Vedantavani
September 2025
Such was Nag Mahashaya, the great Devotee
At the request of the family of Mr Paul, the great devotee, Durga Charan Nag, once went to Bhojeswar. When he was about to return to Calcutta, the family gave him Rs.8 as his steamer fare and a good blanket to protect himself from cold. Mr Paul knew very well that Durga Charan Nag accepted nothing from anyone, lived an extremely frugal life, would never accept a penny more, and was the greatest all-renouncing saint in modern times. He pressed 8 rupees and the blanket somehow into Durga Charan’s hands. The steamer station was about six miles from Bhojeswar. When Durga Charan reached there and was going to buy his ticket, a woman in torn clothes and five or six children hanging to her came to him and, in a most piteous tone, brought to his notice her sufferings and privations. She asked for help. Hearing her story, Nagmahashaya burst into tears and gave away the 8 rupees as well as the blanket with the words, “Mother, take these and save yourself and your children.” The beggar woman blessed him and went away. Being fatigued due to long walk and tiresome journey, Nagmahashaya took rest for a while at the station. When the steamer had left the station, he resumed his journey towards Calcutta on foot, as he had no money left to pay for the fare. On the way, if he found any temple, he begged for some Prasad, and at other times lived on parched rice. He crossed the rivers and streamlets on a ferry boat on payment of the fare when they were wide, but when narrow, he crossed them swimming. He had only seven annas and six pies with him. Depending on that small amount he set out for Calcutta and walking continuously on foot for twenty-nine days, he reached home. 
Latu Maharaj Remembers his younger days…
The Master taught me a lot. Sometimes he deliberately sent me to Loren (Swami Vivekananda) so I could hear from him about many things. Often the Master arranged a debate between Girish Babu (Girish Ghosh) and Loren, but Loren was forceful and not afraid to challenge anyone. He argued a lot, and I reported everything to the Master. Now and then the Master tested me. Once he asked, “Naren said all this, and you remained silent?”
“What do I know?” was my reply. How can I compete with Loren?”
The Master said, “You’ve heard so many things here (meaning himself) and you said nothing?” You should tell him that if God didn’t create this world, who did?” “Loren says this creation is a natural process,” I replied. “Is it possible for nature to create?” asked the Master. “If there is an effect, there must be a cause that preceded it. There is a powerful Being behind this creation.”
Did you know that the Master snatched me from the strings of the world? I was an orphan. He showered me with love and affection. If he had not accepted me, I would have been like an animal and worked all my days as a slave. My life would have been worthless. I am an illiterate man. He always told me, ‘Always keep your mind spotless. Do not allow impure thoughts to enter it.’ If you find such desires tormenting you, pray to God and chant His name. He will protect you. If the mind still refuses to remain calm, go to the temple of the Mother and sit before her. Or else come here (pointing to himself).”
Once a devotee in Dakshineswar was behaving very badly, and I found it impossible to contain my irritation. I scolded him, and he felt very hurt. The Master knew how much the devotee had suffered, and after he had left, he said to me, “It is not good to speak harshly to those who come here. They are tormented by worldly difficulties. If they come here and are scolded for their shortcomings, where will they go? Never use harsh words against anyone in the presence of holy company, and never say anything that will hurt anyone.”
Do you know what he told me about that? Go to this man tomorrow and speak to him in such a way that he forgets what you said to him today.” So the next day I visited him. My pride was humble. I spoke to him with kind words. When I returned, the Master simply asked, “Did you give him my regards?” Surprised by his words, I said I hadn’t. Then he said, “Go to him again and offer him my greetings.”
So I went to the man again and gave the Master his greetings.
At this, the devotee burst into tears. I was touched to see him cry.
When I returned this time, the Master said, “Now your crime is forgiven.”
[from: Sri Ramakrishna as They Saw Him]
Contribution by Mevrouw Mary Saaleman
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Mary Saaleman is devoted to Sri Ramakrishna since several decades. She spends her time in the study of Sri Ramakrishna-related literature, prayer, etc.
Kunt Hamsun
Kees Boukema
At that time, I wandered with a hungry stomach through Kristiana, that strange city that no one leaves without being marked by it. I observed the people I met or passed, I read the posters on the walls, caught someone’s glance from a window, let every little thing sink in, every insignificant detail that crossed my path and then disappeared again. “If only you had something to eat on such a sunny day!” I let myself be carried away by the cheerful morning, I felt endlessly content, and began humming with joy for no apparent reason. A woman stood in front of a butcher shop with a basket on her arm, deciding what meat to buy for lunch. As I walked past her, she looked at me. She had only one tooth left in her mouth. Nervous and oversensitive as I had been these past few days, the woman’s face immediately made a repulsive impression on me; the large yellow tooth looked like a small finger sticking out of her jaw, and when she looked at me, her gaze radiated fear. Suddenly, I lost my appetite and felt nauseous. When I reached the market halls, I went to the fountain and drank some water. I looked up—the clock in the cathedral tower pointed to ten o’clock.” (‘Sult’, 1890; Dutch translation ‘Hunger’, 1974, pp. 7 and 9).
