Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta, was the Hindu monk who introduced Vedanta and Yoga to the West as living philosophy rather than as an object of colonial study. He is the reason a Shaivite institute in Texas is an intelligible thing rather than an anomaly.

Ramakrishna

His guru was Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886), a priest of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar. Ramakrishna was not a scholar; he was a practitioner who undertook the disciplines of several traditions — Shakta, Vedantic, Vaishnava, and also Islamic and Christian practice — and reported that each arrived at the same realisation. That claim, yato mat tato path — as many faiths, so many paths — is the seed of everything Vivekananda later said in Chicago.

The relationship is worth stating precisely because it inverts the expected order. Narendranath arrived as a sceptic, trained in Western logic at Presidency College and a member of the reformist Brahmo Samaj, and asked Ramakrishna directly whether he had seen God. The answer he received — yes, as clearly as I see you, and more clearly — did not convert him on the spot. He tested the man for years. The tradition's most effective missionary began as its most persistent doubter, which is not incidental to how he later argued.

Chicago, 1893

Vivekananda addressed the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 11 September 1893, opening with "Sisters and Brothers of America" — a form of address that reportedly brought a standing ovation before he had made an argument. He was unknown, unsponsored, and had nearly failed to be seated for lack of credentials.

What he actually argued matters more than the anecdote: not that Hinduism should be adopted, but that sectarianism and fanaticism are the thing to be discarded, and that a religion which claims exclusive possession of truth has misunderstood what it possesses. He was speaking in a hall convened partly to demonstrate Christian superiority.

The Ramakrishna Mission

Founded 1 May 1897. Its principle is atmano mokshartham jagad hitaya cha — for one's own liberation and for the welfare of the world — and its practice fused monastic discipline with famine relief, hospitals, and schools. That fusion is the model this Institute works from: realisation and service as one activity, not two.

His Raja Yoga (1896) made Patanjali's Yoga Sutras available to a Western readership and is, for better and worse, the text through which most of the twentieth-century West met yoga as a practice of mind rather than of body.

He died on 4 July 1902, aged 39.

Tesla, 1896

In New York in early 1896 Vivekananda met Nikola Tesla. He wrote to E. T. Sturdy on 13 February

that Tesla "thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential

energy," and that in that case "the Vedantic cosmology will be placed on the surest of foundations."

Tesla, he recorded, "was charmed to hear about the Vedantic Prana and Akasha and the Kalpas."

The demonstration never came. But Tesla took the vocabulary: his 1907 essay "Man's Greatest

Achievement" describes matter arising from Akasha acted on by Prana, in never-ending cycles.

The episode is worth holding in both hands. It is a real transmission of Indian cosmological

vocabulary into the writing of a major Western engineer — and it is also a case of a monk hoping a

physicist would prove his tradition, and being let down. Vivekananda's own argument never depended on

it, which is to his credit. See Mysticism and Eastern Philosophy in Science.

The line this library draws

Vivekananda's Vedanta is not the same tradition as Pashupata Shaivism, and this library does not blur them. Vedanta is non-dualist and text-centred; the Pashupata is a Shaiva ascetic order with its own sutra and its own deliberately transgressive practice. What they share is the claim that realisation is available to a living person by a method — which is the claim that makes both of them technologies rather than beliefs, and which is why both are in this corpus.