The Master as I saw him

It is strange to remember, and yet it was surely my good fortune, that though I heard the teachings of my Master, the Swami Vivekananda, on both the occasions of his visits to England, in 1895 and 1896, I yet knew little or nothing of him in private life, until I came to India, in the early days of 1898.

For as the fruit of this want of experience I have it, that at each step of his self-revelation as a personality, my Master stands out in my memory against his proper background, of Indian forest, city, and highway, – an Eastern teacher in an Eastern world.

Even in far a-way London indeed, the first time I saw him, the occasion must have stirred in his mind, as it does in mine, recalling it now, a host of associations connected with his own sun-steeped land.

The time was a cold Sunday afternoon in November, and the place, it is true, a West-end drawing room. But he was seated, facing a half-circle of listeners, with the fire on the hearth behind him, and as he answered question after question, breaking now and then into the chanting of some Sanskrit text in illustration of his reply, the scene must have appeared to him, while twilight passed into darkness, only as a curious variant upon the Indian garden, or on the group of hearers gathered at sundown round the Sadhu who sits beside the well, or under the tree outside the village-bounds.

Never again in England did I see the Swami, as a teacher, in such simple fashion. Later, he was always lecturing, or the questions he answered were put with formality by members of larger audiences. Only this first time we were but fifteen or sixteen guests, intimate friends, many of us, and he sat amongst us, in his crimson robe and girdle, as one bringing us news from a far land, with a curious habit of saying now and again “Shiva! Shiva!” and wearing that look of mingled gentleness and loftiness, that one sees on the faces of those who live much in meditation, that look, perhaps, that Raphael has painted for us, on the brow of the Sistine Child.

That afternoon is now ten years ago, and fragments only of the talk come back to me. But never to be forgotten are the Sanskrit verses that he chanted for us, in those wonderful

Eastern tones, at once so reminiscent of, and yet so different from, the Gregorian music of our own churches.

He was quite willing to answer a personal question, and readily explained, in reply to some enquiry that he was in the West, because he believed that the time had come, when nations were to exchange their ideals, as they were already exchanging the commodities of the market.

From this point onwards, the talk was easy. He was elucidating the idea of the Eastern Pantheism, picturing the various sense-impressions as but so many different modes of the manifestation of One¹, and he quoted from the Gita and then translated into English: “All these are threaded upon Me, as pearls upon a string.”

He told us that love was recognised in Hinduism as in Christianity, as the highest religious emotion.

And he told us, – a thing that struck me very much, leading me during the following winter to quite new lines of observation, – that both the mind and the body were regarded by Hindus as moved and dominated by a third, called the Self.

He was describing the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, and I remember the quiet words, “the Buddhists accepted the report of the senses.”

In this respect then, Buddhism must have been in strong contrast with modern agnosticism, whose fundamental suspicion as to the subjective illusion of the senses, – and therefore of all inference – would surely bring it more into line with Hinduism.

I remember that he objected to the word “faith,” insisting on “realisation” instead; and speaking of sects, he quoted an Indian proverb, “It is well to be born in a church, but it is terrible to die there.”

I think that the doctrine of Re-incarnation was probably touched upon in this talk. I imagine that he spoke of Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, as the three paths of the soul. I know he dwelt for a while on the infinite power of man. And he declared the one message of all religions to lie in the call to Renunciation.

There was a word to the effect that priests and temples were not associated in India with the highest kind of religion: and the statement that the desire to reach Heaven was in that country regarded, by the most religious people, “as a little vulgar.”

1 Here Sister Nivedita is referring to the One God, an infinite ocean of consciousness, who, according to Vedanta philosophy, is manifesting Himself as this variety of Creation.

He must have made some statement of the ideal of the freedom of the soul, which brought it into apparent conflict with our Western conception of the service of humanity, as the goal of the individual. For I remember very clearly that I heard him use that word “society” for the first time that afternoon, in the sense that I have never been quite sure of having fully understood. He had, as I suppose, stated the ideal, and he hastened to anticipate our opposition. “You will say,” he said, “that this does not benefit society. But before this objection can be admitted you will first have to prove that the maintenance of society is an object in itself.”

At the time, I understood him to mean ‘humanity’ by ‘society,’ and to be preaching the ultimate futility of the world, and therefore of the work done to aid it. Was this his meaning? In that case, how is one to reconcile it with the fact that the service of humanity was always his whole hope? Or was he merely stating an idea, and standing aside to give it its full value? Or was his word ‘society,’ again, only a faulty translation of the curious Eastern word Samaj, coloured, as that is, with theocratic associations, and meaning something which includes amongst other things, our idea of the church?

He touched on the question of his own position, as a wandering teacher, and expressed the Indian diffidence with regard to religious organisation, or, as someone expresses it, ‘with regard to a faith that ends in a church.’ “We believe,” he said, “that organisation always breeds new evils.”

He prophesied that certain religious developments then much in vogue in the West would speedily die, owing to love of money. And he declared that “Man proceeds from truth to truth, and not from error to truth.”

This was indeed the master-thought which he continually approached from different points of view, the equal truth of all religions, and the impossibility for us, of criticising any of the Divine Incarnations, since all were equally forth-shinings of the One¹. And here he quoted that greatest of all verses of the Gita: “Whenever religion decays and irreligion prevails, then I manifest Myself. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the evil, for the firm establishment of the truth, I AM BORN AGAIN AND AGAIN.”

We were not very orthodox, or open to belief, we who had come to meet the Hindu Yogi, as he was called in London at that time. The white-haired lady, with the historic name, who sat on the Swami’s left, and took the lead in questioning him, with such exquisiteness of courtesy, was, perhaps, the least unconventional of the group in matters of belief, and she had been a friend and disciple of Frederick Denison Maurice. Our hostess and one or two

1. The One Supreme God, who resides in all.

others were interested in those modern movements which have made of an extended psychology the centre of a faith. But most of us had, I incline to think, been singled out for the afternoon’s hospitality, on the very score of our unwillingness to believe, for the difficulty of convincing us of the credibility of religious propaganda in general.

Only this habit, born of the constant need of protecting the judgement against ill-considered enthusiasm, can, as I now think, furnish any excuse for the coldness and pride with which we all gave our private verdicts on the speaker at the end of our visit. “It was not new,” was our accusation, as one by one we spoke with our host and hostess before leaving. All these things had been said before.

For my own part, however, as I went about the tasks of that week, it dawned on me slowly that it was not only ungenerous, it was also unjust, to dismiss in such fashion the message of a new mind and a strange culture. It occurred to me that though each separate dictum might find its echo or its fellow amongst things already heard or already thought, yet it had never before fallen to my lot to meet with a thinker who in one short hour had been able to express all that I had hitherto regarded as highest and best. I therefore took the only two opportunities that remained to me, of hearing the Swami lecture, while he was still in London.

The feeling that great music wakes in us, grows and deepens with its repetition. And similarly, as I read over the notes of those two lectures now, they seem to me much more wonderful than they did then.

For there was a quality of blindness in the attitude I presented to my Master, that I can never sufficiently regret. When he said “The universe is like a cobweb and minds are the spiders; for mind is one as well as many”: he was simply talking beyond my comprehension. I noted what he said, was interested in it, but could pass no judgment upon it, much less accept it. And this statement describes more or less accurately the whole of my relation to his system of teaching, even in the following year, when I had listened to a season’s lectures; even, perhaps, on the day when I landed in India.

There were many points in the Swami’s teachings of which one could see the truth at once. The doctrine that while no religion was true in the way commonly claimed, yet all were equally true in a very real way, was one that commanded the immediate assent of some of us. When he said that God, really Impersonal, seen through the mists of sense became Personal, one was awed and touched by the beauty of the thought. When he said that the spirit behind an act was more powerful than the act itself, or when he commended vegetarianism, it was possible to experiment. But his system as a whole, I, for one, viewed with suspicion, as forming only another of those theologies which if a man should begin by accepting, he would surely end by transcending and rejecting. And one shrinks from the pain and humiliation of spirit that such experiences involve.

It is difficult at this point to be sufficiently explicit. The time came, before the Swami left England, when I addressed him as “Master.” I had recognised the heroic fibre of the man, and desired to make myself the servant of his love for his own people. But it was his character to which I had thus done obeisance. As a religious teacher, I saw that although he had a system of thought to offer, nothing in that system would claim him for a moment, if he found that truth led elsewhere. And to the extent that this recognition implies, I became his disciple. For the rest, I studied his teaching sufficiently to become convinced of its coherence, but never, till I had had experiences that authenticated them, did I inwardly cast in my lot with the final justification of the things he came to say. Nor did I at that time, though deeply attracted by his personality, dream of the immense distance which I was afterwards to see, as between his development and that of any other thinker or man of genius whom I could name.

Referring to this scepticism of mine, which was well known at the time to the rest of the class, a more fortunate disciple, long afterwards, was teasing me, in the Swami’s presence, and claiming that she had been able to accept every statement she had ever heard him make. The Swami paid little or no attention to the conversation at the time, but afterwards he took a quiet moment to say ”Let none regret that they were difficult to convince! I fought my Master for six long years, with the result that I know every inch of the way! Every inch of the way!”

One or two impressions, however, stand out from those first discourses. Christianity had once meant to me the realisation of God as the Father. But I had long mourned over my own loss of faith in this symbolism, and had desired to study its value as an idea, apart from its objective truth or untruth. For I suspected that such a conception would have its own effect on the character and perhaps on the civilisation of those who held it. This question, however,

I had been unable to follow up, for want of material of comparison. And here was one who told us of no less than five systems of worship, founded on similar personifications of the divine idea. He preached a religion which began with the classification of religious ideas!

I was very much struck, further, by the strangeness, as well as the dignity, of some of the Indian conceptions which I now heard of for the first time. The very newness of these metaphors, and of the turn of thought, made them an acquisition. There was the tale, for instance, of the saint who ran after a thief, with the vessels he had dropped in his terror at being discovered, and cast them all at his feet, crying, “O Lord, I knew not that Thou wast there! Take them, they are Thine! Pardon me Thy child!” And again, of the same saint, we heard how he described the bite of a cobra, when at nightfall he recovered by saying “A messenger came to me from the Beloved.”

There was the inference, again, that the Swami himself had drawn from the mirage in the desert. Fifteen days he had seen it, and taken it always to be water. But now that he had been thirsty and found it to be unreal, he might see it again for fifteen days, but always henceforth he would know it to be false. The experience to which such achievements had been possible, the philosophy that could draw some parallel between this journey in the desert and life, were such as it seemed an education to understand.

But there was a third element in the Swami’s teaching, whose unexpectedness occasioned me some surprise. It was easy to see that he was no mere lecturer, like some other propounders of advanced ideas whom I had heard even from the pulpit. It was by no means his intention to set forth dainty dishes of poetry and intellectuality for the enjoyment of the rich and idle classes. He was, to his own thinking at least, as clearly an apostle, making an appeal to men, as any poor evangelical preacher, or Salvation Army officer, calling on the world to enter into the kingdom of God.

And yet he took his stand on what was noblest and best in us. I was not thinking of his announcement that sin was only an evil dream. I knew that such a theory might merely be part of a cumbrous system of theology, and no more a reality to its elucidator than the doctrine that when a man steals our coat we should give to him our cloak also, was to ourselves. The thing that I found astonishing was a certain illustration urged by him. His audience was composed for the most part of fashionable young mothers, and he spoke of their terror and their flight, if a tiger should suddenly appear before them in the street. “But suppose”, he said, with a sudden change of tone, “suppose there were a baby in the path of the tiger! Where would your place be then? At his mouth – any one of you – I am sure of it.”

These, then, were the things I remembered and pondered over, concerning the Swami, when he had left England, that winter, for America, – first, the breadth of his religious culture; second, the great intellectual newness and interest of the thought he had brought to us; and thirdly, the fact that his call was sounded in the name of that which was strongest and finest, and was not in any way dependent on the meaner elements in man.

The Swami returned to London, in April of the year following, and taught continuously, at the house where he was living with his good friend, Mr. E.T. Sturdy, in S. George’s Road, and again, after the summer holidays, in a large classroom near Victoria Street. During July, August, and September, he travelled in France, Germany and Switzerland, with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Sevier, and Miss H. F. Muller. In December, he left for India, with some of his disciples, by way of Rome, and arrived at Colombo, in Ceylon, on January the 15th, 1897.

Many of the lectures which he gave during the year 1896, have since been published, and in them, all the world may read his message, and the interpretation by which he sought to make it clear. He had come to us as a missionary of the Hindu belief in the Immanent God, and he called upon us to realise the truth of his gospel for ourselves.

Neither then, nor at any after-time, did I ever hear him advocate to his audience any specialised form of religion. He would refer freely enough to the Indian sects, – or as I would like to call them, ‘churches,’ – by way of illustration of what he had to say.

But he never preached anything but that philosophy which, to Indian thinking, under-lies all creeds. He never quoted anything but the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. And he never, in public, mentioned his own Master, nor spoke in specific terms of any part of Hindu mythology.

He was deeply convinced of the need for Indian thought, in order to enable the religious consciousness of the West to welcome and assimilate the discoveries of modern science, and to enable it also to survive that destruction of local mythologies which is an inevitable result of all world-consolidations.

He felt that what was wanted was a formulation of faith which could hold its adherents fearless of truth. “The salvation of Europe depends on a rationalistic religion,” he exclaims, in the course of one of his lectures; and again, many times repeated, “The materialist is right! There is but One¹. Only he calls that One Matter, and I call it God!”

1. According to Vedanta philosophy, the entire phenomenal Universe comprising living-beings (Sanskrit: chetan), and matter (Sanskrit: jad), emanates from one ocean of consciousness, called God. Both matter and living beings are but differing modes of vibration of this extremely subtle substrate of consciousness.

In another, and longer passage, he describes the growth of the religious idea, and the relation of its various forms to one another. “At first,” he says, ”the goal is far off, outside Nature, and far beyond it, attracting us all towards it. This has to be brought near, yet without being degraded or degenerated, until, when it has come closer and closer, the God of Heaven becomes the God in Nature, till the God in Nature becomes the God who is Nature, and the God who is Nature, becomes the God within this temple of the body, and the God dwelling in the temple of the body becomes the temple itself, becomes the soul of man. Thus it reaches the last words it can teach. He whom the sages have sought in all these places, is in our own hearts. Thou art He, O Man! Thou art He!”

He always considered, for his own part, that his greatest intellectual achievement during this period had consisted in his lectures on Maya, and it is only by reading these carefully, that an idea can be formed of the difficulty of the task he undertook, in trying to render the conception in modern English. Throughout the chapters in question we feel that we are in presence of a struggle to express an idea which is clearly apprehended, in a language which is not a fit vehicle for it. The word is wrongly understood, says the Swami, to mean ‘delusion’. Originally it meant something like ‘magic,’ as “Indra through his Maya assumed various forms.” But this meaning was subsequently dropped, and the word went through many transformations.

