Swami Gambhirananda

The Sylhet he was born into

He was born Jatindra Nath Datta on 11 February 1899 — the 29th of Māgh, 1305, by the Bengali calendar — in the village of Sadhuhati in the district of Sylhet, then in the Assam province of British India and now in Bangladesh. His father, Dinanath Datta, was a local zemindar, a landholder, and the family belonged, the Order’s biography records, to the Śākta tradition, the worship of the Divine Mother. His mother, Tarasundari Devi, was a woman of long daily japa who would sometimes shape an image of Śiva out of clay, worship it, and immerse it in the pond. Jatindra was the last of four children: two elder brothers, Jitendra and Surendra, and an elder sister, Sushama. It was a large joint family, and it was broken early. He lost his father young and was brought up in the well-to-do household of his maternal uncles, where the eldest of them, Abhay Kumar Dam, stood guardian, since the boy had no uncles on his father’s side. In that house the family deity, Sri Madanmohan, was worshipped every day, and the Durgā and Kālī pūjās came round each autumn.

Sylhet at the turn of the century was a district of rivers, tea and rice, far from Calcutta but not cut off from it. The Ramakrishna Mission had monks at Sylhet town, and it was there, staying with his uncles, that the boy first came into contact with the Order whose head he would one day be. He had already read some of the Ramakrishna–Vivekananda literature at home. The books of Swami Vivekananda, the biography says plainly, gave him his first inspiration and aroused in his heart a feeling of renunciation. That is the whole of what the Order tells of his inner life as a boy, and this page adds nothing to it.

Two things about the setting matter for what follows. The first is that the Bengal of his youth was a Bengal of revolutionary politics and police surveillance, and the Ramakrishna Mission, watched by the Government, had become wary of admitting unknown young men; that wariness would nearly turn him away at the door. The second is that the province he was born in would be partitioned twice in his lifetime — in 1947 and again, in effect, in 1971 — so that the village of his birth, the school of his boyhood, the town where he gave his first speech and the centres he visited as General Secretary in 1972 and 1977 would all lie in another country. The map below marks them in present-day Bangladesh for that reason.

Where the life was lived

The life has an unusual geography for a monk of his generation, because it was lived less on the road than at a desk. There is the Sylhet of birth and schooling, with Shillong and Maulavi Bazar; the Calcutta of college and of the Order’s offices; Rangoon, where a year of government accounts turned him towards monastic life; Varanasi, where he was first refused and later ordained; Deoghar, where he spent eleven years teaching and running a school; Mayavati in the Kumaon Himalaya, where he edited the Order’s English monthly and later presided over the Advaita Ashrama; Belur Math, where he served for some thirty years as office-master, Assistant Secretary, General Secretary and President; and Ranchi, where as Vice-President he lived at the Morabadi ashrama. Round these are the pilgrimages of his old age — Kedārnāth and Badrīnāth, Amarnāth, Gaṅgotrī, Kanyākumārī — and the last tour of December 1988 through the small towns of the 24-Parganas and Navadvīp.

The journeys abroad were few and are on the second map further down the page: Rangoon in 1922–23 and again in 1969; Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka in 1969; the centres of the Order in Europe and America in the autumn of 1972, on the way to an eye operation in Boston; Dhaka and Narayanganj in 1972 and 1977; Pashupatināth in Nepal in 1976; and Mauritius, where he consecrated the marble image of Sri Ramakrishna in the temple there.

The boy who lost his father, and the stars over Rangoon

His schooling moved with the family’s circumstances. He began at the village school in Sadhuhati, went on to the Maulavi Bazar High School, then to the Government High School at Shillong, and back to Maulavi Bazar, from which he passed the Entrance Examination in 1917 in the first division and won a scholarship. With it he went to Calcutta and was admitted to the Scottish Church College — Swami Vivekananda’s old college, though the Order’s biography does not labour the point — and lived in the Ogilvie hostel next to the college. Two of his classmates became well-known writers: Sajani Kanta Das, the editor, and Gopal Haldar. The biography is careful to record that he was not a bookish boy. He excelled at football, volleyball and rowing, and to the end of his life he would listen to the running commentaries of matches on the radio and take a particular interest in the results. His eldest brother sent him money; he added his scholarship to it and made ends meet. In 1922 he took his B.A. with Honours in Economics, his subjects being English, Bengali, Mathematics and Economics. The biography adds a detail that he must have supplied himself: in all his student years in Calcutta it never once occurred to him to go and see the Holy Mother, who was then living at the Udbodhan house in north Calcutta, or Swami Saradananda, or any of the direct disciples at Belur Math. The man who would write what the Order calls the first authentic biography of Sri Sarada Devi never saw her.

Then he did what many educated young Bengalis did: he went to Burma for work. He was employed for a time as an accounts officer in the military department at Rangoon. What happened there is told in the biography with a directness that repays quoting closely. He would sit alone on the roof of his house at night and gaze at the sky full of stars, and feel, as he sat, a beckoning from an unknown world. Then his eyes would fall on the military barracks below, where he noticed the immoral, shallow and inhuman life of the soldiers — and, alongside it, their strict discipline, their obedience to rules and their sense of responsibility. There arose in his mind, the Order says, a conflict between the lure of the military life and the call of Swami Vivekananda. Being an idealist, the call prevailed.

It is worth pausing on that conflict, because it is so unlike the usual pattern. The young men who came to the Order in the 1880s and 1890s were drawn from a Master’s presence or a brother-monk’s example. Jatindra Datta had neither. He had read books, met some monks in a district town, and found in the barracks of a colonial army a picture of discipline that attracted him and a picture of life that repelled him. The monk he became kept the discipline and discarded the rest. The colleagues who described him fifty years later used the same words the biography uses of those soldiers — method, fixed time-schedules, a sense of responsibility — and the man who sat on the Rangoon rooftop would have recognised the description.

Varanasi and Deoghar, 1923: the door that would not open

The biography opens its detailed account not with the birth but with a scene: it was March 1923, and a gentle young man suddenly appeared in Varanasi. He had come to see his teacher, who was now a sannyāsin of the Order living at the Ramakrishna Mission centre there — Swami Jagadananda, under whom, the biography says elsewhere, he studied Vedānta — and found on arriving that the teacher had gone away. He went instead to the Secretary of the Home of Service, the Sevashrama, and laid his desire before him. The Secretary declined. The reasons the biography gives are the reasons of the time: the revolutionary movement was active everywhere, the Government was keeping an eye on the Ramakrishna Mission, and as a rule no unknown person was being admitted. “We do not admit any unknown young man,” the Secretary told him. “You are highly educated. This Sevashrama may not suit you. You had better go to Belur Math.” The reply was prompt and shows the man already formed: “Sir, you are not admitting me because I am unknown to you; but the same problem will arise when I go to Belur Math. Will you kindly give me a letter of introduction?” He got a letter saying only that he had come to Varanasi to see Swami Jagadananda, and went to Belur.

At Belur Math the President of the Order was Swami Shivananda, Mahapurush Maharaj, a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. But the young man’s business was with the office, and the Joint Secretary, Swami Shuddhananda, gave him a disappointing reply. He was, the biography says, deeply depressed, and the ray of hope in his heart grew faint. What saved the situation was an accident of presence. The Secretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith at Deoghar, Swami Sadbhavananda, and its Chief Supervisor, Swami Nirvedananda, happened to be at the Math, and they proposed that he should come to Deoghar. He agreed. Before he left he went to Mahapurush Maharaj for his blessing, and received a sentence that he took as the rule of his life: “Stay at the Math. Let your character be built up first, and then you will do useful work.” The first thing needed in a monk’s life, the biography glosses, is the building up of character. In May 1923, aged twenty-four, he joined the Deoghar Vidyapith as a brahmacārin. Swami Nirvedananda told him: “In course of time you will have to do a lot of work for the Ramakrishna Order.”

The Vidyapith was a residential school for boys in the Santal Parganas of Bihar, and he stayed there, in two spells, for about eleven years — from 1923 to 1929 and from 1931 to 1935 — first as a monastic worker, then as Headmaster, and finally as Secretary. The last office came to him in 1926, when Swami Sadbhavananda fell ill with tuberculosis and was sent to Madras for treatment, and the young brahmacārin took over the running of the school in addition to teaching. The Vidyapith then had many problems, the biography says: a paucity of funds, a shortage of students and teachers. He was twenty-seven. It was his first taste of administration and he seems never afterwards to have been without it. He lived, the biography insists, like every other brahmacārin: he washed his own dishes, took no advantage of his position, and played football, volleyball and carrom with the rest.

A word about the two dates. The Order’s short summary says he joined the Order in May 1923; its detailed account opens in March 1923 at Varanasi. Both are right: March is when he arrived and was refused, May when he was admitted at Deoghar. This page keeps both.

Saumya Chaitanya: the guru who said “O Lord! bless him”

In December 1923, on the Holy Mother’s birthday, at 9.30 in the morning at Belur Math, he took the vows of brahmacarya with a few others. The ācārya on the seat was Swami Shuddhananda — the same officer who had turned him away nine months before. His new name was Saumya Chaitanya. When Mahapurush Maharaj met him he recalled a phrase from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 6.2.1 — sad eva somya, “Being alone, my dear” — and called him by it: “Sadeva Somya.” For three days he ate the plain boiled rice and ghee of the newly vowed, cooked by himself, on the bank of a pond called Padmapukur that no longer exists. He had not yet received initiation. On the fourth day Mahapurush Maharaj, of his own accord, told him and another brahmacārin, Mati Maharaj (later Swami Shivaswarupananda), not to take food, and initiated them in the old shrine on his own birthday.

The disciple’s own account of that morning survives, and the biography quotes it. He knew none of the rules and had brought nothing with him. Seeing his predicament the guru said, “Go to the shrine-store downstairs and bring a myrobalan or any other fruit.” He did not remember afterwards which fruit he brought, but the guru accepted it, sent him downstairs, and prayed to Sri Ramakrishna, “O Lord! bless him.” The blessing, the biography says, was felt by him throughout his life. His account of the first meeting is equally exact. He had been told that Mahapurush Maharaj was strict and serious and a man of few words, and he was afraid. “When I first met him, I sat quietly after the usual courtesies. One or two persons came and went away exchanging a few words with him. I was all the time looking at him. He also glanced at me now and then. He was extremely handsome, his complexion was very fair, and his eyes were full of love and affection. Therefore, even though I was not fully free from fear, I had decided that this very noble and quiet Sannyasin would be my guide in life.”

He could not enjoy that company for long, living as he did far from Belur. But he spent the Durgā Pūjā, Christmas and summer holidays at the Math, and there he saw the direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna who were still living — Swamis Saradananda, Akhandananda, Subodhananda, Vijnanananda and Abhedananda. It never occurred to him, the biography records, to put a question to any of them; he paid his obeisance and came away. The exception was Khoka Maharaj, Swami Subodhananda, who mixed with monks and brahmacārins sometimes like a child, sometimes like an elder brother and sometimes like an affectionate father. It was Swami Akhandananda, though, who made him speak. Asked to attend a meeting of the Trustees, which made him nervous, he was told by the President of that meeting to give a lecture at Sonargaon, in what is now Bangladesh. “I have never given a lecture,” he said. “You shall have to go there and deliver a lecture,” Akhandananda insisted. He went with an aged sādhu and spoke. It was the first public speech of a man who would address the Order’s Second Convention fifty-four years later.

