A short life
history of Swami Vivekananda and a few of his teachings.
Swami Vivekananda, known in his pre-monastic life as
Narendra Nath Datta, was born in an affluent family in Kolkata on 12 January 1863 . His father, Vishwanath Datta, was a
successful attorney with interests in a wide range of subjects, and his mother,
Bhuvaneshwari Devi, was endowed with deep devotion, strong character and other
qualities. A precocious boy, Narendra excelled in music, gymnastics and
studies. By the time he graduated from Calcutta University
At the threshold of youth Narendra had to pass through a
period of spiritual crisis when he was assailed by doubts about the existence
of God. It was at that time he first
heard about Sri Ramakrishna from one of his English professors at college. One day in November 1881, Narendra went to
meet Sri Ramakrishna who was staying at the Kali Temple
Apart from removing doubts from the mind of Narendra, Sri
Ramakrishna won him over through his pure, unselfish love. Thus began a guru-disciple relationship which
is quite unique in the history of spiritual masters. Narendra now became a frequent visitor to
Dakshineshwar and, under the guidance of the Master, made rapid strides on the
spiritual path. At Dakshineshwar,
Narendra also met several young men who were devoted to Sri Ramakrishna, and
they all became close friends.
After a few years two events took place which caused
Narendra considerable distress. One was
the sudden death of his father in 1884.
This left the family penniless, and Narendra had to bear the burden of
supporting his mother, brothers and sisters.
The second event was the illness of Sri Ramakrishna which was diagnosed
to be cancer of the throat. In September
1885 Sri Ramakrishna was moved to a house at Shyampukur, and a few months later
to a rented villa at Cossipore. In these
two places the young disciples nursed the Master with devoted care. In spite of poverty at home and inability to
find a job for him, Narendra joined the group as its leader.
Sri Ramakrishna instilled in these young men the spirit of
renunciation and brotherly love for one another. One day he distributed ochre robes among them
and sent them out to beg food. In this
way he himself laid the foundation for a new monastic order. He gave specific instructions to Narendra
about the formation of the new monastic Order.
In the small hours of 16
August 1886 Sri Ramakrishna gave up his mortal body. After the
Master’s passing, fifteen of his young disciples (one more joined them later)
began to live together in a dilapidated building at Baranagar in North Kolkata .
Under the leadership of Narendra, they formed a new monastic
brotherhood, and in 1887 they took the formal vows of sannyasa, thereby
assuming new names. Narendra now became
Swami Vivekananda (although this name was actually assumed much later.)
After establishing the new monastic order, Vivekananda heard
the inner call for a greater mission in his life. While most of the followers of Sri
Ramakrishna thought of him in relation to their own personal lives, Vivekananda
thought of the Master in relation to India and the rest of the
world. As the prophet of the present
age, what was Sri Ramakrishna’s message to the modern world and to India in
particular? This question and the
awareness of his own inherent powers urged Swamiji to go out alone into the
wide world. So in the middle of 1890,
after receiving the blessings of Sri Sarada Devi, the divine consort of Sri
Ramakrishna, known to the world as Holy Mother, who was then staying in
Kolkata, Swamiji left Baranagar Math and embarked on a long journey of
exploration and discovery of India .
During his travels all over India , Swami Vivekananda was deeply
moved to see the appalling poverty and backwardness of the masses. He was the first religious leader in India to
understand and openly declare that the real cause of India ’s downfall was the neglect of
the masses. The immediate need was to
provide food and other bare necessities of life to the hungry millions. For this they should be taught improved
methods of agriculture, village industries, etc. It was in this context that Vivekananda
grasped the crux of the problem of poverty in India (which had escaped the
attention of social reformers of his days): owing to centuries of oppression,
the downtrodden masses had lost faith in their capacity to improve their
lot. It was first of all necessary to
infuse into their minds faith in themselves.
For this they needed a life-giving, inspiring message. Swamiji found this message in the principle
of the Atman, the doctrine of the potential divinity of the soul, taught in
Vedanta, the ancient system of religious philosophy of India . He saw that, in spite of poverty, the masses
clung to religion, but they had never been taught the life-giving, ennobling
principles of Vedanta and how to apply them in practical life.
Thus the masses needed two kinds of knowledge: secular knowledge to improve their economic condition
and spiritual knowledge to infuse in them faith in themselves and strengthen
their moral sense. The next question was
how to spread these two kinds of knowledge among the masses? Through education – this was the answer that
Swamiji found.
