat meat and smoke in secret, reasoning with themselves that there is nothing essentially wrong in doing these things, but that one must not offend a weaker brother and should hide these things for expediency’s sake. He on the contrary said. “If I do a wrong, I shall not hide it but shout it from the house-tops.”

It is true that we were conventional and proper to the point of prudishness. Still even one more Bohemian might have been disconcerted. He, in the days when men did not smoke before ladies, would approach, and blow the cigarette smoke deliberately into one’s face. Had it been anyone else, I should have turned my back and not spoken to him again. Even so for a moment I recoiled. I caught myself and remembered the reason for coming. I had come to one in whom I had seen such spirituality as I had never even dreamed of. From his lips I had heard truths unthought of before. He knew the way to attainment. He would show me the way. Did I intend to let a little whiff of smoke turn me back? It was all over in less time than it takes to tell it. I knew it was over in another sense as well. But more of that later.

Then we found that this man whom we had set up in our minds as an exalted being did not observe the conventions of our code. All fine men reverence womanhood; the higher the type, the greater the reverence. But here was one who gave no heed to the little attentions which ordinary men paid us. We were allowed to climb up and slide down the rocks without an extended arm to help us. When he sensed our feeling, he answered, as he so often did, our unspoken thought. “If you were old or weak or helpless, I should help you. But you are quite able to jump across this brook or climb this path without help. You are as able as I am. Why should I help you? Because you are a woman? That is chivalry, and don’t you see that chivalry is only sex? Don’t you see what is behind all these attentions from men to women?” Strange as it may seem, with these words came a new idea of what true reverence for womanhood means. And yet, he it was, who wishing to get the blessing of the one who is called the Holy Mother, the wife and disciple of Shri Ramakrishna, sprinkled Ganga water all the way so that he might be purified when he appeared in her presence. She was the only one to whom he revealed his intention. Without her blessing, he did not wish to go to the West. Never did he approach her without falling prostrate at her feet. Did he not worship God as Mother? Was not every woman to him a manifestation in one form or other of the Divine Mother? Yes, even those who had bartered their divinity for gold!…. Did he not see this divinity in the nautch-girl of Khetri, whereupon she, sensing his realization of her true nature, gave up her profession, lived a life of holiness, and herself came into the Great Realization? Knowing the criticism that awaited him in India, he still dared in America to initiate into sannyasa a woman, for he saw in her only the sexless Self.

Sannyasin and beggar though he was. never did he forget to be regal. He was generous to a fault, but never uncontrolled in his generosity. Needless to say, there was never a trace of display in any act which he did. If he was with those who had abundance of this world’s goods, he accepted what was offered gladly and without protest, even with an alacrity which at times approached glee. But from those who had little, he would accept nothing. He was no longer the mendicant monk, but something so different that one asked, “Has he at one time been one of the Great Moguls?” Foolish thought! Was he not greater than the greatest of the Moguls, than all the Moguls combined? Was he not more than regal? Was he not majestic?

His compassion for the poor and downtrodden, the defeated, was a passion. One did not need be told, but seeing him one knew that he would willingly have offered his flesh for food and his blood for drink to the hungry. To this day his birthday is celebrated by feeding the poor. The downtrodden and the outcasts are on this day served by Brahmins and Kayasthas, young men of the highest castes. To those in the West it is impossible to convey the significance of such service. Caste and outcaste! Who but a Vivekananda could bring about this relationship so unobtrusively? No arguments regarding caste and the depressed classes. Nothing but heart and devotion. So even in small things while he was still in America. Thus, when asked why he was taking French lessons, he said in confusion, “This is the only way M.L. can keep from starving.” Thrusting a ten dollar bill into the hand of another he said. “Give this to S…, do not say it is from me.” When one of the group, a weak brother, was accused of juggling with the Vedanta Society’s money, he said. “I will make good any deficiency.” Then the matter was dropped and he said to one of the others. “I do not know where I could have found the money to make up the loss, but I could not let the poor suffer.”

Even after he left America, he still had great concern for those he left behind, who found life a great struggle. Especially did he feel for “women with men’s responsibilities”. Asked whether he endorsed a certain woman who was going about the country as a religious teacher and using his name and reputation to get a following, he said: “Poor thing! She has a husband to support, and she must get a certain amount every month.” “But Swami, someone said, “she claims to be authorised by you to prepare students for your teaching. She says, if we go through her two preliminary classes, then we will be ready to be taught by you. It is so absurd and unscrupulous. To the first class she gives a few gymnastic exercises, and to the second she dictates some quotations or gems which she has gathered from various books on occultism. Should she be allowed to mislead people, take their money, and use your name?” All that he said was. “Poor thing! Poor thing! Shiva! Shiva!” With this “Shiva! Shiva!” he put the matter out of his mind. Someone asked him once what he meant when he said “Shiva! Shiva!” and he answered with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes “Shiver my timbers. Ho. ho, ho. and a bottle of rum.” This was not flippancy. How could he answer a casual question otherwise? We had noticed that when something disturbed him, after allowing himself to be troubled by it for a few minutes, his “Shiva! Shiva!” seemed to end it. We knew that he had reminded himself of his true nature, in which everything of a disquieting nature was dissolved.

In New York once there was pitiful little group that clung to him with pathetic tenacity. In the course of a walk he had gathered up first one and then another. This ragged retinue returned with him to the house of 58th Street which was the home of the Vedanta Society. Walking up the flight of steps leading to the front door the one beside him thought. “Why does he attract such queer abnormal people?” Quick as a flash he turned and answered the unspoken thought. “You see. they are Shiva’s demons.”

Walking along Fifth Avenue one day, with two elderly forlorn devoted creatures walking in front, he said. “Don’t you see, life has conquered them!” The pity. the compassion for the defeated in his tone! Yes, and something else — for then and there, the one who heard, prayed and vowed that never should life conquer her, not even when age, illness, and poverty should come. And so it has been. His silent blessing was fraught with power.

PLANNING THE WORK

In those early days we did not know the thoughts that were seething in Swamiji’s mind, day and night. “The work! the work!” he cried. “How to begin the work in India! The way, the means!” The form it would take was evolved gradually. Certainly before he left America, the way, the means, and the method were clear in every detail. He knew then that the remedy was not money, not even education in the ordinary sense, but another kind of education. Let man remember his true nature, divinity. Let this become a living realization, and everything else will follow — power, strength, manhood. He will again become MAN. And this he proclaimed from Colombo to Almora.

First a large plot of land on the Ganga was to be acquired. On this was to be built a shrine for worship, and a monastery to give shelter to the gurubhais (brother-disciples) and as a centre for the training of younger men. They were to be taught meditation and all subjects relating to the religious life, including the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, Sanskrit, and science. After some years of training, whenever the head of the monastery considered them sufficiently prepared, they were to go out, to form new centres, to preach the message, to nurse the sick, to succour the needy, to work in times of famine and flood, to give relief in any form that was needed. How much of what he thought out at this time has been carried out! To this India can bear testimony.

It seemed almost madness for a mendicant monk to plan such an extensive work. In later years we were to see it carried out in every detail.

The summer before he had been at Greenacre, a place on the coast of Maine, where seekers of Truth gathered year after year to hear teachers of all religions and cults. There, under a tree which to this day is called “The Swami’s Pine”, he expounded the message of the East. Here he came in contact with a new phase of American life. These splendid young people, free and daring, not bound by foolish conventions, yet self-controlled, excited his imagination. He was much struck by the freedom in the relations between the sexes, a freedom with no taint of impurity. “I like their bonne camaraderie,” he said. For days at a time his mind would be concerned with this problem. Pacing up and down. every now and then a few words would fall from his lips. He was not addressing anyone but thinking aloud. His soliloquy would take some such form: “Which is better, the social freedom of America, or the social system of India with an its restrictions? The American method is individualistic. It gives an opportunity to the lowest. There can be no growth except in freedom, but it also has obvious dangers. Still, the individual gets experience even through mistakes. Our Indian system is based entirely upon the good of the samaj (society). The individual must fit into the system at any cost. There is no freedom for the individual unless he renounces society and becomes a sannyasin. This system has produced towering individuals, spiritual giants. Has it been at the expense of those less spiritual than themselves? Which is better for the race? Which? The freedom of America gives opportunities to masses of people. It makes for breadth, whilst the intensity of India means depth. How to keep both, that is the problem. How to keep the Indian depth and at the same time add breadth?”

It goes without saying that this was not merely a speculative problem, mental gymnastics. It was a question vital to the welfare of India. In America he saw the value and effect of social freedom, yet no one was more fully alive than he to the inestimable good produced by the system of India — a form of society which has kept the country alive thoughout many ages which have witnessed the rise and fall of other countries equally great. His problem was to find out whether there was a way of adding to this structure the best of other countries, without endangering the structure itself.

For days he would speak out of the depths of his meditation on this part of the work. In this case, location, buildings, ways and means were all subordinate to the ideal. He was trying to see the woman of the future, the ideal for India. It was not a light task for even his luminous mind, which wrought it slowly, detail by detail. Like a great sculptor standing before a mass of splendid material, he was lost in the effort to bring to life an image, such as no artist had ever conceived before: an image which was to be an expression of the Divine Mother, through which the Light of spirituality shines. We watched fascinated as this perfection slowly took shape. So might some favoured one have watched. Michael Angelo at work with chisel and hammer, bringing into term the concept of power, strength. and majesty, which was to grow into his “Moses!”

What was the work for women which he had in mind? Certainly not merely a school for children. There were already thousands of these. One more or less would make no appreciable difference. Neither was it to be a boarding school, even if it supplied a need by providing a refuge for girls whose parents were unable to marry them off. Nor a widow’s home, though that too would fill a useful purpose. It was not to be a duplication of any of the forms of work which had so far been attempted. Then what? To answer that question it is only necessary to ask: What is the significance of Shri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to the world, and more especially to India at this time? The new power, the new life that came with this influx of spirituality was not meant for men alone, but how could it be brought to the women of India? How could they be set on fire and become torches from which millions of others might catch the flame? This was one of his greatest concerns. “For this work a woman is needed,” he cried. “No man can do it. But where is the woman?”

As far back as his wander-years, he consciously searched for the woman who should be able to meet his need. One after another was put to the test and failed. Of one in whom he had had great hopes he said, in answer to the question: why not she? — “You see she intends to do her own work.” There was no criticism in this, only a statement of fact. Again and again it happened that those in whom he had attempted to rouse the latent power within, mistook the power emanating from him for their own, and felt that under the same circumstances they too could manifest greatness. They wanted to do not his work but their own! It was not easy to find someone who had the necessary qualifications, spiritual and intellectual, who had the devotion of the disciple, who was selfless, and who could pass on the living fire. Having found such a one, and trained her, she in turn would have to train others, from amongst whom five or six would be capable of continuing and extending the work. These five or six would have to be women of towering spirituality, women of outstanding intellectual attainments, combining the finest and noblest of the old and the new. This was the goal. How was it to be accomplished? What kind of education would produce them?

Purity, Discipleship, and Devotion were to him essential for the one who was to do his work. “I love purity.” he often said. always with a touching pathos. “All attempts must be based upon the ideal of Sita.” he said. “Sita, purer than purity, chaster than chastity, all patience, all suffering, the ideal of Indian womanhood. She is the very type of the Indian woman as she should be, for all the Indian ideals of a perfected woman have centred around that one life of Sita, and here she stands, these thousands of years, commanding the worship of every man, woman and child throughout the length and breadth of Aryavarta.”

Of purity he spoke constantly; but there was a quality which he seldom named, a quality which is not directly associated with womanhood — yet from the stories he told, one knew that to him no type could be complete without it. Again and again he told the story of the Rajput wife who, whilst buckling on her husband’s shield said, “Come back with your shield or on it.” How graphically he pictured the story of Padmini, the Rajput queen! She stood before us in all her dazzling beauty, radiant, tender, lovely. Rather than permit the lustful gaze of the Mohammedan invader, every woman of that chivalrous race would rush to meet death. Instead of sympathizing with the trembling timid woman, full of fear for the one she loved. he said. “Be like the Rajput wife!”

Had it been merely a question of a college degree, were there not already numbers of women who had achieved that? The young men who came to him, many of them with degrees, needed training. Much that had been learnt must be unlearnt. New values must be substituted for old, new purposes and aims must be brought into focus. When the mind had been purified, then it was ready for the influx of spirituality, which was poured into it by teaching, conversation, and most of all by the living contact with those who could transmit it. In this way a gradual transformation could take place and they would be fitted to give the message and continue the work. Intellectual attainments were but secondary, although he did not underestimate their value. Reading and writing must be the key which would unlock the door to the treasure-house of great ideals and wider outlook. For it was not merely a school which he had in mind. not an institution, but something much larger, something which cannot be easily labelled or defined, something which would make thousands and tens of thousands of institutions possible in the future. In short, it was to be an attempt to create the educators of a new order. The education must not be merely academic, but to meet the requirements of the time, it must be intellectual, national, and spiritual. Unless those who initiated it lighted their own torches at the altar where burns the fire that was brought from above, the work would be of little value. Thai is why discipleship is necessary. All cannot come to the altar, but one torch can light others, until hundreds, thousands are aflame. Spirituality must be transmitted. It cannot be acquired, although regular practices are necessary — meditation, association with those who have realized, the reading of scriptures and other holy books.

Not that it was ever stated that devotion was one of the qualifications. It is only now, after this lapse of time, that in looking back, one knows how necessary it is. Swamiji made no demands of any kind. His respect, nay reverence, for the divinity within was so sincere and so profound that his mental attitude was always: “Hands off.” He did not ask tor blind submission. He did not want slaves. He used to say. “I do not meddle with my workers at all. The man who can work has an individuality of his own, which resists against any pressure. This is my reason for leaving workers entirely free.” Imperious though he was, he had something which held this quality in check — a reverence for the real nature of man. Not because he believed all men equal in the sense in which that phrase is often glibly repeated, but because in the language of his own great message, all men are potentially divine. In manifestation there are great differences. All should not have equal rights, but equal opportunities. With his great compassion he would have given the lowest, the most oppressed, more than those who manifested their divinity to a greater degree. Did they not need it more? Could such as he exact anything in the nature of control of the will of another? The devotion which he did not demand, but which was necessary nevertheless, lay in acceptance of him as a guru, a faith and love in him that would replace self-will.

India is passing through a transition, from the old order of things to the new, the modern. No matter how much we may deplore it, how much we may cling to the old and oppose the change, we cannot prevent it. It is upon us. The question is: how shall we meet it? Shall we let it overtake us unawares, or shall we meet it fearlessly and boldly, ready to do our pan to shape it to the needs of the future? Some have met it by blindly accepting an alien culture, suited to the needs of the land from which it sprang, but unsuited for transplantation. Each country must evolve its own culture and the institutions necessary for its development. If India cannot escape the change, which is taking place all over the world, especially in Asia, she must control the situation. The new must grow out of the old, naturally and in harmony with the law of its growth. Shall the lotus become the primrose? Rather let us create conditions by which the lotus can become a more beautiful, a more perfect lotus, which shall live for ever as the symbol of a great race, and, which although its roots be in the mud of the world, bears flowers in a rarer, purer atmosphere.

In some respects die transition which is upon us affects women particularly. With the growth of cities women are taken out of the free natural life of the village, and confined within brick walls in crowded towns. If they are poor but of high caste, as most of them are, they often do not escape from this confinement for months at a time. The economic pressure is incredibly severe. Anxiety, poor food, lack of air and exercise result in unhappiness, disease, and premature death. The lot of the widow is worse than that of the married woman. There is no place for her in the scheme of things. In the old village life she was part of the social order, a respected, useful asset. Now she is in danger of becoming the household drudge. She feels that the least she can do in return for food and shelter is to save the family the expense of a servant. When poverty becomes still more grinding, she is the first to know that in her absence the family would dispense with such help. In such a case there is feeling of humiliation for the less sensitive. For others it is much deeper. They feel that they are taking the bread out of the mouths of those around them, Their suffering is great, the more so in that they are helpless. There is nothing they can do to add to the family’s income.

It was this class that Swamiji particularly wished to help. “They must be economically independent,” he said. How this was to be done, it was not for him to say, so he implied. It was a problem to be worked out by the one who should undertake the work. “They must be educated,” he said next. Here he was more explicit and laid down certain principles. Education should not be according to Western methods but according to the Indian ideal. Reading and writing are not ends in themselves. The teaching could be such that these achievements would be used for a noble purpose and for service, not for self-indulgence and not to add one more superficial weapon. If the woman who learns to read, uses the knowledge only for imbibing vulgar, frivolous, sensational stories, she had better be left illiterate. But if it becomes the key which opens the door to the literature of her own country, to history, to art, to science, it proves a blessing. The great ideals of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were to be kept before their minds constantly, by stories, by readings, jatras, Kathakathas,4 until the characters lived and moved among them, until these ideas became pan of their very being, something living, vital, powerful, which would in time produce a race of superwomen.

There should be, to begin with, a thorough education in the vernacular, next Sanskrit, then English, science, history, mathematics, geography. And to this, work with the hands: sewing, embroidery, spinning, cooking, nursing, anything in the way of indigenous handicraft. While all Western knowledge, including science, must be given a place, Indian ideals and Indian traditions must always be held sacred. Education will come by the assimilation of the greatest ideas of the East and of the West. Any kind of education which undermines the faith of the Indian woman in the past culture of her race, its religion and traditions, is not only useless but detrimental. She had better be left as she is. Mathematics must become a discipline for the mind, a training in accuracy and truth, history a practice in tracing effects to their causes, a warning against repetition of the mistakes of the past. The emancipation of women meant to him a freedom from limitations, which should disclose their real power.

The old methods of education in the West concern themselves only with the mind, its training, its discipline. To this, certain facts relating to history, literature, science, geography, and languages were added. This is a very limited conception. Man is not a mind only. Why not build up a new education based upon the true nature of man? When a new Light comes into the world, it must illumine all aspects of life. If man is divine now, education must be an uncovering of the knowledge already in man? “Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man,” he said.

Let us try a new experiment. At this crucial time when it becomes necessary to review the whole subject, let us break away from some of the old traditions of education. Let us build upon a broader conception, larger aims. Not only must Indian women be highly educated, but a few at least should be of outstanding intellect — the intellectual peers of any women in the world — their flame of spirituality set aglow by the Great Light which has illumined the world in these modern times. They should be on fire, renunciation and service should be their watchwords. A few such women could solve the problems of the women of India, In the past, women made the supreme sacrifice for a personal end. Are there not a few now who will devote heart, mind, and body for the greater end? “Give me a few men and women who are pure and selfless,” Swamiji would say, “and I shall shake the world!” No man can do this work. It must be done by women alone. On this point he was stern. “Am I a woman that I should solve the problems of women? Hands off! They can solve their own problems.” This was consistent with his unbounded faith in the power and greatness latent in all women. “Every woman is part of the Divine Mother, the embodiment of Shakti (Divine Energy),” he believed. This Shakti must be roused. If woman’s power is often for evil rather than for good, it is because she has been oppressed; but she will rouse the lion in her nature when her fetters drop. She has suffered throughout the ages. This has given her infinite patience, infinite perseverance.

Just as in theology, we no longer teach that man is a child of sin and sorrow, born and conceived in iniquity, but is a child of God, pure and perfect, why should we not change our attitude towards education, and look upon the student as a creature of light and knowledge, unfolding the leaves of his destiny in joy, freedom, and beauty? All religions have taught: “The Kingdom is within you.”

For obvious reasons, a new experiment in education can be worked out more easily with women than with men. Women need not work for a degree, as for some time to come they will not attempt to get positions requiring one. In this respect they do not yet find it necessary to conform to accepted standards. Out of it will grow a new race, a race of supermen and superwomen — a new order. Schools for children? Yes, for education should be widespread. Widows’ homes, nursing, all forms of service and activity. New life on all planes, the new intellectual outlook, full of new vigour. If the experiment fails, it will not be an entire loss. Power, initiative, self-responsibility will have been developed. If it succeeds as it inevitably must, the gain will be incredibly great. Results can hardly be foreseen at this stage. The woman who is the product of such a system will at least approach the stature of a superwoman. A few such are urgently needed at the present critical time.

