Swami Vivekananda

• 1. Introduction

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  Swami Vivekananda stepped up to speak at the Art Institute of Chicago on the 11th of September 1893 and began with five words: "Sisters and brothers of America!" The reaction came at once. A crowd of seven thousand rose to its feet and applauded for two full minutes before he could continue. The speaker was a Hindu monk born Narendranath Datta. How did a restless boy from Calcutta come to stand on that platform? What question about God sent him to a teacher at Dakshineswar? And what did he build, in India and in the West, once the applause faded?

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• 2. A Restless Genius

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  On the 12th of January 1863, during the festival of Makar Sankranti, a boy was born at 3 Gourmohan Mukherjee Street in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. He was named Narendranath, shortened to Narendra or Naren. He was one of nine siblings in an aristocratic Bengali Kayastha family.

  His father, Vishwanath Datta, was an attorney at the Calcutta High Court, with a progressive and rational outlook. His mother, Bhubaneswari Devi, was a devout housewife. Her son's character drew on both of them. His grandfather Durgacharan Datta, a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, had left his family to become a monk at the age of twenty-five.

  Even as a small child, Narendra meditated before images of Shiva, Rama, Sita and Hanuman, and wandering ascetics fascinated him. He was also mischievous and restless, and his parents often struggled to control him. His mother once said, "I prayed to Shiva for a son and he has sent me one of his demons".

  In 1871, at the age of eight, he enrolled at Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's Metropolitan Institution. He stayed there until the family moved to Raipur in 1877. After they returned to Calcutta, he became the only student to earn first-division marks in the Presidency College entrance examination of 1879.

  He read hungrily across philosophy, religion, history, social science, art and literature. He also knew the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. He trained in Indian classical music and took part in sports and physical exercise. At the General Assembly's Institution, now the Scottish Church College, he passed the Fine Arts examination in 1881 and finished a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1884.

  His Western reading ran from David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza to Georg W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin. Herbert Spencer's ideas on evolution fascinated him so much that he wrote to Spencer. He also translated Spencer's book Education, first published in 1861, into Bengali.

  Friends and teachers marvelled at his prodigious memory and his speed at reading. Some accounts call him a shrutidhara, a person who can retain whatever he hears. William Hastie, principal of the Scottish Church College, wrote: "Narendra is really a genius. I have travelled far and wide but I have never come across a lad of his talents and possibilities, even in German universities, among philosophical students. He is bound to make his mark in life".

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• 3. Searching For God

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  In 1880, Narendra joined Nava Vidhan, a movement led by Keshab Chandra Sen, who had met Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and turned from Christianity back to Hinduism. At some point before 1884 he joined a Freemasonry lodge. In his twenties he joined the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, a breakaway faction of the Brahmo Samaj. From 1881 to 1884 he also worked with Sen's Band of Hope, which urged young people to give up smoking and drinking.

  Brahmo ideas shaped his first beliefs. They denounced polytheism and caste restrictions and favoured a streamlined, monotheistic reading of the Upanishads and Vedanta. Rammohan Roy, who founded the Brahmo Samaj, was strongly influenced by unitarianism. Debendranath Tagore questioned reincarnation and karma and rejected the authority of the Vedas. Sen drew on American transcendentalism, which valued personal religious experience over reasoning and theology.

  One question marked the real beginning of Narendra's intellectual quest for God. Had anyone come face to face with Him? He put it to several prominent Calcutta residents, and none of their answers satisfied him. When he asked Debendranath Tagore, the reply was only, "My boy, you have the Yogis eyes."

  According to Banhatti, Ramakrishna was the first to answer plainly: "Yes, I see Him as I see you, only in an infinitely intenser sense." Scholars still argue about how much weight to give him. Elizabeth De Michelis suggests the Brahmo Samaj influenced Narendra more than Ramakrishna did, and that Sen was the link between them. Swami Medhananda agrees the Brahmo Samaj mattered but says the meeting with Ramakrishna turned him away from Brahmoism.

  A literature class at the General Assembly's Institution set the meeting in motion. Professor William Hastie was lecturing on Wordsworth's poem The Excursion. While explaining the word "trance", he suggested his students visit Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar. Narendra was among those who went.

