SwamiYatiswarananda READINGS ON THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA VolumeI(Madras1911) VolumeII(Madras1922) Wiesbaden,Germany April26,1934throughJanuary9,1935 VedantaStudyCircle Athens,Greece 1994 Publishedby: JohnManetta Beles28(Koukaki) GR11741Athens,Greece Phone:[+30]2109234682 email: [email protected] website: www.vedanta.gr Printedin Athens,Greece Printing 1st—September,1994 PrintedtoCD—August2004 Processedwith: VenturaPublisher Typesetin: Helvetica10/12 PUBLISHER’SNOTE Dear Friends, Further to Swami Yatiswarananda’s READINGS on SWAMI BRAH- MANANDA’S SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS, and the READINGS on the VEDANTASARA, the NARADA BHAKTI SUTRAS, the DRG-DRSYA VIVEKA and the BHAGAVAD-GITA, we are happy to share with you Swami Yatiswarananda’s READINGS ON THE GOSPEL OF SRI RA- MAKRISHNA VOL. I & II, the notes of class-talks delivered at Wies- baden, Germany, to an intimate group of European students, from April 25, 1934 through January 9, 1935. Our search in Germany for Readings generated between 1933-1938 had already revealed a German translation of the Gospel Readings, and we were lucky to find a copy of the English original during our 1993 search at Sri Ramakrishna Math, Bangalore, India. Along with the original carbon copies of class-notes, there was also a slightly edited version with topic-titles, compiled by Mr. Wolfram K. Koch (Swami Yatiswarananda’s host at Wiesbaden) apparently intended for eventual publication, which we have verified and supplemented for the present publication. In view of its historical interest, we give Mr. Koch’s Introduction to the Gospel Readings, just after this Publisher’s Note. It is due to Mr. Koch’s painstaking labour that these notes were manually taken down, decoded, verified, and hard copies made for circulation among the members of the Wiesbaden Group. Vedanta students, of course, already know of MEDITATION AND SPIRITUAL LIFE, the extensive selection of Swami Yatiswarananda’s writings and talks. The present READINGS on the GOSPEL, naturally, duplicate ideas in the aforementioned book. However, repetition is wel- come to the earnest seeker, and it will be especially interesting for Eu- ropeans to identify with the actual format of how Vedanta was pioneered in the Europe of 60 years ago! Romain Rolland mentions Swami Yatiswarananda in his diary under date of May 1st, 1935, when the Swami visited Rolland in Switzerland together with Paul Geheeb. The Swami had already been moving — since November 1933—mainly in Germany and Switzerland [Wies- baden, Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Campfer, St.Moritz, etc.] , and occa- sionally also to the Hague and Poland. He also visited France several times between 1933 and 1938, and represented the Order at the 1936 Ramakrishna Centenary celebrations at the Sorbonne, in Paris. The Readings on the Gospel is the fifth of a series of specific books studied ‘live’, and in a particular order, with the European students (whose minds were practically virginal as regards the practical applica- tions of Vedanta), in order to generate a corpus of material to support them—and, why not, even future generations of students—in their spiri- tual struggle. It is indeed a great good fortune that these READINGS can be con- sulted by us today. We are sure you will find them both inspiring, and challenging, like the other Readings generated during the Swami’s pre-World War II period in Europe, which are particularly addressed to the Western student,—who often has a hard time to acquire a correct perspective about what true spiritual life is all about, and then struggle to live as a spiritual athelete amidst a spiritual wilderness, mostly with little or no support from any Centre. Daily study of the various Readings, daily study and reflection on particular scriptural passages, such as later published in THE DIVINE LIFE, etc., is repeatedly recommended by the Swami, just to provide the necessary daily support. And the Readings are pretty well self-con- tained, with plenty of essential quotations from scripture and classic manuals, etc., which renders them exceedingly lively. The Gospel Volumes I & II (originally published in English from Ma- dras in 1911 and 1922) are those that preceded the full translation of the original Bengali, published by Swami Nikhilananda from New York, in 1942. Volume II is out of print, but some Centres may have copies in their libraries, which one could photocopy. As for Volume I (M.’s original English) it was reprinted in 1978, and rightly so, for it is indeed ‘doctrin- ally important’, as Swami Tapasyananda writes in his introduction, and it has a charm of its own, just like Volume II. Those who may like to parallelly study the Gospel sections will find page-references leading them to the editions presently in print— in the Contents, in the Headers to each day’s Readings