Swami Vivekananda-biography by Sanjay Bose

Among the Master’s disciples, Tarak, Latu, and the elder Gopal had already cut off their relationship with their families. The young disciples whom Sri Ramakrishna had destined for the monastic life were in need of a shelter. The Master had asked Naren to see to it that they should not become householders. Naren vividly remembered the Master’s dying words: ‘Naren, take care of the boys.’ The householder devotees, moreover, wanted to meet, from time to time, at a place where they could talk about the Master. They longed for the company of the young disciples who had totally dedicated their lives to the realization of God. But who would bear the expenses of a house where the young disciples could live? How would they be provided with food and the basic necessaries of life?

All these problems were solved by the generosity of Surendranath Mitra, the beloved householder disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. He came forward to pay the expenses of new quarters for the Master’s homeless disciples. A house was rented at Baranagore, midway between Calcutta and Dakshineswar. Dreary and dilapidated, it was a building that had the reputation of being haunted by evil spirits. The young disciples were happy to take refuge in it from the turmoil of Calcutta. This Baranagore Math, as the new monastery was called, became the first headquarters of the monks of the Ramakrishna Order.1 Its centre was the shrine room, where the copper vessel containing the sacred ashes of the Master was daily worshipped as his visible presence.2

Narendranath devoted himself heart and soul to the training of the young brother disciples. He spent the day-time at home, supervising a lawsuit that was pending in the court and looking after certain other family affairs; but during the evenings and nights he was always with his brothers at the monastery, exhorting them to practise spiritual disciplines. His presence was a source of unfailing delight and inspiration to all.

The future career of the youths began to take shape during these early days at Baranagore. The following incident hastened the process. At the invitation of the mother of Baburam, one of the disciples, they all went to the village of Antpur to spend a few days away from the austerities of Baranagore. Here they realized, more intensely than ever before, a common goal of life, a sense of brotherhood and unity integrating their minds and hearts. Their consecrated souls were like pearls in a necklace held together by the thread of Ramakrishna’s teachings. They saw in one another a reservoir of spiritual power, and the vision intensified their mutual love and respect. Narendra, describing to them the glories of the monastic life, asked them to give up the glamour of academic studies and the physical world, and all felt in their hearts the ground swell of the spirit of renunciation. This reached its height one night when they were sitting for meditation around a fire, in the fashion of Hindu monks. The stars sparkled overhead and the stillness was unbroken except for the crackling of the firewood. Suddenly Naren opened his eyes and began, with an apostolic fervour, to narrate to the brother disciples the life of Christ. He exhorted them to live like Christ, who had had no place ‘to lay his head.’ Inflamed by a new passion, the youths, making God and the sacred fire their witness, vowed to become monks.3

When they had returned to their rooms in a happy mood, someone found out that it was Christmas Eve, and all felt doubly blest. It is no wonder that the monks of the Ramakrishna Order have always cherished a high veneration for Jesus of Nazareth. The young disciples, after their return to Baranagore, finally renounced home and became permanent inmates of the monastery. And what a life of austerity they lived there! They forgot their food when absorbed in meditation, worship, study, or devotional music. At such times Sashi, who had constituted himself their caretaker, literally dragged them to the dining-room. The privations they suffered during this period form a wonderful saga of spiritual discipline. Often there would be no food at all, and on such occasions they spent day and night in prayer and meditation. Sometimes there would be only rice, with no salt for flavouring; but nobody cared. They lived for months on boiled rice, salt, and bitter herbs. Not even demons could have stood such hardship. Each had two pieces of loin-cloth, and there were some regular clothes that were worn, by turns, when anyone had to go out. They slept on straw mats spread on the hard floor. A few pictures of saints, gods, and goddesses hung on the walls, and some musical instruments lay here and there. The library contained about a hundred books.

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As a Wandering Monk
Among the Master’s disciples, Tarak, Latu, and the elder Gopal had already cut off their relationship with their families. The young disciples whom Sri Ramakrishna had destined for the monastic life were in need of a shelter. The Master had asked Naren to see to it that they should not become householders. Naren vividly remembered the Master’s dying words: ‘Naren, take care of the boys.’ The householder devotees, moreover, wanted to meet, from time to time, at a place where they could talk about the Master. They longed for the company of the young disciples who had totally dedicated their lives to the realization of God. But who would bear the expenses of a house where the young disciples could live? How would they be provided with food and the basic necessaries of life?

