Vedanta Vani
June 2025
Nag Mahashaya’s visit to Belur Math
One day Nagmahashaya was going to the Belur Math. He had to cross the Ganges on a ferry boat. There were people of various temperaments in the boat. Nagmahashaya took his seat in one corner. When the boat came to a certain distance, the Math building was in sight, and Nagmahashaya with folded palms made obeisance to the Math house. Finding him thus showing reverence, a passenger began to criticize the Math people and its ways and customs. Two or three others joined him with enthusiasm. Nagmahashaya could not tolerate anymore. He got excited and said, “You know only to satisfy your craving for lust and gold! What do you know of the Math? Fie upon your tongue that spoke ill of the saints.” Those people got terrified and asked the boatman to land the boat very soon; and they fled away lest they should be cursed for their showing disregard to the Sadhus. Hearing the incident, Swami Vivekananda remarked, “Yes, that kind of hissing as Nagmahashaya did, is required at times.”
Sri Ramakrishna used to say, “When the flower blooms, bees come of their own accord.” When the Divine wisdom truly dawns in the heart of a person it never fails to spread its charm and luster around, and real seekers after truth, of themselves, gather round him. So do we find in the life of Nagmahashaya too. From about this time, earnest devotees and genuine God-seekers began to flock to Nagmashaya from all part of the country. His name spread far and wide. Nagmahashaya told his wife, “Sri Ramakrishna’s last words of benediction have now been fulfilled. Those that would come here must be true seekers of God — so I was told by the Master. Serve them with all care and devotion. God will bless you.”
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Sri Ramakrishna on Human Traits
1 Sri Ramakrishna is said to ascertain the predominant tendencies of his devotees by observing their physiognomy and other signs. Physiology and psychology now prove that every particular thought, when it becomes active, leaves an impression on the brain and the body.
The Vedas and other scriptures have always confirmed this fact. All Hindu philosophical and religious books declare that the mind builds the body and that the physical form of a person changes accordingly if his thoughts and tendencies are good or bad. Therefore there are many proverbs about ascertaining a person’s nature from the form of his body and limbs. And that is also the reason why in marriage, initiation and other ceremonies an examination of the hands, feet, and other parts of the persons concerned is considered necessary.
It is no wonder that Sri Ramakrishna, believing as he did in the scriptures, would investigate the shape of the body and limbs of his disciples. He would reveal many facts about them in the course of conversations. And we would listen in amazement to his descriptions of the various limbs and features of a person as he compared their shape with the objects of daily life and explained their special significance.
About the eyes he would say: “Some have eyes like lotus leaves, some like the eyes of a bull, and some have the eyes of a yogi or a deva (god). Those who have eyes like lotus leaves are endowed with good and spiritual tendencies. Those whose eyes are like those of a bull have strong sensual tendencies. The eyes of a yogi have an upward gaze and are reddish in color. The divine eye is not very large, but is long and extends to the ear. If a man looks sideways or out of the corners of his eyes while talking, know that he is more intelligent than the average person.” Or he would speak about the peculiarities of the body: “Those with a devoted temperament have a naturally soft body, and the joints of their hands and feet are supple. And even if their body is slender, the muscles are so formed that it does not appear angular.”
[from: Sri Ramakrishna as They Saw Him]
Selection and 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.
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“East is East and West is West”
Kees Boukema
Recently, the beautifully printed book Rondom Dao; De filosofie van Otto Duintjer als wegwijzer naar Laozi en Zhuangzi (Publisher DAMON, 2025) was published. The author, Woei-Lien Chong, born in Amsterdam, studied sinology in Leiden, Taipei and Beijing and also Western philosophy at Leiden University. There she obtained her doctorate in 2005 on the subject “Reception of Kantian philosophy in contemporary China”. From 1985 to 2010, Chong was a university lecturer in Chinese philosophy at the R.U. Leiden and from 2015 at the I.S.V.W. in Leusden. During her studies in Western philosophy, she was impressed with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). She found his epistemology in particular grand and intriguing, but also oppressive and claustrophobic. According to Kant, we would not live in ‘reality’, but in a self-made model of the outside world. However, when she became acquainted with Otto Duintjer’s reflections “Hints voor een diagnosis” [‘On the nature, boundaries and alternatives of the ‘rational-empirical consciousness’, Baarn, 1988] she understood that we are indeed capable of experiencing reality without reconstructing it within the framework of our everyday experiential knowledge. In this context, Woei-Lien Chong saw remarkable similarities between Duintjer’s philosophy and the Chinese Daoism of Laozi and Zhangzi, respectively 5th and 3rd century BC.
