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WHO SEEKS NIRVAŅA? entered the temple of Jagganāth. As he looked at the holy image he debated within himself whether God had a forin or was formless. He passed his staff from left to right to feel whether it touched the image. The staff touched nothing. He understood that there was no image before him; he concluded that God was formless. Next le passed the staff from right to left. It touched the image. The sannyāsin understood that God had form. Thus he realized that God has form and, again, is formless." 2
"What is vijñāna?" he said on another occasion. "It is knowing God in a special way. The awareness and conviction that fire exists in wood is jñāna, knowledge. But to cook rice on that fire, eat the rice, and get nourishment from it is vijñāna. To know by one's inner experience that God exists is jñāna. But to talk to Him, to enjoy Him as Child, as Friend, as Master, as Beloved, is vijñāna. The realization that God alone has become the universe and all living beings is vijñāna." 8
And with respect to the ideal of becoming annihilate in Brahman, he would sometimes say, quoting the poet Rāmprasād, "I love to eat sugar, I do not want to become sugar." 31
The Mahāyāna Bodhisattva tastes unending saviorship by devoting himself with absolute selflessness to his teaching task in the vortex of the world; in the same spirit, the Hindu Tāntric initiate, by persevering in the dualistic attitude of devotion (bhakti), enjoys without cease the beatitude of the knowledge of thc omnipresence of the Goddess.
“The Divine Mother revealed to me in the Kālī temple that it was She who had become everything," Śrī Rāmakrishna told his friends. "She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The Image was Consciousness, the altar was
2 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, translated with an introduction by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, 1942, p. 858.
3 Ib., p. 288. sa Contrast supra, p. 439.
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