My Guru and His Disciple

  Of course, by making this decision, I have blackmailed myself into carrying out my duties with twice as much zeal, as long as I am here. Since Swami was sick, I had to represent him at an official tea party for about fifty culture enthusiasts. After tea, the swami in charge made all of them shush and then asked me questions, which I had to answer in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone. He tried hard to maneuver me into saying that I disapprove of the dirtiness of modern literature. I politely avoided doing so.

  January 4. Today Prema and Arup got their heads shaved, in preparation for sannyas. Now they are in a dilemma; they hate exposing their baldness, yet they would like to get their skulls suntanned, to be less conspicuous. The shaven Bengali monks, with their brown skins, look perfectly natural.

  Prema tells me he feels this shaving was a crossing of the Rubicon; now he is one hundred percent committed. He and Arup have already been issued their gerua robes, neatly folded, ready to be put on at the prescribed moment, during the sannyas ritual.

  Preparations for the Vivekananda birthday celebration are now nearly complete. There is an arch over the entrance gate, tented entrances to the shrines, hung with glass chandeliers, and a pavilion containing all the books about Vivekananda in every language.

  To Javadpur University, to give a question-and-answer talk to the students. This I enjoyed because I didn’t have to be holy. They wanted to hear a lot about Huxley. The professor who introduced me is writing a book on Yeats. He and his wife had reproductions of Van Gogh and Rouault in their apartment, and a copy of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

  At supper, Prema and Arup were eating as much as they could, because their fast begins tomorrow morning. Prema says that no one should take sannyas until the ego has been “smashed.” He feels that his conflicts with some of the nuns at the Hollywood Center were really blessings—a form of disciplining by Mother Kali.

  January 5. Until today, I’ve had diarrhea, but this morning’s stool is thicker. I feel nothing but the dull senseless urge to get the hell out of here. Such is my longing for escape that I’m not even nervous about the flight; a sinister sign. Masturbated this morning, not because I really wanted to, just out of meanness. I’m mean and sullen.

  This afternoon, Swami moved back into his room at the Math. He has a swelling on the side of his face which he is trying to reduce with hot compresses.

  January 6. A terrific wailing and drumming of instruments burst forth at about 4:30 a.m., announcing the Big Day. Prema calls this “snake-charming music.”

  Found Swami concerned about his face. He told Prema, “I want to leave the body in India,” so Prema is worried. Arup fell asleep—which is strictly against the rules, during the sannyas fast—and dreamed of pork chops.

  The Math grounds were crowded all day. Thousands of devotees were fed from leaf plates. Loudspeakers shouted. Kirtan singers wailed. A line of people waited on the staircase to bow down in Swamiji’s room. Nikhilananda was in a very good humor at breakfast this morning. He said, “This is the country of self-destruction.”

  In the afternoon there was a meeting at which Swami presided and spoke, despite his ill health. I spoke, too. When we got back to Swami’s room, he held out his hand and asked me to massage it. I did my best, telling him that I’d never massaged a hand before. He answered gaily, “Why can’t you do something for Swami you never did before?”

  He was in his “baby” mood. He kept dozing off but wanted us to stay in the room with him. Was he perhaps in a high spiritual state and giving us the privilege of serving the “It” which had taken him over? In that building, with Vivekananda and Brahmananda so powerfully present, this explanation didn’t seem farfetched.

  January 7. Woke with a sore throat to the noise of snake-charming music over the loudspeakers. But this poor old snake couldn’t rise. However, I did get up at 7:30 and went out to look for the newly made swamis. I found Arup first. He is now Swami Anamananda; Anama means the Nameless One. He looks marvelous in his gerua; the color brings out the blueness of his eyes and the paleness of his skin. He was embarrassed but delighted when I prostrated. Then some other people ran up to him and bowed down. He raised his hand in blessing, so benevolently, like the ancient abbot of a monastery, and murmured, “Bless you.”

