(Photo: Swami Vivekananda, spiritual luminary.)
Swami Vivekananda arrived in Chicago at age thirty as a delegate to the World’s Parliament of Religions. It was the first such parliament and might have been the last if the “handsome monk in the orange robe,” as one writer described him, had not made it memorable. He stole the show with an eloquent refutation of misconceptions about Hinduism, a staunch denunciation of fanaticism, and respect for all pathways to the divine.
At a time when most Americans hadn’t even met a Jew, his enthusiastic reception was remarkable considering he was a dark-skinned man in odd clothing representing a foreign religion. The welcome, however, was stained by predictable attacks from conservative Christians, to whom a heathen was a heathen no matter how erudite and inspiring he may seem.
Swami Vivekananda introduced to the West a modern, rational, pragmatic interpretation of the core Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. He spent less than four years here, on two separate trips, and died in his homeland at age 39. But his legacy of ideas and institutions endures to this day. He produced voluminous writings, including four seminal books that introduced Westerners to the classic yogic pathways—bhakti (devotion), karma (action), jnana (intellect), and raja (meditative practice)—and established Vedanta Societies in several major cities.
The swamis who were trained in India to run those and the newer centers that came along were, aside from books, the chief source of Indian wisdom until Paramahamsa Yogananda came along in 1920. Some became mentors to cultural icons of the mid-twentieth century, such as Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, Christopher Isherwood, Joseph Campbell, and J.D. Salinger, whose extensive interpretations and commentaries on Indian philosophy—and, in Salinger’s case, fictional characters schooled in those teachings—changed the way millions saw the world and engaged the spiritual impulse.
In his brief time in America, Swami Vivekananda set the template for the East-to-West transmission that would reshape the spiritual landscape.
Author Philip Goldberg
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