A milestone in the series of conceptions that finally determined its meaning is found in the text, “Because we talk in vain, and because we are satisfied with the things of the senses, and because we are running after desires, therefore we, as it were, cover this reality with a mist” Finally the word is seen to have assumed its ultimate meaning in the quotation from the Svetasvatara Upanishad. “Know Nature to be Maya. And the mind, the ruler of this Maya, as the Lord Himself.” “The Maya of the Vedanta,” says the speaker, “in its latest development, is a simple statement of facts – what we are, and what we see around us.”

But that these words are not intended as a definition will be seen by anyone who reads the whole of the lectures on Maya for himself. It is there evident that the word does not simply refer to the Universe as known through the senses, but also describes the tortuous, erroneous, and self-contradictory character of that knowledge. “This is a statement of fact, not a theory,” says the Swami, “that this world is a Tantalus’ hell, – that we do not know anything about this Universe, yet at the same time we cannot say that we do not know. To walk in the midst of a dream, half sleeping, half waking, passing all our lives in a haze, this is the fate of every one of us. This is the fate of all sense knowledge. This is the Universe”.

We see here, as in many other of his interpretations, that an Indian word is incapable of exact rendering into English, and that the only way of arriving at an understanding of it is to try to catch the conception which the speaker is striving to express, rather than to fasten the attention on a sentence or two here or there. By Maya is thus meant that shimmering, elusive, half-real half-unreal complexity, in which there is no rest, no satisfaction, no ultimate certainty, of which we become aware through the senses, and through the mind as dependent on the senses. At the same time – “And That by which all this is pervaded, know That to be the Lord Himself!”

In these two conceptions, placed side by side, we have the whole theology of Hinduism, as presented by the Swami Vivekananda, in the West. All other teachings and ideas are subordinated to these two. Religion was a matter of the growth of the individual, “a question always of being and becoming.”

But such growth must presuppose the two fundamental facts, and the gradual transference of the centre of gravity, as it were, out of the one into the other, – out of Maya into the Self. The condition of absorption in Maya was “bondage” in the Eastern sense. To have broken that bondage was “freedom” or Mukti, or even Nirvana. The path for the would-be breaker of bondage must always be by seeking for renunciation, not by seeking for enjoyment. In this matter, the Swami was, as he said himself, only echoing what had been the burden of all religions. For all religions, Indian and other, have called a halt in the quest for pleasure. All have sought to turn life into a battlefield rather than a ball-room. All have striven to make man strong for death rather than for life.

Where I think that the Swami perhaps differed somewhat from other teachers was in his acceptance of every kind of mastery as a form of renunciation. Towards the end of his life I told him that ‘renunciation’ was the only word I had ever heard from his lips. And yet in truth I think that ‘conquer!’ was much more characteristic of him. For he pointed out that it was by renunciation, that is to say, by sustained and determined effort, by absorption in hard problems through lonely hours, by choosing toil and refusing ease, that Stephenson, for instance, invented the steam-engine. He pointed out that the science of medicine represented as strong a concentration of man’s mind upon healing as would be required for a cure by prayer or by thought. He made us feel that all study was an austerity directed to a given end of knowledge. And above all, he preached that character, and character alone, was the power that determined the permanence of a religious wave.

Resistance was to his mind the duty of the citizen, non-resistance of the monk. And this, because for all the supreme achievement, was strength. “Forgive,” he said, “when you also can bring legions of angels to an easy victory.” While victory was still doubtful, however, only a coward, to his thinking, would turn the other cheek.

One reads the same lesson in his Master’s story of the boy who for twenty years worked to acquire the power to walk on water. “And so,” said a saint, “you have given twenty years of effort to doing that for which others give the ferryman a penny!” The lad might have answered that no ferryman could give his passengers what he had acquired by twenty years of patient striving. But the fact remains that to these teachers, supremely sane, the world’s art of navigation had its own full value and its proper place.

Years afterwards, in Paris, someone approached him with a question as to the general history of the development of Indian ideas on these subjects. “Did Buddha teach that the many was real and the ego unreal, while Orthodox Hinduism regards the One as the Real, and the many as unreal?” he was asked. “Yes,” answered the Swami, “And what Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and I have added to this is, that the Many and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the same mind at different times and in different attitudes.”

Gifted to an extraordinary degree with a living utterance of metaphysics, drawing always upon a classical literature of wonderful depth and profundity, he stood in our midst as, before all, the apostle of the inner life, the prophet of the subordination of the objective to the subjective. “Remember!” he said once to a disciple, “Remember! the message of India is always ‘Not the soul for Nature, but Nature for the soul!’”

And this was indeed the organ-note, as it were, the deep fundamental vibration, that began gradually to make itself heard through all the intellectual interest of the things he discussed, and the point of view he revealed. Like the sound of the flute, heard far away on the banks of some river in the hour of dawn, and regarded as but one amongst many sweet songs of the world: and like the same strain when the listener has drawn nearer and nearer, and at last, with his whole mind on the music, has become himself the player – may have seemed to some who heard him long, the difference between the life of the soul in Western thinking and in Eastern.

And with this came the exaltation of renunciation. It was not, perhaps, that the word occurred in his teachings any oftener than it had done before. It was rather that the reality of that life, free, undimensioned, sovereign in its mastery, was making itself directly felt. A temptation that had to be fought against was the impulse to go away, and bind upon oneself intellectual shackles not to be borne, in order to be able to enter in its fullness upon the life of poverty and silence.

An occasion came, when this call was uttered with great force. Some dispute occurred in the course of a question-class. “What the world wants to-day”, said the Swami, – the determination to “throw a bomb,” as he called it, evidently taking sudden possession of him, -“What the world wants to-day, is twenty men and women who can dare to stand in the street yonder, and say that they possess nothing but God. Who will go?” He had risen to his feet by this time, and stood looking round his audience as if begging some of them to join him, “Why should one fear?” And then, in tones of which, even now, I can hear again the thunderous conviction, “If this is true, what else could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter?’

“What the world wants is character,” he says, in a letter written at this time to a member of his class. “The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love – self-less. That love will make every word tell like a thunder-bolt. Awake, awake, great souls! The world is burning in misery. Can you sleep?”

I remember how new to myself at that time was this Indian idea that it was character that made a truth tell, the love expressed that made aid successful, the degree of concentration behind a saying that gave it force and constituted its power. Thus the text ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow,’ holds us, said the Swami, not by the spell of its beauty, but by the depth of renunciation that speaks in it.

Was this true? I felt that the question might be tested by experience, and after some time I came to the conclusion that it was. A quiet word, from a mind that put thought behind language, carried immediate weight, when the same utterance from the careless, would pass by unheeded. I do not know a stronger instance of this fact than a certain saying that is recorded of the Caliph Ali. Many have heard, and none surely without emotion, the words of the Lion of Islam, “Thy place in life is seeking after thee. Therefore be thou at rest from seeking after it!” But never, until we relate them to the speaker, four times passed over in the succession to the Caliphate, never until we know how the man’s whole life throbs through them, are we able to explain the extraordinary power of these simple sentences.

I found also that an utterance consciously directed to the mind, instead of merely to the hearing, of the listener, evoked more response than the opposite. And having begun to make these psychological discoveries, I was led gradually to the perception that if indeed one’s reason could, as one had long thought, make no final line of demarcation as between mind and matter, yet at least that aspect of the One-substance which we called Matter was rather the result of that called Mind or Spirit, than the reverse. The body, not the will, must be regarded as a bye-product of the individuality. This in turn led to the conception of a consciousness held above the body, a life governing matter, and free of it, so that it might conceivably disrobe and find new garments, or cast off the form known to us, as that form itself casts off a wounded skin. Till at last I found my own mind echoing the Swami’s great pronouncement on immortality, “The body comes and goes.” But this ripening of thought came gradually and did not complete itself for many months.

In the meantime, as I look back upon that time, I feel that what we all really entered upon in the Swami’s classes was not so much an intellectual exposition, as a life of new and lofty emotions, – or, as they would be called in India, ‘realisations.’

We heard the exclamation, in describing the worship of God as a child, “do we want anything from Him?” We bowed to the teaching that “love is always a manifestation of bliss,” and that any pang of pain or regret was therefore a mark of selfishness and physicality. We accepted the austere ruling that any, even the slightest, impulse of differentiation, as between ourselves and others was ‘hatred,’ and that only the opposite of this was ‘love.’ Many who have ceased to believe in the creed of their childhood have felt that at least the good of others was still an end in itself, and that the possibility of service remained, to give a motive to life. It is strange, now that ten years have passed, to remember the sense of surprise with which, holding this opinion, we listened to the decorous eastern teaching, that highest of all gifts was spirituality, a degree lower, intellectual knowledge, and that all kinds of physical and material help came last. All our welling pity for sickness and for poverty classified in this fashion! It has taken me years to find out, but I now know, that in train of the higher giving, the lower must needs follow.

Similarly, to our Western fanaticism about pure air and hygienic surroundings, as if these were marks of saintliness, was opposed the stern teaching of indifference to the world. Here indeed, we came up against a closed door, and had no key. When the Swami said, in bold consciousness of paradox, that the saints had lived on mountain-tops “to enjoy the scenery,” and when he advised his hearers to keep flowers and incense in their worship-rooms, and to care much for the purity and cleansing of food and person, we did not understand enough to connect the two extremes. But in fact he was preaching our own doctrine of physical refinement, as it would be formulated in India. And is it not true that until we in the West have succeeded in cleansing the slums of our great cities, our fastidiousness is very like the selfworship of the privileged?

A like fate awaited our admiration for such saints as knew how to order their worldly affairs with conspicuous success and prudence. True spirituality was indifferent to, nay contemptuous and intolerant of, the things of this world. This message the Swami never mitigated. In giving it, he never faltered. The highest spirituality cannot tolerate the world¹.

We understood clearly enough that these were the ideals of sainthood only. We were learning chapter after chapter of a great language which was to make it easy for us to hold communion with the ends of the earth. We gathered no confusion as to those questions which concern the life of citizenship and domestic virtue, and form what may be regarded as the kindergarten of the soul. The idea that one country might best advance itself by learning to appreciate those ideals of order and responsibility which formed the glory of another was in no wise discredited. At the same time we were given, as the eternal watchword of the Indian ideals, “Spirituality cannot tolerate the world¹.” Did we, in contradiction, point to monastic orders, well-governed, highly organised, devoted to the public good, and contrast our long roll of abbots, bishops, and saintly lady-abbesses, with a few ragged and God-intoxicated beggars of the East? Yet we had to admit that even in the West, when the flame of spirituality had blazed suddenly to its brightest, it had taken their form. For those who know the land of Meera Bae and Chaitanya, of Tukaram and Ramanuja, can hardly resist the impulse to clothe with the yellow garb the memory of S. Francis of Assissi also.

In one of the volumes of the English translation of the ‘Jataka Birth-Tales’, there occur over and over again the words “when a man has come to that place where he dreads heaven as much as hell’ – and I do not know how the realisation that the Swami’s presence brought could be better described. Most of those who listened to him in London, in the year 1896, caught some glimpse, by which they were led to understand a little of the meaning of the eastern longing to escape from incarnation.

But master of all these moods and dominating them, was one that had barely been hinted at, in the words “If this is true, what other thing could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter?”

For there was a power in this teacher to sum up all the truths he himself had come to teach, together with his own highest hope, and to treat the whole as a mean bribe, to be flung away fearlessly, if need were, for the good of others. Years after, this spoke more clearly in the indignant reply with which he turned on some remark of my own, “Of course I would commit a crime, and go to hell for ever, if by that I could really help a human being!” It was the same impulse that spoke also, in his constant repetition to some few of us, as if it had a special bearing on the present age, of the tale of that Bodhisattva, who had held himself back from Nirvana till the last grain of dust in the universe should have gone in before him to salvation.

1. (Sanskrit: chetan), and matter (Sanskrit: jad), emanates from one ocean of consciousness, called God. Both matter and living beings are but differing modes of vibration of this extremely subtle substrate of consciousness.

Does it mean that the final mark of freedom lies in ceasing from the quest of freedom? I have found the same thing since, in many of the Indian stories; in Ramanuja, for instance, breaking his vow, and proclaiming the sacred mantram to all the pariahs; in Buddha, keeping no secret, but spending his whole life in work; in Shishupal, choosing to be the enemy of God, that he might the sooner return to him; and in innumerable legends of the saints fighting against the deities.

But the Swami was not always entirely impersonal. Once after a lecture he came up to a small group of us, and said, a propos of some subject that had been opened up, “I have a superstition, – it is nothing, you know, but a personal superstition! – that the same soul who came once as Buddha came afterwards as Christ.” And then, lingering on the point of departure, he drifted into talk of his “old Master,” of whom we then heard for the first time, and of the girl who, wedded and forgotten, gave her husband his freedom, with tears. His voice had sunk lower, as he talked, till the tones had become dream-like. But finally, almost in soliloquy¹, he shook off the mood that had stolen upon him, saying with a long breath, “Yes, yes! these things have been, and they will again be. Go in peace, my daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole!”

It was in the course of a conversation much more casual than this, that he turned to me and said, “I have plans for the women of my own country in which you, I think, could be of great help to me,” and I knew that I had heard a call which would change my life. What these plans were, I did not know, and the effort of abandoning the accustomed perspective was for the moment so great that I did not care to ask.

But I had already gathered that there was much to learn, if one’s conception of the world were to be made inclusive of the view-point of foreign peoples. – “And you have blasted other cities!” had once been the startling reply, when I had spoken of the necessity of making London fair. For to me the mystery and tragedy of London had long been the microcosm of the human problem, standing as the symbol of the whole world’s call. “And you have blasted other cities, to make this city of yours beautiful!” I could elicit no more, but the words echoed in my ears for many days.

In my eyes, our city was not beautiful. My question had been misunderstood. But through this misunderstanding, I had discovered that there was another point of view. “The English are born on an island, and they are always trying to live on it,” said the Master once to me, and certainly the remark seems true of myself, as I look back on this period of my life, and see how determinately insular even my ideals had hitherto been. I learnt no more of the Indian point of view, during my life in England.

The friend, who afterwards called me to her side in India, chose a certain evening in London, when both the Swami and myself were her guests for an hour, to tell him of my willingness to help his work. He was evidently surprised, but said quietly, “For my own part I will be incarnated two hundred times, if that is necessary, to do this work amongst my people, that I have undertaken.”

And the words stand in my own mind beside those which he afterwards wrote to me on the eve of my departure, “I will standby you unto death, whether you work for India or not, whether you give up Vedanta, or remain in it. The tusks of the elephant come out, but they never go back. Even so are the words of a man.”

But these references to the Swami’s own people were merely personal, and as such were strictly subordinate. In his classes, in his teachings, his one longing seemed to be for the salvation of men from ignorance. Such love, such pity, those who heard him never saw elsewhere. To him, his disciples were his disciples. There was neither Indian nor European there.