Some of us believe that if Swami Vivekananda’s ideas regarding the education of women are carried out in the true spirit, a being will be evolved who will be unique in the history of the world. As the woman of ancient Greece was almost perfect physically, this one will be her complement intellectually and spiritually — a woman gracious, loving, tender, long-suffering, great in heart and intellect, but greatest of all in spirituality.

(Prabuddha Bharata, January – December 1931)

SOME PROBLEMS OF INDIA

It often seemed to us that Swami Vivekananda was not consistent. For days together he would inveigh passionately against child-marriage, caste, purdah, emotionalism in religion, or some other subject, until he made us believe that there was no other point of view. Then quite suddenly, perhaps in answer to a facile acceptance of all that he had said, he would turn and rend those who agreed with him, demolish all his previous contentions, and prove conclusively that the opposite was true. “But, Swamiji,” someone said in distress, “you said just the opposite yesterday.” “Yes, that was yesterday,” he would reply, if at all. Neither did he try to reconcile the two points of view or make any explanation. If we did not think he was consistent, what was that to him? As Emerson says. “A foolish consistence is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He was looking at all the problems of life from a different vantage point. From his observation tower, the surrounding country looked different from what it did to us who were a part of the landscape. The most he ever said was, “Don’t you see, I am thinking aloud?”

We came to know long afterwards that after weighing all the pros and cons, he came to a conclusion. This did not mean that he thought that one side was altogether right and the other altogether wrong, but rather that the balance was slightly in favour of the one, and probably only so because of the needs of time. Having come to this decision, he no longer discussed the matter but thought of some way to put his conclusions into practice.

Criticism he considered detrimental. Reform, he thought, did more harm than good because it always begins with condemnation. This was disintegrating especially in a country in the position of India where it is most important to restore the lost faith of the individual and the race. All change of value must be growth and could not be superimposed from outside. With his prophetic sense he could see the causes already at work bringing about the changes which so many felt to be necessary. Economic causes prevailed at this period. Very little thought was required to see how the growing poverty would affect purdah, caste, child-marriage as well as other customs.

Some one ventured to oppose him one day, and he turned swiftly saying. “What, you dare argue with me, a descendant of fifty generations of lawyers!” Then he marshalled his facts and arguments and spoke so brilliantly that some of us were convinced that black was white. But if one said to him. “I can’t argue with you, Swamiji, but you know that thus and thus is true,” to that he always yielded with amazing gentleness. “Yes, you are right.” All of this was but a little fun, a little relief from the tension at which he and we with him were kept much of the time.

What amazed us was that he not only saw the problems clearly but found solutions for them — solutions that were quite unique. Every custom was traced back to its origin. In the beginning there was a reason for it; it filled a need. In time it became a custom, and, as is usual with customs, accretions like barnacles were added and militated against its usefulness. What was valuable and what was harmful in this or that custom was now the question. As certain conditions brought it into existence, were the present conditions such as to put an end to it? After all, these institutions are not peculiar to India, as most seem to think. The United States has been in existence as an independent nation not much more than one hundred and fifty years, yet there are already two distinct castes which are as rigid as it is possible to make them. A negro may be as blond as a Swede, but can never cross the barrier between the two races. And then India never lynched its depressed classes! Besides these two rigid castes, there are many subdivisions less rigid, generally based on money. Is it not nobler to place highest the caste that is rich only in spirituality, than to make money the standard? Child-marriage was practised in Europe until quite recently. We read again and again of princesses married at twelve and we know that what the royal families did, the subjects imitated. In Romeo and Juliet of Shakespeare, Juliet is stated to have been just under fourteen at the time her parents planned her marriage to Count Paris.

Is it not evident that these customs grow out of the limitations of human nature and out of certain conditions which made them necessary at the time? Instead of condemning, Swami Vivekananda, after tracing them back to their source, following their history, and seeing clearly what undesirable things had been incorporated, tried to find first of all the corrective idea. In some cases this in itself would be sufficient. In others, the forces at work in India today would bring about the change. But there are cases, in which without implying any condemnation of the old a new institution must be created, which will gently, almost imperceptibly, in time displace the old.

Marriage is a great austerity. It is not for self but for samaj — the society. There must be chastity in word, thought, and deed. Without a great ideal of faithfulness in monogamy there can he no true monasticism. There must be fidelity even when the emotion is no longer there. Chastity is the virtue which keeps a nation alive. To chastity he attributed the fact that India still lives while other nations no older than herself have sunk into oblivion.

Such an observation would lead to a recital of the rise and fall of the nations of antiquity. In the beginning of the national life, in its days of struggle, there was self-denial, restraint. austerity. As the nation grew prosperous, this was replaced by self-indulgence, laxity, luxury, resulting in decay, degeneration, destruction. Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Rome — this is the story of each and all. But India lives. However individuals may fail, India had never lowered the standard.

Then thinking of the changes which will inevitably come soon, he questioned, “Which is better? The arranged marriage of India or the individual choice of the West? But our young men are even now demanding the right to choose their wives.” Again, “Is intermarriage advisable? Heretofore, the worst of both races have produced an unfortunate breed. What if the best of the two races unite? It might produce a race of supermen. Would it? Is it advisable?” His country, always Swami’s country! How to preserve this great race which has given to the world some of its most transcendental ideas, and is still the custodian of spiritual treasures of which the world outside stands in need?

Or he would turn to the question of child-marriage. Was there any subject upon which he did not throw the rays of his luminous mind? It was a revelation to watch the concentration of this searchlight upon problems. A question or a chance remark was enough. He would jump up, walk rapidly to and fro while words poured forth like molten lava. His mind would seize upon a subject and he would not let it go until it had revealed its secret to him. It has been said that he upheld child-marriage, caste, purdah. He has been accused of being untrue to the great principle inherent in his message. Those of us who saw him wrestle with these problems, know how far from truth this is. He who was roused to a very passion of chivalry at the sight of injustice, of suffering due to man’s cruel domination, was he the one to add another link to the fetters which bind the helpless? He “whose heart was like butler.” whose feeling for the downtrodden was a passion, whose mission it was to help those in bondage to attain the Great Freedom, how could one think that he would not prove himself the Master of compassion, the Deliverer?

Yet he had but little sympathy with reform and reformers. How could he be in harmony with a method which, while it tore up the evil by the roots, destroyed so much that was beautiful and precious in the process, leaving ugly barren places behind? Whatever changes were to be made in his country, must not be brought about by the loss of her self-respect or by loss of faith in herself. Denunciation of her customs and institutions, no, that was not the way. What perversity was it that made so many of his own generation see only evil in the land of their birth and unalloyed good in everything Western? How had this hypnotism come about? Could India have lived through the ages if this were true? The heart of India is sound. Evils there may be. Where are they not? Is the West free from them? Pacing back and forth, hour after hour, he would wrestle with the problems of India.

It is essential in all cases, but particularly in India at the present day, not to destroy faith and reverence. Can you eliminate the evil without bringing graver dangers into existence? There was neither child-marriage nor purdah in ancient India — nor do they exist in all parts of India today. They are only in the provinces which have been under Mohammedan domination. What has it done? It has preserved the chastity of the race. Not only must women be chaste but men as well. The chaste woman must not so much as look at another man nor must she allow her face to be seen.

To him it seemed incredible that any man should look with contempt upon the institutions of his country or upon past institutions of which they were the product. But he was not blind to the other side. “We are degenerating in physique. Is this the cause? What is the remedy?” Of the evils that followed in the wake of child-marriage, he said little. Were they not too well known? He did not say that they must be ended. for he never gave expression to what to him was obvious. Here was an institution that entailed suffering, that made for weakness, that was evil in some of its aspects. One cannot believe that after having faced the facts he did not at once try to find some way to eliminate alt the undesirable elements. But was there any reason why he should adopt methods which would result in still worse evils. His was no stereotyped mind: then why expect of him stereotyped methods? Some of us were later to know why this subject stirred him so deeply.

After perhaps hours of thought on the subject, he would heave a deep sigh and say, “Well, well, the economic pressure will bring about changes. This together with education will do much to end it. Education! We must educate our women! But not the kind of education that is open to them now. Heaven forbid! That would be worse than the existing evil.”

(Prabuddha Bharata, Golden Jubilee Number, June 1945)

KANHERI

While he (Swami Vivekananda) was at Thousand Islands he made plans for future, not only for his disciples in India and the work there, but also for those of his followers in America, who were hoping some time to go to India, At that time we thought these plans only day-dreams. One day he said. “We shall have a beautiful place in India, on an island with the ocean on three sides. There will be small caves which will accommodate two each, and between each cave there will be a pool of water for bathing, and pipes carrying drinking water will run up to each one. There will be a great hall with carved pillars for the Assembly Hall, and a more elaborate Chaitya Hall for worship. Oh! it will be luxury.” It seemed as if he were building castles in the air. None of us dreamed that this was something which could ever be realized.

Of all that group I was the one who was privileged to go to India, though it was not until several years later. After I had been in India two or three years, I found myself alone in Bombay with two or three days at my disposal. For some time. I had had a desire to visit Kanheri,5 which I knew was not far from Bombay. I knew nothing of this place except that there were some caves there, one of them a Chaitya Hall, which Fergusson in his History of Indian and Eastern Architecture has described as a bad imitation of the one at Karli. Surely there was nothing in this to attract one! I wondered at the intensity of my desire, the more so as there were other groups of caves within easy reach of Bombay, but which I had no special desire to see. I wondered at it.

No one seemed able to direct me. Those whom I asked had never heard of Kanheri. After a whole day of inquiry, some one said, “I think, if you take the train tomorrow morning at seven and go to a place called Borivali, you will find some one who can tell you where Kanheri is.” This I did. I found that Borivali is only twenty-two miles from Bombay. I did not know any Hindustani at that time, but I remembered that the word for cave is guha. There were three bullock-carts at the station, one of them in charge of a lad of seventeen or so, whose looks I liked. I went up to him and said, “Guha“; he shook his head, I repeated “Guha, guha” He kept on shaking his head. Then a brilliant idea struck me and I said. “Kanheri, Kanheri!” This time he nodded vigorously. Then I said. “Kitna (How much)?” and he held up three fingers saying. “Tin rupiya (Three rupees).” I was delighted and climbed into his cart.

The road led first through a field of stubble and from that into a forest. This forest grew denser and darker the farther we penetrated into the interior. Behind trees, I could see the dark aboriginal people of the forest with bows and arrows peering at us. The road had become a mere cow-path and then even this track came to an end. Here my young bullock driver stopped. “From here you must go on alone.” he startled me by saving, I don’t know how, but it seemed that we were able lo make ourselves understood. So I answered. “But I can’t go on alone. I don’t know the way. You must come with me” He replied. “I can’t leave my bullocks.” I, being at that time ignorant of the tact that there were tigers in the forest which might devour his bullocks, suggested that he tie them to a tree and come with me. This he did after a little hesitation.

We went only a short distance and then came to a stream which at that season was almost dried up. On the other side was a small hill. Here we found carved stone steps leading lo the top. And what a view there was from the crest of the hill! The ocean on three sides, a forest leading down to the water, carved seats on which to rest, sculptured halls of magnificent proportions. Here it all was – the island with the ocean on three sides, a great sculptured Assembly Hall, the Chaitya Hall built in imitation of the one at Karli. the small cells, containing two stone beds each, pools of water between the cells, even the pipes to carry water! It was as if a dream had unexpectedly come true. The place was deserted, not even a caretaker. Coming upon this abandoned site, which answered in detail to the fairytale we had heard long before in America, I was profoundly affected. It was perhaps not strange then that I had a very vivid dream that night, in which it seemed that I was in the Durbar Hall with the great assembly of those who lived there in a time long past, I could see the gathering and the one who was instructing the assembled novitiates. I could even hear what was being said and recognized it as a teaching with which I was familiar, although it was different from the form to which I had been accustomed. The impression remained with me all through the next day and for many days to come. In fact, it proved to be indelible. But to my regret, I could not remember the words that were actually said.

I came back to Calcutta still full of this experience which had affected me so deeply. When I told Swami Sadananda the story of the finding of the deserted island with the 109 caves, and explained how Swamiji at Thousand Islands had described the place, he said. “Yes, Swamiji in his wanderings in western India before he went to America, found these caves. The place stirred him deeply”, for it seems that he had a memory of a previous life in which he lived there. At that time, the place was unknown and forgotten. He hoped that some day he might acquire it and make it one of the centres for the work which he was planning for the future. Later, in my wanderings in western India. I too found it, and now you! We have all lived there in the past!” In later years when he was in a position in which he might have acquired it, it was no longer available, for the government had taken it over. Now there is a caretaker at the place. A road has been built, the jungle cut down, and picnic panics may frequently be seen there.

Kanheri is on the island of Salsette, about twenty miles north of Bombay. It is in reality a part of the mainland, from which it is separated by a small stream. The ocean surrounds it on the other three sides. In the early years of the Christian era this island was inhabited by monastic members of the Buddhist Order. The great Chaitya Hall is said to have been dedicated by the celebrated Buddhaghosa in the year A.D. 4. There is an inscription to this effect in the entrance. At that time it must have been one of the great Buddhist centres. Buddhaghosa left Kanheri for Ceylon, and from there went to Burma where he introduced Buddhism. He was the great preacher of that age, remarkable for his eloquence and his power as a missionary. His great work. which has come down to modern times, is the Mahamarga — the Great Way.

SWAMI IN DETROIT — 1896

Vivekananda was to visit Detroit once more (in July 1900), but this time for only a short farewell visit.

When asked what preparation he made for speaking, he told us none — but neither did he go unprepared. He said that usually before a lecture he heard a voice saying it all. The next day he repeated what he had heard. He did not say whose, voice he heard. Whatever it was, it came as the expression of some great spiritual power, greater than his own normal power, released by the intensity of his concentration. This may have been quite unconscious. No written words can convey the vitality, the power, the majesty that came with his spoken words. What might happen to one’s ideas, values, personality, if this current of power were let loose upon them! It was great enough to move the world, let alone one little human personality, which was but as a straw upon its mighty current. It was force that could sweep everything before it. Old ideas would change, the purposes and aims of life, its values would change, old tendencies would be directed into a new channel, the entire personality would be transmuted.

What was it which emanated from him which all felt and none could explain? Was it the ojas of which he so often spoke, that mysterious power which comes when the physical forces of the body are transmuted into spiritual power? When this happens, man has at his command a power so great that it can move the world. Every word that he utters is charged. One who possesses it may say only a few sentences, but they will be potent until the end of time, while the orator who lacks it may ‘speak with the tongue of men and of angels’, but it is as nothing, ‘as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ This, according to Swami Vivekananda, explains why the few simple sayings of a humble carpenter are still a power in the world after two thousand years, while all that was said by the scholars and the learned of his time has been forgotten.

Something of this power is lost in the written word, as those know well who were fortunate enough to hear Vivekananda speak. The spiritual force generated at such times was so great that some in the audience were lifted above the normal state of consciousness, so that it was possible to remember only the beginning of a lecture. After a certain point, there seemed to be a blank. The normal mind was no longer functioning: a higher state of consciousness, beyond reason and memory, had taken its place. Long after, perhaps, it would be found that during that period when the mind seemed blank, a specially deep impression had been made.

So popular was he as a lecturer that no place could be found which was large enough to hold all who wished to come. The man who had in vain tried to find a hall large enough to hold the audiences for the lectures during Vivekananda’s second visit to Detroit said. “He could fill a circus tent!” After giving this course of lectures, he was invited by his friend Rabbi Grossman to speak at the Temple Beth-El on the last Sunday of his stay in Detroit. An hour before the time appointed, the Temple was filled to its utmost capacity and it became necessary to close the doors. Hundreds were turned away. Others, refusing to be shut out, hammered on the doors and tried by every means to gain admittance. Just as the lecture was about to begin the clamour became so great that it seemed as if the mob would storm the place. But when he appeared on the platform a hush fell over the audience. I heard a foreign voice near me gasp. “How beautiful he is!” And indeed never was beauty more ethereal. At this time the power was not so obvious. It had been transformed into a diviner radiance and a deeper compassion for the world which he was soon to leave. So India often pictures her gods — robes and turbans of concentrated sunlight, complexion of gold, a divine radiance lighting the face, an inner stillness as of a deep pool. He rose and poured forth majestic truths in a voice which completed a beautiful harmony of appearance, voice and message. Not a gesture was there to detract the mind from the intense concentration into which he had plunged his hearers.

THE GURU

In America he preached only Advaita. He seldom spoke of his Guru. Few suspected the tremendous influence upon his life of the simple Brahmin of Dakshineswar. Even to those who were most sympathetic, he approached the subject with shyness. But of the profundity of the relation there could be no doubt. Through it, there came to us our first glimpses of the meaning of ‘guru’. To this he added all that the scriptures have said, together with the tradition built up by the holy men of India throughout the ages. Passing through the crucible of his mind, his loyalty and devotion carried a most profound meaning. It did more than that. It created in us a similar feeling and attitude, and brought to birth a similar relation between us and our guru. It set a lofty standard.

How new these ideas were at that time! The first great idea was that the guru must be a knower of Brahman. This is the most important qualification, for only the knower of Brahman has the power to transmit spirituality. The transmission of spirituality from guru to disciple was a startling and fascinating idea to the Protestant type of mind in the West. Spirituality can be transmitted! This, then, explains the doctrine of Apostolic Succession. This is why the Church of Rome still believes that the spiritual power of Peter has been transmitted from Pope to Pope. Be that as it may, today in India it is believed, nay, known with certainty, that the guru can transmit his spirituality to a disciple.

Again, “each has an individual path which is known to the guru’; and his tendencies indicate whether he should take the path of devotion or worship, or of psychic control, or the path of knowledge of the Real, or of unselfish work. All paths lead to the goal, but one of these will present fewer obstacles to the aspirant. Having set the disciple on the path, the guru, like a loving mother, warns him of dangers, explains experiences that might otherwise alarm or dismay. He is the Guardian of the Threshold, not to forbid entrance, but to protect the neophyte against groundless fears. To him the disciple goes for courage. To him the disciple pours out his confidences and tells his experiences. He must tell them to no one else. His mantram, his ishtam, his experiences, must be, as Swamiji said, “not secret, but sacred.” There must be the utmost devotion and unquestioning faith in the guru. “Would you jump out of window if I asked you to?” he once asked. He wanted a few disciples who had that kind of devotion. He needed that quality for his work. Again and again, he told the story of Guru Nanak (Govind Singh) who, putting his disciples to the supreme test, asked who would trust him even unto death. One came forward. He look him into his tent and in a few minutes the great leader came out, his sword dripping with blood. Again he put their faith in-him to test, and again one went into the tent with him and did not come out again. This was repeated until five had gone into the tent not to return. Then he threw open the tent-flap, and they saw their companions unharmed in the tent, and with them a goat which the Guru had killed. Is it to be wondered at that with disciples whose devotion was unto death it was possible for Guru Nanak (Govind Singh) to accomplish the great work he did? For, as Swamiji so often said:

“‘The guru must be wonderful and the disciple must also be wonderful.'”6

“Worship your guru as God. He will take you to the other shore. Trust him through everything. ‘Though my guru should visit the tavern and still, my guru is holy Nityananda still.’ 7 — Have that kind of faith in him.”

“‘Only those who go through the Sushumna (the path of Yogis) reach the Atman.'”

“They must go to a guru to learn.”

“The guru is the vehicle by which the spiritual influence is brought to you.”

Great as he himself was, one never felt inferior in his presence. In some indefinable way he made all who came into contact with him feel great. Was this because he had trained himself to see only the best in others and to make nothing of their faults and weaknesses? It was probably even deeper than that. Realizing himself as the Atman, it was his constant effort to see that Divine Self in others. Little faults can drop away, but That remains and shines forth. He knew us better than we knew ourselves. How constantly he voiced the highest truth as: “The greatest sin is to think yourself weak. No one is greater; realize you are Brahman. Nothing has power except as you bestow it. We are beyond the sun, the stars, the universe.”

