My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  Besides, we shared a cultural background with him. Abanindra’s British tyrants had forced him to attend schools modeled on the British educational system, to learn to speak British English, not American, and to study literature and philosophy which was almost exclusively British. (Abanindra had found the philosophy unsubtle and materialistic but had acquired a lasting fondness for Shakespeare.)

  And now Abanindra, transformed into Prabhavananda, was actually playing teacher to two highly distinguished representatives of the tyrant race. Here were Huxley and Heard coming to him as pupils, humbly intent on learning the philosophy of his race, which their ancestors had conquered and then presumed to teach. What a victory! No, I am not being flippant. And I don’t mean that Prabhavananda was enjoying the situation spitefully. That he should have such pupils gave him genuine pride, and his pride was tempered with humility. He was constantly aware of the many things which the two of them could have taught him. He had a Hindu reverence for knowledge as such, even though much of their knowledge was of a sort which his monastic training made him regard as spiritually worthless. He really valued his association with them and continued to value it in later years when he saw them only seldom.

  But were Heard and Huxley fully his pupils, even at the beginning? Were they indeed accepting his philosophy as a whole, without reservations? No, I don’t think they were. Both of them were eclectics—continually on the lookout for fresh formulations of ideas, new items of information which they could fit into their complex individual world pictures. Neither one of them could have put himself unreservedly under the direction of a single teacher.

  And then there was the question of age. It certainly wasn’t unheard-of for a swami to have disciples who were older than himself. But the Hindu concept of the relationship does have a father-child aspect; and both Huxley and Heard may well have found this embarrassing. Gerald was four years older than Prabhavananda, Aldous was less than a year younger. Yet both of them could have belonged to a senior generation, not because they looked so old but because of their air of maturity and assurance. Prabhavananda, though nearly forty-six, was still aware of his boyish appearance; it sometimes made him feel unsure of himself, as he was the first to admit.

  I, on the other hand, was eleven years Prabhavananda’s junior, as boyish-looking as he, and even less sure of myself. Many of the psychological props which had hitherto supported me had been knocked away. I now needed a new kind of support, and I urgently hoped to be able to accept him as my first and only religious teacher, my guru.

  He was considerably shorter than I was. This made me able to love him in a special, protective way, as I loved little Annie Avis, my childhood nanny, and as I should love Stravinsky. His smallness sometimes seemed baby-like, because it was combined with an animal lack of self-consciousness about his physical functions. He belched loudly without excusing himself. He also expelled the mucus from his sinuses with harsh snorting noises which embarrassed the fastidious. (In later life, he stopped doing this—probably because his sinuses cleared after he gave up smoking.)

  As a youth he must have had a lithe, athletic body which I would no doubt have found sexually attractive. He was still slim and carried himself erect. I was aware of a strong sexuality in him which seemed to be controlled, rather than repressed or concealed. He would remark, quite often and without embarrassment, that some girl or woman was beautiful. His honest recognition of the power of sex attraction and his lack of prudery in speaking of it was a constant corrective to my inherited puritanism.

  The breadth and smoothness of his forehead gave him a calm, truthful look. His nostrils were very wide; I wondered if this was the result of the deep inhalations and exhalations which he recommended as a method of quieting the mind before meditation. His lips were big and expressive, without any suggestion of austere restraint; when they parted a little, the two extra-large front teeth peeped out, comically rabbitlike. His skin was golden but not dark. When he wore his monastic robes—of which the yellow color symbolizes renunciation—the effect was striking; he seemed all gold. But that was only when he gave lectures in the temple. Otherwise, he nearly always wore informal Western clothes: a white shirt with or without a tie, a woolen pullover, gray flannel slacks, and leather slippers.

  Oriental eyes are often somewhat dismissively described as beautiful. Prabhavananda’s eyes, if you considered them simply as features, were not remarkably so. They didn’t dazzle or dominate you at first glance. They were soft, dark, and moist, with yellowish whites. Therefore, whenever I describe their effect upon me, the reader must remember that I am really describing how Prabhavananda—or “this thing”—was using them on that particular occasion.

