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I
One morning, after visiting the temple of Mother Durga, the Swami was passing through a place where there were a large tank of water on one side and a high wall on the other. Here he was surrounded by a troop of large monkeys. They were not willing to allow him to pass along that way. They howled and shrieked and clutched at his feet as he strode. As they pressed closer, he began to run; but the faster he ran, the faster came the monkeys, and they began to bite at him. When it seemed impossible for him to escape, he heard an old sannyasi calling out to him: "Face the brutes." The words brought him to his senses. He turned and boldly faced the irate monkeys. As soon as he did that, they fell back and fled. With reverence and gratitude he gave the traditional greeting to the sannyasi, who smilingly responded with the same, and walked away. In a New York lecture years later, the Swami referred to this incident and pointed to its moral: "That is a lesson for all life-face the terrible, face it boldly. Like the monkeys, the hardships of life fall back when we cease to flee before them. If we are ever to gain freedom, it must be by conquering nature, never by running away. Cowards never win victories. We have to fight fear and troubles and ignorance if we expect them to flee before us."
I
About two miles from Vrindavan, he saw a man contentedly smoking a pipe (Chillum) by the wayside. The Swami, weary, felt that a smoke would do him good; so he asked the man to allow him to have a pull or two at the pipe. The smoker shrank back and said diffidently, "It would defile you, sir. I am a Bhangi [a sweeper]". The Swami, conditioned by caste-con¬sciousness, shrank back too, and went his way, After going a short distance, the thought struck him, "What! I have taken the sannyasi's vow and have given up all ideas of caste, family prestige and so forth: yet I fell back into caste ideas when the man told me that he was a sweeper! And I could not smoke the pipe which he had touched! That was due to ages of habit." The thought made him so restless that he turned back and found the man still seated there. Sitting down beside him, he said, "Brother, do prepare me a Chillum of tobacco." But the man humbly expostulated, "Sir, you are a holy man: I am an outcaste!" But the Swami would not listen to his objections and insisted on having a smoke from that pipe. (LSV)
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