On Inadequacy -Satsang With H.H Shri Swami Dayananda

Question: What is your concept of moksha?

Swamiji: My concept of moksha is freedom from the sense of limitation and the sense of dependence for your security and happiness. It is not my concept. It is the concept of Vedanta.

Question: Does it means freedom from materialism?

Swamiji: Freedom from the sense of inadequacy.

Question: Inadequacy can be spelt out. My inadequacy may be that I do not have a certain social position. Some people say they do not have enough money. One may say one needs this much and I may say I need a little more.

Swamiji: It is the same. You are talking of your concept of adequacy. You are accepting inadequacy anyway. You may think that by having some more money, you will be adequate. Another man may think that with some power he will be adequate. Yet another may go for name. One may work more for scholarship, position,  or whatever. But it is clear that everyone has a sense of inadequacy.

Question: Does the problem of inadequacy require metaphysics ... soul... meditation?

Swamiji: We can accept this much: there is a self-consciousness and therefore a self-judgement. The universal judgement is, “I am inadequate.” When I find myself inadequate, I cannot stand it and therefore there is a natural urge for becoming adequate. According to your concept of adequacy, a given thing may make you adequate and that varies from person to person. Logically  it is impossible for you to be adequate because inadequacy plus something is still inadequate only. When you evaluate a gain, taking into account the loss involved, it turns out to be not a great gain, because in every gain there is a loss. Every gain is accompanied by a loss. You get something only when you invest something and thus you will discover that in the relative world any gain involves a certain loss. Naturally therefore the inadequacy continues to be and that is the experience of everyone.

The question that arises now is whether the urge to be adequate is natural or not. It is a natural urge; one cannot stop it also because one cannot ‘become’ adequate. I cannot stop working against inadequacy and therefore I have to find a solution. If the solution is not empirically available, necessarily then I will have to ask the question, “Am I really inadequate?” Is inadequacy merely a standpoint?

Suppose inadequacy itself is a judgement based on a standpoint and I may be taking it to be absolute. Suppose the standpoint makes me inadequate, I look at myself as inadequate, then only it is my problem; if something else is inadequate, then it is not really my problem, it is not a problem centered on ‘I’. Therefore, if there is an inadequacy centered on ‘I’, I am inadequate. Therefore I should discover myself to be adequate.

There is no way of myself discovering adequacy by myself though wealth, power or anything because anything I gain is going to be inadequate and therefore ‘I’ plus something will still be inadequate. Inadequate plus inadequate is inadequate. Finite plus finite is finite only. So through inadequacy there is no possibility of gaining adequacy for myself. My urge is natural and I cannot remain being inadequate; the sense of inadequacy is something I cannot live with happily. And therefore I should discover that perhaps I need not ‘become’ adequate. Becoming adequate is meaningless. Perhaps  I ‘am’ adequate. I have to say only ‘perhaps’. Perhaps I am adequate.

Therefore the whole enquiry falls on your own lap. Now you will ask the question, ‘who am I?’ Then it becomes metaphysics.

Question: Is it not that the social structure is such that every individual feels inadequate?

Swamiji: It is an individual problem that I feel inadequate. After all when you say you are inadequate or the society is putting an inadequacy on you, it is just inadequacy. I am saying that even if there is no society, the sense of inadequacy will still remain.

I would like to know how do you look at yourself, what is the self. Suppose you say you are the physical body, definitely you are inadequate. If you say you are the mind, definitely you are inadequate. If you say, “I am knowledge that I have gathered”, definitely you are inadequate, because knowledge never comes to be adequate. Therefore in any way you look at yourself, there is going to be inadequacy.  This is the basic judgement. First you judge yourself and then you look at yourself through society. You look at the other fellow and if he is recognized as more beautiful, you develop a complex. Then if some other fellow is more successful, you have another complex.

Question: Are you trying to say there is ignorance of oneself?

Swamiji : Yes. I am born with ignorance and the ignorance is two-fold. One is ignorance of myself and the other is ignorance of everything else. I have such means of knowledge as perception, inference etc to know things other than myself. But then the self-ignorance continues. You do not require self-knowledge to operate the other means of knowledge. You can be a successful scientist without self-knowledge. In this regard, there is no distinction between human beings and animals!

Om Tat Sat

Analysing A Rose

When you examine any object, you find that it resolves into its constituent parts. For example , take a rose. What is the truth of the rose? Are the petals the rose? No? When you pull apart all the petals, what is left is a center - Is the center part the rose? Is the stalk the rose? No.

