Swami Vivekananda

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Swami Vivekananda was an Indian Hindu monk and teacher of Vedanta, the chief disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, and the figure who did more than any other to bring the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta and the practice of yoga before a Western audience at the close of the nineteenth century.

He was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in 1863, into an educated and relatively prosperous family, and trained in the Western philosophy and logic of a colonial English-language education. The decisive turn of his life was his meeting, as a young and sceptical student, with Ramakrishna — a temple priest at Dakshineswar whose ecstatic religiosity he first resisted and then accepted as authentic. After Ramakrishna’s death in 1886 he took monastic vows, gathered the scattered disciples into a brotherhood, and for several years wandered India as a mendicant before the journey that made his name.

In 1893 he travelled to Chicago and addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions, an interfaith gathering held alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition. His speeches there — pleading for the recognition of Hinduism as a universal and tolerant faith rather than a heathen curiosity — drew wide notice in the American press and launched several years of lecturing across the United States and Britain. Out of that work came his expositions of the four yogas, and in particular Raja Yoga (1896), his rendering of Patanjali’s system, which shaped how generations of Western readers understood meditative practice. On his return to India he founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, an order combining contemplative monasticism with social service and relief work — an emphasis that was, in the Indian monastic setting, something of an innovation.

The philosophy he taught was a particular reading of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualist school that holds the individual self and the absolute, ātman and Brahman, to be ultimately one. Vivekananda framed this as practical Vedanta: not a doctrine for the cloister alone but a basis for self-reliance, dignity, and the service of others, in which the divinity of every person was the operative truth. He held, and taught, that the religions of the world were so many paths to a single realisation — a conviction often read since as a forerunner of the modern language of religious universalism, though scholars note it carried the particular stamp of his Vedantic commitments and his moment under colonial rule.

He died at the monastery of Belur Math, near Calcutta, in 1902, not yet forty. His influence ran in two directions at once: within India he became a touchstone for cultural confidence and later for nationalist sentiment, while in the West his lectures helped fix an image of “Eastern spirituality” that would feed the Theosophical milieu and, far downstream, the yoga and meditation movements of the following century. The order he founded continues; the Complete Works remain the record of what he said.

→ In the library: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (1924) · Shankara — The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom (Johnston, 1925)

→ Related: Gnosis · Theosophy · Neoplatonism