Two moments from Mahapurush Maharaj’s visit to Deoghar in January 1926 stayed with him. In the kitchen, where Saumya Chaitanya was cutting vegetables, the guru came to him after tipping the drummers who had begun to dance for joy at his arrival, and said: “Here I feel the manifestation of divine Shakti. In course of time great deeds will be done here.” The disciple did not understand it then; he understood it later. And one morning Mahapurush Maharaj, whose asthma the Deoghar cold had aggravated, told them he had passed the whole night sitting up in bed. Touching his chest he said that when the pain became unbearable he had concentrated his mind on this, and the pain subsided. Swami Omkarananda, who was present, asked what “this” was. “This is verily the Atman,” Mahapurush replied. Saumya Chaitanya, the biography says, tried to cultivate that feeling for the rest of his life; and in later years it was found that he hardly told anyone of his troubles or illness.

Sannyāsa at Varanasi, and six annas a day

He received sannyāsa in 1928 on Swami Vivekananda’s birthday, at Varanasi, with Mahapurush Maharaj present and Swami Jagadananda — the teacher he had come to Varanasi to find five years before — as ācārya. The candidates performed their own funeral rites at Maṇikarṇikā Ghāṭ, as the rule of sannyāsa requires, and cast their staffs into the Ganga. His own recollection was recorded: “After taking Sannyasa we took bath in the Ganga, visited the temples of Goddess Annapurna and Lord Vishvanath and paid our obeisance to Mahapurushji by lying prostrate before him. After Sannyasa, one has to beg alms. Mahapurushji himself gave us the first alms in the form of a rupee and said, ‘Buy and eat Jilipi.’ We did so, sitting in the open courtyard of the Advaita Ashrama.” At noon he begged his alms elsewhere. The guru named him Gambhirananda — the bliss of profundity — and the biography notes that his external appearance was indeed gambhīr, grave. The monks called him Gambhi Maharaj.

After a spell at the Udbodhan house in Calcutta he was posted to the Advaita Ashrama at Varanasi from 1929 to 1931, under Swami Nirbharananda, Chandra Maharaj. The work assigned to him was shopping. Chandra Maharaj gave him six annas a day — two for the materials of Sri Ramakrishna’s worship, four for the monks’ vegetables — and the young sannyāsin, the biography records, would sometimes save a pice or two and return it. He also studied the scriptures under a learned paṇḍit in the city. It is the only formal Sanskrit training the Order mentions for a man who would translate Sri Śaṅkara’s commentaries on eight Upaniṣads, the Brahma-sūtra, the Gītā and the Chāndogya into English. The rest he taught himself, over a lifetime, in the hours a full-time administrator could spare.

In 1936 he went with some monks to see the Ardha-Kumbha at Allahabad and called on Swami Vijnanananda at the Muthiganj ashrama. The direct disciple was upstairs. “Who are you?” he called down. “We are Sadhus of the Ramakrishna Math.” “Where are you coming from?” “From the Kumbha Mela area.” “All right,” said Vijnanananda, “go back to the same place.” A day or two later Vijnanananda himself visited the fair at the confluence, and Gambhirananda had the good fortune of walking round it with him. The biography tells the story without comment. It is the kind of story he liked to tell, and the point of it is the direct disciple’s freedom, not the young monk’s discomfiture.

The office-master: Belur, Mayavati and the road to Lohaghat

From 1936 his life belonged to the Order’s administration. He was a member of the Working Committee of the Math and Mission for nearly ten years, 1936–41 and 1945–47, which meant living at Belur Math, where members were then elected at the conference of monks held every third year. He was the office-master. A colleague remembered that when a monk was transferred from the Math to another centre, it was generally Gambhirananda who wrote the farewell address. In 1945, on his second posting at Belur, he was appointed Inspector of Branch Centres, visiting the Order’s houses across India and reporting on them to the authorities — work that gave him the intimate knowledge of every centre that his later years drew on.

Between the two Belur spells came Mayavati. The Advaita Ashrama sits in the lap of the Himalaya in the Kumaon hills, and from it is published Prabuddha Bharata, the English monthly Swami Vivekananda founded. Gambhirananda edited it for three years, 1942–44, when Swami Pavitrananda was President of the Ashrama. His editorials, the biography says, on various subjects and from different points of view, won the admiration of all; and it was in his editorship that two famous paintings of Nandalal Bose, ‘Shiva Taking Poison’ and ‘Nataraja’, were published in the journal. A brahmacārin who typed his articles — now a senior monk — remembered being asked to see how they had come out, noticing a few mistakes of grammar and spelling, hesitating, and finally mentioning them. The editor was not displeased. “Well, you can make corrections where necessary,” he said. The typist marvelled that a junior of one year’s standing should be given leave to correct the editor, and concluded that only a real sannyāsin could be so modest.

He was made a Trustee of the Ramakrishna Math and a member of the Governing Body of the Mission in March 1947, and in April joined the headquarters as one of the Assistant Secretaries, serving until 1953; in 1949 he was added to the Advisory Finance Committee. Then, from 1953 to 1963, he went back to the hills as President of the Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati. The biography’s account of that decade is a small catalogue of practical care: he enlarged the vegetable garden, solved the long-standing scarcity of water, brought cows of good breed to increase the milk, started bee-keeping, and had good flower plants sent up from Calcutta for the garden. When the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, C. B. Gupta, visited the Ashrama, Gambhirananda obtained through him a metalled road of seven and a half kilometres from Lohaghat to the Ashrama, and named it Mayavati Road. A first storey was added to the monks’ quarters. And in Calcutta, where the Ashrama’s publication department at 4 Wellington Lane had outgrown its rooms, he bought a plot at 5 Dehi Entally Road in 1958, laid the foundation stone on 17 November of that year, and opened the new building on 8 December 1961 — the house from which the Order’s English books, including his own, have been published since.

It was in these Mayavati years that the writer emerged. The Bengali Upanishad Granthavali had come out in three parts in the early 1940s; now, in English, came Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi (1955), History of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission (1957), and the two volumes of Eight Upaniṣads with Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary (1957 and 1958). The Order’s summary puts it simply: he had an outstanding record of service to the organisation, and he was an erudite scholar. The order of those two clauses is the order of his own priorities, and the next section is about how he kept them together.

Thirteen years at the helm

He was appointed Assistant Secretary a second time on 5 October 1963, and when Swami Vireshwarananda became President of the Order in 1966, Gambhirananda became its General Secretary on 16 February of that year. He held the office for about thirteen years. The biography’s judgement is that he had administrative skill and deep monastic ardour, a rare combination — “like a diamond set in gold”. He was very methodical; he followed a fixed time-schedule for every piece of work; he consulted his colleagues when necessary; he solved difficult problems tactfully; and when necessary he could chide monks harshly. To his old colleague Swami Bhuteshananda, later President, he once said: “If you want anyone to be chided, send him to me. I cannot persuade anyone with sweet words. If that is required I shall send him to you.” Bhuteshananda’s own summary is worth having whole: “Swami Gambhiranandaji was quite practical. He had a very strong personality. A great quality of his character was his sense of justice.”

He regarded the daily routine of the office as worship. The verse he most often recited, gently and under his breath, was from the Śivamānasapūjā — which the biography attributes to Vyāsa, and which is more commonly printed among the hymns ascribed to Sri Śaṅkara: ātmā tvaṁ Girijā matiḥ sahacarāḥ prāṇāḥ śarīraṁ gṛham … yad yat karma karomi tat tad akhilaṁ Śambho tavārādhanam — “You are my Self, Girijā my intellect, the vital breaths your attendants, the body your house … whatever I do, all of it, O Śambhu, is worship of you.” A General Secretary who says that verse over the morning post has resolved the old quarrel between work and contemplation in the simplest way possible, by declining to admit it.

The work of those years is recorded in outline. New centres of the Math and Mission were opened at Along, Tirap and Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh, at Guwahati in Assam, at Hyderabad and at Raipur. At Belur, where there had been no proper arrangement for old and sick monks, he had the Arogya Bhavan built, and took personal steps to create a fund for their support and treatment. And in the same years, at a desk in the same office, he translated Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahma-sūtra into English; the book came out in 1965, a few months before he became General Secretary, and was later prescribed as a textbook by the Universities of Nagpur and Delhi.

He also, at the request of many monks and against the pressure of the office, went on pilgrimage: Kedārnāth and Badrīnāth in October 1973, Pashupatināth in Nepal in March 1976, Amarnāth in July 1976, Kanyākumārī in March 1977 and Gaṅgotrī in October 1977. Of Amarnāth, which he reached on 26 July 1976 with one colleague, the biography records something he would not usually have told. Coming down from the cave, their foreheads smeared with its ash, he exclaimed: “Do you know what I saw there? I had a vision of Sri Thakur sitting there!” He repeated it to many who asked, though in general he kept silent about such things.

His eyes had been weak since childhood — even as a schoolboy he had avoided studying at night — and they worsened with age. In 1972 an operation for a detached retina in the left eye was arranged at Boston, which gave temporary relief and no cure. In 1977, still General Secretary, he broke a leg and told his attendant nothing for some time; he was sent to the Seva Pratishthan, came back plastered, and when Swami Abhayananda asked about it during a Trustees’ meeting held in his bedroom, answered, “O! That’s nothing.” Old age and failing sight made him ask, again and again, to be relieved. The authorities were reluctant; he insisted; and on 1 April 1979 he became a Vice-President of the Order, and went to live mostly at the Morabadi ashrama in Ranchi.

Beyond India: Rangoon, Boston and Mauritius, mapped

He was not a travelling monk, and the map of his journeys abroad is short. Rangoon comes first and, in a sense, explains everything after it: the year of military accounts in 1922–23 in which the roof-top and the barracks decided his life. He saw Burma again in 1969, when as General Secretary he visited the Order’s centres in Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka on administrative work. In 1972, on his way to Boston for the eye operation, he visited all the branch centres of the Ramakrishna Math in America and Europe between August and November — the biography names no cities other than Boston, so none is pinned. He was in Dhaka and Narayanganj, in the new Bangladesh, in 1972 and again in 1977; at Pashupatināth in March 1976; and as Vice-President he flew to Mauritius to consecrate the marble image of Sri Ramakrishna in the temple there.

Swipe sideways to pan the map

Set against the fifty countries of Swami Ranganathananda or the forty years of Swami Nikhilananda in New York, it is a modest itinerary, and the modesty is the point. His contribution to the Order’s reach was made from inside: the Brahma-sūtra translation that an American or German reader could use, the History that told the movement its own story, the centres opened in the north-east, the funds for the old. When he did go abroad it was to see and be seen by his own brothers, and to come home.

