Swami Brahmananda

The Bengal he was born into

He was born Rākhāl Chandra Ghosh on 21 January 1863, in the village of Sikrā-Kulīngrām near Basirhat, in the 24 Parganas district north-east of Calcutta, into a family of zamindars — landholders — who were, by the standards of the Bengal countryside, well off. Calcutta in 1863 was the capital of British India and the second city of the Empire; the rebellion of 1857 was six years past, the Crown had taken the country from the Company, and Bengal was in the middle of the ferment that its historians call the Renaissance: English education, reformist religion, newspapers, a new middle class arguing about God in drawing rooms. Twenty miles out, in a village of ponds and rice, that argument was a rumour. Rākhāl's world was the family Durgā Pūjā, the village Kālī temple, and songs about Kṛṣṇa the cowherd sung in the fields.

The name his parents gave him means "cowherd", the boy-companion of Kṛṣṇa at Vṛndāvan, and the tradition has always seen the choice as more than a name. His father, Ānanda Mohan Ghosh, was a zamindar who started a village school chiefly so that his son could be taught in it. His mother, a devotee of Kṛṣṇa, died when he was five; his father married again, and the stepmother brought him up. The Belur Math account describes a strong, handsome, athletic boy who wrestled, played, made clay images of the Divine Mother and worshipped them, and who — when a schoolmaster caned his classmates — was so distressed that the master gave up caning altogether. It also says that when he sang about Kṛṣṇa in a secluded spot in the fields with his friends, he sometimes "lost almost all outward consciousness". The two things — the athlete and the boy who went out of himself in a song — were there from the start.

Where the life was lived

His life ran from a village in the 24 Parganas to Dakṣiṇeśvar and Calcutta, then across the whole of northern and western India in years of wandering — Vṛndāvan, Kāśī, the Narmadā, Dvārakā, Hardwār — and finally, as head of the Order, up and down the country from Bhubaneswar to Madras and Bangalore. He never left India. The map shows the places on present-day coordinates.

Calcutta, and a friend called Narendra

In 1875, aged twelve, he was sent to Calcutta to an English high school, and in the gymnasium of the neighbourhood he met a boy two months older than himself who was the acknowledged leader of the local youth: Narendranāth Datta, later Swami Vivekananda. They exercised together and became close friends. Narendra took him to the Brāhmo Samāj, the reformist congregation that worshipped a formless God and had no use for images, and both boys signed its pledge not to worship idols. Rākhāl, who had made clay goddesses with his own hands, signed it. It did not last.

What did last was a growing absorption in what the Belur Math account calls "life, death, and the Eternal Verity", and a loss of interest in school so complete that his guardians tried persuasion, then sternness, and finally his father did what fathers did: arranged a marriage, to the sister of Manomohan Mitra of Konnagar, in the hope that a wife would pull him back to the world. It was, as it turned out, the worst possible choice for the purpose, because Manomohan and his mother were devotees of a priest at the Kālī temple at Dakṣiṇeśvar, and in the middle of 1881 Manomohan took his new brother-in-law to meet him.

Dakṣiṇeśvar: the boy from the vision

Sri Ramakrishna had, some time before, seen in a vision a boy standing under a banyan tree, whom the Divine Mother told him would be his son. When Rākhāl bowed to him, the tradition says, he recognised him. He said, in front of the others, that this was the boy — and he meant, he was careful to say, a spiritual son, not a son in the worldly sense. From then on he treated Rākhāl with a tenderness that the other disciples found startling. Rākhāl was eighteen or nineteen; in the Master's presence, the account says, he "felt like a child of four or five", and the Master cared for him "like a helpless infant", feeding him, fussing over his health, going into ecstasy at the sight of him.

It was not only tenderness. Rākhāl was given, in meditation beside the Kālī temple, his mantra, his chosen form of God and a vision of that form, and his practice advanced so fast that he was frequently lost in absorption and had to be brought back. The Master warned him never to tell a lie, even as a joke; taught him humility by staying at a festival where he himself was being insulted, when Rākhāl wanted to leave; and, when the boy came to him miserable because his mind wandered in meditation, wrote something on his tongue and — Rākhāl said — the trouble vanished. The father, hearing that his son was living at the temple, put him under watch; Rākhāl escaped and ran back to Dakṣiṇeśvar; the father eventually gave the case up as hopeless.