IMPRISONMENT IN FLESH

Up and down, up and down ceaselessly. “He (Swamiji) is restless, so restless,” some would say. But it was not the restlessness of the man who does not know what is urging him on, what it is he wants. Only too well did he understand what was actuating him. He could have explained it lucidly, logically. A great free soul, conscious of the reality of his being, of his divinity, felt himself imprisoned in a cage of flesh. The bondage of the body was torture. The lion brought from the jungle, where he roamed at will, never forgets the glory of freedom. Restlessly he paces the short distance allowed by his bars. Here was a mighty free soul caged in flesh. The imprisoned glory struggled to escape. True, we are all caught in this bondage, but there is hardly a human being who knows it. We cling to our captivity. We would not give it up. Few even understand that “shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing Boy”.

But here before our eyes we saw one who was fully conscious, who realized the Great Freedom beyond, to whom the bondage was torture, who was ceaselessly struggling to break through. For us who witnessed this struggle, no words were necessary. Without any teaching whatever, our eyes were opened. “I am not the body, I am not the mind.” “So that is what it means,” we thought “I am beyond the body with its disabilities, beyond the mind with its limitations, for I am That, I am That.”

In 1902, I saw him at Belur, a very different Vivekananda from the one whom I had known in America. Here I saw the lion in his natural surroundings. Here it was not necessary to wear the mask of conventions, nor to conform to man-made rules. He had a serenity here which was sometimes lacking in foreign countries. He was among his own. He could be himself and it was an even greater self than we had seen before. He was surrounded by young devotees and brother-disciples, those sons of Sri Ramakrishna, who were now gathered in after long years of wandering. Much of his work was finished. He had given his message in America, in England, and to a lesser degree in Germany and France. In India the roar of the lion was heard from Colombo to Almora. Through the devotion of his young English disciple Goodwin, his message was put into permanent form. He had acquired the plot of land on the Ganges of which he had dreamed in America, and built a shrine for the worship of Sri Ramakrishna and a monastery which was to shelter the children of Sri Ramakrishna — his fellow disciples. He had organized teaching centres, educational institutions, orphanages, famine and flood relief. He was only thirty-nine, and he knew that his release was near. It came July 4.1902.

He shared the Hindu belief in the saying of the Gita that, “Whenever virtue subsides and vice prevails, then do I manifest Myself. For the protection of the good and the destruction of the evil and for the preservation of righteousness, I am born anew in every age.” (Bhagavad-Gita,. IV, 7-8).

Whenever spirituality is at a low ebb and the need of the world is great, God comes in human form. With the advent of the Avatar a great spiritual force comes into the world, a force which protects the good, destroys evil, preserves the Dharma, revivifies religion, draws thousands into the current of living spirituality, and brings new life. This influence is felt not only on the spiritual plane, but on the intellectual and physical planes as well. In the realm of intellect, it expresses itself as a revival of art, literature and music, of learning in every field. Men of genius appear and become famous in these realms. There is new life. In the physical world the power is not so intense, but more widespread and apparent. It manifests itself in a greater prosperity, in a renewed love of freedom, and in a more virile national consciousness. The nation enters upon a Renaissance. This power according to Swami Vivekananda continues in force for nearly six hundred years, gradually expending itself until the world again sinks into a state in which its only hope is another manifestation of God — another Avatar. While these are not all of equal rank, each brings an influx of spiritual power, revivifies life on all planes and moves the world. A few instances may illustrate this theory.

Before the coming of the Buddha, India had sunk into a state of materialism. All privileges were usurped by the Brahmins, who decreed that hot oil should he poured into the ear of Sudras who so much as heard the secret teaching. The time was ripe for the advent of a new manifestation of God, an Avatar — and the Buddha was born. He came, the Compassionate One, who withheld nothing. “I have never had the closed fist.” he said. “All that I know I have taught.” The highest teaching was given equally to the Brahmin and the outcaste, to the holy man and to the thief. All were equal in his sight, as they are in the sight of God. With him came a new influx of spirituality, a mighty force into which thousands upon thousands were caught. Its highest and greatest manifestation was in the realm of religion. There a great revival took place. Great numbers of all ranks gave up the world for the life of renunciation. Princes and barbers, masters and servants, alike entered upon the path. Once having renounced, all were equal. The prince bowed at the feet of his former barber, if it should be that the barber had been initiated first.

This incident is narrated in the Pali Canon: A number of the most powerful of the Sakya princes had decided to become monks of the Sangha of the Buddha. They were attended by their barber, who was to return to their homes the garments and jewels they had laid aside. As they went on, the barber too felt the impulse to join them in the new life. The princes encouraged him in this resolve, but asked him to go before them and receive initiation first, so that they would be obliged to do reverence to him. Caste restrictions and special privileges were put aside and only he was great, who was great in the “Kingdom of God”.

The revival was felt on all planes-of life, even politically, until under Ashoka, the first Buddhist Emperor. India was a great, united, prosperous empire. But after two or three hundred years the decline began, until at the time of Sankaracharya in the eighth century. Buddhism had reached such a state of degradation that it had to be destroyed.

Six hundred years after Buddha came Jesus of Nazareth. The Roman was master in the land of his birth. Oppression was rife. So desperate was the situation that all classes of people were expecting the coming of the Messiah to deliver them. But does the Avatar ever come in the guise acceptable to the worldly-minded? This son of a carpenter of Nazareth was “despised and rejected of men”. Only a few of the humblest followed him. But he was a mighty one, the son of God in very truth, destined to shake the world to its very foundations; for not long after his death, as time is reckoned in the history of nations, came the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. followed by the adoption of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine as the state religion.

Again six hundred years later in Arabia came the Prophet Mohammed who lifted his country out of the darkness and degradation into which it had fallen. With him began the rise of the Moslem power which was eventually to sweep over western Asia, northern Africa, and even into southern Europe, as also into India.

Sankaracharya in southern India was another great light who came “for the protection of the good and destruction of the evil and for the preservation of righteousness.” By this time. about A.D. 800. Buddhism had become degraded. Many evil customs had been added by the depressed races who had adopted it. It was fit only for destruction. He brought back to India the pure lofty teaching of the Atman. Buddhism was driven out of India, the ancient wisdom re-established. and the country entered upon a new chapter in its life.

The thirteenth century in Europe was the great creative period following the “Dark Ages”. Then came St. Francis of Assisi,”the troubadour of God”. A wave of spirituality swept the country, thousands embraced “Sister Poverty”. In the wake of this power came, first Dante (1265-1321) and Giotto (1266-1336), then later Savonarola (1452-1498) and Michelangelo (1475-1564), Benevenuto Cellini (1500-1571). Bernini (1598-1680) and other great names. The Renaissance had come.

We come now to the twentieth century — with the greatest war in the history of the world waging, brother fighting against brother, millions of the earth’s finest and best wiped out, nation against nation in Europe, the East against the West, in a death struggle, famine, pestilence, the downfall of religion, materialism rampant. Western civilization in danger of extinction. If ever there was need of an Avatar, it is at this time. Will the need be met in this time of direst need? What are the signs of the times? During the nineteenth century several stars of greater or lesser magnitude appeared in various parts of the world, all of whom did their part, great or small, to save the world from the cataclysm which seems about to overtake it. Each has brought new spiritual light and power. Among the greatest of these are the Bab and Bahaullah, in Persia, and Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda in India. Which is the Avatar of this age? We are perhaps too close to these luminaries to know which is the greatest. The Baha’ist will say it is the Bab and Bahaullah, while the followers of Ramakrishna will claim with equal certainty that it is Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Are there signs by which we can tell? Which has given the message most needed at the present time? It must be a message not for any particular nation but for the world. Which has ushered in a new spiritual era, has brought a light which will never be extinguished, has let loose a power which will make a new heaven and a new earth? The future alone can tell.

(Prabuddha Bharata, March 1978)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
JOSEPHINE MACLEOD

ON the twenty-ninth of January 1895, I went with my sister in 54 West 33rd Street, New York, and heard the Swami Vivekananda in his sitting room where were assembled fifteen or twenty ladies and two or three gentlemen. The room was crowded. All the arm-chairs were taken; so I sat on the floor in the front row. Swami stood in the corner. He said something, the particular words of which I do not remember, but instantly to me that was truth, and the second sentence he spoke was truth, and the third sentence was truth. And I listened to him for seven years and whatever he uttered was to me truth. From that moment life had a different import. It was as if he made yon realm; that you were in eternity. It never altered. It never grew. It was like the sun that you will never forget once you have seen.

I heard him all that winter, three days a week, mornings at eleven o’clock. I never spoke to him, but as we were so regular in coming, two front seats were always kept for us in this sitting room of the Swamiji. One day he turned and said. “Are you sisters?” “Yes”, we answered. Then he said, “Do you come very far?” We said, “No. not very far — about thirty miles up the Hudson.” “So far? That is wonderful.” Those were the first words I ever spoke to him.

I always felt that after Vivekananda, Mrs. Roethlisberger was the most spiritual person I ever met. It was she who took us to him. Swamiji had a great place for her also. One day she and I went to the Swami and said. “Swami, will you tell us how to meditate?” He said. “Meditate on the word ‘OM’ for a week and come again and tell me.” So after a week we went back and Mrs. Roethlisberger said,”I see a light.” He said, “Good, keep on,” “O no, it is more like a glow at the heart.” And he said to me, “Good, keep on.” That is all he ever taught me. But we had been meditating before we ever met him, and we knew the Gita by heart, I think that prepared us for recognition of this tremendous life force which he was. His power lay, perhaps, in the courage he gave others. He did not ever seem to be conscious of himself at all. It was the other man who interested him. “When the book of life begins to open, then the fun begins,” he would say. He used to make us realize there was nothing secular in life; it was all holy. “Always remember, you are incidentally an American, and a woman, but always a child of God. Tell yourself day and night who you are. Never forget it.” That is what he used to tell us. His presence, you see, was dynamic. You cannot pass that power on unless you have it, just as you cannot give money away unless you have it. You may imagine it, but you cannot do it.

We never spoke to him, had nothing much to do with him; but during that spring we were dining one night with Mr. Francis. H. Leggett, who later became my brother-in-law. “Yes, we can dine with you but we cannot spend the evening with you,” we had told him. “Very well,” he answered, “just dine with me.” When dinner was over, he said, “Where are you going this evening?” We told him we were going to a lecture; and he asked. “Mayn’t I come?” We said. “Yes.” He came, he listened; and when it was over, he went up to Swamiji, shook hands with him and said. “Swami, when will you dine with me?” And it was he who introduced us to Swami socially.

The Swami came to Ridgely Manor, Mr. Leggett’s place in the Catskill Mountains, and spent some days there. At the time some of the students said. “But Swamiji, you can’t go. The classes are going on.” Swami turned with great dignity and answered. “Are they my classes? Yes, I will go.” And he did. While he was there, he met my sister’s children who were then twelve and fourteen years old. But when we came down to New York and the classes began again, he did not seem to remember them, and they, very much surprised, said. “Swami doesn’t remember us.” We said to them. “Wait until the class is over.” While he was lecturing, he was always completely absorbed in what he was talking about. When he was through speaking, he came up and said, “Well children, how nice to see you again,” showing he did remember them. They were very happy.

Perhaps it was during this period, when he was our guest in New York City, one day he came home very quiet and subdued, He did not speak for hours, and finally we said to him, “Swami! What did you do today?” And he said, “I have seen a thing today that only America can show. I was in the street car. Helen Gould sat on one side and a negro washerwoman, with her washing on her lap, on the other. No place but America can show that.”

In June of that year Swami went up to Camp Percy, Christine Lake. N. H., to be the guest of Mr. Leggett at his fishing camp. We also went. There my sister’s engagement to Mr. Leggett was announced, and Swami was invited to go abroad and be the witness at the wedding. While he was at the Camp, Swami would go out under those beautiful white birch trees and meditate for hours. Without telling us anything about it he made two beautiful birch bark books, written in Sanskrit and English, which he gave to my sister and me.

Then when my sister and I went to Paris to buy her trousseau, Swami went to Thousand Island Park and for six weeks gave those wonderful talks called Inspired Talks, which to me are the most beautiful words that were written, because they were given to a group of intimate disciples. They were disciples, whereas I was never anything but a friend. But that quality that he gave them! Nothing I think revealed his heart as those days did.

He came over to Paris with Mr. Leggett in August. There, my sister and I stayed at the Holland House, and the Swami and Mr. Leggett stayed at a different hotel; but we saw them every day. At that time Mr. Leggett had a courier who always called Swami ‘Mon Prince!‘ And Swami said to him. “But I am not a prince. I am a Hindu monk.” The courier answered, “You may call yourself that, but I am used to dealing with Princes, and I know one when I see one.” His dignity impressed everyone. Yet, when someone once said to him, “You are so dignified, Swami”, he replied, “It isn’t me, it’s my walk.”

On the ninth of September Mr. and Mrs. Leggett were married, and the next day Swami left for London to be the guest of Mr. E. T. Sturdy, who had already met some of the Ramakrishna monks in India and who was a Sanskrit scholar. After Swami had been there some time he wrote. “Come over and get up classes.” But by the time we went over he was already lecturing. He lectured very eloquently at Princes’ Hall, and the next day the papers were full of the news that a great Indian yogi had come to London. He was very honoured there. Until the fifteenth of December we stayed in London. Then Swami again came to America to continue his work here. In April of the following year he went back to London when he established classes and began a real definite work. That was in 1896. He worked there all summer until July when he went to Switzerland with the Seviers.

Swamiji’s knowledge was prodigious. Once when my niece, Alberta Sturges, later Lady Sandwich, was with him in Rome, showing him the sights, she was amazed at his knowledge of where the great monuments were. And when she went to St. Peter’s with him, she was still more amazed to see him so reverential to the symbols of the Roman Church — to all the jewels, all the beautiful draperies, put upon the saints. She said, “Swami, you don’t believe in a Personal God; why do you honour this so much?” He answered, “But Alberta, if you do believe in a Personal God, surely you give it your best.”

That autumn he went from Switzerland to India with Mr. and Mrs. Sevier and Mr. J. J. Goodwin, where a great ovation awaited him by the entire nation. This can be read about in the discourses called Lectures from Colombo to Almora. Mr. Goodwin was the stenographer who had been engaged at 54 West 33rd Street to take down the lectures of Swami Vivekananda. Mr. Goodwin was a court-stenographer, which meant two hundred words a minute, and he was very expensive; but as we did not want to lose any of Vivekananda’s words, we engaged him. After the first week Mr. Goodwin refused any money; when they said to him, “What do you mean?” he said, “If Vivekananda gives his life, the least I can do is to give my service.” He followed Swami around the world, and we have seven volumes (nine now) hot from his lips that Mr. Goodwin took down.

I never wrote to Swami after he went to India, waiting to hear from him. Finally I had a letter, “Why don’t you write?” Then I sent back, “Shall I come to India?” And his answer was, “Yes, come, if you want filth and degradation and poverty and many loin cloths talking religion. Don’t come if you want anything else. We cannot bear one more criticism.” Naturally I went over by the first ship; I sailed on the twelfth of January with Mrs. Ole Bull and Swami Saradananda. We stopped in London. Then on to Rome. We arrived in Bombay on the twelfth of February where Mr. Alasinga met us, who wore the vertical red marks of the Vaishnavite sect. Later on, once when I was sitting with Swami on our way to Kashmir, I happened to make the remark, “What a pity that Mr. Alasinga wears those Vaishnavite marks on his forehead!” Instantly Swami turned and said with great sternness, “Hands off! What have you ever done?” I did not know what I had done then. Of course I never answered. Tears came to my eyes and I waited. I learnt later that Mr. Alasinga Perumal was a young Brahmin teaching philosophy in a college in Madras earning 100 rupees a month, supporting his father, mother, wife, and four children, and who had gone from door to door to beg the money to send Vivekananda to the West. Perhaps without him we never would have met Vivekananda. Then one understood the anger with which Swamiji met the slightest attack on Mr. Alasinga.

When we arrived in Bombay they were very keen that we stay there; but we took the first train to Calcutta, and at four o’clock on the second morning following Swamiji met us with a dozen disciples. There were a score of other distinguished Indians with purple and gold and crimson turbans, to whom Mrs. Ole Bull had offered hospitality when they were in America. They covered us with garlands. We were literally enwrapped with flowers. It is always frightening to me to have garlands put on. Mrs. Ole Bull and I went to a hotel and Mr. Mohini Chatterjee came and stayed there from five o’clock in the afternoon until ten at night. I happened to remark, “I hope your wife will not be worried? He answered; “I will explain to mother when I get home.” I did not understand what that meant. After I knew Mr. Chatterjee well enough, perhaps a year later, I said to him. “What did you mean that first day when you said you would explain to mother?” He answered, “O, I never go to my room for the night without first going to my mother’s room and confiding to her everything that happened during the day.” “But your wife?” I said, “Don’t you confide to her?” He answered. “My wife? She gels that relation from her son.” Then I realized that fundamental difference between the Indian and our Western civilizations. The Indian civilization is based upon motherhood, and our civilization is based upon wifehood, which makes a tremendous difference.

In a day or two we went up to see Swami at his temporary monastery at Belur, at Nilambar Mukherjee’s garden-house. During the afternoon Swami said, “I must take you to the new monastery that we are buying.” I said, “O, but Swami, isn’t this big enough?” It was a lovely little villa he had, with perhaps an acre or two of land, a small lake and many flowers. I thought it was big enough for anyone. But he evidently saw things in a different scale. So he took us across little gullies to the place where is now the present monastery. Mrs. Ole Bull and I, finding this old riverside house empty, said, “Swami, can’t we use this house?” “It isn’t in order,” he answered. “But we’ll put it in order,” we told him. With that he gave us permission. So we had it all newly whitewashed and went down to the bazars, bought old mahogany furniture and made a drawing-room half of which was Indian style and half of which was Western style. We had an outside dining room, our bedroom with an extra room for Sister Nivedita who was our guest until we went to Kashmir. We stayed there quite two months. It was perhaps the most beautiful time we ever had with Swamiji. He came every morning for early tea which he used to take under the great mango tree. That tree is still in existence. We never allowed them to cut it down, though they were keen to do it. He loved our living at that riverside cottage; and he would bring all those who came to visit him, to see what a charming home we had made of this house he had thought uninhabitable. In the afternoons we used to give tea-parties in front of the house, in full view of the river, where always could be seen loads of boats going up-stream, we receiving as if we were in our own drawing-rooms, Swamiji loved all that intimate use we made of things which they took as a matter of course. One night there came one of those deluges of rain, like sheets of water. He paced up and down our outside dining room veranda, talking of Krishna and the love of Krishna and the power that love was in the world. He had a curious quality that when he was a bhakta, a lover, he brushed aside karma and raja and jnana yogas as if they were of no consequence whatever. And when he was a karma-yogi, then he made that the great theme. Or equally so, the jnana. Sometimes, weeks, he would fall in one particular mood utterly disregardful of what he had been, just previous to that. He seemed to be filled with an amazing power of concentration; of opening up to the great Cosmic qualities that are all about us. It was probably that power of concentration that kept him so young and so fresh, he never seemed to repeat himself. There would be an incident of very tittle consequence which would illuminate a whole new passage for him. And he had such a place for us Westerners whom he called “Living Vedantins”. He would say, “When you believe a thing is true, you do it, you do not dream about it. That is your power.”

It was one rainy night that Swami brought the Ceylonese Buddhist monk. Anagarika Dharmapala, to visit us. Mrs. Ole Bull, Sister Nivedita, and I were so happily housed in this cottage, it gave Swami particular joy to show his guests how simply Western women could settle there and make a real home.

On the twelfth of May in 1898 we started en route to Kashmir. We stopped at Naini Tal, the summer residence of the U. P. Government, and there hundreds of Indians met Swami with a beautiful hill pony on which they put him. Then they scattered before him flowers and palms, exactly as they did before Christ when he went into Jerusalem. And I said at once, “So, this is an oriental custom.”

He left us alone for three days. We did not see him at all. We stayed at a hotel. Finally he sent for us. We went into one of the little houses, and there I saw him sitting on his bed wreathed in smiles, so happy was he to see us again. We had given him utter freedom. We never paid any attention to him. He never felt the weight of us. There was never any feeling of the necessity of entertainment.

