l\ JLHsk*'*"' MA*K~, J* *** Ux^VlxtX^uJL THE MASTER AS I SAW HIM BY THE SAME AUTHOR AN INDIAN STUDY OF LOVE AND DEATH CRADLE TALES OF HINDUISM WITH FRONTISPIECE LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LONDON AND NEW YORK THE MASTER AS I SAW HIM BEING PAGES FROM THE LIFE OF THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA HIS DISCIPLE NIVEDITA OF RAMAKRISHNA-VIVEKANANDA LIFE, ETC. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON AND NEW YORK IQIO All rights reserved jtohttafrm t0 In sending out into the world this book the tribute of her love and gratitude to her Guru Nivedita has the blessings and good wishes of all his brothers. Bellur Math Feb. ist. 1910. SARADANANDA, 2021288 TABLE OF CONTENTS. -CHAPTER. PAGE * A WORD TO WESTERN READERS, I. THE SWAMI IN LONDON. 1895 . . -4 II. THE SWAMI IN LONDON. 1896 . . . -22 III. THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 49 IV. THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA AND THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA 74 V. WANDERINGS IN NORTHERN INDIA . . . II 3 VI. THE AWAKENER OF SOULS .... 128 VII. FLASHES FROM THE BEACON FIRE . . . 14 VIII. AMARNATH . . . . 1 53 IX. KSHIR BHOWANI l6l X. CALCUTTA AND THE HOLY WOMEN . . .177 XL THE SWAMI AND MOTHER-WORSHIP . . 205 XII. HALF-WAY ACROSS THE WORLD . . . 22O XIII. GLIMPSES OF THE SAINTS 235 XIV. PAST AND FUTURE IN INDIA .... 246 CHAPTER. PAGE XV. THE SWAMI ON HINDUISM .... 257 XVI. GLIMPSES IN THE WEST 275 XVII. THE SWAMl'S MISSION CONSIDERED AS A WHOLE 289 XVIII. THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA'S ATTITUDE TO BUDDHA 3l8 XIX. HIS ESTIMATE OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY . 344 XX. WOMAN AND THE PEOPLE .... 355 XXI. HIS METHOD OF TRAINING A WESTERN WORKER 382 XXII. MONASTICISM AND MARRIAGE .... 406 xxin. OUR MASTER'S RELATION TO PSYCHIC PHE- NOMENA, SO-CALLED 431 XXIV. HIS TEACHING ABOUT DEATH .... 448 XXV. SUPER-CONSCIOUSNESS . . . -475 XXVI. THE PASSING OF THE SWAMI .... 497 XXVII THE END 509 APPENDICES. A. NOTES OF A LECTURE DELIVERED IN LONDON. NOV. 1 6, 1895 B. NOTES OF A LECTURE DELIVERED IN LONDON. NOV. 23, 1895. [ SEE CHAPTER I. Ante. ] C. NOTES OF LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE VEDANTA SOCIETY, NEW YORK, SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, JUNE IOTH AND I7TH, 1900. D. NOTES OF A LECTURE ON 'MOTHER-WORSHIP 5 DELIVER- ED AT THE VEDANTA SOCIETY NEW YORK, SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 24TH, 1 900. [ SEE CHAPTER 1 6. Ante ] PRINTED BY S. C. GHOSE AT THE LAKSHMI PRINTING WORKS, 64-1 & 64-2 SUKEA'S STREET, CALCUTTA. A WORD TO WESTERN READERS. FROM the close of the era of the Bud- dhist Missions, until the day when, as a yellow-clad Sannyasin, the Swami Viveka- nanda stood on the platform of the Parlia- ment of Religions in the Chicago Exhibi- tion of 1893, Hinduism had not thought of herself as a missionary faith. Her profes- sional teachers, the Brahmins, being citizens and householders, formed a part of Hindu society itself and as such were held to be debarred from crossing the seas. And her wandering Sadhus, who are, in the highest cases, as much above the born Brahmin in authority, as saint or incarnation may be above priest or scholar, had simply not thought of putting their freedom to such use. Nor did the Swami Vivekananda A WORD TO WESTERN READERS appear at the doors of Chicago with any credentials. He had been sent across the Pacific Ocean, as he might have wandered from one Indian village to another, by the eargerness and faith of a few disciples in Madras. And with American hospitality and frankness he was welcomed, and accord- ed an opportunity of speaking. In his case, as in that of the Buddhist missionaries, the impelling force that drove him out to foreign lands was the great personality of One at whose feet he had sat, and whose life he had shared, for many years. Yet, in the West, he spoke of no personal teacher, he gave the message of no limited sect. "The religious ideas of the Hindus" were his theme at Chicago ; and similarly, thereafter, it was those elements which were common to, and characteristic of, orthodox Hinduism in all its parts, that formed the burden of his teach- ing. Thus, for the first time in history, Hinduism itself formed the subject of the A WORD TO WESTERN READERS generalisations of a Hindu mind of the highest order. The Swami remained in America until August of the year 1895, when he came to -Europe for the first time. In September he found his way to England, and a month or so later, he began teaching in London. I. IN LONDON, 1895. It is strange to remember, and yet it was surely my good fortune, that though I heard the teachings of my Master, the Swami Vivekananda, on both the occasions of his visits to England, in 1895 an< ^ 1896, I yet knew little or nothing of him in private life, until I came to India, in the early days of 1898. For as the fruit of this want of ex- perience I have it, that at each step of his- self-revelation as a personality, my Master stands out in my memory against his proper background, of Indian forest, city, and high- way, an Eastern teacher in an Eastern world. Even in far a- way London indeed, the first time I saw him, the occasion must have stirred in his mind, as it does in mine, recalling it now, a host of associations con- nected with his own sun-steeped land. The THE SWAMIIN LONDON -time was a cold Sunday afternoon in Novem- ber, and the place, it is true, a West-end draw- ing room. But he was seated, facing a half- circle of listeners, with the fire on the hearth behind him, and as he answered question after question, breaking now and then into the chanting of some Sanskrit text in illustration of his reply, the scene must have appeared to him, while twilight passed into darkness, only as a curious variant upon the Indian garden, or on the group of hearers gathered at sundown round the Sadhu who sits beside the well, or under the tree out- side the village-bounds. Never again in England did I see the Swami, as a teacher, in such simple fashion. Later, he was al- ways lecturing, or the questions he answer- ed were put with formality by members of larger audiences. Only this first time we were but fifteen or sixteen guests, intimate friends, many of us, and he sat amongst us, in his crimson robe and girdle, as one THE SWAMf IN LONDON bringing us news from a far land, with a curious habit of saying now and again "Shiva ! Shiva !" and wearing that look of mingled gentleness and loftiness, that one sees on the faces of those who live much in meditation, that look, perhaps, that Raphael has painted for us, on the brow of the Sistine Child. That afternoon is now ten years ago, and; fragments only of the talk come back to me. But never to be forgotten are the Sanskrit verses that he chanted for us, in those wonderful Eastern tones, at once so reminis- cent of, and yet so different from, the Gre- gorian music of our own churches. He was quite willing to answer a personal question, and readily explained, in reply to- some enquiry that he was in the West, be- cause he believed that the time had come, when nations were to exchange their ideals, as they were already exchanging the commo- dities of the market. From this point on- wards, the talk was easy. He was elucidat- THE SWAM I IN LONDON ing the idea of the Eastern Pantheism, pictur- ing the various sense-impressions as but so many different modes of the manifestation of One, and he quoted from the Gita and then translated into English: "All these are thread- ed upon Me, as pearls upon a string." He told us that love was recognised in Hinduism as in Christianity, as the highest religious emotion. And he told us, a thing that struck me very much, leading me during the following winter to quite new lines of observation, that both the mind and the body were regard- ed by Hindus as moved and dominated by a third, called the Self. He was describing the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, and I remember the quiet words, "the Buddhists accepted the report of the senses." In this respect then, Buddhism must have been in strong contrast with modern agnos- ticism, whose fundamental suspicion as to THE SWAM1 IN LONDON the subjective illusion of the senses, and therefore of all inference would surely bring it more into line with Hinduism. I remember that he objected to the word "faith," insisting on "realisation" instead; and speaking of sects, he quoted an Indian proverb, " It is well to be born in a church, but it is terrible to die there. " I think that the doctrine of Re-incarnation was probably touched upon in this talk. I imagine that he spoke of Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, as the three paths of the soul. I know he dwelt for a while on the infinite power of man. And he declared the one message of all religions to lie in the call to Renunciation. There was a word to the effect that priests and temples were .not associated in India with the highest kind of religion : and the statement that the desire to reach Heaven was in that country regarded, by the religious people , "as a little vulgar." 8 THE SWAM/ IN LONDON He must have made some statement of the ideal of the freedom of the soul, which brought it into apparent conflict with our Western conception of the service of hu- manity, as the goal of the individual. For I remember very clearly that I heard him use that word "society" for the first time that afternoon, in the sense that I have never been quite sure of having fully under- stood. He had, as I suppose, stated the ideal, and he hastened to anticipate our opposi- tion. "You will say/' he said, "that this does not benefit society. But before this objec- tion can be admitted you will first have to prove that the maintenance of society is an object in itself." At the time, I understood him to mean 'humanity' by 'society,' and to be preaching the ultimate futility of the world, and there- fore of the work done to aid it. Was this his meaning ? In that case, how is one *o reconcile it with the fact that the service THM SWAMI IN LONDON of humanity was always his whole hope ?' Or was he merely stating an idea, and standing aside to give it its full value ? Or was his word 'society,' again, only a faulty translation of the curious Eastern word Samaj, coloured, as that is, with theocratic associations, and meaning something which includes amongst other things, our idea of the church ? He touched on the question of his own position, as a wandering teacher, and ex- pressed the Indian diffidence with regard to religious organisation, or, as some one expresses it, 'with regard to a faith that ends in a church.' "We believe," he said, "that organisation always breeds new evils." He prophesied that certain religious developments then much in vogue in the West would speedily die, owing to love of money. And he declared that "Man pro- ceeds from truth to truth, and not from error to truth." 10 THE SWAMI IN LONDON This was indeed the master-thought which he continually approached from di- fferent points of view, the equal truth of all religions, and the impossibility for us, of criticising any of the Divine Incarnations, since all were equally forth-shinings of the One. And here he quoted that greatest of all verses of the Gita : "Whenever reli- gion decays and irreligion prevails, then I manifest Myself. For the protection of the / good, for the destruction of the evil, for the firm establishment of the truth, I AM BORN AGAIN AND AGAIN." We were not very orthodox, or open to belief, we who had come to meet the Hindir Yogi, as he was called in London at that time. The white-haired lady, with the his- toric name, who sat on the Swami's left, and took the lead in questioning him, with such exquisiteness of courtesy, was, perhaps, the least uncoventional of the group in matters of belief, and she had been a friend and 1 1 THE SWAMI IN LONDON disciple of Frederick Denison Maurice. Our liostess and one or two others were interested in those modern movements which have made of an extended psychology the centre of a faith. But most of us had, I incline to think, been singled out for the afternoon's hospita- lity, on the very score of our unwillingness to believe, for the difficulty of convincing us of the credibility of religious propaganda in general. Only this habit, born of the constant need of protecting the judgment against ill- considered enthusiasm, can, as I now think, furnish any excuse for the coldness and pride with which we al! gave our private verdicts on the speaker at the end of our visit. "It was not new," was our accusation, as one by one we spoke with our host and hostess before leaving. All these things had been said before. For my own part, however, as I went about the tasks of that week, it dawned on 12 THE SWAM I IN LONDON me slowly that it was not only ungenerous, it was also unjust, to dismiss in such fashion the message of a new mind and a strange cul- ture. It occurred to me that though each separate dictum might find its echo or its fellow amongst things already heard or already thought, yet it had never before fallen to my lot to meet with a thinker who^ in one short hour had been able to express all that I had hitherto regarded as highest and best. I therefore took the only two 'op- portunities that remained to me, of hearing the Swami lecture, while he was still in-. London. The feeling that great music wakes in us, grows and deepens with its repetition. And similarly, as I read over the notes of those two lectures now, they seem to me much more wonderful than they did then. For there was a quality of blindness in the attitude I presented to my Master, that I can never sufficiently regret. When he said THE SWAMI IN LONDON "The universe is like a cobweb and minds -are the spiders ; for mind is one as well as many" : he was simply talking beyond 'iny comprehension. I noted what he said, was interested in it, but could pass no judgment upon it, much less accept it. And this statement describes more or less -accurately the whole of my relation to his system of teaching, even in the following year, when I had listened to a season's lectures ; even, perhaps, on the day when I landed in India. There were many points in the Swami's teachings of which one could see the truth at once. The doctrine that while no religion was true in the way commonly claimed, yet -all were equally true in a very real way, was one that commanded the immediate assent of some of us. When he said that 