Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/114

96 and into English. There are many that remind us of old Sanskrit sayings, of which there are several collections, all, however, in metrical form. The sayings of R^makr/shi^a are different, because they are in prose, uttered evidently on the spur of the moment, and tinged here and there with European ideas which must have reached Rmakr/sh#a through his intercourse with Anglo-Indians, and not from books, for he was ignorant of English. I received a complete collection of them from R&makrcshtfa's own pupil, Vivek&- nanda, well known by his missionary labours in the United States and England. I give them as they were sent to me, with such corrections only as seemed absolutely necessary. I thought at first of arranging them under different heads, but found that this would have destroyed their character and made them rather monotonous reading. I believe as they are> they give a true picture of the man and of his way of teaching, suggested by the impulses of the moment, but by no means systematic, and by no means free from repetitions and contradictions. I should have liked very much to leave out some of his sayings, because, to our mind, they seem insipid, in bad taste^ or even blasphemous. But should I not in doing so have offended against historic truth? We want to know the man who has exercised and is exercising so wide an influence, such as he was, not such as we wish him to have been. He himself never wished to appear different from what he was, and he often seems to have made himself out worse than he was. Besides, if I had done so, I know that there are men who would not have been ashamed of suspecting me