and in the Topics in Volume I listed in the Appendix A. There is also an Alphabetical Index of Topics in the present Readings, and a Gospel History. Paragraph num- bering is known to be occasionally erratic.. In these Gospel Readings in particular, prophetic reference is made again and again to the impending catastrophe of World War II, then just 5 years away. This was in the context of the way to combat the severe spiritual obstacles of “righteous” indignation, hatred, dislike and aver- sion, towards brutality and other uncivilized happenings in the then en- vironment—not much different from today’s, though in a different form! PUBLISHER INTRODUCTION byWolframH.Koch [toSwamiYatiswarananda’sReadingsonthe GospelofSri Ramakrishna,Vol.I&II(EnglishEditions)deliveredat Wiesbaden,Germany,in1934] It is a unique background against which it was Swami Yatiswar- ananda’s destiny to bring for the first time the message of Sri Rama- krishna to the Europe of 1933. That it was just to Germany of all countries that it was brought, where the chaos following the first World War had grown to its climax, is by no means astonishing. For there, naturally, the yearning for spiri- tual liberation too had become most poignant. Such an elemental upsurge towards spiritual evolution, as it will happen now and then on a larger scale in human history, could not but bring about tangible results. Germany, after the catastrophe of the War (World War I) and the general outer and inner breakdown, was being torn asunder by a dozen or more ideologies, which, each in its own way fought for prior- ity in people’s minds. Old values had proved to be worthless and newly invented ones grew exuberantly out of the accumulated mud. It is where the downward pressure is the greatest that the liberating reaction will one day become the most powerful. Looking back on those years, the comparison with what is happen- ing today (1953) irrepressibly imposes itself on the minds of our gen- eration, and we shall possibly not be too far wrong by expecting that in some not too distant future it may again be in Germany where a new centre of spiritual realization will be established. Like today, those who could not reconcile themselves with the gen- eral course things were taking and who had cultivated a subtler sense of understanding, felt intuitively that all that presented itself to the de- moralized, post-inflation society of that time did not bear the mark of permanence and liberation which they sought. The result was, that the louder the voices in the streets claiming some vague ‘freedom of the senses’, the more silent became those whose longing went rather in the direction of a ‘freedom from the senses’ and of religious realization. Their number increased steadily and their hankering found expres- sion when and whenever they met. Those chosen few of a country in dissolution contacted one another more or less secretly in many differ- 6 Introduction by Wolfram Koch ent places, but it was the privilege of a small and quite heterogeneous group of ardent students of Truth living in Wiesbaden, the lovely gar- den-town in the middle of the Taunus-hills, overlooking the Rhine,1 to receive in their midst the first messenger of the Vedantic Truth as it was taught by Sri Ramakrishna to modern mankind. Nowadays, the complete Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, rendered into English prose from the Bengali original text,2 is being read and com- mented upon in innumerable lectures, readings and classes in and outside the Vedanta Centres of the Ramakrishna Order all over the world. Those first talks in Wiesbaden however, given to a handful of peo- ple ready to receive spiritual instruction, will for ever retain the fra- grance and the subtle spiritual charm of those unique early days when Swami Yatiswarananda for the first time, in the intimacy of an old-fash- ioned drawing-room, began to speak of the Master’s teachings. None of those present there could then guess that out of this modest begin- ning the large centres in London and Paris would come to grow. It was the rare good fortune of Mr. Wolfram H. Koch—the Wiesbaden scholar, now well known by his contributions to the read- ers of periodicals like Prabuddha Bharata and Vedanta for the West—to have become, almost twenty years ago now, the mouthpiece of this group of friends. At the same time, favoured by outward circumstances, he could give special stress to the fervent request he had decided to place be- fore the head of the Ramakrishna Math in India, asking him to send out a member of the Order who would be willing to give them spiritual instruction and guidance. The request fell on fruitful soil and Swami Yatiswarananda, then al- ready one of the most advanced members of the Order, was entrusted with the task of bringing spiritual light into a country in darkness, lacer- ated as it was by a host of destructive forces.