  I walked with him, and presently Prema came by, in a group of other new swamis on their way to beg alms. (You have to do this for three days after taking sannyas; but it’s no big problem because there are pious families which have notified the Math in advance that they are ready to feed you, so you know just where to go.)

  Prema is Swami Vidyatmananda. Vidya means Knowledge; Vidya-Atman means the Soul of Knowledge. However, since Vidya means knowledge-in-its-essence—that is, spiritual knowledge—there is really no distinction between the two terms. Prema could just as well have been called Vidyananda, except that there is another swami with that name.

  I ran over to him and prostrated and he hugged me warmly. The onlookers were pleased, I felt, to see us Westerners playing the scene according to their rules.

  Later, I went into Swami’s room. Like nearly all the other swamis, he had been present at the sannyas ceremony during the dead hours of last night. He was being massaged by a young monk. He said, “You see—I massaged Maharaj, so now I get massage!”

  Then Prema came back from begging alms, carrying some food in a begging bag. According to custom, he had to offer it first to Swami, as his guru. I took some, too. It was soupy and tepid. I nearly gagged on it and I noticed that Swami took very little, although he remarked, “This food must be very pure!”

  Then Swami Gokulananda of the Ramakrishna Mission College came in with two of his students. Swami began telling the boys about Maharaj: “I tried to think lustful thoughts in Maharaj’s presence, and I couldn’t. I tried deliberately, and I couldn’t … But such an experience will not be possible again until the Lord comes back to earth.”

  Then, having softened them up, Swami repeated the demand he made the other day, that the college must produce more monks. “Run away from here,” he told one of the boys. Then, turning to Gokulananda: “Swami, buy him a railway ticket to Madras. He can join our monastery there. Otherwise, he will get married to a little girl.” Then, to the boy, in an affectionately teasing tone: “Yes, you will get married! And afterwards you will say, ‘I couldn’t help it; when I wanted to be a monk, my mother cried, so I got married.’” The boy laughed, embarrassed. Swami told him, “Write to me when you join the monastery—not before!”

  After this, Gokulananda sent the boys away, because he wanted to talk to Swami alone. (It was Swami who originally persuaded him to join the Order.) So I left, too.

  Going up the stairs to the balcony, I found that the Vivekananda Room was open. A swami was cleaning it, no doubt because of the mess made by yesterday’s visitors. I prostrated and touched my forehead to the bed, praying the only prayer which seemed appropriate to my present mood: “Give me devotion—even against my will.” Then I went onto the balcony, took out my beads, and laid them for a moment on the floor, just where Brahmananda had stood when Swami first met him.

  In the afternoon, I packed and then sat for a while with Swami. He is feeling much better, but the doctor wants him to have his lungs X-rayed in Madras. He will stay for a while at the monastery there. He suggested that I should change my plans and go with him, but he wasn’t insistent about this. I felt he didn’t even expect me to agree.

  I also talked to Prema, who is very happy at the prospect of remaining in India for maybe a year and working on various projects for the Order. Arup will return to Hollywood soon. I’m sure India won’t see him again.

  Suddenly it was time to begin the official goodbyes. Leaving a monastery seems a much more casual affair than arriving at one. When you arrive, they are humanly pleased to see you. When you leave, they are philosophically resigned—it’s the Lord’s will; and all travel is anyhow only within maya, for how can we ever leave His presence?

  George volunteered to come with me
to the airport. This caused a delay, because a kirtan was in progress and he had left his tape recorder running on the musicians’ platform. We waited for them to stop playing. They didn’t. So he had the embarrassment of having to go up to the platform and take away the recorder in full view of the audience.

  At the airport, George said to me with a grin: “I suppose you’ll be writing that diary all night?”

  Eighteen

  I did write quite a lot that night—the plane was so cold that I couldn’t sleep anyway, and I wanted to add notes to my diary while my memories of Belur Math were still clear. I knew they would begin to fade next morning, after I had landed in Rome and joined some American friends there. Already, during the flight, there was one distracting element: a party of Australians who had started out with the plane from Sydney. Loud-voiced muscular men who looked like cricketers in their open-necked white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, they seemed to me much more exotic than Indians—the Farthest West invading the Far East.

