Complete biography of Swami Vivekananda

SWAMIVIVEKANANDA, one of the most notable figures in the social and religious development of modern India, was a Bengali bearing the secular name of Narendra Nath Dutt.

He was born in Calcutta on the 9th of January, 1862. He was by birth a Kayastha, a member of a caste of writers, belonging to the middle class of the Indian social order. Of his mother he often spoke with a sense of deep indebted­ness.

“It is my mother,” he declared, “who has been the constant inspiration of my life and work.” His father seems to have been much influenced by the atmo­sphere of the new India of his time, an India that was coming under the powerful influence of the scientific outlook of the West. He abandoned his ancestral faith, but we are told that when his son showed him on one occasion the Christian Bible he said, “If there is a religion it would be in this book.”

The young man received a good education, graduating from a Christian College in Calcutta. The influence of Herbert Spencer was at that time very powerful over the quick and assimilative minds of the students of Bengal, and Narendra seemed likely to follow in this respect in the footsteps of his father. “The analytic and scientific method of the West,” we are told by one of his disciples of a later day, “laid hold on him.” We can see that even then he was aware of a conflict within him between his reason and his passions, a conflict that throughout all his tumultuous life was never fully resolved. There was much in him, it is evident, that drew him towards a life of sensuous enjoy­ment. “He could box, swim, row, and had a passion for horses. He was the favourite of youth and the arbiter of fashion.” Especially he seems to have possessed the ear of a musician and a voice that, whether he used it, as a young man, to sing the songs of Bengal or, later, to deliver his orations to American audiences, charmed those who listened to it. Madame Calve described his voice as “an admirable baritone having the vibrations of a Chinese gong.” On the occasion of his first meeting with Paramhamsa Ramakrishna the young man, who was then eighteen years of age, was asked to sing. He did so, with the result that his future Master, emotionally intensely sensitive as he was, passed, we are told, into an ecstasy.

But there was another aspect of his experience besides that of “a young artist prince of the Renaissance.” From his youth up, he himself tells us, two dreams visited him. In one he saw him­self “the possessor of riches, honours, power and glory.” “But the next instant,” he goes on, “I saw myself renouncing all worldly things, dressed in a simple loin-cloth, living on alms, sleeping at the foot of a tree.” When the tumult of his restless life was dying down and the end was at hand he delivered this verdict-More and more the true greatness seems to me to be that of the worm doing its duty silently from moment to moment and hour to hour.” There was little of the silent worm about Vivekananda at any period of his life, but perhaps one can under­stand better the clamorous energy of his career if one remembers that always this ideal lay behind it and never ceased to beckon him.

To understand the spiritual discord of which Narendra Nath Dutt was already aware we must have some conception of the atmosphere which he breathed as a student in Calcutta. India, in the decade during which he was at College, was entering upon the gradual process of its awakening to a new interest in its national and spiritual heritage. The period of docile submission to the forces that for some time had been invading India was passing. Restlessness and self questioning were stirring the minds of many, but with as yet little confidence as to the direction in which advance should be made. It was not surprising that this ferment should have its centre in the eager and questing spirit of the Bengali people. A generation had passed since the death of Raja Ram­mohan Roy, the first of the great men of modem India, and a different temper from his was now abroad in the land. The Samaj Movement, of which he was the initiator, was beginning to lose its impetus and to exhibit symptoms of a divided purpose. Narendra had come for a while under the influence of the Brahmo Samaj leaders, but their ration­alistic theism and their Puritan ethics did not long satisfy him, not even when these were modified by the emotionalism of Keshub Chunder Sen and were pro­claimed with his powerful eloquence. Another influence more truly Hindu and more attuned to the mood of this young paladin, and to the nationalist pride beginning to stir the hearts of many like him, was about to lay its grasp upon him and bring his hesitations to an end.

