My Guru & His Disciple (27 page)

*   *   *

On September 22, 1959, Swami left for India with five nuns who had just taken their final vows, thus becoming our first
pravrajikas,
female swamis. Swami returned three months later.

*   *   *

During 1960, my diary records almost nothing of interest about Swami or the Vedanta centers.

On September 17, I had a visit from one of the newer monks at Trabuco. He was obviously uncertain whether he wanted to go on living there or not and hoped to get some reassurance from me. Could I give it to him?
Should
I give it to him? I had been in this situation several times before, and it was always tricky.

He asked me about my time up at the Center in the nineteen-forties, why I joined and why I left. I tried to avoid presenting myself to him as a model he could identify with—pointing out that I didn't start off by deciding to become a monk, that I was drawn into the Center because of Swami's desire to have me as a collaborator on his Gita translation, that when I decided to leave there was no dramatic break, that I have continued to see Swami and be his collaborator ever since.

“So really,” he asked, “it's much the same now as if you'd stayed on there being a monk?” But I couldn't let him think that. So I owned that there had been a “jazzy” (the words I sometimes pick!) period in my life after I'd left, and that, indeed, people had come to Swami and told him I was going to the dogs—and that Swami had charmingly shut them up … So then I got the conversation off onto Swami and how marvelously he has changed since I've known him—proving that the spiritual life does bring its reward … I hope he was satisfied.

(Apparently he wasn't, since he left the Order not long after this.)

*   *   *

December 26. Swami's birthday lunch. Swami radiant, all in white. “You don't have to tell me that you love me,” he said to us, after the girls had sung the gooey second verse of the Happy Birthday song.

February 17, 1961. Today was the Ramakrishna puja, so I went to vespers. There were lots of people, and Swami unwisely decided to save time—he thought it would take too long for each one of us to come up into the shrine room, be touched by the relics, offer a flower, and leave again. So, instead, he came down out of the shrine room with the tray of relics and moved around among us, touching us with it as we sat on the floor of the temple. This arrangement would have worked if each person had got up and left the temple after being touched. Only, a lot of them didn't. Prema said he believed that one individual was dead drunk, but I think it was sheer affectation; some like to pretend to themselves that the touch of the relics has put them into a trance. Thus an absurd traffic jam was created and Swami became confused. So several were touched twice and others not at all.

March 2. Yesterday I called the Center and told them that I wouldn't be coming there for supper, as I usually do on Wednesdays—this was because I wanted to get on with my work. A bit later, Swami called me and said, “I'm lonely for you, Chris.” It wasn't that he was nagging at me to come. He just felt like saying this, so he picked up the phone and said it. There are no strings attached to his love, therefore it is never embarrassed. The ordinary so-called lover is out to get something from his beloved, therefore he is afraid of going too far and becoming tiresome.

*   *   *

Don spent nearly all of that year in London, studying art at the Slade School. In April, I went over there to be with him. I returned in October.

*   *   *

In November, I went to stay at Trabuco with Swami and with Swami Ritajananda, who was leaving soon to take charge of the Vedanta Society at Gretz, just outside Paris.

As we sat in the cloister, with that marvelous still-empty prospect of lion-golden hills opening away to the line of the sea, I said to Swami: “You're really
certain
that God exists?”

He laughed: “Of course! If he doesn't exist, then I don't exist.”

“And do you feel he gives you strength to bear misfortune?”

“I don't think of it like that. I just know he will take care of me. It's rather hard to explain. Whatever happens, it will be all right.”

I asked him when he began to feel certain that God existed.

“When I met Maharaj. Then I knew that one could know God. He even made it seem easy … And now I feel God's presence every day. But it's only very seldom that I see him.”

Later, after Ritajananda had joined us, Swami said, “Stay here, Chris, and I'll give you sannyas. You shall have a special dispensation from the Pope.” He said this laughingly, but I had a feeling that he really meant it—otherwise, he surely wouldn't have said it in Ritajananda's presence.

