The Master as I saw him

The Swami had one remarkable characteristic. He made all who were near him appear great. In his presence, one saw and loved, at its highest, their unspoken purpose; and even their faults and failings, if one realised them, would seem to be justified and accounted for.

We surely stand at many different grades of perception! Some of us see and recognise only the form and the acts of a man. Others will refer his features to a central type, and note on his external aspect the tide-marks of the will, in all its mixedness and complexity of ebb and flow. But still others are aware of a vast magazine of cause behind, against which a life stands out as a single fragmentary effect. We ourselves cannot gauge the knowledge that prompts our own words and deeds.

Something after this fashion was the vision that grew upon me, of the world into which I had entered, as the Swami’s disciple, on my arrival in Calcutta, early in November 1898. During the months between that date and the following July, I saw him always in the midst of his own people, without even the friendly intervention of a European home. I became myself one of the people, living with them in surroundings which his genius had created. And thus enveloped by his interpretation, thus dominated by his passionate love of his own race, it was like walking in some twilight of the gods, where the forms of men and women loomed larger than their wont.

It had been taken for granted from the first, that at the earliest opportunity I would open a girls’ school in Calcutta. And it was characteristic of the Swami’s methods, that I had not been hurried in the initiation of this work, but had been given leisure and travel and mental preparation. To myself it was clear that this school, when opened, must at first be only tentative and experimental. I had to learn what was wanted, to determine where I myself stood, to explore the very world of which my efforts were to become a part.

The one thing that I knew was, that an educational effort must begin at the stand-point of the learner, and help him to development in his own way. But I had no definite plans or expectations, save to make some educational discovery which would be qualitatively true and universally applicable, to the work of the modern education of Indian women.*

* It must here be pointed out that the school in question proved even more tentative than I had imagined. In the autumn of 1903, the whole work for Indian women was taken up and organised by an American disciple, Sister Christine, and to her, and her faithfulness and initiative, alone, it owes all its success up to the present. From the experiment which I made in 1898 to 1899, was gathered only my own education. – Nivedita

Others, however, had probably thought more largely of the matter, and I had heard much as to the desirability of holding myself above all sects. But all these questions were solved once for all, on a certain evening in camp, in the forest of Vernag, in Kashmir, when the Swami turned to me, as we all sat in a circle about the log-fire, and asked me what were now my plans for the school. I replied eagerly, begging to be freed from collaborators, to be allowed to begin in a small way, spelling out my method; and urging, above all, the necessity of a definite religious colour, and the usefulness of sects.

The Swami listened and accepted, and as far as his loyalty went to every wish of mine, in this matter, thenceforth, he might have been the disciple and I the teacher. Only in one respect was he inflexible. The work for the education of Indian women to which he would give his name, might be as sectarian as I chose to make it. “You wish through a sect to rise beyond all sects,” had been his sole reply to this part of my statement. He withdrew, at the first sign of hesitation on my side, the name of an Indian lady whose help had been proffered. But he would not on the other hand, countenance my own seeking of assistance amongst the few acquaintances I had already made. For the ocean of Indian character I had as yet no plummet, and it was safer to go long unaided than to commit an error at the start.

It was to carry out this plan, then, that I arrived in Calcutta alone, in the beginning of November. I was able to find my way at once, from the station to the north end of the town. But once there, with insular rigidity, I insisted on being made the guest of the women. The Swami was himself staying, as it happened, at a sort of parish-room of the Order, in Calcutta. Through him, therefore, the negotiations were carried on. The widow of Sri Ramakrishna – Sarada Devi, or “the Holy Mother,” as she is called amongst us – was living close by, with her community of ladies; and in the course of the day, I was accorded possession of an empty room in her house.

This is one of the occasions on which people look back, feeling that their courage was providentially determined by their ignorance. It is difficult to see how else a necessary solution could have been found. Yet had I deeply understood at the time, the degree of social embarrassment which my rashness might have brought, not only upon my innocent hostess, but also on her kindred in their distant village, I could not have acted as I did. At any cost, I must in that case have withdrawn. As it was, however, I imagined caste to be only a foolish personal prejudice, – which must yield to knowledge, – against some supposed uncleanness of foreign habits; and thus cheerfully assuming all the ignorance to be on her side, confidently forced myself upon this Indian lady’s hospitality.

In the event, fortunately, the Swami’s influence proved all-powerful, and I was accepted by society. Within a week or ten days, a house in the close neighbourhood was found for me. But even then, I spent all my afternoons in the Mother’s room. And when the hot weather came, it was by her express command that I returned to her better-arranged house, for sleeping-quarters. And then I occupied no room apart, but shared the cool and simple dormitory of the others, with its row of mats, pillows, and nets, against the polished red earthenware of the floor.

It was a strange household, of which I now found myself a part. Downstairs, in one of the guard-rooms beside the front-door, lived a monk, whose severe austerities, from his youth up, had brought him to the threshold of death, from consumption, in the prime of manhood. To his room I used to go, for Bengali lessons. In the kitchen behind, worked a disciple of his, and a Brahmin cook; while to us women-folk belonged all above-stairs, with roofs and terraces, and the sight of the Ganges hard by.

Of the head of our little community, it seems almost presumptuous to speak. Her history is well-known. How she was wedded at five, and forgotten by her husband till she was eighteen; how she then, with her mother’s permission, made her way on foot from her village-home to the temple of Dakshineswar on the Ganges-side, and appeared before him; how he remembered the bond, but spoke of the ideals of the life he had adopted; and how she responded by bidding him Godspeed in that life, and asking only to be taught by him as the Guru, – all these things have been told of her many times over.

From that time she lived faithfully by his side for many years, in a building in the same garden, at once nun and wife, and always chief of his disciples. She was young when her tutelage began and in hours of quiet talk, she will tell sometimes in how many directions his training extended. He was a great lover of order, and taught her even such trifles as where to keep her lamp and its appurtenances, during the day. He could not endure squalor, and notwithstanding severe asceticism, he loved grace and beauty and gentle dignity of bearing. One story that is told of this period of her life, is of her bringing to him a basket of fruit and vegetables one day, with all the eagerness and pride of a happy child. He looked at it gravely, and said “But why so extravagant?”

– “At least it was not for myself!” said the young wife, all her sunshine gone, in sudden disappointment, and she turned and went away, crying quietly. But this Sri Ramakrishna could not bear to see. “Go, one of you,” he said, turning to the boys beside him, “And bring her back. My very devotion to God will take wings, if I see her weep!”

So dear she was to him. Yet one of her most striking traits is the absolute detachment with which she speaks of the husband she worships. She stands like a rock, through loud and shine, as those about her tell, for the fulfilment of every word of his. But “Guru Deb!” “Divine Master,” is the name she calls him by, and not one word of her uttering ever conveys the slightest trace of self-assertion with regard to him. One who did not know who she was, would never suspect, from speech of hers, that her right was stronger, or her place closer, than that of any other of those about her. It would seem as if the wife had been long ago forgotten, save for her faithfulness, in the disciple. Yet so deeply is she reverenced by all about her, that there is not one of them who would, for instance, occupy a railway berth above her, when travelling with her. Her very presence is to them a consecration.

To me it has always appeared that she is Sri Ramakrishna’s final word as to the ideal of Indian womanhood. But is she the last of an old order, or the beginning of a new? In her, one sees realised that wisdom and sweetness to which the simplest of women may attain. And yet, to myself, the stateliness of her courtesy and her great open mind are almost as wonderful as her sainthood. I have never known her hesitate, in giving utterance to large and generous judgment, however new or complex might be the question put before her. Her life is one long stillness of prayer. Her whole experience is of theocratic civilisation. Yet she rises to the height of every situation.

Is she tortured by the perversity of any about her? The only sign is a strange quiet and intensity that comes upon her. Does one carry to her some perplexity or mortification born of social developments beyond her ken? With unerring intuition she goes straight to the heart of the matter, and sets the questioner in the true attitude to the difficulty. Or is there need for severity? No foolish sentimentality causes her to waver. The novice whom she may condemn, for so many years to beg his bread, will leave the place within the hour. He who has transgressed her code of delicacy and honour, will never enter her presence again. “Can’t you see,” said Sri Ramakrishna, to one who had erred in some such way, “Can’t you see that the woman in her is wounded? And that is dangerous!”

And yet is she, as one of her spiritual children said of her, speaking literally of her gift of song, “full of music,” all gentleness, all playfulness. And the room wherein she worships, withal, is filled with sweetness.

The Mother can read, and much of her time is passed with her Ramayana. But she does not write. Yet it is not to be supposed that she is an uneducated woman. Not only has she had long and arduous experience in administration, secular and religious; but she has also travelled over a great part of India, visiting most of the chief places of pilgrimage. And it must be remembered that as the wife of Sri Ramakrishna she has had the highest opportunity of personal development that it is possible to enjoy At every moment, she bears unconscious witness to this association with the great. But in nothing perhaps does it speak more loudly than in her instant power to penetrate a new religious feeling or idea.

I first realised this gift in the Holy Mother, on the occasion of a visit that she paid us in recent years, on the afternoon of a certain Easter-Day. Before that, probably, I had always been too much absorbed, when with her, in striving to learn what she represented, to think of observing her in the contrary position. On this particular occasion, however, after going over our whole house, the Mother and her party expressed a desire to rest in the chapel, and hear something of the meaning of the Christian festival. This was followed by Easter music, and singing, with our small French organ. And in the swiftness of her comprehension, and the depth of her sympathy with these resurrection-hymns, unimpeded by any foreignness or unfamiliarity in them, we saw revealed for the first time, one of the most impressive aspects of the great religious culture of Sarada Devi. The same power is seen to a certain extent, in all the women about her, who were touched by the hand of Sri Ramakrishna. But in her, it has all the strength and certainty of some high and arduous form of scholarship.

The same trait came out again, one evening, when, in the midst of her little circle, the Holy Mother asked my Gurubhagini and myself, to describe to her a European wedding. With much fun and laughter, personating now the “Christian Brahmin,” and again the bride and bridegroom, we complied. But we were neither of us prepared for the effect of the marriage vow.

“For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, – till death us do part,” were words that drew exclamations of delight from all about us. But none appreciated them as did the Mother. Again and again she had them repeated to her. “Oh the Dharmmi words! the righteous words!” she said.

Amongst the ladies who lived more or less continuously in the household of Sarada Devi at this time were Gopal’s Mother, Jogin-Mother, Rose-Mother, Sister Lucky, and a number of others. These were all widows, – the first and the last child-widows – and they had all been personal disciples of Sri Ramakrishna when he lived in the temple garden at Dakshineshwar.

Sister Lucky, or Lakshmididi as is the Indian form of her name, was indeed a niece of his, and is still a comparatively young woman. She is widely sought after as a religious teacher and director, and is a most gifted and delightful companion. Sometimes she will repeat page after page of some sacred dialogue, out of one of the Jatras, or religious operas, or again she will make the quiet room ring with gentle merriment, as she poses the different members of the party in groups for religious tableaux. Now it is Kali, and again Saraswati, another time it will be Jagadhattri, or yet again, perhaps, Krishna under his kadamba tree, that she will arrange, with picturesque effect and scant dramatic material.

Amusements like these were much approved of, it is said, by Sri Ramakrishna, who would sometimes himself, according to the ladies, spend hours, in reciting religious plays, taking the part of each player in turns, and making all around him realise the utmost meaning of the prayers and worship uttered in the poetry.

Gopal’s Mother was an old, old woman. She had already been old, fifteen or twenty years before, when she had first walked over, one day at noon, from her cell at Kamarhatty, by the Ganges-side, to see the Master in the garden at Dakshineswar. He received her, so they say, standing at his door, as if he expected her. And she, whose chosen worship had been for many years Gopala, the Babe Krishna, the Christ-Child of Hinduism, – saw Him revealed to her, as in a vision, as she drew near. How true she always was to this! Never once through all the years that followed, did she offer salutation to Sri Ramakrishna, who took her thenceforth as his mother. And never have I known her to speak of our Holy Mother, save as “my daughter-in-law.”

In the months which I spent with the Mother and her ladies, Gopaler-Ma would sometimes be in Calcutta, and sometimes, for weeks together, away at Kamarhatty.

There, a few of us went, one full-moon night, to visit her. How beautiful was the Ganges, as the little boat crept on and on! And how beautiful seemed the long flight of steps rising out of the water, and leading up, through its lofty bathing-ghat, past the terraced lawn, to the cloister-like verandah on the right, where, in a little room, – built probably in the first place for some servant of the great house at its side, – Gopaler-Ma had lived and told her beads, for many a year.

The great house was empty now. And her own little room was absolutely without comforts. Her bed was of stone, and her floor of stone, and the piece of matting she offered her guests to sit on, had to be taken down from a shelf and unrolled. The handful of parched rice and sugar-candy that formed her only store, and were all that she could give in hospitality, were taken from an earthen pot that hung from the roof by a few cords. But the place was spotlessly clean, washed constantly by Ganges-water of her own sturdy carrying. And in a niche near her hand lay an old copy of the Ramayana, and her great horn spectacles, and the little white bag containing her beads. On those beads, Gopaler-Ma had become a saint!

Hour after hour, day after day, for how many years, had she sat, day and night, absorbed in them!

The radiant white moonlight made the trees and flowers outside seem like black shadows, moving and whispering in a dream-world of white marble. But nothing could seem so dreamlike, as, in the midst of our busy hurrying world, the thought of spots like this little cell of Gopaler-Ma, enshrining her silent intensity of peace. “Ah!” said the Swami, when he heard of the visit, “this is the old India that you have seen, the India of prayers and tears, of vigils and fasts, that is passing away, never to return!”

