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During his whole life he had never remembered the divine and even now he was busy with grammar. What will he gain by memorizing the rules of grammar?
Swami Ramateertha went to America and the Americans were deeply impressed by him. He was a unique person, a living vedantin. For him the divine was not a borrowed idea, it was an actual experience -- he was luminous with his experience. The simple heart of America was greatly impressed by him. The heart of America is very simple; the reason for this is that America has no past, no history, no tradition. The country is only three hundred years old. Its heart is as simple as that of a child; it is not covered with many layers of words of knowledge and scriptures. So the people of that country loved Ramateertha. They listened to his words so attentively, as if he had brought the message of nectar, of the deathless. They danced and sang with him.
Ramateertha returned to India. He thought that if a country like America -- which has no tradition of religion, where people are absolutely materialistic -- could be so impressed by his talks and by his personality, then what will happen in India? I am coming back to my home country whose tradition is thousands of years old. Its history is so old that nobody knows when it started, it is hidden in darkness. The land where the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita were created, the land where people like Buddha, Mahavira and Shankara were born. With this background the people of India will listen to me so eagerly, as if I am distributing diamonds. When such a miracle could happen in America where people are materialistic, where they cannot understand godliness, where their connections with the divine are broken, then what would not happen in India?
But what actually happened in India, Ramateertha could never have imagined! He thought that it would be better to enter India through Benares, the old city of Kashi, because this is the city which has witnessed the whole glorious past of India. Buddha delivered his first sermon there, Shankara declared his universal victory in scriptural debating there, Jaina tirthankaras were born there. There is no other city older
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