  His voice was naturally soft. But when he lectured, he spoke loudly and clearly, without effort. His English was fluent, with some quaint pronunciations which delighted me. He said “fussht” for “first,” “etarnal” for “eternal,” “okezzshionally” for “occasionally,” “whir-relied” for “whirled,” “Mr. Hard” for “Mr. Heard.”

  * * *

  “This house belongs to Maharaj. Maharaj is watching over it, over all of you. I can do nothing on my own. I am only his servant.” This was what Prabhavananda would tell me, and everybody else who came to the Center, again and again.

  Such statements embarrassed me a little at first. I reacted to them with a nervous smile. But I was aware that Prabhavananda didn’t make them lightly; that they didn’t merely express a conventional piety, as in the phrase: “This is God’s house.”

  You could say that his belief in the presence and protection of Brahmananda was all the religion he needed. It was through Brahmananda that he felt himself in communication with “this thing.” Actually, during his monastic life in India, he had met most of Ramakrishna’s direct disciples and had spent much more time with some of them than he had spent with Brahmananda himself. Knowing these disciples must have confirmed Prabhavananda’s faith. He spoke of them with the deepest reverence. But Brahmananda was his guru, and remained unique.

  Could I pretend to understand what such a devotion must mean? No. My own experience of relationships was so different and so inferior. I couldn’t help thinking of any sort of love relation as a bargain struck between two parties. The parties might keep to it for a short or a long while or even until death, but they could never regard it as absolutely firm. Neither one of the parties could be trusted not to violate it at any moment without warning—thus enabling the other party to impose penalties or employ the blackmail of forgiveness.

  Prabhavananda explained that Brahmananda didn’t love others in this person-to-person way. Having realized God, who is love, he had become love. Those who came into his presence felt that love; he gave forth love while remaining incapable of possessiveness or jealousy.

  I could understand this statement as an intellectual proposition; emotionally, it was unintelligible to me. And I had difficulty in relating it to Brahmananda’s behavior during that brief, extraordinary scene of Abanindra’s decision to join the monastery. Brahmananda’s answer, “When the Lord wills,” seemed disconcertingly passive, almost indifferent—even though it was accompanied by a look of “unforgettable sweetness.” Was this because Brahmananda was already aware that Abanindra had subconsciously made up his mind to become a monk?

  And, beyond this mystery, there was an even greater one: What had both Brahmananda and Holy Mother meant by asking, “Haven’t I seen you before?” Must one suppose that they had been associated with Abanindra in a previous life? And did that mean that Abanindra was already a member of their inner circle and that his becoming a monk in this life was therefore inevitable? I decided not to try to make sense out of any of this for the present. I put it into what Gerald aptly called “my suspense account.”

  When Prabhavananda insisted that he himself wasn’t really running the Center, the image which occurred to me in trying to understand this situation was that of a party of rock climbers, roped together. The highest climber we could see was Prabha
vananda. But, above him, up there out of sight, was Brahmananda, the actual leader of the party. Brahmananda had already reached the summit, the goal of the climb. Therefore he must have seen to it that the top end of the rope was firmly belayed. The climbers could all follow him to the summit, provided that they didn’t lose their determination to go on climbing. Even if they slipped and fell, it could only be for a short distance. The rope would break their fall and hold them while they found a new toehold on the cliff face.

  It was very important to me that Prabhavananda described himself as a servant; that made me feel closer to him. It meant that I needn’t expect him to be perfect and try to explain away his weaknesses. From this standpoint, his major addiction, chain-smoking, seemed sympathetic, even reassuring. The humility expressed by his attitude to Brahmananda must surely protect him from spiritual pride. Instead of claiming the greatness of a spiritual teacher, he was showing us an example of a great disciple—which was what we most needed, being disciples ourselves.

  Nevertheless, the basic question remained: Was Brahmananda indeed up there, and was there contact between him and Prabhavananda? Perhaps the day would come when I should be able to get a direct answer to this, through meditation. All I could hope for at present was some kind of half answer obtained indirectly through Prabhavananda, by studying his words and actions and trying to get a glimpse of what was behind them.

