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The Vedanta was an inseparable part of Swami Vivekananda s personality. He lived and breathed this philosophy while preaching it to India and the west. While Vivekananda s landmark address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 established him as modern India s great spiritual leader, his popularity and appeal is attributed to his ability to integrate his human side with his profound spiritual side. In this beautifully written biography, Chaturvedi Badrinath liberates Vivekananda from the confines of the worship room and offers an unforgettable insight into the life of a man who was the very embodiment of the Vedanta that he preached.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	20 septembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184755077
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0660€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CHATURVEDI BADRINATH
Swami Vivekananda
The Living Vedanta

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
The Beginnings : The Inheritance
Another Inheritance , From Another Life
The Inheritance From the Dust of India
Towards the New World
The Web of Love and its Maya
Swami Vivekananda Reaches America
At the Parliament of Religions
After the Parliament of Religions : Swami Vivekananda s Temptation and The Work
The Prakriti and the Swami : The Climate , Clothes , and the Diet
Simultaneity in the Life of Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda and Vivekananda : The Divided Self
Swami Vivekananda s Last Benediction
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
Chaturvedi Badrinath was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. A philosopher, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, 1957-89, and served in Tamil Nadu for thirty-one years (1958-89). He was a Homi Bhabha Fellow from 1971 to 1973. As a Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University, 1971, he gave a series of four seminars on Dharma and its application to modern times. Invited by a Swiss foundation, Inter-Cultural Cooperation, he spent a year in Europe in 1985-86. In 1985, he was a main speaker at the European Forum, Alpbach, Austria, and at a conference of scientists at Cortona, Italy. From 1989 onwards, for four years, the Times of India published his articles on Dharma and human freedom every fortnight. He was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, during 1990-92. He was one of the two main speakers at the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace conference, 1994, Seoul, South Korea. In 1999, at Weimar, he gave a talk on Geothe and the Indian Philosophy of Nature; and contributed to an inter-religious conference at Jerusalem with the Dalai Lama. He was one of the two main speakers at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation symposium on civilizational dialogue , Tokyo, 2002.
Chaturvedi Badrinath s other published books are Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-one Essays (1993), Introduction to the Kama Sutra (1999), Finding Jesus in Dharma: Christianity in India (2000), and The Mahabharata-An Inquiry into the Human Condition (2006). He passed away in Pondicherry in February 2010. Please visit http://chaturvedibadrinath.com for further information.
Dedicated to Bhubaneswari Devi, Mother of Swami Vivekananda
All expansion is life , all contraction is death . All love is expansion , all selfishness is contraction . Love is therefore the only law of life . He who loves lives , he who is selfish is dying . Therefore , love for love s sake , because it is the only law of life , just as you breathe to live . This is the secret of selfless love , selfless action , and the rest .
Swami Vivekananda
The dry Advaita must become living-poetic-in everyday life ; out of hopelessly intricate mythology must come concrete moral forms ; and out of bewildering Yogi-ism must come the most scientific and practical psychology-and all this must be put in a form that a child may grasp it . That is my life s work .
Swami Vivekananda
Introduction

Vivekananda is much more than the Swami Vivekananda. Few know Swami Vivekananda; Vivekananda, even fewer.
Swami Vivekananda s life is inseparable from his changing responses to the social conditions of his times in India, and of the West equally so. But this is not all. There is in all human lives the interplay of history and transcendence; in the life of a man like Swamiji even more so. The tension between the two would become a source also of his self-division; for history began to trouble him more and more. With its inner turmoil and pain, that division of the self increased very nearly in the same measure as the spectacular progress of his mission in the West. He gave expression to it in many of his letters to those American women-Mary Hale, Josephine MacLeod, Sara Chapman Bull, Christine Greenstidel (later Sister Christine)-and to Margaret Noble (later Sister Nivedita), who loved him and understood what he was. They understood that he had a mission, the work , rooted in the history of his times but which, simultaneously, transcended all history and touched the deepest longings of the human soul. He was concerned with both, and thus spoke two languages: the language demanded by history, and the language beyond all history, with a passion that was uniquely his. To meet Vivekananda is to float with him in these two worlds at the same time.
