Swami Abhedananda

The Calcutta he was born into

He was born Kāliprasād Chandra on 2 October 1866, at Āhiritolā in north Calcutta, into what Belur Math calls an enlightened family. His mother, Nayantārā Devī, was intensely devoted to the Goddess Kālī, to whom she had prayed with her whole soul for a gifted son; when he came she named him Kāliprasād, “the grace of Kālī”, to record the answer. His father, Rasiklāl Chandra, was a senior teacher of English at the Oriental Seminary in Calcutta, and the boy's schooling began at the age of five. The Order records that he outdid his schoolmates at study, games, painting and everything else he turned his hand to, that he listened rapt to the stories of the epics from his parents, and that from boyhood he inclined to Sanskrit.

What made him unusual, even in a city full of clever boys, was the appetite. Belur Math gives the reading list, and it should be reproduced, because no other disciple of Sri Ramakrishna has one like it. He read in Wilson's History of India that Śaṅkara had propounded the Advaita system, and decided to be a philosopher. He read the Gītā, and wanted to follow the great ācāryas. Then he read John Stuart Mill's Logic and Three Essays on Religion, Herschel's Astronomy, Ganot's Physics, Lewes's History of Philosophy and Hamilton's Philosophy, and alongside them Kālidāsa, Bhavabhūti and Bāṇabhaṭṭa. He passed the Entrance Examination creditably at eighteen. He had, the Order says, a remarkable sympathy for all faiths even at that age; and in 1882 and 1883 he attended a series of public lectures by the philosopher Śaśadhar Tarkacūḍāmaṇi on the six systems of Hindu philosophy, and was struck above all by the lecture on the Yoga of Patañjali and what it said about the infinite possibilities of the human soul. He read the authoritative books on Yoga, wanted to practise it, and began looking for a teacher who could make him a real yogī and show him the way to nirvikalpa samādhi. A classmate told him about a man at Dakṣiṇeśvar.

Hold that picture: a boy of seventeen who has read Mill and Hamilton in English and Bāṇa in Sanskrit, and wants not a philosophy but a method. The Western reading never left him; it is why, alone among the Master's disciples, he could spend four hours arguing about the unity of ultimate reality with William James, and why an American audience could listen to him for twenty-five years. But he did not go to Dakṣiṇeśvar for an argument. He went for samādhi.

Where the life was lived

The Indian part of the life is short and dense. Calcutta, Dakṣiṇeśvar, Cossipore and Baranagore between 1884 and 1888; then seven years on foot — to the sources of the Ganga and the Yamunā, to Kedārnāth and Badrīnāth, to Hardwar and Rishikesh, to Purī, to Dwārakā on the far western coast, to Rāmeśwaram in the far south; then, in August 1896, a ship. The map below shows those Indian places, and the places of his one visit home in 1906 and of his last eighteen years — Leh and the monastery of Hemis in Ladakh, Darjeeling, and the house in Calcutta where he died. The far larger part of the life, twenty-five years in London and America and the long homeward journey across the Pacific and through Asia, is on a second map further down the page.

Noon at Dakṣiṇeśvar, 1884

He went in the middle of 1884, setting out at noon, and arrived to find that Sri Ramakrishna had gone to Calcutta and would not be back until after dark. Belur Math records what happened while he waited, and it is one of the small scenes on which this website turns. He sat under a tree. A young man appeared and asked why he had come. The young man was Śaśī, the future Swami Ramakrishnananda; he discovered that the visitor had eaten nothing at noon, and arranged a meal and a place to rest through the afternoon. The mother of the monastery was already at work, two years before there was a monastery. At about nine in the evening the Master came home. Kāliprasād went in, bowed, and said what he had come to say: that he wished to learn Yoga so that he might reach the highest samādhi.

Two accounts of the answer survive, and both are given here. Belur Math has the Master say: “You were a great Yogi in your previous birth. This is your last birth. I shall initiate you into the mysteries of Yoga practices.” Abhedananda's own account, written late in life for a volume called Contemporary Indian Philosophy and reproduced in the biographical sketch prefixed to his Complete Works, is longer and puts it in the first person: “I met the great Yogi, Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, and asked him whether he could teach me the practical methods of ‘Yoga Philosophy’. He replied, ‘Yes,’ and after reading of my past life, he said, ‘You were a great Yogi in your past incarnation. Come my boy, I will teach you how to practise Yoga’. Then he initiated me and gave me instructions in concentration and meditation. He touched my chest and aroused my Kundalini, the ‘Serpent Power’ at the base of my spinal column, and I went into Samadhi, the state of super-consciousness. In him I found the embodiment of the Absolute Truth of the highest philosophy as well as of the universal Religion which underlies all sectarian religions of the world, and became his humble disciple.” Belur Math adds a detail he leaves out: the Master wrote a mantra on his tongue.