  Later, when talking about that night, I used to claim jokingly that it was then I had first become aware that Vivekananda—grateful, no doubt, for my help in celebrating his centenary—had given me a charming thank-you present, an idea for a novel. A month after this, my diary mentions that I am considering a novel about Prema taking sannyas. However, I didn’t start writing this novel for another whole year and I didn’t finish it until 1966. It was published in 1967 as A Meeting by the River. The final version has almost nothing in it which relates specifically to Prema; but he was my invaluable adviser throughout its writing, particularly on the essential question: How does it feel to be a Westerner who is a Hindu monk?

  * * *

  Swami stayed in India more than a month longer than I did. During much of this time he was sick—which perhaps explains the mood in which he returned to Hollywood:

  March 15, 1964. When I was up at the Center, one of the nuns remarked that someone had come into the bookshop and asked for a guidebook to the temples of India. So I said, why didn’t they stock a guidebook to India? And Swami grinned and said, “No, Chris—I will not deliberately send anyone to his death.”

  He is full of such cracks at present, and behind them you feel a real resentment; he keeps declaring that he will never never return to India, that he couldn’t meditate at all while he was there. And yet he also tells how he and George went with one of the Belur Math swamis to meditate in the shrine of the Divine Mother at Dakshineswar and how they all three became aware that the image was alive!

  September 18. The day before yesterday, I went up to the Center and worked right through the proofs of Ramakrishna and His Disciples, incorporating all the corrections suggested by our various advisers. Now, aside from checking the captions under the photographs, the whole job is done and the rest is up to the publishers.

  India had a last straw to throw on my back, after all this while. Someone from the committee of the Parliament of Religions wrote saying that one of my talks isn’t ready for publication because it was never properly recorded. So they want me to rewrite it. No, I told Swami. Whereupon, he said he would do it. Oh, the blackmail! Of course I had to say that, if he did it, I would revise it later.

  November 18. Swami told us: “Think about death—and then you’ll know what to pray for.”

  * * *

  American and British reviews of Ramakrishna and His Disciples began to appear in April 1965 and continued to do so throughout that summer. The majority of them were unfavorable. And I suspected some of the few favorable reviewers of being fellow believers rather than purely literary admirers.

  One recurring objection to the book was that I, who had written such worldly novels, was its author. “It is still a bit difficult to regard Herr Issyvoo as a gurufancier.” Such critics had evidently expected that I would handle this subject, also, with irony or treat it as high camp. My matter-of-fact presentation of biographical source material disappointed and bored them: “A reverent but rather colorless guide … The whole book is written in this for-the-children manner … A second-rate fairy-story … Poker-faced solemnity while describing some of the antics of Ramakrishna … Describes this feverish history in a vein of utter credulity.”

  For Ramakrishna himself, there was some rather patronizing praise: “An extraordinary being … piety beyond dispute … devotion, happiness and good cheer … a gay and even humorous man.” There was only one half-accusation of homosexuality: “A transvestite and something of a coquette.”

  My impression was that many of the reviewers—including even some who were themselves unbelievers—felt offended by the suggestion that Ramakrishna could have been an avatar, since this was a denial of the uniqueness of Jesus as Son of God. Few showed any respect for Ramakrishna’s spiritual experiences, declaring them to be without relevance to the problems of life, “not so much unbelievable as purposeless,” “ecstasy without ethics,” mere escapism. His loss of outer consciousness while in the state of samadhi was dismissed as “a sign of weakness, not strength.”

