My Father's Guru

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

  I myself wrote P.B. a typically pretentious letter on August 20, 1959, from Montevideo, Uruguay, in which I told P.B. that upon meeting the disciples in Buenos Aires, I saw that “they had attained to a very high level.” The books they advocated, mostly the two quoted earlier by Krishnamenon, made a profound impression on me. I blamed P.B. for keeping me at a lower level, the “yogic standpoint,” instead of on this loftier plane of Vedantic theory, and for having kept me and my family from what I felt was our right access to a different kind of philosophical teaching. I was echoing my father. Why didn’t you teach us this level? Did you even know it? It was definitely my first move against this guru, though not yet against the idea of a guru I was merely exchanging one for another. I also implicitly criticized P.B. for encouraging us to emigrate to avoid the war. He took all of this rather good-naturedly and wrote me later in 1959:

  This brings up a point which you might not have appreciated before your Vedantic studies, whether all this fuss about survival is justified. On the New Year card which the family sent me, and I was glad to have, you or Diana had written: We came to South America to preserve the body—only to find after all we have no body, we are no body. This is pure Vedantic truth, of course, but it is also a good joke!

  I was, albeit glacially, beginning to mature. I was becoming increasingly skeptical of the idea of an imminent Third World War. At the Universidad de Montevideo, I had a large number of English and Uruguayan friends; my sexuality was beginning to awaken, at long last I felt the urge to leave my family. I finally decided to apply to college. I chose Harvard and determined to leave Uruguay. Nobody put any pressure on me to stay. World War III was becoming an embarrassment, a symbol of our former selves. Clearly nobody in our family believed in it any longer. I brought it up, we all indicated that it was no longer something on which to base our lives. My parents had commitments in South America, but it was clear that they, and Linda too, intended to leave sometime during the coming year.

  My father decided to give me a last trip together, to Europe, in the summer of 1961, just before I left for Harvard. We went to Germany, he bought me a Volkswagen bug, and we headed to the tip of Italy to take a ferry to Greece. My illusions were falling fast. I was beginning to give up on P.B. Even though he insisted in his letters that the war could still come, it was clear he had made a major miscalculation and had caused all of us major disruptions in our lives. But I was still convinced that even if P.B. was not the right guru for me, gurus as such, and “philosophy”—that is, Indian philosophy—were my life. I wanted to study Sanskrit. In Uruguay I had had a number of girlfriends, and although I had not slept with anybody yet, I could feel I was getting closer. This was in such contrast to the teaching of P.B. that I had to decide either that he was wrong or that I was immoral and sinful. Sex seemed to be such a powerful force, I could not dream of controlling it. It was time to start a new life.

  I was still young for my age—physically, intellectually, socially, and even morally. This is evident from an entry in my diary for New Years Day, 1960:

  New Years Resolutions:

  Memorize Atma Nirvritti and Atma Darshan

  Improve table manners

  In August 1961, I left for Cambridge and my first year as an undergraduate at Harvard.

  Chapter Nine

  Harvard and Disillusion

  In late August 1961, at nineteen, I arrived in Cambridge to study English literature, especially modern poetry. I was put in a freshman dormitory but felt completely out of place. I could not imagine surviving a year in such an environment. Part of the reason is that I was so young for my age. I had almost no social skills and really couldn’t talk to boys my own age. I felt completely lost in the very first discussions I heard. I could not participate and knew I would never be accepted.

  So I went to see the chairman of the department of English, Walter Jackson Bate. With unbelievable chutzpah, I told him that I had already studied English literature at the University of Montevideo and that I should be given a year’s credit for the reading I had done. I cannot imagine why, but after an hour’s conversation, Professor Bate told me he accepted my work and that I would be given one year’s credit. I could henceforth be considered a second-year student at Harvard.

