130. The Pandit Who Couldn't Swim

Here is a story Appa tells me before I go to college.

A group of men is crossing the Ganges in a rowboat. One of them, a pandit, passes the time by flaunting his erudition, asking each passenger in turn, "Have you read the Vedas? The Silappathikaram? The Bhagavata Purana?" and preening because, of course, no one had. Then it so happened that a storm cracked the sky; the sudden rain swiftly filled the boat. As the boat began to sink, a passenger asked of the pandit, "Revered sir, can you swim?" The pandit could not. And the passenger said, "Sir, I may not know The Silappathikaram, but I can swim" (Sri Ramakrishna, 1947, p. 122).

In its original telling, this is a story about Maya and the nature of god, but Appa tells it like a riddle about academia. What will a person gain by mastering theory alone? The needful thing is action.