The first quotation is from Belur Math's own life of Swami Abhedananda, from which every quotation on this page is taken unless another source is named. The second is from the biographical sketch in his Complete Works, published by the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, Calcutta, quoting Contemporary Indian Philosophy, first edition, page 49; the sketch places the visit on a Sunday morning, Belur Math at noon, and this page follows Belur Math.

He had asked for a method and been given one, and the Order says he practised it, going regularly to Dakṣiṇeśvar and sitting at the Master's feet. What he found there went beyond the method. In Sri Ramakrishna he found, in his own words, the embodiment of the Absolute Truth of the highest philosophy and of the universal religion beneath the sects; and from the Master, Belur Math says, he learned that dualism, qualified non-dualism and non-dualism are stages on the way to the Supreme Truth — the position he would hold, and preach, for the next fifty-five years. He became close to Narendranāth, the future Vivekananda, and the two held learned discussions on abstruse points of Eastern and Western philosophy; he describes himself as Narendra's close companion, and it is easy to see why, since they had read many of the same books. During the Master's illness at Śyāmpukur and Cossipore in 1885 and 1886 he served him with the others. He had, he says, two years with him.

Kali the ascetic

After the Master's death in August 1886 he renounced the world with his brothers and took the name Abhedananda, “the bliss of non-difference”. At the Baranagore monastery he did what his temperament dictated: Belur Math records that he often shut himself in his room for intense spiritual practice and for the systematic study of Vedānta and Western philosophy, and that this earned him two epithets from his brothers, “Kali Tapasvī”, the ascetic Kali, and “Kali Vedāntī”. Both stuck. The Vedanta Society of Northern California, which keeps a page on him, notes that the first was a nickname; it is also a fair description of the shape of the life to come, in which reading and solitude alternated with public speech.

It was at Baranagore that the third of his gifts showed itself. He composed Sanskrit hymns to Sri Ramakrishna and to the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi. When she heard the one he had written about her, the Order says, she was deeply impressed, and blessed him: “May the Goddess of Learning ever dwell in your throat.” The blessing was literal. The hymn to the Mother that begins prakṛtiṁ paramām abhayāṁ varadām is still sung in many monasteries of the Order, and the Vedanta Society of Northern California calls it, of all his contributions to the movement, the most widely appreciated and enduring — unrivalled, it says, in depth of conception and felicity of expression. A man who would write so many books in English is remembered in his own Order chiefly for a few verses of Sanskrit. He would probably not have minded.

Barefoot to the sources of the rivers

Then came what Belur Math calls the call of the forest: the pull towards the wandering life of the orthodox monastic tradition. The Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, which he founded, dates it 1888 to 1895 — seven years. He travelled barefoot, the Order says, depending entirely on whatever chance brought him, enduring every privation and practising austerities of every kind. He walked to the sources of the Ganga and the Yamunā. He visited Kedārnāth and Badrīnāth in the high Himalaya, Hardwar at the foot of the hills, Purī on the eastern sea, Dwārakā on the western, Rāmeśwaram at the southern tip — the four corners of the sacred geography and the two great mountain shrines besides. He spent most of the time, Belur Math says, in contemplation of the Absolute.

He met the great saints of the age. The sketch in his Complete Works names Trailaṅga Swami of Vārāṇasī, Bhāskarānanda Swami and Pavhārī Bābā of Ghazipur; and it happens that a letter of Vivekananda's survives from Ghazipur, dated 2 April 1890, addressed to “My dear Kali”, that shows the two brothers longing to meet and Vivekananda, who was then living near Pavhārī Bābā, half-afraid to leave: “You have expressed a desire to see me. I too have a similar longing, and it is this that makes me afraid of going. Moreover, the Babaji forbids me to do so.” At Rishikesh, Belur Math records, Abhedananda made a special study of Vedānta under Swami Dhanrāj Giri, a monk celebrated for the depth of his scholarship and well versed in all six systems. He was, in other words, completing his education in the traditional manner, on foot, under a teacher, in the forest. The self-taught reader of Mill was becoming a trained Vedāntin.