'God, really Impersonal, seen through the mists of sense became Personal, one was .awed and touched by the beauty of the THE SWAM I IN LONDON thought. When he said that the spirit behind an act was more powerful than the act itself, or when he commended vegetaria- nism, it was possible to experiment. But his system as a whole, I, for one, viewed with suspicion, as forming only another of those theologies which if a man should begin by accepting, he would surely end by trans- cending and rejecting. And one shrinks from the pain and humiliation of spirit that such experiences involve. It is difficult at this point to be sufficient- ly explicit. The time came, before the Swami left England, when I addressed him as " Master." I had recognised the heroic fibre of the man, and desired to make my- self the servant of his love for his own people. But it was his character to which I had thus done obeisance. As a religious teacher, I saw that although he had a system of thought to offer, nothing in that system would claim him for a moment, if he found THE SWAM I IN LONDON that truth led elsewhere. And to the extent that this recognition implies, I became his disciple. For the rest, I studied his teaching sufficiently to become convinced of its coherence, but never, till I had had experien- ces that authenticated them, did I inwardly cast in my lot with the final justification of the things he came to say. Nor did I at that time, though deeply attracted by his personality, dream of the immense distance which I was afterwards to see, as between his development and that of any other thinker or man of genius whom I could name. Referring to this scepticism of mine, which was well known at the time to the rest of the class, a more fortunate disciple,, long afterwards, was teasing me, in the Swami's presence, and claiming that she had been able to accept every statement she had ever heard him make. The Swami paid little or no attention to the conversation 16 THE PERSONIFICATION OF GOD at the time, but afterwards he took a quiet moment to say ''Let none regret that they were difficult to convince ! I fought my Master for six long years, with the result that I know every inch of the way ! Every inch of the way !" One or two impressions, however, stand out from those first discourses. Chris- tianity had once meant to me the reali- sation of God as the Father. But I had long mourned over my own loss of faith in this symbolism, and had desired to study its value as an idea, apart from its objective truth or untruth. For I suspected that such a conception would have its own effect on the character and perhaps on the civi- lisation of those who held it. This ques- tion, however, I had been unable to follow up, for want of material of comparison . And here was one who told us of no less than five systems of worship, founded on similar personifications of the divine idea FIRST VISIT TO LONDON He preached a religion which began with the classification of religious ideas ! I was very much struck, further, by the strangeness, as well as the dignity, of some of the Indian conceptions which I now heard of for the first time. The very newness of these metaphors, and of the turn of thought, made them an acquisition. There was the tale, for instance, of the saint who ran after a thief, with the vessels he had dropped in his terror at being discovered, and cast them all at his feet, crying, "O Lord, I knew not that Thou wast there ! Take them, they are Thine ! Pardon me Thy child !" And again, of the same saint, we heard how he described the bite of a cobra, when at nightfall he recovered, by saying *' A messenger came to me from the Beloved." There was the inference, again, that the Swami himself had drawn from the mirage in the desert. Fifteen days he had seen it, and taken it always to be water. 18 INDIAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS But now that he had been thirsty and found it to be unreal, he might see it again for fifteen days, but always henceforth he would know it to be false. The experience to which such achievements had been possible, the philosophy that could draw some parallel between this journey in the desert and life, were such as it seemed an education to understand. But there was a third element in the Swami's teaching, whose unexpectedness occasioned me some surprise. It was easy to see that he was no mere lecturer, like some other propounders of advanced ideas whom I had heard even from the pulpit. It was by no means his intention to set forth dainty dishes of poetry and intellect- uality for the enjoyment of the rich and idle classes. He was, to his own thinking at least, as clearly an apostle, making an appeal to men, as any poor evangelical preacher, or Salvation Army officer, calling FIRST VISIT TO LONDON on the world to enter into the kingdom of God. And yet he took his stand on what was noblest and best in us. I was not thinking of his announcement that sin was only an evil dream. I knew that such a theory might merely be part of a cumbrous system of theology, and no more a reality to its elucidator than the doctrine that when a man steals our coat we should give to him our cloak also, was to ourselves. The thing that I found astonishing was a certain illustration urged by him. His audience was composed for the most part of fashionable young mothers, and he spoke of their terror and their flight, if a tiger should suddenly appear before them in the street. "But suppose", he said, with a sudden change of tone, "suppose there were a baby in the path of the tiger ! Where would your place be then ? At his mouth any one of you I am sure of it." These, then, were the things I remem- 20 INDIAN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS bered and pondered over, concerning the Swami, when he had left England, that winter, for America, first, the breadth of his religious culture ; second, the great intellectual newness and interest of the thought he had brought to us ; and thirdly, the fact that his call was sounded in the name of that which was strongest and finest, and was not in any way dependent on the meaner elements in man. 2! II. THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA IN LONDON 1896. The Swami returned to London, in April of the year following, and taught continuously, at the house where he was living with his good friend, Mr. E. T. Sturdy, in S. George's Road, and again, after the summer holidays, in a large class- room near Victoria Street. During July, August, and September, he travelled in France, Germany and Switzerland, with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Sevier, and Miss H. F. Muller. In December, he left for India, with some of his disciples, by way of Rome, and arrived at Colombo, in Ceylon, on January the i5th, 1897. Many of the lectures which he gave during the year 1896, have since been pub- 22 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON' lished, and in them, all the world may read his message, and the interpretation by which he sought to make it clear. He had come to us as a missionary of the Hindu belief in the Immanent God, and he called upon us to realise the truth of his gospel for ourselves. Neither then, nor at any after-time, did I ever hear him advocate to his audience any specialised form of religion. He would refer freely enough to the Indian sects, or as I would like to call them, ' churches, ' by way of illustration of what he had to say. But he never preached anything but that philosophy which, to Indian thinking, under- lies all creeds. He never quoted anything but the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. And he never, in public, mentioned his own Master, nor spoke in specific terms of any part of Hindu mythology. He was deeply convinced of the need for Indian thought, in order to enable the reli- gious consciousness of the West to welcome SECOND VISIT TO LONDON and assimilate the discoveries of modern science, and to enable it also to survive that destruction of local mythologies which is an inevitable result of all world-consolidations. He felt that what was wanted was a formu- lation of faith which could hold its adherents fearless of truth. " The salvation of Europe depends on a rationalistic religion, " he ex- claims, in the course of one of his lectures ; and again, many times repeated, " The materialist is right ! There is but One. Only he calls that One Matter, and I call it God !" In another, and longer passage, he describes the growth of the religious idea, and the relation of its various forms to one another. " At first," he says, ''the goal is far off, outside Nature, and far beyond it, attracting us all towards it. This has to be brought near, yet without being degraded or degenerated, until, when it has come closer and closer, the God of Heaven be- comes the God in Nature, till the God in LECTURES ON MA YA Nature becomes the God who is Nature, and the God who is Nature, becomes the God within this temple of the body, and the God dwelling in the temple of the body becomes the temple itself, becomes the soul of man. Thus it reaches the last words it can teach. He whom the sages have sought in all these places, is in our own hearts. Thou art He, O Man ! Thou art He!" He always considered, for his own part, that his greatest intellectual achievement during this period had consisted in his lectures on Maya, and it is only by reading these carefully, that an idea can be formed of the difficulty of the task he undertook, in trying to render the concep- tion in modern English. Throughout the chapters in question we feel that we are in presence of a struggle to express an idea which is clearly apprehended, in a language which is not a fit vehicle for it. The SECOND VISIT TO LONDON word is wrongly understood, says the Swami, to mean 'delusion'. Originally it meant something like ' magic, ' as " Indra through his Maya assumed various forms." But this meaning was subsequently dropped, and the word went through many transformations. A milestone in the series of conceptions that finally determined its meaning is found in the text, " Because we talk in vain, and because we are satisfied with the things of the senses, and because we are running after desires, therefore we, as it were, cover this reality with a mist" Finally the word is seen to have assumed its ultimate meaning in the quotation from the Svetasvatara Upanishad. " Know Nature to be Maya. And the mind, the ruler of this Maya, as the Lord Himself." " The Maya of the Vedanta," says the speaker, " in its latest development, is a simple statement of facts what we are, and what we see around us." But that these words are not intended as 26 LECTURES ON MA YA a definition will be seen by anyone who reads the whole of the lectures on Maya for himself. It is there evident that the word does not simply refer to the Universe as known through the senses, but also describes the tortuous, erroneous, and self- contradic- tory character of that knowledge. " This is a statement of fact, not a theory." says the Swami, "that this world is a Tantalus' hell, that we do not know anything about this Universe, yet at the same time we cannot say that we do not know. To walk in the midst of a dream, half sleeping, half waking, passing all our lives in a haze, this is the fate of every one of us. This is the fate of all sense knowledge. This is the Uni- verse". We see here, as in many other of his interpretations, that an Indian word is incap- able of exact rendering into English, and that the only way of arriving at an understanding of it is to try to catch the conception which the speaker is striving to express, rather than 27 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON to fasten the attention on a sentence or two here or there. By Maya is thus meant that shimmering, elusive, half-real half-unreal complexity, in which there is no rest, no satis- faction, no ultimate certainty, of which we be- come aware through the senses, and through the mind as dependent on the senses. At the same time "And That by which all this is pervaded, know That to be the Lord Him- self!" In these two conceptions, placed side by side, we have the whole theology of Hindu- ism, as presented by the Swami Vivekananda, in the West. All other teachings and ideas -are subordinated to these two. Religion was a matter of the growth of the individual, *'a question always of being and becoming." But such growth must presuppose the two fundamental facts, and the gradual transfer -ence of the centre of gravity, as it were, out of the one into the other, out of Maya into the Self. The condition of absorption in Maya was " bondage" in the Eastern sense. 28 RENUNCIATION OR CONQUEST To have broken that bondage was "freedom" or Mukti, or even Nii'vana. The path for the would-be breaker of bondage must always be by seeking for renunciation, not by seeking for enjoyment. In this matter, the Swami was, as he said himself, only echoing what had been the burden of all religions. For all religions, Indian and other, have called a halt in the quest for pleasure. All have sought to turn life into a battlefield rather than a ball-room. All have striven to make man strong for death rather than for life. Where I think that the Swami perhaps differed somewhat from other teachers was in his acceptance of every kind of mastery as a form of renunciation. Towards the end of his life I told him that 'renunciation' was the only word I had ever heard from his lips. And yet in truth I . think that ' conquer ! ' was much more characteristic of him. For he pointed out that it was by renunciation, 29 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON that is to say, by sustained and determined effort, by absorption in hard problems through lonely hours, by choosing toil and refusing ease, that Stephenson, for instance, invented the steam-engine. He pointed out that the science of medicine represented as strong a concentration of man's mind upon healing as would be required for a cure by prayer or by thought. He made us feel that all study was an austerity direc- ted to a given end of knowledge. And above all, he preached that character, and character alone, was the power that deter- mined the permanence of a religious wave. Resistance was to his mind the duty of the citizen, non-resistance of the monk. And this, because for all the supreme achievement, was strength. ''Forgive," he said, "when you also can bring legions of angels to an easy victory." While victory was still doubt- ful, however, only a coward, to his thinking, would turn the other cheek. 