How the books were made

He wrote, translated or edited fifteen books, and the biography lists them with the years of first publication. In Bengali: Stavakusumāñjali, a garland of hymns (1346 B.E., about 1939); Upanishad Granthavali in three parts (1348, 1350 and 1351 B.E., about 1941–44); Sri Sri Ramakrishna Bhaktamalika, lives of the Master’s devotees, in two parts (1359 B.E., about 1952); Sri Ma Sarada Devi (1360 B.E., about 1953); Siddhāntaleśa-saṁgraha, the sixteenth-century digest of Advaita positions (1365 B.E., about 1958); Yuganayak Vivekananda, the life of Swami Vivekananda in three volumes (1373 B.E., about 1966); and Kah Panthah, “Which is the way?” (1393 B.E., about 1986). In English: Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi (1955); History of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission (1957); Eight Upaniṣads with Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary, volume I (1957) and volume II (1958); Brahma-sūtra Bhāṣya of Sri Śaṅkarācārya (1965); The Apostles of Sri Ramakrishna (1966), which he compiled and edited; Chāndogya Upaniṣad with Śaṅkara’s commentary (1983); Bhagavad Gītā with Śaṅkara’s commentary (1984); and Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad with Śaṅkara’s commentary (1986). He also edited the eighth volume of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda and the third volume of The Cultural Heritage of India, on the philosophies. His last work, an English translation of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s commentary on the Gītā, was complete in draft but its revision was unfinished when he died.

The prefaces show how he understood the job. The Eight Upaniṣads, dated from Mayavati in September 1957, opens: “The present attempt aims at making the thoughts of the great saint and philosopher Sri Sankaracarya available to those readers who are either unfamiliar with Sanskrit or, though fairly acquainted with it, prefer the medium of another language for a better understanding.” He acknowledged the difficulty of carrying so abstruse a philosophy into a language so different in form and spirit, and stated his rule: “We have still tried to be as literal and as true to the spirit and sequence of the sentences, as the English language would permit, without compromising comprehension.” The first volume held the Īśā, Kena, Kaṭha and Taittirīya, with Swami Omkarananda thanked for editing the Īśā; the second, promised in that preface, brought the Aitareya, Muṇḍaka, Māṇḍūkya with Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā, and Praśna. The typographical device he invented — Śaṅkara’s quotations from the Upaniṣadic text set in italics, followed by their English equivalents, so that a reader without Sanskrit could skip the italics and still have a self-contained sentence — is still the way the Order prints these books.

The Brahma-sūtra Bhāṣya was harder. Its publisher’s preface of January 1965 explains why it was undertaken: “Sri Sankaracarya’s great commentary on the Brahma-Sutras had been translated into English twice. But the non-availability of these translations or their high price raised the need for a fresh dependable translation at a moderate price.” The translation had been finished three years earlier and held back by difficulties. It gives the word-for-word meaning of each sūtra under its Sanskrit text, then a running translation with clarifying words in brackets; in the commentary the doubts, the opposing views, the objections and the Vedāntin’s answers are shown separately; the translation follows the Ratnaprabhā gloss in the main, consulting the Nyāyanirṇaya and the Bhāmatī occasionally; and for Upaniṣadic quotations it uses Swami Madhavananda’s Bṛhadāraṇyaka and his own Eight Upaniṣads. A second edition in 1972 carried a foreword by T. M. P. Mahadevan of Madras, and it was Mahadevan who wrote to him privately asking that the word ‘opponent’, by which he had rendered pūrvapakṣa, be replaced by ‘prima facie view’. Sixteen years later, the biography records, he was still telling a young monk to make the change wherever the word occurred — a small window on to a translator who never regarded a book as finished.

The History of 1957 was a different kind of task. It marked the Mission’s diamond jubilee, and its preface, dated 30 September 1957, is frank about the state of the records: “In tracing the development of the sister institutions a little elaborately for the first time, we were often hampered by a lack of recorded evidence. Nevertheless, no pains have been spared to verify facts.” Swami Madhavananda edited it with a board of three senior monks; Christopher Isherwood wrote the foreword and improved the English; the historians Jadunath Sarkar and R. C. Majumdar read the manuscript. It deliberately introduces personalities sparingly and tells the story through the institutions. That was his temperament exactly, and it is the reason his own life is so much better documented in dates and offices than in feelings.

The Bengali Sri Ma Sarada Devi, published in the Holy Mother’s centenary year, drew a question from many readers who could not believe a man who had never seen her could write such a book. “I have not seen her with physical eyes,” he answered, “but when I meditate, the image of the Mother appears before me. She is always with me.” He translated the book into English himself.

Seva-Yoga: the thesis he gave the Order

If there is one idea that is his, the biography says it is this: he established Swami Vivekananda’s ideal of service — seva — on a philosophical basis, as a yoga in its own right, and he did it in essays and lectures over many years. A sannyāsin once told him that he had heard a long lecture of his on the ideal of service at Bangalore in 1968, and had noticed that since then he had gradually evolved the principle of Seva-Yoga, which was a valuable contribution to the thought of the Math and Mission. Gambhirananda’s reply is the nearest thing to a manifesto he left: “Getting the hint from Lila Prasanga, I have proceeded. In order to give a concrete shape to Swamiji’s ideal of service one will have to proceed by harmonising all the four yogas — Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Raja Yoga and Karma Yoga. Swamiji has told us to devise new paths of Sadhanas on the basis of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings.” The Līlāprasaṅga is Swami Saradananda’s great life of Sri Ramakrishna, and the “hint” is its account of the Master’s saying at Dakṣiṇeśvar — not compassion for creatures, but service of them as God.

The reasoning matters for an Advaita site, because service is often thought to belong to the path of action alone, a preliminary that the knower of Brahman leaves behind. Gambhirananda’s position was that in Sri Ramakrishna’s teaching the four yogas are not four ladders but one practice seen from four sides, and that service of the living being as God draws on all of them at once: the knowledge that the one Self is in all, the devotion that worships it there, the concentration that keeps the mind on it while the hands work, and the action itself. When he spoke to the Order’s first Youth Convention in 1985, he made the same point from the other end. Swami Vivekananda’s motto was ātmano mokṣārthaṁ jagaddhitāya ca, “for one’s own liberation and for the good of the world”; and the last words, he told the young people, had to be understood in the light of Sri Ramakrishna’s teaching, recalling how the Master, speaking of compassion, had suddenly stopped and asked who they were to show compassion to others, when it was God alone who could.