The letter is in the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, volume 6, Epistles — Second Series, letter XXX, translated from Bengali; the Order's editors identify “Kali” as Abhedananda.

The wandering ended because of a different letter. Vivekananda, in America from 1893, was writing to his brothers urging a new kind of Order — monks who would give their lives to serving others and carrying Sri Ramakrishna's ideas across the world. Belur Math records that Abhedananda accepted the plan with the others, and gives his reason in his own words: because of his profound faith in Vivekananda, and because he knew that “the voice of Swami Vivekananda was the voice of the Master.” The Ramakrishna Vedanta Math quotes the message that followed, in the words it attributes to Vivekananda: “Send Kali immediately to London to assist me in my work here. I am arranging his passage.”

London, 1896: the lecture he had not agreed to

He sailed from Calcutta in August 1896, by the sketch's dating; Belur Math says the latter part of the year. What happened next is one of the Order's best stories, and Belur Math tells it without embellishment. Vivekananda announced that a learned brother disciple from India would lecture on Advaita Vedānta at the next meeting of the Christo-Theosophical Society of London. Abhedananda had not been consulted. His name was printed on handbills and in newspapers without his knowledge. He had never in his life stood on a public platform to make a speech, in English or in any Indian language. He remonstrated. Vivekananda's answer was the only encouragement he gave: “Depend on him who has ever given me strength and courage in all the trials of my life.”

He appeared on the appointed day. The hall was packed to suffocation. He spoke, the sketch records, on the Advaita philosophy of the Pañcadaśī — not an easy subject for a first lecture, or for a London audience — and the maiden speech was a success. Two English disciples of Vivekananda left accounts. Eric Hammond wrote: “The Master (Swami Vivekananda) was more than content to have effaced himself in order that his brother's opportunity should be altogether unhindered. The whole impression had in it a glowing beauty quite indescribable.” And: “It was as though the Master thought, ‘Even if I perish on this plane, my message will be sounded through these dear lips and the world will hear it.’” Captain Sevier, who would later found the Advaita Ashrama at Māyāvatī, said: “Swami Abhedananda is a born preacher. Wherever he will go, he will have success.”

Vivekananda handed him the Vedānta and Rāja Yoga classes and left for India in December 1896. Abhedananda kept the classes going and lectured in churches and philosophical societies in London and its suburbs for a year. He met Max Müller and Paul Deussen. His eloquence, his lucid exposition and what the Order calls his depth of spiritual realisation made, it says, a profound impression. The man who had shut himself in a room at Baranagore had been pushed on to a platform by the one brother who could push him, and had discovered that the platform was where he belonged.

New York: a quarter of a century

In 1897, at the request of American friends and with Vivekananda's approval, he crossed the Atlantic, and on 9 August 1897 he landed in New York to take charge of the Vedanta Society that Vivekananda had founded there in 1894. Belur Math records that he was almost penniless. The Society's own account says that his first season of lectures ran from October 1897 to May 1898 and was a success, and that on 29 October 1898 the Society was formally incorporated under the laws of the State of New York — the legal foundation on which it still stands, with a monk of the Order in its pulpit to this day. He organised it, the sketch says; he gave regular lectures on every aspect of Vedānta philosophy and religion; and in the Mott Memorial Hall he delivered, Belur Math records, ninety lectures to satisfy public demand.

The intellectual high point came early. In 1898, at the house of William James, the philosopher and psychologist, he held a discussion with James on the problem of the unity of ultimate reality that lasted nearly four hours; Josiah Royce, Charles Lanman, Nathaniel Shaler and Lewis Janes, the chairman of the Cambridge Philosophical Conferences, took part. Belur Math records the outcome with a precision that does credit to both men: James admitted that from Abhedananda's standpoint it was impossible to deny ultimate unity, but declared that he still could not believe it. Nobody was converted. Everybody was heard. That May he was at Harvard, and lecturing and holding conversations in Cambridge, Newton and Medford; later that year he taught at the Green Acre conferences in Eliot, Maine; in 1899 he was back in New England, at Worcester, Cambridge and Lynn. In 1905 and 1906 he delivered the lectures at the Brooklyn Institute that became India and Her People.