  They probably first met in November 1881 at the house of Surendra Nath Mitra, where Ramakrishna had been invited to lecture. Ram Chandra Datta brought Narendra along while he was preparing for his F. A. examination. According to Makarand Paranjape, Ramakrishna asked the young man to sing, liked his talent and invited him to Dakshineswar. Narendra himself did not count this as their first meeting.

  He made his own visit to Dakshineswar in late 1881 or early 1882. He did not accept Ramakrishna as a teacher at first and rebelled against his ideas, yet his personality kept drawing him back. As a Brahmo, he rejected idol worship, polytheism and the worship of Kali. He dismissed Ramakrishna's ecstasies and visions as hallucinations. He called the Advaita Vedanta idea of identity with the absolute blasphemy and madness. Ramakrishna was unperturbed and told him, "Try to see the truth from all angles".

  Then, in 1884, Narendra's father died suddenly and left the family bankrupt. Creditors demanded repayment, and relatives threatened to evict the family from their ancestral home. The son of a well-to-do household became one of the poorest students in his college, and every attempt to find work failed. He doubted that God existed, but he found comfort in Ramakrishna.

  One day he asked Ramakrishna to pray to the goddess Kali for his family's finances. Ramakrishna told him to go to the temple and pray himself. Narendra went three times, and each time he found he could not ask for any worldly need. He asked for true knowledge and devotion instead. Gradually he became ready to give up everything to realise God, and he accepted Ramakrishna as his Guru.

  In 1885, Ramakrishna developed throat cancer. He was moved to Calcutta and then to a garden house in Cossipore. Narendra and the other disciples nursed him, and Narendra's spiritual education continued. At Cossipore he experienced Nirvikalpa samadhi. Ramakrishna gave ochre robes to Narendra and several others, forming his first monastic order. He taught that serving people was the most effective worship of God. He asked Narendra to look after the monastic disciples and asked them to see Narendra as their leader. Ramakrishna died in the early morning hours of the 16th of August 1886.

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• 4. The Wandering Monk

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  Unpaid rent was the first crisis after Ramakrishna's death. Support from devotees and admirers thinned out, and the bills piled up until the disciples had to find a new home. Many went back to family life. Narendra turned a dilapidated house at Baranagar into a monastery for those who stayed. The rent was low and was raised through mādhukarī, or holy begging. This house became the first building of the Ramakrishna Math, the monastic order of Ramakrishna.

  Narendra later recalled those early days: "We used to get up at 3:00 am and become absorbed in japa and meditation. What a strong spirit of detachment we had in those days! We had no thought even as to whether the world existed or not."

  On Christmas Eve of 1886, the twenty-three-year-old Narendra and eight other disciples took formal monastic vows at the Radha Gobinda Jiu temple in the village of Antpur. The mother of a fellow monk, Baburam, had invited them there that December. They resolved to live as their master had lived. In 1887, Narendra and Vaishnav Charan Basak compiled a Bengali song anthology named Sangeet Kalpataru. Narendra gathered and arranged most of the songs, but unfavourable circumstances kept the book from being finished.

  In 1888, Narendra left the monastery as a parivrājaka, a wandering monk with no fixed home and no ties. His only belongings were a kamandalu, or water pot, a staff, and two favourite books: the Bhagavad Gita and The Imitation of Christ. For five years he crossed India on foot and by railway, living mostly on alms. He visited centres of learning and studied the country's many religious traditions and social patterns.

  He stayed with scholars, dewans, rajas, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, paraiyars, who were low-caste workers, and government officials. What he saw of poverty and suffering moved him deeply, and he resolved to uplift the nation.

  His patron, friend and disciple Raja Ajit Singh of Khetri suggested a new name. Vivekananda joins the Sanskrit words viveka and ānanda, meaning the bliss of discerning wisdom. Under that name he left Bombay on the 31st of May 1893, bound for Chicago and the World's Parliament of Religions.

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• 5. The Chicago Parliament

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  Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo were among the Japanese cities Vivekananda visited on his way to America. He also passed through China and Canada, and he reached Chicago on the 30th of July 1893.