30 THE REAL AND THE UNREAL One reads the same lesson in his Master's story of the boy who for twenty years worked to aquire the power to walk on water. "And so," said a saint, "you have given twenty \ years of effort to doing that for which others j give the ferryman a penny !" The lad might/ have answered that no ferryman could give his passengers what he had acquired by twenty years of patient striving. But the fact remains that to these teachers, supreme- ly sane, the world's art of navigation had its own full value and its proper place. Years afterwards, in Paris, some one approached him with a question as to the general history of the development of Indian ideas on these subjects. "Did Buddha teach that the many was real and the ego unreal, while Orthodox Hinduism regards the One as the Real, and the many as unreal ?" he was asked. "Yes," answered the Swami, "And what Rama- krishna Paramahamsa and I have added to this is, that the Many and the One are the SECOND VISIT TO LONDON same Reality, perceived by the same mind at different times and in different attitudes." Gifted to an extraordinary degree with a living utterance of metaphysic, drawing always upon a classical literature of wonder- ful depth and profundity, he stood in our midst as, before all, the apostle of the inner life, the prophet of the subordination of the objective to the subjective. "Remember!" he said once to a disciple, "Remember! the message of India is always 'Not the soul for Nature, but Nature for the soul T And this was indeed the organ-note, as it were, the deep fundamental vibration, that began gradually to make itself heard through all the intellectual interest of the things he discussed, and the point of view he revealed. Like the sound of the flute, heard far away on the banks of some river in the hour of dawn, and regarded as but one amongst many sweet songs of the world : and like the same strain when the listener THE LIFE OF THE SOUL. has drawn nearer and nearer, and at last, with his whole mind on the music, has be- come himself the player may have seemed to some who heard him long, the difference between the life of the soul in Western thinking and in Eastern. And with this came the exaltation of renunciation. It was not, perhaps, that the word occurred in his teachings any oftener than it had done before. It was rather that the reality of that life, free, undimensioned, sovereign in its mastery, was making itself directly felt. A temptation that had to be fought against was the impulse to go away, and bind upon oneself intellectual shackles not to be borne, in order to be able to enter in its fulness upon the life of poverty and silence. An occasion came, when this call was uttered with great force. Some dispute occurred in the course of a question-class. "What the world wants to-day", said the 33 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. Swami, the determination to "throw a bomb," as he called it, evidently taking sud- den possession of him, "What the world wants to-day, is twenty men and women who can dare to stand in the street yonder, and say that they possess nothing- but God. Who will go?" He had risen to his feet by this time, and stood looking round his audience as if begging some of them to join him, "Why should one fear?" And then, in tones of which, even now, I can hear again the thunderous conviction, "If this is true, what else could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter ?" "What the world wants is character," he says, in a letter written at this time to a member of his class. "The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love self- less. That love will make every word tell like a thunder-bolt. Awake, awake, great souls ! The world is burning in misery. Can you sleep ?" 34 THE SPIRIT BEHIND THE WORD. I remember how new to myself at that time was this Indian idea that it was charac- ter that made a truth tell, the love expressed that made aid successful, the degree of con- centration behind a saying that gave it force and constituted its power. Thus the text 'Consider the lilies, how they grow,' holds us, said the Swami, not by the spell of its beauty, but by the depth of renunciation that speaks in it. Was this true ? I felt that the question might be tested by experience, and after some time I came to the conclusion that it was. A quiet word, from a mind that put thought behind language, carried im- mediate weight, when the same utterance from the careless, would pass by unheeded. I do not know a stronger instance of this fact than a certain saying that is recorded of the Caliph Ali. Many have heard, and none surely without emotion, the words of the Lion of Islam, " Thy place in life is 35 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. seeking after thee. Therefore be thou at rest from seeking after it ! " But never, until we relate them to the speaker, four times passed over in the succession to the Caliphate, never until we know how the man's whole life throbs through them, are we able to explain the extraordinary power of these simple sentences. I found also that an utterance consciously directed to the mind, instead of merely to the hearing, of the listener, evoked more response than the opposite. And having begun to make these psychological dis- coveries, I was led gradually to the percep- tion that if indeed one's reason could, as one had long thought, make no final line of demarcation as between mind and matter, yet at least that aspect of the One-substance which we called Matter was rather the result of that called Mind or Spirit, than the reverse. The body, not the will, must be regarded as a bye -product of the indivi- 36 REALISATIONS. duality. This in turn led to the conception of a consciousness held above the body, a life governing matter, and free of it, so that it might conceivably disrobe and find new garments, or cast off the form known to us, as that form itself casts off a wounded skin. Till at last I found my own mind echoing the Swami's great pronouncement on immortality, " The body comes and goes." But this ripening of thought came gradually and did not complete itself for many months. In the meantime, as I look back upon that time, I feel that what we all really entered upon in the Swami's classes was not so much an intellectual exposition, as a life of new and lofty emotions, or, as they would be called in India, 'realisations.' We heard the exclamation, in describing the worship of God as a child, "do we want anything from Him ?" We bowed to the teaching that "love is always a manifestation 37 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. of bliss," and that any pang of pain or regret was therefore a mark of selfishness and physicality. We accepted the austere ruling that any, even the slightest, impulse of differentiation, as between ourselves and others was ' hatred,' and that only the opposite of this was 'love.' Many who have ceased to believe in the creed of their childhood have felt that at least the good of others was still an end in itself, and that the possibility of service remained, to give a motive to life. It is strange, now that ten years have passed, to remember the sense of surprise with which, holding this opinion, we listened to the decorous eastern teaching, that highest of all gifts was spirituality, a degree lower, intellec- tual knowledge, and that all kinds of phy- sical and material help came last. All our welling pity for sickness and for poverty classified in this fashion ! It has taken me years to find out, but I now know, 38 PHYSICAL REFINEMENT IN INDIA. that in train of the higher giving, the lower must needs follow. Similarly, to our Western fanaticism about pure air and hygienic surroundings, as if these were marks of saintliness, was opposed the stern teaching of indifference to the world. Here indeed, we came up against a closed door, and had no key. When the Swami said, in bold consciousness of paradox, that the saints had lived on mountain-tops " to enjoy the scenery, " and when he advised his hearers to keep flowers .and incense in their worship-rooms, and to care much for the purity and cleansing of food and person, we did not understand enough to connect the two extremes. But in fact he was preaching our own doctrine of physical refinement, as it would be formu- lated in India. And is it not true that until we in the West have succeeded in cleansing the slums of our great cities, our fastidiousness is very like the self-worship of the privileged ? 39 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. A like fate awaited our admiration for such saints as knew how to order their worldly affairs with conspicuous success and pru- dence. True spirituality was indifferent to, nay contemptuous and intolerant of, the things of this world. This message the Swami never mitigated. In giving it, he never faltered. The highest spirituality cannot tolerate the world. We understood clearly enough that these were the ideals of sainthood only. We were learning chapter after chapter of a great language which was to make it easy for us to hold communion with the ends of the earth. We gathered no confusion as to those questions which concern the life of citizenship and domestic virtue, and form what may be regarded as the kindergarten of the soul. The idea that one country might best advance itself by learning to appre- ciate those ideals of order and respon- sibility which formed the glory of another 40 SPIRITUALITY EAST AND WEST. was in no wise discredited. At the same time we were given, as the eternal watch- word of the Indian ideals, "Spirituality cannot tolerate the world." Did we, in contradiction, point to monastic orders, well- governed, highly organised, devoted to the public good, and contrast our long roll of abbots, bishops, and saintly lady-abbesses, with a few ragged and God-intoxicated beggars of the East? Yet we had to ad- mit that even in the West, when the flame of spirituality had blazed suddenly to its brightest, it had taken their form. For those who know the land of Meera Bae and Chaitanya, of Tukaram and Ramanuja, can hardly resist the impulse to clothe with the yellow garb the memory of S. Francis of Assissi also. In one of the volumes of the English trans- lation of the 'Jataka Birth-Tales', there occur over and over again the words 'when a man has come to that place where he dreads 41 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. heaven as imick as hell" and I do not know how the realisation that the Swami's pre- sence brought could be better described. Most of those who listened to him in London, in the year 1896, caught some glimpse, by which they were led to understand a little of the meaning of the eastern longing to escape from incarnation. But master of all these moods and dominating them, was one that had barely been hinted at, in the words "If this is true, what other thing could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter?" For there was a power in this teacher to sum up all the truths he himself had come to teach, together with his own highest hope, and to treat the whole as a mean bribe, to be flung away fearlessly, if need were, for the good of others. Years after, this spoke more clearly in the indignant reply with which he turned on some 42 THE CROWN OF FREEDOM. remark of my own, " Of course I would commit a crime, and go to hell for ever, if by that I could really help a human being ! " It was the same impulse that spoke also, in his constant repetition to some few of us, as if it had a special bearing on the present age, of the tale of that Bodhisattva, who had held himself back from Nirvana till the last grain of dust in the universe should have gone in before him to salvation. Does it mean that the final mark of freedom lies in ceasing from the quest of freedom ? I have found the same thing since, in many of the Indian stories ; in Ramanuja, for instance, breaking his vow, and proclaiming the sacred mantram to all the pariahs ; in Buddha, keeping no secret, but spending his whole life in work ; in Shishupal, choosing to be the enemy of God, that he might the sooner return to him ; and in innumerable legends of the saints fighting against the deities. But the Swami was not always entirely 43 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. impersonal. Once after a lecture he came up to a small group of us, and said, a propos of some subject that had been opened up, " I have a superstition, it is nothing, you know, but a personal superstition ! that the same soul who came once as Buddha came afterwards as Christ. " And then, lingering on the point of departure, he drifted into talk of his " old Master, " of whom we then heard for the first time, and of the girl who, wedded and forgotten, gave her husband his freedom, with tears. His voice had sunk lower, as he talked, till the tones had become dream-like. But final- ly, almost in soliloquy, he shook off the mood that had stolen upon him, saying with a long breath, " Yes, yes ! these things have been, and they will again be. Go in peace, my daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole ! " It was in the course of a conversation much more casual than this, that he turned 44 PERSONAL GLIMPSES. to me and said, " I have plans for the women of my own country in which you, I think, could be of great help to me," and I knew that I had heard a call which would change my life. What these plans were, I did not know, and the effort of abandoning the accustomed perspective was for the moment so great that I did not care to -ask. But I had already gathered that there was much to learn, if one's conception of the world were to be made inclusive of the view-point of foreign peoples. " And you have blasted other cities !" had once been the startling reply, when I had spoken of the necessity of making London fair. For to me the mystery and tragedy of London had long been the microcosm of the human problem, standing as the symbol of the whole world's call. " And you have blasted other cities, to make this city of yours beautiful !" I could elicit no more, but the words echoed in my ears for many days. 45 SECOND VISIT TO LONDON. In my eyes, our city was not beautiful. My question had been misunderstood. But through this misunderstanding, I had dis- covered that there was another point of view. "The English are born on an island, and they are always trying to live on it," said the Master once to me, and certainly the remark seems true of myself, as