Swami Vivekananda is most remembered for his passionate plea for tolerance and understanding at the inaugural World Parliament of Religions that was held in Chicago in 1893; that speech and his subsequent lecture tours in America and England were a landmark event in the introduction of Eastern philosophy to the citizens of the West.
Born Narendranath Dutta into quite a high-class Calcutta family, as a child he used to have the experience of seeing a bright ball of light watching over him as he went to bed at night. However, as he grew up, his Western university education led him to question the existence of God, and he began to look for someone who would provide him with positive proof of His existence. Time and time again he met various sages and asked them whether they had seen God only to be met with a shake of the head. However, a teacher in his college mentioned a holy man by the name of Sri Ramakrishna who lived in Dakineshwar to the north of Calcutta. In November 1881, Narendranath went to see Sri Ramakrishna and ask him the same question as he had asked the other sages. To Naren's amazement, Sri Ramakrishna greeted him with rapturous joy, saying he was the one he had been waiting for all these years; this unsettled Naren considerably. However, when Naren asked him had he seen God Ramakrishna replied "Yes, I see God, just as I see you here, only in a much intenser sense", in a voice that clearly came from experience. Naren was left with very mixed feelings, which only increased when on their subsequent meeting Sri Ramakrishna, touched him and caused him to have a spiritual experience which frightened him because he was unused to them. Nevertheless, there was something inside Sri Ramakrishna which kept drawing Naren back to visit him.
Initially the young Naren, whose intellectual mind could at most only rationalize belief in a formless God, used to ridicule Sri Ramakrishna for his faith in the Mother aspect of the Divine. However, without reacting to this criticism or insisting that Naren give up his reasoning, Sri Ramakrishna began to expand his horizons with the most powerful tools of all - patience and love. Sri Ramakrishna always praised Naren to the skies - "Every now and then I take stock of the devotees. I find that some are like lotuses with ten petals, some like lotuses with a hundred petals. But among lotuses Narendra is a thousand-petalled one", he would say - and the very sight of Naren would often send him into high meditative trance. When Naren rebuked him for embarrasing him with this praise, Sri Ramkrishna, referring to his experiences of oneness with the Divine Mother, said "Mother says that I love you because I see the Lord in you. The day I shall not see Him in you, I shall not be able to bear even the sight of you." Sri Ramakrishna stood by him when he fell on hard times (his fathers debt left the whole family in debt with Naren the sole provider) refusing to believe accounts by others that Naren had turned away from the spiritual life. Under Sri Ramakrishna's guidance, Naren began to have high meditation experiences, and soon accepted Ramakrishna's belief in the Mother as his own. Later, he would say it was Sri Ramakrishna's love that brought him around.
In 1885 Sri Ramakrishna showed the first signs of what came to be diagnosed as throat cancer. In time he was moved from his Dakineshwar home to Serampore, where his students could care for him better. It was here that Vivekananda began to naturally come to the fore as the leader of the small band of very close disciples. Two very interesting examples show his distaste for superstition and emphasis on obtaining practical experience. Once, some of his students were afraid to go near Sri Ramakrishna for fear his disease might be contagious: Naren promptly swallowed a half-finished drink of Sri Ramakrishna's to prove otherwise. On another occasion, some impetuous students were running around Calcutta proclaiming Sri Ramakrishna as an incarnation of God and professing to have visions that they in fact did not have; Naren took them aside an impressed on them the necessity of gaining spiritual experience first and not engaging in sentimentality.
Naren longed for the highest experience of nirvikalpa samadhi, where the feeling of 'I' melts away in an experience of indescribable bliss. One day quite unexpectedly he had this experiences. Afterwards Sri Ramakrishna told him "Now the Mother has shown you everything. But this realization, like the jewel locked in a box, will be hidden away from you and kept in my custody. I will keep the key with me. Only after you have fulfilled your mission on this earth will the box be unlocked, and you will know everything as you have known now". Ramakrishna told him he would also be a teacher; when Naren hesitated, Ramakrishna said "But you must. Your very bones will do it".
Upon Sri Ramakrishna's passing, his close disciples lived in a house, where they underwent strenuous spiritual practise and supported each other in their efforts . Afterwards Naren became a wandering monk for a couple of years, and embarked upon a pilgrimages all over the land of India, visiting many of its saints and holy temples. He spoke with with prime ministers, maharajas and untouchables, Hindus and Muslims alike. When he reached the southernmost point of India, he swam out to a rock and meditated there on the past, present and future for three days and nights. During his travelling years he saw the misery that inequality and poverty had created, and was filled with the need to bring about a spiritual regeneration in India, and improve the material condition of its poorest people. It had also become inwardly clear to him that the next step was to go abroad to America.
