My Guru and His Disciple

by Christopher Isherwood

  “It was a great grace,” he told me solemnly. On another occasion, speaking to Prema, he interpreted this vision as having been a sign from Maharaj that I was the proper person to write the Ramakrishna biography. How like Swami that was! When he had set his heart on something, it had to have the Lord’s blessing.

  * * *

  March 13, 1958. Swami told me that the people at Belur Math had written that George had been utterly transformed by sannyas in a single day—but they didn’t say how. George himself had written: “Three days ago, I became a Brahmin. Two days ago, I became a ghost—one always becomes what one fears! Yesterday I became Krishnananda.” There is a majestic note of impersonality in this last sentence. It’s like when you say, in the ritual worship, “I am He.”

  (George was referring to different stages of his preparation to take the vows of sannyas. The sannyasin has to renounce all caste distinctions. Since you can’t renounce what you haven’t got, George had first to be admitted into the highest caste, that of the Brahmins. Taking sannyas is regarded as a spiritual rebirth. Since you can’t be reborn as long as you are still alive, George had first to think of himself as having died and become a ghost.)

  March 28. Swami said he has only recently discovered that God’s grace is actually in the mantram. Maharaj had told him that this was so.

  April 24. Swami says that visions don’t matter—only devotion matters. He told me to “remember the Lord.”

  May 9. Swami said that enlightenment is not loss of individuality but enlargement of individuality, because you realize that you’re everything.

  June 26. Swami told me that he feels the presence of the Lord almost continuously; he no longer has to make much of an effort. When he wakes up in the night—which he has to do, two or three times, to go to the toilet, because of his prostate trouble—he feels the presence. Sometimes it is Ramakrishna, sometimes Holy Mother, Maharaj, or Swamiji. I asked if it made any difference that he had known Maharaj and seen Holy Mother during their lifetimes, but not the others. No, he said, they were all equally real.

  He says he never prays directly for problems to be solved. He only asks for more devotion to the Lord.

  August 22. Unwillingly, I have to admit to myself that the whole introductory section of Ramakrishna and His Disciples—telling how I personally came to know about him—is irrelevant. I’ve written seventy pages and it’s not that they’re bad; they just don’t belong in this book. I can probably use them, one of these days, somewhere else.

  (The Vedanta Society’s press published a revised version of this material in 1963, as a pamphlet called An Approach to Vedanta.)

  August 31. Swami told me on the phone that a well-known actress came to him and asked if she should go to India. Swami said, “Why? You won’t get anything out of India unless you have reached something inside yourself.” He then asked her if she had been meditating according to his instructions. When she told him no, he “got all excited” and told her not to come back until she had done so for a month. So then she got out of her chair and sat on the floor at Swami’s feet and said, “Teach me once again.” So he did, and she went away—on probation!

  November 19. Tonight I went up to the Center. Suddenly I was so glad to be sitting on the floor beside Swami’s chair—like his dog, without saying a word. After supper, I read them the revised first chapter of the Ramakrishna book.

  December 11. Swami told me that he’d had “a terrible time” that morning, in the shrine room: “I mean, a good terrible time.” He had been overpowered by the knowledge that “there is abundant grace.” He had cried so much that he had had to leave the temple. He said, what was the use of reasoning and philosophy, when all that mattered was love of God.

  * * *

  Early in January 1959, while I was having supper with Swami, he mentioned the apartment house which the Vedanta Society was about to have built, as an income property. Several devotees were planning to move into it. He urged me and Don to take one of the apartments.

  To have done this would have been almost the same as moving into the Center itself, right across the street. We should have become involved in all its activities, to the gradual exclusion of our own. No doubt, Swami would soon have got into the habit of sending for me at all hours, just as he would send for one of the monks or nuns, whenever he was troubled by an anxiety or inspired by a new project … No, the apartment house was out of the question for us, and I never considered it seriously, though I had to pretend to him for a while that I was doing so.

