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

by Sister Gargi

  From our base at Belur Math, Kathleen and I set off again in March of 1974 to tour northern India. In April we reached Almora in the Himalayan foothills, where we had an invitation to visit Gertrude Emerson Sen, the well-known author of books about India. I had written to Mrs. Sen in regard to her large collection of Swami Vivekananda’s many unpublished letters to his disciple from Detroit, Christina Greenstidel. These letters were understandably precious to her. Because of some earlier and now forgotten misunderstanding with the authorities of Belur Math, she had refused them access to her collection; but she had agreed to let me see it.

  Kathleen and I immediately became friends with Gertrude Sen, a warm hostess and a fascinating conversationalist. Not only did she let me read her treasure of Swamiji’s letters to Christina and to others, but she permitted a photostatist from Lucknow to come and copy them. She even converted a small bathroom into a darkroom for his use.

  From Almora we drove deeper and higher into the Himalayas to Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati, escorted in a small car up the winding road by two swamis from Lucknow. Almost immediately, a daily editorial battle began between Swami Budhananda and me.

  It was not until after Swami Budhananda had given me free rein to edit the Life as I pleased that he was instructed by the Belur Math authorities not to make any change unless such change was absolutely necessary; to Swami Budhananda, this was an unbreachable order. He was now caught between a radical bit-in-teeth editor and the conservative elders at Belur Math, to whom the Life was holy writ, not to be altered. Swami Budhananda never explained his dilemma to me and my ignorance of it would cause endless difficulty between us—I could not understand, for instance, his innumerable objections to my corrections of factual material.

  We worked in the mornings and, it seemed to me, debated every word that I had changed in the text and every fact of Swami Vivekananda’s life that I had set straight. Since Swami Budhananda had not informed me during our correspondence that each editorial change would require verification, I had left my voluminous research notes in San Francisco. I had no way, other than raising my voice to higher and yet higher levels, to substantiate the changes I had made. At lunchtime, exhausted and in a fury, I wended my way down the hill to the guesthouse where Kathleen listened to my account of the morning’s strife, which I gave at first close to tears, then with laughter.

  In the afternoons Kathleen and I enjoyed the serene, deeply silent forests of Mayavati, walking along the road until the sun set with a spectacular farewell. Generally, the snow peaks were not visible through the haze that arose from the plains; but when the towering white mountains were now and then revealed, we caught our breath in disbelief at their majesty. Our stay in the Himalayas lasted for six months, with our visas periodically extended.

  In October of 1974, the editorial task force (consisting of Swami Budhananda, Swami Balaramananda, Kathleen, and me) finally returned to the plains. One of the first things Swami Budhananda did was to take the much-scrawled-over manuscript to Swami Gambhirananda; with trepidation, he offered to read it aloud to him, since the general secretary’s eyesight was poor. But to Swami Budhananda’s immense relief Swami Gambhirananda said, somewhat crossly, “No! Why should you read it to me? You and Gargi have edited it. That’s enough!”

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. We hadn’t finished. I worked on at Belur Math, now and then traveling by car through traffic-clogged, pothole-ridden, and fume-choked roads to Calcutta, where the editorial battle, now toned down, continued.

  At the beginning of 1975, Kathleen returned to San Francisco by way of Ireland, where she visited an elderly and ailing aunt. A trip that she would not have ventured to make alone a year before, she now braved with assurance and aplomb. After six lonely months of holding our own in the spiritual fastness of the Himalayas, both Kathleen and I had changed.

  As the summer climate grew stifling, Swami Budhananda suggested that I move into an air-conditioned room at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, which was convenient to the Advaita Ashrama office in Calcutta, where we continued to edit the Life. I wrote in my journal on May 18, 1975,

  The sittings are now often entirely pleasant and good, with united, cooperative, concentrated work. I like it very much! SBU [Swami Budhananda’s cable name, which Swami Balaramananda, Kathleen, and I always used among ourselves] is much more civil to me nowadays.

  I told this to Bharat Maharaj. He said, “Yes, because he is afraid of what we would say. At Mayavati he is the lion; here he is nothing.”