  A few hours later I was on my way to Adams house, where I was put in a small suite with two other students, Bob and Louis. Even there I felt different, unacceptable. I was a vegetarian and there was not much for me to eat. I remember meeting Sol Kripke, the philosopher, who was kosher, and we managed to find some solace eating together a few times. But I felt completely out of place in the college environment. It was quickly apparent to me that I was far less mature both intellectually and socially than almost anybody else I met. My way of compensating for this was to deny it totally and claim that things were the opposite of what they seemed: I couldn’t get on with kids my own age because I was so intellectually and socially mature. I really needed to be with adults.

  I was also having trouble with the so-called parietal rules at Harvard which said that a woman must leave a student’s room by 10 P.M. Every second that I was not studying, I spent at Wellesley, meeting women. This was a paradox that was becoming more and more pronounced in my character: While I still considered myself a spiritual person, I was becoming increasingly obsessed—an even stronger word would not be out of place—with sex. I saw it everywhere. I wanted it. I thought about it all the time. No woman seemed safe from my predations. I look back at it with horror. I had absolutely no understanding of what I was doing.

  One evening I was invited to meet an older (perhaps forty-five) professor of Indian philosophy who was visiting from India. She had something of a following in India and was even considered a kind of guru. Somehow the discussion turned to spiritual matters. This woman said she had never felt sexual desire in her life because her mind was filled with spiritual thoughts. There was simply no room. As the guests were leaving her apartment, she asked me to stay a little bit, as there was something she wanted to tell me. When we were alone she said: “You looked as though you did not believe what I was saying. Is that true?”

  “Well, actually I don’t, no,” I replied.

  “You don’t believe I am free of sexual desire?”

  “No.”

  “I will prove it to you. Touch my breasts.”

  I did as I was told.

  “See, I feel nothing. Now touch my thighs.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Again, nothing. Even if you enter me with your penis, I will feel nothing. Do you believe me?”

  “No.”

  “Try.”

  I did.

  “See, I feel nothing sexual. The whole time this is going on I am thinking only about the higher self, the atman.”

  I was skeptical. I assumed it was a ruse to have sex. I wondered if this was what P.B. told his wife, if gurus generally did this. It did not occur to me then that I was not conducting research but was engaged in a human encounter for which I had responsibilities, too.

  *

  By this time I was taking courses in Sanskrit, which proved extraordinarily difficult. I knew Spanish and French but had never before learned an inflected language, and Sanskrit is highly inflected. The little bit of Sanskrit I had learned as a young boy did not help here. I didn’t know anything about cases, and when I was told a noun form I did not recognize was a dative or an ablative or a genitive, I had no idea what was meant. Another blow to my narcissism. It took me years to understand that verbs are conjugated and nouns are declined. To this day, I mix it up and am never sure where declensions and conjugations belong. The man who taught the class was a very patrician Virginian, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard.

  I remember meeting Professor Ingalls for the first time:

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Jeff. Who are you?”

  “Professor Ingalls.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “Professor Ingalls.”

  I was in his off
ice, and he said he had to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  Puzzled by my inquisitiveness, which I don’t believe he had encountered before, he replied that he was going to get a haircut.

  “I can come with you,” was my eager response.

  He was bemused.

  “We could go for a drive afterward to see the fall leaves change colors.”

  He had no idea where I had come from. And I had no idea what Harvard was like.

  “Before you leave, who is your guru?”

  He was completely mystified. “If you mean who taught me Sanskrit, it was Professor Clark.”

  “No, I mean your spiritual teacher.”

  “I don’t have one” was his dry response. It was really the first inkling I had that somebody could teach and study Sanskrit for reasons other than spiritual. It was a completely new notion for me.

  Sanskrit as a language, rather than a collection of spiritually freighted terms, was also a new concept to me. If it had not been for the kindness of one of the students, Alan Keiler, then a junior fellow in linguistics and now a professor of musicology at Brandeis, I doubt I would have made it past the first year. He was very talented in languages and was amused by my complete mystification. He set about coaching me and teaching me the rudiments of the language so that I could follow what was going on in class. He succeeded, barely. I also turned for help to Wendy Donniger, now professor of religious studies at the University of Chicago.

