ABSTRACT
Unfortunately his childhood was marred by the bullying he experienced from his older brother, Jitendra Das. The Acharya Pranavananda, like many another saint and yogi of the Hindu tradition, meditated on the formless Ultimate and saw it as indeed the supreme which lies beyond all the qualifications which humans place upon their God. The labour of the paddies and rice fields could be seriously disturbed by flooding, crops destroyed, children deprived. The rumours that perhaps he was a manifestation of Shiva had spread and peasant families sometimes came to the house hoping for a power-enhancing glimpse of the divine child. So the child’s apprehension of the God Vishnu was a counterpart to his early ambition to go the other way, into formless meditation and asceticism. Binode as a child may not yet have been aware of his calling to revitalise the symbolic worship of the Hindus; but his experience of Narayana and the Tulsi plant was surely relevant to it.