And yet he was profoundly conscious of the historic significance of his own preaching. On the occasion of his last appearance in London, [at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, on Sunday afternoon, December the 15th, 1896] he pointed out the fact that history repeats itself, and that Christianity had been rendered possible only by the Roman Peace. And it may well have been that the Buddha-like dignity and calm of bearing which so impressed us, were but the expression of his far outlook and serene conviction that there would yet be seen a great army of Indian preachers in the West, reaping the harvest that he had sown so well, and making ready in their turn new harvests, for the more distant reaping of the future.

“HE knew nothing of Vedanta, nothing of theories! He was contented to live that great life, and to leave it to others to explain.” So said the Swami Vivekananda once, referring to his Master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. And, as an expression of the idea that there may in a great life be elements which he who lives it may not himself understand, the words have often come back to me, in reference to his own career.

In the West, the Swami had revealed himself to us as a religious teacher only. Even now, it needs but a moment’s thought and again one sees him in the old lecture-room, on the seat slightly raised above his class, and so enthroned, in Buddha-like calm, once more in a modern world is heard through his lips, the voice of the far past.

But renunciation, the thirst after freedom, the breaking of bondage, the fire of purity, the joy of the witness, the mergence of the personal in the impersonal, these, and these alone, had been the themes of that discourse. It is true that in a flash or two one had seen a great patriot. Yet the secret signal is sufficient where destiny calls, and moments that to one form the turning-point of a life, may pass before the eyes of a hundred spectators, unperceived. It was as the apostle of Hinduism, not as a worker for India, that we saw the Swami in the West.

“Oh how calm,” he exclaimed, “would be the work of one, who really understood the divinity of man! For such, there is nothing to do, save to open men’s eyes. All the rest does itself.” And out of some such fathomless peace had come all that we had seen and heard of him.

From the moment of my landing in India, however, I found something quite unexpected underlying all this. It was not Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, nor even the ideas which were connected with him, that formed so strange a revelation here. It was the personality of my Master himself, in all the fruitless torture and struggle of a lion caught in a net. For, from the day that he met me at the ship’s side, till that last serene moment, when, at the hour of cow-dust¹, he passed out of the village of this world, leaving the body behind him, like a folded garment, I was always conscious of this element inwoven with the other, in his life.

1. The hour of cow-dust or Goudhuli in India, refers to the time in the evening when villagers return home after having grazed their cattle. At this time the sun is close to setting and the dust kicked up by the cow’s feet bathes everything in a golden mist

But wherein lay the struggle? whence came the frequent sense of being baffled and thwarted? Was it a growing consciousness of bodily weakness, conflicting with the growing clearness of a great purpose?

Amongst the echoes that had reached his English friends of his triumphal reception in India, this had been the note carried by a man-friend to my own ear. Banished to the Himalayas¹ with shattered health, at the very moment when his power had reached its height, he had written a letter to his friend which was a cry of despair.

And some of us became eager to take any step that might make it possible to induce him to return to the West, and leave his Indian undertakings on other shoulders. In making such arrangements, how little must we have realised of the nature of those undertakings, or of the difficulty and complexity of the education that they demanded!

To what was the struggle actually due? Was it the terrible effort of translating what he had called the ‘super-conscious’ into the common life? Undoubtedly he had been born to a task which was in this respect of heroic difficulty. Nothing in this world is so terrible as to abandon the safe paths of accepted ideals, in order to work out some new realisation, by methods apparently in conflict with the old.

Once, in his boyhood, Sri Ramakrishna had asked “Noren,” as he was then called, what was his highest ambition in life, and he had promptly answered, ‘to remain always in Samadhi.’ His Master, it is said, received this with a smile. “I thought you had been born for something greater, my boy!” was all his reply.

We may take it, I think, that the moment marked an epoch in the disciple’s career. Certainly in years to come, in these last five and a half years, particularly, which were his crowning gift to his own people, he stood for work without attachment, or work for impersonal ends, as one of the highest expressions of the religious life. And for the first time in the history of India an order of monks found themselves banded together, with their faces set primarily towards the evolution of new forms of civic duty.

In Europe, where the attainment of the direct religious sense is so much rarer, and so much less understood than in the East, such labour ranks as devotional in the common acceptance. But in India, the head and front of the demand made on a monastic order is that it produce saints. And the value of the monk who, instead of devoting himself to maintaining the great tradition of the super-conscious life, turns back to help society upwards, has not in the past been clearly understood.

1. The intense work in America and Europe coupled with the Sannyasin lifestyle that Swami Vivekananda lead broke down his health completely On his return to India he suffered from diabetes, kidney disease and asthma. To recuperate doctors advised him to escape the damp climate of Calcutta and seek rest in Himalayan mountain towns, such as Darjeeling.

In the Swami’s scheme of things however, it would almost seem as if such tasks were to take that place in the spiritual education which had previously been occupied by systems of devotion. To the Advaitin, or strict believer in the Indian philosophy of Vedanta, the goal lies in the attainment of that mood in which all is One and there is no second. To one who has reached this, worship becomes impossible, for there is none to worship, none to be worshipper; and, all acts being equally the expression of the Immanent Unity, none can be distinguished as in any special sense constituting adoration. Worship, worshipper, and worshipped are one.

Yet it is admitted, even by the Advaitin, that systems of praise and prayer have the power to “purify the heart” of him who uses them. For clearly, the thought of self is more quickly restrained in relation to that of God, than to any other. Worship is thus regarded as the school, or preparation, for higher stages of spiritual development. But the self-same sequence would seem to have held good in the eyes of the Swami, with regard to work, or the service of man. The “purifying of the heart” connoted the burning out of selfishness. Worship is the very antithesis of use. But service or giving, is also its antithesis. Thus he hallowed the act of aid, and hallowed, too, the name of man. Till I know of one disciple, who, in the early days of the Order, was so filled with the impulse of this reverence that he sucked the sores of the lepers to bring them ease.

The nursing of the sick and the feeding of the poor, had indeed from the first been natural activities of the Children of Ramakrishna. But when the Swami Vivekananda returned from the West these things took on a larger aspect. They were considered from a national point of view. Men would be sent out from the Monastery to give relief in famine-stricken areas, to direct the sanitation of a town, or to nurse the sick and dying at a pilgrim centre. One man started an orphanage and industrial school at Murshidabad. Another established a teaching nucleus in the South. These were, said the Swami, the ‘sappers and miners’ of the army of religion.

His schemes however went much further. He was consumed with a desire for the education of Indian women, and for the scientific and technical education of the country. How the impersonal motive multiplies the power to suffer, only those who have seen can judge. Was his life indeed a failure, as he was sometimes tempted to feel it, since there never came to his hands that “twenty million pounds” with which, as he used to say, he could have set India on her feet? Or were there higher laws at work, that would eventually make a far greater success than any that could have been gathered within a single lifetime?

His view was penetrative as well as comprehensive. He had analyzed the elements of the development to be brought about. India must learn a new ideal of obedience. The Math was placed, therefore, on a basis of organization which was contrary to all the current ideas of religious freedom. A thousand new articles of use must be assimilated. Therefore, though his own habits were of the simplest, two or three rooms were provided with furniture. Digging, gardening, rowing, gymnastic exercises, the keeping of animals, all these were by degrees made a part of the life of the young brahmacharins¹ and himself.

And he would throw a world of enthusiasm into a long course of experiments on such problems as the sinking of a well or the making of brown bread. On the last Charok Puja day of his life a gymnastic society came to the Math for sports and prizes, and he spoke of his desire that the Hindu Lent should be celebrated henceforth by special courses of athletic exercises. The energy which had hitherto gone into the mortification of the body, might rightly, in his opinion, under modern conditions, be directed to the training of the muscles.

To a western mind, it might well seem that nothing in the Swami’s life had been more admirable than this. Long ago, he had defined the mission of the Order of Ramakrishna as that of realizing and exchanging the highest ideals of the East and of the West. And assuredly he here proved his own power to engage in such an undertaking as much by his gift of learning as by that of teaching.

But it was inevitable that he himself should from time to time go through the anguish of revolt. The Hindu ideal of the religious life, as a reflection on earth of that of the Great God in the Divine Empyrean, “- the Unmoving, the Untouched, “pure, free, ever the Witness, ” – is so clear and so deeply established that only at great cost to himself could a man carry it into a fresh channel. Has anyone realized the pain endured by the sculptor of a new ideal? The very sensitiveness and delicacy of perception that are necessary to his task, that very moral exaltation which is as the chisel in his hand, are turned on himself in passive moments, to become doubt, and terror of responsibility.

What a heaven of ease seems then, to such a soul, even the hardest and sternest of those lives that are understood and authenticated by the imitative moral sense of the crowd! I have noticed in most experiences this consciousness of being woven out of two threads, one that is chosen and another endured. But in this case the common duality took the form of a play upon two different ideals, of which either was highest in its own world, and yet each, to those who believed in its fellow, almost as a crime.

1. Brahmacharins are monks who have taken a vow of celibacy.

Occasionally, to one who was much with him, a word, let fall unconsciously, would betray the inner conflict. He was riding on one occasion, with the Rajah of Khetri, when he saw that his arm was bleeding profusely, and found that the wound had been caused by a thorny branch which he had held aside for himself to pass. When the Swami expostulated, the Rajput laughed the matter aside, “Are we not always the Defenders of the Faith, Swamiji ?” he said. “And then,” said the Swami, telling the story, “I was just going to tell him that they ought not to show such honour to the Sannyasin, when suddenly I thought that perhaps they were right after all. Who knows? May be I too am caught in the glare of this flashlight of your modern civilisation, which is only for a moment.” “- I have become entangled,” he said simply, to one who protested that to his mind the wandering Sadhu of earlier years, who had scattered his knowledge and changed his name as he went, had been greater than the Abbot of Belur, burdened with much work and many cares, “I have become entangled.”

And I remember the story told by an American woman, who said she could not bear to remember his face, at that moment when her husband explained to this strange guest that he must make his way from their home to Chicago with money which would be paid gladly to hear him speak of religion. “It was,” she said “as if something had just broken within him, that could never again be made whole.” One day he was talking, in the West, of Meera Bae, – that saint who once upon a time was Queen of Chitore, – and of the freedom her husband had offered her, if only she would remain within the royal seclusion. But she could not be bound. “But why should she not?” someone asked, in astonishment. “Why should she?” he retorted. “Was she living down here in this mire?” And suddenly the listener caught his thought, of the whole nexus of the personal life, with its inter-relations and reaction upon reactions, as intolerable bondage and living anguish.

And so, side by side with that sunlit serenity and child-like peace which enwrapped the Swami as a religious teacher, I found in his own country another point of view, from which he was very, very human. And here, though the results of his efforts may have been choicer, or more enduring, than those of most of us, yet they were wrought at the self-same cost of having to toil on in darkness and uncertainty, and only now and then emerging into light. Often dogged by the sense of failure, often over-taken by a loathing of the limitations imposed alike by the instrument and the material, he dared less and less, as years went on, to make determinate plans, or to dogmatize about the unknown. “After all, what do we know?” he said once, “Mother uses it all. But we are only fumbling about.”

This has not perhaps been an element in the lives of the great teachers on which their narrators have cared to dwell much. Yet one catches a hint of it in the case of Sri Ramakrishna, when we are told how he turned on God with the reproach, “Oh Mother! what is this You have brought me to? All my heart is centred in these lads!” And in the eleventh chapter of the Dhammapada¹ one can see still, though twenty-four centuries have passed since then, the wave-marks of similar storms on the shores of the consciousness of another Teacher:

Seeking for the maker of this tabernacle, and not finding, I must run through a course of many births; and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen! Thou shall not again build up this tabernacle. All thy rafters are fallen. Thy ridge-pole is broken. The mind, approaching the Eternal, has attained to the extinction of all desires.

There was one thing however, deep in the Master’s nature, that he himself never knew how to adjust. This was his love of his country and his resentment of her suffering. Throughout those years in which I saw him almost daily, the thought of India was to him like the air he breathed. True, he was a worker at foundations. He neither used the word ‘nationality,’ nor proclaimed an era of ‘nation-making’. ‘Man-making’, he said, was his own task. But he was born a lover, and the queen of his adoration was his Motherland.

Like some delicately-poised bell, thrilled and vibrated by every sound that falls upon it, was his heart to all that concerned her. Not a sob was heard within her shores that did not find in him a responsive echo. There was no cry of fear, no tremor of weakness, no shrinking from mortification, that he had not known and understood. He was hard on her sins, unsparing of her want of worldly wisdom, but only because he felt these faults to be his own. And none, on the contrary, was ever so possessed by the vision of her greatness. To him, she appeared as the giver of English civilisation. For what, he would ask, had been the England of Elizabeth in comparison with the India of Akbar? Nay, what would the England of Victoria have been, without the wealth of India, behind her? Where would have been her refinement? where would have been her experience?

His country’s religion, history, geography, ethnology, poured from his lips in an inexhaustible stream. With equal delight he treated of details and of the whole, or so it would often seem to those who listened. Indeed there would sometimes come a point where none who wished to remember what had been said already, could afford to listen any longer. And still, with mind detached, one might note the unwearied stream of analysis of the laws regarding female inheritance, or the details of caste customs in different provinces, or some abstruse system of metaphysics or theology, proceeding on and on for a couple of hours longer.

1. The Dhammapada is an ancient Buddhist scripture containing the teachings of Lord Buddha.

In these talks of his, the heroism of the Rajput, the faith of the Sikh, the courage of the Mahratta, the devotion of the saints, and the purity and steadfastness of noble women, all lived again. Nor would he permit that the Mohammedan should be passed over. Humayoon, Sher Shah, Akbar, Shah Jehan, each of these, and a hundred more, found a day and a place in his bead-roll of glistening names.

Now it was that coronation song of Akbar which is still sung about the streets of Delhi, that he would give us, in the very tone and rhythm of Thanasena. Again, he would explain how the widows of the Mogul House never remarried, but lived like Hindu women, absorbed in worship or in study, through the lonely years. At another time he would talk of the great national genius that decreed the birth of Indian sovereigns to be of a Moslem father and of a Hindu mother. And yet again he would hold us breathless, as we lived through with him the bright, but ill-starred reign, of Sirajud-Daulah; as we heard the exclamation at Plassy of the Hindu general, listening to an order sent in treachery, “Then is the day lost!” and saw him plunge, with his horse, into the Ganges; as, finally, we lingered with the faithful wife, clad in the white sari of the widow amongst her own people, through long years tending the lamp above the grave of her dead lord.

Sometimes the talk would be more playful. It would arise out of some commonplace incident. The offering of a sweetmeat, or the finding of a rare commodity like musk or saffron, or events simpler still, would be enough to start it.

He told us how he had longed, when in the West, to stand once more at dusk some little way outside an Indian village and hear again the evening calls, – the noise of children growing sleepy at their play, the evensong bells, the cries of the herdsmen, and the half-veiled sound of voices through the quickly-passing twilight. How homesick he had been for the sound of the July rains, as he had known them in his childhood in Bengal! How wonderful was the sound of water, in rain, or waterfall, or sea! The most beautiful sight he could remember was a mother whom he had seen, passing from stepping-stone to stepping-stone across a mountain brook, and turning as she went, to play with and caress the baby on her back. The ideal death would be to lie on a ledge of rock in the midst of Himalayan forests, and hear the torrent beneath, as one passed out of the body, chanting eternally ‘Hara! Hara! The Free! The Free!’

Like some great spiral of emotion, its lowest circles held fast in love of soil and love of nature; its next embracing every possible association of race, experience, history, and thought; and the whole converging and centring upon a single definite point, was thus the Swami’s worship of his own land. And the point in which it was focussed was the conviction that India was not old and effete, as her critics had supposed, but young, ripe with potentiality, and standing, at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the threshold of even greater developments than she had known in the past. Only once, however, do I remember him to have given specific utterance to this thought. “I feel myself” he said in a moment of great quiet, “to be the man born after many centuries. I see that India is young.” But in truth this vision was implied in every word he ever spoke. It throbbed in every story he told. And when he would lose himself, in splendid scorn of apology for anything Indian, in fiery repudiation of false charge or contemptuous criticism, or in laying down for others the elements of a faith and love that could never be more than a pale reflection of his own, how often did the habit of the monk seem to slip away from him, and the armour of the warrior stand revealed!

But it is not to be supposed that he was unaware of the temptation which all this implied. His Master had said of him, in the years of his first discipleship, “It is true that there is a film of ignorance upon his mind. My Mother¹ has placed it there, that Her work may be done. And it is thin, as thin as a sheet of tissue paper. It might be rent at any moment!” And so, as one who has for-sworn them will struggle against thoughts of home and family, he would endeavour, time and again, to restrain and suppress these thoughts of country and history, and to make of himself only that poor religious wanderer, to whom all countries and all races should be alike.

He came back, in Kashmir, from one of the great experiences of his life, saying, with the simplicity of a child, “There must be no more of this anger. Mother said ‘What, even if the unbeliever should enter My temples, and defile My images, what is that to you? Do YOU PROTECT ME? OR DO I PROTECT YOU?”

His personal ideal was that sannyasin of the Mutiny, who was stabbed by an English soldier, and broke the silence of fifteen years to say to his murderer “- And thou also art He!”

He was always striving to be faithful to the banner of Ramakrishna, and the utterance of a message of his own seemed often to strike him as a lapse. Besides, he believed that force spent in mere emotion was dissipated, only force restrained being conserved for expression in work.

Yet again the impulse to give all he had would overtake him, and before he knew it, he would once more be scattering those thoughts of hope and love for his race and for his country, which, apparently without his knowledge, fell in so many cases like seed upon soil prepared for it, and have sprung up already, in widely distant parts of India, into hearts and lives of devotion to the Motherland. Just as Sri Ramakrishna, in fact, without knowing any books, had been a living epitome of the Vedanta so was Vivekananda of the national life. But of the theory of this, he was unconscious. In his own words, applied to his own Master, “He was contented simply to live that great life, and to leave it to others to find the explanation!”

It was amongst the lawns and trees of the Ganges-side that I came to know, in a personal sense, the leader to whose work my life was already given. At the time of my landing in India (January 28th. 1898), the ground and building had just been purchased at Belur, which were afterwards to be transformed into the Calcutta Monastery of the Order of Ramakrishna. A few weeks later still, a party of friends arrived from America, and with characteristic intrepidity¹ took possession of the half-ruined cottage, to make it simply but pleasantly habitable. It was as the guest of these friends, here at Belur, and later, travelling in Kumaon and in Kashmir, that I began, with them, the study of India, and something also of the home-aspects and relationships of the Swami’s own life.

Our cottage stood on a low terrace, built on the western bank of the river, a few miles above Calcutta. At flood-tide the little gondola-like boat, – which to those who live beside the Ganges serves the purpose of a carriage, – could come up to the very foot of the steps, and the river between us and the opposite village, was from half to three-quarters of a mile broad. A mile or so further up the eastern bank, could be seen the towers and trees of Dakshineswar, that temple-garden in which the Swami and his brothers had once been boys, at the feet of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

The house which was in actual use at that time as the Monastery, lay some half mile or so to the south of our cottage, and between us and it were several other garden-houses, and at least one ravine, crossed by a doubtful-looking plank made out of half of the stem of a palm tree. To our cottage here, then, came the Swami daily, at sunrise, alone or accompanied by some of his brothers. And here, under the trees, long after our early breakfast was ended, we might still be found seated, listening to that inexhaustible flow of interpretation, broken but rarely by question and answer, in which he would reveal to us some of the deepest secrets of the Indian world.

I am struck afresh whenever I turn back upon this memory, by the wonder as to how such a harvest of thought and experience could possibly have been garnered, or how, when once ingathered, could have come such energy of impulse for its giving-forth.

Amongst brilliant conversationalists, the Swami was peculiar in one respect. He was never known to show the slightest impatience at interruption. He was by no means indifferent as to the minds he was addressing. His deepest utterances were heard only in the presence of such listeners as brought a subtle sympathy and reverence into the circle about him. But I do not think he was himself aware of this, and certainly no external circumstance seemed to have power to ruffle him. Moods of storm and strength there were in plenty; but they sprang, like those of sweetness, from hidden sources; they were entirely general and impersonal in their occasion.

It was here that we learnt the great outstanding watchwords and ideals of the Indian striving. For the talks were, above all, an exposition of ideals. Facts and illustrations were gathered, it is true, from history, from literature, and from a thousand other sources. But the purpose was always the same, to render some Indian ideal of perfection clearer. Nor were these ideals always so comprehensible as might have been supposed. This was a world in which concentration of mind was the object of more deliberate cultivation than even the instincts of benevolence could require, but the time was not yet come in which this was to be argued as for or against India.

The attainment of the impersonal standpoint was boldly proposed, in matters personal “Be the Witness!” was a command heard oftener than that which bids us pray for our enemies. The idea of recognizing an enemy would have seemed to this mind a proof of hatred. Love was not love, it was insisted, unless it was ‘without a reason,’ or without a ‘motive,’ as a western speaker might have attempted, though perhaps with less force, to express the same idea. Purity and renunciation were analyzed untiringly. The Great God, tempted by nothing -not kingship nor fatherhood; not wealth nor pleasure; in all the worlds He had created, proving on the contrary, in matters worldly, ‘a very simple fellow,’ incurious, easily deceived, and begging His daily handful of rice from door to door, shone through all our dreams.

Titiksha, or non-correction of evil, was a mark of the religious life, and of this we might find a western example in that monk who was a leper, and who, when the maggots fell from his finger-joints, stooped and replaced them, saying, “Eat brothers!” The vision of Raghunath was one of the perfections of the soul, and that saint had had it, who fainted, when the bullocks were beaten in his presence, while on his back were found the weals made by the lash. We were even called upon to understand a thought immeasurably foreign to all our past conceptions of religion, in which sainthood finds expression in an unconsciousness of the body, so profound that the saint is unaware that he goes naked. For that delicate discrimination of a higher significance in certain cases of nudity, which, in Europe, finds its expression in art, in India finds it in religion. As we, in the presence of a Greek statue, experience only reverence for the ideal of beauty, so the Hindu sees in the naked saint only a glorified and childlike purity.

There was one aspiration, however, which was held, in this new thought-world, to be of the same sovereign and universal application in the religious life as that of the concentration of the mind. This was the freedom of the individual soul, including all the minor rights of thought, opinion, and action. Here lay the one possession that the monk was jealously to guard as his own, the one property on which he must brook the foot of no intruder; and as I watched the working out of this, in daily life, I saw that it amounted to a form of renunciation.

To accept nothing, however pleasant, if it concealed a fetter; at a word to stand ready to sever any connection that gave a hint of bondage; how clear must be the mind that would do this, how pure the will! And yet this ideal, too, was eloquent of many things. One could not help seeing that it accounted for the comparative non-development of monasticism in India, for the fact that the highest types of the religious life, in the past, had been solitary, whether as hermits or wanderers.

In the monastery beside us there were men, as we were told, who did not approve of their leader’s talking with women; there were others who objected to all rites and ceremonies; the religion of one might be described as atheism tempered by hero-worship; that of another led him to a round of practices which to most of us would constitute an intolerable burden; some lived in a world of saints, visions and miracles; others again could not away with such nonsense, but must needs guide themselves by the coldest logic. The fact that all these could be bound together in a close con-fraternity, bore silent witness to their conception of the right of the soul to choose its own path. It also, as I could not help thinking, both then and after, accounted for the failure, in certain respects, of the old Indian forms of authority.

For, in order that the highest and most disinterested characters may throw themselves into the work of the city and the state, it is surely necessary that they should sincerely hold the task of such organisation to be the highest and most honourable which they could aspire to carry out. In the India of the past, however, the best men had been too conscious of the more remote spiritual ideals, and amongst them, of this conception of freedom, to be capable of such an enthusiasm for the assertion of the civic and national discipline. And we cannot wonder that in spite of the existence of ability and character, certain advantages of the modern system have thus been left for the moderns to demonstrate.

That Hinduism, nevertheless, is capable enough of adding to her development that of the inspiration and sustenance of such activities, is shown, as I believe, in the very fact of the rise of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, with their characteristic contribution to the national thought.

It was perhaps as an instance of that ‘exchange of ideals’ which he had ever in mind, that the Swami gravely warned us again and again, as the great fault of the Western character, against making any attempt to force upon others that which we had merely found to be good for ourselves.

And yet at the same time, when asked by some of his own people what he considered, after seeing them in their own country, to be the greatest achievement of the English, he answered, ‘that they had known how to combine obedience with self-respect’.

But it was not the Swami alone whom we saw at Belur. We were accounted by the monastery as a whole, as its guests. So back and forth would toil the hospitable monks, on errands of kindness and service for us. They milked the cow that gave us our supply, and when the servant whose duty it was at nightfall to carry the milk, was frightened by the sight of a cobra in the path, and refused to go again, it was one of the monks themselves who took his place in this humble office. Some novice would be deputed daily, to deal with the strange problems of our Indian house-keeping. Another was appointed to give Bengali lessons. Visits of ceremony and of kindness were frequently paid us by the older members of the community. And finally, when the Swami Vivekananda himself was absent for some weeks on a journey, his place was always duly taken at the morning tea-table by someone or another who felt responsible for the happiness and entertainment of his guests. In these and a thousand similar ways, we came in touch with those who could reveal to us the shining memory that formed the warp, on which, as woof, were woven all these lives of renunciation.

For they had only one theme, these monastic visitants of ours, and that was their Master Sri Ramakrishna and his great disciple. The Swami had now been back with them for thirteen or fourteen months only, and scarcely yet had they recovered from their first pleasure and surprise. Before that he had been practically lost to them for some six years. It was true that of late he had corresponded with them freely, and that for no time had they been, long, altogether off his track. And yet, when his first success in America had been heard of, most of his brethren had had only their confidence in the great mission foretold by his Master, to tell them that it was he.

Those who have witnessed here or there some great life of asceticism, will recognise a mood of passionate longing to lose one’s own identity, to be united with the lowliest and most hidden things, to go forth from amongst men, and be no more remembered by them, as an element in the impulse of renunciation. This it is which explains, as I think, the long silence and seclusion in caves; the garb of mud and ashes, so often worn as a man wanders from forest to forest, and village to village; and a thousand other features of this type of religion, which to the Western onlooker might seem inexplicable.

This mood would seem to have been much with the Swami in the early years after the passing of his Master. And again and again he must have left the little band of brethren, in the hope never to be heard of more. Once he was brought back from such an expedition by the community itself, who heard that he was lying ill at a place called Hathras, and send to take him home. For such was the love that bound them all to each other, and especially to him, that they could not rest without nursing him themselves.

A few months later he was followed to the monastery by a disciple whom he had called to himself during his wanderings. This man’s name, in religion, was Sadananda, and from his account, with its strong broken English, I glean the record of the life that was lived at this period in the monastery. When he arrived – it had taken him some two or three months, by means of railway service, to earn his way to Calcutta from his old home – he found the Swami on the point of setting out once more. But for his sake this journey was abandoned, and the departure that was to have taken place that evening did not occur till twelve months later. “The Swami’s mission began with me,” says this first disciple proudly, referring to this time.

During this year, he the Master, “would work twenty-four hours at a time. He was lunatic-like, he was so busy!” Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he would rise and call the others, singing, “Awake! Awake! all ye who would drink of the divine nectar!” Then all would proceed to meditation, afterwards drifting almost unconsciously into singing and talking, which would last till noon, or even later. From hymns and chanting they would pass into history. Sometimes it would be the story of Ignatius Loyola; again Joan of Arc, or the Rani of Jhansi; and yet again the Swami would recite long passages from Carlyle’s French Revolution, and they would all sway themselves backwards and forwards dreamily, repeating together “Vive la Republique! Vive la Republique!”

Or the subject of their reveries might be S. Francis of Assisi, and with the same unconscious instinct of the dramatist, they would lose themselves in an endless identification with his “Welcome, Sister Death!” It might perhaps be one or two o’clock when Ramakrishnananda -the cook, housekeeper, and ritualist of the community – would drive them all, with threats, to bathe and eat. But after this, they would “again group” – again would go on the song and talk, till at last evening had come, bringing with it the time for the two hours of Arrati to Sri Ramakrishna.

As often as not, even this would scarcely break the absorption, again would follow song, and talk of the Master; again would come the trances of meditation. Or on the roof, till long after midnight it might be, they would sit and chant ”Hail Sita-Rama!” The special festivals of all religions brought each their special forms of celebration. At Christmas time, for instance, they would recline, with long shepherds’ crooks, around a lighted log, and talk in low tones of the coming of the angels to the lonely watchers by their flocks, and the singing of the world’s first Gloria.

Very curious is the story of how they kept Good Friday. Hour after hour had gone by, and they had risen gradually to that terrible exaltation of spirit which comes to those who give themselves to that day. Food was not to be thought of, but they had contrived to have by them a few grapes, and the juice was squeezed out, and mixed with water, to be drunk out of a single cup by all. In the midst of such scenes, the voice of a European was heard at the door, calling on them, in the name of Christ.

With inexpressible delight they swarmed down on him, twelve or fifteen men of them, eager to hear of the day from the lips of a Christian. “- But he said he belonged to the Salvation Army, and knew nothing about Good Friday. They only kept General Booth’s birthday and something else, I forget what”, said Sadananda, and in the cloud that overcast the face and voice of the teller, one could realize the sudden depression that fell, at this discovery, upon the monks. It seems that in their first disappointment, they snatched his Bible from the unfortunate missionary, saying he was not worthy to possess it, and drove him forth. It is said however that one of their number stole round by another door and brought him back to eat, and have his property secretly restored to him.

“Those were hot days,” says the teller of the tale, with his face aglow, “there was no minute of rest. Outsiders came and went, pundits argued and discussed. But, he, the Swami, was never for one moment idle, never dull. Sometimes he was left alone for a while, and he would walk up and down, saying, ‘Hari bol! bol! bol! Call on the Lord! Call! Call!’ or ‘Oh Mother!’ in all these ways preparing himself for his great work. And I watched all the time from a distance, and in some interval said, ‘Sir, will you not eat?’ – always to be answered playfully.”

