A Disciple's Journal: In the Company of Swami Ashokananda

by Sister Gargi

  It turned out that she was not only still living but resided in Salinas, California, a town within easy driving distance of San Francisco. Her name was Mrs. Louise Baker Hyde. I, of course, wrote to her and received a warm and enthusiastic reply, along with an invitation to lunch. I spent a memorable afternoon with Mrs. Hyde, who had known and the entire Hale family and remembered them well. She lent me many precious photographs to have copied for the book. I had no doubt that Swamiji himself had led me to her.

  The research often went like that, but there were also disappointments. I found John Fox’s address, for instance, only a week or two after he had died. John Fox had been secretary to Mrs. Ole Bull (Swamiji’s close friend and supporter) and was with Swami Vivekananda in London in 1896. His widow told me that he would have loved to talk with me about his memories of those wonderful days (she herself knew nothing of them). That was one of the times I kicked myself for being too slow. For the most part, though, research material seemed to drop into my lap from the sky.

  In June of 1965, Kathleen Davis and I flew to southern California, where Swami Vivekananda had lived and worked in December of 1899 and the early part of 1900. We visited the tiny Victorian house in South Pasadena that had belonged to the Mead sisters, where Swamiji and seven other grown people and one small child had lived—presumably in comfort—for about a month. That small gem of a house is today a place of pilgrimage and the room that Swamiji had to himself has been made into a shrine. Kathleen and I visited every other place in southern California where Swamiji had lived or lectured, and I spent a full day gathering information in the Huntington Library, to which I had temporary access. All in all, we spent a full, rewarding, and very pleasant week.

  In October of 1969, Bobbie Day and I flew to New York City where we rented a car and took off into the spectacular October countryside of upstate New York. When it was Bobbie’s turn to drive, I, to whom this fantastic splurge of nature was a new experience, took dozens of photographs in an attempt to capture the splendor of the scarlet and golden trees. We drove first to the estate of Ridgely in the Hudson River valley, where Mrs. Frances Leggett (the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Francis H. Leggett, Swamiji’s hosts in 1899) had invited us to spend a day and a night. Frances Leggett, a gracious and warm hostess, took time to show us Ridgely and its various houses.

  Then Bobbie and I went on a grand pilgrimage tour to visit the other places where Swamiji had lectured or stayed: Thousand Island Park in the St. Lawrence River; Camp Percy in New Hampshire; Mrs. Bull’s house in Cambridge, and Breezy Meadows in Farmington, Massachusetts; and Greenacre near Elliot, Maine. Finally we returned to New York City.

  From New York we flew back to San Francisco—I with much new information and many overexposed snapshots, some of which were of the empty sky and others of Bobbie’s hands on the steering wheel. There was only one good photograph of a flaming autumn tree. In late October of that year, I finished writing the second book, entitled Swami Vivekananda, His Second Visit to the West: New Discoveries.

  By then, Swami Ashokananda had had a cerebral stroke that paralyzed his left side. He had also become very ill with a kidney infection. His mind, however, was unaffected and he wanted me to read the new book to him. So, chapter by chapter, I read to him every night, at first sitting on a chair, which proved to be so uncomfortable that I took to kneeling on a cushion by his bedside, the manuscript open on the bed itself. Every now and then Swami would fall asleep and I would stop reading. After a few minutes of silence, he would abruptly open his eyes, fully awake. “Why have you stopped?” he would say. “Read on.”

  “You were asleep,” I would reply. He would simply say again, “Read on.” Once he replied incredulously, “Do you think I listen only with my surface mind?”

  Though he often seemed to be asleep, I learned that he was, indeed, listening to every word. If there was something in the text he did not like or something that was not exactly correct, his eyes would fly open and he would point out the fault or suggest a better way of putting what I was trying to say or a better way of organizing the chapter. He was a wonderful critic and editor. When I had read all the chapters to him, he said to the room at large, not hiding his pleasure, “Marie Louise has written a good book.” There was nothing that could have supported me more strongly during the editorial struggles that were to come than those words. “This time,” he said to me later, “you will have to fight your own battles.” He had armed me, though, and given me the backup force of his approval.