Are these individual parts the rose? No.

Examine each individual part – and you find it is made of parts. Then examine each of these individual parts and you find it is made of some more constituents.

Like this on analysis every object is found to be nothing but its constituents parts which are nothing but their constituents parts which again are but their constituent parts ....

And so some philosophies will claim that there is no truth at all in the rose ...  in fact the rose as a rose  is non-existent.

What do we say ... we say the rose and all its  constituent parts proves their existence only because of the presence of a conscious being – the one who is analysing the rose. The rose ‘is’ and every constituent also ‘is’.

This conscious being is the truth of the rose – the conscious being ‘is’ and the rose ‘is’ – the ‘is’ of the conscious being and the ‘is’ of the rose is one and the same. There is no difference between the substance of consciousness being and that of the rose.

There is only one substance here – existence or the ‘isness’ – the ‘is’ called as SAT – this SAT is the satyam – the truth of the rose, this SAT is  the satyam -  the truth of the one who is analysing the rose to find out its truth! The rose is merely a word with a meaning centred on one’s tongue and the substance, the truth is SAT – IS. This SAT is one, non-dual. It is satyam and the rose is mithya a dependent reality.

Om Tat Sat

Purno'ham

Om Sad-Guru Shri Dayanandeshwaraya Namah

Purno’ham – what shines as ‘I’ is suddha caitanyam is purna –is whole.

Wholeness is to be understood. Whole – means that which has no holes, which is complete, full – undivided, part-less, whole – ekam advitiyam.

I am – self-evident, self-revealing consciousness that is :-

·         never subject to any division (no time-wise division therefore always present and changeless, indestructible, nor subject to space-wise division therefore all pervading, not limited by the boundary of the body, nor subject to object-wise division therefore in the apparent form of all objects),

·         free of all differences (sajatiya bheda, vijatiya bheda, svagata bheda),  in whose presence all divisions, all differences are perceived, who is in and through all the differences and yet free of all differences,

·         free of subject-object division, and yet who is in and thru the subject-object, pervading the subject, pervading the object and yet free of both subject and object – who is WHOLE – all-inclusive and yet free of all that is included in it!!

Purno’ham. Cinmayoham ....Sat-cit-ananda svarupoham So’ham.

Om Tat Sat

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Satsang with H. H. Shree Swami Dayananda : The truth of oneself is not an intellectual conclusion, nor is it something to be ‘reached’ by experiences.

 Question :     But we keep hearing that there are teachers who, through touch, can cause all things to fall into place so that you realize the Truth. Could it be that through experiences you can get enough glimpses of the vision of Truth so that you then won’t have to go through the heavy intellectual resistance to accepting that vision? Does it boil down to clearing the intellect?

Swamiji :      No. The Truth of oneself is not an intellectual conclusion, nor is it something to be ‘reached’ by experiences. The Guru is not an elevator who touches you and you go ‘up to Brahman.’ Brahman is you -- not a place to be reached. It is not through an experience that you become Truth. There is nothing to become. There is nothing to transform. You are the Truth that you are seeking. The teaching of Vedanta is simply a means of knowledge (praman), and an instrument that shows you what you are. 

What you are is not an intellectual conclusion. An intellectual conclusion is an inferential conclusion about something that is not available for immediate perception but about which there are data available from which logical conclusions can be reached. You need not be inferred because you are right here with yourself; you are immediately present. You are available to be known, not to be inferred. You fail to know yourself only due to ignorance, not due to lack of availability. Knowledge, not inference, and not experience, destroys that ignorance.

Vedanta directly teaches what you are. The use of logic is for the removal of doubts to give clarity to your vision. We use certain reasoning methods (yukti) to remove the blocks you may have that interfere with your clear vision. These blocks are always rational and can be removed by reason. We use your experiences also. We help you assimilate your experiences in terms of knowledge. In fact, we help you see that you have always had the experience of yourself. You don’t require a new experience to see yourself. There is no source of the vision of fullness (ananda) that you call happiness, except yourself.

Whenever, at any time, you pick up a resolving moment of happiness, you experience your essential self. Vishayaananda means happiness gained through a desirable object—something in which there is a ‘kick’ for you and for a moment that ‘kick’ swallows up all the other wants of the wanting mind. That fullness (aananda) that, happiness (sukha) is but yourself, really. Through some gain, through some sensation, through a profound appreciation of beauty, a certain mental condition occurs in which, for the moment, you are just with yourself—you do not want a change in anything whatsoever. In the quiet clarity of a mind that wants no change, you pick up yourself as a moment of happiness. You do not recognize that happiness as yourself and instead attribute it to an object or a situation experienced.