  My only tool for Prabhavananda study was my own intuition. It certainly wasn’t infallible. It had made mistakes in the past, especially when I had demanded quick judgments; it functioned slowly. Still, it was all I had and better than nothing. It already assured me that Prabhavananda wasn’t in the least crazy and wasn’t in any sense a charlatan. But, for all his sanity, honesty, and intelligence, he could still be a wishful thinker, sincerely self-deceived. Would it ever be possible for me to feel certain about this, one way or the other?

  Four

  What I have just written is misleading in one respect; it suggests that my relationship with Prabhavananda was now established and continuous. Well, in a sense, it was. I thought about him many times every day, taking it for granted that he would be available whenever I needed him. But the astonishing fact remains that, during the rest of the year and the spring and summer of 1940, I very seldom went to see him.

  I will try to explain why.

  * * *

  Sometime in July 1939, Berthold Viertel, the poet and film director, had returned home from England via New York. I had first met him in 1933 in London, where we had worked together on the script of a film he was to direct (see Christopher and His Kind). We had become close friends.

  Berthold, his wife, Salka, and their three sons had a house near the beach in Santa Monica Canyon. Though Berthold and Salka were both Jews from Central Europe, they couldn’t exactly be called refugees, since they had settled in the United States several years before Hitler came into power. Both had worked for the Hollywood studios, Salka as an actress as well as a writer.

  Berthold had now been commissioned to direct a film and wanted me to help him with the script. It was to be about a young German officer who becomes a Nazi and is later disillusioned; quite ordinary stuff for those days, but when Berthold began to improvise on it, it sounded thrilling—what stuff didn’t? I agreed eagerly, although he warned me that there would be very little money in it for either of us—the producer was of the kind called “independent,” a more ominous word then than now. (Indeed, the film was never made and ended in a lawsuit—which I had to settle out of my own pocket.)

  Since 1933, refugees from Hitler’s Reich had been arriving in Los Angeles. Salka, because of her connections at the studios and elsewhere, was able to find many of them work, especially the writers, actors, and musicians. Her home had become one of their favorite meeting places.

  I myself belonged to this refugee world by adoption, having lived in it during my wanderings through various European countries, between 1933 and 1938. In those days, I had known a lot of its inhabitants, some intimately, and had been accepted by them almost as one of themselves, all the more so because I was traveling with an anti-Nazi German, Heinz. As far as an outsider could, I empathized with their self-mocking, witty despair and nearly sane paranoia.

  These people were already dwelling in a future, a wartime, which very few native Californians could even imagine. To myself, as a European, the war atmosphere which the refugees breathed was more native than the ignorant peacefulness of the California air. They drew me into their midst by an overwhelming psychological suction. While I was with them, I actually worried less, because I felt that they were all sharing my worry with me. I took to spending more and more time in their depressing yet comforting company and became reluctant to leave it.

  In September, a week or two after the outbreak of war in Europe, Vernon and I moved from the house we had been renting in Hollywood, into furnished rooms. These rooms were in Santa Monica Canyon, only a short walk from the Viertels but a long drive from where Chris Wood and Gerald Heard lived, and an even longer drive from the Vedanta Center.

  * * *

  Early in 1940, I got a job at M-G-M. This was chiefly thanks to the Viertels, who knew a producer there, Gottfried Reinhardt, one of Max Reinhardt’s sons. We were to make a film out of James Hilton’s novel Rage in Heaven. My fellow screenwriter was Robert Thoeren, an Austrian. So I remained within the refugee world even at the studio. Gottfried, Robert, and I often spoke German together when we were discussing the script.

