| |
than Kashi in the whole world. Even Jerusalem is new; Mecca and Medina are also new. Kashi is the oldest place of pilgrimage. It is the first city on earth to have become civilized.
So Ramateertha came to Benares and he gave his first discourse there. But just in the middle of the talk a pundit got up and said, "Stop! Do you know Sanskrit?" Ramateertha just could not understand this interruption. He was a carefree man. He didn't know Sanskrit. He knew Urdu and Persian very well. He had never thought about what the knowledge of Sanskrit had to do with the Vedas, with Brahma and with knowledge. The divine can be realized without knowing any language. In spite of being illiterate Kabir knew, illiterate Mohammed knew; the flowers of that knowing blossomed in the life of the carpenter's son, Jesus. For this one does not have to be a scholar.
So Ramateertha was quite surprised by the question and he replied, "No, I don't know Sanskrit." That pundit started laughing.
The other people got up to leave and they said, "When you don't know Sanskrit, how can you know Vedanta? First go and learn Sanskrit, then come to teach others."
After this Ramateertha went to the Himalayas, and the sad part of the story is that he gave up the sannyasin clothes. When he died he was not in his ochre robes, because he thought that why be a part of the tradition whose religion has got stuck in mere words and whose sannyas has become only scholarliness and who thinks that the knowledge of Sanskrit is necessary to know Vedanta? So when he died he was not in his ochre robes. He had even given up sannyas.
Tradition has polluted even sannyas. America could understand him but India could not. America is ignorant -- that is why it could understand. India is very knowledgeable -- a bit too knowledgeable. Without knowing, India has the illusion of knowing too much. Its mind has become scholarly but not wise. It has become so full of words that there is no space left for the wordless, and religion has nothing to do with words. Therefore you should be more attentive to what I do not say than to what I say to you. When I speak, don't pay too much attention to my words;
|
|
|