Then the country. He travelled, Belur Math says, extensively throughout the United States, Alaska and Mexico — the sketch adds Canada — and spoke on Vedānta in almost all the principal cities of America. He made frequent trips to Europe and lectured across the Continent. He founded, the sketch records, several Vedānta centres and trained many Western disciples. He lectured on comparative religion, taking as his subjects the lives and teachings of Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tzu, Christ, Muhammad and Sri Ramakrishna together. He spent, in Belur Math's summary, almost a quarter of a century spreading the message of Sri Ramakrishna in prominent centres of an alien culture, and showed in doing so organising ability, sound judgement, balanced opinion and adaptability to Western methods of work.

Swipe sideways to pan the map

He came home once, briefly, in 1906. The Order's biography of Swami Ramakrishnananda records that his brother came to Colombo to meet him with the young Swami Paramananda; that they visited Kandy, Anurādhapura and Jaffna, where Abhedananda spoke at the Hindu College; that they crossed to Tuticorin; that Abhedananda laid the foundation of the new Madras monastery at Mylapore, was in Mysore with his brother from 7 to 12 August and met the Maharaja, and on 20 August laid the foundation of the Bangalore monastery. The Vedanta Kesari adds that he visited the little girls' school Ramakrishnananda had just started in north Madras. Then he went back to America and to the work, for another fifteen years.

The centre of his American teaching can be stated in one saying, which Belur Math preserves and which he made, it says, in most of his lectures, calling on his hearers to cultivate purity of thought and love for all without regard to caste, creed or nation: “Whether we believe in God or not, Whether we have faith in prophets or not, if we have self-control, concentration, truthfulness, and disinterested love for all, then we are on the way to spiritual perfection. On the contrary, if one believes in God or in a creed and does not possess these four, he is no more spiritual than an ordinary man of the world. In fact, his belief is only a verbal one.” It is worth reading twice, because it is more radical than it sounds. It does not say that belief is unimportant. It says that belief without the four qualities is not spirituality but talk, and that the four qualities without belief are the road. A New York audience of 1900, brought up on creeds, had not often heard that from a clergyman.

The homeward road, 1921–23

He left America the long way round, and the sketch in his Complete Works preserves the route. In 1921 he sailed from San Francisco and crossed the Pacific, breaking the voyage at Honolulu, where he attended the Pan-Pacific Educational Conference as a delegate from India. He went on to Japan; to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Canton in China; to Manila; to Singapore, from where he was invited to Kuala Lumpur and gave a series of lectures on Vedānta and comparative religion; and to Rangoon, where he lectured many times. He reached Calcutta in September 1921. Belur Math says of the journey that he spread the message of Sri Ramakrishna in all those places, and it is worth noticing that a monk of the Order taught in Japan, China, the Philippines and Malaya on his way home at the end of twenty-five years' work.

He did not retire. After reaching India, Belur Math records, he began a long tour that took him as far as Tibet and Kabul; on the way back he visited Peshawar, the Punjab and the important places of northern India. The sketch dates the Tibetan journey to 1922 and says he visited many Buddhist shrines and monasteries, among them Hemis in Ladakh. It also records something that this page reports exactly as the sketch gives it, without adding to it: that at Hemis he came across a manuscript said to contain an account of Jesus Christ's coming to India, that he translated portions of it with the help of a lama, and that he published them in a Bengali book, Kāśmīr o Tibbate, in 1922. The Order's main life does not mention the manuscript, and neither its existence nor its contents can be checked from any source this website is prepared to cite; what can be said is that he went, that he wrote a book about the journey, and that he was in his fifties and had spent the previous twenty-five years in lecture halls when he did it. He reached Belur Math in 1923.

What he built in Calcutta

He then did what he had done in New York: he founded a centre. Belur Math records that he established it in the heart of Calcutta under the name Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, to carry on Vedānta work in India, in the Order's careful phrase, according to his own plan and method. Many distinguished men of the city gathered round him and helped. A Bengali monthly, Viśvavāṇī, was started to carry his work. The Society was later dedicated to Sri Ramakrishna and renamed the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, which still stands in north Calcutta and keeps his archive; in 1924, the sketch records, he added an āśrama at Darjeeling. The dates are given differently by the two institutions. Belur Math and the sketch place the founding in 1923, after his return to Belur; the Math's own history says he started the Society in 1921, on returning to Calcutta. Both are given here, and the reader may take it that the work began on his return and took its settled form two years later.