  After less than a year at Adams house, I decided I needed to live off campus. There were rules about women not spending the night that I found hard to obey. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before I got caught. I could not believe that the university would really care, but friends told me it was serious and I had better be careful. I talked the Center for the Study of World Religions into letting me stay there in a lovely subsidized garden apartment. As an undergraduate, I had no business being there, but somehow I convinced them. It seemed a shortcut to knowledge. I was so helpless there (as a child spiritual star I had not been expected to cook or clean) that Arthur, the caretaker, took pity on me, and began helping me take care of the apartment. He was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. Once there I met the person with whom I was closest in my academic life: Bimal Matilal, an Indian who, until he died a few months ago at fifty-six, had been Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University, and the best Sanskrit scholar I knew.

  In all fairness, it was Ingalls, cool as he was and remained to me personally, who taught me what scholarship looked like. He was cool because I was so insistent and pushy. He saw I had talent but was lacking much, including everything he considered social graces. I knew he was extremely conservative politically, where I was not. In all fairness to him, I don’t think he disliked me, he just found me intolerable, which I often was. He always encouraged my growing love for scholarship, which he certainly shared.

  At the same time that Ingalls was introducing me to the real world of Indian scholarship on a daily basis, my reading of the great French indologist Louis Renou and the Belgian Buddhist scholar Etienne Lamotte showed me that what I had learned about the history of Indian texts from talking with P.B. was entirely bogus. The dates were wrong, the names were wrong, even the language was wrong P.B. didn’t know whether a text had been written in Sanskrit or in some other language. My judgment was improving, I was maturing intellectually, but it was also a question of exposure. You could not put P.B.’s books next to those by Renou or Lamotte and not immediately see the enormous gulf. I had never seen books like those by Renou and Lamotte in my house. I had not been exposed to anything but the world P.B. had approved. Lamotte, in contrast to P.B., knew the language; Lamotte was cautious and careful in what he said. He knew the history. He knew the texts thoroughly. P.B., as a writer about Indian texts, was simply a charlatan.

  I was a charlatan too. I found that out from I. A. Richards. He was teaching a graduate course in poetry that I had absolutely no business attending. He graciously allowed me to take it. I made a complete fool of myself. It was entirely beyond my capabilities. I have just found a letter I wrote to my parents on December 6, 1962:

  In poetics, with I. A. Richards. Don’t understand a word. But that’s all right, because nobody else in the class does either. I spoke with him, he likes me, and wants me to do a paper on Sanskrit poetics. His course is so difficult to get into that there is no examination. Just a paper a week. Guess what our paper is on this week? “Give a morphemic and phonemic explanation of the syntactic difference of the interpolation of ‘less’ for ‘more’ in Book I., line 388 of Paradise Regained by Milton.” How do I do it, you ask? I bullshit.

  For the essay, I wrote an embarrassingly saccharine account of the Upanishads and English poetry that made even P.B. look good by comparison. It was awful beyond description. I spoke of how Shelley had “undoubtedly” (meaning I had no idea if it was true or not) read these texts in an early translation and had “taken over their angelic substance into his own heavenly poetry.” I can still remember what I. A. Richards wrote at the end of this essay, to which he gave the lowest passing grade he could (B-), out of compassion; “Of the ineffable one must speak, if at all, softly.” He was referring to the fact that I was writing the equivalent of a scream. I even remember one of the lines: “Angels have brushed with their wings the Upanishads and left magic dust on them for the rest of us to enjoy.” It wasn’t English, it wasn’t writing, it wasn’t thinking, it wasn’t anything. The odd thing is that the minute I. A. Richards pointed this out, I knew it. Something was happening. I learned too from his response to a maudlin poem I wrote him, fortunately lost. When I asked him what he thought of it some days later, he said with extraordinary finesse. “One must live with a poem for a long time before forming any kind of judgment.” I knew he was sparing my feelings.

