As part of this morning’s service at the Vedanta Society, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the congregation sang a hymn including the following verse:

When the hour of death draws near,
Never, never will the rules of grammar protect you.

This is a sentiment one rarely encounters in Western hymns, but it is akin to the warning of St. Thomas à Kempis that it is better to feel contrition than to know how to define it. Ironically enough (or perhaps not?), the hymn was written by Shankara, one of the most powerful intellects in the history of Hinduism. He was a 9th-century philosopher-theologian of Advaita (nondualist) Vedanta, and his birthday is being celebrated by Vedantists this week. I have loved his work ever since college days, and it gives me yet another reason to be grateful to T. S. Eliot — who turned me on, back then, to both Dante and the Vedanta, and, much later, to high-church Anglicanism. (And how could I forget? Today’s service even concluded with the words we all remember from “The Waste Land”: “Shantih shantih shantih.”)

T. S. Eliot was an intellectual high-flier, indeed one of the highest; but he would agree with Shankara that — to translate that hymn into our Western idiom — it is not the English majors who will be accepted into the kingdom, but those who do the will of their Father in Heaven.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that a better analogy than the statement of Thomas à Kempis would be the famous statement by St. Thomas Aquinas that he had had a vision that everything he had written amounted to just a pile of straw. (Shankara has always impressed me as being for Hinduism what Aquinas was for Catholicism: the most gifted and innovative intellectual systematizer in a long and content-rich religious tradition.)