“I knew when I was in his [Schuon’s] presence that I was in the presence of a true saint and also the spiritual master that I was seeking. When I say ‘true saint’, I don’t mean just a saintly man but a true saint of the first magnitude, such as one cannot expect to meet in the twentieth century. I mean a saint of the magnitude of St. Bernard, St. Francis, or St. Augustine in Christianity; of Ibn Arabi or Rumi in Sufism; of Shankara in Hinduism; and of Milarepa in Buddhism. I knew this with a certainty.”
~ Martin Lings, author of A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, describing his first meeting with Schuon