In Calcutta, Gopaler-Ma felt, perhaps a little more than others, the natural shock to habits of eighty years’ standing, at having a European in the house. But once over-ruled, she was generosity itself. Conservative she always was: stubbornly prejudiced, never. As far as the daily life went, there can have been little difference, to her consciousness, between her own hermitage on the Ganges-bank, and the conventual round of the Mother’s household. The days were full of peace and sweetness. Long before dawn, one and another rose quietly and sat on the sleeping-mat, from which sheets and pillows were now removed, beads in hand, and face turned to the wall. Then came the cleansing of the rooms and personal bathing. On great days, the Mother and one other would be carried down to the river in a palkee, and till this arrived, the time was spent in reading the Ramayana.

Then came the Mother’s worship in her own room, with all the younger women busy over lights and incense, Ganges-water and flowers and offerings. Even Gopaler-Ma would aid, as this hour came round, in the preparation of fruits and vegetables. The noon-day meal and the restful afternoon would pass, and again as evening drew on, the servant going by the door with the lighted lamp would break in upon our chat. Groups would break up. Each of us would prostrate before image or picture, and touch the feet of Gopaler-Ma and the Mother, or accompany the latter to where the light was placed, near the basil-plant on the terrace; and fortunate indeed was she who from this was permitted to go, like a daughter, and sit beside the Mother at her evening-meditation, there to learn those salutations to the Guru which formed, with her, the beginning and end of all worship.

The Indian home thinks of itself as perpetually chanting the beautiful psalm of custom. To it, every little act and detail of household method, and personal habit is something inexpressibly precious and sacred, an eternal treasure of the nation, handed down from the past, to be kept unflawed, and passed on to the future. This mode of thought is interwoven with the passionate quest of ideal purity, and with the worship of motherhood, to make the guiding and restraining force of the whole Indian character. The East worships simplicity, and herein lies one of the main reasons why vulgarity is impossible to any Eastern people.

But no one can point out such a secret as this, at the moment when one needs it, for the simple reason that no one can place himself sufficiently outside his own consciousness to find out that others were born, not only with a different equipment of associations, but also with a different instinct as to their value. Fortunately, however, by watching the Swami, and puzzling over the contrasts he unconsciously presented, I was able to discover it, and many things were made easier thereby.

No one was ever more clearly aware that character was everything, or, as he phrased it, that “custom was nothing,” yet none could be more carried away than he by the perfection and significance of all with which he was familiar. To the customs of his own people he brought the eye of a poet, and the imagination of a prophet. He had learnt that ”custom was nothing” when he had met with ideal womanhood and faith amongst polyandrous peoples, or delicacy and modesty adorned in the evening costumes of the West.

But these things had not shaken his reverence for the conventionalities of his own country. The plain white veil of the widow was to him the symbol of holiness, as well as sorrow. The gerrua rags of the sannyasin, the mat on the floor for a bed, the green leaf instead of a plate, eating with the fingers, the use of the national costume, all these things he appeared to regard as a veritable consecration. Each of them whispered to him some secret of spiritual power or human tenderness. And he answered with a passion of loyalty that would achieve for them, if it could, the very conquest of the world; but failing, would think all heaven lay in sharing their defeat.

Thus he taught me also to sing the melodious song, in feeble and faltering fashion, it is true, but yet in some sort of unison with its own great choir, inasmuch as, with them, I learnt to listen through the music, even while following, for the revelation it could bring of a nation’s ideals and a nation’s heart.

Those months between November 1898 and June 1899, were full of happy glimpses. My little school was begun on the day of Kali Puja, and the Mother herself came and performed the opening ceremony of worship. At the end, she gave a whispered blessing, spoken aloud by Rose-Mother. She ‘prayed that the blessing of the great Mother might be upon the school, and the girls it should train be ideal girls.’ And somehow to know that an undertaking is remembered and fraught with prayer in the lofty mind and heart of our Mother, is to me a benediction that makes content. I cannot imagine a grander omen than her blessing, spoken over the educated Hindu womanhood of the future.

The Swami lived commonly at the monastery, five or six miles out of Calcutta, and on the opposite bank of the river. But, on his frequent visits to town, he would almost always send for me to join him, either at the noon or evening meal, and to those who showed me kindness, he would always make a special effort to offer hospitality at Belur.

Even his smallest actions often had a meaning that was not evident to a new eye. I did not dream, when he came to me one day and asked me to cook for him a certain invalid dish, that there was any special intention in the request. And when I heard afterwards that on receiving it, he had himself eaten very little, preferring to share it with those about him, I was only disappointed, being at that time unaware of the almost sacramental nature of this act. It was many months before I learnt to understand the deep forethought and kindness with which he – and also the Holy Mother on his behalf, – was constantly working to make a place for me, as a foreigner, in Hindu society. The aim of his whole life was, as he had said to me, in Kashmir, “to make Hinduism aggressive, like Christianity and Islam,” and this was one of the ways in which he sought to realise that ideal.

The same purpose spoke again in his definition of the aims of the Order of Ramakrishna -“to effect an exchange of the highest ideals of the East and the West, and to realise these in practice” – a definition whose perfection, and special appropriateness to the present circumstances of India, grows on one with time.

To his mind, Hinduism was not to remain a stationary system, but to prove herself capable of embracing and welcoming the whole modern development. She was no congeries of divided sects, but a single living Mother-Church, recognising all that had been born of her, fearless of the new, eager for the love of her children, wherever they might be found, wise, merciful, self-directing, pardoning and reconciling. Above all she was the holder of a definite vision, the preacher of a distinct message amongst the nations. To prove her this, however, he relied on no force but that of character. The building of the temple of his faith was allimportant, it was true; but for it there was infinite time, and with it worked the tendency and drift of things.

For himself, the responsibility was to choose sound bricks. And he chose, not with an eye to the intellect, or power of attraction, or volume of force, of those who were chosen, but always for a certain quality of simple sincerity, and, as it seemed, for that alone. Once accepted, the ideal put before them all was the same; not muktP but renunciation, not self-realisation, but self-abandonment. And this rather, again, on behalf of man, than as an offering to God. It was the human motive that he asserted to his disciples.

May one of them never forget a certain day of consecration, in the chapel at the monastery, when, as the opening step in a life-time, so to speak, he first taught her to perform the worship of Siva, and then made the whole culminate in an offering of flowers at the feet of the Buddha!

“Go thou,” he said, as if addressing in one person each separate soul that would ever come to him for guidance, “and follow Him, who was born and gave His life for others FIVE HUNDRED TIMES, before He attained the vision of the Budddha!”

The story of the glimpses which I caught of this part of the Swami’s life would be singularly incomplete, if it contained no mention of his worship of the Mother. Spiritually speaking, I have always felt that there were two elements in his consciousness.

Undoubtedly he was born a Brahmajnani, as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa so frequently insisted. When he was only eight years old, sitting at his play, he had developed the power of entering Samadhi. The religious ideas towards which he naturally gravitated, were highly abstract and philosophical, the very reverse of those which are commonly referred to as ‘idolatrous.’ In his youth, and presumably when he had already been some time under the influence of Sri Ramakrishna, he became a formal member of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. In England and America he was never known to preach anything that depended on a special form. The realisation of Brahman was his only imperative, the Advaita philosophy his only system of doctrine, the Vedas and Upanishads his sole scriptural authority.

And yet, side by side with this, it is also true that in India the word “Mother” was forever on his lips. He spoke of Her, as we of one deeply familiar in the household life. He was constantly preoccupied with Her. Like other children, he was not always good. Sometimes he would be naughty and rebellious. But always to Her. Never did he attribute to any other, the good or evil that befell.

On a certain solemn occasion, he entrusted to a disciple a prayer to Her that in his own life had acted as a veritable charm. “And mind!” he added suddenly, turning with what was almost fierceness upon the receiver, “make Her listen to you, when you say it! None of that cringing to Mother! Remember!”

Every now and then he would break out with some new fragment of description. The right hand raised in blessing, the left holding the sword, – ”Her curse is blessing!” would be the sudden exclamation that ended a long reverie. Or becoming half-lyric in the intensity of his feeling, “Deep in the heart of hearts of Her own, flashes the blood-red knife of Kali. Worshippers of the Mother are they from their birth, in Her incarnation of the sword!”

From him was gathered, in such moments as these, almost every line and syllable of a certain short psalm, called the ‘Voice of the Mother,’ which I wrote and published about this time. “I worship the Terrible!” he was continually saying, – and once, “It is a mistake to hold that with all men pleasure is the motive. Quite as many are born to seek after pain. Let us worship the Terror for Its own sake.”

He had a whole-hearted contempt for what he regarded as squeamishness or mawkishness. He wasted few words on me, when I came to him with my difficulties about animal sacrifice in the temple. He made no reference, as he might have done, to the fact that most of us, loudly as we may attack this, have no hesitation in offering animal sacrifice to ourselves. He offered no argument, as he easily might have done, regarding the degradation of the butcher and the slaughter-house, under the modern system.

‘Why not a little blood, to complete the picture?” was his only direct reply to my objections. And it was with considerable difficulty that I elicited from him, and from another disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, sitting near, the actual facts of the more austere side of Kali-worship, that side which has transcended the sacrifice of others.

He told me however that he had never tolerated the blood-offering commonly made to the “demons who attend on Kali.” This was simple devil-worship, and he had no place for it. His own effort being constantly to banish fear and weakness from his own consciousness and to learn to recognise THE MOTHER as instinctively in evil, terror, sorrow, and annihilation, as in that which makes for sweetness and joy, it followed that the one thing he could not away with was any sort of watering-down of the great conception.

“Fools!” he exclaimed once, – as he dwelt in quiet talk on “the worship of the Terrible”, on “becoming one with the Terrible” – “Fools! they put a garland of flowers round Thy neck, and then start back in terror, and call Thee ‘the Merciful’!” And as he spoke, the underlying egoism of worship that is devoted to the kind God, to Providence, the consoling Divinity, without a heart for God in the earthquake, or God in the volcano, overwhelmed the listener. One saw that such worship was at bottom, as the Hindu calls it, merely ‘shop-keeping,’ and one realised the infinitely greater boldness and truth of the teaching that God manifests through evil as well as through good. One saw that the true attitude for the mind and will that are not to be baffled by the personal self, was in fact the determination, in the stern words of the Swami Vivekananda, ‘to seek death not life, to hurl oneself upon the sword’s point, to become one with the Terrible for evermore!’

It would have been altogether inconsistent with the Swami’s idea of freedom, to have sought to impose his own conceptions on a disciple. But everything in my past life as an educationist had contributed to impress on me now the necessity of taking on the Indian consciousness, and the personal perplexity associated with the memory of the pilgrimage to Amarnath was a witness not to be forgotten to the strong place which Indian systems of worship held in that consciousness.

I set myself therefore to enter into Kali worship, as one would set oneself to learn a new language, or take birth deliberately, perhaps, in a new race. To this fact I owe it that I was able to understand as much as I did of our Master’s life and thought. Step by step, glimpse after glimpse, I began to comprehend a little. And in matters religious, he was, without knowing it, a born educator. He never checked a struggling thought. Being with him one day when an image of Kali was brought in, and noticing some passing expression, I suddenly said “Perhaps, Swamiji, Kali is the Vision of Siva! Is She?” He looked at me for a moment. “Well! Well! Express it in your own way,” he said gently, “Express it in your own way!”

Another day he was going with me to visit the old Maharishi Devendra Nath Tagore, in the seclusion of his home in Jorasanko, and before we started, he questioned me about a death-scene at which I had been present the night before. I told him eagerly of the sudden realisation that had come to me, that religions were only languages, and we must speak to a man in his own language. His whole face lighted up at the thought. “Yes!” he exclaimed, ‘And Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was the only man who taught that! He was the only man who ever had the courage to say that we must speak to all men in their own language!”

Yet there came a day when he found it necessary to lay down with unmistakeable clearness his own position in the matter of Mother-worship. I was about to lecture at the Kalighat, and he came to instruct me that if any foreign friends should wish to be present, they were to remove their shoes, and sit on the floor, like the rest of the audience. In that Presence no exceptions were to be made. I was myself to be responsible for this.*

After saying all this, however, he lingered before going, and then, making a shy reference to Colonel Hay’s poem of the ‘Guardian Angels’, he said, “That is precisely my position about Brahman and the gods! I believe in Brahman and the gods, and not in anything else!”

He was evidently afraid that my intellectual difficulty would lie where his own must have done, in the incompatibility of the exaltation of one definite scheme of worship with the highest Vedantic theory of Brahman. He did not understand that to us who stood about him, he was himself the reconciliation of these opposites, and the witness to the truth of each. Following up this train of thought, therefore, he dropped into a mood of half-soliloquy, and sat for a while talking disjointedly, answering questions, trying to make himself clear, yet always half-absorbed in something within, as if held by some spell he could not break.

* In no temple anywhere, ought there to be any exception. No one has any respect for a man who cannot stand for the dignity and sacredness of his own place of worship. – N.

“How I used to hate Kali!” he said, ”And all Her ways! That was the ground of my six years’ fight, – that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at last! Ramakrishna Paramahamsa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She guides me in every little thing I do, and does with me what She will!……Yet I fought so long! I loved him, you see, and that was what held me. I saw his marvellous purity……I felt his wonderful love……His greatness had not dawned on me then. All that came afterwards, when I had given in. At that time I thought him a brain-sick baby, always seeing visions and the rest. I hated it. And then I too had to accept Her!”

