Friendships Fall Off

By G. L. Krishna

We often underestimate the importance of intellectual compatibility in forging deep friendships. Having lost a couple of good friendships solely due to ideological divergences, I have pondered deeply on this topic. As a part of that, I have often tried to recall if there have been episodes, in the lives of great men, of ideological divergences leading to friendships falling off.

Vivekananda, as a young monk, had a raging appetite for scriptural scholarship.  His questions were sincere and his disagreements, severe. His quest for a genuine scholar took him to one Pramadadas Mitra of Varanasi. Pramadadas was a Sanskrit scholar of high renown. The young Vivekananda wrote numerous letters to him with a view to get his doubts clarified. While in Varanasi, the two of them spent several hours discussing scriptural topics. Their common interests made them close friends. In one his letters, Vivekananda thanks him profusely for his "broad, generous heart."

Strange are the ways of fate. Like many good things in life, Vivekananda's friendship with Pramadadas cooled in about a decade's time. Pramadadas was orthodox in his outlook whereas Vivekananda was reformist. Vivekananda expected Pramadadas to understand that his reformist attitudes had the endorsement of Hinduism's Vedantic core. For instance, caste-based discriminations, although a part of some Smriti texts, were evidently dissonant with the Vedantic outlook of "seeing the self in all." But even the "broad, generous heart" of the scholarly Pramadadas failed to understand Vivekananda's perfectly valid arguments. It would sound harsh to implicate Pramadadas' somewhat weak intellectual and moral imagination as the cause of his rift with Vivekananda. But that seems to be the fact. 

 

As regards human relationships in general, Ramakrishna taught that they are ephemeral. "God alone is your own," he often pointed out to people who were immersed in the sweet joys that human relationships bring. Vivekananda must have derived solace from those words of his old teacher. After all, that is what Indian wisdom too has always taught. The following verse is found in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata:

 

यथा काष्ठं च काष्ठं च समेयातां महोदधौ ।
समेत्य च व्यपेयातां तद्वत् भूतसमागमः ॥

 

“Just as two logs drift together on the vast ocean and then drift apart, so too do living beings associate and dissociate.”