  Meanwhile, Marion Langerman, a devotee from Berkeley, who was just then between secretarial jobs, moved to San Francisco in order to type the manuscript at Swami’s request. She settled into Mara Lane’s apartment and typed daily for hours on end, until, at the very close of Swami Ashokananda’s life, the work was finished, and I could tell him so.

  Swami left his body on December 13, 1969. The drama of the last part of his life has been related in A Heart Poured Out and need not be repeated here. The blows his work received, his illnesses, his last struggles, and his victories were not a part of my journal, probably because I did not have the heart at the time to write any of it down. On the day of his departure from this world, I wrote in my journal only the words “My Beloved Swami.”

  EPILOGUE

  After the first overbearing mountains of grief gradually flattened out into a featureless and seemingly endless bog in which I found no footing and no path, nor wanted any, I awoke one morning as though called by a compelling and familiar voice—Swami Ashokananda’s—asking me, “What are you doing? Finish your work!”

  There was much work to finish. Although Swami Vivekananda, His Second Visit to the West: New Discoveries had been typed during 1969, I still had to write a preface, compile a list of illustrations, and copyedit the manuscript before it could be sent to India. On the evening of April 14, 1970, we offered the finished typescript in the shrine at the New Temple. Dorothy Murdock, Kathleen Davis, and I made a ceremony of it, performing a small worship at the altar. Afterward, we celebrated with chocolate ice cream and cookies at my new apartment in the convent building. We were moving back into life.

  By 1970, Western civilization had reached the Xerox stage—though barely. Kathleen and I drove to the town of Burlingame fifteen miles south of San Francisco to have two xeroxed copies made of the typescript. I mailed the first copy to Swami Gambhirananda, general secretary of the Ramakrishna Order, on April 17, and a day or two later I sent the second copy to the publisher, Swami Budhananda, president of Advaita Ashrama. Swami Gambhirananda, who was known never to leave an unanswered letter on his desk overnight, replied at once with noncommittal brevity, “Advaita Ashrama can now think of taking up the task of arranging for publication.”

  At the end of 1969, the convent had moved into the building on the corner of Steiner and Vallejo Streets less than a block away from the New Temple. Edith Soulé, Martha Muirhead, her younger sister Mary, Luke Williams, and I had separate apartments in this same building. Kathleen Davis occupied a bedroom and a kitchen in the center of the convent quarters with the idea, which never materialized, that she would eventually be absorbed into the convent itself.

  In the penthouse of this same building, a large room was devoted to the editing of Swami Ashokananda’s lectures and classes, which consisted of over nine hundred recorded tapes, fifty or so already transcribed. Nancy Jackman, Kathleen, and I were in charge of the editing, which occasionally entailed some rousing arguments, primarily between Nancy and me.

  After a trans-Pacific correspondence throughout 1971 and 1972 between Swami Budhananda and me over his editing of Second Visit—in which many points were battled over until the writing seemed to hang in shreds—the second book of New Discoveries was finally finished to our mutual satisfaction; it would be published in 1973.

  In the meantime, I had been collecting material for the third book of New Discoveries, which would be subtitled The World Teacher. During 1971, I was deep in
this work when Swami Budhananda wrote that he wanted me to edit those chapters of The Life of Swami Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western Disciples that dealt with Swamiji’s life and work in the West, to bring them up to date in accord with the facts that had been brought to light in the first two New Discoveries books.

  I was then fifty-nine years old and in good health but I felt that, at such an advanced age, I had only a few more years to live. I replied to Swami Budhananda that I could not, in my few remaining years, complete both my projected book and edit the Life. Swami Budhananda did not accept my reply. He persisted and eventually I acquiesced. I set aside my research for the third New Discoveries book and began to read the Life with the eye of an editor. In reply to my query about how far I could go in editing the book, Swami Budhananda wrote that I could make as many tentative alterations and additions as I wanted. With this go-ahead, I started serious work on the Life in November of 1971.

  Swami Prabuddhananda was now in charge of the Vedanta Society of Northern California; he had come from Bangalore in June of 1970 and soon began to acquire students of his own. Among these were two fancy-free, hippielike young women from Kentucky who came one Wednesday night to a lecture at the New Temple on the recommendation of a friend. They were in a venturesome mood, for in those days a Hindu swami was still an object of mystery and curiosity and to attend a Hindu temple was a thrilling, convention-defying act. The giggling young women had no idea that a single flighty evening would change their lives forever. To the consternation and bewilderment of their Catholic parents, it wasn’t long before they joined the convent. (Today, they are both ordained Vedantin nuns.)

  One of these young women (Linda Winé, now Pravrajika Virajaprana) was a good typist and eager to be useful around the Vedanta Society. With Swami Prabuddhananda’s consent, I asked her to help with the typing of my edited version of the Life. It was a difficult task even for an expert because, for the sake of clarity, I wanted the editorial changes typed with a red ribbon, which caused frequent interruptions in the rhythmical clacking into which every good typist falls. Nevertheless, Linda kept up with me, as did Kathleen, and the three of us soon produced a typescript of the Life to send to Swami Budhananda. It was aflame with red ink and must have raised the swami’s labile blood pressure to the danger point. His monastic elders gave him permission to invite me to India to go over the text with him, word by word, at Advaita Ashrama (the editorial office of the Order’s publications in the Himalayas, which was also an austere monastic retreat).

  The invitation from Swami Budhananda, coming just then, was extremely fortuitous, for it coincided with another that I received from India one Sunday morning in late 1972. I was sitting in the back of the New Temple auditorium after a lecture when Mr. Warren, a monk who lived in the Vedanta Retreat at Olema, approached me. He had recently returned from India where he had taken sannyas, his final monastic vows (he was now Swami Sahajananda). He sat down on the chair next to mine—an alarming thing for him to do, considering that he was Swami Ashokananda’s student and knew the rules separating the sexes as well as I did. I congratulated him on his sannyas. It was the first time I had ever spoken to him. He thanked me and, without further small talk, said, “I have a message for you from Swami Abhayananda. He asked me to say that he invites you to come to Belur Math.”

  Probably my mouth flew open. I knew that Swami Abhayananda was the famed and revered Bharat Maharaj, who had confronted tigers in the Himalayas and was a dear friend of Swami Ashokananda. Moreover, a visit to Belur Math, the monastic headquarters of the Order situated on the Ganges north of Calcutta and a place of pilgrimage in itself, had been my recent dream.

  “When?” I asked.

  Swami Sahajananda shrugged his shoulders. “He didn’t say.” Then he added, leaning slightly toward me for emphasis, “If I were you, I would accept.” With that, he left the auditorium. It was many years before I was again near enough to him to thank him for having borne to me a message that would richly change the remaining thirty-odd years of my life (after all), giving them a color and a depth they could not otherwise have had.

  I wrote to Swami Abhayananda at once to accept his invitation and to ask if Kathleen Davis, another devotee, might also come. The swami replied promptly that we were both welcome. The best time to come, he added, would be in December of 1973—almost a year away. While waiting, we edited a number of Swami Ashokananda’s lectures and made substantive changes to the Life to make it both factually accurate and readable.

  Most important, we prepared for what we looked upon as a trip to the darkest part of central Africa. We shopped in several sporting goods stores. Kathleen bought a mountaineering outfit, complete with climbing boots, which she later wore on the beach at Honolulu, sitting primly in meditation posture in the midst of sprawled, near-naked, sun-tanned bodies. I bought a heavy woolen pullover and ski pants, which I never wore at all, and a broad-brimmed sports hat, which I wore once or twice at Belur Math, much to the amusement of Bharat Maharaj and perhaps many others. Nothing we packed had much relationship to any of the circumstances in which we would find ourselves. The most important things, such as typewriters and manuscripts, we shipped separately. These critical items remained in Calcutta customs for months because I had not declared them, thinking that unaccompanied baggage was no one’s business but our own.