The phrase “according to his own plan and method” should be read as the Order means it. The Ramakrishna Vedanta Math is not a branch of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission at Belur; it is a separate institution founded by a direct disciple, and the Vedanta Society of Northern California records that he visited Belur Math occasionally and maintained a cordial relationship with his brother monks there. Twenty-five years of running his own Society in a foreign country had made him a man who ran things his own way, and the Order does not pretend otherwise. It also does not pretend that this diminished him. He is on Belur Math's list of the Master's direct disciples with the others, his hymn is sung in many of their shrines, and the Vedanta Society of New York that he took charge of in 1897 is theirs.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

The Order's account is frank about what the work cost, and the difficulties fall into four kinds. The first was that he had never spoken in public, and was made to do so in front of a packed London hall by a brother who had printed his name on the handbills first and told him afterwards. He did not pretend to like it. Belur Math says he remonstrated, and it records Vivekananda's reply, which was not an apology but a demand for trust. He gave the trust, and the fear was gone in one evening; but he had to be pushed, and the push came from the one person he could not refuse.

The second was money and malice. He landed in New York almost penniless, to take charge of a Society whose founder had left. And Belur Math records, in a sentence that the Order does not soften, that Christian missionaries fabricated scandalous lies in an attempt to bring him into disrepute. The Order does not say what the lies were, and this page does not guess. It says that he continued his work, and that in time he was acclaimed a great exponent of Hindu thought and invited before learned societies. The libel was answered by the ninety lectures.

The third was distance. He was away from India for twenty-five years with one short visit home. He was not at Belur when the Math was built, when Vivekananda died in 1902, when the Holy Mother came to live at Udbodhan, or when his brother Ramakrishnananda — the young man who had fed him under the tree — died in 1911. The return journey, when it came, was a lecture tour of Asia, and it was followed not by rest but by Tibet. The independence of his later work in Calcutta is not unrelated to this. A man who has been the sole representative of a movement in a continent for a quarter of a century does not easily become one voice among many.

The fourth was his body. Belur Math records that in Calcutta he spent the last drop of his energy for those who came to him, that the strain of the work told seriously on his health, and that his constitution broke down under the pressure. The last public utterance, the Order says, was the address to the Parliament of Religions in 1937; he had two more years, and they were not years of public work.

What he taught

He wrote a great deal, in English, for Western readers, over twenty-five years; and because the books were written to be understood by people with no Sanskrit and no prior sympathy, they are among the clearest statements of Vedānta ever made in the language. Four ideas organise them. The first is that religion is practice, not theory. The opening pages of How to be a Yogi, published by the Vedanta Society in New York in 1902, put it flatly: “True religion is extremely practical; it is, indeed, based entirely upon practice, and not upon theory or speculation of any kind, for religion begins only where theory ends. Its object is to mould the character, unfold the divine nature of the soul, and make it possible to live on the spiritual plane, its ideal being the realization of Absolute Truth and the manifestation of Divinity in the actions of the daily life.” This is why the four qualities matter more than the creed, and why the boy who asked for a method rather than a philosophy grew into a man who taught the yogas as methods.

The second is the harmony of the paths, learned from the Master and stated as doctrine. How to be a Yogi gives each yoga its own chapter and its own dignity: Haṭha Yoga teaches health through breathing and diet “but it does not claim that physical health is the same as spirituality”; Rāja Yoga “deals entirely with the mind and psychic power and may be called the science of applied psychology”; Karma Yoga rests on “the secret of work”, which “consists in working for work's sake and not for fruits”; Bhakti Yoga “leads to the same destination as all the other branches of Yoga, but is especially suited for such as are emotional in their nature”; and Jñāna Yoga “teaches that there is one life, one Being, one Reality, and that all notions of distinction and differentiation, that all beliefs in the permanent duality or multiplicity of existence are unreal and illusory”, being “based entirely upon the monistic principles of the Advaita or non-dualistic system of Vedanta.” The same destination, by different roads suited to different natures: he was teaching Sri Ramakrishna in the vocabulary of a New York lecture hall.

The third is Self-knowledge as the ground of everything else, including the idea of God. Self-Knowledge (Ātma-jñāna), in its third edition of 1905, argues it from the Upaniṣads' stories of Indra and from first principles: “Spirit is the perceiver and knower, while matter is that which is perceived, sensed and known. The one is the subject and the other is the object.” “Self-knowledge precedes even the conception of God. If the thought about God, which is in our mind, be separated from self-consciousness it instantly vanishes and becomes non-existent.” And the conclusion: “if we wish to become immortal, we must know this Self or Atman; there is no other way to immortality.” This is straight Advaita, argued rather than asserted, for readers who had been told that Hinduism was idolatry.