I said, “Swami, that would be a mistake worthy of Vivekananda himself.”

(This was an allusion to the fact that Vivekananda had sometimes given sannyas to Western disciples who were—judging from their subsequent behavior—quite unworthy of it.)

Swami says that the Hindu astrologers predict the world will come to an end next February 2nd. However, the astrologers themselves are praying that it shan't happen. I objected—rather cleverly, I thought—that Ramakrishna has predicted another incarnation for himself on earth, and that this contradicts any such prophecy. Swami agreed.

November 8. Yesterday evening, I got back from Trabuco and went up to the Hollywood Center to attend the Kali puja, just to please Swami. I never feel I have any personal part in it. It belongs, quite naturally, to the women, and how they dress up for it, in their saris! One of them had let her hair down, falling loose over her shoulders but, oh, so elegantly arranged. Well, it's their party … Meanwhile, I sat outside the shrine room in a corner and gossiped cozily in whispers with one of the monks from Trabuco, as we waited for Swami to asperse us with Ganges water. This he did vigorously, as if he were ridding a room of flies with DDT.

(This reminds me of another, earlier occasion, at a puja also being held at night, when Swami was about to asperse the assembled devotees. Suddenly he burst out laughing and exclaimed, “You look so funny, sitting there!” His laughter—in which, after a moment's shock, we all joined—shattered the gravity of this ancient ritual, making it now and new.)

Sixteen

Don and I were in New York during December and January; he had a show of his portrait drawings there. He stayed on for a while, after its opening, to do more portraits on commission. I got back to Los Angeles on January 27, because I wanted to take part in Vivekananda's breakfast puja.

January 28, 1962. Prema met me and drove me to the Center. I spent the night in one of the apartments of their apartment house. This morning, just before six, I saw Swami, and then we all went into the shrine for the breakfast ritual. I read the Katha Upanishad—vain, I have to admit, of my rendition.

The
Katha Upanishad
begins by telling a story which introduces its philosophical message:

Vajasrabasa is making a sacrifice, to win God's favor. At the same time, being miserly, he is trying to cheat God by offering up his worst cattle, the old, the barren, the blind, and the lame. Nachiketa, one of his sons, sees this and is shocked and disgusted. He asks his father scornfully, “To whom will you offer
me
?” And he repeats this question until Vajasrabasa gets angry and tells him, “I offer you to Death.”

Nachiketa, who is ardently spiritual, “like a flame of fire,” but also, one feels, a bit of a prig, answers that Vajasrabasa must not go back on his words, even though they were spoken in anger. Nachiketa is ready to die, and he sets out at once for the house of the King of Death.

But, after this noble exit, there is a comic anticlimax. Death is not at home. Nachiketa has to wait three days for his return.

The King of Death is a character whom Bernard Shaw might have put into a play. Outwardly, he is a figure of majesty and terror; inwardly, he is disillusioned and therefore wise. He knows now that he was foolish to have wished to become King of Death, since his power is not eternal.

When Death arrives home, he is scolded by his servants. They tell him that he has insulted this Brahmin youth by keeping him waiting. Death, as a mere householder of a lower caste, must show hospitality to every Brahmin, or he will lose the merit of his good karma. So Death approaches Nachiketa with courteous apologies and offers him three boons, in compensation for the three days he has waited.

The first two boons which Nachiketa asks are immediately granted. Then, for his third boon, Nachiketa requires an answer to the question: When a man dies, does he continue to exist, or doesn't he?

The King of Death is secretly delighted. This question shows him that Nachiketa is a serious seeker after knowledge. However, wanting to be certain of Nachiketa's seriousness, Death slyly tests him further by raising objections. Even the gods, he says, were once puzzled by this mystery. The truth of it is subtle and hard to understand. Why doesn't Nachiketa ask for something else—sons and grandsons, a hundred years of life, cattle, elephants, horses, gold, a huge kingdom, heavenly maidens such as are ordinarily not to be had by mortals, together with their bright chariots and their musical instruments?