One thing became clear to Swamiji: to carry out his plans
for the spread of education and for the uplift of the poor masses, and also of
women, an efficient organization of dedicated people was needed. As he said later on, he wanted “to set in
motion machinery which will bring noblest ideas to the doorstep of even the
poorest and the meanest.” It was to
serve as this ‘machinery’ that Swamiji founded the Ramakrishna Mission a few
years later.
It was when these ideas were taking shape in his mind in the
course of his wanderings that Swami Vivekananda heard about the World’s Parliament
of Religions to be held in Chicago
in 1893. His friends and admirers in India wanted
him to attend the Parliament. He too
felt that the Parliament would provide the right forum to present his Master’s
message to the world, and so he decided to go to America . Another reason which
prompted Swamiji to go to America
was to seek financial help for his project of uplifting the masses.Swamiji,
however, wanted to have an inner certitude and divine call regarding his
mission. Both of these he got while he
sat in deep meditation on the rock-island at Kanyakumari. With the funds partly collected by his
Chennai disciples and partly provided by the Raja of Khetri, Swami Vivekananda
left for America from Mumbai on 31 May 1893.His speeches at the World’s
Parliament of Religions held in September 1893 made him famous as an ‘orator by
divine right’ and as a ‘Messenger of Indian wisdom to the Western world’. After the Parliament, Swamiji spent nearly
three and a half years spreading Vedanta as lived and taught by Sri
Ramakrishna, mostly in the eastern parts of USA and also in London .
He returned to India in January 1897. In response to the enthusiastic welcome that
he received everywhere, he delivered a series of lectures in different parts of
India ,
which created a great stir all over the country. Through these inspiring and profoundly
significant lectures Swamiji attempted to do the following:
To rouse the religious consciousness of the people and
create in them pride in their cultural heritage;
To bring about unification of Hinduism by pointing out the
common bases of its sects;
To focus the
attention of educated people on the plight of the downtrodden masses, and to
expound his plan for their uplift by the application of the principles of
Practical Vedanta.
Soon after his return to Kolkata, Swami Vivekananda
accomplished another important task of his mission on earth. He founded on 1 May 1897 a unique type of
organization known as Ramakrishna Mission, in which monks and lay people would
jointly undertake propagation of Practical Vedanta, and various forms of social
service, such as running hospitals, schools, colleges, hostels, rural
development centre etc, and conducting massive relief and rehabilitation work
for victims of earthquakes, cyclones and other calamities, in different parts
of India and other countries.
In early 1898 Swami Vivekananda acquired a big plot of land
on the western bank of the Ganga at a place called Belur to have a permanent
abode for the monastery and monastic Order originally started at Baranagar, and
got it registered as Ramakrishna Math after a couple of years. Here Swamiji established a new, universal
pattern of monastic life which adapts ancient monastic ideals to the conditions
of modern life, which gives equal importance to personal illumination and
social service, and which is open to all men without any distinction of
religion, race or caste.
It may be mentioned here that in the West many people were
influenced by Swami Vivekananda’s life and message. Some of them became his disciples or devoted
friends. Among them the names of
Margaret Noble (later known as Sister Nivedita), Captain and Mrs. Sevier,
Josephine McLeod and Sara Ole Bull, deserve special mention. Nivedita dedicated her life to educating
girls in Kolkata. Swamiji had many
Indian disciples also, some of whom joined Ramakrishna Math and became
sannyasins.In June 1899 he went to the West on a second visit. This time he spent most of his time in the
West coast of USA . After delivering many lectures there, he
returned to Belur Math in December 1900.
The rest of his life was spent in India , inspiring and guiding
people, both monastic and lay. Incessant
work, especially giving lectures and inspiring people, told upon Swamiji’s
health. His health deteriorated and the
end came quietly on the night of 4
July 1902 . Before his
Mahasamadhi he had written to a Western follower: “It may be that I shall find
it good to get outside my body, to cast it off like a worn out garment. But I shall not cease to work. I shall inspire men everywhere until the
whole world shall know that it is one with God.”
Making an objective assessment of Swami Vivekananda’s
contributions to world culture, the eminent British historian A L Basham stated
that “in centuries to come, he will be remembered as one of the main molders of
the modern world…” Some of the main contributions that Swamiji made to the
modern world are mentioned below:
1. New
Understanding of Religion: One of the most significant contributions of Swami
Vivekananda to the modern world is his interpretation of religion as a
universal experience of transcendent Reality, common to all humanity. Swamiji met the challenge of modern science
by showing that religion is as scientific as science itself; religion is the
‘science of consciousnesses. As such,
religion and science are not contradictory to each other but are complementary.
