My Only Cause

[Listen to Asha read this story]

In The Path, Swamiji describes Daya Mata as he knew her during the years when they both lived in the ashram of their Guru.

“Kindness,” he wrote, “was the hallmark of her personality. I looked upon her as my model in the ideal spirit of discipleship that I was striving to acquire.”

Considering how harshly Daya Mata treated Swamiji in later years, his generosity toward her in his autobiography, which he wrote during those later years, has always astonished me.

“Her worst persecution,” I said to Swamiji, “came after 1990, with the lawsuits she, through SRF, filed against you. But even in 1976, when you wrote The Path, you had already been expelled from SRF, and she'd shown herself to be anything but charitably disposed toward you. Yet you don’t even hint at that side of her character. Instead, you helped create the image of Daya as Master’s ideal disciple. Only a few know her personally, others take their cue from what people like you say. Because of what you wrote, many people later sided with Daya, not with you. In your autobiography, you worked against your own cause.”

“Truth is my only cause,” Swamiji said. “What I wrote is how I experienced her at the time. Subsequent events did not change that. In The Path I chose to emphasize a reality in her toward which she herself is striving, and which I still see as her deeper reality.”