My Guru & His Disciple (17 page)

One of the devotees, an old lady, offered to pay for my training as a monk, because “you boys are doing such splendid work.”

After Portland, I went on up to Seattle, to stay a night at the Center there before returning to Los Angeles. Ashokananda and Vividishananda were with me on the train.

As soon as we crossed the Oregon–Washington state line, Ashokananda began what became a tiresomely prolonged would-be humorous bullying of Vividishananda. When we discovered that the train had no dining car, he declared that Vividishananda was responsible, since Washington was his state. Vividishananda merely smiled and said nothing.

The Seattle Center was much smaller than either of the others I had just visited. Vividishananda had only one monk who actually lived with him in his house. This was a young man who had lately been demobilized from the Army. He seemed quite as devoted to Vividishananda as George was to Prabhavananda; but, unlike George, he took his renunciation a shade too grimly—or so I thought. After telling me that he and Vividishananda went for a daily walk through the park, he added: “But we shan't be able to do that when summer comes, because the girls lie around there in swimming suits.”

Vividishananda's smiling quietness was impressive. He appeared to take religion as a matter of course—how else could one spend one's life? I imagined myself as his disciple. He would claim my every waking moment—no time-wasting chatter, no self-indulgent scribblings, no sex fantasies. I might develop genuine austerity. But I should also develop a terminal illness and escape from him by dying within the year. Devatmananda would keep me orbiting around him in a whirl of chores; all I should ever learn from him would be how to fix the plumbing. I hadn't the temperament for utter submission to Ashokananda, even though I realized that it might do wonders for me spiritually; he would goad me to defiance and revolt. As for Vishwananda, whom I was now growing deeply fond of, my joining him at the Chicago Center could well have disastrous results for both of us. I could see myself sinking with him into gluttony, and even seducing him into becoming my drinking companion.

No—for me, it was Prabhavananda or nobody.

November 19. A lot of time has gone by, but little news. My position is exactly the same. The shrine is always with us. As long as some contact is maintained with it, all is simple and possible. As soon as contact is broken, all is horrible, tense, confused.

The other day, Swami said to me, “Do you know what purity is, Chris? Purity is telling the truth.”

Two soldiers are walking past the temple. One of them looks at it and I hear him exclaim: “Boy! The guy who built that thing sure had a screwy wife!”

*   *   *

By the end of October, Swami and I had finished a rough draft of our translation of the
Gita.
Since then, we had been revising it, with the help of a friend of mine, Margaret Kiskadden. This revision was carried out with increasing but still unshared misgivings, as far as Mrs. Kiskadden and I were concerned. At last, on November 22, she reached the brink of frankness and confessed that she didn't think our version was really any better than most of the others—which we had been criticizing for their obscurity and archaic un-English locutions; it was dull and it was clumsy and it reeked of Sanskrit. She further confessed that she had shown part of our version to Aldous, that they had discussed it, and that he had agreed with her opinion.

It was an awful moment, because, once she'd said this, its truth was only too obvious. I felt a wave of depression sweep over me—and Swami, seeing how I felt, suddenly turned very small and gray and shriveled, a bird on a winter bough.

And then—it was really amazing—I saw in a flash what to do. I ran back to my room with the manuscript.

Our version began: “Oh, changeless Krishna, drive my chariot between the two armies which are eager for battle, that I may see those whom I shall have to fight in this coming war. I wish to see the men who have assembled here, taking the side of the enemy in order to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra.”

In about half an hour, I had turned this into:

Krishna the changeless,

Halt my chariot

There where the warriors,

Bold for the battle,

Face their foemen.

Between the armies

There let me see them,

The men I must fight with,

Gathered together

Now at the bidding

Of him their leader,

Blind Dhritarashtra's

Evil offspring:

Such are my foes

In the war that is coming.

I brought this back and showed it to them, and they were both excited. I'm excited myself, because it opens up all sorts of possibilities, and I now realize how horribly bored I was with the old translation. I don't see my way clearly yet, but obviously this method can be applied throughout the book. There should be several different kinds of verse, and I think I can vary the prose style, too. We are going to Aldous this evening, to discuss the whole thing with him.

What had I actually done, during that half hour? I had turned a passage of creaky antiqued prose into some lines of verse which were alliterated and heavily stressed in imitation of an Old English epic. Why? Because I had felt a sudden urge to get the show on the road. The prose had dragged its feet. The verse was brisk and catchy, it seemed to be going somewhere. At least, I had said to myself, I won't let the reader fall asleep on page one.

Thus described, my action sounds irresponsible, frivolous, merely desperate. But, even then, I knew that it wasn't—that I was taking this first step in accordance with an overall plan for rewriting our translation, unclear to me as yet but definitely workable. I was also beginning to see how such a plan could be justified.

Considered simply as a work of literature, the
Gita
is not a unity, except in the sense that it is all composed in the same kind of Sanskrit verse. It has several quite distinct aspects. If you have to choose between translating it into English verse or prose, prose seems preferable, because much of the material doesn't lend itself easily to the capacities of English verse. (The Sanskrit original is, from an English point of view, unnaturally terse and compressed; translated literally, it would become a poem written in telegrams.) It is at least arguable that a mixture of verse and prose is better than either medium used exclusively; that both are needed to present the
Gita
in its full variety.

To begin with, the
Gita
is epic. It was composed to fit into another, far larger epic poem, the
Mahabharata
—the story of the descendants of King Bharata (
Maha
means “great”), who lived in ancient India. At a certain point in that story, Arjuna, one of its warrior heroes, is about to lead his men in a civil war against the army of his foster brother, who has tricked him and his natural brothers out of the kingdom they should have inherited. Arjuna is a friend and disciple of Krishna, who is living on earth in human form. Krishna agrees to be with Arjuna throughout the battle as his charioteer, but he will not join in the fighting.

It is here that the
Gita
takes up the story, naming the leading warriors on both sides and telling how Arjuna asks Krishna to drive him into the no-man's-land between the armies, so that he may see the men he is about to fight against. When Arjuna does see them, he realizes that many are his kinsmen or old friends, and he exclaims that he would rather die than kill them. He begs Krishna to advise him what to do.

Thus far, the
Gita
has preserved the epic character of the
Mahabharata.
But now, as Krishna begins to reason with and instruct Arjuna, it becomes a quite different kind of literary work, having sometimes the character of a gospel, sometimes that of a philosophical discourse. The gospel passages are often poetic in feeling; the discourse passages, translated into English, seem to demand prose; verse would only make them prosy.

Krishna himself has different tones of voice. Sometimes he speaks as God, sometimes as man. Like Jesus, he speaks as God in the aspect of Protector, telling Arjuna to take refuge in him. But he also appears to Arjuna in the aspect of God transcendent, within whose being all creation is contained. Arjuna, who has begged Krishna to grant him this vision, is terrified by its majesty, its blinding brilliance, and the thunder of its speech. Krishna calms his fears by reappearing in human form, as Arjuna's familiar friend. In this aspect, he speaks simply and affectionately. Then, as Krishna returns to his discourse, his tone changes again. He explains the nature of action, the practice of renunciation and meditation, the forces which activate the universe, and the respective temperaments and spiritual duties of different kinds of individual. While doing this, he often uses Sanskrit philosophical terms which require footnotes to explain them; they have no exact equivalents in English. His tone rises, now and then, to thrilling passages of lyrical declaration; more often, it has the quietness of absolute authority—a university lecture delivered by God.

In conclusion, Krishna tells Arjuna that he must fight, because this is his
dharma
—the duty which is imposed upon him by his own nature. Arjuna is a member of the warrior caste and he has accepted the responsibilities of a military leader. He cannot now impulsively disown his dharma and try to obey some other concept of duty; a dharma which is not naturally his will lead him into spiritual confusion. And Krishna adds: “If you say ‘I will not fight,' your resolve is vain. Your own nature will drive you to the act.”

(It was of special importance to me, as a pacifist, to learn that the
Gita
doesn't sanction war—as some have claimed—any more than it sanctions pacifism. It cannot, from its absolute standpoint, do either. It leaves each individual to discover what his or her dharma is.)

Arjuna has been convinced by Krishna's teachings. He agrees to fight. Thus, the
Gita
ends. The
Mahabharata,
continuing its story, tells that the battle lasted eighteen days and resulted in total victory for Arjuna and his brothers.

*   *   *

I don't remember that Swami ever made any objection to the method I was about to use in rewriting our translation. Yet this was a delicate subject. By questioning the literary unity of the
Gita,
I had come near to raising another question: Is the
Gita
a philosophical unity? Many scholars have declared that it isn't—that it contains additions and alterations made at later periods by philosophers of differing schools and that it shows the influence of Buddhist and even of Christian thought. Swami was too well educated not to be able to see a certain justification for such criticisms; but his whole soul rebelled against them. To him, since childhood, the
Gita
had been sacred—every line of it equally so. If I couldn't share his feeling, I could at least take his side by stirring up the prejudice of my college days to damn these dull academic dogs whose noses were trained only to sniff out a “corrupt” text.

Looking through our
Gita
today, I find many transitions from prose to verse or from verse to prose which I can't justify logically. I must have made them purely by ear and often just to keep changing the pace. But Swami, whose faith in my literary taste was stronger even than mine in his spiritual discrimination, passed nearly everything—only objecting, occasionally and very mildly, when I used a word or phrase which strayed too far from its Sanskrit original.

*   *   *

The rough draft of the revision was quickly finished—so quickly, indeed, that my accomplishment became a household legend; Swami even hinted that I had been divinely inspired. I was pleased with myself but also well aware that this praise came from friends who knew nothing of the world of the theater and the film studios. I, who had seen a script reconstructed before breakfast, a song composed while the actors waited on stage, knew that such so-called miracles are not uncommon. I suspect that they are often the result of simultaneous but divided activities in the creative mind. You have no faith in the version of the book or play you are working on but are unwilling to change it, telling yourself that this would mean a lot of trouble and that time is short. Meanwhile, however, a rebellious element inside you has secretly created its own anti-version, complete down to the last detail, and is waiting for a chance to produce and impose it. If the rebellion succeeds, outside observers are amazed at the speed and smoothness with which the takeover is accomplished.

Rebellions may be made smoothly, but never without causing psychological disturbance. In my own case, I suddenly felt that I couldn't work under such pressure unless I started smoking again. (I had given up the habit with difficulty in 1941, because I was upset about my parting from Vernon and wanted to raise my morale by asserting my willpower.) When I lit my first cigarette, I felt so sick to my stomach that I had to run out into the garden for air. But I persisted, and soon I was chain-smoking as compulsively as Swami himself.

Eleven

January 3, 1944. Swami and several of us went to see The Song of Bernadette. On the whole, Swami approved of it. He liked the deathbed scene and the vision of the Lady because, he told us, visions usually appear in the
corner
of a room, and that's what happens in this film. Needless to say, he was convinced that the roses on the Lady's feet were really lotuses. He is extraordinarily obstinate on this point. As for me, I had a real good cry, from about reel two onwards, and greatly enjoyed myself.