He held the position with the same fairness he brought to scholarship. At Mysore in 1968, the biography records, he debated for about an hour with Swami Adidevananda, a learned monk of the Order, over the question of which deity was Sri Śaṅkara’s chosen ideal, each citing texts against the other. A young sannyāsin who had listened, amazed at their learning, asked afterwards which side had prevailed. “Neither side,” said Gambhirananda. It is a good answer to a bad question, and it tells you how he read: Śaṅkara’s commentaries were for him a discipline of attention, not an arsenal.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

The Order’s biography of him is unusually plain about the hard things, and this page follows it. The first difficulty was the door. He was refused at Varanasi and refused at Belur, for the good reason that a watched Order could not take in strangers, and he got in only because two monks from a school in Bihar happened to be standing in the office. He never forgot it, and as General Secretary he could be gentle with the awkward and the unknown.

The second was the body. He had bad eyes from boyhood; a detached retina in 1972 that surgery in Boston could not mend; a cataract removed at Madras on 19 May 1981; a broken leg in 1977; a hernia operation in 1983; and a heart that failed him on 22 March 1985, so that a pacemaker was fitted the next day. His way with all of it was concealment. He hardly told anyone of his troubles, the biography says, and the question of sending for a doctor did not arise at all. It is not a method the reader is advised to copy, but it was the fruit of the morning at Deoghar when Mahapurush touched his chest and said “This is verily the Atman”, and he would have said so.

The third was temperament. He was not a man of sweet words, and he knew it; he told Bhuteshananda as much. Colleagues remembered his harshness with the same breath as his justice, and the biography does not pretend the harshness away. What it insists on is that it was never in his own interest. When someone congratulated him on a book or praised a lecture he kept quiet, unaffected. As President he said, “Even now I cannot quite understand that it is me whom they call President.” And he was often heard to say: “This world is so huge. Asia is a continent in this world, India is a country in Asia, West Bengal is in India, Howrah district is in West Bengal and Belur Math is in Howrah district. Thus it is like a very small point in the map. In this point you find Gambhirananda.”

The fourth was scholarship done in the margins of an administrator’s day. He had one paṇḍit at Varanasi and no university Sanskrit. The Brahma-sūtra translation waited three years for publication; the Madhusūdana Gītā never got its final revision. He would have counted none of this a grievance. But a reader who wonders why the great English Śaṅkara of the Ramakrishna Order came from the General Secretary’s office and not from a professor’s study should know that the answer is a man who did his japa nine or ten thousand times a day and his translation after the post.

What he taught

He was not a public preacher, and the biography records few sermons. What it records instead is a method, and the method can be stated. At the Chandigarh ashrama on 17 November 1980 he lectured on “Sādhana according to Sri Ramakrishna”, and afterwards the monk attending him asked what his own way of sādhana had been. “It was the spirit of detachment as mentioned in the Gita,” he said, and quoted two half-verses: jñeyaḥ sa nitya-sannyāsī yo na dveṣṭi na kāṅkṣati — he is to be known as a perpetual renouncer who neither hates nor desires (5.3) — and nirdvandvo hi mahābāho sukhaṁ bandhāt pramucyate — free from the pairs of opposites, O mighty-armed, he is easily released from bondage. “This is the way of my Sadhana.” To a further question he added: “I did Japa nine to ten thousand times every day. Along with that I practised the spirit of detachment. Besides, now and then I meditated on the divine Lila of Sri Ramakrishna.” And then the sentence that joins the two: “Sri Ramakrishna and the Holy Mother are the living symbols of that shloka in the Gita.”

That is a complete teaching in four lines. Detachment, in his understanding, was not coldness but the state the Gītā describes — neither hating nor hankering — and it was to be practised, not merely admired, in the middle of a working day. Japa gave the mind a fixed point; the Master’s life gave it a form to dwell on; and the two exemplars showed that the verse could be lived. It is the same harmony of the yogas he argued for in Seva-Yoga, applied inward.

The second thing he taught, by example more than statement, was that the Advaita texts are to be read whole and read fairly. He rendered Śaṅkara’s pūrvapakṣa — the position set up to be answered — first as ‘opponent’ and then, on a scholar’s advice, as ‘prima facie view’, and he changed it because the second is truer: the objector in a Vedānta commentary is not an enemy but the reader’s own first thought, brought into the open to be examined. A site that promises never to belittle another school could ask for no better rule.

The third was the sanctity of the ordinary. The Śivamānasapūjā verse over the office post; the six annas returned to Chandra Maharaj; the correction accepted from a first-year brahmacārin; the insistence that old monks have a house and a fund — these are one teaching, that the Self is served in the details or not at all. He spoke of Belur Math as a point on the map and of himself as a point in that point, and then ran the point with a fixed time-table. The humility and the method were the same thing.

The sayings, and what they were for

He left no book of aphorisms, and the sayings the biography preserves were all said to someone for a reason. A few, with their occasions.

To an old sannyāsin who asked after his health in 1985, with the pacemaker newly in his chest: “I know I am going towards the abode of Yama, the god of death.” Then, after a pause: “No, not towards the abode of Yama. Ekamevadvitiyam. Aham Brahmasmi. Why should I go to the abode of Yama? Those who are to go there, may do so.” The two Sanskrit phrases are the Chāndogya’s “one only, without a second” (6.2.1 — the very verse from which Mahapurush had named him “Sadeva Somya” sixty-two years before) and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka’s “I am Brahman”. It is Advaita used for its proper purpose, at the proper moment.

