23-5-46

I had been away for several days and this morning was
standing at the doorway to the dining hall when Bhagavan entered, so I thought he saw me, but apparently he did not recognise me, so bad has his eyesight become. And yet he will not use his spectacles. At breakfast I was sitting in the first place in the row on his right and he recognised me and asked when I had arrived. I replied, "Last night, but it was after 9-30 when I arrived."

G.V. Subbaramayya had come while I was away and he
was making a Telugu translation of a parody Bhagavan had
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composed of a stanza by Avvai. Avvai's stanza goes: "Oh, pain-giving stomach, you will not go without food even for one day, nor will you take enough for two days at a time. You have no idea of the trouble I have on your account. It is impossible to get on with you."

Bhagavan immediately replied with a parody giving the
stomach's complaint against the ego: "Oh ego! You will not give even an hour's rest to me, your stomach. Day after day, every hour, you keep on eating. You have no idea how I suffer; it is impossible to get on with you."

Then Bhagavan explained, "In the month of Chittrai in
1931, on full moon day, we had all eaten heavily and everyone was complaining of uneasiness in the stomach, so someone, I think the late Somasundaram, quoted this stanza of Avvai's. Then I said that the stomach had more cause to complain against us than we against it. It can be expected to work but it should be given some rest too and after taking rest it can work again. But we never give it a rest. It might not mind even having no rest if we gave it more food to digest only when it had finished digesting what we had already given, but we do not even do that; we load it with more food while it is still digesting the previous meal. So it has just cause for complaint. That is why I composed a stanza like that."

Then Bhagavan asked whether I had been shown the
photograph of the Dakshinamurti image at Madras Museum that had been received at the Asramam during my absence. I said that I had not but that the Parsi boy, Framji's son, had told me about it. So Bhagavan asked T.P.R. to show it to me. I found it had the head turned to the right but the eyes looking rather to the left. When I mentioned this Bhagavan said: "Head and face are all the same; perhaps that is why he wrote — `with face turned to the right'." Bhagavan was referring to a phrase in the letter that accompanied the photograph. Someone remarked that the gaze
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seemed to be turned rather inwards than to the left and I must admit that it is so.

When I entered the hall in the afternoon Bhagavan was
already explaining in answer to some questions put by Mr. Poonja, a Punjabi:

"I ask you to see where the `I' arises in your body, but it is
really not quite correct to say that the `I' rises from and merges in the heart in the right side of the chest. The heart is another name for the Reality and it is neither inside nor outside the body; there can be no in or out for it, since it alone is. I do not mean by `heart' any physiological organ or any plexus of nerves or anything like that, but so long as one identifies oneself with the body and thinks he is in the body he is advised to see where in the body the `I'-thought rises and merges again. It must be the heart at the right side of the chest since every man, of whatever race and religion and in whatever language he may be saying `I', points to the right side of the chest to indicate himself. This is so all over the world, so that must be the place. And by keenly watching the daily emergence of the `I'-thought on waking and its subsiding in sleep, one can see that it is in the heart on the right side."

In the course of the day, G.V. Subbaramayya asked
Bhagavan how Ganapati Sastri wrote his Ramana Gita, whether he took notes on the conversations and then wrote them out. Bhagavan replied, "Remembering such talks was child's play to him. He could listen to a long and learned lecture on some intricate subject and then at the end reproduce the gist of it accurately in the form of sutras, not omitting anything of importance that had been said. Once he and Arunachala Sastri, who was also a learned man, had a discussion. Ganapati Sastri took up the position of drishti srishti ^[?], that we create and then see, that is to say that the world has no objective reality apart from our minds, while Arunachala Sastri took up the opposite view of srishti drishti ^[?],
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that creation exists objectively before we see it. Arunachala Sastri argued first and upheld his standpoint with a great display of logic and learning and many quotations. Then Ganapati Sastri wrote down in the form of sutras all that he had maintained and asked him whether the sutras gave a faithful summary of everything he had said. He agreed that they did, so Ganapati Sastri said: "Then now you will have my criticism and condemnation of it". He then expounded very ably the advaitic ^[?] point of view, that the world is an illusion as world but real as Brahman, that it does not exist as world but exists and is real as Brahman. In the same way he could record any discussion he heard; so remarkable was his power of memory, that he must have reproduced the Ramana Gita in that way. It would have been mere child's play for him."