Source: Editorial, The Vedanta Kesari, June 1970.

Author: Swami Kailasananda

LET us suppose for a moment that our world had been and is entirely without books! The very thought is maddening! We simply cannot imagine such a possibility! For if books had never been written, our beautiful earth will have been a far different world from what it is now, and mankind will have grown into quite a different type of community. A world without books will indeed be a desert of poverty of thought, dearth of refinement, absence of all poetry. Life in such a world will be an unendurable dragging on.

The most sweetening influences on existence on earth have been the thinkers and writers, the authors and poets who have reflected keenly, conceived sublimely and expressed themselves in immortal words of music and meaning. These geniuses not only reduce to deathless literary forms the impulses which sway all mankind, and thus help all men catch glimpses of their own hidden souls, but also hold before ordinary men alluring vistas of higher idealism and loftier rapture. They thus serve a two-fold purpose -- a faithful mirroring of the human spirit, and a lifting of it to rarefied heights. And books are but the very stuff of what grand fancy and noble imagination have captured, and the irrepressible urge for expression into word-artistry has pictured out.

The word is but the physical form of the intangible idea. Books are therefore the colourful visible vesture clothing the soul's roaming on the thought plane. They therefore have the power to add to our knowledge, to correct and clarify our concepts, to impel us into subtler query and research, either through striking a chord of sympathy or through kindling the critical faculty or through providing a board in the mind from which springs are possible to superior atmospheres of reflection. It cannot therefore be gainsaid that books have made our civilization of today. Books are not mere paper and print; they are on one side the tongues of illustrious dreamers and on the other side open windows providing a peep into the animations of gifted souls. They link even the drabbest of mortals with the high flights of superminds. Books have therefore become indispensable to enlightened living.

Not all books of course are of equal value, quite a number of them are unhelpful, if not poisonous. A few are worthy only of a distant nodding acquaintance. Only a very small number are the healthiest food for the soul. Again many are of a pleasing exterior, but they befoul the mind. Many excellent books have often the fewest readers. Books alone make race-continuity on the intellectual plane possible. It is not always that the most easily understood books are the best ones; often they that give hard exercise to the mind are the best ones. Time has its own way of passing judgment on books. There are books which are for all time, and books which flash and die in the course of just a while. It is in the self-interest of society to propagate among its members, by persuasion or even by force, good books; for the nature of existence is such that if the word of God is not sounded and caused to be received, the word of the Devil will circulate and be heard. The mind of man is highly impressionable, and if noble thoughts are not made to impress themselves on it, base ones will surely get lodged in it; and noble thoughts are ready at hand only in books, which are really written learning.

Books are in fact treasure-houses of thoughts, and the world is ruled by thoughts and ideas rather than by other factors. It must be remembered that no book however well written ever reveals the author's mental contents in full. The mind that thinks is far bigger than the word that is penned and printed. The reader must therefore cultivate the ability to get behind the expressed word to the vastness of the author's unexpressed thought. Only then does reading become a pure pleasure and also a useful lesson. The poor author who shows away his all is but a mason who places brick on brick without any art; the talented author, like the architect, gives ample scope for the play of the reader's imagination. Books are, indisputably, noble things. Life and nature have well been described as God's Book, the finis to which is never said, ‘a marvelous book in which the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran are but so many pages and an infinite number of pages remain yet to be unfolded.’

The power which books exercise over the human mind is tremendous. People swear by their pet books. They even subordinate reason and judgment to whatever is uttered in their favourite, especially religious, book. Religions seem to have their life centre in their respective sacred books. ‘The book becomes the God’. Even a prophet cannot with impunity transcend the holy book of the sect he is born in. The surest way to inculcate even a new idea is to link it somehow to a statement in the ancient venerated literature of the community. As Swami Vivekananda points out, “There is a great advantage in book worship; it gives strength. All religious sects have disappeared excepting those that have a Book. Nothing seems to kill them. . . .. One of the great advantages of a Book is that it crystallizes everything in tangible and convenient form, and is the handiest of idols. . . . . "

Reverence is the dominant trait of the Hindu mind reverence based on a deep appreciation of the fine things in creation. It is this underlying attitude of reverence, devotion and adoration that has made and kept the Hindu race so very religious. This reverence has passed into national culture and that culture comes to every soul which takes birth in India as an inescapable inheritance. To cite one instance of this quality of reverence, the Hindus, once in a year, celebrate the Saraswati Puja, (the worship of learning) when all the books in the house not merely the so-called sacred books, but all books on all sorts of subjects, printed and in manuscript, of paper or of palm-leaf are brought out and dusted and cleaned and are placed on a decorated altar and are worshipped, as an image of a Deity is worshipped, with sacred mantra and significant tantra and with offerings, light-wavings, chants and recitals, and the holy day on which all this is done is a national holiday. Again no Hindu will ever set his foot on any piece of printed paper; it is too holy to be foot-touched. Just as the Puja patras (the vessels and utensils used in ceremonial worship) are as sacred as the Deity itself, so are books as worthy of veneration as learning and learning's Deity are. The pious Hindu who sits for the daily chanting of the 18 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita begins the chanting only after uttering a few verses to Lord Krishna, but along with the prayer to Krishna he also utters this prayer to the Bhagavad Gita itself.

