Tagore's speech to students at Peking University

What do you want from me? Why do you have to talk to me? When I say I'm not an orator, I'm honest.

Sometimes I act helplessly, protesting against my self-identification. Expressing the feelings of the divine intercourse between the leaves and nature in the lonely life has consumed most of my years.

When I was young like you, like a hermit, I lived alone in a wooden boat, adrift on a great river like your Yangtze River. I have changed the habit of thinking about problems in a lonely mind.

I was afraid of the crowd, and whenever I was asked to speak, I felt trepidation. I have no talent as a speaker, and speech is only a destiny that is difficult to violate in me.

I hope that I come among you today with real talent and as a poet. You shouldn't have asked me to speak, but you could have expected something better, like a lyric poem.

I don't know your language, otherwise I would have studied Chinese poetry diligently. It is too late for me to learn, and in this life and in this life, I will not be able to become a scholar.

Whatever your job, don't take me as an example. When I was a child, I used to skip school and leave my studies behind, when I was only thirteen years old.

However, it also saved me. I attribute everything I have today to the courageous actions I took as a teenager. The textbooks that I despised gave me admonitions and did not give me encouragement.

As for learning, you know mathematics, logic and philosophy, and I know nothing. In front of your proctor teacher, I can only turn in the blank paper in a decadent manner.

But the keen sense of perception I gained, never damaged, allowed me to touch the life and nature that whispered to me.

Smart people write their minds into books, and I admire their remarkable talents. However, psychic feelings are also precious talents.

We were born in a great world. If I had cultivated Mune's mind, if I had felt suffocated under the piles of books, I would have lost my whole world long ago.

Reality is all over the world, all things and nature, and when we come into contact with reality, once we suffocate and stifle our perceptual power, we are unaware of the blue sky, the flower basket of the four seasons, and the subtle relationship between love, mercy and friendship. I have always cherished this kind of perception.

If Mother Nature is willing, she will put on a laurel for me, lean over and kiss me, bless me, and say happily, "You love me."

I live in this great world not as a member of a society or group, but as a mischievous ghost and tramp. In my heart of the world I face, I am free.

You may say that I am not educated, that I am uneducated, that I am a pedantic poet. You may become scholars, philosophers; but I think I may have the right to laugh at your profundity.

At the age of thirteen, how could I have the gifted wisdom to recognize the value of perception?

At that time, I had not yet fully perceived the winding path that led to it. I also didn't know that by giving up everything else, I could win the freedom to live in vientiane.

It comes from a strong, direct sense of self, not from books and teachers.

Really, I know, you don't look down on me because I have less math than you do.

You believe that I have come close to the secrets of Vientiane along a unique path—a conclusion not from thorough analysis, but from the general view that a child can walk closer to his mother's bedroom than to his distinguished guests. I

The innocence of a child was preserved in my heart, and for this I found the door of Mother Nature's bedroom, the dark room, lit by a lamp, from the distant horizon, the symphony of awakening lamps, resonating with the songs I sang.