This influence was that of an unlettered Brahman ascetic called Ramakrishna, who by the spell of his personality was drawing to himself great numbers of those who, in Calcutta and the country round about, were looking for a guide to lead them out of their perplexities. This is not the place in which the story of this remarkable man can be told. Max Muller first made him and his teaching known to the West, and his extraordinary qualities have not ceased since then to interest and attract students of Oriental mysticism. What concerns us is to understand what it was in him that brought this young seeker so completely into subjection to his spirit. At what date Narendra first saw his Master seems to be somewhat uncertain. It may have been when, at the age of 18, he, with some student companions, met him in the house of a friend, and the seer perceived the great qualities in him and set himself to win him. The story of the struggle in Narendra between the advanced views he had imbibed in the halls of the Brahmo Samaj and the very different message of this Hindu who followed old ways and claimed to have reached through them truths hid from the learned, need not be related here. How it ended may be told in the words of one of Narendra’s fellow-students, after­wards a distinguished teacher and scholar, Brajendra Nath Seal.

He is describing, more than twenty years afterwards, the change that was wrought at this time in his friend by the influence of Ramakrishna. “I watched,” he says, “with intense interest the trans­formation that went on under my eyes. The attitude of a young and rampant Vedantist-cum Hegelian-cum Revo­lutionary like myself towards the cult of religious ecstasy and Kali-worship may be easily imagined; and the spectacle of a born iconoclast and free-thinker like Vivekananda, a creative and dominating intelligence, a tamer of souls, himself caught in the meshes of what appeared to me an uncouth, supernatural mysti­cism, was a riddle which my philosophy of the Pure Reason could scarcely read at the time.” What he saw of this change and of its source in Vivekananda’s Master who had brought it about in his disciple seemed to this observer to prove that Vivekananda obtained’ somehow “the firm assurance he sought in the saving grace and power of his Master” and that in the strength of this assurance he went forth preaching and teaching his message.

We need not, however, accept the explanation of onlookers as to the change wrought in Narendra by the man whom he always called his Master and of whom he wrote: “If there has ever been a word of truth, a word of spirituality that I have spoken anywhere in the world, I owe it to him.” He himself tells us how in the early days of their acquaintance he asked Rama- krishna, “Do you believe in God?” and the reply he received was, “I see Him just as I see you here only in a much intense sense.” This was what the young man’s restless spirit was seeking. “Religion,” he says, “con­sists in realisation-not in reasoning about its doctrines but in experiencing it.” Two ideals that he found in this religion of realisation were, first, re­nunciation and, second, the unity of all religions. As regards the former he could affirm of Ramakrishna, “That man was the embodiment of renuncia­tion.” He could equally have said that he was the embodiment of religious universalism.

It is not necessary, nor, perhaps, pos­sible to present Vivekananda’s religious beliefs as a consistent whole. What is important is to note the power that they had over him and how he sought to proclaim them as a message both for India and for the world. Dr. Brajendra Nath Seal, who has already been quoted, sums up this message as “the creed of the Universal Man and the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of the Self.” It was, in fact, a combination of the two ancient Hindu doctrines of Jnana and bhakti, or, in Western terms, it was a combination of an absolute monism which affirms that all is one, and at the same time of a devout approach to a God who can be, worshipped. We can, however, best form a judgment in regard to his creed by his own proclamation of it and the conclusions for life and practice that he himself deduced from it.

The whole of the life that was granted to him from this time on was devoted to the task that his Master bequeathed to him. Ramakrishna died on August 15, 1886, and soon thereafter Vivekananda, along with other disciples of the Master, constituted themselves, under his leader­ship, into an order of sannyasis or world- renouncers. The name that the head of the order himself adopted was Vive­kananda, suggesting a combination of “discrimination” and “joy” as his special characteristic. The next six years were spent by him mainly as a wandering ascetic in preparation for the work that was to come. Words that he is said to have uttered at Benares during this period may be taken as representing what was passing within his mind. “I am going away,” he said, “and I shall never come back till I can burst on society like a bomb and make it follow me like a dog.”