I look back on this period of my life, and see how determinately insular even my ideals had hitherto been. I learnt no more of the Indian point of view, during my life in England. The friend who afterwards called me to her side in India, chose a certain evening in London, when both the Swami and myself were her guests for an hour, to tell him of my willingness to help his work. He was evi- dently surprised, but said quietly, " For my own part I will be incarnated two hundred times, if that is necessary, to do this work amongst my people, that I have undertaken." And the words stand in my own mind beside 46 THE MESSAGE OF THE GURU. those which he afterwards wrote to me on the eve of my departure, "/ will standby you unto death, whether you work for India or not, whether you give up Vedanta, or remain in it. The tusks of the elephant come out, but they never go back. Even so are the words of a man." But these references to the Swami's own people were merely personal, and as such were strictly subordinate. In his classes, in his teachings, his one longing seemed to be for the salvation of men from ignorance. Such love, such pity, those who heard him never saw elsewhere. To him, his disciples were his disciples. There was neither Indian nor European there. And yet he was pro- foundly conscious of the historic significance of his own preaching. On the occasion of his last appearance in London, [at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, on Sunday afternoon, December the i5th, 1896] he pointed out the fact that history repeats 47 HISTORIC RELIGIONS. itself, and that Christianity had been ren- dered possible only by the Roman Peace. And it may well have been that the Buddha- like dignity and calm of bearing which so impressed us, were but the expression of his far outlook and serene conviction that there would yet be seen a great army of Indian preachers in the West, reaping the harvest that he had sown so well, and making ready in their turn new harvests, for the more distant reaping of the future. III. THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. "HE knew nothing of Vedanta, nothing of theories ! He was contented to live that great life, and to leave it to others to explain." So said the Swami Vivekananda once, refer- ring to his Master, Ramakrishna Parama- hamsa. And, as an expression of the idea that there may in a great life be elements which he who lives it may not himself under- stand, the words have often come back to me, in reference to his own career. In the West, the Swami had revealed himself to us as a religious teacher only. Even now, it needs but a moment's thought and again one sees him in the old lecture- room, on the seat slightly raised above his class, and so enthroned, in Buddha-like calm, once more in a modern world is heard through his lips, the voice of the far past. 49 THE DUALITY OF LIFE. But renunciation, the thirst after freedom, the breaking of bondage, the fire of purity, the joy of the witness, the mergence of the personal in the impersonal, these, and these alone, had been the themes of that dis- course. It is true that in a flash or two one had seen a great patriot. Yet the secret signal is sufficient where destiny calls, and moments that to one form the turning-point of a life, may pass before the eyes of a hundred spectators, unperceived. It was as the apostle of Hinduism, not as a worker for India, that we saw the Swami in the West. "Oh how calm," he exclaimed, " would be the work of one, who really understood the divinity of man ! For such, there is nothing to do, save to open men's eyes. All the rest does itself." And out of some such fathomless peace had come all that we had seen and heard of him. From the moment of my landing in India, however, I found something quite THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. unexpected underlying all this. It was not Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, nor even the ideas which were connected with him, that formed so strange a revelation here. It was the personality of my Master himself, in all the fruitless torture and struggle of a lion caught in a net. For, from the day that he met me at the ship's side, till that last serene moment, when, at the hour of cow- dust, he passed out of the village of this world, leaving the body behind him, like a folded garment, I was always conscious of this element inwoven with the other, in his life. But wherein lay the struggle ? whence came the frequent sense of being baffled and thwarted ? Was it a growing conscious- ness of bodily weakness, conflicting with the growing clearness of a great purpose ? Amongst the echoes that had reached his English friends of his triumphal reception in India, this had been the, note carried by THE RELIGION OF WORK. a man-friend to my own ear. Banished to the Himalayas with shattered health, at the very moment when his power had reached its height, he had written a letter to his friend which was a cry of despair. And some of us became eager to take any step that might make it possible to induce him to return to the West, and leave his Indian undertakings on other shoulders. In making such arrangements, how little must we have realised of the nature of those undertakings, or of the difficulty and complexity of the education that they demanded ! To what was the struggle actually due ? Was it the terrible effort of translat- ing what he had called the *su t rr-r~nsci- ous' into the common life ? Undoubtedly he had been born to a task which was in this respect of heroic difficulty. Nothing in this world is so terrible as to abandon the safe paths of accepted ideals, in order THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. to work out some new realisation, by methods apparently in conflict with the -old. Once, in his boyhood, Sri Ramakrishna had asked "Noren," as he was then called, what was his highest ambition in life, and he had promptly answered, 'to remain always in Samad/ii.' His Master, it is said, received this with a smile. "I thought you had been born for something greater, my boy !" was all his reply. We may take it, I think, that the moment marked an epoch in the disciple's career. Certainly in years to come, in these last five and a half years, particularly, which were his crowning gift to his own people, he stood for work without attachment, or work for im- personal ends, as one . of the highest ex- pressions of the religious life. And for the first time in the history of India an order of monks found themselves banded together, with their faces set primarily towards the evolution of new forms of civic duty. In 53 SERVICE AS WORSHIP. Europe, where the attainment of the direct religious sense is so much rarer, and so much less understood than in the East, such labour ranks as devotional in the common acceptance. But in India, the head and front of the demand made on a monastic order is that it produce saints. And the value of the monk who, instead of devoting himself to maintaining the great tradition of the super-conscious life, turns back to help society upwards, has not in the past been clearly understood. In the Swami's scheme of things how- ever, it would almost seem as if such tasks were to take that place in the spiritual edu- cation which had previously been occupied by systems of devotion. To the Adwaitin, or strict believer in the Indian philosophy of Vedanta, the goal lies in the attain- ment of that mood in which all is One and there is no second. To one who has reached this, worship becomes impossible, for there 54 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. is none to worship, none to be worshipper ; and, all acts being equally the expres- sion of the Immanent Unity, none can be distinguished as in any special sense con- stituting adoration. Worship, worshipper, and worshipped are one. Yet it is ad- mitted, even by the Adwaitin, that systems of praise and prayer have the power to "purify the heart" of him who uses them. For clearly, the thought of self is more quickly restrained in relation to that of God, than to any other. Worship is thus regarded as the school, or preparation, for higher stages of spiritual development. But the self-same sequence would seem to have held good in the eyes of the Swami, with regard to work, or the service of man. The "purifying of the heart" connoted the burning out of selfishness. Worship is the very antithesis of use. But service or giving, is also its antithesis. Thus he hallowed the act of aid, and hallowed, too, 55 THE PUBLIC GOOD. the name of man. Till I know of one disciple, who, in the early days of the Order, was so filled with the impulse of this reverence that he sucked the sores of the lepers to bring them ease. The nursing of the sick and the feeding of the poor, had indeed from the first been natural activities of the Children of Ramkrishna. But when the Swami Vivekananda returned from the West these things took on a larger aspect. They were considered from a national point of view. Men would be sent out from the Monastery to give relief in famine-stricken areas, to direct the sanita- tion of a town, or to nurse the sick and dying at a pilgrim centre. One man started an orphanage and industrial school at Murshida- bad. Another established a teaching nucleus in the South. These were, said the Swami, the 'sappers and miners' of the army of religion. His schemes however went much further. He was consumed with a desire THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. for the education of Indian women, and for the scientific and technical education of the country. How the impersonal motive multiplies the power to suffer, only those who have seen can judge. Was his life indeed a failure, as he was sometimes tempt- ed to feel it, since there never came to his hands that "twenty million pounds" with which, as he used to say, he could have set India on her feet ? Or were there higher laws at work, that would eventually make a far greater success than any that could have been gathered within a single lifetime ? His view was penetrative as well as comprehensive. He had analyzed the ele- ments of the development to be brought about. India must learn a new ideal of obe- dience. The Math was placed, therefore, on a basis of organization which was contrary to all the current ideas of religious freedom. A thousand new articles of use must be assimi- 57 THE PAIN OF THE PIONEER lated. Therefore, though his own habits were of the simplest, two or three rooms were provided with furniture. Digging, garden- ing, rowing, gymnastic exercises, the keeping of animals, all these were by degrees made a part of the life of the young brahmachartns and himself. And he would throw a world of enthusiasm into a long course of experiments on such problems as the sinking of a well or the making of brown bread. On the last Charok Puja day of his life a gymnastic society came to the Math for sports and prizes, and he spoke of his desire that the Hindu Lent should be celebrated henceforth by special courses of athletic exercises. The energy which had hitherto gone into the mortifica- tion of the body, might rightly, in his opinion, under modern conditions, be direct- ed to the training of the muscles. To a western mind, it might well seem that nothing in the Swami's life had been more admirable than this. Long ago, he 58 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. had defined the mission of the Order of Rama- krishna as that of realizing and exchanging the highest ideals of the East and of the West. And assuredly he here proved his own power to engage in such an undertaking as much by his gift of learning as by that of teaching. But it was inevitable that he himself should from time to time go through the anguish of revolt. The Hindu ideal of the religious life, as a reflection on earth of that of the Great God in the Divine Empyrean, the Unmoving, the Un- touched, "pure, free, ever the Witness, "- is so clear and so deeply established that only at great cost to himself could a man carry it into a fresh channel. Has any one realized the pain endured by the sculptor of a new ideal ? The very sensitiveness and delicacy of perception that are neces- sary to his task, that very moral exaltation which is as the chisel in his hand, are turned on himself in passive moments, to 59 HIS DOUBT OF THE PRESENT. become doubt, and terror of responsibility. What a heaven of ease seems then, to such a soul, even the hardest and sternest of those lives that are understood and authenti- cated by the imitative moral sense of the crowd ! I have noticed in most experiences this consciousness of being woven out of two threads, one that is chosen and another endured. But in this case the common duality took the form of a play upon two different ideals, of which either was highest in its own world, and yet each, to those who believed in its fellow, almost as a crime. Occasionally, to one who was much with him, a word, let fall unconsciously, would betray the inner conflict. He was riding on one occasion, with the Rajah of Khetri, when he saw that his arm was bleeding pro- fusely, and found that the wound had been caus- ed by a thorny branch which he had held aside for himself to pass. When the Swami ex- postulated, the Rajput laughed the matter 60 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. aside, " Are we not always the Defenders of the Faith, Swamiji ?" he said. "And then," said the Swami, telling the story, I was just going to tell him that they ought not to show such honour to the Sannyasin, when sud- denly I thought that perhaps they were right after all. Who knows ? May be I too am caught in the glare of this flashlight of your modern civilisation, which is only for a moment." " I have become entan- gled," he said simply, to one who protested that to his mind the wandering Sadku of earlier years, who had scattered his know- ledge and changed his name as he went, had been greater than the Abbot of Belur, burdened with much work and many cares, " I have become entangled." And I remem- ber the story told by an American woman, who said she could not bear to remember his face, at that moment when her husband explained to this strange guest that he must make his way from their home to Chicago 61 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. with money which would be paid gladly to hear him speak of religion. " It was," she said "as if something had just broken within him, that could never again be made whole." One day he was talking, in the West, of Meera Bae, that saint who once upon a time was Queen of Chitore, and of the freedom her husband had offered her, if on- ly she would remain within the royal seclusion. But she could not be bound. " But why should she not?" some one asked, in asto- nishment. " Why should she?" he retorted. " Was she living down here in this mire ?" And suddenly the listener caught his thought, of the whole nexus of the personal life, with its inter-relations and reaction upon reactions, as intolerable bondage and living anguish. And so, side by side with that sunlit serenity and child-like peace which enwrapped the Swami as a religious teac'i:-;r, I found in his own country another point 62 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. of view, from which he was very, very human. And here, though the results of his efforts may have been choicer, or more enduring, than those of most of us, yet they were wrought at the self-same cost of having to toil on in darkness and uncertainty, and only now and then emerging into light. Often dogged by the sense of failure, often over- taken by a loathing of the limitations imposed alike by the instrument and the material, he dared less and less, as years went on, to make determinate plans, or to dogmatize about the unknown. " After all, what do we know?" he said once, "Mother uses it all. But we are only fumbling about." This has not perhaps been an element in the lives of the great teachers on which their narrators have cared to dwell much. Yet one catches a hint of it in the case of Sri Ramakrishna, when we are told how he turned on God with the reproach, "Oh Mother ! 