This universal conception frees religion from the hold of
superstitions, dogmatism, priest craft and intolerance, and makes religion the
highest and noblest pursuit – the pursuit of supreme Freedom, supreme
Knowledge, and supreme Happiness.
2. New View of
Man: Vivekananda’s concept of ‘potential divinity of the soul’ gives a new,
ennobling concept of man. The present
age is the age of humanism which holds that man should be the chief concern and
centre of all activities and thinking.
Through science and technology man has attained great prosperity and
power, and modern methods of communication and travel have converted human
society into a ‘global village’. But the
degradation of man has also been going on apace, as witnessed by the enormous
increase in broken homes, immorality, violence, crime, etc. in modern
society. Vivekananda’s concept of
potential divinity of the soul prevents this degradation, divinizes human
relationships, and makes life meaningful and worth living. Swamiji has laid the foundation for
‘spiritual humanism’, which is manifesting itself through several
neo-humanistic movements and the current interest in meditation, Zen etc all over
the world.
3. New Principle
of Morality and Ethics: The prevalent
morality, in both individual life and social life, is mostly based on fear –
fear of the police, fear of public ridicule, fear of God’s punishment, fear of
Karma, and so on. The current theories
of ethics also do not explain why a person should be moral and be good to
others. Vivekananda has given a new
theory of ethics and new principle of morality based on the intrinsic purity
and oneness of the Atman. We should be
pure because purity is our real nature, our true divine Self or Atman. Similarly, we should love and serve our neighbors
because we are all one in the Supreme Spirit known as Paramatman or Brahman.
4. Bridge between
the East and the West: Another great
contribution of Swami Vivekananda was to build a bridge between Indian culture
and Western culture. He did it by
interpreting Hindu scriptures and philosophy and the Hindu way of life and
institutions to the Western people in an idiom which they could understand. He made the Western people realize that they
had to learn much from Indian spirituality for their own well-being. He showed that, in spite of her poverty and
backwardness, India
had a great contribution to make to world culture. In this way he was instrumental in ending India ’s
cultural isolation from the rest of the world.
He was India ’s
first great cultural ambassador to the West.
On the other hand, Swamiji’s interpretation of ancient Hindu
scriptures, philosophy, institutions, etc prepared the mind of Indians to
accept and apply in practical life two best elements of Western culture, namely
science and technology and humanism.
Swamiji has taught Indians how to master Western science and technology
and at the same time develop spiritually.
Swamiji has also taught Indians how to adapt Western humanism
(especially the ideas of individual freedom, social equality and justice and
respect for women) to Indian ethos.
Selected Teachings of Swami Vivekananda
My ideal, indeed, can be put into a few words, and that is:
to preach unto mankind their divinity and how to make it manifest in every
movement of life.
Education is the
manifestation of the perfection already in man.
We want that education by which character is formed,
strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can
stand on one's own feet.
So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold
every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense pays not the
least heed to them.
Whatever you think, that you will be. If you think yourselves weak, weak you will
be; if you think yourselves strong, strong you will be.
If you have faith in all the three hundred and thirty
millions of your mythological gods, and still have no faith in yourselves,
there is no salvation for you. Have faith in yourselves, and stand up on that
faith and be strong; that is what we need.
Strength, strength it
is that we want so much in this life, for what we call sin and sorrow have all
one cause, and that is our weakness. With weakness comes ignorance, and with
ignorance comes misery.
The older I grow, the
more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new Gospel
Purity, patience, and
perseverance are the three essentials to success, and above all, love.
Religion is realization;
not talk, not doctrine, nor theories, however beautiful they may be. It is
being and becoming, not hearing or acknowledging; it is the whole soul becoming
changed into what it believes.
Religion is the
manifestation of the Divinity already in man.
Teach yourselves,
teach everyone his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it
awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come,
and everything that is excellent will come when this sleeping soul is roused to
self-conscious activity.
They alone live who
live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.
This is the gist of
all worship – to be pure and to do good to others.
It is love and love
alone that I preach, and I base my teaching on the great Vedantic truth of the
sameness and omnipresence of the Soul of the Universe.
By going through the teachings of Swami Vivekananda we can
easily learn how live and how to be a good citizen to this universe.
