Hands raised before the Radha asan

Parents ask him constantly how to give children sanskar, and they usually mean what to tell them. He redirects it immediately. Children are poor listeners and extremely good observers, and what forms them is the behaviour available in the house every day, not the instruction delivered on a Sunday.

The example he uses is uncomfortable enough that people remember it. A father who tells his son not to lie and then, in the boy's hearing, sends a lie down a phone line to get out of an obligation, has taught the boy exactly one thing, and it was not the sentence. The demonstration always outweighs the instruction, because the demonstration is what was real.

The same logic applies to practice, and this is where he is most direct with parents. A child instructed to take the name, in a house where nobody visibly does, learns that this is something adults require of children. A child who simply grows up with a parent who chants during ordinary work absorbs it as part of how a day is shaped, and never has to be persuaded.

He warns against the opposite error too, and it is a common one among devotees. Practice enforced on a household produces compliance and resentment, and the resentment often outlasts the childhood. Children made to sit through something for an hour because a parent has become serious about it will remember being made to sit, and will drop the whole thing at the first opportunity.

There is a wider claim underneath. Most of what he says about grihastha dharma rests on the household being where devotion is tested, and children are the most exacting part of that test because they are watching without discretion. How you speak to your wife when you are tired, how you talk about your employer, what you do when the shopkeeper gives you too much change, are all curriculum whether or not you intended them to be.

What it asks of you is to stop teaching and start being observed. Do the practice where it can be seen, without announcing it and without requiring anybody to join. Let the household notice that you take the name during ordinary work, that you do not lie on the phone, and that you are steady when something goes wrong. That is the entire method, and it does not need a lecture attached.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.