Swami Vivekananda

His mother used to say that she had prayed to Shiva for a son, and that Shiva had sent her one of his demons instead.

She said it with love. Narendranath Datta, born in Calcutta on a January morning in 1863, was the kind of child who exhausts a household — a beautiful singer, a wrestler, a boy who could read a page at a glance and keep it for life, and who could not be made to accept a single thing on anybody's authority. When he was naughty beyond bearing they would pour a pot of water over his head and call on Shiva's name, and it worked every time. He remembered it all his life.

He described himself afterwards without a trace of apology. From my very boyhood I was a dare-devil sort of fellow, he told a disciple once, in the room above the Ganges. Otherwise, do you think I could make a tour round the world without a single copper in my pocket?

He was still a small child when he first played at being a wandering monk, sitting in ashes with a cloth round his waist, in imitation of the holy men who came begging at the door. When one of them came, the family locked him upstairs, because he would give away whatever he could carry. He loved to hear the Ramayana chanted in the neighbourhood and would sit through it forgetting supper and the hour; and one night, hearing that Hanuman lived in banana groves, he went and waited a long time in a banana orchard near the house, in the dark, on the chance of seeing him.

He grew into the finest education Bengal could give a boy. He read Hume and Kant, Spinoza and Hegel, Mill and Darwin; he wrote to Herbert Spencer and argued with him; his principal said he had travelled the world and never met a lad with such gifts. He played all day and studied at night with the doors bolted, so that nobody ever saw him work. And all that reading did to him what real reading does — it took his religion away. He joined the reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, who had scrubbed Hinduism clean of idols and caste and left a tidy rational God behind. It was not enough. Something in him had begun to burn, and it would not be put out by a well-argued position.

Something else was happening too, which he did not tell anyone at the time and which he told very plainly many years later, when a disciple asked whether he had seen visions as a schoolboy.

While I was still at school, one night I shut the door and sat down to

meditate, and my mind grew quite absorbed. How long I stayed like that I

cannot say. The meditation was over — I was still sitting there — when

the south wall of that room parted and a luminous figure stepped out and

stood before me. There was a strange radiance on his face, and yet no

expression on it at all. It was the figure of a sannyasin, deeply calm,

his head shaved, a staff and a water-pot in his hand. He looked at me

steadily for a while, as if he meant to speak. I stared back at him,

astonished. Then a kind of fear came over me — I threw the door open and

hurried out of the room.

He never saw the figure again, and said he had regretted the door ever since. Many a time and often I have thought that if again I saw him, I would no more be afraid but would speak to him. But I met him no more. Long afterwards he came to his own conclusion about who it had been. I now think it was the Lord Buddha whom I saw.

So he went round Calcutta asking the one question that mattered, of every religious man he could find — asking it flatly, almost rudely, the way a man asks who cannot afford to be lied to:

Have you seen God?

Nobody said yes. One great man of the reforming movement looked at him a long moment and said only, "My boy, you have the yogi's eyes." It was a lovely thing to say. It was not an answer.

He was eighteen when he first went out to the temple garden at Dakshineswar, on the Ganges a little north of the city, where there lived a priest of the Divine Mother named Ramakrishna — a man of almost no schooling who fell into trances, wept at the name of Kali, and was said by some to be mad and by others to be God.

Somebody asked the boy to sing. He sang a song that ends on the words keep the treasure in secret — purity, and before the last note had settled the old man was on his feet, crying out as though a long watch had ended: "My boy! My boy! I have been looking for you these three years, and you have come at last!"

Narendra asked his question. He told the story himself, years later, to a hall of Americans, and the flatness of the telling is the best part of it:

I crept near to him and asked him the question which I had been asking others

all my life: "Do you believe in God, Sir?" "Yes," he replied. "Can you prove

it, Sir?" "Yes." "How?" "Because I see Him just as I see you here, only in a

much intenser sense."

That impressed me at once, he said. For the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw God.

And then began the six years that made him, and they were six years of fighting.

Everything about the man at Dakshineswar offended the boy's trained mind. Ramakrishna was a worshipper of Kali — the black Mother with the garland of skulls — and Narendra had come up through the Brahmo Samaj, where such things were superstition to be swept away. Ramakrishna saw visions; Narendra thought visions were a disorder of the nerves. Ramakrishna could not be argued with, because he did not argue. He simply loved the boy with an intensity that frightened everybody who saw it, and waited.

Vivekananda never dressed this up. Near the end of his life he said it straight out, and it is the single most important sentence anyone has about his inner history:

How I used to hate Kali! And all Her ways! That was the ground of my six

years' fight — that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at last!

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She guides

me in everything I do, and does with me what She will. . . . Yet I fought so

long! I loved him, you see, and that was what held me. I saw his marvellous

purity. . . . I felt his wonderful love. . . . His greatness had not dawned on

me then. All that came afterwards when I had given in. At that time I thought

him a brain-sick baby, always seeing visions and the rest. I hated it. And

then I, too, had to accept Her!

I loved him, you see, and that was what held me. Not the doctrine. Not the evidence. The love held him while the argument raged, for six years, and the argument lost.

What the Master did during those six years was mostly to refuse to win. He never laid the same discipline on two men. He never once required Narendra to believe in the gods. He let him rant. Once the boy attacked a sect he despised for three solid hours while the old man listened without a word, and at the end of it Ramakrishna said only: "Well, well — perhaps every house may have a back door. Who knows?" Vivekananda quoted that sentence for the rest of his life as the whole of his Master's method. Never a word of condemnation for any!