Two years of this, and then the fevers began — recurring attacks that would trouble him all his life — and the Master sent him to Vṛndāvan with the devotee Balarām Bose for a change of air. He fell ill there too, and the Master, alarmed, prayed for him to the Mother and received, he said, an assurance. Rākhāl came back after three months, better. It was the first of his journeys to Vṛndāvan, and it fixed the place in him.

"Rājā"

In 1885 the Master's throat cancer was diagnosed, and he was moved to Śyāmpukur and then to the garden house at Cossipore, where the young disciples nursed him through his last months. Rākhāl was among them, and the accounts say he grew, in those months, more serious and more inward. The Master said of him that he had the wisdom and the capacity to administer a vast kingdom; Narendra proposed that they call him Rājā, king, and the Master approved. The name stuck for the rest of his life. When the Order came into being and he became its head, the monks called him Rājā Mahārāj, or simply Mahārāj, and the Order still does.

Sri Ramakrishna died on 16 August 1886. The young men, penniless, took a dilapidated house at Barānagore, a little downriver from Dakṣiṇeśvar, and in the winter of 1886–87 they formally took the vows of sannyāsa together. Rākhāl became Swami Brahmānanda. The Barānagore years, the Order's account says, were "marked by hard tapasya and disregard for physical comfort": one cloth each, rice and boiled greens, days of meditation and nights of scripture and song, and a determination to make permanent, alone, what they had known in the Master's presence.

The years of wandering

Brahmānanda wanted solitude, and for the best part of eight years he had it. He went first to Purī, begging his food, and left when Balarām Bose's hospitality there made austerity impossible. Then, with Narendra's permission and Swami Subodhānanda for a companion, he went north: to Kāśī by way of Deoghar; to Oṃkāranātha on the Narmadā, where for six days, the account says, he remained "in an ecstatic mood, almost oblivious to the external world"; to the Pañcavaṭī near Nāsik; to Dvārakā, Kṛṣṇa's city on the western sea; to Porbandar, Girnār and Ajmer; and back to Vṛndāvan, where he practised so severely that Subodhānanda, bringing him food, found he had sometimes forgotten to eat it, and the two of them, living side by side, hardly spoke.

When Balarām Bose died he moved again, to Kankhal near Hardwār, where the Ganges comes out of the hills, seeking greater solitude still. He said afterwards that Kankhal's atmosphere was the most favourable he had known for spiritual practice. It was there that Swami Vivekananda, coming down from Almora with Swami Turīyānanda, Swami Sāradānanda and a devotee, found him unexpectedly, judged that the austerity was damaging his health, and more or less compelled him to come away toward Meerut. When Vivekananda went off alone, Brahmānanda and Turīyānanda went on pilgrimage together to Jvālāmukhī in the Punjab hills, then through the Punjab, Sind, Bombay and Rājputāna. In Bombay they met Vivekananda again, preparing to sail for the Parliament of Religions at Chicago; they travelled with him as far as Abu Road station, saw him off, and went back to Vṛndāvan, where Turīyānanda looked after him and the two of them lived, the account says, "absorbed in communion with God day and night".

He came back to Bengal at the end of 1894, after repeated letters from Vivekananda and from the monastery, which had moved from Barānagore to Ālambāzār. He was thirty-one. He had spent almost all of his twenties in silence, and from what the monks said of him afterwards, it showed.

The Order, and the man who held it

When Vivekananda came home from the West in 1897 he handed Brahmānanda all the money collected for the Indian work, and made him — the account uses the phrase — his "friend, philosopher and guide". When the Ramakrishna Mission was formed in May 1897, Brahmānanda was made president of its Calcutta centre. When the Belur Math trust was drawn up in 1901, Vivekananda made him president of the Math, and on Vivekananda's death in July 1902 he became the head of the whole Order, a position he held for twenty years until his own death. It is not too much to say that the Order as it exists — its monastic discipline, its habit of combining meditation with service, its balance between the contemplative and the administrator — was fixed by him in those two decades.

He was, by every account, a reluctant administrator who was very good at it. He toured the country founding and steadying centres: Bhubaneswar, where he built the monastery and spent long stretches in the last years of his life; Madras, Bangalore, Kankhal, Kāśī, Bombay, Dhākā. He brought discipline to a young order — fixed hours, fixed duties, no exceptions — and he refused to let discipline become the point. Monks who came to him full of the work were told to go and meditate; monks who came to him full of meditation were told to go and work. His rule for the Order, repeated in dozens of forms, was that the life must be lived in both directions at once, and that a monk who neglected either would lose both.