  The Parliament was the idea of Charles C. Bonney, a Swedenborgian layman and Illinois Supreme Court judge. It aimed to gather the world's religions and show the substantial unity of many religions in the good deeds of the religious life. The Brahmo Samaj and the Theosophical Society were invited to represent Hinduism.

  Vivekananda wanted to take part, but he learned that only people with credentials from a genuine organisation would be accepted as delegates. Disappointed, he wrote to Professor John Henry Wright of Harvard University, who had already invited him to speak at Harvard. Wright urged him to go to the Parliament, which he thought would introduce him to the nation. On hearing that Vivekananda lacked credentials, Wright said: "To ask for your credentials is like asking the sun to state its right to shine in the heavens".

  Vivekananda submitted an application describing himself as a monk "of the oldest order of sannyāsis... founded by Sankara". Protap Chandra Mozoomdar supported it. He represented the Brahmo Samaj and sat on the Parliament's selection committee.

  The Parliament met as part of the World's Columbian Exposition, and Vivekananda's turn was a brief address on behalf of India and Hinduism. He first bowed to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning. He then greeted the youngest of nations on behalf of "the most ancient order of monks in the world, the Vedic order of sannyasins, a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance".

  He quoted verse 7 of the Shiva mahimna stotram. It begins: "As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea," and then turns to people. "so, O Lord, the different paths which men take, through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee!" He also cited the Bhagavad Gita, verse 4.11. "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths that in the end lead to Me."

  Sailendra Nath Dhar judged that "it was only a short speech, but it voiced the spirit of the Parliament." The Parliament's president, John Henry Barrows, said: "India, the Mother of religions was represented by Swami Vivekananda, the Orange-monk who exercised the most wonderful influence over his auditors".

  The press nicknamed him the "cyclonic monk from India". The New York Critique called him "an orator by divine right". The New York Herald called him "undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions" and added that after hearing him it felt foolish to send missionaries to such a learned nation. The Boston Evening Transcript reported that "if he merely crosses the platform, he is applauded".

  He spoke several more times at receptions, in the scientific section and in private homes. His subjects were Hinduism, Buddhism and harmony among religions, and his common theme was universality and religious tolerance. Harvard psychology professor William James heard him and said, "that man is simply a wonder for oratorical power. He is an honor to humanity."

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• 6. Teaching The West

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  At the Brooklyn Ethical Society, Vivekananda told his audience, "I have a message to the West as Buddha had a message to the East." On another occasion he described his mission this way: "I do not come to convert you to a new belief. I want you to keep your own belief; I want to make the Methodist a better Methodist; the Presbyterian a better Presbyterian; the Unitarian a better Unitarian. I want to teach you to live the truth, to reveal the light within your own soul."

  For nearly two years he lectured in the eastern and central United States, mostly in Chicago, Detroit, Boston and New York. He founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894. The punishing schedule began to wear on his health. In the spring of 1895 he ended the tours and began giving free private classes in Vedanta and yoga.

  From June 1895 he spent two months at Thousand Island Park, New York, giving private lectures to a dozen disciples. Two American universities offered him academic posts. One was the chair in Eastern Philosophy at Harvard University, and the other was a similar position at Columbia University. He declined both because the duties would conflict with his commitment as a monk.

  He travelled to the United Kingdom in 1895 and again in 1896. In November 1895 he met Margaret Elizabeth Noble, an Irish woman who became one of his closest disciples. He gave her the name Sister Nivedita, meaning dedicated to God. In May 1896 he met Max Müller, an Oxford Indologist who wrote the first Western biography of Ramakrishna. In Germany he met another renowned Indologist, Paul Deussen.

  His success changed his mission into the founding of Vedanta centres in the West. He adapted Hindu ideas to suit audiences more familiar with Western esoteric movements. Central to this was his model of four yogas, built on Raja yoga. It offered a practical way to realise the divine force within.

  In 1896 his book Raja Yoga appeared, an interpretation and adaptation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. It was an instant success and shaped the Western understanding of yoga. In Elizabeth de Michelis's view, it marked the beginning of modern yoga.

  His admirers included Josephine MacLeod, Betty Leggett, Lady Sandwich, William James, Josiah Royce, Robert G. Ingersoll, Lord Kelvin, Harriet Monroe, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sarah Bernhardt, Nikola Tesla, Emma Calvé and Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz.

  He initiated several followers so they could serve the Vedanta Society. Marie Louise, a French woman, became Swami Abhayananda, and Leon Landsberg became Swami Kripananda. Christina Greenstidel of Detroit became Sister Christine, and the two developed a close father-daughter bond.

  In the mountains southeast of San Jose, California, he was given land for a retreat for Vedanta students. He called it "Peace retreat", or Shanti Asrama. Twelve main centres were eventually established in America. The largest is the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, which is also home to Vedanta Press, a publisher of books on Vedanta and English translations of Hindu scriptures.

  From abroad he kept reviving his work in India through letters to followers and brother monks, offering advice and financial support. His tone was forceful. He told Akhandananda, "Go from door to door amongst the poor and lower classes of the town of Khetri and teach them religion." He warned that "No good will come of sitting idle and having princely dishes" unless the poor were helped. In 1895 he founded the periodical Brahmavadin.

  On the 16th of December 1896 he left England for India with his disciples Captain and Mrs. Sevier and J.J. Goodwin. They visited France and Italy and sailed from Naples on the 30th of December 1896. Sister Nivedita followed him to India and devoted the rest of her life to educating Indian women and to the goal of India's independence.

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• 7. Return And Final Years

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  On the 15th of January 1897, Vivekananda landed in Colombo, British Ceylon, to a warm welcome, and gave his first public speech in the East. He lectured at Pamban, Rameswaram, Ramnad, Madurai, Kumbakonam and Madras. Both common people and rajas greeted him with enthusiasm. During his train journeys, people sometimes sat on the rails to force the train to stop so they could hear him. He then went on to Calcutta and Almora.

  In the West he had spoken of India's spiritual heritage. At home he turned to social problems: uplifting the people, ending the caste system, promoting science and industry, tackling widespread poverty and ending colonial rule. His lectures were published as Lectures from Colombo to Almora.

  On the 1st of May 1897 in Calcutta he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, an institution for social service built on the ideals of Karma Yoga. Its governing body consists of the trustees of the Ramakrishna Math, which conducts the religious work. Both bodies have their headquarters at Belur Math. He also founded two monasteries: the Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati in the Himalayas, near Almora, and another in Madras.

  He started two journals, Prabuddha Bharata in English and Udbodhan in Bengali. That same year, Swami Akhandananda began famine-relief work in the Murshidabad district.

  Jamsetji Tata had travelled with Vivekananda from Yokohama to Chicago in 1893, and Vivekananda had inspired him to set up a research and educational institution. Tata now asked him to head his Research Institute of Science. Vivekananda declined, citing a conflict with his spiritual interests.

  In Punjab he tried to mediate an ideological dispute between the Arya Samaj, a reformist Hindu movement, and orthodox sanatan Hindus. After brief visits to Lahore, Delhi and Khetri, he returned to Calcutta in January 1898. He spent several months consolidating the work of the math and training disciples. In 1898 he composed "Khandana Bhava-Bandhana", a prayer song dedicated to Ramakrishna.

  In June 1899, despite declining health, he left for the West a second time, accompanied by Sister Nivedita and Swami Turiyananda. In the United States he established a Vedanta Society in San Francisco. In 1900 he travelled to Paris for the Congress of Religions, where his lectures concerned the worship of the lingam and the authenticity of the Bhagavad Gita.

  He then visited Brittany, Vienna, Istanbul, Athens and Egypt, with the French philosopher Jules Bois as his host for most of the trip. He returned to Calcutta on the 9th of December 1900.

  He settled at Belur Math and went on coordinating the Ramakrishna Mission, the math, and the initiatives in England and the United States. Royalty and politicians came to visit. Asthma, diabetes and chronic insomnia limited his activity. In 1901 he was too unwell to attend the Congress of Religions in Japan, though he still made pilgrimages to Bodhgaya and Varanasi.

  On the 4th of July 1902, Vivekananda woke early and went to the monastery at Belur Math, where he meditated for three hours. He taught his pupils Shukla-Yajur-Veda, Sanskrit grammar and the philosophy of yoga. Later he talked with colleagues about a planned Vedic college in the Ramakrishna Math.

  At 7:00 pm he went to his room and asked not to be disturbed. He died at 9:20 pm while meditating. The rupture of a blood vessel in the brain was reported as a possible cause. His disciples said the vessel burst because his brahmarandhra, an opening in the crown of the head, was pierced as he attained mahasamādhi.

  He had prophesied that he would not live to forty, and he did not. His body was cremated on a sandalwood pyre on the bank of the Ganga at Belur, opposite the spot where Ramakrishna had been cremated sixteen years earlier.

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• 8. Ideas And Legacy

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  Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta was, in Vivekananda's view, the finest expression of what Hinduism is at its core. He held to Ramakrishna's teaching that the Absolute is both immanent and transcendent. According to Anil Sooklal, his neo-Vedanta reconciles dualism and non-dualism, seeing Brahman as "one without a second" yet both with and without qualities.

  Jackson offers a summary of Vivekananda's creed: "Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal." The route could be work, worship, mental discipline or philosophy, taken singly or together. "Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."

  From Ramakrishna he took the idea that Vedanta supports śivajñāne jīver sevā, the practice of serving human beings as real manifestations of the divine. He believed that remembering the divine in every person, whatever their social status, promoted harmony and nurtured love. He also treated samadhi as a means to liberation.

  His idea of involution, the descent of divine consciousness into matter, was probably shaped by Western Theosophists and by Darwin's evolution. Meera Nanda notes that he used the word exactly as Theosophy does. He tied morality to control of the mind, seeing truth, purity and unselfishness as strengthening it. He also supported brahmacharya, which he credited as the source of his stamina and eloquence.

  Charles Freer Andrews, a social reformer, wrote that "The Swami's intrepid patriotism gave a new colour to the national movement throughout India." Vivekananda argued that poverty had to be addressed before a national awakening could come. Sri Aurobindo regarded him as the man who awakened India spiritually. Mahatma Gandhi counted him among the few Hindu reformers "who have maintained this Hindu religion in a state of splendor by cutting down the dead wood of tradition".

  Agehananda Bharati went further, writing that "modern Hindus derive their knowledge of Hinduism from Vivekananda, directly or indirectly". His reworking of Hinduism, often called Neo-Vedanta, opened the way for the enthusiastic Western reception of yoga and Transcendental Meditation. Recent scholarship urges caution. James Madaio observes that traits credited to Neo-Vedanta, such as less emphasis on scripture and more on direct experience, already appear in medieval Advaitic literature like the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi.

  In September 2010, Pranab Mukherjee, then Union Finance Minister, approved in principle the Swami Vivekananda Values Education Project. It aimed to publish his works in many languages and involve young people through competitions, essays, discussions and study circles. In 2011, the West Bengal Police Training College was renamed the Swami Vivekananda State Police Academy. The Chhattisgarh state technical university carries his name, and in 2012 the Raipur airport was renamed Swami Vivekananda Airport. Indian Railways named a train the Vivek Express after him.

  His birthday is observed in India as National Youth Day. The anniversary of his Chicago speech is observed as World Brotherhood Day. India's Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports officially marked 2013 as his 150th birth anniversary.

  Films have followed. Utpal Sinha directed The Light: Swami Vivekananda in 2013 as a tribute to that anniversary. The short 3D-animated film Sound of Joy, directed by Sukankan Roy, depicts his spiritual journey and won the National Film Award for Best Non-Feature Animation Film in 2014.

  Most of his published works grew out of lectures given spontaneously with little preparation, so his written style kept the variety of speech. It could be discursive or expository, conversational or declamatory. One exception is Bartaman Bharat, a Bengali essay first printed in the March 1899 issue of Udbodhan. Its refrain asks readers to honour every Indian as a brother, whatever their poverty, status or caste. His collected writings, lectures and discourses fill nine volumes in the Complete Works.

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