That opportunity came to him when, his years of preparation completed, he emerged at Madras at the close of 1892, ready to go forth in the name of India to America “in behalf of the people and the poor.” He left Bombay on May 31, 1893, travelling by way of Japan to Chicago, where was to be held a “Parlia­ment of Religions” in connection with the World’s Fair in that city. He had only the vaguest idea, it would seem, of what he was going to take part in, but there was a fire within him that drove him on. “It is,” he said, “as if I were about to blaze forth. There are many powers in me. It appears to me as if I could revolutionise the world.” His confi­dence in himself proved to be fully justified. Clothed in a dazzling robe of red silk and wearing the yellow turban of the sannyasi his imposing figure at once drew all eyes and the power of his eloquence completed his conquest. What his audiences thought of him may be indicated by what the Boston Evening Transcript testifies. “At the Parliament of Religions,” we are told, “they used to keep Vivekananda until the end of the programme to make people stay till the end of the session.” When people grew tired and wanted to go away the chairman would intimate that Vivekananda would be the last speaker. “Then he would have the peaceable hundreds perfectly in tether. They would sit smiling and expectant waiting for an hour or two of other men’s speeches to listen to Vivekananda for fifteen minutes.”

He remained in America till August, 1895, and during that time he accom­plished an immense amount of work and gathered to himself a considerable number of disciples. He had, as he wrote in a letter just before his return home, “Planted a seed.” “It is already a plant,” he goes on, “and I expect it to be a tree very soon. I have got a few hundred followers. I shall make several sannyasis and then go to India, leaving the work to them.”

His letters to his friends in India during these years indicate how his hopes soared and died down again with his changing emotions. Sometimes he was weary of being treated as if he were “a circus turn.” “I think I have had enough,” he wrote after he had been a year in the country, “of newspaper blazoning and the humbugging of a public life.” But the burden of his letters to his disciples in India is a reiteration of the charge to “work, work, and work.” He felt increasingly, as he travelled about the land, the need that India should exchange its apathy for energy if it was to be lifted from poverty and degradation. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “in a God or a religion that cannot wipe the widow’s tears or bring a piece of bread to the orphan’s mouth.” One can see signs, as we read his letters from his exile, that the strain of his labours was having an inevitable effect even upon his strength and courage. So he breaks out on one occasion: “I see a greater Power than man or God or devil at my back. I want no one’s help.” Before he set out from India on this journey he had said in Madras that “the Hinduism of the Rishis must become dynamic,” but the force he was daily expending in his speeches (every lecture, it is said, “was a torrential improvisation”) could not but exhaust him, and this was the more inevitable in that he was carrying with him all the time the disease of which he died. In addition to his lectures he found time to write his chief work, an exposition of Raja Yoga-a book which is said to have attracted such different personalities as William James and Leo Tolstoy.

The Swami, before finally leaving America, paid several brief visits to England as well as to Switzerland. Of his experience in England he said, after his return to his own land: “No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English. . . . There is no one among you who loves the English people more than I do now.” While he was there he paid his homage of reverence to Max Muller, in whom he perceived what was to him the summit of all attainment, “a soul that is every day realising its oneness with Brahman.” There also he found new disciples, some of whom proved the most devoted of all his followers. One of these was Mar-garet Noble, of whom Romain Rolland writes: “The future will always unite her name of initiation, Sister Nivedita, to that of her beloved Master, as St. Clare is to St. Francis, although,” he goes on, “the imperious Swami far from possessed the meekness of the Pover-ello.” She outlived her Master, giving herself to a life of service in Calcutta and conducting a school for girls in her own house. The Swami so succeeded in her case in hinduising her thoughts and her habits that she shared in his worship of “Kali the Mother” and indeed went far beyond him in glorifying Hinduism and Hindu life. Mr. M. K. Gandhi in his Autobiography gives us a glimpse of this devoted disciple when he saw her in Calcutta in 1902. “I was taken aback,” he writes, “by the splendour that surrounded her, and even in our conversation there was not much meet­ing-ground.” But if to him and to Mr. G. K. Gokhale this lady seemed “volatile” we find no indication of that in the years of service that she gave to her adopted land. And when in 1911 she died there was a remarkable demon­stration of reverence for her among the Hindus of Bengal.