“No, the thing that made me do it is a secret that will die with me. I had great misfortunes at that time……It was an opportunity……She made a slave of me. Those were the very words – ‘a slave of you.’ And Ramakrishna Paramahamsa made me over to Her……Strange! He lived only two years after doing that, and most of the time he was suffering. Not more than six months did he keep his own health and brightness.

“Guru Nanak was like that, you know, looking for the one disciple to whom he would give his power. And he passed over all his own family, – his children were as nothing to him, till he came upon the boy to whom he gave it, and then he could die.

“The future, you say, will call Ramakrishna Paramahamsa an Incarnation of Kali? Yes, I think there’s no doubt that She worked up the body of Ramakrishna for Her own ends.”

“You see, I cannot but believe that there is somewhere a great Power That thinks of Herself as feminine, and called Kali, and Mother……And I believe in Brahman too……But is it not always like that? Is it not the multitude of cells in the body that make up the personality, the many brain-centres, not the one, that produce consciousness?……Unity in complexity! Just so! And why should it be different with Brahman? It is Brahman. It is the One. And yet – and yet – it is the gods too!”

Similarly, he had returned from a pilgrimage in Kashmir saying “These gods are not merely symbols! They are the forms that the bhaktas¹ have seen!” And it is told of Sri Ramakrishna that he would sometimes speak, coming out of samadhi, of the past experience of that soul that dwelt within him, – “He who came as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus dwells here” – and then would add playfully, turning to his chief disciple, “But not in your Vedanta sense, Noren!’

Thus we are admitted to a glimpse of the struggle that goes on in great souls, for the correlation and mutual adjustment of the different realisations of different times. On the one side the Mother, on the other side Brahman. We are reminded of the Swami’s own words, heard long ago, “The impersonal God, seen through the mists of sense, is personal.” In truth it might well be that the two ideas could not be reconciled. Both conceptions could not be equally true at the same time. It is clear enough that in the end, as a subjective realisation, either the Mother must become Brahman, or Brahman the Mother. One of the two must melt into the other, the question of which, in any particular case, depending on the destiny and the past of the worshipping soul.

For my own part, the conversation I have related marked an epoch. Ever since it took place,I have thought I saw in my Master’s attitude a certain element of one who carried for another a trust confided to him.

He would always, when asked to explain the image of Kali, speak of it as the book of experience, in which the soul turns page after page, only to find that there is nothing in it, after all. And this, to my own mind, is the final explanation. Kali the Mother is to be the worship of the Indian future. In Her name will her sons find it possible to sound many experiences to their depths. And yet, in the end, their hearts will return to the ancient wisdom, and each man will know, when his hour comes, that all his life was but as a dream.

Who does not remember the Veda-like words of the Gita? – “Not, verily, by avoiding action, can a man rise to this inaction!” May we not, similarly, know for a certainty that not without going through this experience can we reach the realisation at the end? Through the Mother to Brahman, through new life and knowledge, and many changes, through the struggles, the victories, and the defeats of the immediate future, to that safe haven of the soul where all is One, and all is peace? As I look more and more closely into the life of that great Teacher whom I have followed, I see each day with growing-clearness, how he himself was turning the pages of the book of experience, and that it was only when he had come to the last word that he could lie back like a weary child, in the arms of his Mother, to be wrapped away at last into the Supreme Revelation, knowing that ‘all this was but a dream!’

On the 20th of June 1899, I left Calcutta, by the same steamer as the Swami, and his gurubhai Turiyananda¹, for London, which we reached on the morning of July 31st. A few weeks later he left England for America, where I met him once more, late in September.

After the five or six weeks which I spent there, as a guest in the same house as he, and a fortnight in Brittany in the following year, 1900, I never again enjoyed any long unbroken opportunity of being with him. Towards the end of 1900 he returned to India, but I remained in the West until the beginning of 1902.

And when I then reached India, it was only as if to be present at the closing scene, to receive the last benediction. To this voyage of six weeks I look back as the greatest occasion of my life. I missed no opportunity of the Swami’s society that presented itself, and accepted practically no other, filling up the time with quiet writing and needlework; thus I received one long continuous impression of his mind and personality, for which I can never be sufficiently thankful.

From the beginning of the voyage to the end, the flow of thought and story went on. One never knew what moment would see the flash of intuition, and hear the ringing utterance of some fresh truth. It was while we sat chatting in the River on the first afternoon, that he suddenly exclaimed, “Yes! the older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness². This is my new gospel. Do even evil like a man! Be wicked, if you must, on a great scale!” And these words link themselves in my memory with those of another day, when I had been reminding him of the rareness of criminality in India.

And he turned on me, full of sorrowful protest. “Would God it were otherwise in my land!” he said, “for this is verily the virtuousness of death!” Stories of the Siva-Ratri, or Dark Night of Siva, of Prithi Rai, of the judgment seat of Vikramaditya, of Buddha and Yasodhara, and a thousand more, were constantly coming up. And a noticeable point was, that one never heard the same thing twice. There was the perpetual study of caste; the constant examination and re-statement of ideas; the talk of work, past present, and future; and above all the vindication of Humanity, never abandoned, never weakened, always rising to new heights of defence of the undefended, of chivalry for the weak. Our Master has come and he

1. Turiyananda, like Swami Vivekananda, was one of the 16 direct-disciples of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. The term gurubhai stands for “brother-disciple”, meaning they shared a common spiritual parent in their divine guru Sri Ramakrishna.

2. Here the word manliness is not meant to convey a chauvinistic ideal, but instead Swami Vivekananda is referring to the qualities of courage, bravery and fearlessness, which even women

has gone, and in the priceless memory he has left with us who knew him, there is no other thing so great, as this his love of man.

I cannot forget his indignation when he heard some European reference to cannibalism, as if it were a normal part of life in some societies. “That is not true!” he said, when he had heard to the end. “No nation ever ate human flesh, save as a religious sacrifice, or in war, out of revenge. Don’t you see? that’s not the way of gregarious animals! It would cut at the roots of social life!” Kropotkin’s great work on “Mutual Aid” had not yet appeared, when these words were said. It was his love of Humanity, and his instinct on behalf of each in his own place, that gave to the Swami so clear an insight.

Again he talked of the religious impulse, “Sex-love and creation!” he cried, “These are at the root of most religion. And these in India are called Vaishnavism, and in the West Christianity. How few have dared to worship Death, or Kali! Let us worship Death! Let us embrace the Terrible, because it is terrible; not asking that it be toned down. Let us take misery, for misery’s own sake!”

As we came to the place where the river-water met the ocean, we could see why the sea had been called ‘Kali Pani’ or black water, while the river was ‘Sadha Pani’ or white, and the Swami explained how it was the great reverence of Hindus for the ocean, forbidding them to defile it by crossing it, that had made such journeys equal to out-casting for so many centuries. Then, as the ship crossed the line, touching the sea for the first time, he chanted “Namo Shivaya! Namo Shivaya! Passing from the Land of Renunciation to the Land of the Enjoyment of the World!”

He was talking again, of the fact that he who would be great must suffer, and how some were fated to see every joy of the senses turn to ashes, and he said “The whole of life is only a swan-song! Never forget those lines –

‘The lion, when stricken to the heart, gives out his mightiest roar.

When smitten on the head, the cobra lifts its hood.

And the majesty of the soul comes forth, only when a man is wounded to his depths.'”

Now he would answer a question, with infinite patience, and again he would play with historic and literary speculations. Again and again his mind would return to the Buddhist period, as the crux of a real understanding of Indian history.

“The three cycles of Buddhism,” he said, one day, “were five hundred years of the Law, five hundred years of Images, and five hundred years of Tantras. You must not imagine that there was ever a religion in India called Buddhism, with temples and priests of its own order! Nothing of the sort. It was always within Hinduism. Only at one time the influence of Buddha was paramount, and this made the nation monastic.” He had been discussing the question of the adoption into Buddhism, as its saints, of the Nags of Kashmir (the great serpents who were supposed to dwell within the springs), after the terrible winter that followed their deposition as deities.

And he drifted on to talk about the Soma plant, picturing how, for a thousand years after the Himalayan period, it was annually received in Indian villages as if it were a king, the people going out to meet it on a given day, and bringing it in rejoicing. And now it cannot even be identified!

Again it was Sher Shah of whom he talked, – Sher Shah, making a thirty years’ interim in the reign of Humayoon. I remember the accession of delight with which he began the subject, saying ”He was once a boy, running about the streets of Bengal!” He ended by showing how the Grand Trunk Road from Chittagong to Peshawar, the Postal system, and the Government Bank, were all his work.

And then there were a few minutes of silence, and he began reciting lines from the Guru Gita. “To that Guru who is Brahman, to that Guru who is Vishnu, to that Guru who is Siva, to that Guru who is Para Brahman, I bow down to that Guru. From the Guru is the beginning, yet is he without beginning: to that Guru who is greatest among the gods, to that Guru who is Para Brahman, I bow down to that Guru.”

He was pursuing some train of thought within, to which these snatches of prayer bore some relation. A moment or two went by, and suddenly he broke his reverie, saying “Yes, Buddha was right! It must be cause and effect in Karma. This individuality cannot but be an illusion!”

It was the next morning, and I had supposed him to be dozing in his chair, when he suddenly exclaimed, “Why the memory of one life is like millions of years of confinement, and they want to wake up the memory of many lives! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!”

“I have just been talking to Turiyananda about conservative and liberal ideas,” he said, as he met me on deck before breakfast one morning, and straightway plunged into the subject.

“The conservative’s whole ideal is submission. Your ideal is struggle. Consequently it is we who enjoy life, and never you! You are always striving to change yours to something better, and before a millionth part of the change is carried out, you die. The Western ideal is to be doing: the Eastern to be suffering. The perfect life would be a wonderful harmony between doing and suffering. But that can never be.”

“In our system it is accepted that a man cannot have all he desires. Life is subjected to many restraints. This is ugly, yet it brings out points of light and strength. Our liberals see only the ugliness, and try to throw it off. But they substitute something quite as bad, and the new custom takes as long as the old, for us to work to its centres of strength.”

“Will is not strengthened by change. It is weakened and enslaved by it. But we must be always absorbing. Will grows stronger by absorption. And consciously or unconsciously, will is the one thing in the world that we admire. Suttee is great, in the eyes of the whole world, because of the will that it manifests.”

“It is selfishness that we must seek to eliminate! I find that whenever I have made a mistake in my life, it has always been because self entered into the calculation. Where self has not been involved, my judgment has gone straight to the mark.”

“Without this self, there would have been no religious systems. If man had not wanted anything for himself, do you think he would have had all this praying and worship? Why! he would never have thought of God at all, except perhaps for a little praise now and then, at the sight of a beautiful landscape or something. And that is the only attitude there ought to be. All praise and thanks. If only we were rid of self!”

“You are quite wrong,” he said again, “when you think that fighting is a sign of growth. It is not so at all. Absorption is the sign. Hinduism is the very genius of absorption. We have never cared for fighting. Of course we could strike a blow now and then, in defence of our homes! That was right. But we never cared for fighting for its own sake. Everyone had to learn that. So let these races of new-comers whirl on! They’ll all be taken into Hinduism in the end!”

He never thought of his Mother-Church or his Motherland except as dominant; and again and again, when thinking of definite schemes, he would ejaculate, in his whimsical way, “Yes, it is true! If European men or women are to work in India, it must be under the black man!”

He brooded much over the national achievement. “Well! well!” he would say, “We have done one thing that no other people ever did. We have converted a whole nation to one or two ideas. Non-beef-eating for instance. Not one Hindu eats beef. No, no!” – turning sharply round – “it’s not at all like European non-cat-eating; for beef was formerly the food of the country!”

We were discussing a certain opponent of his own, and I suggested that he was guilty of putting his sect above his country. “That is Asiatic,” retorted the Swami warmly, “and it is grand! Only he had not the brain to conceive, nor the patience to wait!”‘ And then he went off into a musing on Kali.

“I am not one of those,” he chanted,

“Who put the garland of skulls round Thy neck,

And then look back in terror And call Thee ‘The Merciful ‘!

The heart must become a burial ground,

Pride, selfishness, and desire all broken into dust,

Then and then alone will the Mother dance there!”

“I love terror for its own sake,” he went on, “despair for its own sake, misery for its own sake. Fight always. Fight and fight on, though always in defeat. That’s the ideal. That’s the ideal.”

“The totality of all souls, not the human alone,” he said once, “is the Personal God. The will of the Totality nothing can resist. It is what we know as Law. And this is what we mean by Siva and Kali, and so on.”

Some of the most beautiful scenes in the world have been made for me more beautiful, by listening, in their midst, to these long soliloquies.

It was dark when we approached Sicily, and against the sunset sky, Etna was in slight eruption. As we entered the straits of Messina, the moon rose, and I walked up and down the deck beside the Swami, while he dwelt on the fact that beauty is not external, but already in the mind. On one side frowned the dark crags of the Italian coast, on the other, the island was touched with silver light. “Messina must thank me!” he said, “It is I who give her all her beauty!”

Then he talked of the fever of longing to reach God, that had wakened in him as a boy, and of how he would begin repeating a text before sunrise, and remain all day repeating it, without stirring. He was trying here to explain the idea of tapasya, in answer to my questions, and he spoke of the old way of lighting four fires, and sitting in the midst, hour after hour, with the sun over-head, reining in the mind. “Worship the terrible!” he ended, “Worship Death! All else is vain. All struggle is vain. That is the last lesson. Yet this is not the coward’s love of death, not the love of the weak, or the suicide. It is the welcome of the strong man, who has sounded everything to its depths, and knows that there is no alternative.”