The fourth is the distinction between the essential and the non-essential in religion, which the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math puts on the front of its own history: “Every religion can be divided into two parts, one of which may be called the nonessential and the other the essential.” The essentials are the four qualities and the realisation they lead to; the non-essentials are everything the religions quarrel about. It is the idea behind the address of 1937, and behind the whole American ministry, and he had learned it at Dakṣiṇeśvar from a man who had never read Mill.

The sayings, and what they were for

Everything here is verbatim from the source named. His own English is quoted from the New York and Connecticut editions of his books; what others said of him is from Belur Math.

• “Knowledge of the Self or Atman is therefore the highest of all. It is the ideal of the Science of Yoga, and should be the aim of our life. We should hold it as our first duty to acquire this Self-knowledge before we try to know anything concerning the objects of sense-perception.” — How to be a Yogi, 1902, Introductory. The order of business, stated at the start.
• “In Western countries the word has been grossly misunderstood and misused by many writers, who have employed it in the sense of jugglery, hypnotism, trickery, and fraud.” — How to be a Yogi, on the word “Yoga”. He was clearing the ground before he built.
• “Patience and perseverance are absolutely necessary for any one who desires to enter upon the path of Yoga; those who are not patient cannot hope to arrive at true realization. Those, again, who take it up out of curiosity or through an impulse of temporary enthusiasm, must not expect to get results, and must not blame the teacher for their failure to do so, since the fault is entirely their own.” — How to be a Yogi. A warning to the fashionable seeker, written by a man who had walked barefoot for seven years.
• “The secret of work consists in working for work's sake and not for fruits. If this principle be applied to the actions of our daily lives, then every work done by us will help us to advance toward the perfect emancipation of the soul.” — How to be a Yogi, Karma Yoga. The Gītā in one sentence.
• “This mysterious and invisible vital energy or vital force is called in Sanskrit ‘Prana.’” — How to be a Yogi, Science of Breathing. He explained prāṇāyāma to New York without either mystifying or debunking it.
• “Therefore, the ultimate analysis of spirit and matter shows that both are uncreated, indestructible and eternal. If the one pole of a magnet be eternal, the other pole must necessarily be eternal.” — Self-Knowledge, 1905, Spirit and Matter. The reader of Ganot's Physics reaching for an analogy his audience would accept.
• “Self-knowledge destroys ignorance and makes one absolutely unselfish. Blessed is he who lives in the sunshine of Self-knowledge, having risen above the clouds of fear and selfishness which gather in the night of ignorance.” — Self-Knowledge. Metaphysics with a moral consequence, which is how he always presented it.
• “Patience, perseverance, and earnest and sincere longing are the steps toward the attainment of Self-knowledge.” — Self-Knowledge, Search after the Self, retelling the Upaniṣad's story of Indra's long discipleship. The same three words as in the Yoga book; he did not vary the prescription.
• “Where absolute knowledge and absolute existence prevail, there is also absolute happiness or blissfulness. It is different from changeable pleasure or relative happiness.” — Self-Knowledge, Realization of the Self. Sat, cit, ānanda, for readers who had never heard the words.
• “Whether we believe in God or not, Whether we have faith in prophets or not, if we have self-control, concentration, truthfulness, and disinterested love for all, then we are on the way to spiritual perfection.” — the refrain of his American lectures, as Belur Math records it. The four qualities.
• “Every religion can be divided into two parts, one of which may be called the nonessential and the other the essential.” — as the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math quotes him. The principle behind the Parliament of 1937.
• “Sri Ramakrishna's mission was to proclaim the eternal truth that God is one but has many aspects, and that the same one God is worshipped by different nations under various names and forms; that He is personal, impersonal, and beyond both; that He is with name and form and yet nameless and formless.” — presidential address, Parliament of Religions, Town Hall, Calcutta, 1937. The whole of Dakṣiṇeśvar in a sentence, and his last public words.
• “I hope that this Parliament of Religions will sound the death-knell of all communal strife and struggle, and will create a great opportunity for promoting fellowship among various faiths.” — the same address, in conclusion, in the Calcutta of 1937. The hope was not fulfilled in his lifetime or since; it was the right hope.
• Of him, by Captain Sevier, London, 1896: “Swami Abhedananda is a born preacher. Wherever he will go, he will have success.” Sevier was right for twenty-five years.
• To him, by the Holy Mother, Baranagore, about 1887: “May the Goddess of Learning ever dwell in your throat.” The blessing that the rest of the life fulfilled.

