Autobiography of a Yogi Part 7

"The sage will be your Sanskrit tutor," my parent announced confidently.

Father hoped to satisfy my religious yearnings by instructions from a learned philosopher. But the tables were subtly turned: my new teacher, far from offering intellectual aridities, fanned the embers of my G.o.d-aspiration. Unknown to Father, Swami Kebalananda was an exalted disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. The peerless guru had possessed thousands of disciples, silently drawn to him by the irresistibility of his divine magnetism. I learned later that Lahiri Mahasaya had often characterized Kebalananda as RIs.h.i.+ or illumined sage.

Luxuriant curls framed my tutor's handsome face. His dark eyes were guileless, with the transparency of a child's. All the movements of his slight body were marked by a restful deliberation. Ever gentle and loving, he was firmly established in the infinite consciousness.

Many of our happy hours together were spent in deep KRIYA meditation.

Kebalananda was a noted authority on the ancient SHASTRAS or sacred books: his erudition had earned him the t.i.tle of "Shastri Mahasaya,"

by which he was usually addressed. But my progress in Sanskrit scholars.h.i.+p was unnoteworthy. I sought every opportunity to forsake prosaic grammar and to talk of yoga and Lahiri Mahasaya. My tutor obliged me one day by telling me something of his own life with the master.

"Rarely fortunate, I was able to remain near Lahiri Mahasaya for ten years. His Benares home was my nightly goal of pilgrimage. The guru was always present in a small front parlor on the first floor.

As he sat in lotus posture on a backless wooden seat, his disciples garlanded him in a semicircle. His eyes sparkled and danced with the joy of the Divine. They were ever half closed, peering through the inner telescopic orb into a sphere of eternal bliss. He seldom spoke at length. Occasionally his gaze would focus on a student in need of help; healing words poured then like an avalanche of light.

"An indescribable peace blossomed within me at the master's glance.

I was permeated with his fragrance, as though from a lotus of infinity. To be with him, even without exchanging a word for days, was experience which changed my entire being. If any invisible barrier rose in the path of my concentration, I would meditate at the guru's feet. There the most tenuous states came easily within my grasp. Such perceptions eluded me in the presence of lesser teachers. The master was a living temple of G.o.d whose secret doors were open to all disciples through devotion.

"Lahiri Mahasaya was no bookish interpreter of the scriptures.

Effortlessly he dipped into the 'divine library.' Foam of words and spray of thoughts gushed from the fountain of his omniscience. He had the wondrous clavis which unlocked the profound philosophical science embedded ages ago in the VEDAS. {FN4-6} If asked to explain the different planes of consciousness mentioned in the ancient texts, he would smilingly a.s.sent.

"'I will undergo those states, and presently tell you what I perceive.' He was thus diametrically unlike the teachers who commit scripture to memory and then give forth unrealized abstractions.

"'Please expound the holy stanzas as the meaning occurs to you.'

The taciturn guru often gave this instruction to a near-by disciple.

'I will guide your thoughts, that the right interpretation be uttered.' In this way many of Lahiri Mahasaya's perceptions came to be recorded, with voluminous commentaries by various students.

"The master never counseled slavish belief. 'Words are only sh.e.l.ls,'

he said. 'Win conviction of G.o.d's presence through your own joyous contact in meditation.'

"No matter what the disciple's problem, the guru advised KRIYA YOGA for its solution.

"'The yogic key will not lose its efficiency when I am no longer present in the body to guide you. This technique cannot be bound, filed, and forgotten, in the manner of theoretical inspirations.

Continue ceaselessly on your path to liberation through KRIYA, whose power lies in practice.'

"I myself consider KRIYA the most effective device of salvation through self-effort ever to be evolved in man's search for the Infinite."

Kebalananda concluded with this earnest testimony. "Through its use, the omnipotent G.o.d, hidden in all men, became visibly incarnated in the flesh of Lahiri Mahasaya and a number of his disciples."

A Christlike miracle by Lahiri Mahasaya took place in Kebalananda's presence. My saintly tutor recounted the story one day, his eyes remote from the Sanskrit texts before us.

"A blind disciple, Ramu, aroused my active pity. Should he have no light in his eyes, when he faithfully served our master, in whom the Divine was fully blazing? One morning I sought to speak to Ramu, but he sat for patient hours fanning the guru with a hand-made palm-leaf PUNKHA. When the devotee finally left the room, I followed him.

"'Ramu, how long have you been blind?'

"'From my birth, sir! Never have my eyes been blessed with a glimpse of the sun.'

"'Our omnipotent guru can help you. Please make a supplication.'

"The following day Ramu diffidently approached Lahiri Mahasaya. The disciple felt almost ashamed to ask that physical wealth be added to his spiritual superabundance.

"'Master, the Illuminator of the cosmos is in you. I pray you to bring His light into my eyes, that I perceive the sun's lesser glow.'

"'Ramu, someone has connived to put me in a difficult position. I have no healing power.'

"'Sir, the Infinite One within you can certainly heal.'

"'That is indeed different, Ramu. G.o.d's limit is nowhere! He who ignites the stars and the cells of flesh with mysterious life-effulgence can surely bring l.u.s.ter of vision into your eyes.'

"The master touched Ramu's forehead at the point between the eyebrows.

{FN4-7} "'Keep your mind concentrated there, and frequently chant the name of the prophet Rama {FN4-8} for seven days. The splendor of the sun shall have a special dawn for you.'

"Lo! in one week it was so. For the first time, Ramu beheld the fair face of nature. The Omniscient One had unerringly directed his disciple to repeat the name of Rama, adored by him above all other saints. Ramu's faith was the devotionally ploughed soil in which the guru's powerful seed of permanent healing sprouted." Kebalananda was silent for a moment, then paid a further tribute to his guru.

"It was evident in all miracles performed by Lahiri Mahasaya that he never allowed the ego-principle {FN4-9} to consider itself a causative force. By perfection of resistless surrender, the master enabled the Prime Healing Power to flow freely through him.

"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 fas.h.i.+oned, 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 n.o.ble 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 beat.i.tude of the Eight G.o.ds."

{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.

CHAPTER: 5

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.

Two years elapsed between my flight with Amar toward the Himalayas, and the great day of Sri Yukteswar's arrival into my life. During that interim I met a number of sages-the "Perfume Saint," the "Tiger Swami," Nagendra Nath Bhaduri, Master Mahasaya, and the famous Bengali scientist, Jagadis Chandra Bose.

My encounter with the "Perfume Saint" had two preambles, one harmonious and the other humorous.