I knew and appreciated Swami Abhishiktananda, who was the French Benedictine monk Henry le Saux, and now I find several anecdotes from his life in the book ‘Abhishiktananda in The Cave of the Heart’ by Shirley du Boulay, Orbis Books, New York 2005.
An Indian Carmelite friend said of Abhishiktananda affectionately, ‘There was a man who could talk about silence twenty-four hours a day.’
He gave many lectures to many students, but he had only one disciple who followed him in his meditation and in his life, the young French seminarian Marc Chaduc whom he gave the name of Ajatananda. He took him to the Himalayas for training and prayer, and one day he disappeared and was never heard of again. Abhishiktananda said of him: ‘I showed him the path of illumination without ever having a thought he would take it so seriously!’
He would say: ‘The satires of Isaiah against the makers of idols of wood and gold apply just as much to the makers of conceptual idols. The simple man sculpts a bit of wood and prostrates himself: “You are my God”. The intellectual sculpts a concept and does likewise. Only that this is much more dangerous.’
His motto: ‘Wake up. Wake God up.’ He spent years in the caves of the Arunachala Mountain near Tiruvanamalay in South India where he listened to Shri Ramana Maharshi in his ashram at the foot of the mountain.
I met him once for a long talk at the De Nobili College, Pune, and a gesture of his has remained in my memory to this day. We were speaking in English, but for a moment he switched to Hindi (not Tamil but Hindi) to quote to me what people said of him. He told me: ‘Simple people listen to me because they say I speak to them “from the heart”. And he placed his right hand on his chest over the heart. The gesture stuck in my mind. The Hindi words too. |