The younger monks were, at first, afraid of him. He said almost nothing, and he saw everything. Then they discovered the other side — an affection so complete that a generation of the Order's leaders described him as the person who had loved them most in their lives — and the fear became something else. Swami Prabhavānanda, who later carried the teaching to America and wrote a book about him, called him "the eternal companion". He was, in Vivekananda's phrase, the Order's spiritual guide, and the Order has never appointed another.

How he taught

He gave almost no lectures and wrote nothing for publication. What survives of his teaching was written down by the monks who served him — Swami Prabhavānanda, Swami Yatīśvarānanda, Swami Ashokānanda and others — from conversations, and it has the character of conversation: short, practical, addressed to the person in front of him. He was asked, by young men who had read the Upaniṣads and wanted the highest, what to do, and he told them to practise: to keep a fixed hour of meditation and never miss it, to repeat the Name, to study the scriptures a little each day, to serve, and to be patient. Practise, he said, in every form the word can take; the mind, he taught, is not to be beaten or indulged but fed — given better food than it has been living on — and held to it, gently, again and again, for years.

He was clear about the relation between the paths. Devotion, he said, was the safest road for most, because it brings the mind under control by attraction rather than by force; but devotion without knowledge becomes sentiment, and knowledge without devotion becomes dryness, and both without practice are words. He taught that the goal of all of it was what the Master had — direct experience, God seen and felt as vividly as this room — and he did not hide that he himself had had it. Monks who watched him in his last years describe a man who would go silent in the middle of a sentence and stay there for an hour, and who once, at Bhubaneswar, spent many days in a state in which he had to be fed and led like a child and spoke, when he spoke, of Kṛṣṇa as a companion he could see.

The last years, and Bhubaneswar

He travelled to the end. The Order's account has him in Madras in May 1917 laying the foundation stone of the Ramakrishna Mission Students' Home, in Dhākā in 1916 for the foundation of the monastery there, and back in Madras in 1920 — his last visit to the South — to open the Students' Home's new building. Between journeys he went to Bhubaneswar, in Orissa, where he had personally supervised the building of an āśrama that he meant to be a place of retreat for monks worn down by the work: somewhere with, in the account's words, "suitable facilities for tapasya". He did not live to see the plan completed. It was at Bhubaneswar, in those last years, that the monks saw him most often in the states of absorption that his early life had promised, and heard him speak, as the account records, of a vision the Master too had seen — a thousand-petalled lotus on the waters of the Ganges, and on it a boy holding the hands of Kṛṣṇa.

He came back to Calcutta in the last week of March 1922 and stayed, as he often did, at Balarām Bose's house in Bāgbāzār, a house Sri Ramakrishna had visited many times. On 24 March he was struck by cholera. He recovered from it, and then diabetes set in, and the doctors could do nothing. Through the illness, the account says, he spoke of the highest things, blessed those who came, and returned in ecstasy to the vision of the lotus and the boy. He died on 10 April 1922, closing his eyes, the Order says, in deep samādhi. The monks who were in the room did not describe it as a death.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

He had a body that failed him from youth — recurring fevers, a stomach that rebelled, and finally the cholera and diabetes that killed him — and a temperament that wanted only solitude, set for twenty years in the one position in the Order that made solitude impossible. He had lost his mother at five and his teacher at twenty-three, and the friend of his boyhood, the greatest man he knew, at thirty-nine. He carried the Order through the years after Vivekananda's death when many outside it expected it to dissolve, through famine relief and plague work and the building of monasteries, through quarrels between monks that only he could settle, and he did all of it as a man who had wanted to sit under a tree on the Narmadā and never come back.

He did not pretend otherwise. He told the monks that the work was a burden the Master had put on him, and that he bore it because it was the Master's. He withdrew whenever he could — to Bhubaneswar, to Kankhal, to Vṛndāvan — and came back when he was needed. The lesson the Order drew from him was not that the contemplative life and the active life are easy to combine but that they must be combined anyway, and that the way to do it is to keep the inner life absolutely fixed and let the outer life arrange itself around it.

The sayings, and what they were for

He wrote nothing for publication. What follows is as his disciples recorded it, in the collection the Ramakrishna Math published as Spiritual Teachings of Swami Brahmananda; the chapter is given for each.