From there we started for Almora where he became the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Sevier. We took a bungalow of our own, and there we stayed a month. Swamiji always meant Almora to be the Himalayan home of his Western disciples and expected the monastery to be founded there. But Mr. Sevier, who took his vocation of founding a monastery very seriously, was so interrupted by people coming in to tea-parties daily that he insisted on going forty miles farther into the Himalayas; so Mayavati Ashrama, when started, was eighty miles from a station — and there were no proper roads.

While we were there, word came that Mr. Goodwin had died at Ootacamund. When Swamiji learnt that Mr. Goodwin had died, he looked a long time out upon the snow-capped Himalayas without speaking and presently he said. “My last public utterance is over.” And he seldom spoke in public again.

We left Almora on the twentieth of June for Kashmir. By train to Rawalpindi, where we got tongas with three horses abreast to drive us the two hundred miles up into Kashmir. There were relays of horses every five miles, so that we dashed through on top of this beautiful road, as perfect then as any road the Romans ever made. Then to Baramulla where we got four native house boats. These boats called dungas are about seventy feet long and broad enough to have two single beds in them and a corridor between, covered with a matting house; so wherever we wanted a window we only had to roll up the matting. The whole roof could be lifted in the day-time, and thus we lived in the open, yet knew there was always a roof over our heads. We had four of these dungas, one for Mrs. Ole Bull and me, one for Mrs. Paterson and Sister Nivedita, and one for Swami and one of his monks. Then a dining room boat where we all met to have our meals. We stayed in Kashmir four months, the first three in these simple little boats until after September, when it got so cold, we took an ordinary house boat with fire-places and there enjoyed the warmth of a real house. Sister Nivedita has written a good deal of the talks we had there. Swami would get up about half past five in the morning, and seeing him smoking and talking with the boatmen, we would get up too. Then there would be those long walks for a couple of hours until the sun came up warm; Swami talking about India, what its purpose in life was, what Mohammedanism had done and what it had not done. He talked, immersed in the history of India and in the architecture and in the habits of the people, and we walked on through fields of forget-me-nots, bursting into pink and blue blossoms, way above our heads.

Baramulla is something like Venice. So many of the streets are canals. We had our own little private boat in which we went to and from the main land. But the merchants would come in small crafts all about our boats. We did most of our shopping over the rails of the boat. Each of our boats cost thirty rupees a month, which included the boatmen who fed themselves. The boatmen consisted of father, mother, son. daughter, and tiny children. They had their own little place at the end of the boat, and many a time we begged them for a taste of their food, the aroma being so delicious. The manner of travelling in these boats is that the boat is punted up the river, or it is dragged, the boatmen walking along the shore, or it is rowed. There is nothing extra to pay regardless of how one is navigated. When we wanted to move up the Jhelum river to some of the lakes, we would tell our servants the night before; they would get in supplies of food including ducks or chickens, vegetables, eggs, butter, fruits, and milk. In the morning, when we awakened, we would feel the boat moving along, gliding so imperceptibly that we were scarcely conscious of the motion. Our servant who had walked ahead would then have a delicious meal waiting for us. This he made over a little trough long enough and narrow enough to hold three pans, one containing soup, one meat, and the other rice. The dexterity of these people was a wonder and something we never got over. As a chicken is not considered clean food by the orthodox Hindus, we never told the people we intended to eat the chickens we bought. But when we went up the river, the lower part of the boat held half a dozen clucking chickens. The Pandits who could come to visit Swami would hear them and look around for them. Swami, who knew they were hidden underneath, had a twinkle in his eye, but he would never give us away. Then the Pandits would say. “But Swami, why do you have to do with these ladies. They are mlechchhas. They are untouchables.” Then the Westerners would come to us and say, ‘But don’t you see? Swami is not treating you with respect. He meets you without his turban.” So we had great fun laughing at the idiosyncrasies of each other’s civilization.

Swamiji then sent for Swami Saradananda to come and travel with us, to show us the sights of India — Lahore, Delhi, Agra, Kurukshetra, and so on, Swami going straight down to Calcutta. By the time we got down there, he had already founded the monastery in our little cottage at Belur, As we would not go back there, we took a small house about two miles up at Bally and stayed there until we left for the West.

Mrs. Ole Bull had given several thousand dollars to found the monastery. I having very little, it took me some years to have eight hundred dollars. One day I said to Swamiji. “Here is a little money you may be able to use.” He said. “What? What?” I said, “Yes,” “How much?” he asked. And I said. “Eight hundred dollars.” Instantly he turned to Swami Trigunatita and said, ‘There, go and buy your press.” He bought the press which started the Udbodhan, the Bengali magazine published by the Ramakrishna Mission.

In July 1899 Swami came to England again with Sister Nivedita, where Sister Christine and Mrs. Funke met him. From there he came to America and he came to us at Ridgely Manor in September of that year where we gave him his own cottage with two of his monks, Turiyananda and Abhedananda. Sister Nivedita was also there, and Mrs. Ole Bull. It was quite a community of people who loved and honoured the Swami, He used to call my Sister, Mrs. Leggett. “Mother”, and always sat beside her at table. He particularly liked chocolate ice cream, because, “I too am chocolate and I like it,” he would say. One day we were having strawberries, and someone said to him. “Swami, do you like strawberries?” He answered, “I never tasted them.” “You never tasted them, why you eat them every day!” He said, “You have cream on them — pebbles with cream would be good.”

In the evening, sitting around the great fire in the hall of Ridgely Manor, he would talk, and once after he came out with some of his thoughts a lady said. “Swami, I don’t agree with you there.” “No? Then it is not for you,” he answered. Someone else said. “O, but that is where I find you true.” “Ah, then it was for you.” he said showing that utter respect for the other man’s views. One evening he was so eloquent, about a dozen people listening, his voice becoming so soft and seemingly far away; when the evening was over, we all separated without even saying goodnight to each other. Such a holy quality pervaded. My sister, Mrs. Leggett, had occasion to go to one of the rooms afterward. There she found one of the guests, an agnostic, weeping. “What do you mean?” my sister asked, and the lady said, “The man has given me eternal life. I never wish to hear him again.”

It was while the Swami was at Ridgely Manor that a letter came from a lady unknown to us to say our only brother was very ill in Los Angeles and that she thought, he would die and we ought to know it. So my sister said to me, “I think you must go.” And I said, “Of course. “Within two hours I was packed, the horses were at the door, we had four miles to drive to a railway station, and as I went out Swami put up his hand and said some Sanskrit blessing and then he called out. “Get up some classes and I will come.” I went straight to Los Angeles and in a small white cottage covered with roses, on the outskirts of the city, lay my brother, very ill. But over his bed was a life-size picture of Vivekananda, I had not seen my brother for ten years, so after I had an hour’s talk with him and saw how very ill he was, I went out to see our hostess, Mrs. Blodgett and said to her. “My brother is very ill” She said, “Yes.” I said, “I think he will die.”She said. “Yes.” “May he die here?” I asked. She said, “O yes.” Then I said, “Who is that man whose portrait is over my brother’s bed?” She drew herself up with all the dignity of her seventy years and said, “If ever there was a God on earth, that is the man.” I said, “What do you know about him?” She answered, “I was at the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, and when that young man got up and said, ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’, seven thousand people rose to their feet as a tribute to something they knew not what; and when it was over and I saw scores of women walking over the benches to get near him, I said to myself, “Well, my lad, if you can resist that onslaught, you are indeed a God.” Then I said to Mrs. Blodgett, “I know him.” “You know him?” she asked. I said. “Yes, I left him in the little village of Stone Ridge, of two hundred people, in the Catskill Mountains in New York.” She said, “You know him?” I said, “Why don’t you ask him here?” She said, “To my cottage?” “He will come”, I told her. In three weeks my brother was dead and in six weeks Swamiji was there and began his classes on the Pacific coast, in “Kalifornia”.

We were Mrs. Blodgett’s guests for months. This little cottage had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a sitting room. Every morning we would hear Swami chanting his Sanskrit from the bath, which was just off the kitchen. He would come out with tousled hair and get ready for breakfast. Mrs. Blodgett made delicious pancakes, and these we would eat at the kitchen table. Swami sitting with us; and such discourses he would have with Mrs. Blodgett, such repartee and wit, she talking of the villainy of men and he talking of even the greater wickedness of women! Mrs. Blodgett seldom went to hear him lecture, saying her duty was to give us delicious meals when we got back. Swami lectured a great number of times at the Home of Truth and in various halls, but perhaps the most outstanding lecture I ever heard was his talk on “Jesus of Nazareth”, when he seemed to radiate a white light from head to foot, so lost was he in the wonder and the power of Christ. I was so impressed with this obvious halo that I did not speak to him on the way back for fear of interrupting. as I thought, the great thoughts that were still in his mind. Suddenly he said to me. “I know how it is done,” I said, “How what is done?” “How they make mulligatawny soup. They put a bay leaf in it.” he told me. That utter lack of self-consciousness, of self-importance, was perhaps one of his outstanding characteristics. He seemed to see the strength and the glory and the power of the other man who felt that courage enter into him, until everyone who came near him went away refreshed and invigorated and sustained. So when people have said to me. “What is your test of spirituality?” I have always said, “It is the courage that is given by the presence of a holy man.” Swamiji used to say, “The saviours should take on the sins and tribulations of their disciples and let the disciples go on their way rejoicing and free. There is the difference! The saviours should carry the burdens.”

Another thing he once said to my niece at Ridgely Manor is, “Alberta, no fact in life will ever equal your imagination of it.”

One day Mrs. Blodgett had three ladies come to call on the Swami. I left immediately, so he could be alone with them; and after half an hour he came to me and said. “These ladies are three sisters and they want me to come and make them a visit at Pasadena,” I said. “Go.” He said, “Shall I?” “Yes, go.” I told him. They were Mrs. Hansborough. Miss Mead. and Mrs. Wyckoff. Mrs. Wyckoff’s house is now the Vivekananda House in Hollywood, and one of Swamiji’s monks is there with her.

It was from Alameda, California, he wrote me on April eighteenth 1900, the most beautiful letter I think he ever wrote. This is the last letter in Inspired Talks.

Later in 1900 my sister and Mr. Leggett took a house in Paris for the Exposition. We went over in June, and Swami followed in August. He stayed some weeks with us until he went to stay with Mr. Gerald Nobel, a bachelor. Afterwards he said of Mr. Nobel: “It is worth having been born to have made one friend as Mr. Nobel.” So greatly he honoured this friend of ours. We entertained largely during these six months. Swami coming nearly every day to luncheon.

One day at luncheon in Paris Madame Emma Calve, the singer, said she was going to Egypt for the winter. So as I suggested accompanying her, she at once turned to Swami and said, “Will you come to Egypt with us as my guest?” He accepted. We started out via Vienna for two days. Constantinople for nine days, and four days in Athens, then to Egypt when after a few days Swami said, “I want to go.” “Go where?” I asked. “Go back to India. “I said. “Yes, go. “”May I?” he asked. “Certainly”. I said. So I went to Madame Calve and said. “Swami would like to go back to India.” She said. “Certainly.” She bought him a first class ticket and sent him back. He arrived there in time to hear of he death of Mr. Sevier, and he wrote me at (1 , 2) once of the serenity and beauty of the way in which Mrs. Sevier had taken the death, she continuing the life at the Mayavati Ashrama as if her husband were there.

Going up the Nile and meeting some charming English people who begged me to go to Japan with them, I had occasion to pass again through India en route. Again I saw Swamiji, and he said he would go to Japan if I wrote for him. In Japan I made the acquaintance of Okakura Kakuzu who had founded the fine arts Bijutsuin school of painting in Tokyo. He was very anxious to have Swami come over and be his guest in Japan. But Swami refusing to come. Mr. Okakura accompanied me to India to meet him. One of the happy moments of my life was when after a few days at Belur. Mr. Okakura said to me rather fiercely. “Vivekananda is ours. He is an Oriental. He is not yours.” Then I knew there was a real understanding between them. A day or two after, Swami said to me, “It seems as if a long lost brother has come.” Then I knew there was a real undemanding between these two men. And when Swami said to him. “Will you join us?” Mr. Okakura said, “No, I haven’t finished with this world yet.” Which was a very wise thing.

That summer General Paterson, the American Consul General, allowed me to have the Consulate, and there I had as guest Mr. Oda, who had been my host at the Asakusa temple in Tokyo.

I saw Swami off and on all that year. One day in April he said, “I have nothing in the world, I haven’t a penny to myself. I have given away everything that has ever been given to me.” I said, “Swami, I will give you fifty dollars a month as long as you live.” He thought a minute and then he said, “Can I live on that?” “Yes, O yes,” I said, “but perhaps you cannot have cream.” I gave him then two hundred dollars, but before the four months were passed he had gone.

At Belur Math one day, while Sister Nivedita was distributing prizes for some athletics. I was standing in Swamiji’s bedroom at the Math, at the window, watching, and he said to me, “I shall never see forty.” I, knowing he was thirty-nine, said to him. “But Swami, Buddha did not do his great work until between forty and eighty.” But he said. “I delivered my message and I must go.” I asked. “Why go?” and he said, “The shadow of a big tree will not let the smaller trees grow up, I must go to make room.”

Afterwards I went again to the Himalayas. I did not see Swami again. I went back to Europe for the King’s Jubilee, As I said, I never was a disciple, only a friend, but I remember in my last letter to him in April 1902, as I was leaving India — I was never to see him again — I distinctly remember writing in this good-bye letter the one sentence, “I swim or sink with you.” I read that over three times and said. “Do I mean it?” And I did. And it went. And he received it. though I never had an answer. He died July 4.1902.

On the second of July, Sister Nivedita saw him for the last time. She went to inquire whether she should teach a certain science in her school. Swami answered, “Perhaps you are right, but my mind is given to other things. I am preparing for death.” So she thought he was indifferent. Then he said. “But you must have a meal.” Sister Nivedita always ate with her fingers, a la Hindu; and after she had eaten. Swami poured water over her hands. She said, very much the disciple, “I cannot bear you to do this.” He answered. “Jesus Christ washed the feet of his disciples. “Sister Nivedita had it on the tip of her tongue to say. “But that was the last time they ever met.” It was the last time she ever saw him. That last day he spoke to her of me and of many people, but when he spoke of me he said, “She is pure as purity, loving as love itself.” So I always took that as Swamiji’s last message to me. In two days he died having said, “The spiritual impact that has come here to Belur will last fifteen hundred years — and this will be a great university. Do not think I imagine it, I see it.”

They cabled me on the fourth of July, “Swami attained nirvana.” For days I was stunned. I never answered it. And then the desolation that seemed to fill my life made me weep for years and it was only after I read Maeterlinck who said, “If you have been greatly influenced by anyone, “prove it in your life, and not by your tears”. I never wept again; but went back to America and tried to follow the traces of where he had lived. I went to Thousand Island Park and became the guest of Miss Dutcher to whom the cottage belonged, who gave me the same room that Swami had used.

Fourteen years elapsed before I returned to India. Then I went accompanying Professor and Mrs. Geddes. I then found, instead of India being a place of desolation, all India was alive with Swamiji’s ideas, with half a dozen monasteries, thousands of centres, hundreds of societies. Since that time I have been going frequently. They like to have me at the monastery guest house, because I keep Vivekananda alive, as none of these young men have ever seen him. And I like to be in India, remembering once when I asked him, “Swamiji, how can I best help you?” his answer was, “Love India!” So the upper floor of the guest house at the monastery is mine where I go and will probably go winters, until the end.

(Prabuddha Bharata, December 1949)

[In an undated letter written from the Belur Math guest house, after Swamiji’s passing, she thus describes the impress of his life on hers:]

…The thing that held me in Swamiji was his unlimitedness. I never could touch the bottom — or top — or sides. The amazing size of him!…Oh, such natures make one so free. It’s the reaction on oneself that matters, really, isn’t it? What one gets out of it.

You ask if I am utterly secure in my grasp on the ultimate. Yes, utterly. It seems to be part and parcel of me. It is the Truth I saw in Swamiji that has set me free! One’s faults seem so insignificant, why remember them when one has the ocean of Truth to be our play-ground? It was to set me free that Swamiji came, that was as much a part of his mission as it was to give Renunciation to Nivedita or unity to Mrs. S—. But it is Renunciation that is India’s great spiritual gift, and so the workers in and for India (Nivedita) used to say. “I only hear one word ringing through my ears day and night. Remember Renunciation.” Hence her hold and grip on India and the coming generations. I haven’t any Renunciation, but I’ve freedom. Freedom to see and help India to grow — that’s my job and how I love it. To see this group of fiery idealists burning new paths and outlets from this jungle called Life ….

I feel that Swamiji is a Rock for us to stand upon. That was his function in my life, not worship, nor glory, but a steadiness under one’s feet for experiments! At last I’m free. It’s so curious to feel free, not needed any more in the West, but all my characteristics — in India.

…With two new upper chambers of the guest house I am living in great luxury and space, quiet on this great river. I never dreamed of such luxury anywhere! The luxury of space — no furniture to lake care of, no rugs, pictures, dishes — only a tea set. That impingement of things is gone! Things to do, to take care of, all melted into thin air. Yet I’m not alone! (That I couldn’t bear.) One doesn’t have lo leave the body to find Heaven.

I see — and why all this? That’s the wonder.

“They are fooling us with little brains, but this time they won’t find me napping. I’ve found a thing or two beyond brains, and that is love” as Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Leggett, bless them both.

(Vedanta and the West, November-December 1962)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
CONSTANCE TOWNE

Our of the Old World of India forty years ago came a young, courageous, and handsome man in whose face shone the light of triumph over self. He came to the New World of America uninvited, unheralded, unknown ….

How Vivekananda proceeded serenely on his hazardous pilgrimage — though more than once lacking food and change of raiment; how he was admitted as a delegate at the final session of the Congress of Religions; how he electrified the assemblage with the simplicity and beauty of his message: how on the following morning the metropolitan press of three continents exhausted their powers in proclaiming his spiritual stature among the great teachers of the world — all of this is still remembered by generations now living.

My personal story of Vivekananda — hitherto unpublished — seems to stand alone. When I met him he was twenty-seven years old.1 I thought him as handsome as a god of classic sculpture. He was dark of skin. of course, and had large eyes which gave one the impression of “midnight blue”. He seemed larger than most of his race. who often to us appear slight of frame, because they are small-boned. He had a head heaped with short black curls. At our first meeting I was struck by the emphasis of our colour contrast. I was twenty-four, fair, tall. and slender, with golden hair and grey-blue eyes. Probably there could have been no greater contrast.

Our meeting was rather unusual. After his triumph at Chicago he was, of course, showered with invitations to come to New York, where the great of all the world are entertained. Here lived at that time a very famous physician. Dr. Egbert Guernsey, genial, literary, and ideally hospitable, with a spacious and very handsome house on Fifth Avenue at Forty-fourth Street. It was Dr. Guernsey’s pleasure, heartily endorsed by his charming wife and daughter, to introduce celebrated visitors from abroad to New York society. It was to be expected that he would pay special honour to the great Swami, whose ideal of closer relations between the East and the West in the interest of religion and world peace so strongly appealed to him.

Dr. Guernsey accordingly arranged to give a Sunday afternoon dinner party at which every guest should represent a different religious creed, he himself holding the view-point of Robert Ingersoll, who was absent from the city. His Grace the Cardinal was interested but declined to dine or to appoint a substitute from among his clergy. So it happened that I, being a Catholic and trained by the noted Jesuit Priest, William O’Brien Pardow, S.J., had the privilege of being a guest at that famous Sunday dinner. Dr. Guernsey, who was my physician, sent for me to uphold Catholicism. Dr. Parkhurst was there, and Minnie Maddern Fiske, the famous American actress, who was staying with the Guernseys at the time. I remember that there were fourteen at table.

There was, of course, a tacit understanding that everyone should he polite about his or her religious differences with the Swami and his so-called non-Christian (“Pagan” is a hard word!) attitude. Alas! as the dinner progressed, the most heated dispute was not with the Swami at all. All of the differences were confined to the Evangelical brethren!