Sometimes the talk took place while cooking was going on, or during the service of the altar, offices in which all shared without distinction. For in spite of the poverty of those days, many came to the monks to be fed. Their own resources were scanty. They had only one piece of cloth amongst them that was good enough to be worn across the shoulders, outside the monastery. So this was kept on a line and used by anyone who went out. And they could afford no more. Yet food was found somehow for the poor and for guests, and many came for help or teaching.

They begged funds enough also, to buy and distribute some hundreds of copies of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Imitation¹, the two favourite books of the Order at that time. “Silence, all ye teachers! And silence, ye prophets! Speak Thou alone, O Lord, unto my soul!” was, years after, a sentence that the Swami quoted at a venture as all that he then remembered of Thomas a Kempis. For it is perhaps needless to say that while this book took its place by degrees amongst experiences remembered, the Gita grew every day in fullness of power and beauty in the minds of these Hindu children of Ramakrishna.

So passed some twelve months. Then the Swami went away to Ghazipur to visit Pavhari Baba,* that saint whom he always held second only to Ramakrishna. He came back in a couple of months to share the treasure he had gained with others. Suddenly news came that one of the brothers, by name Yogananda, was lying ill with small-pox at Allahabad, and a party, followed by the Swami, started to nurse him.

At Allahabad, to take up once more Sadananda’s account, many days were passed in religious education. It was as if Yogananda’s sickness had been a mere incident, a call given through him, and the whole town came and went in a great stirring. Small groups would enter and leave, in a constant succession, for days and nights together, the Swami being always in his highest and greatest mood. On one occasion he saw a Mohammedan saint, a Paramahamsa, “whose every line and curve told that he was a Paramahamsa,” and this was the occasion of a great hour.

“Sometimes naked, sometimes mad,

Now as a scholar, again as a fool,

Here a rebel, there a saint,

Thus they appear on the earth, the Paramahamsas.”

1 The Imitation of Christ hy Thomas a Kemnis was one of Swami Vivekananda’s favourite books. Pavhari Baba was a saint who lived near Ghazipur. He died by burning, in 1898.

– So repeating “The Marks of the Paramahamsas” from the Viveka Chudamoni of Sankaracharya, there passed, as the disciple would put it, “a whole night fermenting.” Such experiences lasted perhaps for two weeks, and then the party left Allahabad, and by twos and threes returned to the monastery, in the village of Baranagore on the banks of the Ganges.

But now there came a time, in the year 1890, when the Swami left his brothers, not to return, till the great triumph of the year 1897.

This time he set out with a monk known as Akhandananda, who took him to Almora and left him there, enjoying the hospitality of a family who had formerly befriended himself on a journey to Thibet. It is said that on the way up the mountains, the Swami one day fainted with hunger, when a poor Mohammedan found him, and prepared and gave him a cucumber, which practically saved his life. How long the brothers had been without food I do not know. It may have been that at this time, as certainly later, he was under the vow to ask for nothing, waiting always for food and drink till they were offered. He told someone who knew him during that period and questioned him, that the longest time he had ever gone without food, under this austerity, was five days.

After this, the thread of his wanderings was lost. He wrote occasionally, but the monks themselves were scattered.

‘It had been so dull after they lost him’! says the narrator. And even the first home had to be abandoned, for the landlord talked of rebuilding. There was one monk, however, Ramakrishnananda by name, who would not leave the ashes of their Master, but vowed, with rock-like determination, to keep a roof over-head, come storm, come shine, so to speak, for them and for his brothers, till they should all foregather in their worship-room once more. He, then, with Nirmalananda, the occasional residence of one Premananda, and the new member of the fold, ‘as dish-washer’, removed to a house some distance away, but still in the immediate neighbourhood of Dakshineshwar, and the monastery which had previously been at Baranagore was now known as the Alum Bazar Math.

Akhandananda at this time was always “chasing,” always in pursuit of the absent leader. Every now and then he would hear of him in some town, and would arrive there, only in time to hear that he was gone, leaving no trace. Once the Swami Trigunatita found himself in trouble in a Guzerati state, when someone said that a Bengali Sadhu was staying with the Prime Minister, and if he appealed to him, would surely give him aid. He made his appeal, and found that the unknown Sadhu was the Swami himself. But he, after rendering the assistance that was needed, sent his brother onwards, and himself proceeded alone. The great words of Buddha, constantly quoted by him:

“Even as the lion, not trembling at noises, even as the wind, not caught in a net, even as the lotus-leaf untouched by the water, so do thou wander alone, like the rhinoceros!

– were the guiding principle of his life at this time.

It had been at Almora, as we now know, that news reached him, of the death, in pitiful extremity, of the favourite sister of his childhood, and he had fled into the wilder mountains, leaving no clue. To one who, years after, saw deep into his personal experience, it seemed that this death had inflicted on the Swami’s heart a wound, whose quivering pain had never for one moment ceased. And we may, perhaps, venture to trace some part at least of his burning desire for the education and development of Indian women, to this sorrow.

At this time he passed some months in a cave overhanging a mountain-village. Only twice have I known him to allude to this experience. Once he said, “Nothing in my whole life ever so filled me with the sense of work to be done. It was as if I were thrown out from that life in caves to wander to and fro in the plains below.” And again he said to someone, “It is not the form of his life that makes a Sadhu. For it is possible to sit in a cave and have one’s whole mind filled with the question of how many pieces of bread will be brought to one for supper!”

It was perhaps at the end of this period, and in expression of that propulsive energy of which he spoke, that he made a vow to worship the Mother at Cape Comorin. In carrying this out, he was lavish of time, yet it must have taken him only about two years to accomplish the vow. In the course of his wanderings towards this end, he seems to have touched upon and studied every phase of Indian life. The stories of this period are never ended. The list of the friends he made is never full. He received the initiation of the Sikhs; studied the Mimansa Philosophy with Mahratta pundits; and the Jain Scriptures with Jains; was accepted as their Guru by Rajput princes; lived for weeks with a family of sweepers, in Central India; was able to observe at first hand such obscure questions as the caste-customs of Malabar; saw many of the historic sights and natural beauties of his Mother-land, and finally reached Cape Comorin too poor to pay for a seat in a ferry-boat to the shrine of Kanya Kumari, and swam across the strait to the island, in spite of sharks, to offer the worship he had vowed.

It was on his return northwards through Madras, that he formed the strong group of disciples who became the means of sending him to America, for which country he sailed finally from Bombay, about the beginning of June 1893.

Even this however he was not eager to do. His disciples in Madras still tell how the first five hundred rupees collected for the object were immediately spent by him in worship and charity, as if he would force on his own destiny, as it were, the task of driving him forth. Even when he reached Bombay, he was still waiting for the feeling of certainty. Struggling to refuse the undertaking, he felt as if the form of his own Master appeared to him constantly, and urged him to go.

At last he wrote secretly to Sarada Devi, the widow of Sri Ramakrishna, begging her, if she could, to advise and bless him, and charging her to tell no one of this new departure, till she should hear from him again. It was only after receiving, in answer to this letter, her warm encouragement, and the assurance of her prayers, that he actually left India for the West.

Now, at last, there was no escaping fate. That quest of forgotten-ness that had first borne him out of the doors of the monastery, had led him also to change his name in each Indian village that he reached. And in later years someone heard from him how, after his first great speech at Chicago, the mingling of the bitterness of this defeat with the cup of his triumphant achievement, racked his consciousness all night long. He stood now in the glare of publicity. The unknown beggar could remain unknown no more!

In these wanderings through India, I find the third and final element, in my Master’s realization of that great body of truth, which was to find in him at once its witness and its demonstration.

There can be no doubt, I think, that the formative influences in his life were threefold: first his education in English and Sanskrit literature; second, the great personality of his Guru, illustrating and authenticating that life which formed the theme of all the sacred writings; and thirdly, as I would maintain, his personal knowledge of India and the Indian peoples, as an immense religious organism, of which his Master himself, with all his greatness, had been only, as it were, the personification and utterance. And these three sources can, as I think, be distinctly traced in his various utterances.

When he preaches Vedanta and upholds before the world the philosophy of his people, he is for the most part drawing upon the Sanskrit books of past ages, though, it is true, with a clearness and certainty of touch that could only be the result of having seen them summed up in a single wonderful life.

When he talks of Bhakti as of “a devotion beginning, continuing and ending in love,” or when he analyzes Karma Yoga, ‘the secret of work,’ we see before us the very personality of the Master himself, we realize that the disciple is but struggling to tell of that glorified atmosphere in which he himself has dwelt at the feet of another.

But when we tread his speech before the Chicago Conference, or his equally remarkable “Reply to the Madras Address,” or the lectures in which at Lahore, in 1897, he portrayed the lineaments of a generalized and essential Hinduism, we find ourselves in presence of something gathered by his own labours, out of his own experience. The power behind all these utterances lay in those Indian wanderings of which the tale can probably never be complete. It was of this first-hand knowledge, then, and not of vague sentiment or wilful blindness, that his reverence for his own people and their land was born. It was a robust and cumulative induction, moreover, be it said, ever hungry for new facts, and dauntless in the face of hostile criticism. ‘The common bases of Hinduism had,’ as he once said, ‘been the study of his whole life.’ And more than this, it was the same thorough and first-hand knowledge that made the older and simpler elements in Hindu civilization loom so large in all his conceptions of his race and country. Possessed of a modern education that ranked with the most advanced in his own country, he yet could not, like some moderns, ignore the Sannyasin or the peasant, the idolater or the caste-ridden, as elements in the great whole called India. And this determined inclusiveness was due to that life in which he had for years together been united with them.

It must be remembered, however, that we have not entirely analyzed a great career when we have traced, to their origin in the personal experience, those ideas which form its dominant notes. There is still the original impulse, the endowment of perennial energy that makes the world-spectacle so much more full of meaning to one soul than to another, to be accounted for. And I have gathered that from his very cradle Vivekananda had a secret instinct that told him he was born to help his country. He was proud afterwards to remember that amidst the temporal vicissitudes of his early days in America, when sometimes he did not know where to turn for the next meal, his letters to his disciples in India showed that this innate faith of his had never wavered. Such an indomitable hope resides assuredly in all souls who are born to carry out any special mission. It is a deep unspoken consciousness of greatness, of which life itself is to be the sole expression. To Hindu thinking, there is a difference as of the poles, between such consciousness of greatness and vanity, and this is seen, as I think, in the Swami himself at the moment of his first meeting with Sri Ramakrishna, when he was decidedly repelled, rather than attracted, by what he regarded as the old man’s exaggerated estimate of his powers and of himself.

He had come, a lad of fifteen, as a member of a party visiting Dakshineshwar, and someone, probably knowing the unusual quality of his voice, and his knowledge of music, suggested that he should sing. He responded with a song of Ram Mohun Roy’s, ending with the words, “And for support keep the treasure in secret, – purity.”

This seems to have acted like a signal – “My boy! my boy!” cried Sri Ramakrishna, “I have been looking for you these three years, and you have come at last!” From that day the older man may be said to have devoted himself to welding the lads about him into a brotherhood whose devotion to “Noren,” as the Swami was then called, would be unswerving. He was never tired of foretelling his great fame, nor of pointing out the superiority of his genius. If most men had two, or three, or even ten or twelve gifts, he said, he could only say of Noren that his numbered a thousand. He was in fact “the thousand-petalled lotus.” Even amongst the great, while he would allow that with one might be found some “two of those gifts which are the marks of Siva,” Noren had at least eighteen of such.

He was sensitive to the point of physical pain himself, in his discrimination of hypocrisy, and on one occasion refused to accept a man whose piety of life was regarded by those about him as unimpugnable. The man, he said, with all his decorum, was a whited sepulchre. In spite of constant purification his presence was contamination, while Noren, on the other hand, if he were to eat beef in an English hotel, would nevertheless be holy, so holy that his very touch would convey holiness to others. By such sayings he sought constantly to build up an enduring relation, based firmly on essentials, between those who were to be his supporters, and this disciple who was to lead.

It was his habit, when a new disciple came to him, to examine him mentally and physically in all possible ways. For the human body was to his trained eye, as significant in all its parts, as any model of a machine to a skilled scientific observer. These examinations moreover would include the throwing of the newcomer into a sleep, in which he had access to the subconscious mind. The privileged, as I have been told, were permitted in this condition to relate their own story; while from the less honoured it was evoked by means of questions.

It was after such an examination of “Noren” that the Master told all about him, that when the day should come for this boy to realize who and what he was, he would refuse for a moment longer to endure the bondage of bodily existence, going out from life, with its limitations. And by this was always understood by the disciples, the remembering by the lad of what he had already attained, even in this world, in lives anterior to his present consciousness. No menial service to himself was permitted by Sri Ramakrishna from this particular follower. Fanning, the preparation of tobacco, and the thousand and one little attentions commonly rendered to the Guru, all these had to be offered to the Master by others.

Amongst the many quaint-seeming customs of the East, none is more deep-rooted than the prejudice against eating food cooked by one who is not respected. And on this point the Swami’s Master was as sensitive as a woman. But what he would not eat himself he would give freely to his favourite disciple, for Noren, he said, was the “roaring fire,” burning up all impurity. The core of divinity again, in this boy’s nature was masculine in its quality, as compared to his own merely feminine.

Thus, by an attitude of admiration, not unmixed with actual reverence, he created a belief in the destiny of this particular lad, which, when he himself had passed away, was to stand him in good stead, in furnishing authenticity and support to his work. For the Swami was nothing, if not a breaker of bondage. And it was essential that there should be those about him who understood the polar difference between his breaches of custom and those of the idly selfindulgent. Nothing in the early days of my life in India, struck me so forcibly or so repeatedly as the steadiness with which the other members of the Order fulfilled this part of the mission laid upon them. Men whose own lives were cast in the strictest mould of Hindu orthodoxy, or even of asceticism, were willing to eat with the Europeans whom their leader had accepted.

Was the Swami seen dining in Madras with an Englishman and his wife? Was it said that while in the West he had touched beef or wine? Not a quiver was seen on the faces of his brethren. It was not for them to question, not for them to explain, not even for them to ask for final justification and excuse. Whatever he did, wherever he might lead, it was their place to be found unflinching at his side.

And surely none can pass this spectacle in review, without its being borne in upon him, that meaningless as would have been the Order of Ramakrishna without Vivekananda, even so futile would have been the life and labours of Vivekananda, without, behind him, his brothers of the Order of Ramakrishna. It was said to me lately by one of the older generation that “Ramakrishna had lived for the making of Vivekananda.” Is it indeed so? Or is it not rather impossible to distinguish with such fixity between one part and another, in a single mighty utterance of the Divine Mother-heart? Often it appears to me, in studying all these lives, that there has been with us a soul named Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, and that, in the penumbra of his being, appear many forms, some of which are with us still, and of none of whom it could be said with entire truth that here ends, in relation to him, the sphere of those others, or that there begins his own.

