Jnana YajnasA 108 Day Pilgrimage with Swami Chinmayananda

Those who, with an anglicized outlook, had thought that the scriptures were irrelevant and incomprehensible were fascinated with Pujya Gurudev’s mastery over both the language and the subject of Vedanta. The audience did not need to know Sanskrit. Every word in Sanskrit was transliterated, translated, and explained in clear English from his very first yajna in Pune. Often, Pujya Gurudev’s expressions were poetic and painted a graphic picture. While indicating how the Infinite Brahman is inexplicable, Pujya Gurudev said: “We cannot produce the war of rolling thunders through the frail melodies of a flute!! Similarly, words cannot represent or express fully the roaring silence of all-full-nothingness, Pure Consciousness. In their attempts at reaching the Absolute, words pant and fall back as it were!” Throughout the Kenopanishad discourses in Coimbatore, while the vast audience marveled at Pujya Gurudev’s proficiency in English, they also recognized how His teaching went beyond the realm of language.

In Admiration 

Recalling the profound influence of the discourses in Coimbatore, Shri R Venkataswamy Naidu of Coimbatore expresses how they served as nourishment for the intellect of all. “For me it was love at first sight. There was a void before and the lectures filled up the void. The scientific nature of our religion was pointed out and Chinmaya showed how the other religions cannot stand the test of modern scientific research. Hinduism, the revered old channel, sans eyes and sans teeth and sans everything, was presented to us as a young maiden of sixteen, smiling, dancing and full of life.”