He was also, in those years, being emptied of the wish to be clever, which for him was the hardest renunciation of all. He kept a story of his Master's that tells it exactly: some men went into a mango orchard and busied themselves counting the leaves and the twigs, comparing their colour and their size, noting everything down, and got up a learned discussion on it all — and one of them, more sensible than the rest, sat down and ate the mangoes. So leave this counting of leaves and twigs and note-taking to others, he wrote later, in his own book on love. Say "Shantih, Shantih" to their learned controversies, and let us "eat the mangoes".

In 1884 his father died, and the roof came off the world.

The family had lived well; it turned out they had lived on credit. Relatives went to law over the house. There was no money and no food, and Narendra — the brilliant son, the one everybody had expected to carry them — walked the streets of Calcutta all day looking for work in an office and came home at night with nothing. He had holes in his shoes. He told his mother he had been invited out to dinner so that the little there was would go to the children, and went hungry.

He told the whole of it once, in California, late in his life, to a roomful of strangers who had asked him to speak about himself:

On the one side was my mother, my brothers. My father died at that time, and

we were left poor. Oh, very poor, almost starving all the time! I was the only

hope of the family, the only one who could do anything to help them. I had to

stand between my two worlds. On the one hand, I would have to see my mother

and brothers starve unto death; on the other, I had believed that this man's

ideas were for the good of India and the world, and had to be preached and

worked out. And so the fight went on in my mind for days and months. Sometimes

I would pray for five or six days and nights together without stopping. Oh,

the agony of those days! I was living in hell!

And then: Who would sympathise with me? None — except one. The one was the Master's wife, Sarada Devi, who had come from her village years before, found her husband a God-intoxicated monk, and had answered him — when he told her he could not live the married life and left the decision to her — with the only words she ever needed to say: God speed you! The Lord bless you! Am I the woman to degrade you? If I can, I will help you. Go on in your work. She was poorer than the boys were. She could do nothing but believe them, and she did.

It was in the middle of that year of iron that the thing happened which he never fully explained.

He went to the Master and asked him to pray to the Mother for his family — for food, for money, for their bare survival. Ramakrishna told him to go into the temple and ask Her himself. Three times he went in. Three times he came out having asked for nothing but knowledge, devotion, renunciation, and the sight of Her. He could not make his mouth say the other thing.

That is the story as it is told. What he himself said about it is stranger, and he said it only once, and to a woman he trusted:

No, the thing that made me do it is a secret that will die with me. I had

great misfortunes at the time. . . . It was an opportunity. . . . She made a

slave of me. Those were the very words: a slave of you. And Ramakrishna

Paramahamsa made me over to Her.

He kept the secret. He was a man who talked and talked, who could be induced to explain almost anything, and this one thing he took with him. But the surrender was real, and everything afterwards runs out of it.

He added a detail that reads like a shiver. Strange! He lived only two years after doing that, and most of the time he was suffering. And then, thinking of another teacher who had spent his old age looking for the one disciple to whom he could hand the whole thing over: Guru Nanak was like that, you know. . . . And he passed over all his own family — his children were as nothing to him — till he came upon the boy to whom he gave it; and then he could die.

Ramakrishna fell ill with cancer of the throat in 1885. The young men moved him to a garden house at Cossipore and nursed him there, and the nursing is the first real work the Order ever did — cleaning, watching in shifts, begging for the money to keep it going, a dozen students who had walked out of their examinations and their futures to sit up with a dying priest.

It was in that house of death that the thing Narendra had wanted since boyhood finally happened to him. He spoke of it only years afterwards, and always the same way — flatly, as a fact, the way a man describes a road he has walked. The first taste of it had come long before, at Dakshineswar, the day the Master touched him:

One day the Master touched me in the garden at Dakshineswar; the moment

he touched me, I saw the houses, the doors and halls, the trees, the

moon, the sun — all of it dissolving into the sky. Then, little by

little, the sky itself dissolved into I know not where — what I saw

after that I do not remember at all; I only remember that the sight

filled me with great fear.

And of the full experience, at Cossipore, when he had prayed for it with everything he had:

Then, in the evening, while I was meditating, I could not find my own

body at all — it felt as if it simply did not exist. The moon, the sun,

space, time, the sky, all of it seemed to become one and melt away

somewhere; the sense of the body and all the rest of it was almost

gone — I had all but merged away, that is the truth of it! Only a trace

of "I" remained, and that is why I came back from that samadhi.

Nirvikalpa samadhi: the state in which the little separate self is simply not there any more, and there is no one left to be having the experience. He came out of it beside himself, and went to the Master to say that it had come and that he wanted to live in it always.

Ramakrishna would not give it to him. If you remain day and night in that state, he said, the work of the Divine Mother will not be accomplished; therefore you won't be able to induce that state again; when your work is finished, it will come again. And he locked the treasure in a box, as one of the brothers put it, and kept the key, and told the boy he would have to weep for it at the end of his life, and that he would not be allowed to go until his work was done.

Then, two or three days before the end, he gave him everything. Vivekananda told this one too, to a disciple who could hardly write it down fast enough:

Three or four days before the Master's body left him, he called me to

him alone one day. He sat me before him, looked at me steadily, and fell

into samadhi. Then I clearly felt a subtle force, like an electric

shock, coming out of his body and entering mine! Little by little I too

lost outward consciousness and grew rigid. How long I stayed like that I

cannot remember; when my outward senses returned, I found the Master

weeping. When I asked him why, he answered me tenderly, "Today, giving

you everything I have, I have become a fakir! With this power you are to

do much of the world's work before you come back."