Chong had already noted the affinity of Duintjer’s thinking and learning process with Daoism in ‘Het daoistische wuwei’ (Met drie ogen, Asoka, Rotterdam, 2005, p. 69 – 81). In this essay she provides clarification about the often misunderstood term wuwei. The incorrect use of this term in the sense of ‘not acting’ is based on what is called a ‘category fallacy’ in the philosophy of language. It is not about a certain behaviour (whether or not to refrain from acting), but about a behaviour inspired by insight or not.
According to Daoism, our everyday consciousness is object-oriented, intentional (wei), directed towards objects (wu). Accordingly, we experience reality as objects; in fact, the projections of our object-orientedness. When we let go of that object-orientedness, everything shows itself as it ‘is’ from itself, not as an ‘object-for-us’. If you can let go of the ‘present-making’ way of perceiving, space is created to be aware of everything as it manifests from itself and you can act in the manner of ‘wuwei’. Your behaviour flows from attention and respect for the ‘play and breathing space of life’.
In Duintjer’s words: “As long as you think, your attention is spread over successive moments of time: past, present and future. Your attention takes the form of memories, observations and expectations. As soon as thinking ceases, the senses start to function autonomously. Then attention is no longer divided and spread. Attention then becomes synonymous with sensual, physical, present ‘being’; you are maximally awake and alert. In that state, changes are not considered, considered, directed or evaluated, nor is there any willful and expectant anticipation of what will happen. You become change yourself, you participate in the life stream that is change.”[Hints, p. 104 and Rondom Dao, p. 231 et seq.].
Duintjer’s philosophy, like ‘Daoism’, contains paradoxes, not dogmas. Nor does he appeal to gods or scriptures, but invites us to learn through spiritual practices to perceive the world not only ‘thinkingly’, but empathically and by participating. It is a path through which you learn to recognize your ‘original’ self, which has become overgrown by the rule systems of the connections in which you live. Duintjer does not leave it at that; in chapter V of “Hints for a diagnosis” he gives examples of deviating modes of experience, in which it is not the thinking and judging head, but the inner body feeling that is in charge. A meditative state in which the inner chatter is silenced and the silence becomes audible. When Newton’s mechanics (if-this-happens,-that-happens) that has nestled in our everyday consciousness is let go and attention is no longer divided, we can be ‘present’: Awake and alert, participating in the incessantly changing stream of life. In this context, Duintjer mentions the chakras, which in the Hindu tradition indicate energy centers in the spinal column from which experience and life are lived.
The author illustrates the relationship between Otto Duintjer’s Western philosophy and the Daoism of ancient China by means of subjects such as medicine, creativity, art, dreams, spirituality and social criticism. Chong has a skilled pen and avoids philosophical jargon where possible. She sometimes lapses into repetition, but manages to distract the reader by means of her accurate use of language and the third-person singular ‘she’ in exchange with ‘they’ to keep the reader on track.
“Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.”
These are the opening lines of ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889) by Rudyard Kipling. They refer to Bible Psalm 103, verse 12 and are quoted at every opportunity. Usually ignoring the significant exception, the ‘pointe’, of the poem: The friendship between an Afghan horse thief and the English army officer who pursued him. A friendship based on recognizing each other’s courage and camaraderie. The closing lines read:
“But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face though they come from the ends of the earth.”
