Swami Dayananda Saraswati

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 born in 1930 at Manjakkudi, a village in the Kāverī delta in Tamil Nadu, and worked in business before renouncing. Then he did what few do in either direction: he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta with complete rigour in the Śaṅkara tradition, and then chose to teach in English, word by word from the original texts rather than from summaries. His diagnosis of the problem was institutional. Students were not the bottleneck; qualified teachers were. So he built teachers — long residential courses, two and three years, in Sanskrit grammar and the Prasthānatrayī, which produced hundreds of teachers who now teach on several continents. He taught at Sandeepany in Mumbai, then founded gurukulams at Rishikesh on the Ganges, at Anaikatti in the hills near Coimbatore, at Nagpur, and at Saylorsburg in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. He also built a school and a hospital at Manjakkudi, the village he came from, and in November 2001 convened the first World Congress for the Preservation of Religious Diversity in Delhi, arguing publicly that a tradition which holds reality to be one has a specific obligation to defend the plurality of religions. His Introduction to Vedanta and his commentaries on the Gītā and the Upaniṣads are still the clearest entry points many students find. He died at Rishikesh on 23 September 2015.

The turn it rests on

He decided the bottleneck was not students but teachers, and built teachers.

What was taught

Trained generations of Vedanta teachers through long residential courses and unmatched precision of language.