  As was Ingalls when he gave me a C in my first year of Sanskrit. He wrote on my first paper: “If I were to grade this for the promise it shows, I would give it an A or an A. If I had to grade it by current standards, I would have to give it an F. As you see, I have compromised.”

  The professor of Buddhism at Harvard, Masatoshi Nagatomi, was personally much warmer and kinder to me than Ingalls. I spent many evenings at his house, ate with him, and enjoyed the hospitality of his family for many years. In spite of his personal liking for me, the message was the same. I studied Pali and Tibetan with him. He supervised my honors thesis, a translation of a Tibetan text, lost in Sanskrit, into English, I heavily and pretentiously annotated it and poorly translated it as well. I simply didn’t know enough Tibetan. Nagatomi made this painfully clear. I had attempted something far beyond my modest linguistic means. I wanted to translate it because it had never before been translated. I had visions of it going into print immediately. Nagatomi saw it going into a trash basket instead, only he was too kind to say so. It was slow and hard work, but I was beginning to become aware of my own limitations. Nevertheless, with enormous bad grace I blamed him for not seeing to it that I got a summa cum laude when I graduated from Harvard, instead of the magna cum laude which I did receive (and which was considerably more than I deserved).

  I had been ill-prepared for the rigors of Harvard. I was not equipped for it intellectually. I had, in fact, meager talents for philogical research. What I had in abundance was enthusiasm and soon a love of the Sanskrit language. As I began to master it, I found pleasure in actually reading and understanding a difficult text, in really knowing what it said, as opposed to guessing. I was never good at grammar, but I was a voracious reader, and I began to read both primary and secondary literature in Sanskrit with enormous gusto. I was slowly acquiring some knowledge. I was beginning to know something. And I was beginning to recognize when somebody else did not.

  Once I spent a few hours with Alan Watts, who was visiting the Center. He looked at my bookshelves and said he was surprised at how many different kinds of books I had. Later that evening he gave a lecture about Buddh
ism. At one point, he used a beautiful and striking metaphor that he claimed was from the Chinese Buddhist canon. I was sitting with Masatoshi Nagatomi, who told me that this metaphor was definitely not to be found in the canon. I asked Alan Watts about it after the lecture. “Where did you get it from?” It was clear he read no Chinese. “I invented it,” he said without shame.

  How did I manage to go through Harvard in the sixties without ever taking a single drug? I think I was so lost in my own world that this phenomenon passed me by. But I was also very impressed with a meeting I had in 1963. I quote from a letter I wrote to my sister.

  Yesterday Friday night, I was at Radcliffe, talking with two girls there about L.S.D., when a troubled-looking graduate girl comes over and explained that she was in the program with one T Leary, and quit, because it is definitely harmful to the mind and the body. She said I had only to meet Leary myself if I wanted proof of this, for he was an example of what happens to people who take the drug. She has promised to send me the articles where this is definitely proven. I don’t know whether this is so or not, but she claims that many of her friends have suffered, and I don’t want to take chances. Not yet anyway, until this whole thing is more thoroughly looked into.

  There was something about this woman, whom I never saw again, that convinced me that she knew something I didn’t, that she had “been there,” and I determined not to experiment with such a dangerous drug. Also, of course, there was the sense of superiority. What was the purpose of LSD but an attempt to bring you to a higher consciousness, which my whole life was already designed to do? To ask for such a shortcut seemed to me cowardly, and philosophically suspect. There was also something slightly sinister about the atmosphere surrounding LSD that put me off.

  I see from a letter I wrote Linda a few days later that I met Leary. I had asked him to give a lecture to the Harvard Oriental Society, which was just an idea of mine so that I could call myself its president. He spoke on “Indian Mysticism and the Mescaline Experience” I told her: