Our Master

(contd.)

Manindra Chattopadhyay, Puranjay Roy Bandopadhyay, Habu senior and junior, Satis (as one of them was called), Bhantu, Rajani joined the party. On each eleventh day of the moon at the shrine of Mother Kali there would be reading of the Bhagavat after which, towards the evening, the party would go round the village chanting the Name. The Master ofcourse was the nucleus : round him did the youths of the village rally. He was the soul of the Samity just as he was its sponsor and founder. Many of the distinguished people and not a few of the holy men of the village  took a leading part. Premananda Brahmachari regularly joined it and Srimad Dhrubananda Giri, Sriman Mahimananda, Srimad Vijnanananda frequently attended. The Master’s brother-in-law Keshab Lal Bandopadhyaya  was an active enthusiast. So the Master immersed himself in the Name and inundated the villages around. Even the little children were carried away. At Digsui he taught little boys and girls (such as his guru’s daughter, Padma) to chant the Name ; he would tempt them with pice and induce them to chant the Name in following combinations : Sitaram Jai Raja Ram, Gouri Sankara Sitaram; Jai Raghu Nandan Jai Sitaram, Janaki Ballav Sitaram. Already therefore  the Master in him had been functioning unawares. At least two gentlemen of questionable character were reclaimed from their evil ways, thanks to the spell of his Name : Indu Bhusan Bandopadhyaya of Ranaghat and Nanu Babu of Santipur , brother-in-law of Nani Babu of Dumurdaha. It was Nanu Babu who received the Grace of his Name first. He went bird- fowling and delighted in shooting innocent creatures and proved to be a nuisance to decent people of the   locality. But one day the hunter was himself hunted. The Name chanted by the Master struck him and away went his fowling piece and his vices. It was his passion for music which drew him to the Master and exposed him to the  benevolent attack of his Name. He attended the Hari Basar the day-and-night chanting of the Name on every  eleventh day of the moon, at the Master’s house for his love of music; but in due course the Name itself, apart from the music that accompanied it., cast its spell on him and he came to be quite another man. The fop went to the  extent of wearing ‘tulasi mala’ or basil rosary. The story of Indu Bhusan’s change was equally striking. He hailed from the district of Nadia and lived in Dumurdaha in connexion with a trade in which he was engaged. This fashionable  young man., in lungi, affecting ultra-modern ways, was a sink of vices. One day in April 1925 (Baisakh 9, 1331.) he  was bathing in the Ganges when he listened to the Master chanting the Name for the benefit of an old lady who had retired to the bank of the Ganges to breathe her last there, and he was in a moment most unexpectedly transformed. The old lady was known as the junior Grand-Ma of Makardaha, also called Handu’s mother. Distinguished for her devotion and loyalty to husband, she desired to make a pilgrimage to the Ganges (Ganga-Yatra, as it is called) and die there and the Master had her taken there, on Baisakh 8 and Srimad Vijnanananda, Manindra and Kartick accompanied. The Master’s mother and sister and the mother of Puranjay Roy Bandopadhyaya spent the night with her under peepul tree on the bank of the Ganges. The next day she passed away listening to the Name.  Indu Bhusan heard it while bathing and the change in him ensued. The Name possessed him. Like Nanu Babu he also became a changed man. After this he regularly joined the ‘Hari Basar’ at the Master’s house, which came as a sunrise to the people of the village. He too like Nanu Babu had gift for music , and the two taught the party how to chant the Name to many tunes; they contributed to the variety and attraction of the chanting and lent the services of music to the cause of the Name. the Master thus took refuge in the Name himself and brought many another into his fold,  changing the Sauls of the neighbourhood into Pauls. The two Sauls turned Pauls that we have mentioned, got to love and revere the Master so much that they entered each into a new relation with him, Indu Babu calling him Brajeshwar and Nanu Babu addressing him as Shyam Sundar. Nam Sankirtan or chanting of the Name, continuously for twenty four hours or more, was a regular feature as Braja Nath’s house, on such ceremonial occasions as Janmasthami and Sivaratri as well as on on every eleventh day of the moon , and every full-moon, every Ekadasi and Purnima day. Moreover there was non-stop chanting of the Name at Braja Nath’s house once every month. Batakrishna Chattopadhyaya of Uttamashram attended. Hazari of Nitya-nandapur also participated. There were times when Nam-kirtan would run without a break to full four days. On one such occasion the Master’s guru pointed out that the chanting of the Name for so many days in the month might adversely affect the studies of his pupils that was when the Master had started his own seminary at Dumurdaha). The Master agreed and submitted, “Permit me then to stop it”. “But how can I?” pleaded the helpless guru. That was how the Master gave himself up to the Name. He would always be holding to the Name, Even when he accompanied a wedding party as guest, he would chant the Name all the way and the Party as a whole joined him. So deep was his attachment to the Name, so steadfast his loyalty to it, that he did not care to attend to nad which had already come to him. That was his way. Once he took to the Name, course