Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

61

Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda was born on: 12 January 1863.

Nivedita was born on: 28 October 1867.

Sri Aurobindo was born on: 15 August 1872.

Does something strike you? Now, if we look closely at these dates we find that:

a)Vivekananda is older than Nivedita by 4 years 290 days,

b)Sri Aurobindo is younger than her by 4 years 291 days.

As though the three formed an equilateral triangle in Time.

We have seen two sides of the triangle; let's now take a brief look at the third.

Noren was born in Calcutta to Bishwanath Dutta and Bhubaneswari Devi. His grandfather, Durgacharan Dutta, left his home to become a sannyasin the very day his son Bishwanath was born. The young one grew up to become an attorney in Calcutta High Court. He earned a lot and spent all he earned; all sorts of relatives sponged on him, and his own generous nature could never says 'no' to anyone.

Bishwanath's wife was gifted. Any passing beggar but sang a song, and it was registered in the throat of Bhubaneswari

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—words and melody were caught with precision in her sweet voice. Busy as an Indian housewife all day long, looking after the myriad needs of the relatives and guests who were constantly dropping in, in the evening this lady would tell the women of the house who sat crowding round her, stories from the Rama-yana and the Mahabharata, and recite from memory long passages from them. All the same, she was sad in her heart, for she was childless. Then an aunt-in-law living in Benares called her there. At Benares, with great devotion, she poured Ganga water everyday on the head of Vireshwar Shiva. One day she saw in a dream-vision Mahadev. He blessed her and then changed himself into a small boy. She took the child in her arms.

It was the day of Ganga-puja — Makarsankranti — and group after group of people were on their way to Ganga for a holy dip. Six minutes before sunrise, her child was born. He was named Narendranath Dutta. His mother called him 'Bilay.'

But, my gosh, what a child I A handful if ever there was one. If he wanted something, he wanted it. There was no gainsaying him. Nor could he be distracted. Neither caresses nor scoldings did ever stop his lusty crying. One day his adoring mother lost her patience and exclaimed, "Oh, why, why instead of coming himself, has Shiva sent one of his bhuts [attendants] ?" But soon she discovered a remedy: whenever Bilay became uncontrollable, she would pour water over his head and say "Shiy-Shiy," and instantly the child would become calm.

From his childhood Noren proved himself to be a born leader. The older he grew the more pronounced became this trait. From school to college —from the Metropolitan Institute

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Swami Vivekananda

to the Presidency College —the student community could not do without him. Games? He was one of the best players, if not the best. Scuffles? Who could put more force in his punches? School debates? Who could defeat the logic of that razor-sharp intelligence? Drama? Who could recite in such a well-modulated voice? It was Noren-Noren-Noren all the way. You give him any musical instrument and he knows how to play it. And, could he sing! Ah, what a voice! His voice itself was a combination of all the musical instruments.

Noren was an agnostic. And like many of his contemporaries, he was attracted by Brahmoism.

But behind all of life's activities, a question was rising in him. The great question that India has asked herself from the dawn of her civilization, the very question the earliest of our Forefathers asked: O Golden Purusha, where are You? Who are You?

Why did the question arise in the young man? Who can say?

Who could answer his question?

He had but to see a sadhu or a sannyasin, and he would rush to him with his question. "Have you seen God?" He rushed to Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, "Have you seen God?" The Maharshi did not give him a plain answer. Nobody, really, ever gave him a plain answer. But it is a law of Nature that when a question burns within, a response is bound to come.

A neighbour of the Duttas, Surendranath Mitra, was a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna. One day, the Guru came to the house of his disciple. Knowing how much 'Thakur' loved to hear

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songs, Mitra went to get a good singer. Who better than Noren? But Noren, by then, was disgusted with these sadhus and sannyasis. He did not care to sing to one of them. But Mitra would not give up, so to please his neighbour Noren went with him to sing to Thakur. He sang, but thought that Thakur was half-lunatic. That is how the first meeting came about between Thakur Sri Ramakrishna and Noren.

One day, early in their acquaintance, Noren put his burning question to Thakur, "Have you seen God?" without really expecting an answer, for he had put it to so many and knew their stock reply. But this man, who had seemed half-mad to him, stunned him. "Oh, exactly as I see you in front of me, I have seen him.... One can speak with Him...." So said Sri Ramakrishna.

The 'half-mad' Thakur not only could himself see God, he could also make others see Him—or rather Her, for She was Kali. Kali as Bhavatarini, the Deliverer of the world.