63 INDIA THE MOTHER. what is this You have brought me to ? All my heart is centred in these lads !" And in the eleventh chapter of the Dhammapada one can see still, though twenty-four centuries have passed since then, the wave- marks of similar storms on the shores of the consciousness of another Teacher.* There was one thing however, deep in the Master's nature, that he himself never knew how to adjust. This was his love of his country and his resentment of her suffering. Throughout those years in which I saw him almost daily, the thought of India was to him like the air he breathed. True, he was a worker at foundations. He neither used the word 'nationality,' nor proclaimed an era of 'nation-making'. 'Man-making', he said, * Seeking for the maker of this tabernacle, and not finding, I must run through a course of many births ; and painful is birth again and again. But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen ! Thou shall not again build up this tabernacle. All thy rafters are fallen. Thy ridge-pole is broken. The mind, ap- proaching the Eternal, has attained to the extinction of all desires. 6 4 RESPONSE TO INDIA. was his own task. But he was born a lover, and the queen of his adoration was his Motherland. Like some delicately- poised bell, thrilled and vibrated by every sound that falls upon it, was his heart to all that concerned her. Not a sob was heard within her shores that did not find in him a responsive echo. There was no cry of fear, no tremor of weak- ness, no shrinking from mortification, that he had not known and understood. He was hard on her sins, unsparing of her want of worldly wisdom, but only because he felt these faults to be his own. And none, on the contrary, was ever so possessed by the vision of her greatness. To him, she appeared as the giver of English civilsa- tion. For what, he would ask, had been the England of Elizabeth in comparison with the India of Akbar ? Nay, what would the England of Victoria have been, without the wealth of India, behind her ? Where would THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. have been her refinement ? where would have been her experience ? His country's religion, history, geography, ethnology, pour- ed from his lips in an inexhaustible stream. With equal delight he treated of details and of the whole, or so it would often seem to those who listened. Indeed there would sometimes come a point where none who wished to remember what had been said already, could afford to listen any longer. And still, with mind detached, one might note the unwearied stream of analysis of the laws regarding female in- heritance, or the details of caste customs in different provinces, or some abstruse system of metaphysics or theology, pro- ceeding on and on for a couple of hours longer. In these talks of his, the heroism of the Rajput, the faith of the Sikh, the courage of the Mahratta, the devotion of the saints, and the purity and steadfast- 66 THE EPIC OF INDIA. ness of noble women, all lived again. Nor would he permit that the Moham- medan should be passed over. Huma- yoon, Sher Shah, Akbar, Shah Jehan, each of these, and a hundred more, found a day and a place in his bead-roll of glisten- ing names. Now it was that coronation song of Akbar which is still sung about the streets of Delhi, that he would give us, in the very tone and rhythm of Thanasena. Again, he would ex- plain how the widows of the Mogul House never remarried, but lived like Hindu women, absorbed in worship or in study, through the lonely years. At another time he would talk of the great national genius that decreed the birth of Indian sovereigns to be of a Moslem father and of a Hindu mother. And yet again he would hold us breathless, as we lived through with him the bright, but ill-starred reign, of Sirajud-Daulah ; THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. as we heard the exclamation at Plassy of the Hindu general, listening to an order sent in treachery, " Then is the day lost ! " and saw him plunge, with his horse, into the Ganges ; as, finally, we lingered with the faithful wife, clad in the white sari of the widow amongst her own people, through long years tend- ing the lamp above the grave of her dead lord. Sometimes the talk would be more playful It would arise out of some commonplace incident. The offering of a sweetmeat, or the finding of a rare commodity like musk or saffron, or events simpler still, would be enough to start it. He told us how he had longed, when in the West, to stand once more at dusk some little way outside an Indian village and hear again the evening calls, the noise of children growing sleepy at their play, the evensong bells, the cries of the 68 THE LOVE OF INDIA. herdsmen, and the half-veiled sound of voices through the quickly-passing twilight How homesick he had been for the sound of the July rains, as he had known them in his childhood in Bengal ! How wonderful was the sound of water, in rain, or waterfall, or sea ! The most beautiful sight he could remember was a mother whom he had seen, passing from stepping-stone to stepping-stone across a mountain brook, and turning as she went, to play with and caress the baby on her back. The ideal death would be to lie on a ledge of rock in the midst of Himalayan forests, and hear the torrent beneath, as one passed out of the body, chanting eternally 'Hara! Hara! The Free! The Free!' Like some great spiral of emotion, its lowest circles held fast in love of soil and love of nature ; its next embracing every possible association of race, experi- ence, history, and thought ; and the 69 THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. whole converging and centring upon a single definite point, was thus the Swami's worship of his own land. And the point in which it was focussed was the convic- tion that India was not old and effete, as her critics had supposed, but young, ripe with potentiality, and standing, at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the threshold of even greater deve- lopments than she had known in the past. Only once, however, do I remem- ber him to have given specific utterance to this thought. " I feel myself" he said in a moment of great quiet, " to be the man born after many centuries. / see that India is young." But in truth this vision was implied in every word he ever spoke. It throbbed in every story he told. And when he would lose him- self, in splendid scorn of apology for any- thing Indian, in fiery repudiation of false charge or contemptuous criticism, or in 70 THE LO VE OF INDIA. laying down for others the elements of a faith and love that could never be more than a pale reflection of his own, how often did the habit of the monk seem to slip away from him, and the armour of the warrior stand re- vealed ! But it is not to be supposed that he was unaware of the temptation which all this implied. His Master had said of him, in the years of his first discipleship, " It is true that there is a film of igno- rance upon his mind. My Mother has placed it there, that Her work may be done. And it is thin, as thin as a sheet of tissue paper. It might be rent at any moment ! " And so, as one who has for- sworn them will struggle against thoughts of home and family, he would endeavour, time and again, to restrain and suppress these thoughts of country and history, and to make of himself only that poor religious THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS. wanderer, to whom all countries and all races should be alike. He came back, in Kashmir, from one of the great experiences of his life, saying, with the simplicity of a child, "There must be no more of this anger. Mother said ' What, even if the unbeliever should enter My temples, and defile My images, what is that to you ? Do YOU PROTECT ME ? OR DO I PROTECT YOU ?" His personal ideal was that sannyasin of the Mutiny, who was stabbed by an English soldier, and broke the silence of fifteen years to say to his murderer " And thou also art He !" He was always striving to be faith- ful to the banner of Ramkrishna, and the utterance of a message of his own seemed often to strike him as a lapse. Besides, he believed that force spent in mere emo- tion was dissipated, only force restrained being conserved for expression in work. Yet again the impulse to give all he had 72 INSTINCT NOT THEORY. would overtake him, and before he knew it, he would once more be scattering those thoughts of hope and love for his race and for his country, which, apparently without his knowledge, fell in so many cases like seed upon soil prepared for it, and have sprung up already, in widely distant parts of India, into hearts and lives of devotion to the Motherland. Just as Sri Ramakrishna, in fact, without knowing any books, had been a living epitome of the Vedanta so was Viveka- nanda of the national life. But of the theory of this, he was unconscious. In his own words, applied to his own Mas- ter, "He was contented simply to live that great life, and to leave it to others to find the explanation !" 73 Iv THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA AND THE ORDER OF RAMA KRISHNA It was amongst the lawns and trees of the Ganges-side that I came to know, in a personal sense, the leader to whose work my life was already given. At the time of my landing in India (January 28th. 1898), the ground and building had just been pur- chased at Belur, which were afterwards to be transformed into the Calcutta Monastery of the Order of Ramakrishna. A few weeks later still, a party of friends arrived from America, and with characteristic in- trepidity took possession of the half-ruined cottage, to make it simply but pleasantly habitable. It was as the guest of these friends, here at Belur, and later, travelling in Kumaon and in Kashmir, that I began, with 74 THE ORDER OF RA MAKRISHNA. them, the study of India, and something 1 also of the home-aspects and relationships of the Swami's own life. Our cottage stood on a low terrace, built on the western bank of the river, a few miles above Calcutta. At flood-tide the little gondola-like boat, which to those who live beside the Ganges serves the purpose of a carriage, could come up to the very foot of the steps, and the river between us and the opposite village, was from half to three-quarters of a mile broad. A mile or so further up the eastern bank, could be seen the towers and trees of Dakshineswar, that temple-garden in which the Swami and his brothers had once been boys, at the feet of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. The house which was in actual use at that time as the Monastery, lay some half mile or so to the south of our cottage, and between us and it were several other garden-houses, and at least one ravine, cross- 75 MORNING TALKS. ed by a doubtful-looking plank made out of half of the stem of a palm tree. To our cottage here, then, came the Swami daily, at sunrise, alone or accompanied by some of his brothers. And here, under the trees, long after our early breakfast was ended, we might still be found seated, listening to that inexhaustible flow of interpretation, broken but rarely by question and answer, in which he would reveal to us some of the deepest secrets of the Indian world. I am struck afresh whenever I turn back upon this memory, by the wonder as to how such -a harvest of thought and experience could possibly have been garnered, or how, when once ingathered, could have come such energy of impulse for its giving-forth. Amongst brilliant conversationalists, the Swami was peculiar in one respect. He was never known to show the slightest impa- tience at interruption. He was by no means indifferent as to the minds he was address- 76 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. ing. His deepest utterances were heard only in the presence of such listeners as brought a subtle sympathy and reverence into the circle about him. But I do not think he was himself aware of this, and certainly no external circumstance seemed to have power to ruffle him. Moods of storm and strength there were in plenty ; but they sprang, like those of sweet- ness, from hidden sources ; they were entire- ly general and impersonal in their occasion. It was here that we learnt the great out- standing watchwords and ideals of the Indian striving. For the talks were, above all, an exposition of ideals. Facts and illustrations were gathered, it is true, from history, from literature, and from a thousand other sources. But the purpose was always the same, to render some Indian ideal of perfection clearer. Nor were these ideals always so comprehensible as might have been supposed. This was a 77 EASTERN IDEALS. world in which concentration of mind was the object of more deliberate cultivation than even the instincts of benevolence could require, but the time was not yet come in which this was to be argued as for or against India. The attainment of the impersonal