The Swami talked with me one day, of the saints he had seen. The subject began perhaps with that Nag Mahashoy, who had paid him a visit in Calcutta, only a few weeks before, and whose death must have occurred a day or two previous to our leaving.

The news reached him, while the ship was still in the River. Nag Mahashoy, he said repeatedly, was “one of the greatest of the works of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.” He described his impassioned idea of the necessity of bhakti, and how he would refuse to give food, to the body of one so worthless and unfortunate as he himself was, in never yet having loved God. He told me, too, how on one occasion Nag Mahashoy had cut down the ridgepole of his cottage, in order to make the fire to cook food for a guest.

The talk passed perhaps, to the story of that youth who was touched by Sri Ramakrishna’s hand, and who never afterwards spoke, save to say “My Beloved! My Beloved!” He lived ten years, without other speech than this.

There were many stories current amongst the monks, of persons who had come to Dakshineshwar during the life-time of their Master, and being touched by his hand, went immediately into Samadhi. In many cases, nothing more was known of the visitants than this.

This was notably true of a certain woman, who had driven to the Temple, and of whom Sri Ramakrishna had said at once that she was “a fragment of the Madonnahood of the worlds.” He had offered salutation to this guest, in the name of the Mother, throwing flowers on her feet, and burning incense before her, and she, as was not perhaps surprising, had passed immediately into the deepest Samadhi.

From this, however, to everyone’s surprise, it had proved most difficult to recall her. It was two or three hours before she awoke from her ecstasy, and when this happened her whole appearance it is said, was as that of one who had been intoxicated. Much relieved that all was ending thus well, however, – for it had been feared that her Samadhi might last much longer, and her family, wherever they were, feel justly disturbed – all lent their aid to the departure of the stranger from the temple, and none had the forethought to make a single enquiry as to her name or abode. She never came again. Thus her memory became like some beautiful legend, treasured in the Order as witness to the worship of Sri Ramakrishna for gracious and noble wifehood and motherhood. Had he not said of this woman, “a fragment of the eternal Madonnahood”?

In my own ignorance of religious matters in general, my mind felt out much after these stray children of the central impulse, shining like distant stars in their own orbits, as it were, and never returning upon us or ours. I wanted to know whether, even in lives so fair as theirs, it might perhaps be possible to forget the great experience of a day long years ago, so that the memory of the great Teacher and his touch would become to them also a far-away incident, a story heard in a dream, even as their visits had become to those who saw them pass.

I wanted in fact to be able to measure the relative values of many things, and I left out of sight at that time altogether, – having not yet begun to consider it – the preparedness which the national idea has produced in every Hindu for such experiences.

But the Swami could not understand my mental twilight. “Was it a joke,” he said, “that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa should touch a life? OF COURSE he made new men and new women of those who came to him, even in these fleeting contacts!”

And then he would tell story after story of different disciples. How one came, and came again, and struggled to understand. And suddenly to this one, he turned and said “Go away now, and make some money! Then come again!” And that man to-day was succeeding in the world, but the old love was proving itself ever alight. There was no mention of the defects of this, or any other of whom he told. As one listened, it was the courage and nobility of each man’s struggle that one felt. Why should every man force himself to be a monk? Nay, how could every man, till his other work was done? But there would be no mistake in the end. All these would be his at last.

Similarly, of the saints. His whole soul went to the interpretation of each, as he rose before him, and it would have been impossible at that moment for the listener to think of any other as higher.

Of Pavhari Baba he had so striven to tell us everything, that it would have seemed scarcely delicate to press vague questions upon him further. All who had been with him at the time of the saint’s death knew that he held him second only to Sri Ramakrishna, knew that there was none whose love to himself he had more valued.

Now he set himself to tell stories for an hour, of one or two others whom he had met. TRAILINGA SWAMI he had seen when very, very old, more than a hundred, apparently. He was always silent. He would lie in a Siva-temple in Benares, with his feet on the image, A madcap, seemingly. He allowed people, however, to write him questions, and sometimes, if he fancied one, would write an answer in Sanskrit. This man was lately dead.

RAGHUNATH DASS had been dead two months, when the Swami reached his ashrama. He had been a soldier originally in the British service, and as an outpost sentinel was faithful and good, and much beloved by his officers. One night, however, he heard a Ram-Ram party. He tried to do his duty, but ‘ Jaya Bolo Ram Chunder ki jai !¹ ’ maddened him. He threw away his arms and uniform, and joined the worship.

This went on for some time, till reports came to the Colonel. He sent for Raghunath Dass, and asked him whether these were true, and if he knew the penalty. Yes, he knew it. It was to be shot.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “Go away this time, and I shall repeat it to no one. This once I forgive you. But if the same thing happens again, you must suffer the penalty.”

That night, however, the sentinel heard again the Ram-Ram party. He did his best, but it was irresistible. At last he threw all to the winds, and joined the worshippers till morning.

Meanwhile, however, the Colonel’s trust in Raghunath Dass had been so great that he found it difficult to believe anything against him, even on his own confession. So in the course of the night, he visited the outpost, to see for himself. Now Raghunath Dass was in his place, and exchanged the word with him three times. Then, being reassured, the Colonel turned in, and went to sleep.

In the morning appeared Raghunath Dass to report himself and surrender his arms. But the report was not accepted, for the Colonel told him what he had himself seen and heard.

Thunderstruck, the man insisted by some means on retiring from the service. Rama it was who had done this for His servant. Henceforth, in very truth, he would serve no other.

“He became a VairagF,” said the Swami, “on the banks of the Saraswati. People thought him ignorant, but I knew his power. Daily he would feed thousands. Then would come the grain-seller, after a while, with his bill. ‘H’m!’ Raghunath Dass would say, ‘A thousand rupees you say? Let me see. It is a month I think since I have received anything. This will come, I fancy, to-morrow.’ And it always came.”

1 Jaya Bolo Ram Chunder ki jai ! _— Hindi words which translate as’ “Salutations to the lord Ram!”

Someone asked him if the story of the Ram-Ram party were true.

“What’s the use of knowing such things?” he answered.

“I do not ask for curiosity,” urged the questioner, “but only to know if it is possible for such things to happen!”

Nothing is impossible with the Lord!” answered Raghunath Dass. . . .

“I saw many great men,” went on the Swami, “in Hrishikesh. One case that I remember was that of a man who seemed to be mad. He was coming nude down the street, with boys pursuing, and throwing stones at him. The whole man was bubbling over with laughter, while blood was streaming down his face and neck. I took him, and bathed the wound, putting ashes* on it, to stop the bleeding. And all the time, with peals of laughter, he told me of the fun the boys and he had been having, throwing the stones. ‘So the Father plays,’ he said.”

“Many of these men hide, in order to guard themselves against intrusion. People are a trouble to them. One had human bones strewn about his cave, and gave it out that he lived on corpses. Another threw stones. And so on ” . . . .

“Sometimes the thing comes upon them in a flash. There was a boy, for instance, who used to come to read the Upanishads with Abhedananda. One day he turned and said ‘Sir, is all this really true?’

“Oh yes!” said Abhedananda, “it may be difficult to realise, but it is certainly true.”

“And next day, that boy was a silent sannyasin, nude, on his way to Kedar Nath!”

“What happened to him? you ask – He became silent!”

“But the sannyasin needs no longer to worship, or to go on pilgrimage, or perform austerities. What, then, is the motive of all this going from pilgrimage to pilgrimage, shrine to shrine, and austerity to austerity? He is acquiring merit, and giving it to the world!”

And then, perhaps, came the story of Shibi Rana. “Ah yes!” exclaimed the teller, as he ended, “these are the stories that are deep in our nation’s heart! Never forget that the sannyasin takes two vows, one to realise the truth, and one to help the world, and that the most stringent of stringent requirements is that he should renounce any thought of heaven!”

* These ashes are made by burning a piece of cotton cloth. – N.

Even a journey round the world becomes a pilgrimage, if one makes it with the Guru. It was late one evening, in the Red Sea, when I brought to the Swami some perplexity, of a personal nature, about the right method of helpfulness to others. It was rarely, indeed, that he would answer a question of this sort, without first turning for authority to some dictum of the Shastras’.

And how grateful does one become later for this fact! It was his personal opinion that one desired. But giving this, as he did, in the form of a comment on some text, it went much deeper into the mind, and became the subject of much longer thought and consideration, than if he had answered at once, in the sense required by the impatient questioner.

In the same way, when I had asked him what becomes of those who failed to keep their vows, he had gone all the way round by a beautiful Sanskrit quotation, to answer me. Even now, I hear the ring of his wonderful voice, repeating Arjuna’s question:

They who begin with Shraddha², and afterwards become unsteady, to what end do those come, O Krishna, who fail in yoga? Do they, fallen from both estates, perish, – blasted, like a summer-cloud before the wind?

And the answer of Sri Krishna, fearless, triumphant, –

“Neither here nor hereafter, O Son of Pritha, shall such meet with destruction. NEVER shall one who has done good, come to grief, O my son!”

And then he drifted into a talk that I can never forget. First he explained how everything, short of the absolute control of mind, word, and deed, was but “the sowing of wild oats.” Then he told how the religious who failed would sometimes be born again to a throne, ‘there to sow his wild oats,’ in gratifying that particular desire which had led to his downfall. ‘A memory of the religious habit,’ he said, ‘often haunts the throne.’

For one of the signs of greatness was held to be the persistence of a faint memory. Akbar had had this memory. He thought of himself as a brahmacharitf who had failed in his vows. But he would be born again, in more favourable surroundings, and that time he would succeed.

And then there came one of those personal glimpses which occurred so seldom with our Master. Carried away by the talk of memory, he lifted the visor for a moment, on his own soul. “And whatever you may think,” he said, turning to me suddenly, and addressing me by name, “I have such a memory!

When I was only two years old, I used to play with my syce, at being a vairagi, clothed in ashes and kaupina. And if a Sadhu came to beg, they would lock me in, upstairs, to prevent my giving too much away. I felt that I also was this, and that for some mischief I had had to be sent away from Siva. No doubt my family increased this feeling, for when I was naughty they would say “Dear, dear! so many austerities, yet Siva sent us this demon after all, instead of a good soul! Or when I was very rebellious they would empty a can of water over me, saying ‘Siva! Siva’! And then I was all right, always. Even now, when I feel mischievous, that word keeps me straight. ‘No!’ I say to myself, ‘not this time!’ “

On the present occasion, then, he went back, in similar fashion, to the Gita. “The Gita says,” he answered me, “that there are three kinds of charity, the Tamasic, the Rajasic, and the Sattvic. Tamasic charity is performed on an impulse. It is always making mistakes. The doer thinks of nothing but his own impulse to be kind. Rajasic charity is what a man does for his own glory. And sattvic charity is that which is given to the right person, in the right way, and at the proper time.

“Your own,” he said, referring to the incident that had brought about my question, “was, I fear, like the tamasic charity. When it comes to the sattvic, I think more and more of a certain great Western woman, in whom I have seen that quiet giving, always to the right person in the right way, at the right time, and never making a mistake. For my own part, I have been learning that even charity can go too far.”

His voice sank into silence, and we sat looking out over the starlit sea. Then he took up the thread again. “As I grow older I find that I look more and more for greatness in little things. I want to know what a great man eats and wears, and how he speaks to his servants. I want to find a Sir Philip Sidney greatness! Few men would remember the thirst of others, even in the moment of death.”

“But anyone will be great in a great position! Even the coward will grow brave in the glare of the foot-lights. The world looks on. Whose heart will not throb? Whose pulse will not quicken, till he can do his best?”

“More and more the true greatness seems to me that of the worm, doing its duty silently, steadily, from moment to moment, and hour to hour.”

How many points on the map have received a new beauty in my eyes, from the conversations they recall! As we passed up the coast of Italy, we talked of the Church. As we went through the Straits of Bonifacio, and sat looking at the south coast of Corsica, he spoke in a hushed voice of “this land of the birth of the War-Lord,” and wandered far afield, to talk of the strength of Robespierre, or to touch on Victor Hugo’s contempt for Napoleon III, with his “Et tu Napoleon!”

As I came on deck, on the morning of our passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, he met me with the words “Have you seen them? Have you seen them? Landing there and crying ‘Din! Din! The Faith! The Faith!'” And for half-an-hour I was swept away into his dramatisation of the Moorish invasions of Spain.

Or again, on a Sunday evening, he would sit and talk of Buddha, putting new life into the customary historic recital of bare facts, and interpreting the Great Renunciation as it had appeared to him who made it.

But his talks were not all entertaining, nor even all educational. Every now and then he would return, with consuming eagerness, to the great purpose of his life. And when he did this, I listened with an anxious mind, striving to treasure up each word that he let fall. For I knew that here I was but the transmitter, but the bridge, between him and that countless host of his own people, who would yet arise, and seek to make good his dreams.

One of these occasions came on a certain evening, as we neared Aden. I had asked him, in the morning, to tell me, in broad outline, what he felt to be the points of difference between his own schemes for the good of India, and those preached by others. It was impossible to draw him out on this subject. On the contrary, he expressed appreciation of certain personal characteristics and lines of conduct, adopted by some of the leaders of other schools, and I regarded the question as dismissed. Suddenly, in the evening, he returned to the subject of his own accord.

“I disagree with all those,” he said, “who are giving their superstitions back to my people. Like the Egyptologist’s interest in Egypt, it is easy to feel an interest in India that is purely selfish. One may desire to see again the India of one’s books, one’s studies, one’s dreams. My hope is to see again the strong points of that India, reinforced by the strong points of this age, only in a natural way. The new state of things must be a growth from within.