I was seated beside the Swami. We looked on in amused silence at the almost comical intolerance of the Creeds. Now and again our host would adroitly make some wise or humorous remark that kept the conversation on a plane not actually injurious to the function of digestion. The Swami would make from time to time a little speech apparently in explanation of his native land and the customs of its people, so different from our own, but always to gain his point in philosophy and religion. A more broad-minded and tolerant man surely could not have been found anywhere in India to carry out the mission of founding Vedanta Centres in America.

He wore on that occasion his orange cassock, a tincture of deep rose-red silk, and his turban of white shot with threads of gold. His feet, otherwise bare, were covered by sandals of soft brown leather.

It was at this dinner that our friendship began. Afterwards. in the drawing-room, he said to me, “Miss Gibbons, your philosophy and mine are one; and the heart of our faiths is the same.”

I then lived with my mother at the Beresford Apartments at 1 East Eighty-first Street, overlooking Central Park. My mother was Southern, of the royal French blood, from Charleston, South Carolina, and a famous beauty, dark of eyes and hair. She was a witty woman and delighted in the social pleasures centering about the Church of England, to which, she maintained, all the aristocratic world belonged. Thus the Swami and I were outside the fold. I told my mother of him on my return home from Dr. Guernsey’s dinner party, and what a splendid mind he had. I dwelt on the great force which had come to us. To which she replied. “What a terrible dinner party, with all those Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, and one black Pagan in orange cloths!” But she grew to like Vivekananda, to respect his view-point, and afterwards joined one of the Vedanta Centres. She was awfully amusing to him, and I can sec him now, after all these years, laughing so gaily at her remarks about him.

On one occasion there was an all-star cast in “Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera, on a Monday night when all society appeared to sit in their boxes and show their anatomy covered with jewels: to gossip, to visit, to come in late and be observed of all observers, and to do everything but listen to the opera. There was Melba in her prime, and de Reszkes, and Bauermeister. The Swami had never been to the opera, and our subscription seats were in a conspicuous part of the orchestra. I had suggested that the Swami be invited to accompany us. Mama said to him, “But you are black. What will the world say?” To which he laughed and said. “I will sit beside my sister. She does not mind. I know.” He never looked more handsome. Everyone about us was so wrapped up in him that I am sure they did not listen to the opera at all that night.

I tried to explain the story of “Faust” to Vivekananda. Mama, hearing me. said, “Heavens! you, a young girl, should not tell this awful story to a man,”

“Then why do you make her come herself, if it is not good?” said the Swami.

“Well,” replied Mama, “it is the thing to do to go to the opera. All the plots are bad; but one need not discuss the plot.”

Alas for poor, vapid humanity and its foolishness! Later on during the performance the Swami said, “My sister, the gentleman who is making love to the beautiful lady in song, is he really in love with her?”

“Oh, yes, Swami.”

“But he has wronged her, and makes her sad.”

“Yes,” I said humbly.

“Oh, now I see,” said the Swami. “He is not in love with the handsome lady, he is in love with the handsome gentleman in red with the tail — what do you call him? — the Devil.” Thus that pure mind reasoned out, weighed and found wanting both, the opera and the audience.

One of society’s pets, a very young girl, came down between the acts to Mama and said, “Mama is consumed with curiosity lo know who the elegant man is in the yellow dressing gown.”

Ours was a great friendship, and I fancy the only one that remains unpublished to the world. It was purely of the spirit, absolutely apart from the material loves and hates. He spoke always of when and what and where our souls would be ultimately, where in that other realm. He never spoke of me to anyone, nor mentioned my name. It was a friendship of Spirit. It still is. He taught me much of the philosophy he preached and wrote about, how to meditate, and what a power it would he against the hurts of life; what force of purpose it would attain for the preservation of the body, for logical thought, for self-control, for ecstasy, for the attraction of others; its power tor good, its knowing how to read others and their needs; not to dull the edge of your sword, to be moderate in one’s consumption of food, to know what one’s own body needs to make it live well; of chastity, tolerance, purity of thought, and love for the world — not of one person but of everyone and of all created things.

And now, forty years later, he has released me from the long silence and has demanded and commanded certain things he wishes done….

How liberal he was, how understanding of others’ points of view! He went to Mass with me at St. Leo’s Church, the little one on Twenty-eighth Street, where all was beauty, and the old priest, Father Ducey, such an artist. There he knelt at high noon at the canon of the Mass. A ray of light falling from the stained-glass window — blue, red, and gold — lit his white turban and outlined his beautiful profile against the marble walls. A great, gorgeous spot of living fire his orange robe made on the marble pavement, and the dear face was rapt in prayer. As the bell rang at the consecration and all heads were bowed in adoration of the presence of Christ on the altar, his hand touched mine, and he whispered, “It is the same God and Lord we both worship.”

(Prabuddha Bharata, January 1934)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
MARY C. FUNKE

SUCH a beautiful spot! There is a large class-room and a kitchen on the ground floor and a number of bedrooms on the second floor. The Swami has a private suite with a separate entrance by an outside stairway. There is a small veranda attached to his room to which he invites us every evening. The view is lovely, as we are higher up than any of the other cottages. We gaze over the tree tops and for miles the beautiful St. Lawrence River winds its way.

We are deeply touched by the very cordial reception given to us who were strangers. Even the Swami had never met us personally, although we had attended all his lectures given in Detroit during the winter of 1894. The joy of it to be so sweetly received by him!

We were nearly frightened to death when we finally reached the cottage, for neither the Swami nor his followers at Thousand Island Park had the remotest idea of our existence and it seemed rather an impertinent thing for us to do, to travel seven hundred miles, follow him up, as it were, and ask him to accept us. But he did accept us — he did — the Blessed One!

It was a dark rainy night, but we could not wait. Every moment was precious, and our imagination was stirred up to the nth degree. We did not know a soul in the place, but finally we hit upon the plan of making inquiries at the various shops and thus find out where Miss Dutcher lived. At one place we were told that there was a cottage occupied by a Miss Dutcher and that a “foreign looking man who dressed queerly” was staying there.

Then we knew our quest was ended, and we found a man with a lantern who went ahead of us.

Up, up the wet and slippery path! It seemed as if we were taking one step up and two back. it was so slippery. The first thing we heard when we reached the house was the rich, beautiful voice of the Swami who was talking to those who had gathered on his porch. Our heartbeats could have been heard, I truly believe. His hostess asked him to come downstairs to see us as “two ladies from Detroit”, and he greeted us so sweetly! It was like a benediction. “I like Detroit.” he said, “I have many friends there, isn’t it?” And what do you think? Instead of our slaying at a hotel or boarding house, as we had expected, those dear people insisted upon our becoming members of the household. Our heart? sang paeans of praise.

So here we are — in the very house with Vivekananda, listening to him from 8 o’clock in the morning until late at night. Even in my wildest dreams I could not imagine anything so wonderful, so perfect. To be with Vivekananda! To be accepted by him! Surely we shall wake up and find it all a dream. For in our dreams we have sought the Swami, now, Reality! Are we “such stuff as dreams are made on?”

Oh, the sublime teaching of Vivekananda! No nonsense, no talk of “astrals””, “imps”, etc., but God, Jesus, Buddha, I feel that I shall never be quite the same again for I have caught a glimpse of the Real.

Just think what it means to listen to a Vivekananda at every meal, lessons each morning and the nights on the porch, the eternal stars shining like “patinas of bright gold”! In the afternoon, we take long walks and the Swami literally, and so simply, finds “books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good (God) in every thing”. And this same Swami is so merry and fun-loving. We just go mad at times.

Later: We have been soaring on the Heights, since I last wrote you. Swami tells us to forget that there is any Detroit for the present — that is, to allow no personal thoughts to occupy our minds while taking this instruction. We are taught to see God in everything from the blade of grass to man — “even in the diabolical man”.

Really, it is almost impossible to find time to write here. We put up with some inconveniences, as it is so crowded. There is no time to relax, to rest, for we led the time is all too short, as the Swami leaves soon for England. We scarcely lake time to array ourselves properly, so afraid are we of losing some of the precious jewels. His words are like jewels, and all that he says fits together like a wonderfully beautiful mosaic. In his talks he may go ever so far afield, but always he comes back to the one fundamental, vital thing — “Find God! Nothing else matters”.

I especially like Miss Waldo and Miss Ellis. although the whole household is interesting. Some unique characters. One, a Dr. Wright of Cambridge, a very cultured man, creates much merriment at times. He becomes so absorbed in the teaching that he, invariably, at the end of each discourse ends up with asking Swamiji, “Well, Swamiji all amounts to this in the end, doesn’t it? I am Brahman, I am the Absolute.” If you could only see Swami’s indulgent smile and hear him answer so gently. “Yes Dokie, you are Brahman, you are the Absolute, in the real essence of your being.” Later, when the learned doctor comes to the table a trifle late, Swami, with the utmost gravity but with a merry twinkle in his eyes, will say. “Here comes Brahman” or “Here is the Absolute”.

Swamiji’s fun-making is of the merry type. Sometimes he will say, “Now I am going to cook for you!” He is a wonderful cook and delights in serving the “brithrin”. The food he prepares is delicious but for “yours truly” too hot with various spices; but I made up my mind to eat it if it strangled me, which it nearly did. If a Vivekananda can cook for me, I guess the least I can do is to eat it. Bless him!

At such times we have whirlwind of fun. Swamiji will stand on the floor with a white napkin draped over his arm, a la the waiters on the dining cars, and will in tone in perfect imitation their call for dinner — “Last call fo’ the dining cah. Dinner served”. — Irresistibly funny! And then, at table, such gales of laughter over some quip or jest, for he unfailingly discovers. the little idiosyncrasies of each one — but never sarcasm or malice — just fun.

Since my last letter to you when I told you of Swamiji’s capacity for merriment, so many little things have occurred to make one see how varied are the aspects of Vivekananda. We are trying to take notes of all that he says but I find myself lost in listening and forget the notes. His voice is wondrously beautiful. One might well lose oneself in its divine music. However, dear Miss Waldo is taking very full notes of the lessons and in that way they will be preserved.

Some good fairy must have presided at our birth — C’s and mine. We do not. as yet, know much of karma and reincarnation but we are beginning to see that both are involved in our being brought into touch with Swamiji.

Sometimes I ask him rather daring questions, for I am so anxious to know just how he would react under certain conditions. He takes it so kindly when I in my impulsive way sometimes “rush in where angels fear to tread”. Once he said to some one, “Mrs. Funke rests me, she is so naive”. Wasn’t that dear of him?

One evening, when it was raining and we were all sitting in the living room, the Swami was talking about pure womanhood and told us the story of Sita. How he can tell a story! You see it, and all the characters become real. I found myself wondering just how some of the beautiful society queens of the West would appear to him — especially those versed in the art of allurement — and before I took time to think, out popped the question, and immediately I was covered with confusion. The Swami, however, looked at me calmly with his big, serious eyes and gravely replied, “If the most beautiful woman in the world were to look at me in an immodest or unwomanly way she would immediately turn into a hideous, green frog, and one does not, of course, admire frogs!”

Apropos of my name, something so funny happened. One day, we all walked down to the village and passed a glass-blower’s tent. Swami was much interested in this and held a whispered conversation with the glass-blower. Then he asked us to take a walk through the main street of the village and upon our return the glass-blower handed him sundry mysterious packages which proved to contain a gift for each of us, a large crystal ball, each one different with our names blown in the glass “With the love of Vivekananda”. Upon reaching the house, we opened our packages. My name was spelled — Phunkey”. We were convulsed with laughter but not where he could hear us. He never having seen my name written, “Phunkey” was the result.

And he was so sweet, so gentle and benign all that evening. just like an indulgent father who had given his children beautiful gifts, although many of us were much older than he.

The Swami has accepted C, as one fitted for his work in India. She is so happy. I was very disappointed, because he would not encourage me to go to India. I had a vague idea that to live in a cave and wear a yellow robe would be the proper thing to do if one wished to develop spiritually. How foolish of me and how wise Swamiji was! He said, “You are a householder. Go back to Detroit, find God in your husband and family. That is your path at present.”

Later: This morning we went to the village and Swami had tin-types taken of himself at our request. He was so full of fun, so merry. I am trying to write you in class as there is literally no other time. I am sitting near the Swami, and he is saying these very words. “The guru is like a crystal. He reflects perfectly the consciousness of all who come to him, He thus understands how and in what way to help.” He means by this that a guru must be able to see what each person needs and he must meet them on their own plane of consciousness.

Now he has closed the class for the morning, and he has turned to me, “Mrs. Funke, tell me a funny story. We are going to part soon, and we must talk funny things, isn’t it?”…

We take long walks every afternoon, and our favourite walk is back of the cottage down a hill and then a rustic path to the river. One day there was olfactory evidence of a polecat in the vicinity, and ever since Swami will say, “Shall we walk down Skunk Avenue?”

Sometimes we stop several times and sit around on the grass and listen to Swami’s wonderful talks. A bird, a flower, a butterfly, will start him off, and he will tell us stories from the Vedas or recite Indian poetry. I recall that one poem started with the line, “Her eyes are like the black bee on the lotus.” He considered must of our poetry to be obvious, banal, without the delicacy of that of his own country.

Wednesday, August 7th: Alas, he has departed! Swamiji left this evening at 9 o’clock on the steamer for Clayton where he will take the train for New York and from there sail for England.

The last day has been a very wonderful and precious one. This morning there was no class. He asked C. and me to take a walk, as he wished to be alone with us. (The others had been with him all summer, and he felt we, should have a last talk.) We went up a hill about half a mile away. All was woods and solitude. Finally he selected a low-branched tree, and we sat under the low spreading branches. Instead of the expected talk, he suddenly said, “Now we will meditate. We shall be like Buddha under the Bo tree.” He seemed to turn to bronze, so still was he. Then a thunderstorm came up, and it poured. He never noticed it. 1I raised my umbrella and protected him as much as possible. Completely absorbed in his meditation, he was oblivious of everything. Soon we heard shouts in the distance. The others had come out after us with raincoats and umbrellas. Swamiji looked around regretfully. for we had to go, and said, “Once more am I in Calcutta in the rains.”

He was so tender and sweet all this last day. As the steamer rounded the bend in the river, he boyishly and joyously waved his hat to us in farewell, and he had departed indeed!

As I finish these brief reminiscences, the calendar tells me that it is February 14, 1925 — just thirty-one years almost to the very hour I first saw and heard Swamiji at the Unitarian Church.

Ah, those blessed, halcyon days at Thousand Island Park! The nights all glowing with the soft mystery of moonlight or golden starlight. And yet the Swami’s arrival amongst us held no mystery, apparently. He came in simple guise.

We found later that anything which smacked of the mystery-monger was abhorrent to him. He came to make manifest the Glory and Radiance of the Self. Man’s limitations are of his own making. “Thine only is the hand that holds the rope that drags thee on.” This was the motif running through the Swami’s teaching.

With infinite pains he tried to show us the path he himself had trod. After thirty-one years Swamiji stands out in my consciousness a colossal figure — a cleaver of bondage, knowing when and where not to spare. With his two-edged flaming sword came this Man “out of the East” — this Man of Fire and Flame, and some there were who received him, and to those who received him he gave Power.

Such was Vivekananda!

(Prabuddha Bharata, February 1927)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
MADAM E. CALVÉ

IT has been my good fortune and my joy to know a man who truly “walked with God”, a noble being, a saint, a philosopher, and a true friend. His influence upon my spiritual life was profound. He opened up new horizons before me; enlarging and vivifying my religious ideas and ideals; teaching me a broader understanding of truth. My soul will bear him eternal gratitude.

This extraordinary man was a Hindu monk or the order of the Vedantas. He was called the Swami Vivekananda, and was widely known in America for his religious teachings. He was lecturing in Chicago one year when I was there; and as I was at that time greatly depressed in mind and body. I decided to go to him, having seen how he had helped some of my friends.

An appointment was arranged for me; and when I arrived at his house. I was immediately ushered into his study. Before going I had been told not to speak until he addressed me. When I entered the room, therefore, I stood before him in silence for a moment. He was seated in a noble attitude of meditation, his robe of saffron yellow failing in straight lines to the floor, his head swathed in a turban bent forward, his eyes on the ground. After a brief pause he spoke without looking up.

“My child,” he said, “what a troubled atmosphere you have: about you! Be calm! It is essential!”

Then in quiet voice, untroubled and aloof, this man, who did not even know my name, talked to me of my secret problems and anxieties. He spoke of things that I thought were unknown even to my nearest friends. It seemed miraculous, supernatural!

“How do you know all this?” I asked at last. “Who has talked of me to you?”

He looked at me with his quiet smile as though I were a child who had asked a foolish question.

“No one has talked to me,” he answered gently. “Do you think that is necessary? I read in you as in an open book.”

Finally it was time for me to leave.

“You must forget,” he said as I rose. “Become gay and happy again. Build up your health. Do not dwelt in silence upon your sorrows. Transmute your emotions into some form of external expression. Your spiritual health requires it. Your art demands it.”

I left him, deeply impressed by his words and his personality. He seemed to have emptied my brain of all its feverish complexities and placed there instead his clear and calming thoughts.

I became once again vivacious and cheerful, thanks to the effect of his powerful will. He did not use any of the ordinary hypnotic or mesmeric influences. It was the strength of his character, the purity and intensity of his purpose, that carried conviction. It seemed to me, when I came to know him better that he lulled one’s chaotic thoughts into a state of peaceful acquiescence, so that one could give complete and undivided attention to his words.

He often spoke in parables, answering our questions or making his points clear by means of a poetic analogy. One day we were discussing immortality and the survival of individual characteristics. He was expounding his belief in reincarnation, which was a fundamental part of his teaching.

“I cannot bear the idea!” I exclaimed. “I cling to my individuality, unimportant as it may be! I don’t want to be absorbed into an eternal unity. The mere thought is terrible to me.”

One day a drop of water fell into the vast ocean,” the Swami answered. “When it found itself there, it began to weep and complain just as you are doing. The great ocean laughed at the drop of water, ‘Why do you weep?’ it asked. ‘I do not understand. When you join me, you join all your brothers and sisters, the other drops of water of which I am made. You become the ocean itself. If you wish to leave me, you have only to rise up on a sunbeam into the clouds. From there you can descend again, a little drop of water, a blessing and a benediction to the thirsty earth.'”

With the Swami and some of his friends and followers I went upon a most remarkable trip, through Turkey. Egypt, and Greece. Our party included the Swami; Father Hyacinthe Loyson; his wife, a Bostonian; Miss MacLeod of Chicago, an ardent Swamist and charming, enthusiastic woman; and myself, the song bird of the troupe.

What a pilgrimage it was! Science, philosophy, and history ‘ had no secrets from the Swami. I listened with all my ears to the wise and learned discourse that went on around me. I did not attempt to join in their arguments, but I sang on all occasions, as is my custom. The Swami would discuss all sorts of questions with Father Loyson, who was a scholar and a theologian of repute. It was interesting to see that the Swami was able to give the exact text of a document, the date of a Church Council, when Father Loyson himself was not certain.

When we were in Greece, we visited Eleusis. He explained its mysteries to us and led us from altar to altar, from temple to temple, describing the processions that were held in each place, intoning the ancient prayers, showing us the priestly rites.

Later, in Egypt, one unforgettable night, he led us again into the past, speaking to us in mystic, moving words, under the shadow of the silent sphinx.

The Swami was always absorbingly interesting, even under ordinary conditions. He fascinated his hearers with his magic tongue. Again and again we would miss our train, sitting calmly in a station waiting-room, enthralled by his discourse and quite oblivious of the lapse of time. Even Miss MacLeod, the most sensible among us, would forget the hour, and we would in consequence find ourselves stranded far from our destination at the most inconvenient times and places.

One day we lost our way in Cairo. I suppose, we had been talking too intently. At any rate, we found ourselves in a squalid, ill-smelling street, where half-clad women lolled from windows and sprawled on doorsteps.

The Swami noticed nothing until a particularly noisy group of women on a bench in the shadow of a dilapidated building began laughing and calling to him. One of the ladies of our party tried to hurry us along, but the Swami detached himself gently from our group and approached the women on the bench.

“Poor children!” he said. “Poor creatures! They have put their divinity in their beauty. Look at them now!”