The summer of 1898 stands out in my memory as a series of pictures, painted like old altar-pieces, against a golden background of religious ardour and simplicity, and all alike glorified by the presence of one who, to us in his immediate circle, formed their central point.

We were a party of four Western women, one of whom was Mrs. Ole Bull of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another a member of the higher official world of Anglo-Indian Calcutta. Side by side with us travelled the Swami, surrounded by his brethren (or gurubhais) and disciples.

Once arrived at Almora, he and his party became the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Sevier, who were then residing there, and we occupied a bungalow some distance away. Thus pleasantly grouped, it was possible to combine a high degree of freedom and intercourse. But when, after a month or so, we left Almora for Kashmir, the Swami went with us, as the guest of Mrs. Ole Bull, and left behind him all his attendants.

What scenes were those through which we journeyed from the beginning of May until the end of October! And with what passionate enthusiasm were we introduced one by one to each point of interest, as we reached it! The ignorance of educated Western people about India, – excepting of course those who have in some measure specialised on the subject -might almost be described as illiteracy, and our object-lessons began, I have no doubt, with Patna, the ancient Pataliputra, itself. The river-front of Benares, as one approaches it by railway from the East, is amongst the sights of the world, and could not fail of our leader’s eager praise. The industries and luxuries of Lucknow must needs be dwelt upon and enumerated. But it was not only the great cities of admitted beauty and historic importance, that the Swami, in his eagerness, would strive to impress on our memory. Perhaps nowhere did his love seem more ardent, or his absorption more intense, than as we passed across the long stretches of the Plains, covered with fields and farms and villages.

Here his thought was free to brood over the land as a whole, and he would spend hours explaining the communal system of agriculture, or describing the daily life of the farm housewife, with such details as that of the pot-au-feu of mixed grains left boiling all night, for the morning porridge. It was the memory, doubtless, of his own days as a wanderer, that so brightened his eyes and thrilled in his voice, as he told us these things. For I have heard it said by sadhus that there is no hospitality in India like that of the humble peasant home. True, the mistress has no better bedding to offer than straw, no better shelter than an outhouse built of mud. But it is she who steals in at the last moment, before she goes to rest herself amongst her sleeping household, to place a tooth-brush twig and a bowl of milk where the guest will find them, on waking in the morning, that he may go forth from beneath her roof comforted and refreshed.

It would seem sometimes as if the Swami lived and moved and had his very being in the sense of his country’s past. His historic consciousness was extraordinarily developed. Thus, as we journeyed across the Terai, in the hot hours of an afternoon near the beginning of the rains, we were made to feel that this was the very earth on which had passed the youth and renunciation of Buddha. The wild peacocks spoke to us of Rajputana and her ballad lore. An occasional elephant was the text for tales of ancient battles, and the story of an India that was never defeated, so long as she could oppose to the tide of conquest the military walls of these living artillery.

As we had crossed the boundary from Bengal into the North-West Provinces, the Swami had stopped to tell us of the wisdom and methods of the great and merciful English ruler who was at that time at the head of their administration. “Unlike others,” he said, in words that impressed my memory at the time, “he understands the need of personal government in Oriental countries, where a strong public opinion is not yet developed, so no hospital, no college, no office knows the day when he will pay it a visit of inspection. And even the poorest believes that if only he can reach him personally, he will receive justice at his hands.” This idea of the importance of personality in Eastern governments often came uppermost in his talk. He constantly spoke of a democracy as theoretically the worst form for an imperial government to take. And one of his favourite speculations was that it had been a perception of this truth that had urged Julius Caesar on, to aspire to the imperial authority.

We realised sometimes, as we listened to him, how hard it had been for the Indian poor, to understand the transition from the personal rule of sovereigns, always accessible to appeal, always open to the impulse of mercy, and able to exercise a supreme discretion, to the cold bureaucratic methods of a series of departments. For we heard from him the personal histories of innumerable simple folk, who, in the early years of British rule, had spent their all in the vain hope of reaching the Queen, and gaining her ear, at Windsor. Heart-broken pilgrims for the most part, who died, of want and disillusionment, far from the homes and villages that they would never see again!

It was as we passed into the Punjab, however, that we caught our deepest glimpse of the Master’s love of his own land. Anyone who had seen him here, would have supposed him to have been born in the province, so intensely had he identified himself with it. It would seem that he had been deeply bound to the people there by many ties of love and reverence; had received much and given much; for there were some amongst them who urged that they found in him a rare mixture of ‘Guru Nanak and Guru Govind,’ their first teacher and their last.

Even the most suspicious amongst them trusted him. And if they refused to credit his judgment, or endorse his outflowing sympathy, in regard to those Europeans whom he had made his own, he, it may have been, loved the wayward hearts all the more for their inflexible condemnation and incorruptible sternness. His American disciples were already familiar with his picture – that called to his own face a dreamy delight, – of the Punjabi maiden at her spinning wheel, listening to its “Sivoham! Sivoham! I am He! I am He!” Yet at the same time, I must not forget to tell that it was here, on entering the Punjab, even as, near the end of his life, he is said to have done again at Benares, that he called to him a Mussulman vendor of sweetmeats, and bought and ate from his hand Mohammedan food.

As we went through some village, he would point out to us those strings of marigolds above the door, that distinguished the Hindu homes. Again he would show us the pure golden tint of skin, so different from the pink and white of the European ideal, that constitutes the ‘fairness’ admired by the Indian races. Or as one drove beside him in a tonga¹, he would forget all, in that tale of which he never wearied, of Siva, the Great God, silent, remote upon the mountains, asking nothing of men but solitude, and ”lost in one eternal meditation.”

We drove from Rawalpindi to Murree, where we spent a few days. And then, partly by tonga, partly by boat, we proceeded to Srinagar in Kashmir, and made it our centre and headquarters, during the wanderings of the following months.

It would be easy to lose oneself here in the beauty of our journeys, in descriptions of mountain-forests on the road to Almora, or of cathedral-rocks and corn-embosomed villages in the Jhelum Pass. For, as one returns upon that time, its record is found in a constant succession of scenes of loveliness. Not least of these pictures is the memory of the handsome old woman, wearing the crimson coronet and white veil of Kashmiri peasants, who sat at her spinning-wheel under a great chenaar-tree* in a farm-yard, surrounded by her daughters-in-law, when we passed that, way, and stopped to visit her. It was the Swami’s second call on her. He had received some small kindness at her hands the year before, and had never tired of telling how, after this, when he had asked, before saying farewell, “- And,

1. Tonga: a horse drawn carriage, which was used for transportation in India.
The Chenaar-tree is the Oriental Palm.

mother, of what religion are you?” her whole face had lighted up with pride and joy, and her old voice had rung out in triumph as she answered loudly and clearly, “I thank our God, by the mercy of the Lord, I am a Mussulman!”

Or I might tell of the avenue of lofty Lombardy poplars outside Srinagar, so like the well-known picture by Hobbema, where we listened to discourse after discourse on India and the Faith.

Or I might linger over the harvest merriment of the villagers, playing in reaped fields on moonlit evenings; or talk of the red bronze of amaranth crops, or the green of young rice under tall poplars at Islamabad. Forget-me-nots of a brilliant blue form the commonest wild flower of the Kashmiri fields in summer; but in autumn and spring, fields and river banks are violet-tinged with small purple irises, and one walks amongst their spear-like leaves as if they were grass. How infinitely tender are the suggestions of those little iris-covered hillocks, rounding off the rise of some road-side against the sky, that mark the burial places of the Mussulman dead!

Here and there, too, amidst grass and irises, one comes on groups of gnarled apple trees, or pear, or plum, the remains of the village orchards which the State, once upon a time, supplied to all its subjects free of cost. Walking here once, at twilight, along the high banks of the river, I watched a party of Mussulman herdsmen, crooks in hand, driving a small flock of long-haired goats before them to their village. And then, as they came to a knot of apple-trees, they stopped awhile, and spreading a blanket for praying-carpet, they proceeded to offer their evening-worship in the deepening dusk.

Verily, says my heart, there is no end of beauty. There is no end!

But in good sooth it is not of these things that I am attempting, in the course of the present pages, to speak. Mine is the broken and faltering witness of one who is fain to tell – not of geography nor of politics, nor yet of the ways and customs of interesting peoples and unknown races, but rather of the glimpses vouchsafed to her of a great religious life of the ancient order, living itself out, amidst the full and torturing consciousness of all the anomalies and perplexities of the Modern Transition.

Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the Swami himself said once of him, “like a flower,” living apart in the garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought to dismiss its very memory. It was at once the greatness and the tragedy of my own Master’s life that he was not of this type. His was the modern mind in its completeness. In his consciousness, the ancient light of the mood in which man comes face to face with God might shine, but it shone on all those questions and all those puzzles which are present to the thinkers and workers of the modern world. His hope could not pass by unheeded, – it might include or it might reject – the hope of men of the nineteenth century. That sudden revelation of the misery and struggle of humanity as a whole, which has been the first result of the limelight irradiation of facts by the organisation of knowledge, had been made to him also, as to the European mind. We know the verdict that Europe has passed on it all.

Our art, our science, our poetry, for the last sixty years or more, are filled with the voices of our despair. A world summed up in the growing satisfaction and vulgarity of privilege, and the growing sadness and pain of the dispossessed; and a will of man too noble and high to condone the evil, yet too feeble to avert or arrest it, this is the spectacle of which our greatest minds are aware. Reluctant, wringing her hands, it is true, yet seeing no other way, the culture of the West can but stand and cry, “To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Vae Victis! Woe to the vanquished!”

Is this also the verdict of the Eastern wisdom? If so, what hope is there for humanity? I find in my Master’s life an answer to this question. I see in him the heir to the spiritual discoveries and religious struggles of innumerable teachers and saints in the past of India and the world, and at the same time the pioneer and prophet of a new and future order of development. In the place which a problem took in his mind I find evidence regarding its final solution which -short of my own definite arrival at an opposite conclusion, as he himself would have been the first to point out – is of the highest value to myself.

And thinking thus, I believe that each trace of those higher and uncommon modes of thought and consciousness to which he held the key, has its significance for the modern age. I believe that much which has passed myself by, uncomprehending, will fall on its proper soil in other lives. And I pray only to give always true witness, without added interpolation, or falsifying colour.

I had heard of “the spiritual life” in Calcutta, as of a thing definite and accessible, to be chosen deliberately, and attained by following certain well-known paths. I found it, on reaching the mountains, to have its roots deep in a yearning love of God, in an anguished pursuit of the Infinite, of which I cannot hope to give any description. For this was characteristic of our Master. Where others would talk of ways and means, he knew how to light a fire. Where others gave directions, he would show the thing itself.

I wish here to be exceedingly explicit. My own part, throughout the years of my discipleship, appears to me to have been something like that of a thought-reader. The only claim that I can make is that I was able to enter sufficiently into the circuit of my Master’s energy to be able to give evidence regarding it from direct perception.

And since I believe that such an experience is subject to laws as definite as those of any physical force, I must endeavour to describe accurately the conditions under which this happened to me.

The Swami himself was, on personal subjects, intensely reserved. He had received confessions, of course, in many parts of the world, yet no one ever lived who more anxiously sought to escape the office of spiritual director. A hot flush and an accession of delicate hauteur were his immediate response, even to such merely theoretical questions as appeared to him to demand too intimate a revelation of the personal experience. I have sometimes heard enquiries forced upon him in his London classes – as to such matters as the feeling which accompanies Samadhi, for instance, – when it was clear to all listeners that he would rather have endured a careless touch upon an exposed nerve.

He had himself suggested my joining his travelling party, for the purpose of receiving his personal training for the work he wished me to do in India. But the method of this training proved entirely general. We would sit all together in garden or verandah, and listen, all together, to the discourse of the hour, each appropriating as much as she chose, and studying after-wards as she liked.

In all that year of 1898 I can remember only one occasion when the Swami invited me to walk alone with him for half an hour, and then our conversation – for it was towards the end of the summer, when I had begun to understand my own position a little – was rather of the policy and aims of the future, than of anything more subjective.

Undoubtedly, in the circle that gathers round a distinguished thinker, there are hidden emotional relationships which form the channels, as it were, along which his ideas circulate and are received. Even a mathematician will succeed in impressing himself on his generation, only in proportion to the radiance of feeling on which his thought is carried. But these expressions are wholly impersonal, and are appreciated by different receivers in very different ways. One holds himself as servant; another, as brother, friend, or comrade; a third may even regard the master-personality as that of a beloved child.

These things have been made into a perfect science in India, and it is there boldly understood and accepted that without some such dramatisation of their own relation to it, ordinary minds cannot be made susceptible of a great religious impulse. In my own case the position ultimately taken proved that most happy one of a spiritual daughter, and as such I was regarded by all the Indian people and communities, whom I met during my Master’s life.

But at the beginning of these journeys, before this and other things became clear to me, my mind was wholly in bewilderment, and it was my great good fortune that I was given at this time, as my daily teacher, in Bengali and in Hindu religious literature, the young monk known as the Swami Swarupananda. For I have always thought that it was to the fact that I found myself on the line of communication between his mind and that of our Master, – as on the pathway of interaction between some major and minor heliograph, – that I owed my ability there-after to read and understand a little of those feelings and ideas with which the air about us was charged.

The Swami Swarupananda had been received at the Monastery, within a few days of my own admission, in the chapel there, to the vows of a novice. But he, after some few weeks of probation, had received the yellow cloth, and taken the rank of a Sannyasin, at the hands of the Swami. The story of his mental development was of extraordinary interest to me. For this man had been brought up in his childhood in the Vaishnava faith, that is to say, in an idea of God as the kind and loving Lord and Preserver of men, and of Krishna as the Saviour and Divine Incarnation, which is practically tantamount to the Christianity of the West.

The usual revulsion, familiar to all of us, had been encountered. In the early and most chivalrous years of manhood he had witnessed a few instances of the injustice of life, had seen bitter proof that the battle in this world was to the strong, and found himself unable to believe longer in the sweet myth of his childhood, of an all-kind Providence. One of these stories I remember. Passing through a crowded street one day, he found a poor woman kneeling and crying softly, as, grain by grain, she picked up from the dust a handful of rice, that had been jostled out of the bowl in her hand, by a passer-by. And then the man found himself in his passionate pity, crying indignantly, “What the Devil would God be doing, if He existed, to let such things happen?”

Two or three such experiences precipitated him upon a year of mental suffering so keen that he never again knew perfect health. But he emerged from it in the peace that comes of a settled attitude towards life. He would break the dream. In other words, he had reached the conclusion that thousands of Indian students have arrived at, both before and since the time of Buddha.

It was henceforth impossible to him to imagine that the solution of the problem might ultimately be found in any picture of God seated on a throne, and the soul of man, in any attitude or relation, kneeling before Him. Rather, he saw in the ignorance and selfishness of the mind itself, the source of all such dreams as this, and of those further dreams, of pain and pleasure, of justice and injustice, of which the world, as we know it, is made up. And he determined to conquer this illusion, to reach the point of utmost insight and certainty, to gain deliverance from the perception of opposites, and to attain to that permanent realisation of One-ness which is known, in the Hindu conception of life, as Mukti.