“So I preach only the Upanishads. If you look, you will find that I have never quoted anything but the Upanishads. And of the Upanishads, it is only that one idea strength. The quintessence of Vedas and Vedanta and all, lies in that one word. Buddha’s teaching was of Non-resistance or Non-injury. But I think this is a better way of teaching the same thing. For behind that Non-injury lay a dreadful weakness. It is weakness that conceives the idea of resistance. I do not think of punishing or escaping from a drop of sea-spray. It is nothing to me. Yet to the mosquito it would be serious. Now I would make all injury like that. Strength and fearlessness. My own ideal is that giant of a saint whom they killed in the Mutiny, and who broke his silence, when stabbed to the heart, to say – ‘And thou also art He!’

“But you may ask – what is the place of Ramakrishna in this scheme?”

‘He is the method, that wonderful unconscious method! He did not understand himself. He knew nothing of England or the English, save that they were queer folk from over the sea. But he lived that great life, – and I read the meaning. Never a word of condemnation for any! Once I had been attacking one of our sects of Diabolists¹. I had been raving on for three hours, and he had listened quietly. ‘Well, well!’ said the old man as I finished, ‘perhaps every house may have a back door. Who knows’?

“Hitherto the great fault of our Indian religion has lain in its knowing only two words -renunciation and mukti. Only mukti here! Nothing for the householder!”

“But these are the very people whom I want to help. For are not all souls of the same quality? Is not the goal of all the same?”

“And so strength must come to the nation through education.”

I thought at the time, and I think increasingly, as I consider it, that this one talk of my Master had been well worth the whole voyage, to have heard.

The Swami was constantly preoccupied with the thought of Hinduism as a whole, and this fact found recurring expression in references to Vaishnavism. As a sannyasin, his own imagination was perhaps dominated by the conceptions of Saivaism. But Vaishnavism offered him a subject of perpetual interest and analysis.

The thing he knew by experience was the truth of the doctrine of Advaita. The symbols under which he would seek to convey this were the monastic ideal and the Worship of the Terrible. But these were truths for heroes. By their means, one might gather an army. The bulk of mankind would always think of God as a Divine Providence, a tender Preserver, and the question of questions was how to deepen the popular knowledge, of the connection between this type of belief and the highest philosophy.

With regard to the West, indeed, the bridges had actually to be built. Advaita had to be explained and preached. But in India, all this had been done long ago. The facts were universally admitted. It was only necessary to renew realisation, to remind the nation of the interrelation of all parts of its own faith, and to go again and again over the ground, in order to see that no weak point remained, in the argument by which Vaishnavism was demonstrated to be as essential to the highest philosophy, as that philosophy was acknowledged to be, to it.

Thus he loved to dwell on the spectacle of the historical emergence of Hinduism. He sought constantly for the great force behind the evolution of any given phenomenon. Where was the thinker behind the founder of a religion? And where, on the other hand was the heart to complete the thought?

Buddha had received his philosophy of the five categories – form, feeling, sensation, motion, knowledge – from Kapila. But Buddha had brought the love that made the philosophy live. Of no one of these, Kapila had said, can anything be declared. For each is not. It but was, and is gone. “Each is but the ripple on the waters. Know, Oh man! thou art the sea!”

Krishna, in his turn, as the preacher and creative centre of popular Hinduism, awoke in the Swami a feeling which was scarcely second to his passionate personal adoration of Buddha. Compared to His many-sidedness, the sannyas of Buddha was almost a weakness.

How wonderful was the Gita! Reading it, as a boy, he would be stopped every now and then by some great sentence, which would go throbbing through his brain for days and nights. “They who find pleasure and pain the same, heat and cold the same, friend and foe the same!” And that description of the battle – a spirited battle too! – with the opening words of Krishna, “Ill doth it befit thee, Arjuna, thus to yield to unmanliness¹!” How strong!

But besides this, there was the beauty of it. The Gita, after the Buddhist writings, was such a relief! Buddha had constantly said “I am for the People!” And they had crushed, in his name, the vanity of art and learning. The great mistake committed by Buddhism lay in the destruction of the old.

For the Buddhist books were torture to read. Having been written for the ignorant, one would find only one or two thoughts in a huge volume.* It was to meet the need thus roused, that the Puranas were intended. There had been only one mind in India that had foreseen this need, that of Krishna, probably the greatest man who ever lived. He recognises at once the need of the People, and the desirability of preserving all that had already been gained. Nor are the Gopi story and the Gita (which speaks again and again of women and sudras) the only forms in which he reached the ignorant. For the whole Mahabharata is his, carried out by his worshippers, and it begins with the declaration that it is for the People.

“Thus is created a religion that ends in the worship of Vishnu, as the preservation and enjoyment of life, leading to the realisation of God. Our last movement, Chaitanyism, you remember, was for enjoyment.”

At the same time, Jainism represents the other extreme, the slow destruction of the body by self-torture. Hence Buddhism, you see, is reformed Jainism, and this is the real meaning of Buddha’s leaving the company of the five ascetics. In India, in every age, there is a cycle of sects which represents every gradation of physical practice, from the extreme of self-torture to the extreme of excess. And during the same period will always be developed a metaphysical cycle, which represents the realisation of God as taking place by every gradation of means, from that of using the senses as an instrument, to that of the annihilation of the senses. Thus Hinduism always consists, as it were, of two counter-spirals, completing each other, round a single axis.

** The Swami was characterising doctrine here: he was not speaking of the personal asceticism of Sri Chaitainya, which has probably never been surpassed.

” It is not be supposed that the Swami here referred to the Dhammapada – a work which he always placed on a level with the Gita. The reference, I think was rather to such books as those Jataka Birth Stories which are published in two volumes in Trubner’s Oriental Series.

“Yes! Vaishnavism says, ‘It is all right! this tremendous love for father, for mother, for brother, husband, or child! It is all right, if only you will think that Krishna is the child, and when you give him food, that you are feeding Krishna!’ This was the cry of Chaitanya, ‘Worship God through the senses!’ as against that Vedantic cry, ‘Control the senses! suppress the senses!’”

“At the present moment, we may see three different positions of the national religion – the orthodox, the Arya Samaj, and the Brahmo Samaj. The orthodox covers the ground taken by the Vedic Hindus of the Mahabharata epoch. The Arya Samaj corresponds with Jainism, and the Brahmo Samaj with the Buddhists.”

“I see that India is a young and living organism. Europe also is young and living. Neither has arrived at such a stage of development that we can safely criticise its institutions. They are two great experiments, neither of which is yet complete. In India, we have social communism, with the light of Advaita – that is, spiritual individualism – playing on and around it; in Europe, you are socially individualists, but your thought is dualistic, which is spiritual communism. Thus the one consists of socialist institutions, hedged in by individualistic thought, while the other is made up of individualist institutions, within the hedge of communistic thought.

“Now we must help the Indian experiment as it is. Movements which do not attempt to help things as they are, are, from that point of view, no good. In Europe, for instance, I respect marriage as highly as non-marriage. Never forget that a man is made great and perfect as much by his faults as by his virtues. So we must not seek to rob a nation of its character, even if it could be proved that that character was all faults.”

His mind was extraordinarily clear on the subject of what he meant by individualism. How often has he said to me “You do not yet understand India! We Indians are MAN-worshippers, after all! Our God is man!” He meant here the great individual man, the man of self-realisation, – Buddha, Krishna, the Guru, the Maha-Purusha. But on another occasion, using the same word in an entirely different sense, he said “This idea of man-worship* exists in nucleus in India, but it has never been expanded. You must develop it. Make poetry, make art, of it. Establish the worship of the feet of beggars, as you had it in Mediaeval Europe. Make man-worshippers.”

He was equally clear, again, about the value of the image. “You may always say,” he said, “that the image is God. The error you have to avoid, is to think God the image.”

* That is to say, the worship of the manhood which exists in any man, in all men, apart from their individual achievement of thought or character, humanity.

He was appealed to, on one occasion, to condemn the fetichism of the Hottentot¹. “I do not know,” he answered, “what fetichism is!” A lurid picture was hastily put before him, of the object alternately worshipped, beaten, thanked.

“I do that!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see,” he went on, a moment later, in hot resentment of injustice done to the lowly and absent, “Don’t you see that there is no fetichism? Oh, your hearts are steeled, that you cannot see that the child is right! The child sees person everywhere. Knowledge robs us of the child’s vision. But at last, through higher knowledge, we win back to it. He connects a living power with rocks, sticks, trees, and the rest. And is there not a living Power behind them? It is symbolism, not fetichism! Can you not see?”

But while every sincere ejaculation was thus sacred to him, he never forgot for a moment the importance of the philosophy of Hinduism. And he would throw perpetual flashes of poetry into the illustration of such arguments as are known to lawyers. How lovingly he would dwell upon the mimansaka philosophy! With what pride he would remind the listener that, according to Hindu savants, “the whole universe is only the meaning of words. After the word comes the thing. Therefore, the idea is all!”

And indeed, as he expounded it, the daring of the mimansaka argument, the fearlessness of its admissions, and the firmness of its inferences, appeared as the very glory of Hinduism. There is assuredly no evasion of the logical issue in a people who can say, even while they worship the image, that the image is nothing but the idea made objective; that prayer is powerful in proportion to the concentration it represents; that the gods exist only in the mind, and yet the more assuredly exist. The whole train of thought sounded like the most destructive attack of the iconoclast, yet it was being used for the exposition of a faith!

One day, he told the story of Satyavama’s sacrifice and how the word “Krishna,” written on a piece of paper, and thrown into the balances, made Krishna himself, on the other side, kick the beam.

“Orthodox Hinduism” he began, “makes sruti, the sound, everything. The thing is but a feeble manifestation of the pre-existing and eternal Idea. So the name of God is everything: God Himself is merely the objectification of that idea in the eternal mind. Your own name is infinitely more perfect than the person, you! The name of God is greater than God. Guard you your speech!” Surely there has never been another religious system so fearless of truth!

1. The word ‘Hottentots’ was a name disparagingly used to refer to the Khoikhoi people that lived in Southern Africa. The name was given to them by Dutch colonialists and it means ‘stammerer’ in Dutch.

As he talked, one saw that the whole turned on the unspoken conviction, self-apparent to the Oriental mind, that religion is not a creed, but an experience; a process, as the Swami himself has elsewhere said, of being and becoming. If it be true that this process leads inevitably from the apprehension of the manifold to the realisation of the One, then it must also be true that everything is in the mind, and that the material is nothing more than the concretising of ideas.

Thus the Greek philosophy of Plato is included within the Hindu philosophy of the mimansakas, and a doctrine that sounds merely empiric on the lips of Europe, finds reason and necessity, on those of India. In the same way, as one declaring a truth self-evident, he exclaimed, on one occasion, “I would not worship even the Greek gods, for they were separate from humanity! Only those should be worshipped who are like ourselves, but greater. The difference between the gods and me must be a difference only of degree.”

But his references to philosophy did not by any means always consist of these epicurean titbits. He was merciless, as a rule, in the demand for intellectual effort, and would hold a group of unlearned listeners through an analysis of early systems, for a couple of hours at a stretch, without suspecting them, of weariness or difficulty. It was evident, too, at such times, that his mind was following the train of argument in another language, for his translations of technical terms would vary from time to time.

In this way he would run over the six objects with which the mind has to deal, in making up the universe according to the Vaisheshik formulation. These were substance,* quality, action, togetherness, classification or differentiation, and inseparable inherence as between cause and effect, parts and the whole. With this he would compare the five categories of Buddhism, – form, feeling, consciousness, reaction [i.e. the resultant of all previous impressions], and vidya, or judgment.

The Buddhist made form the resultant of all the others, and nothing by itself; the goal therefore, for Buddhism, was beyond vidya [which Buddhism called Prajna], and outside the five categories. Side by side with this, he would place the three illusive categories of the Vedanta (and of Kant) – time, space, and causation [Kala-desh-nimitta] appearing as name-and-form, which is maya, that is to say, neither existence nor non-existence.

* Substance, according to the Vaisheshik, consists of the elements, time space, mind and soul.

It was clear, then, that the seen was not, according to this, a being. Rather is it an eternal, changeful process. Being is one, but process makes this being appear as many. Evolution and involution are both alike in Maya. They are certainly not in Being [Sat], which remains eternally the same.

Nor would western speculations pass forgotten, in this great restoration of the path the race had come by. For this was a mind which saw only the seeking, pursuing, enquiry of man, making no arbitrary distinctions as between ancient and modern.

The analysis of the modern syllogism – under the old Indian title of “the five limbs of the argument” – would be followed by the four proofs of the Nyayas. These were, (i) direct perception; (2) inference; (3) analogy; and (4) testimony. According to this logic, the induction and deduction of the moderns were not recognised: inference was regarded as always from the more known to the less known, or from the less to the more. The inference from direct perception was divided into three different kinds: first, that in which the effect is inferred from the cause; second, that in which cause is inferred from effect, and thirdly, the case in which inference is determined by concomitant circumstances.

Methods of inference, again, were fivefold: by agreement, by difference, by double method of agreement and difference, by partial method of agreement, and by partial method of difference. The two last were sometimes classed together as the method of the residuum. It was quite clear that only the third of these could furnish a perfect inference; that is to say, “proof is only complete when the negative has been proved, as well as the affirmative. Thus God can never be proved to be the cause of the Universe.”

