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Updated: June 12, 2025
'When your book is finished, I shall pay you a visit, he promised. 'Good-by for the present. "I left Allahabad the following day and entrained for Benares. Reaching my guru's home, I poured out the story of the wonderful saint at the KUMBHA MELA. "'Oh, didn't you recognize him? Lahiri Mahasaya's eyes were dancing with laughter. 'I see you couldn't, for he prevented you.
"The scene was a KUMBHA MELA at Allahabad," Lahiri Mahasaya told his disciples. "I had gone there during a short vacation from my office duties. As I wandered amidst the throng of monks and sadhus who had come from great distances to attend the holy festival, I noticed an ash-smeared ascetic who was holding a begging bowl.
It was my first experience of a KUMBHA; I felt slightly dazed by the clamor and surge of the crowd. In my searching gazes around I saw no illumined face of a master. Passing a bridge on the bank of the Ganges, I noticed an acquaintance standing near-by, his begging bowl extended. "'Oh, this fair is nothing but a chaos of noise and beggars, I thought in disillusionment.
"Why did you let me go to the KUMBHA MELA? How bitterly have I blamed myself for leaving you!" "I did not want to interfere with your happy anticipation of seeing the pilgrimage spot where first I met Babaji. I left you only for a little while; am I not with you again?" "But is it YOU, Master, the same Lion of God? Are you wearing a body like the one I buried beneath the cruel Puri sands?"
Not sensing Sri Yukteswar's reluctance to have me leave him, I went on, "Once you beheld the blessed sight of Babaji at an Allahabad KUMBHA. Perhaps this time I shall be fortunate enough to see him." "I do not think you will meet him there." My guru then fell into silence, not wishing to obstruct my plans.
One had but to attend the great Kumbha Mela at Hardwar last year to know how skilful that organisation must have been, which without any seeming effort was able effectively to cater for more than a million pilgrims. Yet it is the fashion to say that we lack organising ability. This is true, I fear, to a certain extent, of those who have been nurtured in the new traditions.
"Even as Babaji had foretold at the KUMBHA MELA, the householder-incarnation of Lahiri Mahasaya was drawing to a close. During the summer of 1895 his stalwart body developed a small boil on the back. He protested against lancing; he was working out in his own flesh the evil karma of some of his disciples.
Wright, "He is a king sitting on a throne of golden straw." We had our dinner that night on the MELA grounds under the stars, eating from leaf plates pinned together with sticks. Dishwashings in India are reduced to a minimum! Two more days of the fascinating KUMBHA; then northwest along the Jumna banks to Agra.
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