RENUNCIATION AND AUSTERITY

In his book My Guru and His Disciple, Christopher Isherwood describes a situation where spiritual lecturer Gerald Heard, an early follower of Swami Prabhavananda, decided to resign his association with the Swami's Vedanta Society of Southern California.  His reason for doing so, as Heard stated in a letter to Prabhavananda, was that the Swami's way of life there in California violated the monastic standards of austerity.  It was too social, too comfortable, too relaxed.

This was to say, the Swami had Hindu notions of hospitality and often invited guests to lunch--some of them not even devotees, but just their relatives or friends. Appetizing meals were served--that is, if one liked curry--and they were not necessarily vegetarian.  The Swami had a car at his disposal.  He chain-smoked, which set a bad example for those who were struggling with their own addictions. The women, nuns, waited on him hand and foot and he accepted their service as a matter of course.  His relations with them--though doubtless absolutely innocent--could easily cause misunderstandings and suspicions among outsiders. For, after all, he WAS the only male in a household of females.

Even if Heard's letter was tactfully worded, it hurt Pravananda's feelings deeply, and he later answered Heard indirectly in an article entitled "Renunciation and Austerity," which he wrote for the Vedanta Society magazine.  It read in part, "You would identify the life of renunciation with a life of poverty and discomfort and you would say that if a spiritual teacher lives in comfort and in a plentiful household he is inevitably not living the consecrated life.  Your view is too simple.  A man of true renunciation concerns himself neither with poverty nor with riches.  If the poor man hugs his few trivial possessions, he is as much attached and as much a worldly man as the rich man.  Only, the poor man is worse off--because of his envy.  Mere outward austerity is a degenerate form of ritualism.  A spiritual soul never makes any demonstration of his renunciation."

According to Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, another of Prabhavananda's early followers, was distressed over this rift.  It was a disaster, Huxley said, when two sincere practitioners of the spiritual life fell out with each other--especially since there were so few of them.  "Judge not that ye be not judged," he murmured to himself several times--which suggested that he thought Heard was wrong.  Heard had his own style which others might well disagree with too, he seemed to be saying; Heard could be seen as too much of a "life-hater," as Isherwood put it, and a task master. 

This, however, was not the end of the Prabhavananda and Heard relationship.  The spiritual college that the latter went on to build in the Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles was not as successful as Heard had hoped.  As a result, he eventually turned it over to the Swami and the Vedanta Society with whom it had a brighter future, ironically as a monastery.