The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 9/Excerpts from Sister Nivedita's Book/IV On The Way To Kathgodam

On Saturday morning we left Almora. It took us two days and a half to reach Kathgodam. . ..

Somewhere en route near a curious old water-mill and deserted forge, the Swami told Dhira Mata of a legend that spoke of this hill-side as haunted by a race of centaur-like phantoms, and of an experience known to him by which one had first seen forms there and only afterwards heard the folk tale.

The roses were gone by this time, but a flower was in bloom that crumbled at a touch, and he pointed this out because of its wealth of associations in Indian poetry.

On Sunday afternoon we rested near the plains in what we took to be an out-of-the-way hotel above a lake and fall, and there he translated for us the Rudra prayer:

From the unreal lead us to the Real. From darkness lead us unto light. From death lead us to immortality. Reach us through and through our self. And evermore protect us — O Thou Terrible! — From ignorance, by Thy sweet, compassionate face.

He hesitated a long time over the fourth line, thinking of rendering it, "Embrace us in the heart of our heart". But at last he put his perplexity to us, saying shyly, "The real meaning is, Reach us through and through our self". He had evidently feared that this sentence, with its extraordinary intensity, might not make good sense in English. . . . I have understood that a more literal rendering would be, "O Thou who art manifest only unto Thyself, manifest Thyself also unto us!" I now regard his translation as a rapid and direct transcript of the experience of Samâdhi itself. It tears the living heart out of the Sanskrit, as it were, and renders it again in an English form.

It was indeed an afternoon of translations, and he gave us fragments of the great benediction after mourning, which is one of the most beautiful of the Hindu sacraments:

The blissful winds are sweet to us. The seas are showering bliss on us. May the corn in our fields bring bliss to us. May the plants and herbs bring bliss to us. May the cattle give us bliss. O Father in Heaven, be Thou blissful unto us! Thy very dust of the earth is full of bliss.

And then, the voice dying down into meditation:

It is all bliss — all bliss — all bliss.

And again we had Suradâsa's song, which the Swami heard from the nautch-girl at Khetri:

O Lord, look not upon my evil qualities! Thy name, O Lord, is Same-Sightedness. Make of us both the same Brahman! . ..

Was it that same day or some other that he told us of the old Sannyâsin in Benares who saw him annoyed by troops of monkeys and, afraid that he might turn and run, shouted, "Always face the brute!"?

Those journeys were delightful. We were always sorry to reach a destination. At this time it took us a whole afternoon to cross the Terai by rail — that strip of malarial country on which, as he reminded us, Buddha had been born.

As we had come down the mountain roads, we had met parties of country-folk fleeing to the upper hills with their families and all their goods, to escape the fever which would be upon them with the rains. And now in the train there was the gradual change of vegetation to watch and the Master’s pleasure, greater than that of any proprietor, in showing us the wild peacocks, or here and there an elephant or a train of camels. . ..