When Noren's father died the relatives who had so long merrily sponged on him, now began to appropriate his lands that lawfully belonged to Bishwanath's immediate family. That did not satisfy their greed, they now wanted to turn the widow and her children out of her own house. Noren did what he could to shoulder the burden of his family, that is his widowed mother, brothers and sisters. After a great deal of searching he found a job at the office of an attorney and another one at a book publisher's. But his tireless effort did not bring in enough to feed all of them and pay the fees for the court-case. As it was, he was trying to make both ends meet

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with the help of his mother. Where before the monthly expenditure of the family was one thousand rupees a month, they were making do with thirty rupees a month. But even those thirty rupees were hard to obtain.

On the other hand his soul was urging him to take up another kind of life. One day he decided to put his dilemma to his Guru. "I shall no longer worry about family affairs, Thakur," Noren told Ramakrishna. "Please ask the Mother to make some arrangement."

"Oh, but I can't talk to Her of such matters. Why don't you tell the Mother yourself? All your trouble stems from the fact that you don't believe in Her. Go to the Kali temple, whatever you ask Her today She will give you. Go to Her."

That night Noren sat in deep meditation in front of Mother Bhavatarini. The image made of earth became full of consciousness. She was alive I A flood of love and devotion washed the heart of the young man. He bowed again and again to the Mother. "Mother, give me consciousness, give me renunciation, Knowledge, devotion, give, make me such that I may see You always freely."

A dazed Noren told Thakur what had transpired. A second time then a third time the same thing happened. Noren was unable to ask the Mother to look after the need of his family. Finally Ramakrishna himself had to give Noren the assurance that his family would never lack any basic necessities of life.

Thus reassured, Noren was now free from family responsibilities. He committed himself totally to the path of Yoga. The Yoga of Sri Ramakrishna.

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After the passing away of Sri Ramakrishna in 1886 and before leaving for America in 1893, Noren had become a wandering ascetic. With a staff in hand he had set out on a long peregrination of India. From the East to the West, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorian, he came to know India. He already knew India as she was in her inner reality: the richness of her spirituality, the Path of Light she had built.

"This is the ancient land," said Swami Vivekananda in one of his Madras lectures, "where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country, the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier after tier, with their snowcaps, look as it were into the very mysteries of heaven. Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived.... This is the land from whence, like the tidal waves, spirituality and philosophy have again and again rushed out and deluged the world, and this is the land from whence once more such tides must proceed in order to bring life and vigour into the decaying races of mankind." Sri Aurobindo added that "the function of India is to supply the world with a perennial source of light and renovation. Whenever the first play of energy is exhausted and earth grows old and weary, full of materialism, racked with problems she cannot solve, the function of India is to restore the youth of mankind and assure it of immortality."

It was Vivekananda's intense patriotic feelings which inspired Sister Nivedita. He adored Mother India. This country was not an inert piece of matter. He had seen in the poor of

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this land the richness of spirit, he had seen in the despised of the earth the milk of kindness.

His circumambulation had stirred Noren to the core. He had seen to what an abject state of weakness his countrymen had been reduced by a century of British rule. Obscurity, ignorance, inaction, loss of self-confidence, loss of self-respect, love of slavery, pettiness, indolence ... India had plunged into an inert sleep of tamas. Above all, in this land of plenty, the son of the soil was a walking skeleton. India's sons were fallen, abject, cringing to a foreign hand. To quote Sri Aurobindo, "A people emasculated, kept ignorant, out of the world's life, poor, intimidated, abjectly under the thumb of the police constable or the provincial prefect.... The nation which has passed through a century of such a misgovernment must necessarily have degenerated. The bureaucracy has taken care to destroy every centre of strength not subservient to itself. A nation politically disorganised, a nation morally corrupted, intellectually pauperised, physically broken and stunted is the result of a hundred years of British rule."

Swami Vivekananda was a walking volcano. He spewed fire wherever he went. The sparks from his Fire set alight other fires. India began to stir in her sleep of the ages. He recalled Indians to their source. For he had seen a people who had forgotten their wealth, a people who had begun to ridicule their own past of which, unfortunately, they knew practically nothing. The divorce from the past was well-nigh complete. He said to the self-repudiating Indians, "Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal foundations that are behind, and after

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that, look forward, march forward and make India brighter, greater, much higher than she ever was." He reminded the amnesic that "our vigour, our strength, nay, our national life, is in our religion." Dharma, he said, "is India's national mind, its national life-current. Follow it and it leads to glory. Give it up and you die."

Vivekananda in his lifetime was the most powerful exponent of a freer dealing with past and present—respecting the forms of the ancient culture yet not hesitating to remould and reject the outworn.