Desiring happiness all the time, you continually seek it through all your actions. You know that you want happiness again. The very fact that you want happiness shows that you know it. Nobody desires something that is unknown. What you do not know is that you are happiness; you cannot help but seek it because it is your very nature and you cannot settle for anything else or anything less. You do know that there are moments of fullness which are moments of happiness. You do not require some strange, new experience to know that.

Even if you gain some new experience that reveals happiness to you, it makes no difference. Whether the experiences you have are usual or unusual, they still have to be assimilated in terms of knowledge. Experience itself does not give knowledge. It is only experience. It come and goes. Shruti, the scriptures, particularly the Upanishads, provide the basis for the knowledge that the moments of happiness I experience reflect my real nature, which is limitless fullness. Shruti, is the means of knowledge, for what one cannot account for through perception-based data.

Not only that experience does not give me the knowledge of the nature of fullness, but also experience does not give me the vision of the whole. Slipping into myself does not give me knowledge of the whole—knowledge of the Truth of me, of the world and of the creator. It is the knowledge of the whole that frees me just as I am. For that knowledge I need to know, very well, what is apparently real (mithya), and what is limitless reality (satyam). It is not enough just to be myself—I have to account for this world or things will not fall into place. If I do not discover the nature of the world as well as the nature of myself, the world will overwhelm me and I will have to escape the world.

Vedanta has been presented as an experience. This has been a wrong presentation. Vedanta is knowledge, not a happening. A teacher unfolds the knowledge of oneself until it is clear. Doubts and vagueness are eliminated by logic bringing clarity of vision.

Vedanta is immediacy of knowledge. When that immediacy of knowledge is presented as experience, confusion follows. This confusion has arisen, at least in part, because of a word in Sanskrit, ‘anubhava’, which has been translated in English simply as ‘experience’. Such a translation causes the expectation of a ‘happening,’ not a ‘seeing.’ I would rather translate ‘anubhava’ as ‘immediate knowledge’. For the qualified student that which comes after teaching is knowledge in keeping with the teaching, and that is anubhava.

Om Tat Sat

The Meditator - Swami Dayananda

The content of the word ‘I’ is pure awareness,

without any form or thought.

When you hear, you become a hearer.

So too, when you think, you become a thinker;

doubt, doubter; decide, decider; inquire, inquirer.

All these are so many roles you can play-

walk, walker; speak, speaker; drive, driver.

In these various roles that you play,

Consciousness, Awareness, is invariable,

not really affected by what happens to the role.

As long as you are just a perceiver or thinker,

you have no problems;

but when you interrelate with people, or even objects, assuming

different roles—

like father or mother, son or daughter, husband or wife,

neighbor or friend, member of a religion, citizen of a country,

person of a given race—

these roles bring about certain reactions on your part.

Since to be father is a role,

the problems of a father belongs to the role, and should be

confined to the role.

It takes self-knowledge to make a role simply a role.

Lack of knowledge makes the role yourself

and because of the non-recognition of oneself playing a role

reactions come, and become very real.

The reactions, everyday, leave behind a personality.

When as a father or mother

you want your son to behave in a manner acceptable to you,

and he doesn’t,

it does leave a hurt.

For a husband and wife,

when in an interaction with each other there is frustration

due to lack of mutual understanding,

there is anger, often locked up inside because of the over-

riding values.

As a citizen of this country,

when policies and actions of the government are not in

common with your values, you are going to react—

with despair, anger, frustration—

and all of them have no vent. They all get embedded in the person.

A number of prejudices against races, against other beliefs and religions, customs and manners of different people in the world again find no expression,

and they again create a personality.

There are persons in your life whom you have to suffer-

like an employer.

You cannot say much, for obvious reasons, against the person

to his face,

but there is anger, unreleased anger.

That you control your anger is prudence,

but that you are angry is an indelible fact.

It is this person, with all these reactions, who sits in meditation.

That is why meditation doesn’t take place.

If meditation is to be yourself, you must get rid of the left-overs

of all these roles;

to be yourself is not to play a role.

At this moment you are not father or son, husband or wife,

employer or employee, neighbor or friend, American or Indian.

You are just a person.

This is what you pay attention to now, in meditation.

