I am not at all inclined to write my autobiography nor would I like anyone else to write my biography until I shed my mortal body. But my life has certainly taught me some lessons about which I shall express briefly now.
At the age of about 12 or 13, in my mother’s presence, I used some foul words against a person. My mother immediately reprimanded me lovingly thus: ‘My boy, your tongue is the abode of Vani or Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and wisdom. Don’t soil it by using foul language against others.’ That advice went straight to my head and heart and has influenced me all these seven or eight decades.
Though born and brought up as a boy in a village, which generally makes for a narrow outlook, I escaped this even in my village life. I broke rules of untouchability and caste superiority and used to eat fruits from the hands of one pariah tenant couple who later on wept when I left home to join the Ramakrishna Mission. When my mother fell ill, the family had to get medicine from an ayurvedic doctor living a mile up the river on the bank of which were our paddy field and home. Our cook agreed to go to meet the doctor in a boat up the current, if one of the elder sons of my mother agreed to help to row and punt the boat. No elder brother agreed to go. When I was asked, I readily agreed due to two factors, namely, love for the mother and love of adventure. We met the doctor and brought the medicine. It was a play and fun for me to row the boat up and rowing it back. This love of adventure and dislike for easy life, and the German philosopher Nietzsche’s dictum, ‘live dangerously,’ has been with me ever since.
Impact of the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna on me
At the age of about 15, studying in class VIII, a friend brought a book in English from the Trissur town library and asked me, ‘Do you like to read a book?’ I said yes. He gave me the book and went away. It was the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, early Madras Ramakrishna Math edition. As soon as I started reading the book, I became absorbed and could not stop till I read about 100 pages. The appeal of Sri Ramakrishna to my heart was simply spontaneous and tremendous. That started a deepening and broadening of my life and to the reading of the then available seven volumes of Vivekananda’s Complete Works, two volumes of the Gospel, and Sister Nivedita’s The Master As I Saw Him, and memorising Swami Abhedananda’s beautiful hymn to Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother, beginning with Prakritim Paramam. All these determined the future course of my life which meant love of God and love of our several people, irrespective of caste, creed, race and gender; and I left home three years later and joined the newly started Ramakrishna Ashrama in Mysore, the head of which was the most holy and lovable late Swami Siddheswarananda, who was Gopal Marar of Trissur Kottil Marar house and whose father was the second prince of the then Cochin royal family and who later on established the Centre Vedantique Ramakrishna in Paris.
Siddheswaranandaji and I met Gandhiji in Mysore in 1927 and made pranams to him and again in Bangalore in 1936 or 1937. Gandhiji’s weekly Young India used to come to our Ashrama in Mysore and I used to read each issue, breathing truth and non-violence, with great delight until Gandhiji stopped its publication and started another weekly, Harijan.
Impact of Swami Vivekananda on me
It was a tremendous inspiration to read the farsighted views of Swami Vivekananda about India’s bright future, even when we were all slaves of the British, and his firm views about the widespread diffusion of the strengthening, unifying, and universal truths of Vedanta in India and abroad during the coming centuries. He has kept before us a plan of developing a Vedantic society and civilisation, first in India, and later, abroad, in the coming centuries, synthesizing Eastern and Western cultures. Our Vedanta philosophy is high, but our society does not bear any Vedantic touch; in a letter from America to his Madras devotee Alasinga on 20 August 1893, Swamiji had written (Complete Works Vol. 5 p.15):
‘No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism, and no religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor and the low in such a fashion as Hinduism!’
(To be continued)
-- This is an excerpt from Dynamic Spirituality for A Globalized World, A commemorative volume of selections from the works of, Swami Ranganathananda, late president of RK Math & Mission