“There is, again, the fact of pervasiveness. A stone falls, and crushes a worm. Hence we infer that all stones, falling, crush worms. Why do we thus immediately re-apply a perception? Experience, says some one. But it happens, let us suppose, for the first time. Throw a baby into the air, and it cries. Experience from past lives? But why applied to the future? Because there is a real connection between certain things, a pervasiveness, only it lies with us to see that the quality neither overlaps, nor falls short of, the instance. On this discrimination depends all human knowledge.”

“With regard to fallacies, it must be remembered that direct perception itself can only be a proof, provided the instrument, the method, and the persistence of the perception, are all maintained pure. Disease, or emotion, will have the effect of disturbing the observation. Therefore direct perception itself is but a mode of inference.”

Therefore all human knowledge is uncertain, and may be erroneous. Who is a true witness? He is a true witness to whom the thing said is a direct perception. Therefore the Vedas are true, because they consist of the evidence of competent persons. But is this power of perception peculiar to any? No! The Rishi the Aryan, and the Mlechha all alike have it.

“Modern Bengal holds that evidence is only a special case of direct perception, and that analogy and parity of reasoning are only bad inferences. Therefore of actual proofs there are only two, direct perception and inference.

One set of persons, you see, gives priority to the external manifestation, the other to the internal idea. Which is prior, the bird to the egg, or the egg to the bird? Does the oil hold the cup or the cup the oil? This is a problem of which there is no solution. Give it up! Escape from Maya!”

On July the 31st, we arrived in London, and the voyage that to myself had been so memorable, was over. The Swami spent a few weeks in Wimbledon, but at this time of the year, not many of his friends were in town, and before long he acceded to the invitations which were constantly reaching him, and went on to America, there to wait, in a beautiful country-home on the Hudson, for the leading that he confidently expected, to show him where his next effort was to lie.

A month later, I became a guest in the same house, and continued to see him daily, until November the 5th, that is to say, six or seven weeks later. After that date, when our party was broken up, the Swami paid a few visits in New York and its neighbourhood. At the end of the month he passed through Chicago, where I then was, on his way to California.

Again I met him in New York in the following June (1900). There for a few weeks, and later in Paris for a similar length of time, I saw him frequently; and in September, finally, I spent a fortnight as his fellow-guest, with American friends, in Brittany. So ends the priceless memory of the years of my schooling under him. For when I next saw my Master, in India in the first half of 1902, it was only to receive his final blessing and take a last farewell.

Discipleship is always serenely passive, but it changes, at a moment’s notice, into strenuous effort and activity, when the personal presence of the Teacher is withdrawn. And this last was what our Master above all expected of his disciples. He said once that whenever a young monk, received for a few weeks or months into the monastery, complained that as yet he had learnt nothing, he always sent him back for a while to the world he had left, there to find out how very much he had in fact absorbed.

Every parting from him was like the entrusting of a standard for warfare. “Be the heroic Rajput wife!” he exclaimed in an undertone on one occasion, to a girl who was about to give way to emotion, at saying farewell to her betrothed. And the words acted like a charm. His last words, after my brief glimpse of him in Chicago, were “Remember! the message of India is always ‘Not the soul for Nature, but Nature for the soul!’”

When I said good-bye to him in Brittany in September, 1900, I was on the eve of returning alone to England, there to find friends and means, if possible, for the Indian work. I knew nothing as yet of the length of my stay. I had no plans. And the thought may have crossed his mind that old ties were perilous to a foreign allegiance. He had seen so many betrayals of honour that he seemed always to be ready for a new desertion.

In any case, the moment was critical to the fate of the disciple, and this he did not fail to realise. Suddenly, on my last evening in Brittany, when supper was some time over, and the darkness had fallen, I heard him at the door of my little arbour-study, calling me into the garden. I came out, and found him waiting to give me his blessing, before leaving, with a man-friend, for the cottage where they were both housed.

“There is a peculiar sect of Mohammedans,” he said, when he saw me, “who are reported to be so fanatical that they take each newborn babe, and expose it, saying, ‘If God made thee, perish! If Ali made thee, live!’ Now this which they say to the child, I say, but in the opposite sense, to you, tonight – Go forth into the world, and there, if I made you, be destroyed! If Mother made you, live!”

Yet he came again next morning, soon after dawn, to say farewell, and in my last memory of him in Europe, I look back once more from the peasant market-cart, and see his form against the morning sky, as he stands on the road outside our cottage at Lannion, with hands uplifted, in that Eastern salutation which is also benediction.

The outstanding impression made by the Swami’s bearing, during all these months of European and American life, was one of almost complete indifference to his surroundings. Current estimates of value left him entirely unaffected. He was never in any way startled or incredulous under success, being too deeply convinced of the greatness of the Power that worked through him, to be surprised by it.

But neither was he unnerved by external failure. Both victory and defeat would come and go. He was their witness. “Why should I care, if the world itself were to disappear?” he said once. “According to my philosophy, that, you know, would be a very good thing! But in fact,” he added, in tones suddenly graver, “All that is against me must be with me in the end. Am I not HER soldier?”

He moved fearless and unhesitant through the luxury of the West. As determinedly as I had seen him in India, dressed in the two garments of simple folk, sitting on the floor and eating with his fingers, so, equally without doubt or shrinking, was his acceptance of the complexity of the means of living in America or France. Monk and king, he said, were obverse and reverse of a single medal. From the use of the best, to the renunciation of all, was but one step. India had thrown all her prestige in the past, round poverty. Some prestige was in the future to be cast round wealth.

Rapid changes of fortune, however, must always be the fate of one who wanders from door to door, accepting the hospitality of foreign peoples. These reversals he never seemed to notice. No institution, no environment, stood between him and any human heart. His confidence in that Divine-within-Man of which he talked, was as perfect, and his appeal as direct, when he talked with the imperialist aristocrat or the American millionaire, as with the exploited and oppressed. But the out-flow of his love and courtesy were always for the simple.

When, travelling in America, he had at first in certain Southern towns been taken for a negro, and refused admission to the hotels, he had never said that he was not of African blood, but had as quietly and gratefully availed himself of the society of the coloured race, when that was offered, as of that of the local magnates who hastened round him later, in mortified apology for what they deemed the insult put upon him.

“What! rise at the expense of another!” he was heard to say to himself, long after, when someone referred with astonishment to this silence about his race. “Rise at the expense of another! I didn’t come to earth for that!” It is not for the monk to dictate terms: the monk submits.

Often, in after-years, he spoke of the pathos of the confidences regarding race-exclusion, which he had received at this time. Few things ever gave him such pleasure as a negro railway-servant who came up to him on one occasion, in a station, saying that he had heard how in him one of his own people had become a great man, and he would like to shake hands.

Finally, it was never possible, in his presence, for the vulgar social exultation of the white man to pass un-rebuked. How stern he would become at any sign of this! How scathing was his reproof!

And above all, how glowing was the picture he would paint, of a possible future for these children of the race, when they should have outstripped all others, and become the leaders of Humanity!

He was scornful in his repudiation of the pseudo-ethnology of privileged races. “If I am grateful to my white-skinned Aryan ancestor,” he said, “I am far more so to my yellowskinned Mongolian ancestor, and most so of all, to the black-skinned Negritoid!”

He was immensely proud, in his own physiognomy, of what he called his ‘Mongolian jaw,’ regarding it as a sign of ‘bull-dog, tenacity of purpose’; and referring to this particular race-element, which he believed to be behind every Aryan people, he one day exclaimed “Don’t you see? the Tartar is the wine of the race! He gives energy and power to every blood!”

In seeking to penetrate his indifference to circumstance, one has to remember that it was based on a constant effort to find the ideal thinking-place. Each family, each hearth-stone, was appreciated by him, in the degree in which it provided that mental and emotional poise which makes the highest intellectual life possible.

One of a party who visited Mont Saint Michel¹ with him on Michaelmas Day 1900, and happened to stand next to him, looking at the dungeon-cages of mediaeval prisoners, was startled to hear him say, under his breath, “What a wonderful place for meditation!”

There are still some amongst those who entertained him in Chicago in 1893, who tell of the difficulty with which, on his first arrival in the West, he broke through the habit of falling constantly into absorption. He would enter a tram, and have to pay the fare for the whole length of the line, more than once in a single journey, perhaps, being too deeply engrossed in thought to know when he had reached his destination.

As years went on, and these friends met him from time to time, they saw the gradual change to an attitude of apparent readiness and actuality. But such alterations were little more than surface-deep. Beneath, the will glowed with all its old fervour, the mind held itself ever on the brink of the universal.

It seemed almost as if it were by some antagonistic power, that he was ‘bowled along from place to place, being broken the while,’ to use his own graphic phrase. “Oh I know I have wandered over the whole earth,” he cried once, “but in India I have looked for nothing, save the cave in which to-meditate!”

And yet he was a constant and a keen observer. Museums, universities, institutions, local history, found in him an eager student. It was the personal aspect of conditions that left him unaffected. Never did the contrast between two hemispheres pass before a mind better fitted to respond to its stimulus.

He approached everything through the ideas which it sought to express. During the voyage to England, he came on deck one day after a sound sleep, and told me that he had in his dreams been pursuing a discussion, as between Eastern and Western ideals of marriage, and had come to the conclusion that there was something in both that the world could ill afford to lose.

At the end of his last visit to America, he told me that on first seeing Western civilisation he had been greatly attracted by it, but now he saw mainly its greed and power. Like others, he had accepted without thought the assumption that machinery would be a boon to agriculture, but he could now see that while the American farmer, with his several square miles to farm, might be the better for machines, they were likely to do little but harm on the tiny farmlands of the Indian peasantry. The problem was quite different in the two cases. Of that alone, he was firmly convinced.

In everything, including the problem of distribution, he listened with suspicion to all arguments that would work for the elimination of small interests, appearing in this as in so many other things, as the perfect, though unconscious expression, of the spirit of the old Indian civilisation. A strong habit of combination he was able to admire, but what beauty of combination was there, amongst a pack of wolves?

He had an intense objection to discussing the grievances, or the problems of India, in a foreign country; and felt deeply humiliated when this was done in his presence. Nor did he ever fail, on the other hand, to back a fellow-countryman against the world. It was useless for Europeans to talk to him of their theories, if an Indian investigator in the same line had come to an opposite conclusion. With the simplicity and frankness of a child, he would answer that he supposed his friend would invent more delicate instruments, and make more accurate measurements, which would enable him to prove his point.

Thus, student and citizen of the world as others were proud to claim him, it was yet always on the glory of his Indian birth that he took his stand. And in the midst of the surroundings and opportunities of princes, it was more and more the monk who stood revealed.

On July the 31st, we arrived in London, and the voyage that to myself had been so memorable, was over. The Swami spent a few weeks in Wimbledon, but at this time of the year, not many of his friends were in town, and before long he acceded to the invitations which were constantly reaching him, and went on to America, there to wait, in a beautiful country-home on the Hudson, for the leading that he confidently expected, to show him where his next effort was to lie.

A month later, I became a guest in the same house, and continued to see him daily, until November the 5th, that is to say, six or seven weeks later. After that date, when our party was broken up, the Swami paid a few visits in New York and its neighbourhood. At the end of the month he passed through Chicago, where I then was, on his way to California.

Again I met him in New York in the following June (1900). There for a few weeks, and later in Paris for a similar length of time, I saw him frequently; and in September, finally, I spent a fortnight as his fellow-guest, with American friends, in Brittany. So ends the priceless memory of the years of my schooling under him. For when I next saw my Master, in India in the first half of 1902, it was only to receive his final blessing and take a last farewell.

Discipleship is always serenely passive, but it changes, at a moment’s notice, into strenuous effort and activity, when the personal presence of the Teacher is withdrawn. And this last was what our Master above all expected of his disciples. He said once that whenever a young monk, received for a few weeks or months into the monastery, complained that as yet he had learnt nothing, he always sent him back for a while to the world he had left, there to find out how very much he had in fact absorbed.

Every parting from him was like the entrusting of a standard for warfare. “Be the heroic Rajput wife!” he exclaimed in an undertone on one occasion, to a girl who was about to give way to emotion, at saying farewell to her betrothed. And the words acted like a charm. His last words, after my brief glimpse of him in Chicago, were “Remember! the message of India is always ‘Not the soul for Nature, but Nature for the soul!’”

When I said good-bye to him in Brittany in September, 1900, I was on the eve of returning alone to England, there to find friends and means, if possible, for the Indian work. I knew nothing as yet of the length of my stay. I had no plans. And the thought may have crossed his mind that old ties were perilous to a foreign allegiance. He had seen so many betrayals of honour that he seemed always to be ready for a new desertion.

In any case, the moment was critical to the fate of the disciple, and this he did not fail to realise. Suddenly, on my last evening in Brittany, when supper was some time over, and the darkness had fallen, I heard him at the door of my little arbour-study, calling me into the garden. I came out, and found him waiting to give me his blessing, before leaving, with a man-friend, for the cottage where they were both housed.

“There is a peculiar sect of Mohammedans,” he said, when he saw me, “who are reported to be so fanatical that they take each newborn babe, and expose it, saying, ‘If God made thee, perish! If Ali made thee, live!’ Now this which they say to the child, I say, but in the opposite sense, to you, tonight – Go forth into the world, and there, if I made you, be destroyed! If Mother made you, live!”

Yet he came again next morning, soon after dawn, to say farewell, and in my last memory of him in Europe, I look back once more from the peasant market-cart, and see his form against the morning sky, as he stands on the road outside our cottage at Lannion, with hands uplifted, in that Eastern salutation which is also benediction.

