ou may safely follow all your inclinations. "He
needs no devotional practices," is one of Ramakrishna's maxims, "whose
heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of {354}
Hari."[217] And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called "the middle
way" to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes,
excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and
pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom,
which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, and thus leads
to rest, to peace, and to Nirvana.[218]

[216] Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French
translation, p. 333), "had passed forty years without ever sleeping
more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this
was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept always
on his knees or on his feet. The little sleep he allowed nature to
take was snatched in a sitting posture, his head leaning against a
piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it
would have been impossible, because his cell was only four feet and a
half long. In the course of all these years he never raised his hood,
no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain's strength. He never
put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sackcloth, with nothing
else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as possible, and over it
a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off
the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of his
cell. Then he closed them and resumed the mantle--his way, as he told
us, of warming himself, and making his body feel a better temperature.
It was a frequent thing with him to eat once only in three days; and
when I expressed my surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once
had acquired the habit. One of his companions has assured me that he
has gone sometimes eight days without food.... His poverty was extreme;
and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he
had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of
the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never
raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the others.
He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent many years
without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at
the age he had reached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes
on th