You don’t play roles now; but the angry person whom you saw

as yourself while playing a given role is not gone,

the anger being there, sadness being there, regret,

disappointment, failure being there, despair and frustration

being there.

There is no way of being yourself unless you strip yourself

of all these left-over roles.

How do you get rid of these left-overs?

Just to be a person, free from all these left-over roles,

is to look at yourself as a person,

a simple person.

First, visualize the blue sky. How do you relate to the sky?

As a person who has no complaint against the sky being what

it is,

you find yourself  as a simple, conscious person,

seeing the sky and the stars therein.

You are an appreciative, a conscious, person.

You can be so in all other situations, too – even situations that

cause problems in you – by being objective to situations.

When you are meditating, you can command this objectivity,

the situation not really being there but only visualized on your own volition.

Think of the clouds or the absence of them;

the rains,  the absence of them.

You accommodate. You accept the situation as it is—

that there is air, that there is sun, that there is moon, does not

become a source of botheration for you.

In fact, you appreciate these things.

Because there are planets, our system is filled with further beauty.

Earth is not alone;

Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn – all these do not create

any kind of reaction in you.

That the earth is a globe doesn’t create any reaction in you.

That it has mountains, valleys, oceans, islands, islets, minerals,

trees, plants, weeds, doesn’t bother you.

Varieties of flowers and fruits, varieties of animals, including insects,

they are to be accepted first and dealt with.

You cannot react with hatred to a mosquito,

but you can act to exterminate the mosquitoes.

Action without hatred to achieve a given result which enhances the

quality of your life is necessary.

Act. But take into account when you act that there is no reaction.

An insect is just an insect, whatever it does, in whichever

form it is, that is how it was made to be.

Accept it, and act.

Now visualize different races—

the Mongolian race, the Polynesian, the Negro, the Caucasian,

and the mixtures all over the world—living in different parts of

the planet.

They have their language, their literature, their music, their

dance, their dress and their eating habits.

What is wrong in this?

Their beliefs, their customs, their manners, their forms of prayer,

and their concept of God,

take them as they are.

Why should they bother you?

Take them as they are.

Come to your own country.

The people—accept them as they are.

The southerner, the northerner, the Polish, the Irish, the Indian,

the Mexican—

accept them as they are.

There is no use being frustrated.

Accommodate your employer, or employees or co-workers.

Remember, as you have a mind, each of them has his or her own mind.

That makes a difference between you two.

Take the person as the person is.

Change the person if you can, and if you are convinced

that such a change is beneficial for both.

Accept your neighbor.

If you cannot stand your neighbor, seek other neighbors—

leave the neighborhood.

But let that neighbor not have handle on your mind,

to make you regretful and angry.

Accommodate the person as the person is.

Let the person be not in a position to hurt you.

Accommodate.

All people struggle with their minds, with their fears, anxieties,

insecurities, complexes.

Accommodate.

Accept your father and mother as they are.

If you think they have not understood you, communicate.

If you think you have failed, accept.

Accept them as they are, and do whatever is to be done.

Accept your partner in life.

It is this person with whom you share your life.

Take the person as the person is, at all levels.

If you think a change would be better, for both, do what you

can to make the change,

but first accept.

If you say, “Unless you change I cannot accept,”

there is reaction.

If you accept, and work for change,

there is love, there is understanding, there is care, there is

concern.

And there is something done.

Accept your own body—

its height, its weight, its looks, its color, its sex, its illness, its

inabilities, inadequacies, its strength, and virtues.

Accept the body as it is.

If you can cure the illness, do.

If you can reduce your weight, and if you want to, do.

But do not reject it just because it has a weight problem.

When you reject, you react.

When you accept, you act.

Accept with love, with understanding.

Now accept your mind—

Its moods and its movements, its prejudices—accept them.

Only then can you change.

Accept the limitation of knowledge, and work for what you

want to know further.

And last, but not the least,

accept your memories.

Let there not be a memory which compels you to

escape from it,

by singing or driving or going on a spree of buying—

hundreds of diversions all to escape from the skeletons of

your memory.

Memory does not harm. Every experience leaves an impression

meant for use.

Be objective toward memories. No piece of memory is going to

frighten you or make you regret what happened.

There is no use in regretting.

There can be learning from what you have gone through;

you can be wiser for what has happened.

Bring up those memories that haunt you.

Look at them as left-overs of a dead past.

Let there be not a single piece of memory that you are afraid

to face.

Now you are yourself.