But Narendra did not want the brother disciples to be pain-hugging, cross-grained ascetics. They should broaden their outlook by assimilating the thought-currents of the world. He examined with them the histories of different countries and various philosophical systems. Aristotle and Plato, Kant and Hegel, together with Sankaracharya and Buddha, Ramanuja and Madhva, Chaitanya and Nimbarka, were thoroughly discussed. The Hindu philosophical systems of Jnana, Bhakti, Yoga, and Karma, each received a due share of attention, and their apparent contradictions were reconciled in the light of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and experiences. The dryness of discussion was relieved by devotional music. There were many moments, too, when the inmates indulged in light-hearted and witty talk, and Narendra’s bons mots on such occasions always convulsed them with laughter. But he would never let them forget the goal of the monastic life: the complete control of the lower nature, and the realization of God.

‘During those days,’ one of the inmates of the monastery said, ‘he worked like a madman. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he would rise from bed and wake up the others, singing, “Awake, arise, all who would drink of the Divine Nectar!” And long after midnight he and his brother disciples would still be sitting on the roof of the monastery building, absorbed in religious songs. The neighbours protested, but to no avail. Pandits came and argued. He was never for one moment idle, never dull.’ Yet the brother complained that they could not realize even a fraction of what Ramakrishna had taught.

Some of the householder devotees of the Master, however, did not approve of the austerities of the young men, and one of them teasingly inquired if they had realized God by giving up the world. ‘What do you mean?’ Narendra said furiously. ‘Suppose we have not realized God; must we then return to the life of the senses and deprave our higher nature?’

Soon the youth of the Baranagore monastery became restless for the life of the wandering monk with no other possessions except staff and begging-bowl. Thus they would learn self-surrender to God, detachment, and inner serenity. They remembered the Hindu proverb that the monk who constantly moves on, remains pure, like water that flows. They wanted to visit the holy places and thus give an impetus to their spiritual life.

Narendra, too, wished to enjoy the peace of solitude. He wanted to test his own inner strength as well as teach others not to depend upon him always. Some of the brother disciples had already gone away from the monastery when he began his wanderings. The first were in the nature of temporary excursions; he had to return to Baranagore in response to the appeal of the inmates of the monastery. But finally in 1890, when he struck out again — without a name and with only a staff and begging-bowl — he was swallowed in the immensity of India and the dust of the vast subcontinent completely engulfed him. When rediscovered by his brother monks he was no longer the unknown Naren, but the Swami Vivekananda who had made history in Chicago in 1893.

In order to satisfy his wanderlust, Narendra went to Varanasi, considered the holiest place in India — a city sanctified from time out of mind by the association of monks and devotees. Here have come prophets like Buddha, Sankaracharya, and Chaitanya, to receive, as it were, the commandment of God to preach their messages. The Ganga charges the atmosphere with a rare holiness. Narendra felt uplifted by the spirit of renunciation and devotion that pervades this sacred place. He visited the temples and paid his respects to such holy men as Trailanga Swami, who lived on the bank of the Ganga constantly absorbed in meditation, and Swami Bhaskarananda, who annoyed Naren by expressing doubt as to the possibility of a man’s total conquest of the temptation of ‘woman’ and ‘gold.’4 With his own eyes Naren had seen the life of Sri Ramakrishna, who had completely subdued his lower nature.

In Varanasi, one day, hotly pursued by a troop of monkeys, he was running away when a monk called to him: ‘Face the brutes.’ He stopped and looked defiantly at the ugly beasts. They quickly disappeared. Later, as a preacher, he sometimes used this experience to exhort people to face the dangers and vicissitudes of life and not run away from them.

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After a few days Naren returned to Baranagore and plunged into meditation, study, and religious discourses. From this time he began to feel a vague premonition of his future mission. He often asked himself if such truths of the Vedanta philosophy as the divinity of the soul and the unity of existence should remain imprisoned in the worm-eaten pages of the scriptures to furnish a pastime for erudite scholars or to be enjoyed only by solitary monks in caves and the depths of the wilderness; did they not have any significance for the average man struggling with life’s problems? Must the common man, because of his ignorance of the scriptures, be shut out from the light of Vedanta?

Narendra spoke to his brother disciples about the necessity of preaching the strength-giving message of the Vedanta philosophy to one and all, and especially to the downtrodden masses. But these monks were eager for their own salvation, and protested. Naren said to them angrily: ‘All are preaching. What they do unconsciously, I will do consciously. Ay, even if you, my brother monks, stand in my way, I will go to the pariahs and preach in the lowest slums.’