From this time on, his schooling of himself to reach the highest would appear to have become a passion. One came to understand, in many ways, that the remaining years of his life in his father’s house had been almost more severe than those spent in most monasteries. And I, reading the Bhagavad Gita under his guidance, long afterwards at Almora, was made able to conceive of what we call the love of God as a burning thirst.

Under the influence of the Swami Swarupananda, I began seriously the attempt at meditation. And if it had not been for this help of his, one of the greatest hours of my life would have passed me by.

My relation to our Master at this time can only be described as one of clash and conflict. I can see now how much there was to learn, and how short was the time for learning to be, and the first of lessons doubtless is the destroying of self-sufficiency in the mind of the taught. But I had been little prepared for that constant rebuke and attack upon all my most cherished prepossessions which was now my lot. Suffering is often illogical, and I cannot attempt to justify by reason the degree of unhappiness which I experienced at this time, as I saw the dream of a friendly and beloved leader falling away from me, and the picture of one who would be at least indifferent, and possibly, silently hostile, substituting itself instead ¹.

Fortunately it never occurred to me to retract my own proffered service, but I was made to realise, as the days went by, that in this there would be no personal sweetness. And then a time came when one of the older ladies of our party, thinking perhaps that such intensity of pain inflicted might easily go too far, interceded kindly and gravely with the Swami. He listened silently and went away. At evening, however, he returned, and finding us together in the verandah, he turned to her and said, with the simplicity of a child, “You were right. There must be a change. I am going away into the forests to be alone, and when I come back I shall bring peace.” Then he turned and saw that above us the moon was new, and a sudden exaltation came into his voice as he said, “See! the Mohammedans think much of the new moon. Let us also with the new moon begin a new life!”

As the words ended, he lifted his hands and blessed, with silent depths of blessing, his most rebellious disciple, by this time kneeling before him….It was assuredly a moment of wonderful sweetness of reconciliation. But such a moment may heal a wound. It cannot restore an illusion that has been broken into fragments. And I have told its story, only that I may touch upon its sequel.

Long, long ago, Sri Ramakrishna had told his disciples that the day would come when his beloved “Noren” would manifest his own great gift of bestowing knowledge with a touch. That evening at Almora, I proved the truth of his prophecy. For alone, in meditation, I found myself gazing deep into an Infinite Good, to the recognition of which no egoistic reasoning had led me. I learnt, too, on the physical plane, the simple everyday reality of the experience related in the Hindu books on religious psychology. And I understood, for the first time, that the greatest teachers may destroy in us a personal relation only in order to bestow the Impersonal Vision in its place.

1. Nivedita’s difficult experience with Swami Vivekananda was not specific to her alone, but was probably undergone by other disciples as well. The strain is not to be thought of as a flaw in the temperament of either the disciple or the guru, rather it was a process of spiritual transformation which Sister Christine beautifully explains, in the book Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda.

She writes that when people accepted Vivekananda as their ‘friend’ he would never interfere in their beliefs, or point out their faults to them; but once someone accepted him as their ‘guru’ the relationship changed. Then he felt it his responsibility to “attack foibles, prejudices, valuations” – in other words to destroy false ideas and illusions which his disciples clung to, and thus free them from Maya, so that they may succeed in their quest to realizing the Supreme Truth by which this world is pervaded.

It is this process that Sister Nivedita is referring to, when she says that Vivekananda relentlessly attacked her cherished prepossessions and beliefs, thereby destroying a superficial friendship, and replacing it with a much deeper guru-disciple bond, in which he could help her attain a glimpse of the Infinite.

This was not perhaps the only experience of its kind, but it was certainly the only one to which I need refer in detail; and the whole incident of which it formed a part gave me the clue to the attitude which the Eastern teacher demands of a disciple.

Before all things this attitude must be one of passivity. I have also heard it urged, that it must be one of personal service. Under these conditions, it is said, the thoughts of the master become as seeds, and germinate in the mind of the pupil. I cannot tell. My own offerings in this kind were limited to very brief and very occasional requisitions of the needle or the pen. A daughter must not at any time act, said the Swami, as if in her father’s house were too few servants! Yet I do believe – for in some cases I have known its truth – that by the loving performance of humble offices for those above us, we may enter into spiritual and intellectual communion with them, which may bear strange and beautiful fruit in our own lives.

The feeling which people of certain schools in the West devote to the Church, that mixture of perfect faith and adoring love, the Eastern disciple is called upon to render to his guru, or spiritual master. It is he and his achievement, which are the power behind his follower. And the unpardonable sacrilege is a failure to acknowledge, or a repudiation of, this debt. Each will express his devotion in his own way. Greatest of all gurus is he who realises most deeply the freedom of the disciple. But devotion to the uttermost there must be. And dry-rot, it is believed, invades that spiritual life which seeks to base its message on itself.

We had at this time, it will be remembered, become part of a society in which solitude was regarded as the greatest medium of self-development. Nothing, said the Swami, better illustrated to his own mind, the difference between Eastern and Western methods of thought, than the European idea that a man could not live alone for twenty years, and remain quite sane, taken side by side with the Indian notion that till a man had been alone for twenty years, he could not be regarded as perfectly himself.

And the contrast, though necessarily expressed with some exaggeration, is nevertheless essentially correct. To Hindu thinking it is only in silence and alone-ness that we can drink so deep of the Impersonal Self that all the facets and angles of our personal littleness are rounded out, as by growth from within. Thus, the faces of the Buddhas, in the hour of Nirvana, are always calm.

The world, in all its aspects and relations, is but a childish interruption of the flow of thought. Behind everything is felt to be that unutterable fullness, of which the thing seen is so paltry and distorted an expression. Human relations are too poor to tempt those who have bathed in the wellspring of all such relations at the Ultimate Source. And this Ultimate Source is not thought of here, it must be remembered, as love or compassion or heroism, though all these may be roads by which to reach it, but as the perception of Oneness, and that alone. I have always thought that this is the reason why steadiness and quiet and self-effacement are virtues so much more central, in the Hindu conception, than the more active and aggressive characteristics prized in the West. Every respect in which we, being persons, can yet be consistently indifferent to our own personality, is so much gained.

Under the domination of these ideas, then, it appeared self-evident to all of us, in that wonderful summer of 1898, that far beyond any of the Saviours-made-visible, were those greater souls who had entered into the Impersonal and the Unmanifested, never to return. “It is a sin even to think of the body,” the Swami would say, now and again; or, “It is wrong to manifest power!” And even in the compassion of a Buddha there was memory of persons! Even in the purity of Jesus there was manifestation!

This last thought seems to form a common motive with Indian Sadhus, for on one occasion when our tents had been pitched indiscreetly near a pilgrims’ camp, and the Swami was halfminded to insist, against hundreds of obstreperous¹ complainants, on leaving them where they were, a strange monk came up to him, and said in a low voice, “You have this power, Swamiji, but you ought not to manifest it!” And he at once had them removed.

As to the power of silence and retirement to make illumination visible, we had many opportunities of judging. For over and over again the Swami would break away, to return unexpectedly. It sometimes seemed as if life in society were an agony to him. He grew nervous under the gaze of numbers of admirers who had heard of his great fame, and would enter his boat and sit watching him, leaving him no privacy. The life of the silent ashen-clad wanderer, or the hidden hermit, he thought of, it would now and then seem, as the lover might think of the beloved.

At no time would it have surprised us, had someone told us that to-day or tomorrow he would be gone for ever; that we were now listening to his voice for the last time. He, and necessarily we, in all that depended on him, were as straws carried on the Ganges of the Eternal Will. At any moment It might reveal Itself to him as silence. At any moment, life in the world might end for him.

This plan-less-ness was not an accident. Never can I forget the disgust with which he turned on myself once, a couple of years later, when I had offered him some piece of worldly wisdom regarding his own answer to a letter which he had brought for me to see. “Plans! Plans!” he exclaimed in indignation. “That is why you Western people can never create a religion! If any of you ever did, it was only a few Catholic saints, who had no plans. Religion was never never preached by planners!”

As it was, in the course of that pleasant summer-journey, we were always liable to hear from the servants that the Swami’s boat had left its moorings an hour ago, and would not return to-day. He might be away, in fact, either one or many days. We never knew. But always he returned from these lonely retreats with shining of radiance and peace, and ever-deepening utterance of knowledge.

To all the disciples of Ramakrishna, religious customs consecrated by the faith of others, have great significance. One of them speaks of the Scala Sancta in Rome¹ as moving him deeply. The ideal of the Order moreover, is to participate in the worship of the accustomed devotees in every detail. Thus I have seen my own Master, when visiting holy places, make the same offerings of milk and rice, or tell his beads in the same manner, as the humblest of the women about him. The minutest rules of conduct, both secular and religious, would be scrupulously observed by him on these occasions. Thus he one-d himself with the people, before rising to his own greatest heights.

Two places in Kashmir are regarded as extremely sacred, one is Kshir Bhowani, a spring at which the Divine Motherhood is worshipped, and the other Amarnath, a mountain-cave in which there is an ice-emblem of Siva. And the most notable events of our summer were his pilgrimages to these two shrines.

But we also were ambitious. We desired to be taught to meditate, in systematic fashion, and begged to be allowed to make a retreat in some lonely place, where we might keep hours of silence, and make our attempts under definite direction. For this reason, tents were brought, and we camped for a week on the edge of a forest, at a place called Achhabal, in the beginning of September. The pilgrimage to Amarnath had been made at the beginning of August, and the Swami left us for Kshir Bhowani on the thirtieth of September. Finally we parted from him, and our journey was over, at Baramulla, October the twelfth.

1. The Scala Sancta in Rome are a set of holy stairs which are believed to have led up to the praetorium of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, where Jesus stood during his trial, prior to his crucifixion.

Even apart from the greater revelations and experiences, flashes from the beacon-fire of that life in whose shadow we dwelt, fell constantly upon us. Once he had just returned from an absence, and as he sat talking of bhakti, a servant came to say his meal was ready. But we could see how intolerable was the thought of food, to one who was still living on the heights of the love of God.

Again it was evening, and we women-folk were seated in the boat of Sthir Mata, as we called our hostess, chatting in low tones, in the falling dusk, when suddenly he came in to spend a few minutes with us. The talk turned on the approaching departure for Europe; but it soon ended; and then one who expected to be left alone in India, spoke of how the others would be missed. The Swami turned on her with a wonderful gentleness. “But why so serious about it?” he said. “Why not touch hands and part with a smile? You are so morbid, you Westerns! You worship sorrow! All through your country I found that. Social life in the West is like a peal of laughter, but underneath, it is a wail. It ends in a sob. The fun and frivolity are all on the surface: really, it is full of tragic intensity. Now here, it is sad and gloomy on the out-side, but underneath are carelessness and merriment.”

“You know, we have a theory that the Universe is God’s manifestation of Himself, just for fun, that the Incarnations came and lived here, ‘just for fun.’ Play, it was all play. Why was Christ crucified? It was mere play. And so of life. Just play with the Lord. Say, ‘It is all play. It is all play.’ Do you do anything?” And then, without another word, he turned and went out into the starlight, and passed into his own boat. And we also, in the hush of the river, said goodnight and parted.

One evening, in our week of retreat, we sat under the great trees beside the stream, and it was of leadership that he talked. He began by comparing certain notable movements of the hour, of which one had grown daily during the lifetime of its founder, both in numbers and complexity, while the other had been seen breaking up into its component parts. Finally he said “I am persuaded, that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born for it. For the difficulty is not in organisation, and making plans; the test, the real test, of a leader, lies in holding widely different people together, along the line of their common sympathies. And this can only be done unconsciously, never by trying.”

From this, the talk somehow strayed to Plato, and someone asked for an explanation of the doctrine of Ideas. He gave this, and as he ended, he said, addressing one of the group in particular, “And so you see, all this is but a feeble manifestation of the great ideas which alone are real and perfect. Somewhere is an ideal you, and here is an attempt to manifest it! The attempt falls short still in many ways. Still, – go on! You will interpret the ideal someday.” “I cannot feel the longing to get out of life that Hindus feel,” said one on another occasion, in response to something he had said about breaking the bonds of life. “I think I would a great deal rather come back and help the causes that interest me, than achieve personal salvation.” “That’s because you cannot overcome the idea of progress,” he retorted quickly. “But things do not grow better. They remain as they were, and we grow better, by the changes we make in them.”

This last sentence has to myself the ring of a Veda. “We grow better, by the changes we make in them.” Similarly, when we were at Almora, I remember a certain elderly man with a face full of amiable weakness, who came to put to him a question about karma. What were they to do, he asked, whose karma it was, to see the strong oppress the weak? The Swami turned on him in surprised indignation. “Why thrash the strong, of course!” he said. “You forget your own part in this karma. – Yours is always the right to rebel!

It was in the course of an open-air meal in the Mogul Gardens at Achhabal, that the Swami suddenly announced that he would go to Amarnath with the pilgrims, and take his daughter¹ with him. Within our little party, there was too much feeling of delighted congratulation, for any obstacle to be put in the way of the fortunate member. And aided thus, as well as by the State officer, in charge of the journey, preparations went forward for this unique experience.

Kashmir seemed, in those weeks, to be full of pilgrims. We left Achhabal, and returned to our boats at Islamabad, for final arrangements, and everywhere we saw the march of gathering hosts. It was all very quiet and orderly and picturesque. Two or three thousand people would encamp in a field, and leave it before dawn, with no trace of their occupation, save the ashes of their cooking-fires. They carried a bazaar with them, and at each halting place, the pitching of tents, and opening of shops, took place with incredible rapidity. Organisation appeared to be instinctive. A broad street would run through the middle of one part of the camp, and here one could buy dried fruits, milk, dahls, and rice. The tent of the Tehsildar, -with that of the Swami on one side, and my own on the other, – was generally placed near some advantageous spot for the lighting of the evening fire, and thus his neighbourhood tended to form a social centre.

There were hundreds of monks, of all the orders, with their Gerrua tents, some no larger than a good-sized umbrella, and amongst these, the Swami’s influence appeared to be magnetic. The more learned of them swarmed about him at every halting place, filling his tent, and remaining absorbed in conversation, throughout the hours of day light.

The talk on their side, he told us afterwards, had been all of Siva, and they had remonstrated with him seriously, when he had insisted, occasionally, on drawing their attention to the world about them. Even foreigners, they urged, were men. Why make such distinctions between Swadesh and bidesh?

Nor could many of them understand the warmth of his love and sympathy for Mohammedanism. The same other-worldliness that made Swadesh and bidesh indistinguishable, also prevented these simple souls from formally conceiving of a unity, in which Hindu and Mohammedan were but rival elements. The soil of the Punjab, they argued, was drenched with the blood of those who had died for the faith. Here, at least, let him 1. Sister Nivedita considered herself as the spiritual daughter of Swami Vivekananda. In Chapter 6, practise a narrow orthodoxy! In answer to this, as became one who was, in fact ‘an anachronism of the future’, the Swami made those practical concessions of the moment that were expressive of his love for the brethren, and drove his principles home to their minds with the greater force and vehemence.