The book passages are from How to be a Yogi (The Vedanta Society, New York, 1902) and Vedanta Philosophy: Self-Knowledge (Atma-Jnana), third edition (The Vedanta Society, West Cornwall, Connecticut, 1905), both of which can be read in full at the Internet Archive; the sketch in his Complete Works dates How to be a Yogi to 1903, and the title page of the copy linked below to 1902. The 1937 extracts and the sayings of others are from Belur Math's life; the “two parts” saying is from the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math's history page.

The books, and how to read them

The sketch in his Complete Works lists the books with their years, and the list is a map of the American ministry: Reincarnation (1900), Spiritual Unfoldment (1902), Doctrine of Karma (1903), How to be a Yogi (1903 by the sketch; 1902 on the New York title page), Divine Heritage of Man (1903), Self-Knowledge (third edition 1905), Gospel of Ramakrishna (1905), India and Her People (the Brooklyn Institute lectures of 1905–06), Sayings of Ramakrishna (1910), Great Saviours of the World (1912), Human Affection and Divine Love (1912). After his return came the Stotra-Ratnākara, his “ocean of hymns”, in 1923, and Kāśmīr o Tibbate in Bengali in 1922. He left many manuscripts, and the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math published them one by one: Path of Realization (1940), Life Beyond Death (1944), Science of Psychic Phenomena (1946), Attitude of Vedanta towards Religion (1947), Philosophy and Religion (1951), Mystery of Death (1953). The Math's edition of the Complete Works runs to many volumes; the first is available to read at the Internet Archive.

How to read him. Begin with How to be a Yogi, which is short, was written for beginners, and lays out the four yogas as roads to one goal in the clearest prose of the movement; the chapter “Was Christ a Yogi?” will tell you how he approached Christianity, which was with reverence and without deference. Go next to Self-Knowledge, which is the Advaita of the Upaniṣads argued step by step for a reader who begins from nothing. Divine Heritage of Man and Doctrine of Karma extend the argument; Reincarnation was the book that sold, and shows how he met the questions Americans actually asked. Great Saviours of the World is the comparative religion of a man who had learned from Sri Ramakrishna that the founders were colleagues. Read the American books as what they are: lectures, delivered without notes to paying audiences in a rented hall, and taken down. They repeat themselves; they explain everything; they never assume you agree. That is their virtue. A hundred and twenty years on, they remain the gentlest way into Vedānta for a reader with no background and a sceptical turn of mind — which is to say, a reader like the boy who read Mill at Āhiritolā.

For the life, Belur Math's account is the trustworthy short one; the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math keeps his archive and its own history; the Vedanta Society of New York records his years there; and the Vedanta Society of Northern California points to Moni Bagchi's Swami Abhedananda: A Spiritual Biography for the full story.

The last years

The last public act was the Parliament of Religions held at the Town Hall in Calcutta in 1937, in the centenary year of Sri Ramakrishna's birth, over which he presided. Belur Math quotes the address at length, and its two passages given above are the summary of his life's teaching: that the Master's mission was to show by living example how a man dead to the world of the senses can live on the plane of God-consciousness, and to demonstrate for the first time that all religions are paths to one goal; and that the Parliament might sound the death-knell of communal strife. It was, the Order says, his last public utterance. His constitution had broken down under the pressure of work; he had spent, in the Order's phrase, the last drop of his energy for the spiritual benefit of those who came to him.

He died in Calcutta on 8 September 1939, a few weeks short of seventy-three. His passing, Belur Math records, was mourned by a large number of people in India and abroad. The Order's own summary of him is exact and should stand as the last word: one of the spiritual and cultural ambassadors of India to the outside world, whose life combined profound spirituality and a spirit of service, and was dedicated to the spiritual uplift of humanity.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for the reader who came in through the door of books. He had read Mill and Hamilton before he had read the Upaniṣads properly, he went to Dakṣiṇeśvar wanting a technique and not a faith, and he spent his life explaining to educated sceptics in a foreign language why the Self is the one thing worth knowing. If that reader is you, begin where he began: “We should hold it as our first duty to acquire this Self-knowledge before we try to know anything concerning the objects of sense-perception.” Then take the four qualities — self-control, concentration, truthfulness, disinterested love for all — as the test of whether anything you believe is more than verbal. Then choose the road that fits your nature, remembering that the roads meet. And then be patient, because “those who are not patient cannot hope to arrive at true realization.”