Thus begins the first autobiographical novel by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. He himself called it: “a number of fragments on the phenomenon of hunger.” The “first person” is not only searching in vain for food, he also fails to establish himself as a writer, and all his attempts to realize his dream of love fail. He records everything that presents itself to his consciousness: sensory impressions, inner monologues, thought associations, alternations of ecstasy and despair, and upsurges of the unconscious. All of this is meticulously expressed. It is a new narrative technique that would become known as “stream of consciousness” and would later be employed by writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk.
In Hunger, but also in other In Hamsun’s novels, the protagonist is a social “outsider” who reveals a desire to live like a wild animal. To live without the shadow of a “consciousness” whose chaos of impressions constantly demands attention. To be freed from consciousness is a dream that can, of course, never be fulfilled. But sometimes, completely unexpectedly, flashes of that dream become reality, and things are seen with the intense and uninhibited surrender of a child’s eyes. In his novel “How It Grew,” Hamsun writes:
“Little Sivert was very well-read, but not well enough to say of a ram: ‘My goodness, look what a Roman nose it has!’ He couldn’t do that. But Sivert could do better: he knew the ram from an early age and sensed the animal and was one with it; it was a family member, a fellow creature.” Once, a mystical primal feeling flashed through his senses, a moment he would never forget: the ram was grazing in the field, suddenly he lifted his head and stopped chewing, he just stood there, watching. Sivert involuntarily glanced in the same direction—no, nothing unusual to see. But then Sivert himself felt something strange inside. “It’s as if he’s looking straight into the Garden of Eden!” he thought. [p. 117].
“Was the life of such a field dweller empty and sad? Oh, not at all. He had his higher powers, his dreams, his infatuations, his rich superstitions. One evening, Sivert was walking along the river. Suddenly, he stopped: two ducks were floating on the water, a male and a female. They spotted him, they had seen the human, and they became frightened. One made a sound, a short, three-note melody, the other responded in kind. At that same instant, they take off, skim like two wheels across the water, and land a stone’s throw further back in the river. Then one makes another sound, and the other responds; it’s the same language as the first time, but so cheerfully that it seems as if they’ve achieved bliss: it’s tuned two octaves higher! Sivert stands watching the birds, looking past them, deep into a dream world. A sound had passed through him, a sweetness; he was left with a subtle memory of something wild and wonderful, something he had experienced before, but that had been erased. He walks home in silence, doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t chatter about it; it couldn’t be captured in earthly language. That was Sivert; as an ordinary young man, he went out one evening and experienced this. [p. 339.]
Mr Kees Boukema is a scholar in Vedanta and Comparative philosophy. His brilliant and thorough-going articles on various philosophical and spiritual subjects are being published since the first issue of the magazine. His latest work is De Beoefening van Meditatie.
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Protecting the Process
Gerson Egas Severo
In my last letter—does the dear reader remember?—I wrote that one of the most central concerns in the heart and mind of a Buddhist in Brazil, living in a non-Buddhist society, a religiously syncretic society, albeit a largely Christian one, is how to maintain some constancy in practice. Whether in meditation, studies, attending a sangha (a religious practice that doesn’t always exist in your city, necessitating travel and commutes), and so on.
I also wrote that, from a very young age, I learned to cultivate micro-practices in my daily life, so that Buddhism is truly present. One of these micro-practices is the wabi sabi mind, a practice, a technique, a meditation that I have truly managed to incorporate into the “small universe” of everyday life.
In this letter, I want to write about a principle that predates these practices, these “processes”: I want to write about the need to protect these very processes. The idea came to me back in 2020, when Dan Brown, the author of “The Da Vinci Code,” returned to the newspaper’s culture sections with the release of his first children’s book, “Symphony of Animals”—a work that also features his own music to listen to while reading.
While searching online for information about the book, I came across an interview that Pedro Bial, a famous Brazilian journalist, conducted with the author for his television program in May 2018. I’ve read several of Dan Brown’s books and recognize the limitations of his writing, of course, but as a reader, I find him inventive, ingenious, and entertaining—and perhaps even have the merit of promoting a certain scientific-literary, fictional universe of disciplines that use symbols as their subject. Not everyone needs to be Kafka or Virginia Woolf, do they? Yeah, right. Well, it turns out I had a bit of a mental explosion watching this interview. It goes like this: a few lines into the conversation, the interviewer says that Dan Brown is a writer known for being quite disciplined, and then asks about his method. The author responds that before the method, or underlying his method, he has a kind of mantra: “Protect the process.”
“Protecting the process” would mean establishing a work routine, shielding it from external interference, from day-to-day life, and so on. Once “protected the process,” you’d be there, with your writing and reading work firmly established in your day, your week, your month, your year, in the timeline you’ve mapped out, free to give your best, with maximum focus and concentration, within your limitations. Let’s picture in our minds Marcel Proust sealing the walls of his room with cork to go in search of his memories and lost time, or the wise Merlin drawing a circle around himself. symbolic, with a symbolic knife, for the practice of their magical arts. It’s a bit like that.
“Some days will be productive, others won’t,” says Brown, “but in the end, there will be an accumulation, a result, that will appear as if “naturally.” It’s almost like in mystical traditions, where the ecstasy after a lifetime of internal effort is often perceived, and reported, as something coming “naturally,” from the outside. Like a “grace,” a “gift.” It sounds simple, doesn’t it? And it is, but it’s also complex. A pregnant woman protects the process. Those who teach elementary school, and beyond, know the importance of protecting the process. Those who practice the art of Flower Arranging, or the Tea Ceremony, know well the importance of protecting the process. Those who have written or are writing a master’s thesis, or a doctoral thesis, know very well the importance of protecting the process. Those who have to undergo psychological therapy, or medical-psychiatric treatment, more or less depend on having the The trick of protecting the process.
On a certain level, the elements involved in this idea are super obvious, and it wouldn’t even need anyone to point them out. Fine. But by saying it a certain way, by saying it again, rearranging it, and re-purposing it—I thought Dan Brown did something extraordinary there. “Protecting the process.” A short phrase, ready to be written, framed, hung on the wall, said aloud, reflected upon, spread in all directions in a world—ours, today’s—that, it seems, only serves to unprotect all processes.
For me, personally and particularly, two words leap out from this “mantra”—besides, of course, the word “protection” itself, the protection of someone who prunes a bonsai with the right mind and scissors. The words are: perseverance and constancy. Deng Ming-Dao, the Chinese-American writer and philosopher, comes to our aid in constructing this tapestry of ideas: even when it seems like nothing encouraging is happening to us, we must persevere and prepare, without neglecting any “process” we have set in motion. Preparation, here, concerns cultivating our resources even when circumstances seem to be against us; after all, the opportunity may not come (the Universe doesn’t “conspire” in our favor, unfortunately)—but it may. Besides, even if any given day isn’t a day of inspiration or a particularly meaningful day, simply practicing, shining light, intelligence, on that work, on that process, is already good in itself. Even if it leads to nothing. If you look closely, with Somerset Maugham, there are no dead ends.
And that’s where the second word comes in: repetition. Once the process is “protected,” it would be necessary to live it every day. Aristotle observed that we are what we repeatedly do. Deng Ming-Dao: our progress can range from the boring to the spectacular, but we must accept both. Each and every day must be connected, inserted into a long series of prayer beads. The works and the days, the book of days. Ming-Dao also noted that, from repetition to repetition, repetition transforms into resistance.
We live life in a game of scales. A work, a practice, a training session, a project, a learning experience in which you are involved, all of this can be (and is) woven into a larger process, which also needs to be protected: our collective existence, our desire for freedom, our search for meaning(s), our Earth—”the most beautiful of planets,” “the ship, our sister,” as Beto Guedes sang—our eventual future journeys to the stars.
Now: what after protecting the processes? What to do, then? What remains to be done? Lao Tzu teaches: “Finish the name, finish the work, remove the body.”
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Gerson Egas Severo is a renowned writer and professor at the university in Brasil. He has contributed to our magazine several times in the past.
Jesus, the Essenes and the Parable of the Unfaithful Administrator
Paulo J. S. Bittencourt
Professor of the History Course at UFFS – Erechim Campus
Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity did not blossom from the Old Testament religion of Israel, but rather from a new religious sensibility that flourished during the intertestamental period. They remained, of course, religious expressions grounded in the essentially moral nature of the Mosaic covenant. Indeed, it is for this reason that, in the Old Testament, the dichotomy of humanity into the righteous and the sinners acquired such great importance. This is, in fact, the very challenge of theodicy, so consecrated in the Book of Job and the prophets, but which would also absorb spirits during the Second Temple period. How is it that we sometimes see the righteous suffering and the sinners succeeding? The foundation of justice, in the Old Testament tradition, was the fear of God (Job 40:7-26). But now the core of the new religious sensibility was condensed into a saying by Antigonus of Soco, dated to the first half of the second century BC, that is, before the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt: “Do not be like servants who serve the master as long as they receive a reward, but be like servants who serve the master as long as they receive no reward.”
There are several references in rabbinic literature that, in addition to equating the fear and love of God as the highest forms of worship, consider love to be superior. We do not know the circumstances that gave rise to this problematic conflict. But it is known that, as early as the first century, an opposition faction among the Pharisees, within the School of Hillel, accused the older group of serving God only out of fear of punishment and revenge, and not out of devoting unconditional love to Him. It was precisely this higher evaluation of love over fear that prevailed and ended up imposing itself on all Jewish groups. Flusser emphasizes that this new emphasis on love for its own sake, regardless of any reward, indicated a softening of the doctrine of reward, also known as the theology of retribution. Furthermore, it presented circumstantial evidence of a growing dissatisfaction and unease with the antithetical representation of good and evil in Old Testament doctrines. For David Flusser, in his magnificent essay “A New Sensibility in Judaism and the Christian Message,” altruistic and social love would have attained the highest degree of importance when considered the very essence of Judaism in the Second Temple period. There was, for example, no controversy between Jesus and the Pharisee rabbis over the dual commandment of love (Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28). By underpinning the solidarity of the new mental attitude that was developing, these concepts also expressed the erosion of the stereotype that typologically classified humanity into the righteous and the sinners. There are no longer consummately righteous, nor are there entirely evil men. In every human heart, noble and base impulses would compete with each other. Formulations of this nature, therefore, led to a pessimistic doctrine of human nature, which made itself felt in the circles of Pharisee scribes who produced the pseudepigrapha of 4 Esdras, and even in the sectarian documents, as the Thanksgiving Scroll attests. Flusser insists in this regard, stating that “(…) the awareness of our own instability and our own effort to combat evil impulses provokes compassion and solidarity with those who succumb to temptation and sin.” Indeed, the prayers of this spiritual climate confirm that it was inconceivable to present oneself to God as worthy of attention and consideration for being good, just, virtuous, or upright, for these qualities belong only to God.
This fundamental attitude served Jesus as one of the pillars of his doctrine of love. But this is not to say that his relationship with the Judaism of his time was uncritical. His moral approach to God and humanity, though in many respects influenced by others, would be developed by him into a profound and paradoxical doctrine, as well as unique and incomparable. Love for one’s enemies, for example, reveals itself as an absolutely singular teaching of Jesus. Despite the insistence on the prohibition of hatred by virtually all Jewish groups of the time, there is no exhortation in his writings that prescribes love for one’s enemies.
In any case, there are clear links between Jesus and the Pharisee milieu, much stronger than the Gospels would have us believe. Among these links, which came to light precisely with the discoveries about the religiosity of the Essenes, Notable, besides the repudiation of sectarian separation, is the insistence on themes of divine providence and the resurrection of the dead. Despite the utmost attention to the prescriptions scrupulously reproduced from the Law of Moses in view of the ideal of perfection and the most complete society, the small brotherhoods of ritual purity, called Pharisaic or “separated,” were supplanted in rigor by the sectarian community of Qumran.
As can be seen, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the study of ancient Judaism would illustrate the unparalleled historical enrichment that the criterion of contextual credibility provided to research on the historical Jesus.
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Professor Paulo Bittencourt teaches History at the UFFS, Erchim Campus, Rio Grande de Sul. “Federal University of Southern Frontier” [UFFS] is one of the best universities of Brasil with highly qualified professors at the helm. Professor Bittencourt never rejects our request for articles, though he is very busy.
Deen Dayal Nag was Nag Mahashay’s father. Nag Mahashay, whose full name was Durga Charan Nag, was a devotee of the highest order. As we all know, Nag Mahashaya was one of the greatest of Sri Ramakrishna’s disciples. Deen Dayal was not too happy with his son Durga Charan, because Nag Mahashay was completely otherworldly, did not care for money or earning for a living, and so on. One day, Dindayal expressed his regret saying, “Many people are worshipping the Divine Mother. If circumstances had allowed us, we also would have done so. But we are not so fortunate. Durgacharan has given up earning money.” Nagmahashaya came to know of it and since that day, he used to arrange for celebrating the festivals of Durga Puja, Kali Puja, Jagaddhatri Puja and all the festivals of the Divine Mother in order to satisfy his father. He would give him no opportunity to divert his mind to worldly thoughts even for a moment, for Nagmahashaya would be always reading from the scriptures like the Bhagavata, Puranas, etc. before his father. Owing to the sincere and continued effort of the son, Deen Dayal’s mind changed. Once when Nag Mahashaya came to Calcutta to buy things for celebrating Durga Puja, he told Suresh that his father was now quite a changed person. Thoughts of the world could not overcome him anymore and he was spending the whole time in thinking and talking of the Divine.
She is on Her way….