The opportunity came when he was invited as a speaker to the World Parliament of Religions that was to be held in Chicago in 1893. Before he left, he assumed the monastic name of Swami Vivekananda. To this day the Parliament is remembered mainly for Swami Vivekananda's contribution to it. Vivekananda's introductory outpouring of goodwill to the audience - "Sisters and brothers of America" - earned the applause of the audience even before his opening speech began. His speech was a passionate affirmation of the universal acceptance of all religions and an end to fanaticism. He gave many more speeches during the parliament; the chairmen of the conference used to put Vivekananda at the end just so the audience would stay. The 1893 parliament is often said to be the event that truly marked the arrival of Eastern thought in the West.
Afterwards Vivekananda toured America lecturing on Eastern thought. He was a very forthright lecturer, and did not refrain from criticizing aspects of India or America where he saw fit. Two years later he completed his famous book, Raja Yoga. During this time he was also training American disciples, and initiated quite a few into the monastic life. In 1896, he visited London; here he was to meet Margaret Noble, who was to become his foremost disciple; he was to give her the name Nivedita. He returned to America and gave a series of talks in New York that were published as the book 'Karma Yoga'. On March 25, 1896, he delivered his famous lecture on 'The Philosophy of Vedanta' before the graduate students of the philosophy department of Harvard University. It produced such an impression that he was offered the Chair of Eastern Philosophy in the university, which he declined.
He returned to India in 1898, to an overwhelming response from the public; crowds everywhere flocked to see him. He gave some inspiring speeches calling on the Indian masses to rise up and assert the power of the soul within them:
"Ay, let every man and woman and child, without respect of caste or birth, weakness or strength, hear and learn that behind the strong and the weak, behind the high and the low, behind everyone, there is that Infinite Soul, assuring all the infinite possibility and the infinite capacity to become great and good. Let us proclaim to every soul: Arise, arise, awake! Awake from this hypnotism of weakness. None is really weak; the soul is infinite, omnipotent, and omniscient. Stand up, assert yourself, proclaim the God within you, do not deny Him!"
He spent a lot of time with Sri Ramakrishna's disciples whom he had last seen many years ago, and inspiring them to also make service to others a part of their spiritual practise: the Ramakrishna Mission was founded in 1897 to organise this humanitarian work. He spent much time travelling in Northern India; quite a few of his English and American students travelled with him, and he spent much time teaching them in their future work of uplifting the lot of India's poorest. At the end of 1898, the Nivedita Girls School was set up in Calcutta - this was the beginning of Nivedita's work in India, and she later became a national figure in India for her work in educating India's women and a leading figure in the cause of Indian independence. Two monasteries were founded by Vivekananda, a permanent temple to Sri Ramakrishna in Belur which would also be a monastery for his brother disciples, and another monastery in the Himalayas which was used completely for the study of advaita, or non-dualistic thought. He exhorted the students in the monasteries to be all-round men: "You must try to combine in your life immense idealism with immense practicality. You must be prepared to go into deep meditation now, and the next moment you must be ready to go and cultivate the fields. You must be prepared to explain the intricacies of the scriptures now, and the next moment to go and sell the produce of the fields in the market..."
He visited America again, but his mind was increasingly turning to meditation and contemplation rather than organisational work; the coming of the day was near when his work would be done. When he returned to India, his health deteriorated, but he still made himself available to anyone who came to him for instruction, sometimes despite the protestation of physicians of his fellow disciples. For Vivekananda, he was only doing what Sri Ramakrishna did before him. "What good is this body? Let it go in helping others.", he would tell others. "Did not the Master preach until the very end? And shall I not do the same? I do not care a straw if the body goes. You cannot imagine how happy I am when I find earnest seekers after truth to talk to. In the work of waking up Atman in my fellow men I shall gladly die again and again!" At the age of only thirty-nine years, Swami Vivekananda attained mahasamadhi, the state where a yogi leaves the body and enters into bliss, finally obtaining the "jewel locked in the box" which his Master had promised him many years before.
Resources:
- Both Vivekananda's biography [1], by Swami Nikhilananda, and the Complete works of Swami Vivekananda [2], including all his major books and many letters written by him, are available on ramakrishnavivekananda.info
- Poems by Swami Vivekananda [3] on poetseers.org
- Vivekananda - An Ancient Silence-Heart and a Modern Dynamism-Life: [4] a book by Sri Chinmoy