Along with his little group of disciples the Swami landed in Colombo in January, 1897. By that time his name was famous throughout India and the story of his Western triumphs had done much to restore to India the sense of self-respect that was slowly being re­created. In consequence, his journey north from Colombo to Madras and Calcutta was a triumphal progress. Vivekananda’s energies had revived again after the weariness and depression into which he had sometimes fallen. “My day is done,” he had said; but now, refreshed in body and stimulated by the enthusiasm of his welcome back to India, his hopes blazed up again and a new plan of campaign was announced in Madras. He still cherished great expectations from his work in America and England. But it is in England that it seems to him now that his religious ideas will root themselves most deeply. “Before many years elapse,” he declares, “a vast majority of the English people will be Vedantists. There is a greater prospect of this in England than in America. You see Americans make a fanfaronade of everything which is not the case with Englishmen.”

But now he is looking mainly to victories in his own land and work on behalf of his own people. He had gone to the West in the hope of raising a large sum of money which he might use for the uplift of his people from their poverty and degradation. In this he had not obtained any great success. Now he turns his reinvigorated energies to arousing in his own fellow- countrymen the spirit of help and of compassion for the poor. “I consider,” he told them, “that the great national sin is the neglect of the masses and that is one of the causes of our downfall. No amount of politics would be of any avail until the masses of India are once more well educated, well fed and well cared for…. I want to start two central institutions at first, one at Madras and one at Calcutta, for training young men as preachers.”

Accordingly a few months later the Ramakrishna Mission was established. Vivekananda did not find it easy at first to persuade his fellow sannyasis from among Ramakrishna’s disciples that his aims were in accordance with the sannyasi tradition or that his methods were such as Ramakrishna would have approved. The Swami was not, how­ever, to be overborne. He burst forth passionately-“Hands off! Who cares for your Ramakrishna? Who cares for your Bhakti and Mukti? Who cares what the Scriptures say? I will go into a thousand hells cheerfully if I can rouse my countrymen to stand on their own feet and be men inspired with the spirit of karma-yoga. I am not a follower of Ramakrishna or anyone; I am a follower of him only who serves and helps others without caring for his own Bhakti or Mukti.” Needless to say this masterful sannyasi got his own way.

Two monasteries were opened, one at Belur near Calcutta, the other at Mayavati near Almora in the Himalayas. Soon the monks found more than enough oppor­tunity for the exercise of their com­passion in caring for the victims of famine and plague. Such philanthropic work and the training of young disciples in the principles of Vedanta were the main tasks laid upon the members of the Mission. Vivekananda was himself the chief teacher and, when his health per­mitted, the chief organiser of the service of the poor and the suffering. The Vedanta he taught was, indeed, a Vedanta of a new pattern. His was to be a “practical Vedanta.” “Spread far and wide,” he said, “the worship of Sri Krishna roaring the Gita out with the voice of a lion. And bring into daily use the worship of Sakti-the divine Mother, the source of all power.”

But his waning strength demanded a rest and a change of climate and, accordingly, in June, 1899, he set out on his second journey to the West. It was very different from the earlier one. He delivered, some lectures, but the early fire was sinking, and he evidently was aware that his work was nearing its end. “The battles are lost and won,” he wrote to one of his disciples. “I have bundled my things and am waiting for the great Deliverer. Shiva, O Shiva, carry my boat to the other shore.” The climate of California suited his need and under its influence “his athletic will relaxed its hold.” In December, 1900, he returned to India and, in spite of the increasing grasp upon him of the diabetic malady from which he had suffered so long, he continued to make plans for the progress of the work of the Mission. But on July 4, 1902, in Belur Monastery the sannyasi, in the language of Hinduism, attained samadhi.