What the sayings are for is obvious once you notice who they were said to: young monks, most of them well-read, who were in danger of mistaking understanding for attainment. Every one of them turns the listener from thinking about the goal to doing something about it before the next meal. That was his whole method as a teacher, and it is why the Order has treated him as its model of the spiritual director rather than of the thinker.

The books, and how to read them

He wrote nothing himself. There are two collections to read, both made by his disciples from notes. Spiritual Teachings of Swami Brahmananda, published by the Ramakrishna Math, gathers his instructions on practice — meditation, japa, the guru, work, the stages of the path — in short numbered paragraphs, and is the place to start; it can be read a paragraph a day. The Eternal Companion, by Swami Prabhavānanda, is a biography followed by a long record of conversations at Madras, Bhubaneswar and Belur in his last years, and gives the man as well as the teaching: the silences, the affection, the sudden withdrawals. Read the biography first and the conversations slowly. Belur Math's own life of him, on the Order's site, is the authoritative short account and the source for the dates on this page.

The timeline, plainly

• 21 January 1863 — born Rākhāl Chandra Ghosh at Sikrā-Kulīngrām near Basirhat, 24 Parganas, Bengal, son of the zamindar Ānanda Mohan Ghosh.
• c. 1868 — his mother dies; his father remarries and the stepmother brings him up.
• 1875 — sent to an English high school in Calcutta; meets Narendranāth Datta, later Swami Vivekananda, in the neighbourhood gymnasium; joins the Brāhmo Samāj with him.
• c. 1880–81 — married to the sister of Manomohan Mitra of Konnagar.
• Mid-1881 — taken by Manomohan to Dakṣiṇeśvar; Sri Ramakrishna recognises him as the boy of his vision and calls him his spiritual son.
• 1881–85 — lives largely at Dakṣiṇeśvar; rapid spiritual progress; sent to Vṛndāvan for three months for his health.
• 1885–86 — nurses the Master at Śyāmpukur and Cossipore; named "Rājā" by Narendra with the Master's approval.
• 16 August 1886 — Sri Ramakrishna dies. Winter 1886–87: sannyāsa at Barānagore; becomes Swami Brahmānanda.
• c. 1887–94 — years of pilgrimage and austerity: Purī; Kāśī via Deoghar; Oṃkāranātha on the Narmadā; Pañcavaṭī; Dvārakā, Porbandar, Girnār, Ajmer; Vṛndāvan; Kankhal near Hardwār; Jvālāmukhī; the Punjab, Sind, Bombay, Rājputāna; Vṛndāvan again with Swami Turīyānanda.
• 1893 — sees Swami Vivekananda off from Bombay, travelling with him as far as Abu Road, on his way to Chicago.
• End of 1894 — returns to the monastery, now at Ālambāzār.
• 1897 — Vivekananda returns from the West and hands him the funds for the Indian work; president of the Calcutta centre of the new Ramakrishna Mission.
• 1901 — appointed president of Belur Math by Vivekananda under the trust deed.
• 4 July 1902 — Vivekananda dies; Brahmānanda becomes head of the whole Order.
• 1902–22 — twenty years as president: tours and founds centres across India; builds the Bhubaneswar monastery; guides a generation of monks.
• 24 March 1922 — an attack of cholera at Balarām Bose's house in Bāgbāzār, Calcutta, followed by complications.
• 10 April 1922 — dies at Balarām Bose's house, Calcutta, aged fifty-nine, in what the Order calls his mahāsamādhi.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for anyone who has responsibilities they did not choose and would rather be somewhere quiet. He wanted a cave on the Narmadā and was given an institution, and he made of that the demonstration that the inner life does not need the cave — that it needs a fixed hour, a fixed practice and a refusal to let anything, however important, take that hour away. His instructions are the least glamorous on this site and among the most useful: sit at the same time every day; do not skip; repeat the Name; read a little; do your work as service; be patient for years; and do not talk about it.

He also stands for something the tradition needs reminding of: that a great teacher may leave no book. His whole legacy is in the men he trained, and through them in the Order, and through the Order in the people it has served for a century. Someone has to keep the fire, and the keeper is not less than the one who lit it.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portrait of him is used on this page, in keeping with this site's rule against inventing likenesses of real teachers; photographs of him exist and are kept by the Order. Dates and places follow Belur Math's own life of him, which is the source for the details of his years of pilgrimage; the order of his travels in those years is as the Order gives it, and exact years for some of them are not recorded. The sayings are as recorded by his disciples in the two collections named above. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates.