Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda (born Narendranath Datta; 12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902) was a Bengali Hindu monk, the chief disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and the most influential figure in the modern revival of Hinduism and its introduction to the West. His address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, which opened with the words “Sisters and brothers of America”, made him famous overnight; in the following years he lectured across the United States and Britain, presenting Advaita Vedānta and Yoga (darśana) as a universal, rational spirituality, and founded the Vedanta Society of New York. In India he founded the Ramakrishna Mission (1897), combining monastic spirituality with social service, and preached a “practical Vedānta”: if every being is divine, then service to the poor and suffering is the worship of God. His call to strength, fearlessness and self-respect — “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached” — inspired the Indian nationalist movement and generations of Indians.

Life

Narendra

Narendranath Datta was born in Calcutta into a prosperous Kāyastha family; his father Vishwanath Datta was a lawyer with rationalist views, his mother Bhuvaneshwari Devi deeply religious. Narendra was a brilliant, athletic, musical student who read Western philosophy — Hume, Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Mill — at the Scottish Church College, and joined the reformist Brahmo Samāj. He was a sceptic, asking every religious teacher he met: “Have you seen God?”

Ramakrishna

In 1881 he met Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the ecstatic priest of the Kālī temple at Dakshineswar, and asked him the same question. Ramakrishna replied: “Yes, I have seen God, just as I see you here, only in a much more intense sense.” Narendra was at first repelled by Ramakrishna’s trances and his worship of Kālī, but returned again and again; once, at Ramakrishna’s touch, he felt the whole world dissolve into an all-pervading consciousness. After his father’s death left the family destitute, he struggled with poverty and doubt; Ramakrishna sent him to pray to Kālī for money, and three times he found himself praying instead for knowledge and devotion. He became the leader of Ramakrishna’s young disciples. Before his death in 1886, Ramakrishna told him to serve human beings as God — “not compassion for beings, but service to beings as Śiva”.

The wandering monk

After his master’s death, Narendra and his brother disciples took monastic vows. From 1888 to 1893 he wandered across India as a mendicant, from the Himālaya to Kanyakumari, and was shocked by the poverty and degradation of the masses. At Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, he swam out to a rock and meditated for three days (December 1892), and resolved to go to the West to seek help for India — and to give the West India’s spiritual message. Sponsored by the Maharaja of Khetri, who gave him the name Vivekananda (“the bliss of discriminating wisdom”), he sailed for America.

Chicago

On 11 September 1893, at the opening of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda — an unknown young monk in an orange robe and turban — rose to speak. His first words, “Sisters and brothers of America”, brought seven thousand people to their feet in a two-minute ovation. His short speech welcomed the gathering in the name of “the most ancient order of monks in the world” and “the mother of religions”, and quoted the Gītā: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take… all lead to Thee.” He condemned “sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism”. The New York Herald called him “undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament”.

He spent the next years lecturing across America and England, founding the Vedanta Society of New York (1894), training Western disciples (including the Irishwoman Margaret Noble, who became Sister Nivedita), and writing Raja Yoga (1896), Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Jnana Yoga.

Return to India

Returning to India in 1897, he received a hero’s welcome from Colombo to Almora, and gave a series of fiery lectures calling on Indians to rise from weakness and superstition. He founded the Ramakrishna Mission (May 1897) and the monastery at Belur Math, near Calcutta. After a second visit to the West (1899–1900), his health failed; he died at Belur on 4 July 1902, aged thirty-nine.

Teaching

The divinity of the soul

Vivekananda’s teaching was a modernised Advaita Vedānta: “Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy — by one, or more, or all of these — and be free. This is the whole of religion.” The four yogas — of work, devotion, meditation and knowledge — are four paths to the same realisation.

Practical Vedānta

His most original contribution was to turn Advaita’s metaphysics into an ethic of service. If the same Self is in all beings, then serving the poor, the sick and the ignorant is worship: “I do not believe in a God or religion which cannot wipe the widow’s tears or bring a piece of bread to the orphan’s mouth.” “The poor, the illiterate, the ignorant, the afflicted — let these be your God.” The Ramakrishna Mission ran hospitals, schools and famine relief.

Harmony of religions

Following Ramakrishna, he taught that all religions are true paths to the one God, and that the Hindu tradition, with its doctrine that “truth is one, the wise call it by many names”, was the model of tolerance. He also argued that religion must be tested by reason and experience.

Strength

He called Indians to strength and fearlessness: “Strength is life, weakness is death.” “What our country now wants are muscles of iron and nerves of steel.” “You will be nearer to heaven through football than through the study of the Gītā.” He attacked untouchability, priestcraft and “kitchen religion” (“don’t touch me”), and called for the education of women and the masses.

Legacy

Vivekananda shaped modern Hindu identity and Indian nationalism; Gandhi, Nehru, Tilak, Aurobindo, Subhas Chandra Bose and Tagore acknowledged his influence. In the West he began the transmission of Vedānta and yoga that led to the modern yoga movement. His birthday is India’s National Youth Day. Critics have argued that his presentation of Hinduism as unified, tolerant and “spiritual” against a “materialist” West was a construction shaped by colonial encounter, and that his legacy has been claimed by Hindu nationalism in ways at odds with his universalism.

Vivekananda in conversation

“Each soul is potentially divine” — and therefore, as he insisted, the hungry need bread before they need philosophy.