The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 9/Excerpts from Sister Nivedita's Book/IV On The Way To Kathgodam
CHAPTER IV
ON THE WAY TO KATHGODAM
JUNE 11.
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.
JUNE 12.
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. . . .