too led him to his Rome and so on. Penance of all sorts he had to perform for he was to be Master to millions, not all of same road therefore could not be prescribed for all, and if different ways had to be shown to different men according to their varying temperaments , all these different ways must be tried first by the Master; or he could not be the Master he was to be. He had therefore to do penance too, to practice austerities might subsequently be catered to. And look at the penance he performed. The triple penance of body, mind and speech he practised with a rigour that would take one’s breath away. As might be expected, strict ‘Brahmacharyya’ or continence was part of his programme. For it was part of his constitution . Brahmacharyya came easily to him. In a casual aside that dropped unawares from him once, he gave us to understand that in early youth ne changed to ger a copy of Aswini Kumar Datta’s Bhakti Yoga, a manual of ethical instructions about the way to achieve control of the senses, which he read with pleasure although the meaning of sensual appetite he did not understand at all. If his habits were abstemious, he had not to cultivate them by any conscious laborious process.  Restraint was in his nature :indulgence was foreign to his constitution. Penance therefore was sport for him. Austerities in his life looked naturally like lolling in sunshine. Worship of the Gods, of the respected and the wise, worship of holy men and of teachers, purity,, uprightness, non-violence, self restraint : all these various forms of bodily penance he gaily performed as well as the different forms of verbal penance consisting in avoiding rude words and lies, in speaking the sweet inoffensive  wholesome truth, and in reading from the sacred texts as a part of the daily routine. To these were added the penance of  mind : the cultivation of peace of mind, gentleness, silence, self-possession and ‘Bhavasamsuddhi’ or chastneing of the spirit to such an extent as to be able to visualize God in every creature, in every bit of creation. If, for nothing else, for his strict and continuous austerities, would he attain to his consummation. Turn now to the Master’s Cult of Obeisance, his practice of Pranam or Prostration at everybody’s feet. That was an original unique aspect of the Master. While worship of the Gods, Brahmanas, teachers and the wise – devadwijagureprajnapujanam- have ever heen an ideal for the spiritual aspirant, no one before the Master had raised it perhaps to an independent self-sufficient cult, capable of bringing Consummation by itself, unassisted by any other course of exercise. One important message of the Master is that by obeisance pure and simple it may be possible for a man to attain to the supreme height, and he, for one practiced it in daily life. He is never tired of quoting the following lines from the Bhagavad : Kham bayum-agnim salilam mahimcha Jyotimsi sattvani disho drumadeen Sarit samudrangscha Hareh sareeram Jat kincha bhutam pranamed ananyah, Which means : “Sky, air, fire, water, earth, moon, sun and all other heavenly bodies, birds and beasts, worms and insects, the directions, trees, rivers, and the seas — whatever is there, all, all have to be regarded as the Body of God and to all should the true Bhakta, the devotee, bow,” This message the Master lived upto. How often and how devoutly, for how many hours indeed, did the Master bow, stretching himself at   full length each time! (And he does so even today.) Every morning he did bow to the sun, lying prostrate on the ground. He would bow then to the Tulasi Plants, to each one of them, one by one, in the vicinity and bow to the Deity. Next he bowed to his mother, and to every other man about him claiming to be his senior in age. He would prostrate before his guru’s friends. When the railway station at Dumurdaha first came into existence, he stretched himself in prostration even there before the station building. He had occasion once to visit the Jail at Burdwan (one of his disciples was there servicing a term of imprisonment, and another disciple was on the staff) and the first thing he did before entering the prison gate was obeisance to the Jail : he lay prostrate before it, to the great astonishment of the officers. What else could he do? Was not the Jail also God Himself in one form? To the bewildered question of the officer who happened to be his disciple, he replied, “Punishment is God.” In one of his earliest books written while he was yet a house-holder in the accepted sense, “Maharasyan” (as it is called) or the Supreme Flixir (done into English by S. Sil as “The Road to Life Divine”), the Master wrote, “Obeisance  Obeisance! Above and below, up and down, in front and behind, Obeisance, obeisance, every where, to all creatures and in all directions. O Ram! Pranam – Pranam! Obeisance – Obeisance!” He followed, as he still does, the instruction of Sri Krishna, as laid down in the Gita: “Manmana bhava mad bhakto madyayi mam namaskuru” “On me fix thy mind/ to me be devoted; bow down to me.” “If you bow to me,” says the Lord, “mam evaisyasi”- “it you prostrate yourself before me, to me shalt thou attain.” If, by nothing else, by sheer Obeisance, would the Master attain to his height. If of nothing else we are capable, this surely is within reach of us all. In order that the down and the out may attain consummation, the Master is his Infinite Mercy
has given us the easiest formula, taking care to follow it himself first and test its supreme efficacy.