Om

O Bhagavad Gita,

With which Partha was illumined

By the Lord Narayana Himself,

Which was composed within Mahabharata

By the ancient sage, Vyasa -

Divine mother, Destroyer of rebirth,

Showerer of the Nectar of Advaita,

Eighteen-chaptered Mother dear,

I meditate on you.

For the very book Gita is as adorable as the Gitacharya. The flute by association is as fascinating as the Flute-player.

(to be continued in 2nd Part…)

Source: The Vedanta Kesari, May 1970 Issue

Author: Swami Kailasananda

IN the imparting of instruction to a pupil the teacher is the supreme factor. Other things like books and apparatus, library and laboratory are useful aids, but are not indispensable items. Surely a more wholesome education was received by the few scantily clad Brahmacharin pupils of our ancient ashram schools who were taught under the trees by a forest-dwelling sage than is received by the many students who today gather in huge halls to listen perhaps to a tame professor's dull lecture. If education is communicating sparks of fire in order to heat the receiving mind, the modern process of education in schools and colleges hardly deserves to be called education. If teaching implies the sure impress of a blossomed soul on blossoming souls, there is truly no teaching to be met with in today's auditoria in universities. If siksha means the Guru's tangible gift of soul-food and the sishya's actual receiving and assimilating of it, there is no siksha whatever in the scholastic institutions of the present day.

Today the teacher has been demoted as it were, from his glory; may be the reason for it is his own growing inadequacy to deliver the goods of teaching; may be he is the victim of a social malady of indifference to right values.. But the sad truth is that people have lost their reverence for the teacher and have come to think that he can be safely turned out, and his work got better done through a radio broadcast, a tape-recorded script, a printed a synopsis etc. They forget that a mechanical radio reproduction of a read-out lecture can never be a substitute for the real human voice and that the glow on the face, the twinkle in the eye, the twitch in the muscle of the teacher who is immediately faced by his pupils are vital aspects of the instruction he imparts and that even television can at best only give a shadowy suggestion and not the real stuff itself. An instruction sans the teacher (in flesh and blood, and necessarily in mind and spirit) is child-nourishing sans the mother.

The teacher must, in the interests of national welfare, soon come in to his own. This happy consummation can come about only if there is an effort on the part of the teacher as well as on the part of the community. The teacher as he is today has not much common ground with his glorious predecessors of the past who were models of individual perfection. It may not be possible for every teacher to be a Vasishta (whose pupil Rama was) or a Sandipani (who had Krishna for his pupil), but surely a teacher if he desires to be worthy of himself must be above a certain standard of intellectual probity, moral eminence, and spiritual acumen. He can benefit his pupil in no way if he is not a lighted lamp; he will serve no useful purpose to his wards if he is only a bin of information. The community in its own interest must re-imbibe a spirit of reverence towards the teacher and not regard him merely as one wage-earner among many, for he is a worker on the subtle and delicate plane of the mind. It is not without significance that neither the teacher nor the pupil in the old days ever uttered a prayer for his own separate welfare; the prayer in the homes of education was always a joint prayer of teacher and pupil; for one was incomplete without the other; and no rounded course of education was possible where teacher interests and pupil interests were repellent to each other. And so teacher and pupils standing together prayed a common prayer :

May He protect us both (the teacher and the taught) together (by revealing knowledge). May He protect us both (by vouchsafing the results of knowledge). May we attain vigour together. Let what we study be invigorating. May we not cavil at each other. Peace! Peace ! Peace!

(Om saha naavavatu; saha nau bhunaktu; …)

It is not easy to be a sound teacher. Not only must a teacher possess erudition, he must be passionately attached to his pupils, in the higher serene way. And he must have a sense of art which implies that he must have a strong religious sense, for as a great thinker said, 'The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout man. A scoffing Raphael or an irreverent Michael Angelo (and we may add or an ungodly Adhyapak) is not conceivable..'

(To be continued…)