The rest of his life he regarded as the spending of that gift. I feel that power is constantly directing me to this or that work. This body has not been made for remaining idle. And once, when a disciple begged him to rest, he said something so unguarded that the young man beside him hardly knew what to do with it:

That one whom the Master used to call "Kali," "Kali" — two or three days

before the Master's body was laid down, She entered this body. It is She

who carries me about, this way and that, and never lets me stay still.

She never lets me look after my own comfort.

Ramakrishna died in August 1886, repeating the name of Kali, passing out of the body in the state he had lived in. And a handful of boys in their early twenties were left holding a fire with no hearth to put it in.

What they did next is the part of the story that he told best himself, because it was the part that cost the most and looked, from the outside, like nothing at all.

They found a derelict house at Baranagar, between Calcutta and Dakshineswar — damp, reputed haunted, cheap. We got hold of a broken-down old house, with hissing cobras living underneath; and because that was the cheapest, we went into that house and lived there. They took the vows of monks. They begged. They had, some nights, rice and salt; other nights nothing. They owned between them a few pieces of ochre cloth, which they shared, so that whoever went out wore them.

And they went off like a rocket. They were up at three in the morning for meditation. They sang and argued philosophy until the small hours. They read the Gita and The Imitation of Christ — their two books — and begged money to give away hundreds of copies of both. Vivekananda later wrote a preface for a Bengali translation of the Imitation which tells you exactly how he read it: each letter of the book is marked deep with the heart's blood of the great soul who had renounced all for his love of Christ, and, of the anonymity of it, is it possible for one who totally renounced all earthly joys and despised the desire for the bauble fame as so much dirt and filth — is it possible for such a soul to care for that paltry thing, a mere author's name?

They kept Christmas with a shepherd's crook round a lighted log, talking in low voices about the angels coming to the watchers in the fields, and they kept Good Friday on grape juice and water; and when a European happened by that day they swarmed down on him in delight, twelve or fifteen of them, desperate to hear the story from a Christian's own lips — and were so crushed when he turned out to be a Salvation Army man who had never heard of Good Friday that they took his Bible away from him and put him out, before one of them crept round by the other door to bring him back, feed him, and secretly give it back.

Nobody helped them. Who would listen to a few boys, with their crank notions? Nobody. At least, in India, boys are nobodies. Their families came to fetch them home and were refused; the neighbourhood laughed, and then stopped laughing and turned nasty. And the more we were derided, the more determined we became.

Ten years were spent without a ray of light! Ten more years! A thousand times

despondency came; but there was one thing always to keep us hopeful — the

tremendous faithfulness to each other, the tremendous love between us.

He said that at the age of thirty-seven, in a comfortable Californian hall, and then he said the thing which for him was the moral of the whole affair, and which he meant as literally as anything he ever said:

In happiness, in misery, in famine, in pain, in the grave, in heaven, or in

hell who never gives me up is my friend. Is such friendship a joke? A man may

have salvation through such friendship.

Their watchword he gave in two words. "No compromise!" was the watchword. "This is the ideal, and this has got to be carried out. If we meet the king, though we die, we must give him a bit of our minds; if the peasant, the same."

Between 1888 and 1892 he walked out of the Order's sight and disappeared into India.

He went alone, mostly on foot, without money, under a series of assumed names so that nobody could follow him, begging his food. He crossed the Himalayan passes on foot in snow. He slept in caves and under trees and in the huts of outcastes, and in a few palaces, because kings kept trying to keep him. He saw Varanasi and Ayodhya and Agra, Rajputana and Gujarat, the Maratha country and the Malabar coast; he read Sanskrit grammar with a pandit in Jaipur and the whole of a Western encyclopaedia somewhere else; he argued with pandits, Muslim scholars, Jain merchants, Christian missionaries, collectors, station-masters, and the poor.

Of what it cost the body he was matter-of-fact, in the way of a man for whom it was simply the terms of the contract:

Sometimes one meal at nine in the evening, another time a meal at eight in the

morning, another after two days, another after three days — and always the

poorest and roughest thing. Who is going to give to the beggar the good things

he has? . . . And most of the time walking, climbing snow peaks, sometimes ten

miles of hard mountain climbing, just to get a meal. They eat unleavened bread

in India, and sometimes they have it stored away for twenty or thirty days,

until it is harder than bricks; and then they will give a square of that. I

would have to go from house to house to collect sufficient for one meal. And

then the bread was so hard, it made my mouth bleed to eat it. Literally, you

can break your teeth on that bread. Then I would put it in a pot and pour over

it water from the river. For months and months I existed that way.

What was happening inside him during those years was a change of subject. He had gone out to find God and he found, everywhere he put his foot, three hundred million people who were not eating. The Vedanta he had been arguing about since he was a boy stopped being an argument. If every soul is divine, then the starving man in the road is not an unfortunate object; he is God, lying in the road.

A prince of Khetri became his friend and gave him the orange robe and the name by which the world knows him. And the faith that carried him through those years he set down later, from America, in one of his first poems in English, and it is worth reading beside everything that came after:

If the sun by the cloud is hidden a bit,

If the welkin shows but gloom,

Still hold on yet a while, brave heart,

The victory is sure to come.