You are a simple, conscious being,

a person who is endowed with memories, mind, sense organs,

body,

all to see the world, to experience, to make your life in this

world, to interact with situations, people.

This is all that is there—

to act, to know, to think, to see, to hear.

You are simple person.

This is meditation.

Be yourself.

Know more about yourself.

Even without Self-knowledge you can be so simple and

relatively free;

and when you turn your attention to learning about yourself,

the words of the teaching ring true all over.

It is the meditator that counts in the meditation.

                                                                       

                                                                        September 1, 1983 

Update on Pujya Swamiji The Mahatma I Know

I have put in my Google Drive and am giving you all the link until such time as I have time to compose it on Blogger again. Please  try the link below

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4o4hZ5-0Ms7Y29tMTk4ZGs5Y2M/view?usp=sharing

Dr Anantanand Rambachan on Pujya Swami Dayananda

http://swarajyamag.com/culture/obituary-swami-dayananda-saraswati-1930-2015/

Few teachers have fulfilled their obligations to their tradition as Swami Dayananda Saraswati did. He has left our world richer with teachers.

In 1973, after graduating from the University of the West Indies, I made a long journey from my home in Trinidad to study at the Sandeepany Sadhanalaya, the aśrama in Mumbai, India, founded by Swami Chinmayananda (1916-1993). This was my first visit to India, the birthplace of my Hindu ancestors. It was a time when few from my country traveled to India.

I was a teenager when Swami Chinmayananda first visited Trinidad in 1965 and I avidly read his available writings. In 1969, I wrote to him for permission to join his aśrama. His sage advice, after rebuking me for my undated letter, was to complete my college education before coming to Sandeepany.  In 1973, Sandeepany Sadhanalaya launched its first intensive multi-year course of study in Vedānta and Sanskrit.  By then, I had fulfilled Swamiji’s advice and I was accepted as his student.

Mumbai was drenched in monsoon rains when I made my way from the airport to Sandeepany. I was introduced to Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who I learned was the prinicipal ācārya and the designer of the course of study that I came to pursue.

When I arrived at Sandeepany, I discovered that the course had already started.  Swamiji, in fact, had completed his teaching of one of the foundational texts, Śaṅkara’s Tattvabodha. Tattvabodha offers concise definitions of the major terms and concepts of Vedānta and is a necessary preliminary to further study. Realizing that I would be at a learning disadvantage for his Upaniṣad classes, Swamiji offered to teach the text again and did so in intimate sessions in his kutir. Though he had recently completed the text, his instruction was patient and thorough. These were features of his teaching that never wavered. There were never signs of impatience or haste.

This was my first and indelible experience of the one who would become the most influential teacher in my life. For the next three years, with rare breaks, I sat at his feet studying the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavadgītā with the commentaries of Śaṅkara.

When Swamiji was ready to begin the teaching of the Bhagavadgītā, he wanted a location where the ancient ṛṣis themselves taught and where their memories were still alive.  He took us all to Purana Jhadi in Rishikesh. There was no accommodation at Purana Jhadi. Swamiji had a tiny one-room cottage, and so we stayed in the spartan rooms of Andhra Ashram. On early mornings and late afternoons, we sat in the open on the banks of the Ganga, breathing the cool air and listening to his meticulous verse by verse exposition of the Bhagagavadgītā. The Ganga roared unceasingly in the background and Swamiji often spoke of it as symbolizing thesampradāya or flow of knowledge.  Swamiji delighted in the simple and unencumbered ascetic setting of Purana Jhadi . It seemed a perfect setting, singing Ganga and silent Himalaya, for Swamiji to do what he loved beyond all else – teach.  It does not surprise that Swamiji chose Rishikesh, a sacred space where he lived as both student and teacher, to be the site of his mahāsamādhi.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati was an abundantly gifted human being and these gifts found fruitful expression in a variety of achievements and initiatives.  A proper and detailed assessment of his legacy is a necessary task for scholars of religion in the future. For his students across the world, however, the heart of this legacy is not in dispute. They have discovered it in his extraordinary gifts as a teacher of Vedānta; this is the image that is lovingly and gratefully alive in their hearts.