  In the sweltering heat of Calcutta my right arm, resting on a notebook, made the page wet with perspiration. The air conditioner in my room was of no help because I never turned it on, preferring the heat to its banging noise. In any case, the work was coming to completion. Although my relationship with Swami Budhananda was still punctuated by impenetrable misunderstandings, he and I were now on friendlier terms. My visa was again extended before we finally finished editing the Life at the close of 1975.

  Swami Budhananda’s eyesight was beginning to fail, so it was no longer possible for him to remain in charge of the Order’s publishing department. By the end of December 1975, he was prepared to leave the Calcutta office of Advaita Ashrama. I went there from Belur Math to say good-bye. He was very friendly that day—and made the longest speech he had ever spoken to me.

  “I have felt,” he said, “that the Divine Mother took up two clumps of earth, two egos, one in each hand, and smashed them together. A lot of dirt fell from both clumps. I benefited from it.”

  I was overwhelmed that he said such a kind thing to me and I could only mumble, “It was I who benefited.” I sincerely meant it.

  In January of 1976 I would leave India, which had been my home for over two years, and I would not return until 1980. By then, Swami Ananyananda had become the president of Advaita Ashrama—a roundish, genial, and gentle monk. My work with him would be to finish writing New Discoveries. Aware that another book was needed to make the history of Swami Vivekananda’s visit to the West complete, Swami Ananyananda suggested that I revise the two books of New Discoveries already published and then write a third book; each of these bulky books would then be cut in half to create six volumes. (As it happened, the third book would end up in the middle of the series as volumes 3 and 4 because it covered the last part of Swami Vivekananda’s first visit to the West, while the second book, Second Visit, would conclude the series as volumes 5 and 6.)

  At times during the next four years of rewriting and writing, I felt that I was not merely climbing Mount Everest without a guide or oxygen, but that the whole of the Himalayan range was bearing down upon my head. Had it not been for my echoing memories of Swami Ashokananda’s voice, “Hup! Push on!” I doubt that I could have completed the third book.

  Kathleen Davis was of constant help throughout 1976–1980. She was a good and tireless typist and had some training in copyediting. With The Chicago Manual of Style (twelfth edition) as our bible, we produced a fairly presentable typescript of more than 1,100 pages that filled to bulging four thick, three-ring binders. By 1980 the manuscript was ready to send to Advaita Ashrama.

  The only difficulty was that no one other than Kathleen had read the entire text. It was, after all, an extremely important thesis that had been written to interpret Swamiji’s message to a rapidly approaching age. My knowledge of Swami Vivekananda stemmed from Swami Ashokananda’s interpretation of his thought, yet I was unsure; how dare I presume to rightly comprehend my teacher’s interpretation? I felt that at least one monk of the Order should read the manuscript and set his seal of approval on it. Swami Prabuddhananda was extremely busy stirring the Vedanta Society of Northern California out of the stagnation of grief into which it had been falling when he took charge in mid-1970. I could not ask him to go carefully through a manuscript of more than one thousand pages.

  Swami Ananyananda, the publisher, was the logical person to read and approve the book, but
I wanted to avoid the agonizing and protracted trans-Pacific correspondence that I suffered through with Swami Budhananda during the editing of Second Visit. It would be better, I reasoned, to go through the book with Swami Ananyananda on the spot—that is, in India. I left San Francisco in December of 1980, this time alone, for Kathleen had no particular desire or need to go. By now she had happily moved into her own apartment in the convent building.

  It took three visits to India between 1980 and 1982 before anyone paid any attention to the manuscript. Finally Swami Vandanananda, the new general secretary, arranged for the ailing Swami Dhyanananda, who was a Sanskrit scholar (quite beside the point, I felt), to come to Belur Math and go through the four binders of typescript.

  For some reason, which still puzzles me, Swami Dhyanananda assumed a highly rancorous tone in the many notes he made regarding the text of the two-volume work. Since I had not met him and had not been asked to work with him one-on-one, his attitude did not disturb me. Swami Vandanananda took an hour out of his busy schedule almost every day to go over Swami Dhyanananda’s latest notes with me. Some of these we ignored as being merely cranky; others, which were scholarly and valid, we agreed with; still others were left up to my own judgment to accept or reject. Swami Vandanananda and I differed on the validity of only a few of Swami Dhyanananda’s long and cantankerous remarks. It was not until I actually met the ailing swami and thanked him for the trouble he was taking that his tone softened.

  Swami Ananyananda, who had been unwell, began to read the manuscript only in early 1983. Working with him was like walking through a verdant landscape, as opposed to climbing cliffs and fording torrential streams. “You are the writer,” he would say when I asked his opinion. He did not know that such trusting words came as a shock to me, so different were they from the verbal challenges of Swami Budhananda. Together, Swami Ananyananda and I, with the help of Swami Dhyanananda, put volumes 3 and 4 of what was now a six-volume work into their final form. It was almost thirty years since Swami Ashokananda had first urged me to write about Swamiji.

  I visited India almost every year after that, to spend ever longer times at Belur Math, which I began to think of as my other home. Bharat Maharaj and Swami Vireswarananda were my first local guardians, showering their affection upon me as they did upon all the Western devotees who stayed at the foreign guesthouse—a special breed, fragile and prone to stomach upset. Actually, I was seldom sick during my long stays in India. Everything agreed with me and that, of course, was because my guardians saw to it that everything would. In this respect, I cannot fail to mention Shibu, the chief servant of the foreign guesthouse, who was like a mother in caring for the guests. Though limited, my conversations with Shibu were sometimes unforgettable. One evening we together watched hundreds of small winged creatures dancing and darting in the air above the pond in front of the guesthouse. Amazed, I asked Shibu what they were—large insects or small birds? With a joyful smile, he said simply, “Brahman playing.”

  With the death of Swami Vireswarananda in 1985 and then of Bharat Maharaj in 1989, I thought that Belur Math would never again be so full of tangible spirituality. But it was not so—sad though I was at their absence, in time Swamis Bhuteshananda, Atmasthananda, and Gitananda, among others, became seniors and amply bestowed their blessings on the devotees. In all the winter and spring months that I spent at Belur Math, I never failed to experience an effortless lift of spirit within and an inpouring of deep affection from the monks. Sri Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, and Swamiji were unwaveringly present, coursing through everyone, monk or devotee, who happened to be there.

  When in India I seldom left Belur Math, but in 1994 I flew to Dacca to visit Swami Ashokananda’s birthplace in Bangladesh with the idea of writing his biography. After a day or two at the Ramakrishna Math in Dacca, during which I was inevitably asked to “say a few words,” I was driven southward with two swamis through acres of tea plantations to Habiganj, a tree-shaded town where we spent the night at the Ramakrishna Ashrama. The following day we drove another seven or eight miles eastward to the erstwhile village of Durgapur, where Swami Ashokananda had lived during his childhood and early youth. The communal riots in Bangladesh during the preceding decade had left standing only one house in this Hindu village, which had once been a thriving oasis of some seventy extended families surrounded by undulating fields of grain. The existing house belonged to surviving members of Swami Ashokananda’s family, who were joined that day by family members and friends from neighboring villages in order to greet us with garlands, gifts of saris, small urns of village soil, and cheers of welcome. They seated us in a row on the veranda and offered us fruit and sweets with an air of excitement; I felt like a long-absent daughter of the village who had returned from foreign lands.

  Soon the music started. Women in colorful skirts and blouses formed a circle under the trees of the courtyard and began to dance. For a time I watched, enchanted. The rhythm of the tablas and sirods, the elated cries and claps of the dancers, the simple steps that I knew I could perform—all were irresistible, and without asking leave of the swamis or of anyone else, I entered the circle of the dancers, waving my arms in the air and hopping about as happily as they. I sensed their delight that I had joined them. Though the swamis were alarmed that I might drop dead, Swami Ashokananda’s eighty-two-year-old daughter had been warmly welcomed!