His example carries a second lesson, quieter than the first. He was pushed on to a platform he had not agreed to stand on, by a brother who trusted him more than he trusted himself, and he discovered there the work of his life. Most of us are not given that push. He would say, on the evidence of his books, that the thing to depend on is not the brother but what the brother pointed to: “Depend on him who has ever given me strength and courage in all the trials of my life.”

A note on the pictures and the dates

No photograph of Swami Abhedananda that this website can confirm to be free of copyright has been found, and its rule is not to show a face it cannot vouch for or to generate one. In place of a portrait the page therefore shows the lamp that stands for every teacher for whom no free likeness exists; the picture credits page explains the policy. Photographs of him certainly exist, and if one is later found under a free licence it will be added and credited. Dates and places follow Belur Math's own life of him, supplemented by the biographical sketch in his Complete Works, the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math's history, the Vedanta Society of New York's record of its ministers, the Vedanta Society of Northern California's page, and, for the visit of 1906, the Order's biography of Swami Ramakrishnananda and The Vedanta Kesari. Where the sources differ, both readings are given: the sketch says he sailed for London in August 1896, Belur Math “the latter part” of that year; Belur Math and the sketch date the founding of his Calcutta centre to 1923, the Math's own history to 1921. The account of the Hemis manuscript is reported as the sketch gives it and not otherwise. The maps are drawn on present-day coordinates and are not from any historical source; the villages of his barefoot years are unrecorded and unpinned.

The timeline, plainly

• 2 October 1866 — born Kāliprasād Chandra at Āhiritolā, Calcutta; educated at the Oriental Seminary, where his father taught English.
• 1882–83 — hears Śaśadhar Tarkacūḍāmaṇi on the six systems; resolves to learn Yoga.
• Mid-1884 — goes to Dakṣiṇeśvar at noon; fed by Śaśī under a tree; initiated by Sri Ramakrishna that night: “You were a great Yogi in your previous birth.”
• 1885–86 — serves the Master at Śyāmpukur and Cossipore.
• 1886–87 — Baranagore; sannyāsa as Swami Abhedananda; “Kali Tapasvī”; the hymns to the Master and the Mother, and her blessing.
• 1888–95 — barefoot through India: the sources of the Ganga and Yamunā, Kedārnāth, Badrīnāth, Hardwar, Purī, Dwārakā, Rāmeśwaram; Vedānta under Swami Dhanrāj Giri at Rishikesh; Vivekananda's letter from Ghazipur, 2 April 1890.
• August 1896 — sails for London; the unannounced first lecture, on the Pañcadaśī, at the Christo-Theosophical Society; takes over Vivekananda's classes in December.
• 9 August 1897 — lands in New York, almost penniless, to take charge of the Vedanta Society.
• 1898 — four hours with William James at his house; Harvard in May; Green Acre; the Society incorporated 29 October 1898.
• 1897–1921 — the American ministry: ninety lectures at Mott Memorial Hall; the United States, Canada, Alaska, Mexico, Europe; the books from Reincarnation (1900) to Human Affection and Divine Love (1912).
• 1906 — the one visit home: Ceylon, Tuticorin, Madras (Mylapore foundation), Mysore 7–12 August, Bangalore foundation 20 August.
• 1921 — San Francisco → Honolulu (Pan-Pacific Educational Conference) → Japan → Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canton → Manila → Singapore, Kuala Lumpur → Rangoon → Calcutta, September.
• 1922 — Tibet and Ladakh (Hemis); Kāśmīr o Tibbate; Kabul, Peshawar, the Punjab.
• 1923 — reaches Belur Math; the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Calcutta (the Math's history says 1921), later the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math; Stotra-Ratnākara; Viśvavāṇī monthly.
• 1924 — the Darjeeling āśrama.
• 1937 — presides over the Parliament of Religions, Town Hall, Calcutta, for the Master's centenary: his last public utterance.
• 8 September 1939 — dies in Calcutta.
• 1940–53 — the manuscripts published by his Math, from Path of Realization to Mystery of Death.