standpoint was boldly proposed, in matters personal "Be the Witness !" was a command heard oftener than that which bids us pray for our enemies The idea of recognizing an enemy would have seemed to this mind a proof of hatred. Love was not love, it was insisted, unless it was 'without a reason,' or without a 'motive,' as a western speaker might have attempted, though perhaps with less force, to express the same idea. Purity and renunciation were analyzed untiringly. The Great God, tempted by nothing not kingship nor fatherhood ; not wealth nor pleasure ; in all the worlds He had created, proving on the contrary, in matters worldly, 'a very simple fellow,' incurious, easily 78 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. deceived, and begging His daily handful of rice from door to door, shone through all our dreams. Titiksha, or non -correction of evil, was a mark of the religious life, and of this we might find a western example in that monk who was a leper, and who, when the maggots fell from his finger-joints, stooped and replaced them, saying, "Eat brothers !" The vision of Raghunath was one of the perfec- tions of the soul, and that saint had had it, who fainted, when the bullocks were beaten in his presence, while on his back were found the weals made by the lash. We were even called upon to understand a thought immeasurably foreign to all our past conceptions of religion, in which sainthood finds expres- sion in an unconsciousness of the body, so profound that the saint is unaware that he goes naked. For that delicate discrimination of a higher significance 79 EASTERN WAELS. in certain cases of nudity, which, in Europe, finds its expression in art, in India finds it in religion. As we, in the presence of a Greek statue, ex- perience only reverence for the ideal of beauty, so the Hindu sees in the naked saint only a glorified and childlike purity. There was one aspiration, however, which was held, in this new thought- world, to be of the same sovereign and universal application in the religious life as that of the concentration of the mind. This was the freedom of the individual soul, including all the minor rights of thought, opinion, and action. Here lay the one possession that the monk was jealously to guard as his own, the one property on which he must brook the foot of no intruder ; and as I watched the working out of this, in daily life, I saw that it amounted to a form of renunciation. To accept nothing, 80 THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM. however pleasant, if it concealed a fetter ; at a word to stand ready to sever any connection that gave a hint of bondage ; how clear must be the mind that would do this, how pure the will ! And yet this ideal, too, was eloquent of many things. One could not help seeing that it accounted for the comparative non- development of monasticism in India, for the fact that the highest types of the religious life, in the past, had been solitary, whether as hermits or wander- ers. In the monastery beside us there were men, as we were told, who did not approve of their leader's talking with women ; there were others who objected to all rites and ceremonies ; the religion of one might be described as atheism tempered by hero-worship ; that of another led him to a round of practices which to most of us would constitute an into- lerable burden ; some lived in a world 81 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. of saints, visions and miracles ; others again could not away with such nonsense, but must needs guide themselves by the coldest logic. The fact that all these could be bound together in a close con- fraternity, bore silent witness to their conception of the right of the soul to choose its own path. It also, as I could not help thinking, both then and after, accounted for the failure, in certain res- pects, of the old Indian forms of authority. For, in order that the highest and most disinterested characters may throw them- selves into the work of the city and the state, it is surely necessary that they should sincerely hold the task of such organisation to be the highest and most honourable which they could aspire to carry out. In the India of the past, however, the best men had been too cons- cious of the more remote spiritual ideals, and amongst them, of this conception of freedom, 82 THE EXCHANGE OF IDEALS. to be capable of such an enthusiasm for the assertion of the civic and national discipline. And we cannot wonder that in spite of the existence of ability and character, certain advantages of the modern system have thus been left for the moderns to demonstrate. That Hinduism, nevertheless, is capable enough of adding to her development that of the inspiration and sustenance of such activities, is shown, as I believe, in the very fact of the rise of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, with their characteris- tic contribution to the national thought. It was perhaps as an instance of that 'exchange of ideals' which he had ever in mind, that the Swami gravely warned us again and again, as the great fault of the Western character, against making any at- tempt to force upon others that whieh we had merely found to be good for ourselves. And yet at the same time, when asked by some of his own people what he considered, 83 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. after seeing them in their own country, to be the greatest achievement of the English, he answered, 'that they had known how to combine obedience with self-respect'. But it was not the Swami alone whom we saw at Belur. We were accounted by the monastery as a whole, as its guests. So back and forth would toil the hospitable monks, on errands of kindness and service for us. They milked the cow that gave us- our supply, and when the servant whose duty it was at nightfall to carry the milk, was frightened by the sight of a cobra in the path, jand refused to go again, it was one of the monks themselves who took his place in this humble office. Some novice would be deputed daily, to deal with the strange pro- blems of our Indian house-keeping. Another was appointed to give Bengali lessons. Visits of ceremony and of kindness were frequently paid us by the older members of the commu- nity. And finally, when the Swami Viveka- 84 MONASTIC HOSPITALITY. nanda himself was absent for some weeks on a journey, his place was always duly taken at the morning tea-table by some one or .another who felt responsible for the happi- ness and entertainment of his guests. In these and a thousand similar ways, we came in touch with those who could reveal to us the shining memory that formed the warp, on which, as woof, were woven all these lives of renunciation. For they had only one theme, these monastic visitants of ours, and that was their Master Sri Ramakrishna and his great disciple. The Swami had now been back with them for thirteen or fourteen months only, and scarcely yet had they recovered from their first pleasure and surprise. Before that he had been practically lost to ,them for some six years. It was true that of late he had corresponded with them freely, .and that for no time had they been, long, .altogether off his track. And yet, when his 85 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. first success in America had been heard of,, most of his brethren had had only their con- fidence in the great mission foretold by his Master, to tell them that it was he. Those who have witnessed here or there some great life of asceticism, will recognise a mood of passionate longing to lose one's own identity, to be united with the lowliest and most hidden things, to go forth from amongst men, and be no more remembered by them, as an element in the impulse of renunciation. This it is which explains, as I think, the long silence and seclusion in caves ; the garb of mud and ashes, so often worn as a man wan- ders from forest to forest, and village to village; and a thousand other features of this type of religion, which to the Western onlooker might seem inexplicable. This mood would seem to have been much with the Swami in the early years after the passingof his Master. And again and again he must have left the little band of brethren, in the hope never 86 A FIRST RECRUIT. to be heard of more. Once he was brought back from such an expedition by the com- munity itself, who heard that he was lying- ill at a place called Hathras, and send to take him home. For such was the love that bound them all to each other, and espe- cially to him, that they could not rest without nursing him themselves. A few months later he was followed to the monastery by a disciple whom he had called to himself during his wanderings. This man's name, in religion, was Sadananda, and from his account, with its strong broken English, I glean the record of the life that was lived at this period in the monastery. When he ar- rived it had taken him some two or three months, by means of railway service, to earn his way to Calcutta from his old home he found the Swami on the point of setting out once more. But for his sake this journey was abandoned, and the departure that was to have taken place that evening did not THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. occur till twelve months later. "The Swami's mission began with me," says this first disciple proudly, referring to this time. During this year, he the Master, "would work twenty-four hours at a time. He was lunatic-like, he was so busy!" Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he would rise and call the others, singing, "Awake ! Awake ! all ye who would drink of the divine nectar !" Then all would proceed to medita- tion, afterwards drifting almost unconsciously into singing and talking, which would last till noon, or even later. From hymns and chanting they would pass into history. Some- times it would be the story of Ignatius Loyola ; again Joan of Are, or the Rani of Jhansi ; and yet again the Swami would recite long passages from Carlyle's French Revolution, and they would all sway them- selves backwards and forwards dreamily, repeating together "Vive la Republique! Vive la Republique !" Or the subject of their 88 THE FIRST LOVE. reveries might be S. Francis of Assisi, and with the same unconscious instinct of the dramatist, they would lose themselves in an endless identification with his "Welcome, Sister Death !" It might perhaps be one or two o'clock when Ramakrishnananda the cook, housekeeper, and ritualist of the communi- ty would drive them all, with threats, to bathe and eat. But after this, they would "again group" again would go on the song and talk, till at last evening had come, bring- ing with it the time for the two hours of Arrati to Sri Ramakrishna. As often as not, even this would scarcely break the absorption, again would follow song, and talk of the Master ; again would come the trances of meditation. Or on the roof, till long after midnight it might be, they would sit and chant ''Hail Sita-Rama !" The special festivals of all religions brought each their special forms of celebration. At Christmas time, for instance, they would re- 89 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. cline, with long shepherds' crooks, around a lighted log, and talk in low tones of the coming of the angels to the lonely watchers by their flocks, and the singing of the world's first Gloria. Very curious is the story of how they kept Good Friday. Hour after hour had gone by, and they had risen gradually to- that terrible exaltation of spirit which comes to those who give themselves to that day. Food was not to be thought of, but they had contrived to have by them a few grapes, and the juice was squeezed out, and mixed with water, to be drunk out of a single cup by all- in the midst of such scenes, the voice of a European was heard at the door, calling on them, in the name of Christ. With inexpres- sible delight they swarmed down on him, twelve or fifteen men of them, eager to hear of the day from the lips of a Christian. " But he said he belonged to the Salvation Army, and knew nothing about Good Friday. They only kept General Booth's birthday,. 90 THE GREAT PREPARATION. and something else, I forget what", said Sadananda, and in the cloud that overcast the face and voice of the teller, one could realize the sudden depression that fell, at this discovery, upon the monks. It seems that in their first disappointment, they snatched his Bible from the unfortunate missionary, saying he was not worthy to pos- sess it, and drove him forth. It is said how- ever that one of their number stole round by another door and brought him back to eat, and have his property secretly restored to him. "Those were hot days," says the teller of the tale, with his face aglow, "there was no minute of rest. Outsiders came and went, pundits argued and discussed. But, he, the Swami, was never for one moment idle,, never dull. Sometimes he was left alone for a while, and he would walk up and down,, saying, 'Hari bol ! bol ! bol ! Call on the Lord! Call! Call!' or 'Oh Mother!' in all THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. these ways preparing himself for his great work. And I watched all the time from a distance, and in some interval said, 'Sir, will you not eat ?' always to be answered playfully." Sometimes the talk took place while cooking was going on, or during the service of the altar, offices in which all shared without distinction. For in spite of the poverty of those days, many came to the monks to be fed. Their own resources were scanty. They had only one piece of .cloth amongst them that was good enough to be worn across the shoulders, outside the monastery. So this was kept on a line and used by anyone who went out. And they could afford no more. Yet food was found somehow for the poor and for guests, and many came for help or teaching. They begged funds enough also, to buy .and distribute some hundreds of copies of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Imita- tion, the two favourite books of the Order at 92 GLIMPSES OF EARL Y DA YS. that time. "Silence, all ye teachers! And silence, ye prophets ! Speak Thou alone, O Lord, unto my soul !" was, years after, a sentence that the Swami quoted at a venture as all that he then remembered of Thomas a Kempis. For it is perhaps needless to say that while this book took its place by degrees amongst experiences remembered, the Gita grew every day in fulness of power and beauty in the minds of these Hindu children of Ramakrishna. So passed some twelve months. Then the Swami went away to Ghazipur to visit Pavhari Baba,* that saint whom he always held second only to Ramakrishna. He came back in a couple of months to share the treasure he had gained with others. Sud- denly news came that one of the brothers, by name Yogananda, was lying ill with small- * Pavhari Baba was a saint who lived near Ghazipur. He died by burning, in 1898. 