Not a work will be lost, no struggle vain,

Though hopes be blighted, powers gone;

Of thy loins shall come the heirs to all,

Then hold on yet a while, brave soul,

No good is e'er undone.

At the end of 1892 the road ran out. He came down the long spine of the country to Kanyakumari, the temple of the Virgin Goddess at the southern tip, where the three seas meet, and he swam out to the last rock standing off the shore and sat on it for three days.

He wrote what happened there to one of his brother-monks, and the letter has none of the dignity of a legend and all of the weight of a decision:

My brother, in view of all this, specially of the poverty and ignorance, I had

no sleep. At Cape Comorin sitting in Mother Kumari's temple, sitting on the

last bit of Indian rock — I hit upon a plan: We are so many Sannyasins

wandering about, and teaching the people metaphysics — it is all madness. Did

not our Gurudeva use to say, "An empty stomach is no good for religion"? That

those poor people are leading the life of brutes is simply due to ignorance.

We have for all ages been sucking their blood and trampling them underfoot.

And the rage underneath it, which he did not trouble to hide from his own brother:

A million or two of Sadhus and a hundred million or so of Brahmins suck the

blood out of these poor people, without even the least effort for their

amelioration — is that a country or hell? Is that a religion, or the devil's

dance?

That is the whole of his life's programme, written on a rock in the sea by a man with no money and no organisation and no name. Religion first, and religion means food. The monks who have been wandering and lecturing will go from village to village instead, and take education with them, and medicine, and maps and a magic lantern, and the highest truths of the Vedanta in language a farmer can follow. And since India has no money, he would have to go and get it from somewhere else.

He heard, in Madras, that a Parliament of Religions was to be held in Chicago. His young men scraped together the fare. He went with almost nothing, having no credentials, not knowing that delegates had to be nominated, not knowing when the Parliament opened.

I was just a vagabond, but I said, "If you send me, I am going. I have not

much to lose, and I do not care if I lose that."

He sailed by way of Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton, Japan, and he wrote back a long, delighted traveller's letter full of boats and temples and palms and fan-shaped trees — and then, at the end of it, he turned on his own countrymen with a violence that must have made the Madras boys drop the page:

Come, be men! . . . Come out of your narrow holes and have a look abroad. See

how nations are on the march! . . . Is there not water enough in the sea to

drown you, books, gowns, university diplomas, and all?

And the postscript, which is the truest short description of his own method: Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember.

Then America, and a bad shock. He had arrived months early and with no idea what things cost. The money bled away. Boston in August was empty of everyone who mattered. He wrote to Alasinga Perumal — the Madras schoolmaster who had begged the fare for him and who would go on begging on his behalf for the rest of the decade — a letter that is the best evidence anyone has of what the beginning actually felt like:

Starvation, cold, hooting in the streets on account of my quaint dress, these

are what I have to fight against. But, my dear boy, no great things were ever

done without great labour. . . . A hundred times I had a mind to go out of the

country and go back to India. But I am determined, and I have a call from

Above; I see no way, but His eyes see. And I must stick to my guns, life or

death.

He got into the Parliament by accident and kindness — a woman he met on the train took him home, and through her he met a Harvard professor who vouched for him. On the eleventh of September 1893, in the Hall of Columbus, he let his turn pass all morning, and stood up only in the afternoon, having written nothing; and instead of "Ladies and gentlemen," he said:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

and seven thousand people were on their feet for two minutes before he could go on.

What he said when they let him speak is worth reading for its restraint. He thanked them in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world, and then quoted the verse he said he had repeated since his earliest boyhood:

As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle

their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through

different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead

to Thee.

And he ended by hoping that the bell which had rung that morning might be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

He spoke six times at the Parliament. He told them the story of the frog in the well who had never seen the sea and threw out the frog who had. He read a paper on Hinduism which contains the sentence that is really his whole gospel in one breath — the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. We are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. . . . Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep — and the sentence that is his whole method of tolerance — man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth.

And on the twentieth of September he stood up and said the hardest thing said at that Parliament, in about a hundred and fifty words:

You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul

of the heathen — why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? . . .

They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a starving

people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him

metaphysics.

At the final session he refused, courteously and completely, the one thing the organisers had half hoped for — a winner:

The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a

Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the

others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of

growth. . . . Upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite

of resistance: "Help and not Fight," "Assimilation and not Destruction,"

"Harmony and Peace and not Dissension."

Then more than three years of work at a pace that killed him.

He lectured across the eastern and central United States, sometimes two and three times a day, often for money at first and then, for the last two years, for nothing at all. He founded the Vedanta Society of New York. He turned down chairs in Eastern philosophy at Harvard and at Columbia, because he was a monk and monks do not take salaries. He crossed to England and found, to his own surprise, that the English suited him: Bands and bands come, and I have no room for so many; so they squat on the floor, ladies and all. I tell them to imagine that they are under the sky of India, under a spreading banyan, and they like the idea.

The letters of those years are the best thing he wrote, because he was writing at speed to people he trusted and had no time to be careful. They swing between exhilaration and exhaustion, tenderness and abuse, and they contain his own clearest statement of what he thought he was for:

To put the Hindu ideas into English and then make out of dry philosophy and

intricate mythology and queer startling psychology, a religion which shall be

easy, simple, popular, and at the same time meet the requirements of the

highest minds — is a task only those can understand who have attempted it. The

dry, abstract 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 so that a child may grasp it. That is my

life's work.