To look back across the forty years of the Swami’s life from that day when the last silence fell is to be impressed anew with the amazing amount of effort that he concentrated within the brief period given to him, as well as with the influence that these forty years have exercised. This man, compact of energy both of speech and action, will continue to be remembered as a bizarre and significant figure dominating his time and leaving an enduring influence behind him. He initiates a new era in the Indian development, the passing of the age of reason, with Raja Rammohan Roy as its distinguished representative, and the inauguration in its stead of a period of romanticism. Swami Vivekananda’s very violence of utterance is a token of the change. Like his fellow-romantic of the West, Nietzsche, he revolts with passion against the enervation that reason brings. He admits, it is true, that reason has its place for the detection and destruction of elements of super­stition in the Hinduism he desires to purify, but his aim is to lead his people to a region that is beyond reason.

What Vivekananda was seeking to do was to achieve a new thing by means of the old instruments that belong to the heritage of the Hindu. He desired to awaken the manhood of his people. He saw one thing clearly and it always had primacy in his purpose-the need for a recreated vitality in a nation drained of its vigour through the centuries. But he must bring this about by means of the ancient traditions of Indian thought. He was therefore an Advaitist, but an Advaitist who at the same time would have the individual man made strong. Thus he would both have and have not. “Will itself,” he says, “is phenomenal and cannot be the Absolute.” And yet what can the individual accomplish apart from his will? It is difficult to find a place for the individual in such a vacuum as the Brahman of the Advaitist is. Thus the two aspects of his thought stand side by side, the one an exalted theory, the other a practical necessity. Man is all, and yet he is himself as well, over- against the All.

It is clear that, as in the case of the great Sankaracharya, he had two levels of religious living between which he vacillated, the austere and passionless Advaita on the one hand, and the worship of “Kali, the Mother” on the other. He belonged by family tradition to the Hindu sect of Saktas, just as his Master, Ramakrishna, did also. He realised that the dark and the terrible, because they are elements in life, must also be elements in religion. As we have seen, he was not content with the rationalistic religion of the Samajists, but, passing beyond them, found himself in the strange and terrify­ing company of the deity of destruction. If God is the All, then the most revolting things ‘must be included in His being. When Sister Nivedita went to her Master with her hesitations on the subject of the bloodshed before Kali his only reply was: “Why not a little blood to com­plete the picture?” His fellow Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, was not able to view the Kali Ghat with such equanimity. In a poem addressed to the goddess with the appeal, “Come, Mother, come,” Vivekananda says,

Who dares misery love

And hug the form of Death,

Dance in Destruction’s dance,

To him the Mother comes.

Thus he found in this grim Mother an object of worship that could satisfy him when his heart could not be content with the empty name of Brahman. Kali for him, as for many others in Bengal in that period of awakening patriotism, was in fact a symbol of India, the motherland.

Yet another element in the message of which this prophet felt himself to he the bearer was the unity of all religions. This follows naturally from the view that everything is God. The religions of the world, therefore, “are but various phases of one Eternal Religion.” This belief he inherited from his Master, Ramakrishna, who did not hesitate to contemplate the vision-terrible as even he perceived it to be-that “all three are of the same substance, the victim of the sacrifice, the block and the executioner.” With this way to “harmony,” Vivekananda was in full agreement. “I accept all religions that were in the past,” he writes, “and worship with them all.” “Acceptance-not even toleration which is an insult and a blasphemy.”

With such words as these the Swami, if he did not always satisfy, at least aroused. It is as an arouser, an enemy, in spite of his Adventism, of negation, an awakener of his sleeping fellow-country­men to living issues, that we should view this remarkable Indian figure. In his robe of red and his great yellow turban he caught for a brief space the eyes of the American people and produced at least a temporary realisation in the West of India’s great heritage of thought and aspiration. But the Swami’s abiding significance lies in what he accomplished among his own people, kindling a flame from the dying embers of their past and awakening in them hope for their future.