93 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. pox at Allahabad, and a party, followed by the Swami, started to nurse him. At Allahabad, to take up once more Sadananda's account, many days were passed in religious education. It was as if Yoga- nanda's sickness had been a mere incident, .a call given through him, and the whole town came and went in a great stirring. Small groups would enter and leave, in a ^constant succession, for days and nights toge- ther, the Swami being always in his highest .and greatest mood. On one occasion he saw a Mohammedan saint, a Paramahamsa, "whose -every line and curve told that he was a Paramahamsa," and this was the occasion of .a great hour. "Sometimes naked, sometimes mad, Now as a scholar, again as a fool, Here a rebel, there a saint, Thus they appear on the earth, the Paramahamsas. " So repeating " The Marks of the 94 THE WANDERING FRIAR. Paramahamsas " from the Viveka Chuda- moni of Sankaracharya, there passed, as the disciple would put it, "a whole night fermenting." Such experiences lasted per- haps for two weeks, and then the party left Allahabad, and by twos and threes returned to the monastery, in the village of Baranagore on the banks of the Ganges. But now there came a time, in the year 1890, when the Swami left his brothers, not to return, till the great triumph of the year 1897. This time he set out with a monk known as Akhandananda, who took him to Almora and left him there, enjoying the hospitality of a family who had formerly befriended himself on a journey to Thibet. It is said that on the way up the mountains, the Swami one day fainted with hunger, when a poor Mohammedan found him, and prepared and gave him a cucumber, which practically saved his life. How long the brothers had been without food I do not know. It may 95 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. have been that at this time, as certainly later,, he was under the vow to ask for nothing, waiting always for food and drink till they were offered. He told some one who knew him during that period and questioned him, that the longest time he had ever gone without food, under this austerity, was five days. After this, the thread of his wanderings was lost. He wrote occasionally, but the monks themselves were scattered. 'It had been so dull after they lost him'! says the narrator. And even the first home had to be abandon- ed, for the landlord talked of rebuilding. There was one monk, however, Rama- krishnananda by name, who would not leave the ashes of their Master, but vowed, with rock-like determination, to keep a roof over- head, come storm, come shine, so to speak, for them and for his brothers, till they should all foregather in their worship-room once more. He, then, with Nirmalananda, 96 THE LEADER LOST. the occasional residence of one Premananda,. and the new member of the fold, 'as dish- washer', removed to a house some distance away, but still in the immediate neighbour- hood of Dakshineshwar, and the monastery which had previously been at Baranagore was now known as the Alum Bazar Math. Akhandananda at this time was always "chasing," always in pursuit of the absent leader. Every now and then he would hear of him in some town, and would arrive there, only in time to hear that he was gone, leav- ing no trace. Once the Swami Trigunatita found himself in trouble in a Guzerati state, when some one said that a Bengali Sadhu was staying with the Prime Minister, and if he appealed to him, would surely give him aid. He made his appeal, and found that the unknown Sadhu was the Swami himself. But he, after rendering the assistance that was needed, sent his brother onwards, and him- self proceeded alone. The great words of 97 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. Buddha, constantly quoted by him, "Even as the lion, not trembling at noises, even as the wind, not caught in a net, even as the lotus-leaf untouched by the water, so do thou wander alone, like the rhinoceros ! :> were the guiding principle of his life at this time. It had been at Almora, as we now know, that news reached him, of the death, in pitiful extremity, of the favourite sister of his childhood, and he had fled into the wilder mountains, leaving no clue. To one who, years after, saw deep into his personal experience, it seemed that this death had in- flicted on the Swami's heart a wound, whose quivering pain had never for one moment ceased. And we may, perhaps, venture to trace some part at least of his burning desire for the education and development of Indian women, to this sorrow. At this time he passed some months in a cave overhanging a mountain-village. Only twice have I known him to allude to this A VOW OF PILGRIMAGE. experience. Once he said, "Nothing in my whole life ever so filled me with the sense of work to be done. It was as if I were thrown out from that life in caves to wander to and fro in the plains below." And again he said to some one, "It is not the form of his life that makes a Sadhu. For it is possible to sit in a cave and have one's whole mind filled with the question of how many pieces of bread will be brought to one for supper !" It was perhaps at the end of this period, and in expression of that propulsive energy of which he spoke, that he made a vow to worship the Mother at Cape Comorin. In carrying this out, he was lavish of time, yet it must have taken him only about two years to accomplish the vow. In the course of his wanderings towards this end, he seems to have touched upon and studied every phase of Indian life. The stories of this period are never ended. The list of the 99 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. friends he made is never full. He received the initiation of the Sikhs ; studied the Mimansa Philosophy with Mahratta pundits ; and the Jain Scriptures with Jains ; was accepted as their Guru by Rajput princes ; lived for weeks with a family of sweepers, in Central India ; was able to observe at first hand such obscure questions as the caste- customs of Malabar ; saw many of the historic sights and natural beauties of his Mother-land, and finally reached Cape Comorin too poor to pay for a seat in a ferry- boat to the shrine of Kanya Kumari, and swam across the strait to the island, in spite of sharks, to offer the worship he had vowed. It was on his return northwards through Madras, that he formed the strong group of disciples who became the means of sending him to America, for which country he sailed finally from Bombay, about the beginning of June 1893. Even this however he was not eager 100 THE CALL OF DESTINY. to do. His disciples in Madras still tell how the first five hundred rupees collected for the object were immediately spent by him in worship and charity, as if he would force on his own destiny, as it were, the task of driving him forth. Even when he reached Bombay, he was still waiting for the feeling of certainty. Struggling to refuse the undertaking, he felt as if the form of his own Master appeared to him constantly, and urged him to go. At last he wrote secretly to Sarada Devi, the widow of Sri Rama- krishna, begging her, if she could, to advise and bless him, and charging her to tell no one of this new departure, till she should hear from him again. It was only after receiving, in answer to this letter, her warm encouragement, and the assurance of her prayers, that he actually left India for the West. Now, at last, there was no escaping fate. That quest of forgotten-ness that had first borne him out of the doors of lot THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. the monastery, had led him also to change- his name in each Indian village that he reached. And in later years some one heard from him how, after his first great speech at Chicago, the mingling of the bitter- ness of this defeat with the cup of his triumph- ant achievement, racked his consciousness all night long. He stood now in the glare of publicity, The unknown beggar could remain unknown no more ! In these wanderings through India, I find the third and final element, in my Master's realization of that great body of truth, which was to find in him at once its witness and its demonstration. There can be no doubt, I think, that the formative influences in his life were threefold : first his education in English and Sanskrit literature ; second, the great per- sonality of his Guru, illustrating and authen- ticating that life which formed the theme of all the sacred writings ; and thirdly, as I would 102 FORMATIVE INFLUENCES. maintain, his personal knowledge of India and the Indian peoples, as an immense reli- gious organism, of which his Master himself, with all his greatness, had been only, as it were, the personification and utterance. And these three sources can, as I think, be dis- tinctly traced in his various utterances. When he preaches Vedanta and upholds be- fore the world the philosophy of his people, he is for the most part drawing upon the Sanskrit books of past ages, though, it is true, with a clearness and certainty of touch that could only be the result of having seen them summed up in a single wonderful life. When he talks of Bhakti as of "a devotion beginning, continuing and ending in love," or when he analyzes Karma Yoga, 'the secret of work,' we see before us the very personality of the Master himself, we realize that the disciple is but struggling to tell of that glorified atmosphere in which he himself has dwelt at the feet of another. But when we 103 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. Tread his speech before the Chicago Con- ference, or his equally remarkable "Reply to the Madras Address," or the lectures in which at Lahore, in 1897, he portrayed the lineaments of a generalized and essential Hinduism, we find ourselves in presence of something gathered by his own labours, out of his own experience. The power behind all these utterances lay in those Indian wanderings of which the tale can probably never be complete. It was of this first- hand knowledge, then, and not of vague sen- timent or wilful blindness, that his reverence for his own people and their land was born. It was a robust and cumulative induction, moreover, be it said, ever hungry for new facts, and dauntless in the face of hostile criticism. 'The common bases of Hinduism had,' as he once said, 'been the study of his whole life.' And more than this, it was the same thorough and first-hand knowledge that made the older and simpler elements in 104 HIS LOVE OF THE PEOPLE. Hindu civilization loom so large in all his conceptions of his race and country. Pos- sessed of a modern education that ranked with the most advanced in his own country, he yet could not, like some moderns, ignore the Sannyasin or the peasant, the idolater or the caste-ridden, as elements in the great whole called India. And this determined inclusive- ness was due to that life in which he had for years together been united with them. It must be remembered, however, that we have not entirely analyzed a great career when we have traced, to their origin in the personal experience, those ideas which form its dominant notes. There is still the orgi- nal impulse, the endowment of perennial energy that makes the world-spectacle so much more full of meaning to one soul than to another, to be accounted for. And I have gathered that from his very cradle Viveka- nanda had a secret instinct that told him he was born to help his country. He was proud 105 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. afterwards to remember that amidst the temporal vicissitudes of his early days in America, when sometimes he did not know where to turn for the next meal, his letters U> his disciples in India showed that this innate faith of his had never wavered. Such an indomitable hope resides assuredly in all souls who are born to carry out any special mission. It is a deep unspoken conscious- ness of greatness, of which life itself is to be the sole expression. To Hindu thinking, there is a difference as of the poles, between such consciousness of greatness and vanity, and this is seen, as I think, in the Swami him- self at the moment of his first meeting with Sri Ramakrishna, when he was decidedly re- pelled, rather than attracted, by what he regarded as the old man's exaggerated esti- mate of his powers and of himself. He had come, a lad of fifteen, as a mem- ber of a party visiting Dakshineshwar, and some one, probably knowing the unusual 1 06 THE MASTER'S RECOGNITION, quality of his voice, and his knowledge of music, sugggested that he should sing. He responded with a song of Ram Mohun Roy's, ending with the words, "And for support keep the treasure in secret, purity." This seems to have acted like a signal "My boy ! my boy !" cried Sri Ramakrishna, "I have been looking for you these three years, and you have come at last !" From that day the older man may be said to have devoted himself to welding the lads about him into a brotherhood whose devotion ta "Noren," as the Swami was then called, would be unswerving. He was never tired of foretelling his great fame, nor of pointing out the superiority of his genius. If most men had two, or three, or even ten or twelve gifts, he said, he could only say of Noren that his numbered a thousand. He was in fact "the thousand-petalled lotus." Even amongst the great, while he would allow that with one might be found some "two of 107 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. those gifts which are the marks of Siva," Noren had at least eighteen of such. He was sensitive to the point of physical pain himself, in his discrimination of hypo- crisy, and on one occasion refused to accept a man whose piety of life was regarded by those about him as unimpugnable. The man, he said, with all his decorum, was a whited sepulchre. In spite of constant purification his presence was contamination, while Noren, on the other hand, if he were to eat beef in an English hotel, would nevertheless be holy, so holy that his very touch would convey holiness to others. By such sayings he sought constantly to build up an enduring relation, based firmly on essentials, between those who were to be