  On the drive back to Habiganj we crossed a river to reach the small village of Gosainagar, once inhabited by untouchable hide-tanners. As a young man, Swami Ashokananda, then Yogesh Datta, had befriended and served these illiterate, malnourished, and previously ignored outcastes. He had forded the river to bring them food, clothing, and textbooks. He taught school for them, fed them, and cured them of disease. Eventually, he saw them established in the cobbler’s trade, to become relatively prosperous and respected members of the Hindu community. All this he did as worship of the Divine, and this selfless service raised his mind to a level in which he experienced the reality of the object of his worship. The outcastes never forgot him.

  The villagers, now cobblers, were waiting for us with garlands and musical instruments. They led us in a parade down the main street of the village, shouting and dancing as they went. At the end of the street, the procession turned and danced back to what seemed to be the village’s largest and noblest house. I was seated in a thronelike chair on the veranda and offered many cakes, sweets, and morsels of peeled fruit. The men, women, and children of the village stood facing me, expectant—but also perplexed, for by now tears were streaming down my face. These excited people, the children, grandchildren, and perhaps great grandchildren of the outcastes whom my guru had so lovingly served some seventy-five years earlier, were now honoring his aged daughter with an outpouring of devotion for his hallowed memory. I could barely utter the few words I was asked to speak. My English was incomprehensible to them, but I hoped that these childlike and loving people understood my tears to be those of reciprocated love and not of sorrow or pain.

  We drove back to Habiganj, and the next day to Dacca, where I stayed a day or two before I flew back to Belur Math.

  The work that Swami Ashokananda had given me to accomplish was finished; I could now write about him. I will never understand how so much grace, from start to finish, had fallen upon me—much of it, I am sure, from Swami Vivekananda himself. I don’t think anyone can ever know how or why grace happens, but whether it comes as a harsh blow or as a gentle push, and whether what one does with it is good or bad, one can never deny its sure and ineluctable reality.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Unless otherwise noted, the illustrations are courtesy of the Vedanta Society of Northern California.

  Frontispiece: Sister Gargi in India, 1975

  The original temple in San Francisco

  Swami Ashokananda in his office at the Old Temple

  The house on Fillmore Street where the author lived in the top rear apartment from 1951 to
1969

  Swami Shantaswarupananda, Edith Soulé, and Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri

  Swami Ashokananda after a lecture at the Berkeley Temple, 1950s

  Dorothy Madison, Swami Ashokananda, and Anna Webster at the Vedanta Retreat at Olema, 1950

  Workers at Olema, 1950

  Virginia Varrentzoff and Kathy Wyatt (now Pravrajika Vijnanaprana) at Olema, 1961

  Dorothy Madison and Mary Lou Williams at Olema, 1970

  Marie Louise Burke at Mount Rose, 1956

  Swami Ashokananda at Mount Rose, 1955

  Picnic at Mount Rose, 1957

  Swami Ashokananda in his cabin at Lake Tahoe, 1957

  On the porch of Swami’s cabin at Lake Tahoe, 1957

  Retreatants at Lake Tahoe, 1957

  Jo and Helen’s cabin at Lake Tahoe

  Marie Louise Burke reading in the cabin, 1957

  Plaster cast of Swami Vivekananda’s statue for the altar of the New Temple

  At the construction site of the New Temple, 1955

  The New Temple in San Francisco

  The entrance to the New Temple. Photograph by Shelley Brown.

  The New Temple shortly after its dedication, 1959

  The first nuns to take formal vows at the San Francisco convent, 1961

  Dorothy Murdock in the garden of the New Temple, 1965

  Kathleen Davis in her room in the convent building, 1975

  Marie Louise Burke (self-portrait), 1972

  The author (now Sister Gargi) at the Belur Math guesthouse, 1975

  Sister Gargi with Bharat Maharaj at Belur Math, early 1980s

  Sister Gargi receiving the Vivekananda Award. Photograph by Monoj Chaudhuri, Calcutta Municipal Gazette.