  Swami’s suggestion was obviously his first move in another back-to-the-monastery campaign. This time, my relationship with Don was under attack. When monk- or nun-making was possible, one had to accept the fact that Swami, being Swami, would do his best to break up any worldly relationship, however fond he might be of the individuals involved in it.

  Though I knew better than to try to persuade Don, I did, of course, hope that he might eventually become Swami’s disciple. I longed to share that part of my life with him. But, in that case, Swami would have to accept us as a pair of householder devotees. I couldn’t imagine myself becoming a monk again under any circumstances, as long as I had Don. If Don were to decide to become a monk, I suppose I might have followed him back into the Order—even though I knew that this would be a separation; a more painful one, perhaps, than death or desertion. Swami would keep us living apart from each other in different centers. He had already “put asunder” several married couples who wished to become monastics, sending the wife to Montecito and the husband to Trabuco. The old permissive days of the single Hollywood household were long since over.

  * * *

  April 29, 1959. Swami told us he believes that he, as an old man during his last incarnation, met Brahmananda as a young man. This was during the eighteen-eighties, on the bank of the river Narmada, where they were both practicing austerities.

  I don’t think I had ever heard Swami say this before—as he grew older, he revealed more and more of his past life. If I had heard this earlier, I should have remembered it as a possible explanation of Maharaj’s otherwise mysterious question, when he and Abanindra first met: “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  Swami’s statement also relates to a story which is printed in his book about Brahmananda, The Eternal Companion:

  I was sitting cross-legged in front of Maharaj with his feet resting on my knees. This was the position in which I often used to massage his feet. Then something happened to me which I cannot explain, though I feel certain that it was Maharaj’s doing. I found myself in a condition in which I was talking and talking, forgetting my usual restraint; it seemed to me that I spoke freely and even eloquently for a long time, but I do not remember what I said. Maharaj listened and said nothing.

  Suddenly I returned to normal consciousness and became aware of Maharaj leaning toward me and asking with an amused smile, “What did you say?” I then realized that I had addressed him as “tumi” (the familiar form of “you,” which is used in speaking to equals and friends). I hastened to correct myself, repeating the sentence—I have forgotten what it was—but using “apani” (the respectful form of “you,” by which we addressed him). At this, he seemed to lose all interest in the conversation and sat upright again.

  I can only assume that Maharaj wanted to corroborate his own intuitive knowledge of my past lives and that he therefore put me into this unusual state of consciousness in which I was able to tell him what he wanted to know.

  (The Hindus believe that memory of our past lives is stored in the mind and can be evoked by oneself or by another person. If Swami had been an old man at the time of this previous meeting with Brahmananda, it would have been natural for him to address the young Brahmananda familiarly.)

  * * *

  In the middle of that summer, one of the monks at Trabuco decided that he wanted to leave the Order and marry a woman he had met. He had been in the monastery for years and the monastic life had seemed to be his true and contentedly accepted vocation.r />
  Swami had been known to get violently upset in such situations, shedding tears and lying awake for nights on end. On first hearing about the woman, he had exclaimed, “I’d like to poison her!” Later, however, he became calm and seemed almost indifferent—which rather hurt the monk’s feelings. This intrigued me. When I questioned Swami, he showed a curious objectivity, as he often did when discussing his own reactions. “I couldn’t pray for him, Chris. I don’t know why. I only said that the Lord must do his will. I prayed three whole nights for ———,” naming another monastic who had left the Order.

  Swami’s view was: Why did the monk have to marry this woman right away? Why didn’t he go off with her somewhere and have an affair? Then he would probably get tired of her and want to come back to the Order. Swami was quite ready to take the monk back, as long as he wasn’t married; but if he did rejoin the Order, Swami said, he would be sent to one of the Ramakrishna monasteries in India for a while, before returning to Trabuco. The monk finally got married, however.

  Lest readers think that Swami’s attitude to the woman betrayed male chauvinism, I should mention that on another occasion, when one of the nuns wanted to marry a man, Swami’s attitude to him was equally ruthless.

  * * *

  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?