300 books presented to Harvard University
On 5 February 1978 Sri Chinmoy presented to Harvard University 300 of the spiritual books he has written. On hand to receive the books of poetry, plays, stories, aphorisms, essays, lectures and questions and answers were Dr. Chase Peterson, Harvard’s Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development, Dr. Krister Stendahl, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, and Mr. Peter L. Oliver, Librarian of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library of the Harvard Divinity School. The presentation took place in Hilles Library at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where Sri Chinmoy’s Jharna-Kala paintings were on exhibit for three weeks. On this historic occasion Sri Chinmoy symbolically offered the spiritual illumination of the East to the intellectual brilliance of the West, epitomized by Harvard, which he once called "the university unparalleled in the whole of the United States of America.”Sri Chinmoy: Dear esteemed friends, dear compassionate brothers, dear Vice President, dear Dean, dear Librarian, at our journey’s very start I wish to offer you my soulful gratitude-heart. I am sincerely happy and divinely grateful for your kind and benevolent acceptance of my humble and insignificant offering. Along with these humble creations of mine I am offering the blossoming petals of my heart’s gratitude.
I am a seeker, and all these writings are expressions of my soulful aspiration. My aspiration cried, cries and forever shall cry for the total embodiment of divinity. Today we are in a temple of divinity.
No other school, no other temple is as soulful, as meaningful and as fruitful as this divinity-flooded Divinity School.
Once more to you three, to all those who are here now and, most of all, to the loving and illumining soul of Harvard, I am offering my heart’s ever-flowing gratitude.
Dean Stendahl: Sri Chinmoy, friends, before I ask Mr. Peter Oliver of the Harvard Divinity School Library to receive these books — which will give my colleagues a feeling that they haven’t produced as much as they thought — I would like to say a few words on this occasion.
One reason this gift and this occasion are important to us at Harvard Divinity School is that historically the main tradition of that school is in the Judaeo-Christian line. And among those ten commandments that are ours in that tradition is one that says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” Everybody knows well that there are many false witnesses brought by the West against the East — from various Western religions toward Eastern religions, and also toward the whole wisdom, insight and grasp of reality that comes out of Eastern meditation. So, while that is not the ultimate purpose, this gift of yours, Sri Chinmoy, helps us to cut down on our breaking of that commandment, because knowing something firsthand makes it easier not to tell stories about it.
The second reason is that by very happy developments, which to me seem providential, we have as part of the Divinity School at Harvard a Center for the Study of World Religions, including also the study of such an understanding of the Ultimate Reality as your paintings and your work and your insight represent. The aim of that Center has always been to take in as much as possible the total manifestations of religious traditions, both of the past and in the making. The people who worked hard in establishing that Center have very well perceived that, especially in the academic setting, one usually deals with the foundation period of religions far back; but the live and contemporary manifestations of insights are usually not part of that total picture. Your gift to Harvard Divinity School seems to me to be another and significant piece in that wonderful puzzle of the totality of human religion. Ultimately only God can hold the whole thing together.
There is also a third reason. Since I am at heart a Christian teacher, the answer must have three parts, by tradition. My third point is that as I sit in this room, as I see this Fountain-Art of yours, I feel it is beautiful and it might be the beauty of holiness. Therefore, we are very graced.
I would now very much like our Librarian, Mr. Peter Oliver, to receive this gift on behalf of the Library.
Mr. Oliver: We seldom receive this many books at one time, and have never received them all from one person’s hand. I would like to thank you very much for putting down your own journey so that others may have it and learn from it, and for presenting it to us. It is a great gift for our students who are seeking their own path.
There is a great deal in Harvard University and in the Divinity School which is open to receiving new insights, and there is also a great deal which prefers not to. But to have the presence of your own outpourings and your own understandings among us, I hope, will open the hearts of many of our students to new learning and to new understandings. I thank you very much.
Sri Chinmoy plays the esraj before a display of 300 of his spiritual books in the penthouse of Hilles Library, Radcliffe.
Dean Stendahl reflects on the significance of the meeting of East and West as Sri Chinmoy’s books are unveiled by Harvard student Steven Schecter, Co-ordinator of the presentation.