India needed to dip in the Fountain of Strength. "This Self," says the Upanishad, "cannot be won by any who is without strength." Gather strength, gather strength, went out Swami Vivekananda's call. "Nothing worthwhile can be achieved by the weak." Said the Fearless One, "Shed fear." Vivekananda preached that India must seek freedom by the aid of Shakti, the Mother of Strength. "Oh India, wouldst thou, with these provisions only, scale the highest pinnacle of civilisation and greatness? wouldst thou attain, by means of the disgraceful cowardice, that freedom deserved only by the brave and heroic Oh thou Mother of strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanlinness, and make me a man!"

Vivekananda's lectures, along with the Gita and Anandamath, later became the handbooks of the Nationalists. And they did shed fear. The patriots received British bullets on their chests with 'Bande Mataram' on their lips, their last words on the gallows were 'Bande Mataram,' and a smile for the executioners. The Nationalists had become Men.

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It was not for nothing that in 1918, the Rowlatt Committee lay the blame for the birth of Nationalism at Vivekananda's door. "His preachings gave rise to Nationalism with a religious tendency."

More appropriate would be these two lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.

"A demigod shaping the lives of men;

"One soul's ambition lifted up the race"

The standing ovation accorded to Swamiji by the audience at the Parliament of Religions, on 11 September 1893, when he began his address by 'Brothers and Sisters of America,' was in reality a salute to Mother India, for he spoke in her name. Among the many accounts of the impact the 'warrior-monk' made on his audience, we give but one. "The handsome monk in the orange robe," wrote Miss Monroe, "gave us, in perfect English, a masterpiece. His personality, dominant, magnetic; his voice rich as a bronze bell; the controlled fervour of his feeling; the beauty of his message to the Western world he was facing for the first time —these combined to give us a rare and perfect moment of supreme emotion."

The visit of Swami Vivekananda to America and the work of those who followed him did more for India than a hundred London Congress sessions could have effected. He showed the nations that Indians were a people with a great past and ancient civilisation who still possess something of the genius and character of their forefathers, have still something to give the world and therefore deserve freedom. "That is the

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true way of awaking sympathy ... by proof of our manliness and fitness, not by mendicancy," said Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo was also certain that "the going forth of Vivekananda, marked out by the Master as the heroic soul destined to take the world between his two hands and change it, was the first visible sign to the world that India was awake not only to survive but to conquer."

Without a shadow of doubt Vivekananda was Sri Ramakrishna's strongest disciple. Sri Aurobindo mentions in a letter "the powerful and vivid vision in which Ramakrishna went up into higher planes and saw the mystic truth behind the birth of Vivekananda." The Master used to say about his Noren that he was a portion of Shiva — Ishwara Koti—and that he was of the eternally liberated souls — Nitya mukti—who can go up and down the ladder of existence. "And what was Vivekananda ?" asked Sri Aurobindo and answered: "A radiant glance from the eye of Shiva ..."

The lion-heart of Vivekananda sought to shake the world. Yet ... "Vivekananda was a soul of puissance if ever there was one," said Sri Aurobindo talking of leaven, a power of unformed stir and ferment out of which forms must result, great souls and great influences who live on in the soul of India, "a very lion among men, but the definite work he has left behind is quite incommensurate with our impression of his creative might and energy. We perceive his influence still working gigantically, we know not well how, we know not well where, in something that is not yet formed, something leonine, grand, intuitive, up heaving that has entered the soul of India and we

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say, 'Behold, Vivekananda still lives in the soul of his Mother and in the souls of her children.'" Sri Aurobindo concluded with the remark: "So it is with all. Not only are the men greater than their definite works, but their influence is so wide and formless that it has little relation to any formal work that they have left behind them."

After his pilgrimage to Amarnath (Kashmir) in August 1898, where he saw the Presence of Lord Shiva, followed by the vision of the Divine Mother at Kshir Bhavani, his bonds began to break.

In January 1899 the work of Belur Math was completed.

In June he left for Europe and America for the second time. In 1900, April 18, he wrote a letter from California to Miss Josephine MacLeod. "After all, Joe, I am only a boy who used to listen with rapt wonderment to the wonderful words of Ramakrishna under the banyan at Dakshineswar. That is my true nature, doing good and so forth are all superimpositions. Now I again hear the voice; the same old voice thrilling my soul...."

In 1902 he made a last pilgrimage to Benares.

On 4 July 1902 Swami Vivekananda's soul was set free. From earth he slipped into the white Ray.

He was thirty-nine years old.

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