his supporters, and this disciple who was to lead. It was his habit, when a new disciple came to him, to examine him mentally and physically in all possible ways. For the human body was to his trained eye, as signifi- 108 VI VEK AN AND AS PAST cant in all its parts, as any model of a machine to a skilled scientific observer. These exami- nations moreover would include the throwing of the newcomer into a sleep, in which he had access to the subconscious mind. The privileged, as I have been told, were per- mitted in this condition to relate their own story ; while from the less honoured it was evoked by means of questions. It was after such an examination of "Noren" that the Master told all about him, that when the day should come for this boy to realize who and what he was, he would refuse for a mo- ment longer to endure the bondage of bodi- ly existence, going out from life, with its limi- tations. And by this was always understood by the disciples, the remembering by the lad of what he had already attained, even in this world, in lives anterior to his present con- sciousness. No menial service to himself was permitted by Sri Ramakrishna from this particular follower. Fanning, the preparation 109 THE ORDER OF RAMAKRISHNA. of tobacco, and the thousand and one little attentions commonly rendered to the Guru, all these had to be offered to the Master by others, Amongst the many quaint-seeming customs of the East, none is more deep-rooted than the prejudice against eating food cooked by one who is not respected. And on this point the Swami's Master was as sensitive as a woman. But what he would not eat him- self he would give freely to his favourite dis- ciple, for Noren, he said, was the "roaring fire," burning up all impurity. The core of divinity again, in this boy's nature was mas- culine in its quality, as compared to his own merely feminine. Thus, by an attitude of ad- miration, not unmixed with actual reverence, he created a belief in the destiny of this particular lad, which, when he himself had passed away, was to stand him in good stead, in furnishing authenticity and support to his work. For the Swami was nothing, if not a no THE ROARING FIRE. breaker of bondage. And it was essential that there should be those about him who understood the polar difference between his breaches of custom and those of the idly self-indulgent. Nothing in the early days of my life in India, struck me so for- cibly or so repeatedly as the steadiness with which the other members of the Order fufilled this part of the mission laid upon them. Men whose own lives were cast in the strictest mould of Hindu orthodoxy, or even of asceticism, were willing to eat with the Europeans whom their leader had accepted. Was the Swami seen dining in Madras with an Englishman and his wife ? Was it said that while in the West he had touched beef or wine ? Not a quiver was seen on the faces of bis brethren. It was not for them to question, not for them to explain, not even for them to ask for final justification and excuse. What- ever he did, wherever he might lead, it was their place to be found unflinching at his side. in THE ORDER OF R And surely none can pass this spectacle in review, without its being borne in upon him, that meaningless as would have been the Order of Ramakrishna without Vivekananda, even so futile would have been the life and labours of Vivekananda, without, behind him, his brothers of the Order of Ramakrishna. It was said to me lately by one of the older generation that "Ramakrishna had lived for the making of Vivekananda." Is it indeed so? Or is it not rather impossible to distinguish with such fixity betwen one part and another, in a single mighty utterance of the Divine Mother-heart? Often it appears to me, in studying all these lives, that there has been with us a soul named Ramakrishna-Viveka- nanda, and that, in the penumbra of his be- ing, appear many forms, some of which are with us still, and of none of whom it could be said with entire truth that here ends, in rela- tion to him, the sphere of those others, or that there begins his own. 112 WANDERINGS IN NORTHERN INDIA. The summer of 1898 stands out in my" memory as a series of pictures, painted like old altar-pieces, against a golden back- ground of religious ardour and simplicity, and all alike glorified by the presence of one who, to us in his immediate circle, formed their central point. We were a party of four Western women, one of whom was Mrs, Ole Bull of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another a member of the higher official world of Anglo-Indian Calcutta. Side by side with us travelled the Swami, surrounded by his brethren (or gurubhais) and disciples. Once arived at Almora, he and his party became the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Sevier, who were then residing there, and we occupi- ed a bungalow some distance away. Thus "3 IN NORTHERN INDIA. pleasantly grouped, it was possible to combine a high degree of freedom and intercourse. But when, after a month or so, we left Almora for Kashmir, the Swami went with us, as the guest of Mrs. Ole Bull, and left behind him all his attendants. What scenes were those through which we journeyed from the beginning of May until the end of October ! And with what passionate enthusiasm were we introduced one by one to each point of interest, as we reached it ! The ignorance of educated Western people about India, excepting of course those who have in some measure specialised on the subject might almost be described as illiteracy, and our object-lessons began, I have no doubt, with Patna, the ancient Pataliputra, itself. The river-front of Benares, as one approaches it by railway from the East, is amongst the sights of the world, and could not fail of our leader's eager praise. The industries and luxuries of 114 THE PEASANTS WELCOME. Lucknow must needs be dwelt upon and enu- merated. But it was not only the great cities of admitted beauty and historic importance, that the Swami, in his eagerness, would strive to impress on our memory. Perhaps nowhere did his love seem more ardent, or his absorption more intense, than as we passed across the long stretches of the Plains, covered with fields and farms and villages. Here his thought was free to brood over the land as a whole, and he would spend hours explaining the communal system of agricul- ture, or describing the daily life of the farm housewife, with such details as that of the pot-du-feu of mixed grains left boiling all night, for the morning porridge. It was the memory, doubtless, of his own days as a wanderer, that so brightened his eyes and thrilled in his voice, as he told us these things. For I have heard it said by sadhus that there is no hospitality in India like that of the humble peasant home. True, IN NORTHERN INDIA. the mistress has no better bedding to offer than straw, no better shelter than an outhouse built of mud. But it is she who steals in at the last moment, before she goes to rest her- self amongst her sleeping household, to place a tooth-brush twig and a bowl of milk where the guest will find them, on waking in the morning, that he may go forth from beneath her roof comforted and refreshed. It would seem sometimes as if the Swami lived and moved and had his very being in the sense of his country's past. His historic consciousness was extraordinarily developed. Thus, as we journeyed across the Terai, in^ the hot hours of an afternoon near the be- ginning of the rains, we were made to feel that this was the very earth on which had passed the youth and renunciation of Buddha. The wild peacocks spoke to us of Rajputana and her ballad lore. An occasional elephant was the text for tales of ancient battles, and the story of an India that was never defeated,. 116 A RIGHTEOUS RULER. so long as she could oppose to the tide of conquest the military walls of these living artillery. As we had crossed the boundary from Bengal into the North- West Provinces, the Swami had stopped to tell us of the wisdom .and methods of the great and merciful En- glish ruler who was at that time at the head of their administration. "Unlike others," he said, in words that impressed my memory at the time, "he understands the need of per- sonal government in Oriental countries, where a strong public opinion is not yet de- veloped, so no hospital, no college, no office knows the day when he will pay it a visit of inspection. And even the poorest believes that if only he can reach him personally, he will receive justice at his hands." This idea -of the importance of personality in Eastern governments often came uppermost in his talk. He constantly spoke of a democracy as theoretically the worst form for an impe- 117 IN NORTHERN INDIA. rial government to take. And one of his fa- vourite speculations was that it had been a perception of this truth that had urged Julius Caesar on, to aspire to the imperial authority, We realised sometimes, as we listened to him, how hard it had been for the Indian poor, to understand the transition from the personal rule of sovereigns, always acces- sible to appeal, always open to the impulse of mercy, and able to exercise a supreme dis- cretion, to the cold bureaucratic methods of a series of departments. For we heard from him the personal histories of innumerable simple folk, who, in the early years of British rule, had spent their all in the vain hope of reaching the Queen, and gaining her ear, at Windsor. Heart-broken pilgrims for the most part, who died, of want and disillusion- ment, far from the homes and villages that they would never see again ! It was as we passed into the Punjab, Rowever, that we caught our deepest glimpse 118 LOVE OF THE PUNJAB. of the Master's love of his own land. Any one who had seen him here, would have supposed him to have been born in the pro- vince, so intensely had he identified himself with it. It would seem that he had been deeply bound to the people there by many ties of love and reverence ; had received much and given much ; for there were some amongst them who urged that they found in him a rare mixture of 'Guru Nanak and Guru Govind," their first teacher and their last. Even the most suspicious amongst them trusted him. And if they refused to credit his judgment, or endorse his outflowing sym- pathy, in regard to those Europeans whom he had made his own, he, it may have been, loved the wayward hearts all the more for their inflexible condemnation and incorrup- tible sternness. His American disciples were already familiar with his picture that called to his own face a dreamy delight, of the Punjabi maiden at her spinning 119 IN NORTHERN INDIA. wheel, listening to its "Sivoham ! Sivoham ! I am He ! I am He !" Yet at the same time, I must not forget to tell that it was here, on entering the Punjab, even as, near the end of his life, he is said to have done again at Benares, that he called to him i Mussulman vendor of sweetmeats, and bought and ate from his hand Moham- medan food. As we went through some village, he would point out to us those strings of mari- golds above the door, that distinguished the Hindu homes. Again he would show us the pure golden tint of skin, so different from the pink and white of the European ideal, that constitutes the 'fairness' admired by the Indian races. Or as one drove beside him in a tonga, he would forget all, in that tale of which he never wearied, of Siva, the Great God, silent, remote upon the mountains, ask- ing nothing of men but solitude, and ''lost in one eternal meditation.' 1 20 BEAUTY OF KASHMIR. We drove from Rawalpindi to Murree, where we spent a few days. And then, partly by tonga, partly by boat, we proceeded to Srinagar in Kashmir, and made it our centre and headquarters, during the wanderings of the following months. It would be easy to lose oneself here in the beauty of our journeys, in descriptions of mountain-forests on the road to Almora, or of cathedral-rocks and corn-embosomed villages in the Jhelum Pass. For, as one returns upon that time, its record is found in a constant succession of scenes of loveliness. Not least of these pictures is the memory of the handsome old woman, wearing the crim- son coronet and white veil of Kashmiri peasants, who sat at her spinning-wheel under a great chenaar-tree *in a farm-yard, surrounded by her daughters-in-law, when we passed that, way, and stopped to visit her. It was the Swami's second call on her. He * The Chenaar-tree is the Orie ntal Plane. 121 IN NORTHERN INDIA. had received some small kindness at her hands the year before, and had never tired of telling how, after this, when he had asked, before saying farewell, " And, mother, of what religion are you ?" her whole face had lighted up with pride and joy, and her old voice had rung out in triumph as she answered loudly and clearly, "I thank our God, by the mercy of the Lord, I am a Mussulman !" Or I might tell of the avenue of lofty Lombardy poplars outside Srinagar, so like the well-known picture by Hobbema, where we listened to discourse after discourse on India and the Faith. Or I might linger over the harvest merri- ment of the villagers, playing in reaped fields on moonlit evenings ; or talk of the red bronze of amaranth crops, or the green of young rice under tall poplars at Islamabad. For-get-me- nots of a brilliant blue form the commonest wild flower of the Kashmiri fields in summer - r 122 APPLE-TREES AND IRISES. but in autumn and spring, fields and river banks are violet-tinged with small purple irises, and one walks amongst their spear-like leaves as if they were grass. How infinitely tender are the suggestions of those little iris-covered hillocks, rounding off the rise of some road-side against the sky, that mark the burial places of the Mussulman dead ! Here and there, too, amidst grass and irises, one comes on groups of gnarled apple trees, or pear, or plum, the remains of the village orchards which the State, once upon a time, supplied to all its subjects free of cost. Walking here once, at twilight, along the high banks of the river, I watched a party of Mussulman herdsmen, crooks in hand, driving a small flock of long-haired goats before them to their village. And then, as they came to a knot of apple-trees, they stopped awhile, and spreading a blanket for praying-carpet, they proceeded to offer their evening-worship in the deepening dusk. 123 IN NORTHERN INDIA. Verily, says my heart, there is no end of .beauty. There is no end ! But in good sooth it is not of these things that I am attempting, in the course