Free My Guru & His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood Page A

here he made no converts at all. Now he has about twenty-four.
    Drove Gerald home. We agreed that this sort of thing could never be transplanted to the West. Ritual is valuable, certainly—but perhaps only for the person who actually celebrates it. The holy women seemed more concerned today with the mere domestic bustle of preparing and serving food. At least that was the impression I got as an outsider.
    Nevertheless, all this Hindu domesticity doesn’t repel me. Precisely because it is so domestic. Ramakrishna really does seem to be established in that household. They fuss over him like a guest of honor. There is no dividing line between the activities of the temple and their daily lives. And, after all, if you admire the man at all, why not make him feel at home? Why not reproduce, as far as possible, the ceremonies he used to practice and the style of life he was accustomed to? It’s really a matter of common politeness—like eating Chinese food when the Chinese Ambassador comes to dinner.
    I was still, as is obvious from the above, seeing the Vedanta Center very much through Gerald’s eyes—from an anthropological rather than a spiritual standpoint. Nevertheless, I had just entered into a relationship with this little Bengali and his establishment which was far more binding and serious than a marriage—I who had always had an instinctive horror of the marriage bond! Would I have involved myself in this way if I had clearly understood what it was that I was doing? Not at that time, I think. I didn’t understand because I didn’t yet believe in the spiritual reality of the involvement.
    Prabhavananda must have known very well what he and I were letting ourselves in for. According to Hindu belief, the tie between the guru and his initiated disciple cannot be broken, either in this world or on any future plane of existence, until the disciple realizes the Atman within himself and is thus set free. Meanwhile, the disciple may neglect, reject, or even betray the guru, but the guru cannot disown him. In such cases, the guru must continue to guide the disciple mentally, from a distance, and protect him through prayer.
    I had to take it for granted that Prabhavananda had long since faced up to and accepted this tremendous responsibility; it was, after all, his justification for being a swami. The mantram which Brahmananda had given him implied the obligation to pass on its power to others by giving them mantrams of their own. The Christians claim that their line of apostolic succession still carries the authority of spiritual power, even though it is now nearly two thousand years long. How short, by comparison, was the line that led us back to Ramakrishna! It was as though we at the Vedanta Center were disciples of a disciple of one of the apostles of Jesus.
    Prabhavananda often told us he believed that no one who came to seek instruction at the Center did so by mere accident. “Ramakrishna chose you, all of you,” he would declare, with conviction. “He led you to this place.” In other words, we had to thank Ramakrishna’s grace rather than any good karma of our own, accumulated through our previous lives. Did I believe this? I would have liked to—good luck gives one far more satisfaction than a reward of merit. But, for the present, I put Prabhavananda’s statement into my “suspense account.” By this time, it contained many items whose disposition couldn’t be determined—and might never be.
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    How did Gerald regard my initiation? He certainly hadn’t discouraged me from accepting it. He himself had already been initiated. So had Huxley. But both of them, as I have said, were temperamentally eclectic. I don’t believe either would have felt that the initiation ceremony imposed limits on him or committed him to a special loyalty.
    I suppose Gerald assumed that I would feel the same way. He can’t have