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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“How Jesus became God”
Paulo J. S. Bittencourt
Professor of the History Course at UFFS – Erechim Campus
For now, at least from the point of view of academic history, we are far from recognizing what Christian believers argue, namely, that the authentic words and acts of Jesus would be inviolably preserved in the so-called canonical Gospels. Thus, the scholar of the historical Jesus will not accept the premise that his research is irrelevant, supposedly doomed to failure from the beginning, under the argument that the creed and dogma have always adequately and eternally captured the essence of Jesus, that is, the Christ of faith. In this sense, let us look at an example, not directly focused on the problem of the historical Jesus, but which deals with the reconstruction of the beliefs of the first generations of the Christian movement. Now, the orthodox interpretations of the Roman Church, which were victorious in the fourth century of the Common Era, postulated that the Incarnationist Christology, according to which Jesus was a pre-existent divine being, equal to the Father, who also became human, was already expressed in the beliefs of the first disciples of the Nazarene, not to mention in Jesus’ own messianic self-awareness. [Christology is the part of Christian theology that studies and defines the nature, person and work of Jesus, with a particular focus on his relationship with God and his significance in the doctrine of the history of salvation.] The historian, however, by denying the title of theologian, will profane the veneration of the idol of origins. He will refuse to reconstruct the initial history of the Jesus movement based on the outcome of the traditional Christological evolution. By studying the New Testament more deeply, he will see that Jesus’ self-affirmations in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke would in no way allow us to conclude in favor of a con-substantial nature between Jesus and the Father. Jesus’ followers did not call him God. Not even Jesus referred to himself as a divine being who came down from heaven [hence the term high Christology for incarnationist Christology]. This same historian, therefore, will consider it plausible to identify the origin of a Christology of the incarnation only from the Gospel of John, thus being a later development of the Christian tradition.
It was Bart E. Ehrman who clarified the issue. In How Jesus Became God, an excellent popular work, the American historian of early Christianity masterfully demarcated the historical evolution of Christologies throughout its first four centuries. Early Christians would maintain Christologies of exaltation, typical of a low Christology, in which the human being Jesus was made the Son of God, consequently elevated to a divine status, a view also called adoptionist Christology, since in it Jesus is not seen as a divine being by nature. Exaltationist Christologies would have correlates in common Greek, Roman and Jewish notions about how a human being could become divine: 1) by exaltation to the divine kingdom; 2) by birth from a divine father. Ehrman cites as confirmation of his mapping the chronological development traced by Raymond Brown, also called the retrograde movement of Christology. For the early Christians, God would have exalted Jesus to a divine status at the resurrection. This older Christology could be found in the pre-literary traditions of Paul and in the book of the Acts of the Apostles; it would not, however, be the view presented in any of the gospels. According to Ehrman, the oldest Gospel, that of Mark, “seems to assume that it was at baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the following gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God at birth; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation.”
However, Ehrman sees a more complex development than this chronological sequence, which is particularly true for the narrative structure of the Gospels. Ideas about Jesus did not develop in a straight line and at the same rate throughout the early Christian world. Thus, it is possible to assume that some Christians professed faith in the divine preexistence of Jesus even before Paul wrote the first letters of the New Testament. We can isolate these excerpts from sayings originating in pre-literary traditions, for example, in the “Hymn on Christ from Philippians” (Philippians 2:6-11), a passage that is widely considered a hymn or an early poem, celebrating Christ and his incarnation. As can be seen, beliefs about the nature and person of Jesus, from the earliest origins of Christianity, constituted a composite and polyphonic symphony, whose dissonant developments orthodox repression would relentlessly seek to silence.
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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.
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Not Being Afraid
Contributor: Francis van Schaik
McKinsey recently revealed that 70 percent of people do not dare to be critical of the organization and its management. Afraid. Then you understand how nice it can be to go on the internet anonymously. Just say what you feel, without having to bear the consequences. It’s easy for me to say. I can get my point across.
Shall we stop idealizing? Stop that strange expectation that the people in the organization are a bit like your family? That you are actually friends. And that you stand together for the same cause? Shall we deal with it as with nice weather? Be grateful when the sun is shining, but don’t complain when it rains and you have a headwind? Complaining about the weather is just as useless as complaining about a lack of safety. It must be safe at home. If safety happens to you in an organization, the sun is shining. And often it rains.
Perhaps that is the highest yield of the stoic philosophy of life. That you adopt a certain realism. No cynicism or sarcasm, but a friendly kind of resignation. Taking things as they come.
‘Idealism destroys more than you like’, my mentor often said. You must dare to distrust idealism because, in secret, it can shelter hypocrisy.
My mentor said that you have your hands full with yourself. Before you know it, you are showing the world the way, while you yourself are getting lost. And then reality catches up with you with a hard blow. Like when you walk into a lamppost, lost in thought.
That’s how I stood full of warm feelings at a poster of Loesje. ‘If everyone would love themselves, everyone would finally be loved’. ‘Keep it to yourself’, the therapist says these days. Much misfortune lies in the expectations we have of others. If the other were different, everything would be so much easier.
And then gradually comes the great discovery. That I am the other.
From the Optimist
Francis van Schaik is a coach of young people and also a student of human relationships with nature, the world and Truth. She regularly contributes to our online magazine. Francis is the regular contributor of articles in this page.
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Letters from Brazil
Wabi Sabi Mind
Gerson Egas Severo
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, although mostly Christian, is how to maintain some constancy in practice. Whether in meditation, studies, presence in a sangha that does not always exist in your city, making it necessary to travel and commute, and so on.
From a very early age, I learned to cultivate micro practices in my daily life, so that Buddhism is something 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. I’m going to talk about it, okay?
“Time” has been one of my main reading axes for quite… well, quite a while, and I even have a little publication on the subject, and so on. Today, however, I’m thinking that the most interesting approach is to try to understand the nature of time intuitively, from the side, approaching it from the edges – more by cultivating the question, watering it, placing it in the sun, pruning it like a bonsai and enriching it as a question, than by actually trying to answer it and organizing the answer in a discourse with a beginning, middle and end, subject, verb and predicate, and everything.
Well: it’s associated with the Japanese aesthetic-philosophical concept of Wabi Sabi, a more or less untranslatable expression, an exercise in meditation, or simple contemplation, which goes like this: you choose any object and “abandon” it in a place, at home, where it is only semi-protected, that is, it is partly subject to the elements: humidity, heat, cold, some rain, cats knocking it over, and so on. It could be a worn wooden stool, an old child’s toy, any utensil, anything at all.
The important thing is that you perceive time affecting the object, the thing that it is – and for that you take a few minutes a day just to contemplate it (drinking tea, coffee, chimarrão, smoking a cigarette) and observe the certainly almost invisible changes that will occur, in a cumulative process of transformation: the second law of thermodynamics, “entropy”, arriving close and making its mark under pressure. See deeply, in the object, the inexorable passage and the roughness, grooves and lessons of time; notice the beauty of the progressive assimilation of imperfections, marks, changes in the material and our perception of these changes (which dialogue with our own and those of the world, which are our own and those of the world), fissures and cracks, and so on. Observe in it the impermanence and insubstantiality – something that would belong to the ultimate fabric of reality, “applied”. There would be no need to “philosophize” too much (much less from a Western point of view); the ideal is to be able to experience and value intuition of the Taoist, or Ch’an, or Zen type, in what would be a space “beyond-beyond language”. You try to empty your mind (you were there just thinking “generically” about time), leaving space for insights to begin to emerge – without the concern of submitting them to the logos and trapping them in a text. I, for my part, have had a wooden “buddha” for nineteen years. It is already quite injured, and its head has curiously tilted in a position that suggests special interest or thoughtful consideration regarding some phenomenon that occurred/occurs in front of it – or about some internal aspect of lucidity, enlightenment, the state of Buddhahood achieved. It is there, and by the very principle of Wabi Sabi the object cannot be “repaired”: on the balcony of our apartment in Erechim, the head would have to be positioned next to the body, and never glued. There is no glue in Dharma, in Tao, in Do (the art of repairing objects is that of Kintsugi – another approach, but with a similar underlying spirit).
Reading all the books in the world about time is cool – but it won’t come close to the kind of understanding that this experience can bring you. Not to mention the amount of fear, anguish and anxiety “released”. There you have it. Ultra mystical, right? Or not so much. Very Taoist, hyper Buddhist… Super cool.
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Gerson Egas Severo is a professor at the University of Erechim, Rio Grande de Sul, Brasil. He is a thinker and contributes deeply thoughtful write-ups on philosophical topics. His articles are regularly published in the journal Bom Dia.