He began to weep. The women were silenced and abashed. One of them leaned forward and kissed the hem of the robe, murmuring brokenly in Spanish, “Humbre de Dios, humbre de Dios!” (Man of God!). Another, with a sudden gesture of modesty and fear, threw her arm in front of her face as though she would screen her shrinking soul from those pure eyes.

This marvellous journey proved to be almost the last occasion on which I was to see the Swami. Shortly afterward he announced that he was to return to his own country. He felt that his end was reproaching, and he wished to go back to the community of which he was director and where he had spent his youth.

A year later we heard that he had died, after writing the book of his life, not one page of which was destroyed. He passed away in the state called samadhi, which means, in Sanskrit, to die voluntarily, from a will to die, without accident or sickness, saying to his disciples. “I will die on such a day.”1

Years later, when I was travelling in India, I wished to visit the convent where the Swami had spent his last days. His mother took me there. I saw the beautiful marble tomb that one of his American friends, Mrs. Leggett, had erected over his grave. I noticed that there was no name upon it. I asked his brother, who was a monk in the same order,2 the reason of this omission. He looked at me in astonishment, and with a noble gesture that I remember to this day. “He has passed on.” he answered.

The Vedantas believe that they have preserved, in their original purity and simplicity, the teachings of Hinduism. They have no temples, saying their prayers in a simple oratory, with no symbolic figures or pictures to stimulate their piety. Their prayers are all addressed to the Unknown God.

“O, Thou who hast no name! O, Thou whom none dare name! O, Thou the Great Unknown!” they say in their supplications.

The Swami taught me a sort of respiratory prayer. He used to say that the forces of the deity, being spread everywhere throughout the ether, could be received into the body through the indrawn breath.

The monks of the Swami’s brotherhood received us with simple, kindly hospitality. They offered us flowers and fruits, spreading a table for us on the lawn beneath a welcome shade.

At our feet the mighty Ganga flowed. Musicians played to us on strange instruments, weird, plaintive chants that touched the very heart. A poet improvised a melancholy recitative in praise of the departed Swami. The afternoon passed in a peaceful, contemplative calm.

The hours that I spent with these gentle philosophers have remained in my memory as a time apart. These beings, pure, beautiful, and remote, seemed to belong to another universe. a better and wiser world.

(Prabuddha Bharata, November 1922)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
MAUD STUMM

IT was in the fall of 1895 that I first saw him, sitting with his back to the light in Mrs. Leggett’s sitting room in Paris. I did not catch his name, but presently found myself next to him, and being asked if I spoke French. He said he didn’t either; when I asked him if in his opinion English would be the next dominant language of the world — as they seemed to be the coming race — “The next great leading force on the earth will be the Tartars or the Negroes” — was his astonishing reply; and he proceeded to give his reasons. I found that he dealt not with decades or even centuries but with vast ages and movements of races, as judged by his knowledge of the past.

Then I inquired who this deep-voiced man was, and was told he was a holy man from the East, Swami Vivekananda. It was long after this that the flower of the Italian army was destroyed utterly by the Negroes of Abyssinia, and I recalled the prophecy that sounded so unlikely!

[She saw him at a dinner given by Mrs. Francis Leggeit at the Metropolitan Club, New York, in 1896.]

Besides this wonderful guest were three others, one of them the young Boston woman who had taken the prize for the “Hymn of the Republic” sung at the World’s Fair. She was little and sat very erect, with an alert expression. Swami was rolling out Sanskrit and translating the ancient glories of India, nobody daring to speak. He dwelt finally upon the spiritual superiority of the Hindu, even today. Thereupon the Boston lady interrupted: “But, Swami, you must admit that the common people of India are way below the cultivation of the same class in, say Massachusetts; why look at one item — the newspapers!” Swami, recalled from his poetic flight, raised his great eyes and regarded her silently. “Yes, Boston is a very civilized place,” he said. “I landed there once, a stranger in a strange land. My coat was like this red one and I wore a turban. I was proceeding up a street in the busy part of the town when I became aware that I was followed by a great number of men and boys. I hastened my pace and they did too. Then something struck my shoulder and I began to run, dashing around a corner, and up a dark passage, just before the mob in full pursuit, swept past — and I was safe! Yes,” he concluded, “Massachusetts is a very civilized place!” Even this did not silence the little woman, and with astonishing temerity she raised her voice again to say, “But, Swami, no doubt a Bostonian in Calcutta would have created just such a scene!” “That would be impossible,” he replied, “for with us it is unpardonable to show even polite curiosity to the stranger within our gates, and never open hostility.”

The next time I remember seeing Swami Vivekananda was when Mrs. Colston and I met him and… Turiyananda, when they landed in New York in 1899. Tired and ill-looking, I saw them early on an August morning descend the gangplank of the small steamer. I had telegraphed Sydney Clarke to help us by being at the pier to look after their baggage. He came, greeted them, claimed the curious foreign-looking boxes, had them checked, and was off to his work. The boat arrived ahead of time, and we happened to be the only three in town at that hour, the party from Ridgely arriving at 10 o’clock, and so disappointed! … As Swami landed with Turiyananda from the steamer, he was carrying most carefully a big bottle wrapped in papers that were torn and ragged; this precious bottle, which he refused to relinquish before reaching Binne-water, contained a wonderful kind of sauce like curry; brought thus by hand from India. “For Jo!” (Josephine MacLeod) he said….

Then we all went back together, and the days that followed! The air of freedom seemed to do him good — and such talks, such wonderful sermons! With his flame-coloured robes draped about him, what a figure he was as he strode the lawns of Ridgely! His stride came nearer to the poet’s description of a “step that spurned the earth” than anything I ever expect to see again; and there was a compelling majesty in his presence and carriage that could not be imitated or described.

One day he told me that he wanted to undertake some sort of work that would keep his hands busy and prevent him from thinking of things that fretted him at that time — and would I give him drawing lessons? So materials were produced, and at an appointed hour he came, promptly, bringing to me, with a curious little air of submission, a huge red apple, which he laid in my hands, bowing gravely. I asked him the significance of this gift, and he said, “in token that the lessons may be fruitful” — and such a pupil as he proved to be! Once only did I have to tell him anything; his memory and concentration were marvellous, and his drawings strangely perfect and intelligent for a beginner. By the time he had taken his fourth lesson, he felt quite equal to a portrait; so… Turiyanananda posed, like any bronze image, and was drawn capitally — all in the study of Mr. Leggett, with its divan for our seat, and its fine light to aid us. Many great ones may come to that room in its future years, and probably will, but never again that childlike man, toiling over his crayons, with as single a mind and heart as if that were his vocation. How often he thanked me for the pleasure it gave him, and for the joy of learning, even that!

Then one very warm day, in the morning-room, we asked him to show us how he wound his turban and he did, adding several other methods employed by different castes and tribes. When he arranged it as the desert people do, to keep the neck from the great heat, I asked him to pose, and he did, talking all the time. That was the day he talked to us of purity and truth. There are many memories connected with those days at Ridgely. Nearly every day Swami was wonderful in a new way! and now it would be music that he dwelt upon, now art, and once he burst into the morning-room, declaring for “Liberty”. “What do I care if Mohammed was a good man, or Buddha! Does that alter my own goodness or evil? Let us be good for our own sake on our own responsibility! Not because somebody way back there was good!” Another time he tried to teach me an ancient Indian love song:

And the flower says, nodding, nodding,
Come gather me, and make of me a garland
For the neck of thy beloved!

I could learn the words, but the air was quite beyond me, so full of little half-tones, and curious runs and turns.

Soon after this, a very large and elaborate dinner was given at Ridgely — the flowers and lights on the table were wonderful and the ladies all in their loveliest gowns and jewels. At a moment when the talk and gaiety had reached its height, and I was observing it all without at that instant taking part, thinking of the good fortune that made such a thing possible and wondering if they all were as merry as they seemed, Swami was seated just obliquely opposite to me and all at once I heard his deep even tones, as if right at my ear, and through all the noise of other talk, “Don’t let it fool you. Baby.” And I saw he had been observing me, over the flowers and lights. (“Baby” was his nickname for me; why I do not know.)

“You never can hide your heart behind those eyes,” he told me once. “for they speak before your lips.” And then he added, “Don’t try to. Keep the shell of pretence that everybody goes encased in off yourself; don’t let it form. You will suffer, but you will feel more and do better work. Nearly all the world goes in a thick casing of convention and hypocrisy — like the two men in the fable, greeting each other with cheek pressed to cheek, each looking over the other’s shoulder, meanwhile winking at the rest of the world.”

One of the greatest things about Swami was his human side. Like a big lovable boy, he thoroughly enjoyed the things he liked: ice cream, for example. How many times I have seen him rise from the table after salad, excusing himself to smoke or walk, when a very quick word from Lady Betty (Mrs. Francis H. Leggett) that she believed there was to be ice cream would turn him back instantly, and he would sink into his place with a smile of expectancy and pure delight seldom seen on the face of anybody over sixteen. He just loved it, and he had all he wanted too.

While I was there that aunimn, I had a worriment that bothered me a good deal, and though I said nothing of it to anyone, it was constantly in my thoughts. Late one afternoon Swami asked me to take a little walk to see a threshing machine at work in a barnyard visible from the west windows of Ridgely. I had been staying in the village for a week, coming every day to the Manor House, and sharing in all its dear delights. All at once, as we went down the hill, he said, “Where were you last night? We missed you at the Ridgely party.” I was perfectly amazed but managed to say I had not heard of it. “Wonderful affair,” he continued, “stringed instruments and such a supper! Pheasants'” he added. “Ever taste pheasant?” “No,” I faltered, “tell me who was there.” “Oh everybody,” he said, “and they danced and danced, not at the Casino but in the house, everything moved out. Wonderful party!” Why I had not been asked and what it all meant, how they could have managed not to speak of it to me before or after! Well, I gave it up, and did not learn until the next day that it was fable, told to change my line of thought and lift me out of the worry for a little while. And nothing could have been more convincing than his manner.

I can see him now, lying at full length on the green couch in the hall, sound asleep like a tired child. Once I tried to draw his features thus, in absolute repose; the lines of the mouth were so simple and lovely and yet so very difficult!

Once he asked me at the end of the drawing lessons, what he could do for me. And having heard that he was wonderful at reading the future, I begged him to do it for me. So he said he would when he felt “prophetic”. A few days after he said, “Come!” and led the way to the library. We sat on the green divan, and asking me to open my hand flat, he laid his hand lightly upon it and turned his head away. He was absolutely silent and as nearly everyone had gone off to walk or read, I hoped for an uninterrupted reading. He took a deep breath or two and began to speak, “I see…” when the door burst open and Alberta in her riding habit descended upon us and broke the spell. He never took it up again and I left shortly after.

Another time there were several lady guests, two of them were accompanied by daughters. We were in the hall, after dinner, and he was draped in his flame-coloured silks. Oh, how splendid a figure, enthralling to the heart and imagination. As he sat by the fire, his eyes slowly turned from one to the other, heavy, dark, liquid eyes, like the “thick clustering bees” in the Eastern simile. All at once he began to speak on marriage, and from the first word the depth of his great meaning was apparent. He spoke as I have never heard a man speak to women. “Of the space that makes attraction felt” in that great bond; and while it seemed to cause some alarm at first to the two mothers, the dignity and nobility of his presentation soon enthralled them too. We shall none of us hear its like again. His views were those of a perfectly normal and natural being with a spiritual nature equal to the other. The words that he said were like a song, impossible to repeat, but of so clear a meaning that they were the very stuff of life itself. When he had finished he arose and amid perfect stillness took his departure; the ideal of a holy man.

(Vedanta and the West, November-December 1953)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
SISTER NIVEDITA

1. Calcutta, February 15, 1899: My lecture on Kali came off on Monday. The Albert Hall was crammed. The Chairman spoke against Kali and me, and was very touching, when unfortunately a devotee got up and amidst tremendous excitement called him all sorts of names. I am sorry to tell you that I laugh whenever I think about it all. Swami was greatly pleased about the lecture, and I trust that there is some reason, for I have several times since been inclined to think that I had done nothing but harm. You see the — declare that that was not Kali worship, and that only what appealed to their lowest feelings was understood by the mob.

Anyway, the Kalighat people have asked me to speak on Kali worship there, at Kalighat. It may not come to anything, but Swami thinks that would be the greatest blow that could be struck against exclusiveness. One lovely gift my lecture has brought me is the friendship and enthusiasm of a young boy full of noble impulses and freshness. I have found out the culminating point of sacrifice, and wonder if I could express it. It seems that the sacrifice of animals only goes on till the devotee is strong enough to offer himself instead, and then, like the Pelican he draws his own blood, and buries the feet of the Mother in flowers dipped in it. To me it explains and justifies the whole. I don’t know how you will feel about it. Everyone seemed to know about that when Swami explained it to me, so I suppose it is recognized.

Yesterday morning two of us went early to be blessed by the old Devendra Nath Tagore. Swami sent word early that he was particularly pleased, and I told the old man this, and said I felt that I was making Swami’s pranams as well as my own. He was quite touched, said he had met Swami once when wandering round in a boat, and would greatly like him to come to him once more. When I told Swami, he was wonderfully moved, and said, “Of coarse I’ll go, and you can go with me, and fix a day as soon as you please!” It seems that as a boy he clambered up into Mr. T’s boat and put anxious questions about Advaitism, and the old man paused and said gently at last, “The Lord has only shown me dualism.” And then he had patted him and said he had the yogi’s eyes.

2. Calcutta, February 21, 1899: My Kali lecture had been a good foundation for bringing Swami to an issue with some friends, whom we were visiting. And so the talk had been all of symbolism. He said,”Poor M. has never studied the history of symbolism. That is why he does not understand that the natural symbols are no good. You see I had a curious education; I went to Shri Ramakrishna and I loved the man, but I hated all his ideas. And so for six years it was hard fighting all the time. I would say, I don’t care in the least for this thing you want me to do’, and he would say, ‘Never mind, just do it, and you will see that certain results follow.’ And all that time he gave me such love; no one has ever given me such love, and there was so much reverence with it. He used to think, “This boy will be So-and-so’, I suppose, and he would never let me do any menial service for him. He kept that up to the very moment of his death too. He wouldn’t let me fan him, and many other things he would not let me do.”

3. Calcutta, March 12, 1899: Last night a monk called, and when I said I wanted to interview Swami for Awakened India, offered to take me back at 6 in the house-boat, if I would drive home. S. came too, in order to bring me home, so we walked. We got there at 8 o’clock. Swami had been sitting beside the fire under the tree…. When I had interviewed him, he said, “I say, Margot, I have been thinking for days about that line of least resistance, and it is a base fallacy. It is a comparative thing. As for me, I am never going to think of it again. The history of the world is the history of a few earnest men, and when one man is earnest the world must just come to his feet. I am not going to water down my ideals, I am going to dictate terms.”…

4. Calcutta, April 9, 1899: Swami says my great fault is attempting too much, in which he is emphatically right. I am to give up all thought of plague-nursing and throw my whole heart and soul still deeper into the sanitation that we have now on hand. Won’t I be just? This is an infinitely higher proof of self-sacrifice and obedience on my part, as you know well, than the delightful excitement of risking plague would be. I say this out of a childish haughtiness, because a friend I prize well is grieved that I have not gone on. And I, too proud to give him a chance of overtly saying so, much less of vindicating myself, am still not proud enough to be beyond the doubts of conscience.

We have had two hundred and thirty-five rupees subscribed for sanitation. It seems a great success, though of course we could do with a great deal more. When the monk who has the work in hand went over on Saturday to report, he said Swami was so touched by the news, that they had two hours of everything, from the Upanishads onwards, “There could be no religion without that activity, that manhood and co-operation. There was Nivedita living in a corner and English people helping her. God bless them all!” But to my great amusement when I reported today, he just winked and said. “Plague, Margot, plague.” He told me, “Our men might be rough and unpolished, but they were the manly men in Bengal. The manhood of Europe was kept up by the women, who hated unmanliness. When would Bengali girls play this part, and drench with merciless ridicule every display of feebleness on the pan of man?”

5. Calcutta, May 1, 1899: …At the Math Swami is lying ill with fever and bronchitis.

On Friday I went to lunch with Swami… .His mood on Saturday was entirely different, however. His days were drawing to an end; but even if they were not, he was going to give up compromise. He would go to the Himalayas, and live there in meditation. He would go out into the world and preach smashing truths. It had been good for a while to go amongst men and tell them that they were in their right place, and so on. But he could do that no longer. Let them give up, give up, give up. Then he said very quietly, “You won’t understand this now, Margot; but when you get further on you will.” …

I find there is money enough in Bengal for Swami, but people want to make their conditions, and so it never reaches him. This is his true attitude of staunchly refusing plum cake, and accepting starvation as the price of principle…..Swami is right about the world being reached that way and no other. The world is something that overcomes the man who seeks it and crouches to him who renounces it….

6. Calcutta, May 8, 1899: How beautiful those times are, “Thy place in life is seeking after Thee. Therefore be thou at rest from seeking after it,” After all, that is the whole truth. The things after which one may and must seek are so very different.

I have seen Swami today. He told me how, as a child of thirteen, he came across a copy of Thomas à Kempis which contained in the preface an account of the Author’s monastery and its organization. And that was the abiding fascination of the book to him. Never thinking that he would have to work out something of the sort one day. “I love Thomas à Kempis, you know, and know it almost off by heart. If only they had told what Jesus ate and drank, where he lived and slept, and how he passed the day, instead of all rushing to put down what he said! Those long lectures! Why, all that can be said in religion can be counted on a few fingers. That does not matter, it is the man that results that grows out of it. You lake a lump of mist in your hand, and gradually, gradually, it develops into a man. Salvation is nothing in itself, it is only a motive. All those things are nothing, except as motives. It is the man they form, that is everything!” And now I remember he began this by saying, “It was not the words of Shri Ramakrishna but the life he lived that was wanted, and that is yet to be written. After all, this world is a series of pictures, and man-making is the great interest running through. We were all watching the making of men, and that alone. Shri Ramakrishna was always weeding out and rejecting the old, he always chose the young for his disciples.”

7. Calcutta, 1899: The event of the week has been my talk with my friends on Friday night. The husband told me, with some bitterness, that he meant to school himself into calling me “Sister Nivedita” instead of “Miss Noble”, then he would be able to think of me less of a human being. At present my dreadful narrowness hurt him unbearably. I got him to tell me our differences. Then it came out. The worship of Swami’s guru, “A man cast in a narrow mould, a man who held woman to be something half-fiend, so that when he saw one, he had a fit.” Between a gasp and a smile I said I could not accept the description. I pointed out that we, none of us, least of all Swami, wanted him to worship too. That was personal. Then again, “An avatara-doctrine could not supply India’s present need of a religion all-embracing, sect-uniting, etc.” To me this is curious, for it seems the only possible way to meet that need — an avatara that declares that sects are at an end. The man who does not believe in incarnation will not call him an avatara like Swami. Again my friend said, “This could not prove the new religion.” I said no one wanted it, no one was planning or bothering to do more than this one bit of educational work that the Order had before it, in all directions now. Questions of worship and the religion of the future could do what they liked. Then he spoke of the great thrill with which he heard Swami say that his mission was to bring manliness to his people, and with which still in England he read the Calcutta lectures and saw him contemptuously tear his great popularity to tatters for the real good of truth and man. But when he found him proceeding to worship his guru and other things, he had dropped with a groan. The man who had been a hero had become the leader of a new sect. I tell you all this by way of record. Some day people will say, “Swami neither did nor taught anything new”, so this emotional divergent is very precious to me.

8. Coasting Ceylon, June 28, 1899: It was quite exciting at Madras. Crowds of people had an appeal to the Governor to let Swami land. But plague considerations prevailed, and we were kept on board, to my great relief, for the sea-voyage is doing him a world of good, and one day of crowds and lectures would be enough to cause him utter exhaustion. It was sufficiently tiring to have to look down and be polite to the constant succession of boat-loads who came to the snip’s side with presents and addresses all day….