He knew exactly what he was up against, and it was not theology. I cannot blame the missionaries and others for not understanding me — they hardly ever saw a man who did not care in the least about women and money. At first they could not believe it to be possible; how could they?

When the Madras boys wrote nervously to say that missionaries were spreading scandal about his diet and his conduct, he wrote back one of the great letters of self-possession:

As for me, mind you, I stand at nobody's dictation. I know my mission in life,

and no chauvinism about me; I belong as much to India as to the world, no

humbug about that. . . . I am a singular man, my son, not even you can

understand me yet. . . . I see a greater Power than man, or God, or devil at my

back. . . . God and truth are the only politics in the world, everything else

is trash.

To the same young man in another mood: Truth is my God, the universe my country. And: I do not believe in duty. Duty is the curse of the Samsari, not for the Sannyasin. Duty is humbug. I am free, my bonds are cut. And, over and over, in a dozen letters: Work on, brave hearts, fail not — no saying nay; work on — the Lord is behind the work.

Beneath the public man there was a private one whom almost nobody met, and he let one American woman see him:

I was not made for these struggles and fights of the world. I am naturally

dreamy and restful. I am a born idealist, can only live in a world of dreams;

the very touch of fact disturbs my visions and makes me unhappy. . . . The

whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer,

that is all.

In the summer of 1895, worn out, he took a dozen students to a cottage on Thousand Island Park in the St Lawrence and taught them every day for seven weeks — the happiest teaching of his life, and the most intimate. One of them took notes, and those notes are the closest thing we have to sitting in a room with him:

Books are useless to us until our own book opens. — We are the living books and books are but the words we have spoken. . . . Read man, he is the living poem. — The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. — This world is just a gymnasium in which we play; our life is an eternal holiday. — Accumulate power in silence and become a dynamo of spirituality. What can a beggar give? Only a king can give, and he only when he wants nothing himself. — You are free, free, free!

And, one morning, the thing he actually thought about himself, said without any drama at all: Swami Vivekananda is just the speck on the object-glass; I am Atman, real, unchangeable, and that reality alone enables me to see Swami Vivekananda.

It was there, in July, that he wrote The Song of the Sannyasin, which is his own vow set to a drumbeat:

Strike off thy fetters! Bonds that bind thee down,

Of shining gold, or darker, baser ore;

Love, hate — good, bad — and all the dual throng,

Know, slave is slave, caressed or whipped, not free;

For fetters, though of gold, are not less strong to bind;

Then off with them, Sannyasin bold! Say —

"Om Tat Sat, Om!"

In 1896 he published Raja Yoga, his rendering of Patanjali — the book that first carried the idea of meditation to a great part of the Western world. And then his health began to go, and he wanted to go home.

He landed at Colombo in January 1897 and was met by something no Indian monk had ever been met by. They took the horses out of his carriage and pulled it themselves. Whole towns came out. He travelled up the country giving the lectures afterwards collected as Lectures from Colombo to Almora, and they are not gentle. He had not come home to be garlanded. He had come home with a programme and a temper.

To a friend who asked why he did not lecture in Bengal as he had in the West, he answered:

What good will lecture after lecture do, in an India where the body is

wasted for want of food, the mind is wasted, in a land that is the very

birthplace of disease and grief and affliction? . . . It is worry over

the belly that keeps India restless. Before you can make people hear

religion, you must first take away the people's worry over their

bellies; otherwise mere lecturing will bear no fruit at all.

And to the young men who came in crowds to hear philosophy:

What will you do with your own liberation? Even the wish for liberation

is only a kind of selfishness. Throw away meditation, throw away

liberation and all such things — take up the very work that I have

taken up. . . . Do even a little work for others, and the power within

you wakes; think even a little of another's good, and little by little

the strength of a lion grows in the heart. I love you all so much — but

I wish you would work yourselves to death for others; I would be glad to

see you do it!

In May 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, and wrote into its object the thing he had worked out on the rock at Kanyakumari: to preach the truths that Ramakrishna had lived, for one's own liberation and for the good of the world — and to feed, teach, and nurse without asking anybody's caste. Within months his monks were running famine relief in Murshidabad and Dinajpur, and soon afterwards plague relief in Calcutta — high-caste young men carrying nightsoil out of slums and nursing low-caste cholera patients with their own hands.

It is worth pausing on what was actually new in this, because he did not invent Indian monasticism and he did not invent charity. What he did was weld them together and give the weld a theology. If every soul is literally divine, then feeding a starving man is not the superior stooping to the inferior. It is worship, and the starving man is the altar. Shiva-jnane jiva-seva — service to the living creature in the knowledge that it is Shiva.

He put it plainest not in a lecture but in a monastery garden, with a crowd of important Calcutta gentlemen waiting for him indoors and a gang of Santal labourers sitting in front of him eating a meal he had ordered for them. He had been told the visitors had arrived. I shan't be able to go now, he said. I am happy with these men. And to the labourer who had worried that the Swami's food would cost him his caste, and had been given curry made without salt so that it would not:

You are Narayana indeed — today I have made my offering to Narayana.

Afterwards, to his monks:

I found them the veritable embodiment of God — such simplicity, such sincere

guileless love I have seen nowhere else. . . . Sometimes I feel a desire to sell

the Math and everything, and distribute the money to the poor and destitute. We

have made the tree our shelter. Alas! the people of the country cannot get

anything to eat, and how can we have the heart to raise food to our mouths? . . .

After so much austerity, I have understood this as the real truth — God is

present in every Jiva; there is no other God besides that. "Who serves Jiva,

serves God indeed."

And then the sentence that tells you he had understood the real disease, which was not hunger:

Don't think it happens simply from the pinch of an empty belly. It happens because they get no sympathy from us.

That same year a young Irishwoman named Margaret Noble, who had heard him in a London drawing-room, wrote asking to come and work in India. He wrote back a letter with no salesmanship in it whatever — telling her India was hot and dirty and would probably kill her, that the caste system would humiliate her, that he could promise her nothing — and then: if you have the will to come, you will be welcome. She came. He gave her the name Nivedita, the dedicated, and she gave the rest of her life to his country.

In 1898 he took a party of Western disciples to Kashmir, and the summer turned into the strangest and most naked passage of his life.

He had come into the mountains to rest, and instead he began to burn. In August he climbed to the cave of Amarnath among the glaciers, and went in — as pilgrims do — almost naked, his body smeared with ash. What he saw there he never described. What he said about it, afterwards, sitting silent and red-eyed in a room at the Math, was this:

Ever since I saw Amarnath, it is as if Shiva has been sitting on my head for twenty-four hours, and will not come down at all.

And then Kshir Bhavani, the shrine of the Mother in a spring of milk-white water, where he went alone at the end of the summer and stayed seven days, worshipping Her with a maund of milk-rice a day. He had been grieving all summer over the ruined temples of Kashmir, broken by invaders centuries before and never rebuilt. Standing in front of Her he thought: Alas, if I were then living I could never have borne it silently.

And he heard an answer.

It was according to My desire that the Mohammedans destroyed this temple. It

is My desire that I should live in a dilapidated temple, otherwise, can I not

immediately erect a seven-storeyed temple of gold here if I like? What can you

do? Shall I protect you or shall you protect me!

He came down from the mountains a changed man. Since hearing that divine voice, I cherish no more plans. The idea of building Maths etc. I have given up; as Mother wills, so it will be. When a disciple, remembering the Advaita he had been taught, gently suggested that divine voices are only the echo of our own inner thought, the Swami turned grave and would not have it:

Whether it be internal or external, if you actually hear with your ears such a

disembodied voice, as I have done, can you deny it and call it false? Divine

Voices are actually heard, just as you and I are talking.

Out of that summer came his English poem Kali the Mother, written in Kashmir, which is not a hymn to a kind goddess and was never meant to be:

For Terror is Thy name,

Death is in Thy breath,

And every shaking step

Destroys a world for e'er.

Thou "Time", the All-Destroyer!

Come, O Mother, come!

Who dares misery love,

And hug the form of Death,

Dance in Destruction's dance,

To him the Mother comes.

And behind it, in Bengali, the fiercer poem he had written earlier and never softened, And Let Shyama Dance There, which says out loud what most devotion never dares:

With their mouths they say they long to see you —

but let the hour come, and who knows where they run.

The terrible sword, still warm with blood,

slips from their hands, and they hand you a flute instead!

You are the truth, dreadful Kali, the great destroyer;

the gentle garlanded one, Vanamali,

is only the shadow that your own Maya casts.

and which ends with the instruction he had followed himself, on the rock at Kanyakumari and in the cave at Amarnath and everywhere else:

Let self-interest, desire, and pride be shattered,

let the heart itself become

a cremation ground —

and let Shyama dance there.

The boy who had fought Kali for six years had become the man who worshipped Her as the terror She is, and would not let anyone put a lute in Her hand.

In December 1898 he carried his Master home.

He took the copper casket with Ramakrishna's ashes on his own right shoulder and walked at the head of a small procession from the rented garden house at Belur to the new ground he had bought on the river, conches and bells going before him, and he told the disciple walking beside him why he was carrying it himself:

The Master told me, "Wherever you carry me on your shoulder, there I

will go, and there I will stay — whether it is under a tree or in a

hut." That is why I am carrying him myself, on my own shoulder, to the

new grounds of the Math.

He set the casket down, worshipped, lit the sacrificial fire, cooked the offering with his own hands, and then said to the householder disciple: None of us (Sannyasins) have any longer the right to take back this casket of Shri Ramakrishna, for we have installed him here today — and made the young man carry it back on his own head, and walked behind him the whole way, saying, at the narrow bridge, Beware, now, you must move very cautiously.

A twelve years' anxiety came off his shoulders that day, he said. And then he began to talk about what the place would be, walking over the scrub and the jungle with his hands behind his back, seeing it all:

This Math will become a centre of learning and of spiritual practice.

. . . The power that rises from this place will cover the whole world;

it will turn the very course of men's lives; ideals will go out from

here, born of the union of Knowledge, Devotion, Yoga and Work together;

at a sign from the men who belong to this Math, in time, new life will

stir in every quarter of the earth; and in time the truly devout will

gather here from everywhere — so many such thoughts are rising in my

mind.

There would be a temple built so that from a distance it read as the syllable Om. There would be a lion and a lamb carved on either side of the door, licking each other — expressing the idea that great power and gentleness have become united in love. There would be a house of learning, and a feeding home, and a hospital ward, and the young monks would have to spend five years feeding the poor and begging the money for it before they were allowed near the books. First of all, comes the gift of food; next is the gift of learning, and the highest of all is the gift of knowledge. And, of the kitchen he wanted: The rice-gruel must run into the Ganga and whiten its water! When I see such a Feeding Home started, it will bring solace to my heart.

He designed the seal of the Mission himself, and explained it to a painter who asked:

The waves of water in the picture stand for Karma; the lotuses, for

Bhakti; and the rising sun is the sign of Jnana. The serpent coiled

around it stands for Yoga and the awakened power of Kundalini. And the

swan in the picture means the Paramatman. So: when Karma, Bhakti and

Jnana are joined together with Yoga, the vision of the Paramatman is

won — that is what the picture means.

Above all, he wanted the place to hold contradictions without breaking. If the Lord wills, we shall make this Math a great centre of harmony. . . . We must see to it that people of all creeds and sects, from the Brahmana down to the Chandala, may come here and find their respective ideals manifested. And then, lower, the line that is the exact centre of his life's work:

Shankara left this Advaita in the forests and on the mountains. This

time I have come to carry it out of there and set it down everywhere, in

the household and throughout society. This Advaita must be sounded like

a drumbeat in every home, in field and market, on mountain and open

plain.

When a disciple said he would rather realise that truth in meditation than work it out in action, the Swami rounded on him:

Does a man feel happy tasting a good thing all alone? It must be given

to others too. Suppose you win your own liberation through the

realisation of Advaita — what does that matter to the world? **You must

carry the three worlds to freedom before you leave this body.**

He never called himself the founder of anything, and he was exact about where his teaching came from. Asked in California to speak about his own work, he stopped in the middle of it to say:

Now, all the ideas that I preach are only an attempt to echo his ideas.

Nothing is mine originally except the wicked ones, everything I say which is

false and wicked. But every word that I have ever uttered which is true and

good is simply an attempt to echo his voice.

And of the whole vast body of what he taught, he claimed to have taken one word:

So I preach only the Upanishads. If you look, you will find that I have never

quoted anything but the Upanishads. And of the Upanishads, it is only that One

idea, strength. The quintessence of the Vedas and Vedanta and all lies in

that one word.

The four paths he taught — work, love, knowledge, meditation — he never presented as four religions or four ranks. They are four temperaments; four doors into one room. Which door is yours is a fact about your constitution, like the colour of your eyes, and the contempt of one door for another he regarded as the whole disease of religious life. Each tendency shows the life-work of the past, the line or radius along which that man must move. All radii lead to the centre. Never even attempt to disturb anyone's tendencies; to do that puts back both teacher and taught.

And then the instruction that is peculiarly his, and harder than it looks: Develop every faculty as if it were the only one possessed — feel knowledge as if it were all there was, then do the same with love, then with meditation, then with work. Give up the waves and go to the ocean, then you can have the waves as you please.

In June of 1899, already ill, he sailed west a second time, with Nivedita and his brother-monk Turiyananda. She called those six weeks at sea the greatest occasion of her life — an unbroken river of talk, from the first afternoon in the river to the last morning off the coast of France.

He talked about everything. About manliness as his new gospel — "Do even evil like a man! Be wicked, if you must, on a great scale!" — meaning that he would rather have a nation of sinners with spines than a nation of the meek without them. About the lion that roars loudest when it is struck to the heart, and how the majesty of the soul comes out only when a man is wounded to his depths. About the sailors whose devotion to him had gone straight into his heart: "You see, I love our Mohammedans," he said, almost as though confessing a fault. Coming through the Straits of Messina in the moonlight he told her that beauty is not out there at all but already in the mind — and then, delighted with himself: "Messina must thank me! It is I who give her all her beauty!"

He founded the Vedanta Society of San Francisco, started a peace retreat in California, spoke at the Paris Congress of the History of Religions, saw Brittany and Vienna and Istanbul and Athens and Egypt. And he was wounded, in Egypt, to hear the people of the country spoken of as "natives", and to find that he was being treated as one of the visitors and not one of them.

It was on that second journey, at Ridgely Manor in New York, that he wrote the poem that reads like a man setting his own weather down:

It is not joy nor sorrow,

But that which is between,

It is not night nor morrow,

But that which joins them in. . . .

It is death between two lives,

And lull between two storms,

The void whence rose creation,

And that where it returns.

To it the tear-drop goes,

To spread the smiling form

It is the Goal of Life,

And Peace — its only home!

And at Lannion, in Brittany, in September of 1900, he took leave of his closest Western disciple. He called her out into the dark garden after supper and gave her a blessing with a blade in it — that if it was only he who had made her, then let her be destroyed out there; but if the Mother had made her, let her live. And then, the next morning, soon after dawn, he came back again to bless her a second time. Her last sight of him in Europe was his figure standing on the road against the morning sky with both hands raised, in the Eastern gesture that is greeting and benediction at once.

He came home to Belur in December of 1900, and he was dying, though only the men closest to him knew how quickly. Asthma. Diabetes. Kidneys failing. Insomnia that would not break. He had said more than once that he would not live to be forty.

The letters of the last eighteen months are among the most touching things he wrote, because the fire is still there and the body is plainly gone. To Mary Hale in Chicago: My health has been and is very bad. I recover for a few days only; then comes the inevitable collapse. To the same woman, from his own weakness, still incapable of letting a friend drift: I am a dying man; I have no time to fool in. Wake up, girl. To Josephine MacLeod, who had carried his burdens for years and taken his outbursts without complaint: I can't even in imagination pay the immense debt of gratitude I owe you. Wherever you are you never forget my welfare; and, there, you are the only one that bears all my burdens, all my brutal outbursts. To Ramakrishnananda in Madras, who had dreamt that the Swami was angry with him and woken up frightened: Never have I laid a curse on you, and why should I do so now? All your life you have known my love for you, and today are you doubting it? True, my temper was ever bad, and nowadays owing to illness it occasionally becomes terrible — but know this for certain that my love can never cease.

And to Brahmananda, in a letter about money and a sick man and a widowed girl, one sentence that gathers up everything he had learnt:

If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day

into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt

after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine.

He made one last journey, in the first weeks of 1902 — to Bodh-Gaya, arriving on what turned out to be his last birthday, and then on to Varanasi. It closed a circle: Bodh-Gaya had been among the first of the holy places he had set out to see as an unknown young monk. Now the orthodox world that had once distrusted him came to him in such numbers and with such affection that he was astonished, he said, at the extent of his empire in men's hearts. And there, with only months to live and his eyesight failing, he was still opening new ground — writing to a younger monk about the relation of Buddhism and Hinduism, and ending: A total revolution has occurred in my mind. . . . I may not live to work out the glimpses, but I shall leave the lines of work indicated, and you and your brethren will have to work it out.

From Varanasi he wrote the blessing that Nivedita kept all her life, and which is the shortest and most complete thing he ever wrote to anyone:

May all powers come unto you! May Mother Herself be your hands and mind! It is

immense power — irresistible — that I pray for you, and, if possible, along with

it infinite peace. . . . If there was any truth in Shri Ramakrishna, may He take

you into His leading, even as He did me, nay, a thousand times more!

Back at Belur he began, quite deliberately, to let go. To Josephine MacLeod, that spring:

A great idea of quiet has come upon me. I am going to retire for good — no more

work for me. If possible, I will revert to my old days of begging. All blessings

attend you, Joe; you have been a good angel to me.

He lost interest in the news. "You may be right," he said, when someone pressed an opinion on him, "but I cannot enter any more into these matters. I am going down into death." To a disciple in that last week: "I am making ready for death. A great tapasya and meditation has come upon me."

Only once did he admit what still held him here. "You know the WORK is always my weak point," he told a disciple that last Sunday. "When I think that might come to an end, I am all undone."

On the Wednesday of that week Nivedita came out to the Math, and, keeping the fast himself and eating nothing, he insisted on serving her meal with his own hands — joking over each dish as he brought it, boiled jack-fruit seeds, potatoes, plain rice, ice-cold milk — and when the meal was over he poured the water over her hands himself and dried them with a towel.

"It is I who should do these things for you, Swamiji," she protested. "Not you, for me."

And he answered: "Jesus washed the feet of His disciples."

The reply that rose to her lips — but that was the last time — was never spoken. Which was as well. Because it was.

Friday, the fourth of July, 1902, was the best day he had had in years. He rose early and meditated for three hours. He taught Sanskrit grammar, and the Yajur-Veda, and yoga philosophy. He talked over plans for a Vedic college with the others. He walked from the monastery gates out to the highroad and back, and came in as the bell was ringing for evening worship.

He went to his room and asked not to be disturbed, and sat down facing the Ganges, and began to meditate, as he had ten thousand times before.

A little after nine that night it was over. The rupture of a vessel in the brain, the doctors said. The piercing of the brahmarandhra at the crown of the head, his brother-monks said — the thing his Master had foretold on his deathbed sixteen years earlier, when he locked the treasure in the box. He was thirty-nine years old.

They burned him on the riverbank at Belur, on the shore directly opposite the spot where they had burned Ramakrishna.

That night, in different places, several of the people who loved him dreamt.

One woke in the dawn certain that Sri Ramakrishna had died a second time, and found the messenger already at his gate. One, a friend from his boyhood, saw him come in triumph and heard him call out that he had spat out the body at last. And one, drawn without knowing why to sit down and meditate at that exact hour of the evening, found himself in front of an infinite radiance, and fell on his face before it crying Siva Guru — Shiva, my teacher.

At Christmas that year a few of them gathered near some old caves at Khandagiri and kept the feast the way the Order had always kept it, with a shepherd's crook and a fire and the Gospel of Luke. They meant to read only the Christmas story, but they could not stop, and read on through the death and into the resurrection; and it no longer sounded to them like a document to be believed or disbelieved. It sounded like people stammering, and failing, and trying again, to write down something that had actually happened to them — because it had now happened to them too. Not a body coming back. Sudden, unlooked-for meetings of will and love; an ordinary evening filling without warning with a presence they knew.

He had told them himself, once, quite matter-of-factly, that he had twice seen the returning dead, and that in the week after Ramakrishna died the form had been luminous.

They ended that night with a prayer that has the whole of his relationship with his people in it: that this living presence of their Master, which death itself had not been able to take from them, should never become a thing remembered — but stay with them as it was, in its actuality, to the end.

He had promised them as much, and characteristically he had put it as a piece of plain work to be done, not a consolation:

It may be that I shall find it good to get outside my body — to cast it off like

a worn-out garment. But I shall not cease to work. I shall inspire men everywhere,

until the whole world shall know that it is one with God.

And for anyone who comes after him and wonders what, out of all of it, he actually asked — he answered that too, in one line of the Upanishad that he made his own and called out, again and again, to the young men of his country:

Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.

॥ ॐ ॥