The outstanding impression made by the Swami’s bearing, during all these months of European and American life, was one of almost complete indifference to his surroundings. Current estimates of value left him entirely unaffected. He was never in any way startled or incredulous under success, being too deeply convinced of the greatness of the Power that worked through him, to be surprised by it.

But neither was he unnerved by external failure. Both victory and defeat would come and go. He was their witness. “Why should I care, if the world itself were to disappear?” he said once. “According to my philosophy, that, you know, would be a very good thing! But in fact,” he added, in tones suddenly graver, “All that is against me must be with me in the end. Am I not HER soldier?”

He moved fearless and unhesitant through the luxury of the West. As determinedly as I had seen him in India, dressed in the two garments of simple folk, sitting on the floor and eating with his fingers, so, equally without doubt or shrinking, was his acceptance of the complexity of the means of living in America or France. Monk and king, he said, were obverse and reverse of a single medal. From the use of the best, to the renunciation of all, was but one step. India had thrown all her prestige in the past, round poverty. Some prestige was in the future to be cast round wealth.

Rapid changes of fortune, however, must always be the fate of one who wanders from door to door, accepting the hospitality of foreign peoples. These reversals he never seemed to notice. No institution, no environment, stood between him and any human heart. His confidence in that Divine-within-Man of which he talked, was as perfect, and his appeal as direct, when he talked with the imperialist aristocrat or the American millionaire, as with the exploited and oppressed. But the out-flow of his love and courtesy were always for the simple.

When, travelling in America, he had at first in certain Southern towns been taken for a negro, and refused admission to the hotels, he had never said that he was not of African blood, but had as quietly and gratefully availed himself of the society of the coloured race, when that was offered, as of that of the local magnates who hastened round him later, in mortified apology for what they deemed the insult put upon him.

“What! rise at the expense of another!” he was heard to say to himself, long after, when someone referred with astonishment to this silence about his race. “Rise at the expense of another! I didn’t come to earth for that!” It is not for the monk to dictate terms: the monk submits.

Often, in after-years, he spoke of the pathos of the confidences regarding race-exclusion, which he had received at this time. Few things ever gave him such pleasure as a negro railway-servant who came up to him on one occasion, in a station, saying that he had heard how in him one of his own people had become a great man, and he would like to shake hands.

Finally, it was never possible, in his presence, for the vulgar social exultation of the white man to pass un-rebuked. How stern he would become at any sign of this! How scathing was his reproof!

And above all, how glowing was the picture he would paint, of a possible future for these children of the race, when they should have outstripped all others, and become the leaders of Humanity!

He was scornful in his repudiation of the pseudo-ethnology of privileged races. “If I am grateful to my white-skinned Aryan ancestor,” he said, “I am far more so to my yellowskinned Mongolian ancestor, and most so of all, to the black-skinned Negritoid!”

He was immensely proud, in his own physiognomy, of what he called his ‘Mongolian jaw,’ regarding it as a sign of ‘bull-dog, tenacity of purpose’; and referring to this particular race-element, which he believed to be behind every Aryan people, he one day exclaimed “Don’t you see? the Tartar is the wine of the race! He gives energy and power to every blood!”

In seeking to penetrate his indifference to circumstance, one has to remember that it was based on a constant effort to find the ideal thinking-place. Each family, each hearth-stone, was appreciated by him, in the degree in which it provided that mental and emotional poise which makes the highest intellectual life possible.

One of a party who visited Mont Saint Michel¹ with him on Michaelmas Day 1900, and happened to stand next to him, looking at the dungeon-cages of mediaeval prisoners, was startled to hear him say, under his breath, “What a wonderful place for meditation!”

There are still some amongst those who entertained him in Chicago in 1893, who tell of the difficulty with which, on his first arrival in the West, he broke through the habit of falling constantly into absorption. He would enter a tram, and have to pay the fare for the whole length of the line, more than once in a single journey, perhaps, being too deeply engrossed in thought to know when he had reached his destination.

As years went on, and these friends met him from time to time, they saw the gradual change to an attitude of apparent readiness and actuality. But such alterations were little more than surface-deep. Beneath, the will glowed with all its old fervour, the mind held itself ever on the brink of the universal.

It seemed almost as if it were by some antagonistic power, that he was ‘bowled along from place to place, being broken the while,’ to use his own graphic phrase. “Oh I know I have wandered over the whole earth,” he cried once, “but in India I have looked for nothing, save the cave in which to-meditate!”

And yet he was a constant and a keen observer. Museums, universities, institutions, local history, found in him an eager student. It was the personal aspect of conditions that left him unaffected. Never did the contrast between two hemispheres pass before a mind better fitted to respond to its stimulus.

He approached everything through the ideas which it sought to express. During the voyage to England, he came on deck one day after a sound sleep, and told me that he had in his dreams been pursuing a discussion, as between Eastern and Western ideals of marriage, and had come to the conclusion that there was something in both that the world could ill afford to lose.

At the end of his last visit to America, he told me that on first seeing Western civilisation he had been greatly attracted by it, but now he saw mainly its greed and power. Like others, he had accepted without thought the assumption that machinery would be a boon to agriculture, but he could now see that while the American farmer, with his several square miles to farm, might be the better for machines, they were likely to do little but harm on the tiny farmlands of the Indian peasantry. The problem was quite different in the two cases. Of that alone, he was firmly convinced.

In everything, including the problem of distribution, he listened with suspicion to all arguments that would work for the elimination of small interests, appearing in this as in so many other things, as the perfect, though unconscious expression, of the spirit of the old Indian civilisation. A strong habit of combination he was able to admire, but what beauty of combination was there, amongst a pack of wolves?

He had an intense objection to discussing the grievances, or the problems of India, in a foreign country; and felt deeply humiliated when this was done in his presence. Nor did he ever fail, on the other hand, to back a fellow-countryman against the world. It was useless for Europeans to talk to him of their theories, if an Indian investigator in the same line had come to an opposite conclusion. With the simplicity and frankness of a child, he would answer that he supposed his friend would invent more delicate instruments, and make more accurate measurements, which would enable him to prove his point.

Thus, student and citizen of the world as others were proud to claim him, it was yet always on the glory of his Indian birth that he took his stand. And in the midst of the surroundings and opportunities of princes, it was more and more the monk who stood revealed.

The mission of Buddha, in the centuries before the Christian era, was twofold. He was the source, on the one hand, of a current of energy, that swept out from the home-waters to warm and fertilise the shores of distant lands. India, scattering his message over the Eastern world, became the maker of nations, of churches, of literatures, arts and scientific systems, in countries far beyond her own borders.

But within India proper, the life of the Great Teacher was the first nationaliser. By democratising the Aryan culture of the Upanishads, Buddha determined the common Indian civilisation, and gave birth to the Indian nation of future ages.

Similarly, in the great life that I have seen, I cannot but think that a double purpose is served, – one of world-moving, and another, of nation-making. As regarded foreign countries, Vivekananda was the first authoritative exponent, to Western nations, of the ideas of the Vedas and Upanishads. He had no dogma of his own to set forth. “I have never,” he said, “quoted anything but the Vedas and Upanishads, and from them only that the word strength!” He preached mukti instead of heaven; enlightenment instead of salvation; the realisation of the Immanent Unity, Brahman, instead of God; the truth of all faiths, instead of the binding force of any one.

Western scholars were sometimes amazed and uncomfortable, at hearing the subject of the learned researches of the study poured out as living truths, with all the fervour of the pulpit, but the scholarship of the preacher proved itself easily superior to any tests they could offer.

His doctrine was no academic system of metaphysics, of purely historic and linguistic interest, but the heart’s faith of a living people, who have struggled continuously for its realisation, in life and in death, for twenty-five centuries. Books had been to him not the source and fountain of knowledge, but a mere commentary on, and explanation of, a Life whose brightness would, without them have dazzled him, and left him incapable of analysing it.

It had been this same life of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa that had forced upon him the conviction that the theory of Advaita, as propounded by Sankaracharya – the theory that all is One and there is no second was ultimately the only truth.

It was this life, re-enforced of course by his own experience, that had convinced him that even such philosophies* as seemed to culminate at a point short of the Absolute Oneness, would prove in the end to be dealing with phases only, of this supreme realisation.

As an expression of this goal, however, every sincere belief was true. “Bow thy head and adore,” had said Sri Ramakrishna, “where others worship, for in that form in which man has called on Him, God will assuredly appear.” At each step between the earth and the sun, said the Swami, we might conceivably take a photograph. No two of these would be perfectly similar. Yet which could be said to be untrue? These sayings referred to the compatibility of the antagonistic religious ideas of different sects and creeds.

But when the Teacher of Dakshineshwar set himself to determine the accessibility of the highest illumination through the life of woman, we are perhaps justified in feeling that he opened the door to a deeper regard for the sacredness of what is commonly considered to be merely social and secular.

In a world of symbols, he proved the service of the home as true a means to God as attendance on the altar; the sacraments of the temple, though served by priestly hands, not more a means of grace than the common bread of the household, broken and distributed by wife or mother. “Everything, even the name of God,” said Sri Ramakrishna, “is Maya. But some of this Maya helps us towards freedom; the rest only leads us deeper into bondage.”

In showing, that the daily life of a good woman was thus blessed, that a home was a temple, that courtesy, hospitality, and the fulfilment of duty in the world might be made into one long act of worship, Sri Ramakrishna, as I think, provided basis and sanction for what was to be a predominant thought with his great disciple.

The Swami Vivekananda, in his wanderings over India during subsequent years, studied its multitude of small social formations, each embodying its central religious conviction, and found in all broken gleams of that brightness which he had seen at its fullest in his Master.

But when, in 1893, he began to see the world outside India, it was by national and patriotic unities that he was confronted. And in these, as naturally as in the creeds and sects of his own land, he continued to feel the outworking of the Divine within Man. For many years, this was entirely unconscious, yet no one around him stood unimpressed by his eager study of the strong points of different peoples.

* Dualism the doctrine of the ultimate difference between soul and God saved and Saviour’ and Qualified Dualism, the mergence of the soul in the realisation of God, but not in His being.

One day, in the course of my voyage to England, when he had been telling me, with the greatest delight, of the skilled seamanship and exquisite courtesy of the Turk, I drew his attention to the astonishing character of his enthusiasm. His mind seemed to turn to the thought of the ship’s servants, whose childlike devotion to himself had touched him deeply. “You see, I love our Mohammedans!” he said simply, as if accused of a fault. “Yes,” I answered, “but what I want to understand is this habit of seeing every people from their strongest aspect. Where did it come from? Do you recognise it in any historical character? Or is it in some way derived from Sri Ramakrishna?”

Slowly the look of puzzled surprise left his face. “It must have been the training under Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,” he answered. “We all went by his path to some extent. Of course it was not so difficult for us as he made it for himself. He would eat and dress like the people he wanted to understand, take their initiation, and use their language. ‘One must learn,’ he said ‘to put oneself into another man’s very soul.’ And this method was his own! No one ever before in India became Christian and Mohammedan and Vaishnava by turns!”

Thus a nationality, in the Swami’s eyes, had all the sacredness of a church, – a church whose inmost striving was to express its own conception of ideal manhood. “The longer I live,” he was once heard to ejaculate, “the more I think that the whole thing is summed up in manliness!”

By a reflex of consciousness, the more he became acquainted with the strength and lovableness of other nations, the more proud he grew of his Indian birth, becoming daily more aware of those things in which his own Motherland, in her turn, stood supreme.

He discussed nations, like epochs, from various points of view successively, not blinding himself to any aspect of their vast personality. The offspring of the Roman Empire he considered always to be brutal, and the Japanese notion of marriage he held in horror. Unvaryingly, nevertheless, he would sum up the case in terms of the constructive ideals, never of the defects, of a community; and in one of the last utterances I heard from him on these subjects, he said, “For patriotism, the Japanese! For purity, the Hindu! And for manliness, the European! There is no other in the world,” he added with emphasis, “who understands, as does the Englishman, what should be the glory of a man!”

His object as regarded India, said the Swami, in a private conversation, had always been “to make Hinduism aggressive.” The Eternal Faith must become active and proselytising, capable of sending out special missions, of making converts, of taking back into her fold those of her own children who had been perverted from her, and of the conscious and deliberate assimilation of new elements.

Did he know that any community becomes aggressive, that any faith will be made active, the moment it becomes aware of itself as an organised unity? Did he know that he himself was to make this self-recognition possible to the Church of his forefathers? At any rate, his whole work, from the first, had consisted, according to his own statement, of “a search for the common bases of Hinduism.”

He felt instinctively that to find these and reassert them, was the one way of opening to the Mother-Church the joyous conviction of her own youth and strength. Had not Buddha preached renunciation and Nirvana, and because these were the essentials of the national life, had not India, within two centuries of his death, become a powerful empire? So he, too, would fall back upon the essentials, and declare them, leaving results to take care of themselves.

He held that the one authority which Hinduism claimed to rest upon, the only guide she proposed to the individual soul, was “spiritual truth.” Those laws of experience that underlie, and give birth to, all scriptures, were what she really meant by the word “Vedas.”

The books called by that name were refused by some of her children – the Jains for example – yet the Jains were none the less Hindus for that. All that is true is Veda, and the Jain is to the full as much bound by his view of truth as any other. For he would extend the sphere of the Hindu Church to its utmost. With her two wings he would cover all her fledglings. “I go forth,” he had said of himself before he left for America the first time, “I go forth, to preach a religion of which Buddhism is nothing but a rebel child, and Christianity, with all her pretensions, only a distant echo!”