On taking office as President, 9 April 1985: “I shall live at the most for four years.” He died three years and eight months later. In June 1988, to an attendant: “You will serve me for one more year. After that you will carry me to the cremation ground.” Nobody, the biography says, could believe it at the time. And in the last months, asked whether he would go out: “Even if Yama comes, he will find me ready like this!”

To the Order’s Second Convention in 1980, concluding a speech on the Ramakrishna Movement: “Thus the Ramakrishna Movement is expanding by its inner strength and pointing out to the world the real path of human progress. The world is athirst for such a message and its ultimate success can never be doubted; for the Upanishad says, ‘Satyameva jayate nanritam.’” — truth alone triumphs, not untruth (Muṇḍaka 3.1.6). He had sat through the First Convention of 1926 as a spectator.

To the young people of the first Youth Convention, 1985: “Swamiji’s ideal was — Atmano mokshartham jagaddhitaya cha (for one’s own salvation and for the welfare of the world). The last words ‘jagaddhitaya cha’ should be understood in the light of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna.”

To the attendant who objected, on 22 or 23 December 1988, when the dying President asked him to remove his socks so that the newly initiated could touch his feet: “Take off the socks. They get this opportunity only once in lifetime.” And to himself, back in his room: “I was afraid whether I could continue or not, but it went off very well.”

What the sayings were for is clear from the list: not to instruct an audience but to steady a particular person — the frightened attendant, the anxious old monk, the young convention — and, at the end, to steady himself. The Upaniṣad was quoted at the moment it was needed, and not otherwise.

The books, and how to read them

For a reader of this site the order is clear. Begin with the Eight Upaniṣads, in two volumes, and begin with the Kaṭha or the Kena in volume I, where Śaṅkara’s commentary is at its most humane; read the translation first without the italics, as the preface allows, then a second time with them, watching which words of the text the commentator seizes on. Go on to the Māṇḍūkya in volume II, where Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā is included with Śaṅkara’s commentary on both — the fullest statement of Advaita in the shortest scripture, and the book this site returns to most often. Both volumes are free to read at the Internet Archive, and in print from Advaita Ashrama.

Then the Brahma-sūtra Bhāṣya. It is a long book and a technical one, but his layout makes it usable in a way its predecessors were not: each sūtra with its word-meanings, the doubt, the prima facie view, the objection and the answer marked off from one another. Read the first four sūtras — the catuḥsūtrī — slowly, and the great second chapter, first section, on the objections from Sāṅkhya and the atomists, as a demonstration of how Advaita argues: by stating the other side at full strength first. It, too, is at the Internet Archive and in print.

The Bhagavad Gītā with Śaṅkara’s commentary (1984) is the most widely read of his books today; the Chāndogya (1983) and Śvetāśvatara (1986) complete the set of Upaniṣads with commentary that the Order publishes in English, alongside Swami Madhavananda’s Bṛhadāraṇyaka. For the history of the movement itself, the History of the Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission (1957) remains the foundation, with the preface’s honesty about missing records as its warrant; and Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi (1955) is the life of the Mother written by a man who had never met her and said she was always with him. Bengali readers have Yuganayak Vivekananda, the three-volume life that the Order says filled a keenly felt want, and the Bhaktamalika on the Master’s devotees.

A caution, in the spirit of his own prefaces. These are translations that try to be “as literal and as true to the spirit and sequence of the sentences” as English allows, and they read like it. They are not paraphrases. A reader who wants Śaṅkara made easy should go elsewhere; a reader who wants to know what Śaṅkara actually said, sentence by sentence, has had no better friend in English.

The eleventh President: four years, ten centres, and the last tour

As Vice-President from April 1979 he began, for the first time, to give spiritual initiation, and the biography says he showered his grace liberally, ignoring all inconvenience. He lived mostly at Ranchi and came now and then to Belur. In these years, after the cataract operation of 1981, he translated the Gītā and the Chāndogya, and went to Mauritius to consecrate the image of Sri Ramakrishna. His sight now made reading impossible, and someone or other read to him every day; the biography remembers him joking, “Even when you go to Ramakrishna Loka you will read out to me!” After the hernia operation of 1983, resting at the Arogya Bhavan he had built for others, he had the manuscript of Marie Louise Burke’s New Discoveries about Swami Vivekananda read to him, sat silent when it was done, and then broke suddenly into a Bengali song about the time having come near to break the bonds. He never stopped studying. “Monks should themselves study the scriptures and ponder over them,” he used to say. “Only then they will understand their essence.”

On 22 March 1985 he collapsed and was found to have a weak heart; on 23 March a pacemaker was fitted. The tenth President, Swami Vireshwarananda, had died, and on 9 April 1985 Gambhirananda was appointed the eleventh President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He said, on taking over, that he would live at most four years. He gave his first initiations as President on 29 May 1985, the Daśaharā Daśamī, in the old shrine at Belur where he had himself been initiated in 1923. He inaugurated the Order’s first Youth Convention that year. During his presidency ten new centres were opened: Agartala and Barasat in 1985; Midnapore and Antpur, Swami Vivekananda’s place of the Christmas Eve vows, in 1986; Madurai, Palai and Lucknow in 1987; Shikra, Jaipur and a centre in Canada in 1988. He was attached to the ashrama at Gourhati near Arambagh in Hooghly, where at his initiative a temple with a marble image of Sri Ramakrishna was built and village work begun. Even in old age he attended public functions of the Order and visited relief camps and villages.

