India: Swami Vivekananda

WAIS does not devote enough space to India, so I am grateful to John Gehl for thie information about Swami Vivekananda. I wonder if WAIS India expert Glynn Wood has any comment: "The Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) who became a well-known personality both in India and in America during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Fame came suddenly to him at the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, where his knowledge of Eastern and Western culture, as well as his andsome figure and striking personality, appealed to the many classes of Americansattending the Parliament.

Vivekananda, whose birth name was Narendranath Datta, was born into an upper-middle-class Kayastha family in Bengal, India. He was educated at a Western-style university where he was exposed to Western philosophy, Christianity, and science. Social reform occupied a prominent place in Vivekananda's thought, and he joined the Society of Brahma, which was dedicated to eliminating child marriage and illiteracy and to spreading education among women and the lower castes. He later became the most notable disciple of Ramakrishna, who taught the essential unity of all religions.

Stressing the universal and humanistic side of the Vedas and believing more in service than dogma, Vivekananda engaged in a missionary effort to spread Hindu thought and spirituality in the United States and England. In 1893 he appeared in Chicago as a spokesman for Hinduism at the World's Parliament of Religions and so captivated the assembly that a newspaper account described him as "an orator by divine right and undoubtedly the greatest figure at the Parliament." Thereafter he lectured throughout the United States and England, making converts to the Vedanta movement.

In America Vivekananda became India's spiritual ambassador and pleaded eloquently for better understanding between India and the New World in order to create a healthy synthesis of East and West, of religion and science. In India he was regarded as the patriot saint of modern India and an inspirerof her dormant national consciousness. Many political leaders of India have publicly acknowledged their indebtedness to Vivekananda as a promoter of peace and human brotherhood. In the course of a short life of 39 years, ten of which were devoted to public activities, he succeeded in producing four classic treatises on Hindu philosophy.