… Swami had just been here for an hour, and somehow the talk drifted on to the question of Love. Amongst other things he talked about the devotion of the English wife and the Bengali wife, of the suffering they would go through without a word. Then of the little gleam of sunshine and poetry, to which all human love must wade through oceans of tears, Then the tears of sorrow alone bring spiritual vision, never tears of joy. That dependence is fraught with misery, independence alone is happiness. That almost all human love, save sometimes a mother’s, is full of dependence. It is for oneself, not for the happiness of the one loved, that it is sought. That the love on which he could most surely count, if he became a drunkard tomorrow, was not that of his disciples, they would kick him out in horror, but that of a few (not all) of his gurubhais. To them he would be still the same. “And mind this, Margot,” he said. “It is when half a dozen people learn to love like this that a new religion begins. Not till then. I always remember the woman who went to the sepulchre early in the morning, and as she stood there she heard a voice and she thought it was the gardener, and then Jesus touched her, and she turned round, and all she said was “My Lord and my God!’ That was all, ‘My Lord and my God.’ The person had gone. Love begins by being brutal, the faith, the body. Then it becomes intellectual, and last of all it reaches the spiritual. Only at the last. ‘My Lord and My God.’ Give me half a dozen disciples like that and I will conquer the world.”

9. America, October 9, 12 & 13, 1899: Swami has been pacing up and down for an hour and a half,’warning me against politeness, against this “Lovely” and “Beautiful”, against this continual feeling of the external. “Come to the Himalayas,” he would say every now and then. “Realize yourself without feeling; and when you have known that, you can fall upon the world like a bolt from the blue. I have no faith in those who ask. ‘Will any listen to my preaching?’ Never yet could the world refuse to hear the preaching of him who had anything to say. Stand up in your own might. Can you do that? Then come away to the Himalayas and learn.” Then he broke into Shankaracharya’s sixteen verses on Renunciation, ending always with a humming refrain “Therefore, you fool, go and worship the Lord”. To get rid of all these petty relations of society and home, to hold the soul firm against the perpetual appeals of senses, to realize that the rapture of autumn trees is as truly sense-enjoyment as a comfortable bed or a table dainty, to hate the silly praise and blame of people — these things were the ideal that he was holding up, “Practise titiksha,” he said again and again, that is, bearing the ills of the body without trying to remedy, and without remembering them. The monk whose fingers were rotting away with leprosy and who stooped gently to replace the maggot that fell from the remaining joint, was the example he used. And he talked about loving misery and embracing death. Later he was pointing out how the only civilizations that were really stable were those that had been touched with vairagya.

Surely it cannot be that anyone of us fails to see that even the round of duties is merely a formula. It seems so clear that one is held by a chain that one has never yet been strong enough to break. Yesterday Swami talked of Shiva. “Let your life in the world be nothing but a thinking to yourself,” Even meditation would be a bondage to the free soul, but Shiva goes on and on for the good of the world, the Eternal Incarnation, and Hindus believe that but for the prayers and meditations of these great souls, the world would fall to pieces (that is, others would find no chance of manifesting and so coming to freedom) at once. For meditation is the greatest service, the most direct, that can be rendered.

He was talking too of the Himalayan snows and the green of the forests melting into them. “Nature making eternal Suttee on the body of Mahadeva,” he quoted from Kalidasa.

10. America, October 18, 1899: At lunch on Friday, Swami talked about Shri Ramakrishna. He abused himself for being filled and poisoned with the Western reaction of those days, so that he was always looking and questioning whether this man was “Holy” or not. After six years he came to understand that he was not “Holy”, because he had become identified with holiness. He was full of gaiety and merriment and he had expected the Holy to be so different! Later he began to talk of the functions of the nations, apropos, I suppose, of the Boer War. And as he passed to the problems of the Shudra, which would first be worked out here, his face took on a new light, as if he were actually seeing into the future; and he told of the mixture of races, and of the great tumults, the terrible tumults through which the next state of things must be reached. “And these are the signs,” he quoted from old books! “The Kali Yuga is about to thicken, when money comes to be worshipped as God, when might is right, and men oppress the weak.”

At one of the meals, Mrs. B. turned and pointed out how his poetry had been the weak point on which he had been beguiled to the loss of honour. And she said her husband was never sensitive to criticism about his music. That he expected. He knew it was not perfect. But on road engineering he felt deeply, and could be flattered. Then, in our amusement, we all teased Swami for his carelessness about his religious teacherhood and his vanity about his portrait painting; and he suddenly said. “You see there is one thing called Love. and there is another thing called Union; and Union is greater than Love. I do not love religion, I have become identified with it. It is my life; so no man loves that thing in which his life has been spent, in which he really has accomplished something. That which we love is not yet oneself. Your husband did not love music for which he had always studied: he loved engineering, in which as yet he knew comparatively little. This is the difference between bhakti and jnana; and this is why jnana is greater than bhakti.” All morning his talk of the great sweep of the Mogul hordes under Genghis Khan had been going on. It had begun in his talking about Law, the old Hindu conception of it as the King of kings who never slept and showing that the Hindu had in the Vedas the true notion of it, while other nations only knew it as regulations. On Sunday evening three of us accompanied a guest to her home. We had been reading Schopenhauer on “Women” aloud. Coming back it was wonderful moonlight, and we walked on up the avenue in silence; it seemed as if a sound would have been desecration. About it Swami said, “When a tiger in India is on the trail of prey at night, if its paw or tail makes the least sound in passing, it bites it till the blood comes.” And he talked of the need we Western women had to absorb beauty quietly, and turn it over in the mind at another time.

One afternoon so quiet was everything, we might have been in India. I had been feeling quite inferior to the people who wanted Advaitism and the Vedic texts, but oh, what a dose of the other was here.

It began with a song of Ramprasad, and I’ll try to give you the whole of that early talk.

From the land where there is no night
Has come unto me a man.
And night and day are now nothing to me.
Ritual-worship is become for ever barren.

My sleep is broken. Shall I sleep any more?
Call it what you will, I am awake.
Hush! I have given back sleep to Him whose it was.
Sleep have I put to sleep for ever.

The music has entered the instrument,
And of that mode I have learnt a song.
And that music is always playing before me,
And concentration is the great teacher thereof.

Prasad speaks, understand O Mind, these words of science,
The secret of Her whom I call my Mother.
Shall I break the pot before the market?1
Lo, the six philosophers2 could not find out Kali.

The world hast thou charmed, Mother,
Charmer of Shiva.
Thou who playest on the vina,
Sitting on the huge lotus of muladhara3.

This body is the great vina
And sushumna, ida and pingala are the strings thereof.
And thou playest on the three gamuts,
With the great secret of qualitative differentiation.

Ramakrishna used to see a long white thread proceeding out of himself. At the end would be a mass of light. This mass would open, and within it he would see the Mother with a vina. Then She would begin to play; and as She played, he would see the music turning into birds and animals and worlds and arrange themselves. Then She would stop playing and they would all disappear. The light would grow less and less distinct till it was just a luminous mass, the siring would grow shorter and shorter, and the whole would be absorbed into himself again. And as Swami told this, he said. “Oh, what weird scenes things bring before me, the weirdest scenes of my whole life! Perfect silence, broken only by the cries of the jackals, in the darkness under the great tree at Dakshineswar. Night after night we sat there, the whole night through, and He talked to me. when I was a boy. The guru was always Shiva and was always to be worshipped as Shiva, because he sat under the tree to teach, and destroyed ignorance. One must offer all one’s doings, or even merit would become a bondage and create karma; so Hindus getting you a cup of water will say, ‘To the World’ or may be ‘To the Mother’. But there is one soul that can take it all without harm — One who is eternally protected, eternally the same. unspoilt — He who drank the poison of the world and only made Himself the blue-throated. Offer all you do to Shiva.”

Then he talked of vairagya, how much grander to give one’s youth, how miserable to have only age to offer. Those who come to it old attain their own salvation; but they cannot be gurus, they cannot show mercy. Those who come young shall carry many across without any benefit to themselves.

Then he talked of the school, “Give them all you like, Margot, never mind A B C. It matters nothing. Give as much Ramprasad and Ramakrishna and Shiva and Kali as you like. And do not cheat these Western people, do not pretend it is education and A B C you want money for. Say it is the old Indian spirituality that you want and demand help, do not beg it. Remember you are only the servant of Mother, and if She sends you nothing, be thankful that She lets you go free.”

11. America, October 27, 1899: Yesterday three of us were together when Swami came in, and said. “Let’s have a chat.” He talked about the Ramayana. I’ll tell you a curious thing. When Sadananda talks about the Ramayana. I become convinced that Hanuman is really the hero; when Swami talks of it, Ravana is the central figure. So he told us: Rama was called “The Blue-lotus-eyed”, and he trusted to Mother to help him to recover Sita.4.

But Ravana had prayed to Mother too, and Rama came and found him in her arms so he knew he must do something tremendous, and he vowed one hundred and eight blue lotuses to her image if she would help him. Hanuman went off and got the lotuses, and Rama began the great “Call upon the Mother”. (It was autumn, and the time of Her puja was the spring, so it is in memory of that worship by Rama that the Great Mother Worship has ever since been held in September). Now he covered Her feet with blue lotuses till one hundred and seven were offered (and Mother had stolen one); and lo, the last was missing. But Rama was determined. He was not to be beaten, and calling for a knife, he was about to cut out his own eye that the number of blue lotuses might be complete. And that won the Mother; and She blessed the great hero, so that his arms prevailed. Though not indeed his arms altogether, for in the end Ravana was betrayed by his own brother, and the struggle was brought to an end. “But it was great about the traitor brother in one sense,” said Swami. “For he was taken away to reside at the court of Rama, and thither came the widow of Ravana to look upon the face of the warrior who had robbed her of her husband and son. Rama and his court stood prepared to receive the cortège; but to his amazement, he could see no great queen adorned in splendour, only a simple-looking woman attired in the simple garb of a Hindu widow. ‘Who is this lady?’ he asked the brother in bewilderment, and he replied, ‘Behold, O King, the lioness whom thou hast robbed of her lion and whelps! She comes to gaze upon thy face.'”

What ideals of womanhood Swami holds! Surely not even Shakespeare or Aeschylus when he wrote Antigone, or Sophocles when he created Alcestis had such a tremendous conception. As I read over the things he has said to me of them, and as I realize that it is all, every word of it, a trust for the women of the whole world’s future, but first and chiefly for them of his own land, it seems a trilling thing whether oneself should ever be worthy or not.

One night he was in a great mood of devotion, and told us of Hrishikesh and the little hut that each sannyasin would make for himself and the blazing fire in the evening, and all the sannyasins sitting round it on their own little mats, talking in hushed tones of the Upanishads, “For a man is supposed to have got the truth before he becomes a sannyasin. He is at peace intellectually. All that remains is to realize it; so all need for discussion has passed away and at Hrishikesh, in the darkest of the mountains, by the blazing fire, they may only talk of the Upanishads. Then by degrees, the voices die — silence! Each man sits bolt upright on his mat, and one by one they steal quietly off to their own huts.” Another time he broke out with: “The great defect in Hinduism has been that it offered salvation only on the basis of renunciation. The house-holder was bound by his consciousness of an inferior lot. His part was karma. Renunciation was nothing to him. But renunciation is the whole law. It is all illusion that anyone has been trying to do anything else. We are all struggling to release this great mass of energy. What does that mean but that we are hurrying towards death as fast as we can? The burly Englishman who thinks he wants to possess the earth is really struggling more than most of us to die. Self-preservation is only a mode of renunciation. The desire for life is one method of the love of death.” Swami talked some time of the Sikhs, and their ten Gurus, and he told us a story of Guru Nanak, from the Granth Sahib: He had gone to Mecca, and lay with his feet towards the Caaba Mosque. Then came angry Mohammedans to waken, and if need be, to kill him, for turning his feet towards the place where God was. He woke up quietly, and said simply, “Show me, then, where God is not, that I may turn my feet that way.” And the gentle answer was enough.

12. America, November 4, 1899: On Thursday evening, Swami came in when two of us were talking earnestly; so he joined in, of course. For the first time he talked of defection and disease and treachery. Amongst other things, he said he found himself still the sannyasin, he minded no loss, but he could be hurt through defection. Treachery cut deep.

The details of this Boer War are terrible to me. Strange how the fate of a nation overshadows a man’s karma, and brings a man like General White to disaster! Not England, but Victoria, says the Hindu, won the empire; and even so today, in a detail like the Boer War, no greater than so many that have gone before, no man can foretell the results, for they will be governed by the fact that a new star has appeared in the sky of destiny. By this, and not by any force of arms or numbers, or any visible factor whatever, even the very greatest of men, seem like blind pawns on the chess-board of time, don’t they? The hand that moves them is unseen; only a prophet’s eye now and then catches a glance of the reason; and he who is dashed to pieces in the game seems the only one who is not befooled.

When Swami was talking of Krishna and Rukmini, he said something of the double strain in us of preference and approval. Of how often we give way to desire, and of how our only guide should be the good. Therefore, the wise man is he who likes nothing, and witnesses all. Men find it easy to play their part of life, but something holds the heart captive, and there they do not play. Let the whole be play; like nothing; act; a part all the time. Again he talked of Uma and Shiva. As be says, “It beats all mythology hollow.” Speaking of Shiva he said, “Young is the guru, old is the disciple,”because in India the man who gives his young life is the true guru, but the time for learning religion is old age. And then he commanded us to offer all we did to Shiva, the only protected soul in the universe. Uma, speaking to the Brahmin, said. “Why should He, the Lord of the Universe, dwelt in a graveyard?”

At lunch time I laughed and said that your letter spoke at your wanting “nothing and nobody”. Swami looked up and: said, “No, she doesn’t, that’s right. It’s the last stage one comes to. The beggar must look for alms and rebuffs; but for him who asks nothing, there are no rebuffs.” He said he had been reciting the hatred of fame and wealth all his life, but he was only now beginning to understand what is really meant.

13. Chicago, December 10, 1899: Somebody asked me, “How is it that Swami is so great, and yet today he says, Spirituality is the only thing for my country; I was wrong to desire material good,’ and tomorrow he will be insisting the material benefits must be India’s and so on?” “And his action remains constant both times,” I said; then I went on, showing part of the great helpfulness of these contradictions to myself, how he dramatized for one absolute renunciation of the fruits of action….How true it is indeed that there is no peace without freedom! Is it not absurd to be touched by trifles? I feel the whole need of the whole Vedanta, for it is so helpful to have a will to serve and help absolutely, than to have to sit encased in one body with one way of throwing oneself at difficulties, and only one little narrow path to walk along. But we are all one: is not your way as much mine as Nivedita’s? If one could only realize it!

Anne Arbor,
January 13,1900

To Swami Vivekananda:

Your birthday-poem reached me here last night. There is nothing I could say about it that would not seem commonplace: except that if your beautiful wish were possible, it would break my heart.

For here I am one with Ramprasad — “I do not want to become sugar; I want to eat sugar!” I do not want even to know God in any way; even to think of such things is ridiculous of course — that would not leave my Father unattainably above.

I know one would not need to think of one’s guru — that he would vanish if one realized the Divine — but even in that moment I cannot conceive of perfect bliss without the assurance that his was greater.

One is trying to say impossible things, to think unthinkable thoughts, but you well know what I would express.

I used to think that I wanted to work for the women of India — I used to have alt kinds of grand impersonal ideas — but I I have steadily gone on climbing down from these heights, and I today I want to do things only because they are my Father’s will.

Even knowledge of God seems too like a return of benefits. One longs to serve for serving’s sake, for ever and ever, dear, Master — not for one miserable little life.

And another thing I am sure of, and need to be sure of in true moments, and that is that you will have thousands of children who will be bigger and worthier and able to love you and serve you infinitely better than I, in days that are close at hand.

Yours, daughter,
Margot.

14. Detroit, January 18, 1900: At present I have not in any way come to grief over my relation to Swami — and I have not told it to the world at all. Of that I am sure.

But experience contradicts theory all the time.

On this journey I have seemed to find my feet and to be led every step by Mother Herself. And as I look back I see that the same thing was true before. When I have been free, everything has gone well, but it has been necessary that people should accept my personality with a certain readiness to love me, and when this is so, I find that I simply sit and tell them, for the present, the things Swami tells us. I don’t will one thing or another but unconsciously I seem to be a channel, and I sit and listen to him talking. When I first discovered this, I kept a tight hold over myself, because the acknowledgement of plagiarism while it would have satisfied myself would have been a jarring note. Now I see that it is all right and I don’t bother. Shall a child not rejoice in speaking its fathers’s message?

15. Chicago, January 26, 1900: I am finding daily that Kali’s ways are not as ours, if one may put it so. She puts one person out of the way, only to discover someone else standing ready where one had no more dreamt of help than of flying.

Did I tell you at the last centre how my most blessed helper was the thorniest of all thorns at the beginning of the week? And here it is just the same; two or three of the strongest workers are the most unspeakably unexpected. I find, too, that the marks of a great Renunciation are very different from those of a small, and I laugh daily at our mutual friend’s blindness about Swami’s. Why, that way he has of finding himself in any company, of holding or withholding light indifferently, of caring nothing about people’s opinions of him, are simply gigantic. I only realized, when, after all the love and warmth I had in one town, I reached another and found myself fuming and chafing against the artificiality of people about me, what Swami’s greatness really was, in this respect. And it was these very people, from whom I would have escaped at once if I could, who proved Mother’s appointed instruments — thus setting the seal on Swami’s ways. That irresponsibility of his is so glorious too. Nothing is more enticing than to put oneself into the attitude of generalissimo of the forces, and make splendid plans, compelling fortune; but Swami just waits, and drifts in on the wave. And so on. I am just beginning to understand his bigness.

16. New York, June 4, 1900: You know to my nature a thing hardly seems true or accomplished till it is somehow uttered and left on record.

Swami has just lectured.

I went early and took the seat at the left end of the second row — always my place in London, though I never thought of it at the time.

Then as we sat and waited for him to come in, a great trembling came over me, for I realized that this was, simple as it seemed, one of the test-moments of my life. Since last I had done this thing, how much had come and gone! My own life — where was it? Lost — thrown away like a cast-off garment that I might kneel at the feet of this man. Would it prove a mistake; an illusion; or was it a triumph of choice; a few minutes would tell.

And then he came; his very entrance and his silence as he stood and waited to begin were like some great hymn. A whole worship in themselves.

At last he spoke — his face broke into fun, and he asked what was to be his subject. Someone suggested the Vedanta philosophy and he began.

Oneness — the Unity of all…. “And so the final essence of things is this Unity. What we see as many — as gold, love, Sorrow, the world — is really God…. We see many, yet there is but One Existence…. These names differ only in the degrees of their expression. The matter of today is the spirit of the future. The worm of today — the God of tomorrow. These distinctions which we so love are all parts of one Infinite fact and that one Infinite fact is the attainment of Freedom….

“All our struggle is for Freedom — we seek neither misery nor happiness but Freedom…. Man’s burning unquenchable thirst — never satisfied — asking always for more and more. You Americans are seeking always for more and more. At bottom this desire is the sign of man’s infinitude. For infinite man can only be satisfied when his desire is infinite and its fulfilment infinite also….”

And so the splendid sentences rolled on and on, and we, lifted into the Eternities, thought of our common selves as of babies stretching out their hands for the moon or the sun — thinking them as baby’s toys. The wonderful voice went on:

“Who can help the Infinite….Even the hand that comes to you through the darkness will have to be your own.”

And then with that lingering, heart-piercing pathos that no pen can even suggest, “We — infinite dreamers, dreaming finite dreams.”

Ah, they are mistaken who say that a voice is nothing — that ideas are all. For this in its rise and fall was the only possible music to the poetry of the words — making the whole hour a pause, retreat, in the market place of life — as well as a song of praise in some dim cathedral aisle.

At last — the whole dying down and away in the thought — “I could not see you or speak to you for a moment — I who stand here seeing and talking — if this Infinite Unity were broken for a moment — if one little atom could be crushed and moved out of its place….Hari Om Tat Sat!”

And for me — I had found the infinitely deep things that life holds for us. To sit there and listen was all that it had ever been. Yet there was no struggle of intellectual unrest now — no tremor of novelty.