At the heart of Swamiji’s passion and creativity as a teacher was his foundational commitment to the Veda (śruti) as a source of valid knowledge (pramāṇa). The understanding of the Veda as a pramāṇa, though central to the methodology of the classical teacher, Śaṅkara, did not come easy to Swamiji. He spoke often to us of his early challenges as a student of Vedānta before he understood the Veda as a pramāṇa. His students, he would say, “do not know the magnitude of the discovery that the Veda is a pramāṇa. They did not suffer as I did.”  He attributed his transformative understanding to the teaching of a Telugu-speakingsaṃnyāsin, Swami Pranavananda. Through the teaching of Swami Pranavananda, Swamiji came to see Vedānta as a direct means of knowledge for knowing the truth of oneself, even as the eyes serve as the instrument for the knowledge of forms and colors. “That was enough for me,” said Swamiji. “I never looked back. I had already studied theUpaniṣads – Vedāntaḥ. So, what was needed was only to rearrange – to look at the Upaniṣads, the whole teaching in the light of Pramāṇam.”

Any description of Swamiji’s skillful teaching is incomplete without grasping this fact. This is where he always started his unfolding of the Vedānta vision. The human problem, as Swamiji tirelessly taught, is one of incorrect understanding of the nature of oneself that is full and whole, but erroneously taken to be incomplete and lacking.  Ignorance is dispelled only by knowledge and knowledge must be derived from a valid source.

The Veda-pramāṇa consists of words. The potential of these words to dispel ignorance depends on their handling by a skillful teacher. Swamiji brought to his teaching a deep understanding of the possibilities and limits of language.  He exercised meticulous care in his choice of words and used these with marvelous dexterity and deftness to instruct about that, “from whom all words, along with the mind, turn back having failed to grasp.” (Taittirīya Upaniṣad). He knew well the dangers of linguistic indiscipline and imprecision in speaking of brahman and sought always to use words with caution, and consistency. He was fresh and chaste in his teaching. Words can liberate and words can imprison; he tapped deftly into the liberating potential of the words of the Upaniṣads and taught his students to do the same.

As a teacher, Swamiji’s attention was unwaveringly centered on the end-purpose of his teaching- the freedom of the student sitting at his feet. He made mokṣa, an end that is too-often clothed in mystery and made to seem remote and difficult, real and accessible.  He universalized the human problem as a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness, making it one that is validated in the experience of every human being. He presented mokṣa as freedom from self-inadequacy that is attained through understanding a teaching that dispels ignorance.  He enabled us to see that the full being we want to become is immediately and always available. The presentation of the human problem and its resolution in these terms means that the Vedānta pramāṇa deals with a recognizable human issue.  As a teacher, Swamiji clearly wanted to present the Vedānta  pramāṇa in a manner that overcomes cultural or religious alienation and to make it accessible and relevant to a recognizable problem. I recall that in every class, at some point or the other, he imparted the vision of Vedānta in its entirety. To transmit the vision of the whole in this manner is no small accomplishment for a teacher, and Swamiji always did it with an irresistible relevance, charm and intimacy.

One of the eloquent statements about Swamiji’s impact and effectiveness as a teacher is his ability to nurture and produce capable teachers.  He understood himself as belonging to an ancient lineage (sampradāya) of teachers and students. This lineage had both a teaching to transmit as well as a distinctive methodology to ensure proper transmission and continuity.  He fulfilled his indebtedness to this tradition through his own earnest study, his commitment to teaching, and his founding of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam as a place of teaching and learning. Few teachers have fulfilled their obligations to their tradition as Swamiji did.  He has left our world richer with teachers, monastic and lay, who will contribute to the vitality of this tradition and produce new teachers.

Swamiji’s teaching was essentially an invitation to inquire. One cannot prove that the Vedānta, as a valid source of knowledge, works unless one is willing to give it a try by exposing oneself to a qualified teacher. As a teacher, he never demanded that his students assent to anything apriori. All he asked for was a willingness to try the teaching with an open mind. One must be willing to suspend judgments about the pramāṇa until it is given an opportunity to prove itself.

When I visited Swamiji for the last time in December 2014, forty-one years after we first met, his health was failing and he was frail in body. Each evening, however, a few of us sat around him in the lecture hall to listen to the transcript of his lectures on Taittīriya Upaniṣad.  Between periods of listening, we would support him to exercise by walking around the room. He was attentive to each word, occasionally correcting the transcript, ensuring that his meaning was accurately communicated.  His eyes and face lit up whenever a passage from the commentary of Śaṅkara was cited. He delighted in the clarity and logic of the argument. Commitment to the Veda-pramāṇa was the beginning and end of his self-understanding as a teacher.

One night, at the end of the session, he turned to me and spoke words that I will never forget, “Śastra pramāṇa does work.” 

Jaya Gurudeva