After remaining at Baranagore a short while, Naren set out again for Varanasi, where he met the Sanskrit scholar Pramadadas Mitra. These two felt for each other a mutual respect and affection, and they discussed, both orally and through letters, the social customs of the Hindus and abstruse passages of the scriptures. Next he visited Ayodhya, the ancient capital of Rama, the hero of the Ramayana. Lucknow, a city of gardens and palaces created by the Moslem Nawabs, filled his mind with the glorious memories of Islamic rule, and the sight of the Taj Mahal in Agra brought tears to his eyes. In Vrindavan he recalled the many incidents of Krishna’s life and was deeply moved.

While on his way to Vrindavan, trudging barefoot and penniless, Naren saw a man seated by the roadside enjoying a smoke. He asked the stranger to give him a puff from his tobacco bowl, but the man was an untouchable and shrank from such an act; for it was considered sacrilegious by Hindu society. Naren continued on his way, but said to himself suddenly: ‘What a shame! The whole of my life I have contemplated the non-duality of the soul, and now I am thrown into the whirlpool of the caste-system. How difficult it is to get over innate tendencies!’ He returned to the untouchable, begged him to lend him his smoking-pipe, and in spite of the remonstrances of the low-caste man, enjoyed a hearty smoke and went on to Vrindavan.

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Next we find Naren at the railroad station of Hathras, on his way to the sacred pilgrimage centre of Hardwar in the foothills of the Himalayas. The station-master, Sarat Chandra Gupta, was fascinated at the very first sight of him. ‘I followed the two diabolical eyes,’ he said later. Narendra accepted Sarat as a disciple and called him ‘the child of my spirit’, At Hathras he discussed with visitors the doctrines of Hinduism and entertained them with music, and then one day confided to Sarat that he must move on. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘I have a great mission to fulfil and I am in despair at the smallness of my power. My guru asked me to dedicate my life to the regeneration of my motherland. Spirituality has fallen to a low ebb and starvation stalks the land. India must become dynamic again and earn the respect of the world through her spiritual power.’

Sarat immediately renounced the world and accompanied Narendra from Hathras to Hardwar. The two then went on to Hrishikesh, on the bank of the Ganga several miles north of Hardwar, where they found themselves among monks of various sects, who were practising meditation and austerities. Presently Sarat fell ill and his companion took him back to Hathras for treatment. But Naren, too, had been attacked with malaria fever at Hrishikesh. He now made his way to the Baranagore monastery.

Naren had now seen northern India, the Aryavarta, the sacred land of the Aryans, where the spiritual culture of India had originated and developed. The main stream of this ancient Indian culture, issuing from the Vedas and the Upanishads and branching off into the Puranas and the Tantras, was subsequently enriched by contributions from such foreign peoples as the Saks, the Huns, the Greeks, the Pathans, and the Moguls. Thus India developed a unique civilization based upon the ideal of unity in diversity. Some of the foreign elements were entirely absorbed into the traditional Hindu consciousness; others, though flavoured by the ancient thought of the land, retained their individuality. Realizing the spiritual unity of India and Asia, Narendra discovered the distinctive characteristics of Oriental civilization: renunciation of the finite and communion with the Infinite.

But the stagnant life of the Indian masses, for which he chiefly blamed the priests and the landlords, saddened his heart. Naren found that his country’s downfall had not been caused by religion. On the contrary, as long as India had clung to her religious ideals, the country had over flowed with material prosperity. But the enjoyment of power for a long time had corrupted the priests. The people at large were debarred from true knowledge of religion, and the Vedas, the source of the Hindu culture, were completely forgotten, especially in Bengal. Moreover, the caste-system, which had originally been devised to emphasize the organic unity of Hindu society, was now petrified. Its real purpose had been to protect the weak from the ruthless competition of the strong and to vindicate the supremacy of spiritual knowledge over the power of military weapons, wealth, and organized labour; but now it was sapping the vitality of the masses. Narendra wanted to throw open the man-making wisdom of the Vedas to all, and thus bring about the regeneration of his motherland. He therefore encouraged his brothers at the Barangaore monastery to study the grammar of Panini, without which one could not acquire first-hand knowledge of the Vedas.

The spirit of democracy and equality in Islam appealed to Naren’s mind and he wanted to create a new India with Vedantic brain and Moslem body. Further, the idea began to dawn in his mind that the material conditions of the masses could not be improved without the knowledge of science and technology as developed in the West. He was already dreaming of building a bridge to join the East and the West. But the true leadership of India would have to spring from the soil of the country. Again and again he recalled that Sri Ramakrishna had been a genuine product of the Indian soil, and he realized that India would regain her unity and solidarity through the understanding of the Master’s spiritual experiences.

