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So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs—or anyway, that's how it felt. The following day it was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was already sweating, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: "It's only an hour and a half—you can do anything for an hour and a half. For God's sake, you have friends who were in labor for fourteen hours . . ." But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I had been stapled to it. I kept feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me, and I thought I might faint, or bite somebody in my fury.
My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically directed at Swamiji—my Guru's master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the Gurugita in the first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great and now-deceased Yogi. He was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach, demanding to know how I intended to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding me.
我愤怒至极，足以吞噬世间每个人，尤其针对思瓦米吉——我的导师的师父，也就是设立古鲁梵歌仪式吟唱的创始者。这不是我头一次与这位伟大、已殁的瑜伽大师之间困难的相会。他曾出现在我的梦中，在海边盘问我打算如何阻止海潮，我始终觉得他阴魂不散。
Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual fire-brand. Like Saint Fran-cis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to enter the family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a small village near his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens, Swamiji left home in a loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot in India, searching for a true spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints and Gurus, never finding the teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept outside in Himalayan snowstorms, suffered from malaria, dysentery—and called these the happiest years of his life, just searching for somebody who would show God to him. Over those years, Swamiji became a Hatha Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking, an architect, a gardener, a musician and a swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years, he had still not found a Guru, until one day he encountered a naked, mad sage who told him to go back home, back to the village where he had met the holy man as a child, and to study with that great saint.
思瓦米吉一生坚毅不懈，是位心灵煽动家。和圣方济一样，他亦出身于富裕人家，预期接掌家族事业。然而还是个小男孩之时，他在家里附近某个小村子遇见一位圣者，便深深地被这场经验所感动。才十几岁，思瓦米吉便裹着腰布离家，长年去印度的每个圣地朝拜，寻找真正的心灵大师。据说他遇上六十多位圣人与导师，却始终找不到自己想要的导师。他挨饿，赤脚步行，在喜马拉雅暴风雪中露宿在外，罹患疟疾、痢疾——但他却说在寻找能为他指点神的人的那一段时间，是他生命中最快乐的时光。那几年，思瓦米吉成为阴阳瑜伽师（Hatha），精通草本医学与烹饪，同时也是建筑师、园艺家、音乐家、剑士（我喜欢这点）。人到中年时，他仍未找到导师，直到有天遇上一位裸体、疯狂的圣徒叫他回家去，回到他小时候遇上圣者的村子，追随圣者学习。