This man who stood there held my life in the hollow of his hand — and as he once in a while looked my way, I read in his glance what I too felt my own heart, complete faith and abiding comprehension of purpose — better than any feeling ….Swami says, “All accumulations are for subsequent distribution, this is what the fool thinks.”

17. New York, July 15, 1900: This morning the lesson on the Gita was grand. It began with a long talk on the fact that the highest ideals are not for all. Non-resistance is not for the man who thinks the replacing of the maggot in the wound, by the leprous saint, with “Eat, Brother!” disgusting and horrible. Non-resistance is practised by a mother’s love towards an angry child. It is a travesty in the mouth of a coward, or in the face of a lion.

Let us be true. Nine-tenths of our life’s energy is spent in trying to make people think us that which we are not. That energy would be more rightly spent in becoming that which we would like to be. And so it went — beginning with the salutation to an incarnation:

Salutation to thee — the guru of the universe,
Whose footstool is worshipped by the gods.
Thou one unbroken Soul,
Physician of the world’s diseases.
Guru of even the gods,
To thee our salutation.

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

In the Indian tones — by Swami himself.

There was an implication throughout the talk that Christ and Buddha were inferior to Krishna — in the grasp of problems — inasmuch as they preached the highest ethics as a world-path, whereas Krishna saw the right of the whole, in all its parts — to its own differing ideals. But perhaps no one not familiar with his thought would have realized that this lay behind his exclamation, “The Sermon on the Mount has only become another bondage for the soul of man!”

All through his lectures now, he shows this desire to understand life as it is, and to sympathize with it. He takes less of the “Not this, not this” attitude and more of the “Here comes and now follows” sort of tone. But I fear that people find him even more out of touch at a first hearing than ever used to be the case.

He talked after lunch about Bengali poetry, then about astronomy. He confessed to a whimsical doubt as to whether the stars were not merely an optical delusion, since amongst the million of man-bearing earths that must apparently exist, no beings of higher development than ours yet seemed to have attempted signalling to us.

And he suggested that Hindu painting and sculpture had been rendered grotesque by the national tendency to refuse psychic into physical conceptions. He said that he himself knew of his own experience that most physical or material things had psychic symbols, which were often to the material eye grotesquely unlike their physical counterparts. Yesterday he told me how, as a child, he hardly ever was conscious of going to sleep. A ball of coloured light came towards him and he seemed to play with it all night. Sometimes it touched him and burst into a blaze of light, and he passed off. One of the first questions Shri Ramakrishna put to him was about this, “Do you see a light when you sleep?” “Yes,” he replied, “does not everyone sleep so?”

One of the Swamis says this was a psychic something which showed that concentration was a gift with which he started this life, not to be earned during its course. One thing I am sure of, that gift of Swami’s, of never forgetting any step of his experience, is one of the signs of great souls. It must have been a part of that last vision of Buddha.

When we get to the end. we shall not want to know our past incarnations. Maria Theresa and Petrarch and Laura will have no meaning for us, but the steps of our realization will. This is what he shows. I sit and listen to him now, and all appears to the intellect so obvious, to the will so unattainable; and I say to myself. “What were the clouds of darkness that covered me in the old days? Surely no one was ever so blind or so ignorant!” You must have been right when you thought me hard and cold. I must have been so, and it must have been the result of the long effort to see things by the mind alone, without the feelings.

Swami is all against bhakti and emotion now — determined to banish it, he says. But how tremendous is that unity of mind and heart, from which he starts. He can afford to dispense with either — since both are fully developed, and the rest is merely discipline. I fancy most of us will do well to feel all we can.

18. New York, June 24, 1900: Swami is also a visitor in this house where I am staying.

I have just wound up my stay in America by writing a comforting letter to the Rev. Mother (Dhira Mata – Mrs. Ole Bull) telling the dear soul how all his luck has turned, and he is looking like a god, and leaving her to inter that all earth’s crowns are at his feet.

But indeed his all true! As he is now, nothing can resist him.

This morning at eleven, he is to lecture on Mother-Worship, and you shall have every word of that lecture, it I have to pay ten dollars to get it taken down. It was mentioned by someone yesterday to me, before him, and he turned and said, smiling. “Yes — Mother-Worship — that’s what I am going to lecture on, and that is what I love.”

The other morning I offered him advice that struck him as wrong. I wish you could have seen him! It was worth the offence to catch such a glimpse!

He said, “Remember that I am free — free — born free!” And then he talked of the Mother and of how he wished the work and the world would break to pieces that he might go and sit down in the Himalayas and meditate. That Europeans had never preached a religion, because they had always planned; that a few Catholic Saints alone had come near to this; that it was not he but Mother who did all, and whatever She might do was equally welcome to him. That once Shiva, sitting with Uma in Kailasa, arose to go, and when she asked him why, He said “There, look, that servant of mine is being beaten. I must go to his aid.” A moment later He came back-and again She asked him why. “I am not needed. He is helping himself,” was all the reply.

And then he blessed me, before he went, saying “Well! well! You are Mother’s child.” And I went away much moved, because the moment was somehow so great.

(Prabuddha Bharata, January-December 1935)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
ERIC HAMMOND

WHEN Swamiji came to London, he created considerable attention. Something of the wonder and admiration which had surrounded him during the Parliament of Religions at Chicago had anticipated his advent. His arresting appearance and even more arresting eloquence called many persons to his presence. London affords full scope for multitudinous experiences. It is a city of a thousand phases. Preachers and pleaders of all opinions from all parts of the world gravitate to London. The metropolis with its teeming millions is the natural lodestone that attracts men whose views are as varied as the countries by which they are sent forth. Every form of doctrine is exploited there. Every day a host of halls are filled by anxious inquirers listening to exponents of theories more or less thrilling. Opinions and theories are weighed in the balance. Religions are reviewed. Creeds are criticized and compared. The notation of human impulse, onward, upward, is sounded by performers of all degrees.

London is indeed a very volcano of eruptions, sometimes pious, sometimes philosophical, sometimes pretentious, but mainly eager and earnest. Here, then, to London came Swamiji to place himself, among many conflicting elements, as the protagonist of Hinduism. No more fitting or outstanding person could have arrived at the centre of British thought. Fortified by his intimate acquaintance of, and his infinite belief in, Shri Ramakrishna, he brought the full force of that great soul to bear upon the minds of his hearers. The bed-rock principle on which Shri Ramakrishna stood, and which Swamiji expounded, is slated by the latter in these few words: “Do not care for doctrines, do not care for dogmas, or sects, or churches, or temples; they count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man which is spirituality; and the more this is developed in each man, the more powerful is he for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticize no one, for all doctrines and creeds have some good in them. Show by your lives that religion does not mean words, or names, or sects, but that it means spiritual realization. Only those can understand who have felt. Only those that have attained to spirituality can communicate it to others, can be great teachers of mankind. They alone are powers of light” (My Master) This essential doctrine of spirituality and its realization, preached as only Vivekananda could preach it, drew folks towards him from far and near. London quickly learnt that a striking personality had made his advent. Swamiji started a course of addresses, received visitors — in a word made himself known and felt. Among his earnest admirers was Miss Margaret Noble who was predestined subsequently to become his ardent follower, a nun of the Order of Shri Ramakrishna, a resident in India, a wonderfully vivid speaker and writer in defence of the Vedanta. It was indeed at her persistent urging that this present correspondent journeyed from an outlying district to Swamiji’s lodging. There, on certain specified occasions, he might be seen and conversed with. A very uncomfortable evening, cheerless and dismal, found us at his door, where we were met, at first, by disappointment. Swamiji was not at home. However, a very kindly message awaited us. We were permitted – so the message ran – to follow him to the Sesame Club whither he had gone, at brief notice, to speak in place of a lecturer who was prevented from appearing. Obeying instructions with alacrity we sought the Club. We found ourselves in a big drawing room or hall, filled almost to overflowing by smart people in evening dress. Some courteous and obliging person ushered us close to a platform where one or two chairs were vacant. The position was conspicuous and so, alas! were we. Our overcoats were dripping with rain, nor were we otherwise clothed in fine raiment; not anticipating a summons to so distinguished a gathering. Most of those present were, we discovered, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, tutors and the like. The subject announced for lecture was “Education”. Soon he, Swamiji, appeared. He had little, if any notice, and his speech could not have been in any wise prepared. Yet, then, as always, he proved himself more than equal to the occasion. Collected, calm, self-possessed, he stood forward. A Hindu, primed in heart and tongue with Hindu lore and Hindu faith, backed by the prestige of an ancient civilization and culture which inspired him! It was a novel sight, a memorable experience. His dark skin, his deep glowing eyes, even his costume, attracted and fascinated. Above all, eloquence acclaimed him. the eloquence of inspiration. Again, his surprising command of the English language delighted and held his audience, an audience it must be remembered which consisted largely, as we have said, of men and women whose profession it was to teach English students their mother-tongue and through the medium of that tongue instruct them in other branches of knowledge. More. Swamiji soon showed that he was equally versed in history and political economy. He stood among these people on their own ground. Without fear, beseeching no favour, he dealt them blow upon blow enforcing the Hindu principle that the teacher who taught for the money-making was a traitor to the highest and deepest truth. “Education is an integral part of religion and neither one nor the other should be bought or sold.” His words, rapier-like, pierced the armour of scholastic convention; yet no bitterness spoilt his speech, This Hindu, cultured, gracious with his notable smile that disarmed unkindly criticism, held his own and made his mark. He had come sent by the spirit of Shri Ramakrishna, to make that mark; and he had succeeded al the first attempt. The idea that teachers should work with their pupils for love, and not for the love of lucre, not even for the love of livelihood

Discussion followed. Climatic and other reasons for charges for teaching were set forth, but Swamiji maintained his position.

Such then was our first meeting with him; a meeting which suited in reverent friendship, in genuine admiration and in most grateful remembrance.

(Vedanta Kesari, May 1922)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
E. T. STURDY

ALTHOUGH I am not to be present at your gathering in remembrance of your great predecessor, Swami Vivekananda, I think those present may like to have a pen-picture of him from one who was very closely associated with him.

It is now some forty years since Vivekananda left this country, but the impression that he left with me is as vivid now as on the day that I said farewell to him.

I think this is largely accounted for — for I am not strong in reminiscence — by a quality in him which is described by a Sanskrit word ojas: it signifies bodily strength, virility and also vitality and splendour.

In fact he had a magnetic personality, associated with great tranquillity. Whether he was walking in the street or standing in a room, there was always the same dignity.

He had a great sense of humour and as a natural correlative, much pathos and pity for affliction. He was a charming companion and entered with ease into any environment he found. And I found that all classes of educated persons that he was brought in contact with looked up to and admired the innate nobility that was in the man. One felt at all limes that he was, to use a modern expression, “conscious of the presence of God”. In walking, travelling, and leisure times, there constantly came from him some hardly formulated invocation or expression of devotion.

As a teacher he had a great capacity for perceiving the difficulty of an inquirer, and would elucidate it with great simplicity and point to its solution. At the same time he could enter into great intricacies of thought.

I remember well his discussion with Dr. Paul Deussen, the then head of Kiel University. He pointed out where Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann were wrong in founding their philosophy upon the blind will, the Unconscious, as contrasted with Universal Thought, which must precede all desiring or willing. Unfortunately that error continues today and vitiates a great deal of Western psychology by its using a wrong terminology.

I will close this by remarking that, although if we were enlightened we should see Deity in every manifestation, nevertheless it is a great boon when we can perceive it as patent in noble and holy men. One of such was the Swami Vivekananda.

(Vedanta Kesari, February 1937)

REMINISCENCES OF SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
T. J. DESAI

ABOUT this time (1895) I had an invitation from Miss Muller to attend the two public lectures delivered by Swami Vivekananda. I heard the first lecture at St. James’ Hall with Mrs. Ingall. That was the first time I saw the commanding figure of the great Swami. He looked more like an Indian Prince than a sadhu (holy man). He had a bhagva patka (ochre coloured turban) on his head. He electrified the audience by his grand and powerful oratory. The next day the report appeared in the papers that he was the next Indian after Keshab Chandra Sen, who had surprised the English audience by his magnificent oratory. He spoke on the Vedanta. His large eyes were rolling like anything, and there was such an animation about him that it passeth description. After the meeting was over, the Swami took off his turban and put on a huge and deep Kashmiri cap looking like a big Persian hat.

The next time I heard him was at the Balloon Society. He spoke there for some time but not with his former fire. A clergyman got up after the lecture and attacked the Swami, and said that it would have been better if the Swami had taken the trouble of writing out his lecture at home and of reading it there, etc. The Swami got up to reply, and he was now on his mettle. He made such a fiery speech that the clergyman was nowhere. He said that some people had crude notions that the Vedanta could be learnt in a few days. The Swami further said that he had to devote about twelve long years of his life to the study of the Vedanta. He replied to the objections of the clergyman categorically one by one, recited the sonorous Vedic hymn beginning with “Supurnam” (Taittiriya Aranyaka, III. xi.1.) and ended with a triumphant peroration that still rings in my ears.

In 1896 I became a member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. I came in contact with some of the best scholars of the day. Prof. Rhys Davids was the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was a reputed Sanskrit scholar. The times of the meetings were notified to the members beforehand. A paper on some subject of general interest was read, and then discussion followed. Refreshments were then served, and we had ample opportunities of exchanging our views in conversation, and of making friendship with some of the greatest literary lights of the day. The proceedings of the meetings were published in the quarterly Journal of the Society. Miss Duff and several ladies were also members of the Roval Asiatic Society and were generally found at the meetings. Miss Duff was a Sanskrit scholar and had translated into English the book called The Elements of Metaphysics by Prof. Deussen of Germany. It was quite a treat to talk with the “Blue Stockings”, as highly educated ladies were nick-named in England by orthodox people. I spoke in some of the meetings of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Once I remember that a paper was read by Prof. Bain on the Upanishads. Swami Vivekananda and Mr. Ramesh Chandra Dutt. C.I.E., were also there. Sir Raymond West had taken the chair. After the paper was finished, I made a vigorous and spirited speech. I made some remarks there on “egoism” in general and love of “individuality” of Europeans, as hindrances in the way of realizing the Impersonal and Infinite Brahman. Prof. Rhys Davids was particularly tickled, and he made a violent speech. I got up again and quietly told him that I meant no offence; and that I had the greatest respect for the European intellect, but when they dabbled in the philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedanta, they could be safely guided, in some respects, by the Hindus, as it was their forte Just as a common Arabian sailor-boy would know more about the Arabian Sea and would safely lead us to the desired place, rather than the greatest European sailor who was an utter stranger to the shoals and rocks in the Arabian Sea. The effervescence subsided, and we all had a hearty cup of tea together after the temporary storm. This was the first time I saw Mr. Dutt. He also spoke — but in a temperate persuasive manner.

Swami Vivekananda liked my speech very much, and he took me to his place, talking on various subjects on the way. Strange that the Swami had put on a top hat on that day. If I err not, it was on that day that he and some other Swami (Saradananda or Abhedananda) prepared khichudi, etc., at his place, and asked me to partake of the supper with them.

Swami Vivekananda delivered a series of lectures in different places in London on karma-yoga, jnana-yoga, bhakti- yoga, and raja-yoga, during this year (i.e. 1896). He had also been invited to speak al the Btavatsky Lodge. I attended a good many of them. The cream of the English society attended his lectures, and all were mad after him. The Swami used to take walks with me from the lecture-hall to his house, or from his house to some neighbouring places. I very often dined at his place of residence, at his own invitation, or that of my pupil — Miss Muller, and of Mr. Sturdy, who, I believe, paid for the household expenses after the Swami came to live in London from America. Mr. Sturdy was like a real yogi. Mr. Goodwin was another staunch adherent of the Swami, and he took down in shorthand the lectures of the Swami, which were afterwards published.

In July, 1896, a conference of the London Hindu Association was held at the Montague Mansions. The chair was taken by Swami Vivekananda. the Hon. President of the Association, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji was also present. A lecture was delivered on the “Needs of India” by Mr. Ram Mohan Roy, a gentleman from Madras. I, being the Secretary of the Association, had to arrange for the meeting, refreshments, etc. Swami Vivekananda, as chairman of the conference, rose to speak, and he electrified the audience. Reporters of the press were also present. When he struck his hand on the table during his speech, my watch bounded from the table and fell down on the ground, and created a visible sensation. He had a commanding figure, and my landlady, who had come to the meetings with me, was greatly impressed with his speech and personality. While the Swami had captivated the British public by his oratory, it was placarded, as I was going home, that Prince Ranjit Singhji had saved the honour of England against the Australian team. He had scored 154 runs and was not out. The next day there was a big leading article in the London Times about the “Exploits of Indians in England”. Mr. Chatterji had come first in the Indian Civil Service Examination, and Prince Ranjit Singhji had stood first in the cricket averages in that very year.

Later on in the year, when I was living with the Owens for the second time, Swami Vivekananda had come to my house with another Swami (Saradananda or Abhedananda), as he was invited to take his dinner with us. It seemed from his conversation that he did not object to meat-eating, although he and the other Swami took only the vegetarian dishes prepared for us. The Swami used to smoke cigars. The Owens were generally pleased by Swami Vivekananda’s visit. They admired his personality and powers of conversation.

I came in close contact with the Swami during this year (i.e. 1896). Once he delivered a magnificent speech in a magnificent hall in the West End of London, wherein he narrated the story of a young sannyasin who accidentally happened to go to the palace of a Raja, holding a svayamvara1 for his daughter. The princess, instead of throwing the vara-mala, or the “garland of the choice of a bridegroom”, round the neck of any of the princes present, took a fancy for the young sannyasin, and suddenly dropped it round his head. The sannyasin ran away, and she followed him wherever he went, but to no purpose, as he would not lay down his sannyasa and marry her. After the lecture was over, the Swami was surrounded by the best of the beauty of England, and they put questions after questions to him and asked for explanations. He anyhow managed to extricate himself from them; and when he was alone, he heaved a sigh of relief, and asked me to go with him to his house. On the way, in order to sound the mind of the Swami, I asked him whether it was not wrong on the pan of the you sannyasin to break the heart of that young princess by not marrying her, on which he indignantly cried out, “Why should he desecrate himself?”

On another occasion, when Swami Vivekananda and myself were alone in his house, I put to him several knotty questions on Vedanta, and he explained them to me. One of them was about the unity of the individual soul (i.e. jivatman) with the brahman or paramatman. As I had devoted much of my time to the study and realization of the nature of brahman, I was looking for an answer in speechless silence, and at the same time was trying mentally to indentify myself with the Universal Spirit. The Swami, on finding that at a particular moment at that time I was en rapport with brahman, simply cried out, tat-tvam-asi (Thou art That)! I wanted no further explanation. The Swami returned to India towards the end of this year (i.e. 1896).

I subsequently paid a visit to the learned Swami at his private residence. He kindly received me in a cordial manner. I had a talk with him on religious matters during which he repeated several shiokas (verses) from the Bhagavad-Gita:

(Even in this life they have conquered the round of birih and death, whose minds are firm-fixed on the sameness of everything, for God is pure, and the same to all, and therefore, such are said to be living in God. O Arjuna, you and I have run the cycle of birth and death many times, I know them all, but you are not conscious of them. Know them to be of asurika resolve who, senseless as they are, torture all the organs of the body and Me dwelling within the body. Cast off this mean faint-heanedness and arise, O scorcher of thine enemies.)

Thereupon. I naturally repeated within myself in an audible manner:

(Destroyed is my delusion, and I have gained my memory through thy grace. O Achyuta. I am firm; my doubts are gone. I shall do thy word. Gita, XVIII. 73).

He said that animsa paramo dharmah was a tenet of the Buddhists, and it had gone so far that it had enfeebled the people. He preached a bold and manly religion. He told me that when he had to speak before the Chicago Parliament of Religions for the first time, he fell a little nervous in the beginning, but the mahavakya (great Upanishadic saying), aham brahmasmi (I am Brahman) at once flashed through his brain, and such a tremendous power entered his frame that he outdid himself. He electrified the American audience by his subsequent speeches, and the fact, no doubt, is testified by the reports of the American papers.

He, therefore, advised all men not to belittle themselves, but to realize their brahman-hood, their Divinity.

(Vedanta Kesari, January 1932)