Difficulty of the Vedantic method

Sunday, July 22, 1883

Taking advantage of the holiday, many householder devotees visited Sri Ramakrishna in his room at the Dakshineswar temple garden. The Young devotees, mostly students, generally came on week-days.

Sometimes the Master asked his intimate disciples to come on a Tuesday or a Saturday, days that he considered very auspicious for special religious instruction. Adhar, Rākhāl , and M. had come from Calcutta in a hired carriage. Sri Ramakrishna had enjoyed a little rest after his midday meal.

The room had an atmosphere of purity and holiness. On the walls hung pictures of gods and goddesses, among them one of Christ rescuing the drowning Peter. Outside the room were plants laden with fragrant flowers, and the Ganges could be seen flowing toward the south.

The Master was seated on the small couch, facing the north, and the devotees sat on mats and carpets spread on the floor. All eyes were directed toward him. Mani Mallick, an old Brahmo devotee about sixty-five years of age, came to pay his respects to the Master.

He had returned a few months earlier from a pilgrimage to Benares and was recounting his experiences to Sri Ramakrishna.

Difficulty of the Vedantic method

MANI MALLICK: “A monk whom I met in Benares said that no religious experience is possible without the control of the sense-organs. Nothing could be achieved by merely crying, ‘God! God!’ "

MASTER: “Do you understand the views of teachers like him? According to them, one must first practise spiritual discipline: self-restraint, self-control, forbearance, and the like.

Their aim is to attain Nirvāna. They are followers of Vedānta. They constantly discriminate, saying, ‘Brahman alone is real, and the world illusory.’ But this is an extremely difficult path.

If the world is illusory, then you too are illusory. The teacher who gives the instruction is equally illusory. His words, too, are as illusory as a dream.

“But this experience is beyond the reach of the ordinary man. Do you know what it is like? If you burn camphor nothing remains. When wood is burnt at least a little ash is left.

Finally, after the last analysis, the devotee goes into samādhi. Then he knows nothing whatsoever of ‘I’, ‘you’, or the universe. “Padmalochan was a man of deep wisdom. He had great respect for me, though at that time I constantly repeated the name of the Divine Mother. He was the court pundit of the Maharaja of Burdwan.

Once he came to Calcutta and went to live in a garden house near kamarhati. I felt a desire to see him and sent Hriday there to learn if the pundit had any vanity. I was told that he had none. Then I met him. Though a man of great knowledge and scholarship, he began to weep on hearing me sing Ramprasad’s devotional songs. We talked together a long while; conversation with nobody else gave me such satisfaction.

He said to me, ‘Give up the desire for the company of devotees; otherwise people of all sorts will come to you and make you deviate from your spiritual ideal.’ Once he entered into a controversy, by correspondence, with Utshavananda, Vaishnavcharan’s guru. He told me an interesting incident.

Once a meeting was called to decide which of the two deities, Śiva or Brahma, was the greater. Unable to come to any decision, the pundits at last referred the matter to Padmalochan. With characteristic guilelessness he said: ‘How do I know? Neither I nor any of my ancestors back to the fourteenth generation have seen Śiva or Brahma.’ About the renunciation of ‘woman and gold’, he said to me one day: ‘Why have you given up those things? Such distinctions as “This is money and that is clay” are the outcome of ignorance.’ What could I say to that? I replied: ‘I don’t know all these things, my dear sir. But for my part, I cannot relish such things as money and the like.’

“There was a pundit who was tremendously vain. He did not believe in the forms of God. But who can understand the inscrutable ways of the Divine? God revealed Himself to him as the Primal Power.

This vision made the pundit unconscious for a long time. After regaining partial consciousness he uttered only the sound ‘Ka! Ka! Ka!’ He could not fully pronounce ‘Kāli’.”

A DEVOTEE: “Sir, you met Pundit Vidyasagar. What did you think of him?”

MASTER: “Vidyasagar has both scholarship and charity, but he lacks inner vision. Gold lies hidden within him. Had he but found it out, his activities would have been reduced; finally they would have stopped altogether. Had he but known that God resides in his heart, his mind would have been directed to God in thought and meditation.

Some persons must perform selfless work a long time before they can practise dispassion and direct their minds to the spiritual ideal and at last be absorbed in God.

“The activities that Vidyasagar is engaged in are good. Charity is very noble. There is a great deal of difference between daya, compassion, and maya, attachment. Daya is good, but not maya. Maya is love for one’s relatives-one’s wife, children, brother, sister, nephew, father, and mother. But daya is the same love for all created beings without any distinction.”

The three gunas

M: “Is daya also a bondage?”

MASTER: “Yes, it is. But that concept is something far beyond the ordinary man. Daya springs from sattva. Sattva preserves, rajas creates, and tamas destroys. But Brahman is beyond the three gunas. It is beyond Prakriti.

“None of the three gunas can reach Truth; they are like robbers, who cannot come to a public place for fear of being arrested. Sattva, rajas, and tamas are like so many robbers.

“Listen to a story. Once a man was going through a forest, when three robbers fell upon him and robbed him of all his possessions. One of the robbers said, ‘What’s the use of keeping this man alive?’ So saying, he was about to kill him with his sword, when the second robber interrupted him, saying: ‘Oh, no! What is the use of killing him? Tie him hand and foot and leave him here.’ The robbers bound his hands and feet and went away.

After a while the third robber returned and said to the man: ‘Ah, I am sorry. Are you hurt? I will release you from your bonds.’ After setting the man free, the thief said:

‘Come with me. I will take you to the public highway.’ After a long time they reached the road. Then the robber said: ‘Follow this road. Over there is your house.’ At this the man said: ‘Sir, you have been very good to me. Come with me to my house ’ ‘Oh, no!’ the robber replied. ‘I can’t go there. The police will know it.’ This world itself is the forest. The three robbers prowling here are sattva, rajas, and tamas. It is they that rob a man of the Knowledge of Truth. Tamas wants to destroy him. Rajas binds him to the world. But sattva rescues him from the clutches of rajas and tamas. Under the protection of sattva, man is rescued from anger, passion, and the other evil effects of tamas. Further, sattva loosens the bonds of the world. But sattva also is a robber. It cannot give him the ultimate Knowledge of Truth, though it shows him the road leading to the Supreme Abode of God. Setting him on the path, sattva tells him: ‘Look yonder. There is your home.’ Even sattva is far away from the Knowledge of Brahman.

“What Brahman is cannot be described. Even he who knows It cannot talk about It. There is a saying that a boat, once reaching the ‘black waters’ of the ocean, cannot come back.