death beyond death. 77
near the Chausatthi Temple wearing the robes of Dafanamimonks. I approached
them and saluted, and they beckoned me to sit down. I told them my story. They
were silent when I had finished. Then the oldest among them, a stern-looking man
in his late fifties, said in an unexpectedly gentle tone, “Your effort is laudable,
Brother. I have not seen anything similar in all my life. You could probably earn five
hundred rupees or more and have a nice family in Germany and drive in a car. And
yet you want to be a sadhu. But you cannot have sannyasa; I believe you know that
only the twice-born can enter this state?” I told Swami Sumedhananda—that was
his name—that I was well aware of the stricture, yet Vivekananda had been a fudra
(the lowest of the four caste groups). “That is true, Brother,” Sumedhananda con-
tinued. “But you see, it is easier with a person who has had some sort ofsakskaras;
and where will one draw a limit? But you are from across the ocean. I don’t think
any dafanamiwould give you sannyasa. And if he did, most of us would not regard
you as a sannyasi.” That was it. I bowed and walked away.
The next two days were days of acute suspense and dismay. I must have contacted
over a hundred monks and abbots in three dozen monastic establishments. I got
three types of answer: the first, given by most of the orthodox Brahmanical orders,
was that I was not entitled to sannyasabecause of my wrong birth. There could be
no question of acceptance into their order. The second answer was the sectarian
one: “We will gladly accept you as our own, wherever you may come from, but you
must realize—and promise you will try to realize—that Visnu is the only Lord of
the Universe; that Guru Kabir taught the quintessence of the Veda and that it is upon
him that you will look forthwith as your own guru; that onion and garlic are the
main culprits obstructing the path to perfection.” Of this type, I had had a thorough
experience in the two years I had just concluded at the Mayavati Ashram of the Ra-
makrishna Mission. The third type of answer was procrastination: “Live with us for
a while, see how we think and meditate and serve, and if we find that you fit into our
way of life, and if you feel you can endure it, we shall make you one of ours in due
course.”
I would not have any of it, I would not be a lay hanger-on: I must be in it and of
it. One way was open, and I was about to decide to take it. At Hardvar and
Hrishikesh formal sannyasa is easy to have; one can have it for a very modest sacri-
ficial fee or for rendering services to the monk who initiates you. Many of the hun-
dreds of thousands of folks wearing the ochre robe in India took their sannyasa this
way, I presume, if they took it at all. For there is the possibility to be what is called
a svatantrasadhu, an independent ascetic: one dons the ochre robe, takes a monastic
name, and sets out as a monk, or settles somewhere. Nobody asks a monk what he