  Looked at from outside, my life could have been described as busy, successful, and social. I was earning five hundred dollars a week, low-bracket pay by movie standards, Arabian Nights wealth by mine. I wasn’t inspired by my film work but I was fond of my fellow workers and enjoyed our parlor game of plot construction. In the evenings, at the Viertels’ and elsewhere, I mingled with famous and fascinating people: Aldous and Maria Huxley (who had a house nearby), Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Anita Loos, Thomas Mann and his family, Bertrand Russell. And yet, deep down, I was miserable. I felt steeped in that dull brutish inertia which the Hindus call tamas, the lowest condition of the psyche. My misery expressed itself in various minor ailments. These were being treated by a doctor, whose large fees I could now easily afford.

  The days go by and I don’t see the Swami, don’t start meditating. This isn’t mere laziness. The opposition is enormously strong. Incredible as it seems, part of me actually wants to wallow in black lazy misery, like a pig in filth.

  My diary adds that Vernon has finally caught my depression, “like a South Sea islander who nearly dies of a common cold imported by a trader.”

  * * *

  March 6, 1940. I’ve seen the Swami. He says if I’m too busy to meditate I should think about the word Om, which is God. But I can only become aware of God by thinking all around him. Om says nothing. It’s just a comic noise. I’m afraid the Swami is altogether too Indian for me. I must talk to Gerald again.

  The Sanskrit word Om is used by Hindus as the basic name of God, because it is thought of as being the most comprehensive of all human sounds. Fully pronounced, it combines utterance by the throat, the mouth, and the lips—approximately Ah-oo-mm. This I already knew. But there were moods in which my anti-Hindu prejudice made me rhyme Om with Tom, thus turning it into “just a comic noise”—as in om-tiddly-om-pom.

  * * *

  In July, I went at least twice to a class Prabhavananda was giving on the Upanishads (those portions of the Vedas which contain the teachings of Vedanta philosophy; the rest contain prayers, hymns, rules of conduct, and instructions for the performance of rituals).

  Seated on a cushion, he smilingly exposed the ignorance of his class. He is gentle, persuasive, and humorous. He speaks quietly, with an absolute, matter-of-fact authority. To him, spiritual truths are unanswerable facts, like the facts of geography. You don’t have to get excited about them, or argue or defend. You just state them … I notice that he has a taste for very elegant, pointed shoes.

  So
meone mentioned the Holy Ghost. The Swami was asked to explain It, and said that he couldn’t, he wasn’t a Christian. So everybody present had a try, and the difference in our definitions was a sufficient comment on the muddle of Christian theology. To every suggestion, the Swami replied, “No—that is too far-fetch-ed.” At last he sent one of the girls out for Webster’s Dictionary. Some of the class were quite scandalized. “You won’t find it there,” they told him. But the Swami was confident: “Webster’s Dictionary can tell you everything.” He was wrong, however. Webster said only: “Comforter, Paraclete.” The Swami promised to “ask Mr. Hard.” He seems to have great confidence in Gerald.

  On July 29, I got further instructions from Prabhavananda. He told me to meditate on the Atman, the indwelling God, “this thing” within each one of us: “Imagine that there is a cavity within you. In the middle of this cavity there is a throne, in the form of a red lotus. In the middle of this lotus, a golden light is burning. Approach this light and say ‘Oh Self, reveal Yourself to me.’”

  My comment on this was:

  My imagination revolts from this: it sounds like a stage scene at the Radio City Music Hall. But I shall try to do it. I have put myself into the Swami’s hands and I must follow his instructions, just as I follow Dr. K.’s. We always want to choose our own medicine. A rose, for example, wouldn’t seem nearly so silly to me. But perhaps the lotus is better, just because I don’t like it.

  “The Swami is too Indian for me” was a complaint I would return to, again and again. But, even while persisting in my prejudice, I had to admit to myself that the very Indianness of Vedanta was helpful to me. Because of my other, anti-Christian set of prejudices, I was repelled by the English religious words I had been taught in childhood and was grateful to Vedanta for speaking Sanskrit. I needed a brand-new vocabulary and here it was, with a set of philosophical terms which were exact in meaning, unemotive, untainted by disgusting old associations with clergymen’s sermons, schoolmasters’ pep talks, politicians’ patriotic speeches.