Furthermore, in meeting Swami Vivekananda, one necessarily meets many other persons, in India and the West, into whose lives he had come as a light and who had come into his life with their grace of love and care. Each of them had his or her history, of the mind and circumstance, as he had his . They do not constitute just a catalogue of names, only to be recited in the chanting of the Swami Vivekananda litany. Each one of them shows, in different ways, the complexities of human aspirations and character, through which alone, and not in some abstract haze of spirituality or in the beating of drums of creed and doctrine, is life lived . Swami Vivekananda was pointing to life where alongside its complexities is its utter simplicity, blissful joy coexisting with the pain and suffering of being human. In Vivekanandian thought, neither of the two ever remained unrelated to the other.
However, it is also true that if those who had come into his life were not to remain just names, and their life stories before and after meeting him are necessarily to be narrated insofar as they are known, the chain becomes longer and longer. Furthermore, because each of them was individually in some relationship with him, they inevitably came into relationship with each other. And those relationships were complex, not always easy, but fascinating to study. That chain becomes even longer. The difficulty is this: without them, Swami Vivekananda cannot be understood, but in the mass of details that have been gathered about them, the Swami is lost because the reader is overwhelmed and feels exhausted. There is no easy way to resolve this paradox. Then the easiest thing follows-Swami Vivekananda remains a worshipped icon. The aim of this book is to bring to the reader the man.
The story of Vivekananda s life is inseparable from not only that of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa primarily, but also from that of his own mother, Bhubaneswari Devi. Thereafter come those-most of them women, women of the West-who became central to his life and work. That they were instruments of Swamiji s work is the notion prevalent among many of the Ramakrishna Order and expressed easily. Not only is this wholly un-Vedantic, it is also a complete negation of the man himself, who never in conduct or thought ever regarded anybody as his instrument . Instruments are for use , to be thrown away once their use is over or to be put aside for future use . Nor were those Western women empty vessels into which an Indian saint poured enlightenment: no one can receive enlightenment unless, in one measure or another, one is enlightened already. That they would feel Vivekananda, feel his presence , and talk intensely about him, even decades later, tells us not only about him but about them as well. Many of them were great women, and therefore could recognize greatness where they saw it. And this recognition and fostering of greatness with loving care, was not limited to Vivekananda alone. Sister Nivedita and Sara Chapman Bull also reached out to the Indian scientist Jagadis Chandra Bose, until then struggling alone-Nivedita, with her seemingly inexhaustible resources of love and faith, and Sara Bull with her considerable material resources as well. She gave to her Indian son Vivekananda her deepest love and concern; but helped others, too, in their troubles.
Vivekananda gave a new meaning to the Vedanta, away from its dry metaphysics, and talked of the living Vedanta which meant living relationships in a new light. Even as he expounded non-dualism , he lived relationships , and relationship implies the existence of the other . The sense and the feeling of oneness with the other , in collective relationships quite as much as in the personal, had been always inherent in the Vedanta but was thoroughly obscured in its later scholastic developments. Vivekananda brought out in his person that true meaning. He was, in a literal sense, the embodiment of the true Vedanta.
To all those who came into his life, took loving care of him and supported his work in one way or another, he expressed in a full-throated voice his gratitude, and gratitude implies the existence of the other. Vivekananda never turned non-dualism, or any ism , into some hard theory divorced from life, but brought to a world full of hatred and violence arising from religious absolutism, its deeper import, the inner unity of all life. When he spoke, it was with authority, which struck even those who were antagonistic to him. That authority and its visible majesty grew out of the sense of oneness with all he displayed in his own life, in ways natural and easy. Vivekananda s vedanta did not exclude the sincerest humility and gratitude for what he was receiving from others generously. And neither did it exclude a childlike capacity for merriment, fun and laughter. If university professors were attracted to his powerful intellect and conversed with him for hours, a child of six too could sit in his lap, warm and snug, and widen her eyes in wonder as he told her the stories of Indian bazaars and remember him even forty years after. Even before he began speaking about it, Vivekananda s vedanta was written in every line of his gorgeously handsome face and reflected in his midnight-blue eyes.
Vivekananda repudiated, both in his teachings and in his conduct, the prevalent notions of sannyasa embodying false notions of renunciation . The Mahabharata had done that in the clearest language three thousand ye