“The numerous bodies which were spectacularly
healed through Lahiri Mahasaya eventually had to feed
the flames of cremation. But the silent spiritual
awakenings he effected, the Christlike disciples he
fashioned, are his imperishable miracles.”
I never became a Sanskrit scholar; Kebalananda taught
me a diviner syntax.
{FN4-1} Literally, “renunciate.”
From Sanskrit verb roots, “to cast aside.”
{FN4-2} Effects of past actions, in this or a former
life; from Sanskrit KRI, “to do.”
{FN4-3} Bhagavad Gita, IX, 30-31. Krishna
was the greatest prophet of India; Arjuna was his
foremost disciple.
{FN4-4} I always addressed him as Ananta-da.
DA is a respectful suffix which the eldest brother
in an Indian family receives from junior brothers
and sisters.
{FN4-5} At the time of our meeting, Kebalananda had
not yet joined the Swami Order and was generally called
“Shastri Mahasaya.” To avoid confusion
with the name of Lahiri Mahasaya and of Master Mahasaya
(../chapter 9), I am referring to my Sanskrit tutor
only by his later monastic name of Swami Kebalananda.
His biography has been recently published in Bengali.
Born in the Khulna district of Bengal in 1863, Kebalananda
gave up his body in Benares at the age of sixty-eight.
His family name was Ashutosh Chatterji.
{FN4-6} The ancient four Vedas comprise over
100 extant canonical books. Emerson paid the
following tribute in his journal to Vedic thought:
“It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless
ocean. It contains every religious sentiment,
all the grand ethics which visit in turn each noble
poetic mind. . . . It is of no use to put away
the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat
upon the pond, Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently:
eternal necessity, eternal compensation, unfathomable
power, unbroken silence. . . . This is her creed.
Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment—these
panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude
of the Eight Gods.”
{FN4-7} The seat of the “single” or spiritual
eye. At death the consciousness of man is usually
drawn to this holy spot, accounting for the upraised
eyes found in the dead.
{FN4-8} The central sacred figure of the Sanskrit
epic, ramayana.
{FN4-9} Ahankara, egoism; literally, “I do.”
The root cause of dualism or illusion of maya,
whereby the subject (ego) appears as object; the creatures
imagine themselves to be creators.
A “PERFUME SAINT” DISPLAYS HIS WONDERS
“To every thing there is a season, and a time
to every purpose under the heaven.”
I did not have this wisdom of Solomon to comfort me;
I gazed searchingly about me, on any excursion from
home, for the face of my destined guru. But my
path did not cross his own until after the completion
of my high school studies.