1. Sister Nivedita considered herself as the spiritual daughter of Swami Vivekananda. In Chapter 6, Awakener of Souls – of this book, she writes: “In my own case the position ultimately taken proved that most happy one of a spiritual daughter, and as such I was regarded by all the Indian people and communities, whom I met during my Master’s life.

But, as he told the tale of his warm discussions, the foreign mind could not help, with some amusement, noting the paradox that the Tehsildar himself, and many officers and servants of the pilgrimage, had been Mussulmans, and that no one had dreamt of objecting to their entering the Cave with the Hindu worshippers, on the ultimate arrival at the shrine. The Tehsildar came afterwards, indeed, with a group of friends, begging formal acceptance by the Swami as disciples; and in this, no one seemed to find anything incongruous or surprising.

Leaving Islamabad, we caught up some-where with the pilgrimage, and camped with it, for that night, at Pawan, a place famous for its holy springs. I can remember yet the brilliance of the lights reflected in the clear black waters of the tank that evening, and throngs of pilgrims proceeding in little groups from shrine to shrine.

At Pahlgam – the village of the shepherds – the camp halted for a day, to keep ekadasi\ It was a beautiful little ravine floored, for the most part with sandy islands in the pebble-worn bed of a mountain stream. The slopes about it were dark with pine-trees, and over the mountain at its head was seen, at sunset, the moon, not yet full. It was the scenery of Switzerland or Norway, at their gentlest and loveliest. Here we saw the last of human dwellings, a bridge, a farm house, with its ploughed fields, and a few saeter-huts. And here, on a grassy knoll, when the final march began, we left the rest of our party encamped.

Through scenes of indescribable beauty, three thousand of us ascended the valleys that opened before us as we went. The first day we camped in a pine-wood; the next, we had passed the snow-line, and pitched our tents beside a frozen river. That night, the great camp-fire was made of juniper, and the next evening, at still greater heights, the servants had to wander many miles, in search of this scanty fuel.

At last the regular pathway came to an end, and we had to scramble up and down, along goat-paths, on the face of steep declivities, till we reached the boulder-strewn gorge, in which the Cave of Amarnath was situated. As we ascended this, we had before us the snow-peaks covered with a white veil, newly-fallen; and in the Cave itself, in a niche never reached by sunlight, shone the great ice-lingam, that must have seemed, to the awestruck peasants who first came upon it, like the waiting Presence of God.

1. Ekadasi: An auspicious day of fasting in Hinduism.

The Swami had observed every rite of the pilgrimage, as he came along. He had told his beads, kept fasts, and bathed in the ice-cold waters of five streams in succession, crossing the river-gravels on our second day. And now, as he entered the Cave, it seemed to him, as if he saw Siva made visible before him. Amidst the buzzing, swarming noise of the pilgrim-crowd, and the overhead fluttering of the pigeons, he knelt and prostrated two or three times, unnoticed; and then, afraid lest emotion might overcome him, he rose and silently withdrew. He said afterwards that in these brief moments he had received from Siva the gift of Amar, -not to die, until he himself had willed it. In this way, possibly, was defeated or fulfilled that presentiment which had haunted him from childhood, that he would meet with death, in a Siva temple amongst the mountains.

Outside the Cave, there was no Brahminic exploitation of the helpless people. Amarnath is remarkable for its simplicity and closeness to nature. But the pilgrimage culminates on the great day of Rakhibandhan, and our wrists were tied with the red and yellow threads of that sacrament. Afterwards, we rested and had a meal, on some high boulders beside the stream, before returning to our tents.

The Swami was full of the place. He felt that he had never been to anything so beautiful. He sat long silent. Then he said dreamily, “I can well imagine how this Cave was first discovered. A party of shepherds, one summer day, must have lost their flocks, and wandered in here in search of them. Then, when they came home to the valleys, they told how they had suddenly come upon Mahadev!¹“

Of my Master himself, in any case, a like story was true. The purity and whiteness of the ice-pillar had startled and enwrapt him. The cavern had revealed itself to him as the secret of Kailas². And for the rest of his life, he cherished the memory of how he had entered a mountain-cave, and come face to face there with the Lord Himself.

1. Mahadev: Another name for Lord Siva.

2. Kailas: In Hindu mythology Mount Kailas is considered to be the abode of Lord Siva.

Everything in our life up to the time of the pilgrimage to Amarnath had been associated with the thought of Siva. Each step had seemed to draw us closer to the great snow-mountains that were at once His image and His home. The young moon resting at night-fall above the glacier-cleft and the tossing pines, had suggested irresistibly the brow of the Great God. Above all, that world of meditation on whose outskirts we dwelt, had Him as its heart and centre, rapt and silent, “above all qualities and beyond the reach of thought.”

Undoubtedly this Hindu idea of Siva is the highest conception of God as approached by the spiritual intuition of man. He is the Divine accessible within, and purified of all externals.

It may possibly be, that in the pursuit of uttermost knowledge, this personification of the unmanifesting, is necessarily succeeded by the opposite conception of God – as the power behind all manifestation. It is clear at least that he who has sounded the depths of both these, will be capable of understanding the significance, of every possible human symbol of the divine, since all must be included in one or other of the two. If the Supreme is thought of by man at all, it must be either as Infinite Being or as Infinite Power. Whether there is any such law of nature behind the fact or not, must remain a speculation.

In some imperceptible way, at all events, the Swami’s attention appeared to shift, during the month of August, from Siva to the Mother. He was always singing the songs of Ram Prasad, as if he would saturate his own mind with the conception of himself as a child. He told some of us once, that wherever he turned he was conscious of the presence of the Mother, as if She were a person in the room. It was always his habit to speak simply and naturally of “Mother,” and some of the older members of the party caught this, so that such phrases as “Well, well! Mother knows best!” were a constant mode of thought and speech amongst us, when, for instance, some cherished intention had to be abandoned.

Gradually, however, his absorption became more intense. He complained bitterly of the malady of thought, which would consume a man, leaving him no time for sleep or rest, and would often become as insistent as a human voice. He had constantly striven to make clear to us the ideal of rising beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond pain and pleasure, good and evil alike, – that conception which forms the Hindu solution of the problem of sin, – but now he seemed to fasten his whole attention on the dark, the painful, and the inscrutable, in the world, with the determination to reach by this particular road the One Behind Phenomena. Baffled as he found himself in the object of his visit to Kashmir,* “the worship of the Terrible” now became his whole cry. Illness or pain would always draw forth the reminder that “She is the organ. She is the pain. And She is the Giver of pain, Kali! Kali! Kali!”

His brain was teeming with thoughts, he said one day, and his fingers would not rest till they were written down. It was that same evening that we came back to our houseboat from some expedition, and found waiting for us, where he had called and left them, his manuscript lines on “Kali the Mother.” Writing in a fever of inspiration, he had fallen on the floor, when he had finished – as we learnt afterwards, – exhausted with his own intensity.

KALI THE MOTHER

The stars are blotted out The clouds are covering clouds,

It is darkness vibrant, sonant.

In the roaring, whirling wind,

Are the souls of a million lunatics,

Just loosed from the prison house,

Wrenching trees by the roots Sweeping all from the path.

The sea has joined the fray And swirls up mountain waves,

To reach the pitchy sky.

The flash of lurid light Reveals on every side A thousand, thousand shades Of death, begrimed and black.

Scattering plagues and sorrows,

Dancing mad with joy,

Come, Mother, come!

For Terror is Thy name.

Death is in Thy breath.

And every shaking step

* He had come, at the express invitation of the Maharajah, to choose a piece of land, for the establishment of a math and Sanskrit college. But his choice was twice vetoed, on the list of agenda for Council by Sir Adalbert Talbot, then acting as Resident. Thus it could not even be discussed.

Destroys a world for e’er.

Thou “Time” the All-Destroyer! Come, O Mother, come! Who dares misery love, Dance in destruction’s dance, And hug the form of death, -To him the Mother comes.

About this time, he had taken his boat away from our vicinity, and only a young Brahmo doctor, who was also living in Kashmir that summer, – and whose kindness and devotion to him were beyond all praise, – was allowed to know where he was, and to enquire about his daily needs.

The next evening the doctor went, as usual, but finding him lost in thought, retired without speaking, and the following day, September the thirtieth, he had gone, leaving word that he was not to be followed, to Kshir Bhowani, the coloured springs. He was away, from that day till October the sixth.

———-

In the afternoon of that day we saw him coming back to us, up the river. He stood in front of the dunga, grasping with one hand the bamboo roof-pole, and with the other holding yellow flowers. He entered our houseboat, – a transfigured presence, and silently passed from one to another blessing us, and putting the marigolds on our heads. “I offered them to Mother,” he said at last, as he ended by handing the garland to one of us. Then he sat down. “No more ‘Hari Om!’ It is all ‘Mother,’ now!” he said, with a smile. We all sat silent. Had we tried to speak, we should have failed, so tense was the spot, with something that stilled thought. He opened his lips again. “All my patriotism is gone. Everything is gone. Now it’s only ‘Mother, Mother!’”

“I have been very wrong,” he said simply, after another pause. “Mother said to me ‘What, even if unbelievers should enter My temples, and defile My images! What is that to you? Do you protect ME? Or do I protect you?’ So there is no more patriotism. I am only a little child!”

Then he spoke on indifferent matters, about the departure for Calcutta, which he desired to make at once, with a word or two as to the experience of physical ill into which his perplexities of mind had translated themselves, throughout the past week. “I may not tell you more now: it is not in order,” he said gently, adding, before he left us, – “But spiritually, spiritually, I was not bound down!”

We saw very little of the Swami, during the next few days. Before breakfast the next morning, indeed, two of us were with him on the river-bank for a moment, when, seeing the barber, he said “All this must go!” and left us, to come out again half-an-hour later, without a hair. Somehow, in ways and words that could scarcely be recounted, came to us now and then a detail of that austerity, by which, in the past week, such illumination had come. We could picture the fasting; the offering of milk and rice and almonds daily, in the spring; and the morning worship of a Brahmin pundit’s little daughter, as Uma Kumari – the Divine Virgin; – the whole meanwhile, in such a passion of self-renunciation, that not one wave of reaction could be found in his consciousness for any injury, however great.

A man came one day to ask a question, and the Swami, in monastic dress and with shaven head, happened to enter. “Ought one to seek an opportunity of death, in defence of right, or ought one to take the lesson of the Gita,* and learn never to react?” was the problem put to him. “I am for no reaction,” said the Swami, speaking slowly, and with a long pause. Then he added “- for Sannyasins. Self-defence for the householder!”

The mood seemed to grow upon him, and deepen. He spoke of this time once, as ‘a crisis in his life.’ Again, he called himself a child, seated on the lap of the Mother, and being caressed. And the thought came to us, unspoken, that these Her kisses might make themselves known to mind and nerves as anguish, yet be welcomed with rapture of recognition. Did he not say “There could be bliss in torture.”

As soon as it could be arranged, we left for Baramulla, which we reached on Tuesday evening, October the eleventh. It had been settled that he would go on to Lahore the following afternoon, while we waited some days longer. On the way down the river, we saw very little of him. He was almost entirely silent, and took long walks by the riverside alone, rarely even entering our houseboat for a moment.

His health had been completely broken, by the labours of his return to India; and the physical ebb of the great experience through which he had just passed – for even suffering becomes impossible, when a given point of weariness is reached; and similarly, the body refuses to harbour a certain intensity of the spiritual life for an indefinite period! – was leaving him, doubtless, more exhausted than he himself suspected. All this contributed, one imagines, to a feeling that none of us knew for how long a time we might now be parting, and it was this

* It is perhaps worth-while to say that for my own part I could never understand how this enquirer gathered this particular lesson from the Gita!

thought, perhaps, that brought him to say goodbye on Wednesday morning, as we finished breakfast, and made him stay to talk.

Hour after hour went by, that morning, and it is easier to tell of the general impression created, than to build it up again detail by detail. We who listened, seemed to be carried into an innermost sanctuary. Sometimes he would sing and translate some snatch or other of devotional poetry, always to the Mother. And it was always Kali, with Her foot on the heart of Her worshipper, Who grew clearer to our minds; though he dwelt much, and over and over again, on the thought of the Mother, seated in the market-place of this world, playing amongst the players; flying Her own kite, and in a hundred thousand cutting the strings of only one or two.

“Scattering plagues and sorrows,” he quoted from his own verses,

“Dancing mad with joy,

Come, Oh Mother, come!

For Terror is Thy name!

Death – is in Thy breath.

And every shaking step Destroys a world for e’er”

“It all came true, every word of it,” he interrupted himself to say.

“Who dares misery love.

Dance in Destruction’s dance,

And hug the form of death, –

To him the Mother does indeed come. I have proved it.

For I have hugged the form of Death!”

He spoke of the future. There was nothing to be desired, but the life of the wanderer, in silence and nudity, on the banks of the Ganges. He would have nothing. “Swamiji” was dead and gone. Who was he, that he should feel responsible for teaching the world? It was all fuss and vanity. The Mother had no need of him, but only he of Her. Even work, when one had seen this, was nothing but illusion.

There was no way but love. If people sinned against us, we must love them till it was impossible for them to resist it. That was all. Yet, as I write the words, I know well that I can give no idea of the vastness of which all this was utterance, – as if no blow, to any in the world, could pass and leave our Master’s heart untouched; as if no pain, even to that of death, could elicit anything but love and blessing.

He told us the story of Vasishtha and Viswamitra; of Vasishtha’s hundred descendants slain; and the king left alone, landless and crownless, to live out his life. Then he pictured the hut standing in the moonlight, amongst the trees, and Vasishtha and his wife within. He is pouring intently over some precious page, written by his great rival, when she draws near and hangs over him for a moment, saying, “Look, how bright is the moon tonight!” and he, without looking up, – “But ten thousand times brighter, my love, is the intellect of Viswamitra!”

All forgotten! The deaths of his hundred children, his own wrongs, and his sufferings, and his heart lost in admiration of the genius of his foe! Such, said the Swami, should be our love also, like that of Vasishtha for Viswamitra, without the slightest tinge of personal memory.

At this moment, a peasant brought sprays of pear-blossom, and laid them down on the table at which we sat. And one of us lifted them, saying, “Swami! these were made for worship, for they will bear no fruits!” But he looked at her, smiling, and she could not break the spell, to offer them.

And so he went. We all, servants and boat-people, friends and disciples, parents and children, accompanied him to the tonga on the roadside, to say goodbye. One sturdy little figure, the four-year-old daughter of his chief boatman, whose devotion to him we had long noted, trotted determinedly at his side, with a tray of fruit for his journey on her black head, and stood, smiling fare-well, as he drove away.

And we, not less deeply touched than this little child, but infinitely less unselfish, in our grown-up complexity of thought and emotion, knew not when we should look upon his face again, yet failed not to realise that we had that day lived through hours, within whose radiance all our future would be passed.