Even as books, however, he would claim that the glory of the Vedic scriptures was unique in the history of religion. And this not merely because of their great antiquity; but vastly more for the fact that they, alone amongst all the authoritative books of the world, warned man that he must go beyond all books.

Truth being thus the one goal of the Hindu creeds, and this being conceived of, not as revealed truth to be accepted, but as accessible truth to be experienced, it followed that there could never be any antagonism, real or imagined, between scientific and religious conviction, in Hinduism.

In this fact the Swami saw the immense capacity of the Indian peoples for that organised conception of science peculiar to the modern era. No advance of knowledge had ever been resisted by the religious intellect of India. Nor had the Hindu clergy, – a greater glory still! -ever been known to protest against the right of the individual to perfect freedom of thought and belief. This last fact indeed, giving birth to the doctrine of the Ishta Devata* – the idea that the path of the soul is to be chosen by itself – he held to be the one universal differentia of Hinduism; making it not only tolerant, but absorbent, of every possible form of faith and culture.

Even the temper of sectarianism, characterised by the conviction that God Himself is of the believer’s creed, and his limited group the one true church, and allying itself, as it now and then will, with every statement that man has ever formulated, was regarded by Hinduism, he pointed out, as a symptom, not of falsehood or narrowness, but only of youth. It constituted as Sri Ramakrishna had said, the intellectual fence, so necessary to the seedling, but so inimical to the tree. The very fact that we could impose limitations, was a proof that we were still dealing with the finite. When the cup of experience should be full, the soul would dream only of the Infinite. “All men hedge in the fields of earth, but who can hedge in the sky?” had said the Master.

The vast complexus of systems which made up Hinduism, was in every case based upon the experimental realisation of religion, and characterised by an infinite inclusiveness. The only tests of conformity ever imposed by the priesthood had been social, and while this had resulted in a great rigidity of custom, it implied that to their thinking the mind was eternally free.

But it could not be disputed that the thought-area within Hinduism, as actually realised, had been coloured by the accumulation of a few distinctive ideas, and these were the main subjects of the Swami’s Address before the Parliament of Religions, at Chicago, in 1893.

First of these special conceptions, with which India might be said to be identified, was that of the cyclic character of the cosmos. On the relation of Creator and created, as equal elements in a dualism which can never be more than a relative truth, Hinduism had a profound philosophy, which Vivekananda, with his certainty of grasp, was able to set forth in a few brief words.

The next doctrine which he put forward, as distinctive of Indian thought in general, was that of reincarnation and karma, ending in the manifestation of the divine nature of man. And finally, the universality of truth, whatever the form of thought or worship, completed his enumeration of these secondary differentia.

In a few clear sentences, he had conclusively established the unity, and delineated the salient features, of Hinduism. The remainder of his work in the West was, in the main, a free gift in modern and universal forms, of the great inspirations contained in the Eternal Faith. To him, as a religious teacher, the whole world was India, and man, everywhere, a member of his own fold.

It was on his return to India, in January 1897, that the Swami, in philosophic form, made that contribution to the thought of, his people, which, it has been said elsewhere, is required by India of all her epoch-makers. Hitherto, the three philosophic systems of – Unism, Dualism, and Modified Unism, or Advaita, Dvaita, and Visishtadvaita – had been regarded as offering to the soul, three different ideals of liberation. No attempt had ever before been made to reconcile these schools. On reaching Madras, however, in 1897, Vivekananda boldly claimed that even the utmost realisations of Dualism and Modified Unism, were but stages on the way to Unism itself; and the final bliss, for all alike, was the mergence in One without a second.

It is said that at one of his midday question-classes, a member of his audience asked him why, if this was the truth, it had never before been mentioned by any of the Masters. It was customary to give answers to these questions, first in English and then in Sanskrit, for the benefit of such scholars present as knew no modern language, and the great gathering was startled, on this occasion, to hear the reply “- Because I was born for this, and it was left for me to do!”

In India, the Swami was extremely jealous of any attempt to exclude from Hinduism any of her numerous branches and offshoots. A man was none the less a Hindu, for instance, in his eyes, for being a member of the Brahmo or the Arya Samaj. The great Sikh Khalsa was one of the finest organisations ever created within the Mother-Church, and by her genius. With what ardour he painted for us, again and again, the scene in which Guru Govinda Singh uttered his call to sacrifice!

There were, he held, three different stratifications to be recognised in the Faith. One was that of the old historic Orthodoxy. Another consisted of the reforming sects of the Mohammedan period. And third came the reforming sects of the present period. But all these were equally Hindu. He never forgot that his own longing to consider the problems of his country and his religion on the grand scale, had found its first fulfilment in his youthful membership of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.

And he was so far from repudiating this membership, that he one day exclaimed – “It is for them to say whether I belong to them or not! Unless they have removed it, my name stands on their books to this day!” Thus a man was equally Hindu, in his opinion, whether he prefixed to the adjective the modification of Arya, Brahmo, or Orthodox. The claim of the Jain to a place within the fold, was a simple matter of social and historical demonstration. The Jains of Western India would be indignant to this day, if their right to rank as Hindus were seriously questioned. Even now they exchange daughters in marriage, with orthodox houses, of caste correspondent to their own. And even now, their temples are served occasionally by ordinary Brahmins.

The Swami had disciples amongst all faiths, even the Mohammedan, and by the good offices of certain of his Jain friends, he was allowed to read some of their sacred books, not usually accessible, except to members of their own congregations. From this study, he was deeply impressed with the authenticity of their doctrines and traditions, and with the important part which they had played in the evolution of Hinduism.

Indian religion necessarily includes amongst its strongest ideas, a regard for the immanent humanity in dumb animals, and deep devotion to the ascetic ideal of sainthood. These two features had been isolated and emphasised by the Jains. In their clear pronouncements on the Germ Theory, more-over, confirmed as these have been by the researches of modern science, there was evidence sufficient of the intellectual and spiritual stature of the founders of the school. The Jain is obviously right, said the Swami, in claiming that his doctrines were in the first place declared by Rishis.

With regard to the Christianised castes of the present day, the Swami hoped that they would rise in social status by adopting the faith of the dominant political faction, and that in ages to come, when Christianity should be forgotten, they would still be able to maintain this advance.

In this way, we might hope for a future oblivion of the nineteenth century, as a disintegrating force, and the permanent enriching of the Indian system by its contributions. In evidence of the possibility of such a development, was there not the work of Chaitanya in Northern India, and the fact that he had succeeded in forming, for his followers, “a caste of very great respectability?”

Christianity, in her present-day workings, was difficult to pardon. Not so the other non-Hindu faith, Islam. The picture that this name called up to our Master’s mind was always of an eager confraternity, enfranchising the simple and democratising the great. As a factor in the evolution of modern India, he could never for a moment be forgetful of the loyal acceptance, by Islamic intruders, of the old Indian civilisation, and administrative system. Nor could he disregard the service they had done, not only in exalting the social rights of the lowly-born, but also in conserving and developing, in too gentle a race, the ideals of organised struggle and resistance.

He constantly pointed out that Mohammedanism had its fourfold ‘castes’ – Syyed, Pathan, Mogul, and Sheikh – and that of these the Sheikhs had an inherited right to the Indian soil and the Indian memory, as ancient and indisputable as those of any Hindu. He, told a disciple, a propos of an indiscreetly-written word, that “Shah Jehan would have turned in his grave to hear himself called a ‘foreigner.’” And finally, his highest prayer for the good of the Motherland was that she might make manifest the twofold ideal of “an Islamic body and a Vedantic heart.”

Thus – far aloof as he stood from the political significance of such facts, – India, to Vivekananda’s thinking, was a unity, and a unity still more deeply to be apprehended of the heart than of the mind.

His work in the world, as he saw it, was the sowing broadcast of the message of his own Master. But his personal struggles, his personal desires, were bound up in an inextinguishable passion for his country’s good. He never proclaimed nationality, but he was himself the living embodiment of that idea which the word conveys. He, our Master, incarnates for us in his own person, that great mutual love which is the Indian national ideal.

Nothing was less in his mind, be it understood, than a mere revival or restoration of the Indian past. It was to those who sought to bring this about that he had referred, when he said “Like the Egyptologist’s interest in Egypt, their interest in India is a purely selfish one. They would fain see again that India of their books, their studies, and their dreams.” What he himself wanted was to see the strength of that old India finding new application and undreamt-of expression, in the new age. He longed to see “a dynamic religion.”

Why should one select out all the elements of meanness and decadence and reaction, and call them ‘Orthodox’? Orthodoxy was a term too grand, too strong, too vital, for any such use. It would be rightly applied only to that home where all the men were Pandava heroes, and all the women had the greatness of Sita or the fearlessness of Savitri.

He stood aloof from all special questions, whether of conservatism or reform; not because he sympathised with one party more or less than with the other, but because he saw that for both alike the real question was the recapture of the ideal, and its identification with India. On behalf of Woman and the People, alike, he held that the duty required of us was not to change institutions, but to put these in a position to solve their own problems.

At least equal to this dislike of ignorance was his horror of the identification of India with what is known as Occultism. He had the natural interest and curiosity of educated persons, and would at any time have been glad to undergo inconvenience, in order to put to the test alleged cases of walking on water, handling fire, and so on. We all know, however, that evidence regarding such matters is apt to vanish into the merest hearsay, when followed up.

And in any case, such occurrences would have had no significance for him, beyond pointing the simple moral that our present classification of phenomena was incomplete, and must be revised, to include some unfamiliar possibilities. They would have had no supernatural character whatsoever. Few things in the life of Buddha moved him so deeply as the tale of the unfrocking of the monk who had worked a miracle. And he said of the Figure that moves through the Christian Gospels that its perfection would have seemed to him greater, had there been a refusal to gain credence by the “doing of mighty works.”

In this matter, it is probably true as I have heard it pointed out, in later years, by the Swami Sadananda, that there is a temperamental, as well as intellectual, divergence between Eastern and Western Asia, the one always despising, and the other seeking for “a sign.” In this respect, according to Sadananda, the Mongolian and Semitic conceptions are sharply opposed; while the Aryan stands between, weighing the two. However this may be, it will be admitted by many of us that the modern interest in so-called occult phenomena has been largely instrumental in creating a mischievous idea that the Oriental is a being of mysterious nature, remote from the ordinary motives of mankind, and charged with secret batteries of supernatural powers.

All this was hateful to the Swami. He desired to see it understood that India was peopled with human beings, who have indeed an intensely individual character, and a distinctive culture, but who are in all respects men amongst men, with all the duties, claims, and emotions of common humanity.

He, indeed, had the generosity to extend to the West, the same gospel that the Indian sages had preached in the past to the Indian people – the doctrine of the Divinity in man, to be realised by faithful service, through whatever forms. The life of externals, with its concentration of interest in sense-impressions, was, according to him, a mere hypnotism, a dream, of no exalted character. And for Western, as for Eastern, the soul’s quest was the breaking of this dream, the awakening to a more profound and powerful reality.

He was for ever finding new ways to express his belief that all men alike had the same vast potentiality. “Yes! my own life is guided by the enthusiasm of a certain great Personality,” he said once, “but what of that? Inspiration was never filtered out to the world through one man!”

Again he said. “It is true that I believe Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to have been inspired. But then I am myself inspired also. And you are inspired. And your disciples will be; and theirs after them; and so on, to the end of time!

And on another occasion, to one who questioned him about the old rule of the teachers, that truth should be taught only to those of proved and tested fitness, he exclaimed impatiently, “Don’t you see that the age for esoteric interpretations is over? For good or for ill, that day is vanished, never to return. Truth, in the future, is to be open to the world!”

He would speak, with whimsical amusement, of attempts to offer to India religious ideas and organisations which were European-led, as a culminating effort in the long attempt to exploit one race for the good of another. But he never took such European leading seriously, in matters of religion.

Finally, there was no event in the history of his own people to which he returned more constantly than the great Charge of Asoka to his missionaries, in the third century before Christ. “Remember” said the mighty Emperor to those who were to carry the Law to various countries, “Remember that everywhere you will find some root of faith and righteousness. See that you foster this, and do not destroy!”

Asoka had thus dreamt of the whole world, as federated by ideas, – ideas everywhere guided and permeated by the striving towards absolute truth and perfection of conduct. But this dream of Asoka had had to contend with ancient difficulties of communication and transport, with half-known continents and vast diversity of races.

The preliminary steps, therefore, in his world-federation, would necessarily take so long that the primal impulse of faith and energy might in the meantime be forgotten. It must have been from the consideration of this question that the Swami one day looked up, – as we all entered the mountain-pass that lies beyond the village of Kathgodam, – and exclaimed, breaking a long reverie, “Yes! The idea of the Buddhists was one for which only the modern world is ready! None before us has had the opportunity of its realisation!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go forward without a path!

Fearing nothing, caring for nothing,

Wander alone, like the rhinoceros!

Even as the lion, not trembling at noises,

Even as the wind, not caught in a net,

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

Do thou wander alone, like the rhinoceros!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** ‘The Blessed One passed by my house,

my house – the Barber’s!

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

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

‘I ran, but He turned and awaited me.

Awaited me – the Barber!

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

And He said ‘Yes!’

‘Yes!’ to me – the Barber!

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

And He said ‘Yes!’

Even for me – the Barber!

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

And He said ‘Oh yes!’

Even I – the Barber!

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

And He said ‘Thou mayest!’

Even to me – the poor Barber!’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is the time?’ he asked him.

“Midnight,” was the answer.

“And where are we?”

“Just fifty miles off Crete!”

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

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

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

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