Transcending the mind and the senses, spotless and indestructible, immutable, illimitable and all-blissful. “The Vedas declare,” he said, “that You are It, and that there is no more difference between it and You than between water and its ripples.”

The sage gave me the fullest possible instruction, but the nirguna doctrine did not captivate my heart. Once more I bowed my head at his feet and said, “Tell me, O holy sage, how to worship the personal (the embodied Brahma).

Devotion to Rama is like the element of water and my soul is as it were a fish; how then, O wise lord of the sages, can the one exist without the other? Of your mercy so instruct me that I may behold Raghunatha with my own eyes.

First let me fill my eyes by seeing the lord of Ayodhya, then I will listen to your discourse on nirguna (the attribteless, impersonal Brahma).” Again the sage recited the incomparable story of Hari and demolishing the doctrine of the personal expounded the impersonal. (He rejoiced the dogma of the incarnation and established that Brahma the absolute is altogether attributeless.)

But I rejected the view that God is ever nirguna (impersonal or attributeless) and established with great obstinacy the doctrine of his concrete manifestation (i.e., the doctrine of the incarnate, personal Absolute). When I went on arguing with him, signs of resentment appeared on the sage’s person.

Listen, my lord; discourtesy carried to excess rouses even the wise to wrath. If one rubs sandalwood with excessive violence, the friction will surely produce fire from it.

Again and again, the sage angrily expatiated on spiritual wisdom, while I sat still and argued the matter from every point of view in my own mind: