Swami Abhedananda

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was a Bengali schoolboy called Kali, studying for his final examination, when he walked to the temple garden at Dakshineswar on the Hooghly to see the priest people were talking about. He stayed, served him through the last illness, and afterwards, at the makeshift monastery at Baranagar, meditated with such ferocity that his brother monks nicknamed him the ascetic. Then came the part that would have been unimaginable in that room. In 1896 Swami Vivekananda brought him to London to help with the Vedānta work, and he was soon sent on to take charge of the young centre in New York. He spent roughly a quarter of a century in the English-speaking world, lecturing and writing for audiences with no Sanskrit and no tradition — which meant finding, again and again, ordinary English for ideas that had never needed it before. Everything on this site is a late descendant of that experiment. He returned to India in 1923 and founded the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, a centre for the study of the texts, and he went on writing — including Sanskrit hymns to his own teacher and to the Holy Mother. He died on 8 September 1939. The lesson he embodies is unglamorous and rare: the same person who can sit for years in the dark can also stand in a hired hall in Manhattan and make himself understood.

The turn it rests on

After returning to India in 1923 he established the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math; he died on 8 September 1939.

What was taught

Took the non-dual teaching to English-speaking audiences for a quarter of a century, then came home and built a centre for the study of the Vedānta texts themselves.