  At Belur Math a devotee provided us (at Bharat Maharaj’s request) with saris, which another affable and quick-handed Bengali devotee showed us how to “tie,” as they say. The complicated operation was dazzling. Left to ourselves, we gathered yards of excess material into a bunch that we stuffed inside a waistband, without the security of a safety pin. One evening while we were watching fireworks from Bharat Maharaj’s veranda (it was Sri Ramakrishna’s birthday), the skirt of my sari came loose and threatened to fall, taking with it the entire yardage. Not understanding the mechanics of the drapery, I did not know what end of it to secure and made a dash for a dark and secluded corner where I tore the sari off and started all over again to wrap it around.

  I hated saris and soon settled upon a costume composed of a lungi (a colorful wraparound skirt such as workmen and servants habitually wore) with a Western shirt hanging loose over it. I was not at all aware that on a middle-aged woman this costume was hilariously incongruous to the Indians, who were too polite to mention it. Bharat Maharaj commented only on my hat. “You wear hat?” he said in his charmingly broken English, with a gleam deep in his eyes. At once, I removed the hat and never wore it again.

  Bharat Maharaj, then in his eighties, welcomed Kathleen and me with love and kindness. He did everything to make us feel wanted and at home. He let us sit in his office at his round table for hours at a stretch and talked with us intermittently between his long conversations with Bengali devotees who came to him with their problems and their grief. Almost invariably these devotees, who approached him barely suppressing their sobs, left him with radiant faces, all sorrow removed. Although we could not understand the language, these small dramas were a joy to watch. Bharat Maharaj was clearly a healing ocean of love and concern as he greeted each of the devotees, most of whom he had known since their childhood. As we watched day after day, our own grief, which we still deeply felt, began to dissolve. Bharat Maharaj later told me that he knew our visit to Belur Math would have that effect upon us, and that was why he had invited us.

  Within a month of our arrival, Kathleen and I went on a pilgrimage tour of southern India, down to the windy tip of the continent, Cape Comorin, where we meditated in Swami Vivekananda’s temple, which stands majestically on a rock beyond the shore. Traveling north, we became exhausted and cabled Belur Math to say we were returning immediately.

  Back at Belur Math we found the company of Bharat Maharaj far more uplifting than the temples of south India. But this was not a restful time for me. A few days before Kathleen and I had left the Math for our tour of south India, Swami Lokeswarananda, newly designated to be the next s
ecretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Calcutta, had come to Bharat Maharaj’s office in the early evening to inform me that I would have to give two lectures at the Institute. My adrenaline level rose to overflowing and I launched an extensive and detailed explanation of why this was an impossible idea. During my earnest recitation, Swami Lokeswarananda looked with an impassive and stony face into a corner of the room. When I had quite finished and had fallen silent, certain that I had dissuaded him, the Swami turned to me and said unsmilingly, “Now, we must set the dates for your talks.”

  So, apart from visiting Bharat Maharaj and the president of the Order, Swami Vireswarananda, I spent this respite at Belur Math writing two papers. Delivering the first talk, I had a bad case of laryngitis but somehow managed to be heard by over a thousand people. The second talk at the Institute also went well, and I breathed a sigh of vast relief. But I was not off the hook; that stint was the beginning of what was to me a highly stressful career as a speaker—or rather as a reader of papers, for extraneous talks were truly out of my range. On many occasions in the years to come I would be asked (as though I had a choice) to “say a few words” to thousands of people who had assembled for reasons other than to hear me speak.

  The climax of my life as a public speaker would come later, in 1982, when the Institute of Culture created the Vivekananda Award. I became the first recipient of this prize, which was presented to me before a large audience by Swami Vireswarananda on January 3, 1983, in recognition of my two New Discoveries books. I wanted to refuse the honor, but it was pressed upon me with such love and pleasure that a refusal would have been unthinkably churlish. And I of course knew myself to be not only honored but also blessed.