Naren again became restless to ‘do something’, but what, he did not know. He wanted to run away from his relatives since he could not bear the sight of their poverty. He was eager to forget the world through meditation. During the last part of December 1889, therefore, he again struck out from the Baranagore monastery and turned his face towards Varanasi. ‘My idea,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘is to live in Varanasi for some time and to watch how Viswanath and Annapurna deal out my lot. I have resolved either to realize my ideal or to lay down my life in the effort — so help me Lord of Varanasi!’

On his way to Varanasi he heard that Swami Yogananda, one of his brother disciples, was lying ill in Allahabad and decided to proceed there immediately. In Allahabad he met a Moslem saint, ‘every line and curve of whose face showed that he was a paramahamsa.’ Next he went to Ghazipur and there he came to know the saint Pavhari Baba, the ‘air-eating holy man.’

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Pavhari Baba was born near Varanasi of brahmin parents. In his youth he had mastered many branches of Hindu philosophy. Later he renounced the world, led an austere life, practised the disciplines of Yoga and Vedanta, and travelled over the whole of India. At last he settled in Ghazipur, where he built an underground hermitage on the bank of the Ganga and spent most of his time in meditation. He lived on practically nothing and so was given by the people the sobriquet of the ‘air-eating holy man’; all were impressed by his humility and spirit of service. Once he was bitten by a cobra and said while suffering terrible pain, ‘Oh, he was a messenger from my Beloved!’ Another day, a dog ran off with his bread and he followed, praying humbly, ‘Please wait, my Lord; let me butter the bread for you.’ Often he would give away his meagre food to beggars or wandering monks, and starve. Pavhari Baba had heard of Sri Ramakrishna, held him in high respect as a Divine Incarnation, and kept in his room a photograph of the Master. People from far and near visited the Baba, and when not engaged in meditation he would talk to them from behind a wall. For several days before his death he remained indoors. Then, one day, people noticed smoke issuing from his underground cell with the smell of burning flesh. It was discovered that the saint, having come to realize the approaching end of his earthly life, had offered his body as the last oblation to the Lord, in an act of supreme sacrifice.

Narendra, at the time of his meeting Pavhari Baba, was suffering from the sever pain of lumbago, and this had made it almost impossible for him either to move about or to sit in meditation. Further, he was mentally distressed, for he had heard of the illness of Abhedananda, another of his brother disciples, who was living at Hrishikesh. ‘You know not, sir,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘that I am a very soft-natured man in spite of the stern Vedantic views I hold. And this proves to be my undoing. For however I may try to think only of my own good, I begin, in spite of myself, to think of other people’s interests.’ Narendra wished to forget the world and his own body through the practice of Yoga, and went for instruction to Pavhari Baba, intending to make the saint his guru. But the Baba, with characteristic humility, put him off from day to day.

One night when Naren was lying in bed thinking of Pavhari Baba, Sri Ramakrishna appeared to him and stood silently near the door, looking intently into his eyes. The vision was repeated for twenty-one days. Narendra understood. He reproached himself bitterly for his lack of complete faith in Sri Ramakrishna. Now, at last, he was convinced, he wrote to a friend: ‘Ramakrishna has no peer. Nowhere else in the world exists such unprecedented perfection, such wonderful kindness to all, such intense sympathy for men in bondage.’ Tearfully he recalled how Sri Ramakrishna had never left unfulfilled a single prayer of his, how he had forgiven his offences by the million and removed his afflictions.

But as long as Naren lived he cherished sincere affection and reverence for Pavhari Baba, and he remembered particularly two of his instructions. One of these was: ‘Live in the house of your teacher like a cow,’ which emphasizes the spirit of service and humility in the relationship between the teacher and the disciple. The second instruction of the Baba was: ‘Regard spiritual discipline in the same way as you regard the goal,’which means that an aspirant should not differentiate between cause and effect.

Narendranath again breathed peace and plunged into meditation. After a few days he went to Varanasi, where he learnt of the serious illness of Balaram Bose, one of the foremost lay disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. At Ghazipur he had heard that Surendranath Mitra, another lay disciple of the Master, was dying. He was overwhelmed with grief, and to Pramadadas, who expressed his surprise at the sight of a sannyasin indulging in a human emotion, he said: ‘Please do not talk that way. We are not dry monks. Do you think that because a man has renounced the world he is devoid of all feeling?’