  And then, from the English and the Eastern Americans alike, came those predictable sneers at Southern California—which, it was claimed, the cult of Ramakrishna had had no difficulty in penetrating, because it is “Christendom’s soft underbelly.” There was even a sneer at Swami, who was judged guilty by association with the book, since I had dedicated it to him: “I have always been slightly suspicious of Indian sects who choose to establish themselves in this, the ‘crank belt’ of Southern California. No doubt, on one level, such a decision is logical enough; this, after all, is the region in which the ‘lolly’ is to be found in rich profusion and I suppose that even the most saintly swami cannot afford completely to disregard the more mundane pressures of life.”

  * * *

  November 17, 1965. Tonight Swami told me that he’d been astonished “to find some old tendencies” which caused him to feel caste prejudice. An official of the Indian government had come to see him and he had realized “by various indications” that the man must be an untouchable. Nevertheless, Swami had invited him to lunch, but had been “so relieved” when the invitation was refused.

  Swami was so funny, telling me this. It wasn’t the prejudice itself which seemed grotesque to me, only its subtleties—Swami hadn’t in the least minded shaking hands with this man, but he hated having to eat with him at the same table. “You see, Chris, they eat carrions.”

  “But this man doesn’t eat carrion, does he?” I asked.

  Swami was really shocked: “Oh no! Of course not! He is an educated man. He is sent by the Indian government!”

  December 21. At the class last Wednesday, we reached this passage in The Gospel of Ramakrishna: “As a devotee cannot live without God, so also God cannot live without His devotee … It is the Godhead that has become these two in order to enjoy Its own bliss.” This obviously moved Swami very much, but he seemed unable to explain to us why. It must be something he has actually experienced for himself.

  May 31, 1966. Yesterday I finished my third and final draft of A Meeting by the River. I’ve always known that I would have to show it to Swami—since he will be held responsible for me if the Belur Math takes offense at anything in the book. I have no great respect for the Math’s opinion. But the thought of Swami reading the homosexual scenes makes me squirm inside. Why? I would never apologize for them, morally or artistically; they are an absolutely necessary part of the story. Furthermore, Swami has praised me for being myself and making no pretenses about the way I live my life. Just the same, I squirm. Am taking him the manuscript tomorrow.

  June 3. Swami rang up to say he’d finished my novel. “As I finished reading the last scene there were two tears running down my cheeks.” What an angel he is! He was obviously every bit as relieved as I was that he didn’t have to say it would offend Belur Math. He even suggested that it could be sold at our bookshop, but I felt that this was just his relief speaking, he knew quite well that it couldn’t. He did also say that any Calcutta reader would know I w
as referring to the Belur Math, because there, is no other monastery like it on that part of the Ganges.

  * * *

  On June 18, we had the customary Father’s Day lunch at the Center, honoring Swami as our father. This year, some of the monks put on a musical show, with Vedantically revamped lyrics of the songs from My Fair Lady. One of the lyrics was about me: “Blimey, he’s a blinking limey and a real fine bloke.”

  I was embarrassed but also touched and pleased. I am always aware of a relationship to the monastics here. I am still a member of their family, even though I now know very few of my relatives well. As for the nonmonastic respectable majority of the congregation, it is only Swami’s approval which forces them to accept me and pretend to themselves that they haven’t heard lurid and no doubt fairly accurate rumors about my life. The fact that I’ve written the Ramakrishna biography and worked on the Gita and the Shankara and the Patanjali translations must make my novels less, rather than more excusable in their eyes—it isn’t as if I didn’t know any better!

  July 16. Swami said that Maharaj had told him that morality is unimportant if you have devotion to God. “But of course we can’t preach that,” Swami added, with a giggle.

  I said that that was all very fine, but I personally could feel no devotion at all. Swami said, “Anyone who says he has devotion or thinks he has devotion doesn’t have it. People come to me every week and talk about their devotion to God. And I don’t believe them.”

  September 1. Swami is in hospital, with visiting forbidden. The doctor admits that he has had a slight heart attack but doesn’t seem alarmed. As always, it must be very hard to judge how sick Swami is, because he relaxes so completely toward any illness. If it wants him to be sick, okay, he’ll be sick.