But Nachiketa rejects all these, saying that no one who has met Death face to face, as he himself has, could desire such things, knowing them all to be perishable and therefore worthless.

Whereupon Death, convinced that he has found a worthy pupil, begins to teach Nachiketa the truth about immortality …

Reading this story aloud in the shrine room, I consciously did my utmost to entertain our invisible guest as he sat at his breakfast. Now and then, I would raise my eyes to the shrine and address him directly. I hammed up the passages of drama and comedy, trying to make him weep or chuckle … You were showing off, I would later accuse myself; is
that
what you call worship? I was offering Vivekananda what I do best, I would reply; and if I don't enjoy my own performance, how can I expect
him
to?

Then I had breakfast with Swami. He has been pestered by another of these madwomen—they're one of his chief occupational hazards. She broke into his room recently, in the middle of the night, and later wrote letters accusing him of forcing her into samadhi against her will, and of teaching her masturbation by remote control. Swami can never help laughing when he talks about such situations, but they scare him when they happen.

He gave me mahaprasad, a grain of rice from the Jagannath Temple at Puri. Ramakrishna said that this prasad is like Ganges water, “Brahman made visible.” Swami has a whole store of these grains and takes one first thing in the morning, every day.

May 24. The madwoman has been sending Swami more anonymous letters, with torn-up photos of Ramakrishna or Swami in them, and the question, “Is the farce still going on?”

June 2. Don said this morning that he would like to have a mantram and wished Swami would give him one. It's the first time Don has ever said this.

June 7. Yesterday evening, Don came up with me to the Center, talked to Swami alone, and told him he wanted a mantram. Swami seems to have been pleased and surprised—as well he might be, since Don has known him for nearly ten years without asking for one! He gave Don some instructions about meditating and told him he'd initiate him next December.

(The mantram Swami gave Don must have been a provisional one, not the personal, permanent mantram which he would be given at the time of his initiation.)

Swami is being threatened again by the madwoman. So the boys have fixed a buzzer system between his room and the monastery. If she arrives in the middle of the night and starts to smash in Swami's door, he merely has to flip the switch and the monastery is alerted like a fire station. The boys can be over in eighteen seconds—they have rehearsed it!

July 9. Don left for New York this evening, to draw various people. While waiting for his plane at the airport, we talked about the mantram Swami gave him. He said that repeating it has made a tremendous difference to him already. He also said he was afraid that making japam might take over his life. He was afraid he might get in deeper than he was ready to get, and be unable to think about anything but finding God. I said well, that was something we neither of us could do anything about, if it was going to happen. My attitude wasn't due to pious resignation. I just don't believe it will happen, so I have no idea how I should react if it did. I suppose I should be both miserable and delighted.

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That autumn, the swami in charge of one of the other Vedanta centers died. A woman member of his congregation had gradually, through the years, established herself as a power figure. Now she seemed to be threatening to take control of the Center. Its other members, we heard, were all under her influence and would do nothing to oppose her.

A few days later, while I was visiting Swami, several women devotees were discussing the situation in his presence. One of these women was particularly vehement. She kept telling Swami that he ought to get on a plane and go and deal with the power woman in person, but that he was afraid to. It was a strangely ugly scene, reminding me of the women in Icelandic sagas who taunt their men into going out to kill someone. The woman who was speaking seemed to turn into the woman she was attacking.

This was one of the rare occasions on which Swami appeared to me to be intimidated and temporarily helpless. Yet I didn't feel disturbed. Such glimpses of his weaknesses and faults helped me to see him doubly—as Abanindra Nath Ghosh and as the receptacle of “this thing,” the Eternal. If I had felt that it was Abanindra who was getting more and more spiritual, I should have been shocked by his accompanying weaknesses. But no, I told myself, that isn't what's happening, at all. Abanindra, with his weaknesses
and
his virtues, is fading away, while “this thing,” which has always been present within him, is becoming more and more evident.