He used to say that initiating others was, for him, the discharge of a responsibility, and that he did not want to be engrossed in administration as President; but if somebody came to him with a difficulty he attended to it. The biography’s stories from these years are of particular people set right — a young woman disciple whom he scolded out of a course that would have destroyed her, and who obeyed him; a married couple, both his disciples, brought back from the edge of a tragedy — and they are told without names, so this page tells them without names too. His food was of the plainest, vegetables boiled without oil or spice, because his digestion had been weak from childhood; asked about it he always said it was quite good.

On 15 December 1988 he set out on what the biography calls his last tour: Bamunmura, Shikra and Barasat in the 24-Parganas, and Navadvīp. Before leaving for Navadvīp he went into the Barasat ashrama temple to bow to Sri Ramakrishna and stayed unusually long; coming out, he looked back at it. Initiations had been fixed for 22 and 23 December, and he was afraid the work might be hampered. It was not. When the time came for the initiated to bow to their guru he asked the attendant to take off his socks, and when the attendant objected, said they had this opportunity only once in a lifetime. The same day he signed a letter of blessing to the son of a Ranchi disciple on his marriage — his last letter. On 24 December he was admitted to the Ramakrishna Mission Seva Pratishthan in Calcutta with a severe lung infection and cardiac trouble. On the evening of 27 December he told an attendant that his temperature and blood pressure were rising and asked for Dr Roy; the doctors came; he was breathing hard and sweating. “I am feeling uneasy,” he said — his last words. The attendants saw him draw three deep breaths, as if in a last obeisance to Sri Ramakrishna, the Holy Mother and Swamiji, and then his body was still. It was 7.27 p.m.

The news went to the Math. Swami Abhayananda, the senior-most monk, stunned, exclaimed: “Gambhirananda too has gone away!” Old sādhus hurried from Belur to the hospital; All India Radio broadcast the news. The body, decked with flowers, was carried to Belur Math, and on 28 December it lay under the mango tree Swami Vivekananda planted, before the cremation on the bank of the Ganga that afternoon. The Order’s summary says he was ninety; by the calendar he was eighty-nine years and ten months, and both figures are given here.

For the seeker now

Swami Gambhirananda is not a teacher one goes to for warmth, and it would be false to this page to pretend otherwise. One goes to him for three other things. The first is his Śaṅkara. No one has put more of the commentaries into careful English, and no one has been more scrupulous about marking where the text stops and the interpretation begins. A seeker who reads the Kaṭha, the Māṇḍūkya and the first four sūtras of the Brahma-sūtra in his versions has read Advaita at the source, with the arguments of the other schools stated fairly before they are answered — which is the only way this site believes they should be met.

The second is the resolution of a false problem. Many who are drawn to Advaita fear that a life of work — an office, a school, a family — disqualifies them from it, and many who work fear that Advaita will make them cold. His life is an argument against both fears. He ran the Ramakrishna Order for thirteen years and translated the Brahma-sūtra Bhāṣya in the same years; he said the Śivamānasapūjā over the morning post; and he taught, in Seva-Yoga, that service of the living being as God is not a preliminary to knowledge but one of its four faces. The Gītā verse he named as his own sādhana — neither hating nor desiring — is available to anyone, at any desk.

The third is his manner with the end. He named his term, spent it opening centres and initiating the many, took off his socks for the newest disciples on the last day he could stand, and met his death with the Chāndogya’s “one only, without a second” and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka’s “I am Brahman” on his lips — not as a performance, but because they were the sentences he had lived on. A seeker may not be able to do that. A seeker can see that it was done, in living memory, by a man who began as an accounts clerk on a Rangoon rooftop, and take heart.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No photograph of Swami Gambhirananda that this site can show under a free licence has been found, and the lamp stands at the head of the page in place of a portrait; no picture has been generated or borrowed to fill the space. Dates, offices and quotations follow the Ramakrishna Math and Mission’s own published biography of him, which combines a short official summary with a detailed life drawn largely from his own recollections and those of his colleagues; the prefaces quoted are from the first editions of the books themselves, as digitised at the Internet Archive. Where the Order’s two accounts differ, both are given: he came to Varanasi in March 1923 and was admitted at Deoghar in May; the summary says he died at ninety, the dates give eighty-nine. The Bengali years of his early books are given in the Bengali era, as the Order gives them, with approximate Common Era equivalents added in brackets and marked “about”. The biography attributes the Śivamānasapūjā to Vyāsa; it is more commonly printed among the hymns ascribed to Sri Śaṅkara, and this page reports both without deciding. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates from place-names in the biography, not from any historical map; Sadhuhati is pinned at the district town of Sylhet, since the village is not separately located, and the centres he visited in Europe and America in 1972 are not pinned because none but Boston is named.

The timeline, plainly

• 11 February 1899 — born Jatindra Nath Datta at Sadhuhati, Sylhet district; father Dinanath, a zemindar of a Śākta family; mother Tarasundari Devi; youngest of four.
• Boyhood — loses his father young; brought up by his maternal uncles under the guardianship of Abhay Kumar Dam; meets monks of the Ramakrishna Mission at Sylhet; reads Swami Vivekananda.
• 1917 — Entrance Examination from Maulavi Bazar High School, first division, with a scholarship; Scottish Church College, Calcutta; Ogilvie hostel.
• 1922 — B.A. with Honours in Economics; accounts officer in the military department, Rangoon; the roof-top and the barracks.
• March 1923 — Varanasi: refused at the Home of Service; letter of introduction; Belur Math: refused again; Mahapurush Maharaj: “Stay at the Math. Let your character be built up first.”
• May 1923 — joins the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith, Deoghar, aged twenty-four; there 1923–29 and 1931–35 as worker, Headmaster and, from 1926, Secretary.
• December 1923 — brahmacarya at Belur on the Holy Mother’s birthday, as Saumya Chaitanya; initiated four days later by Swami Shivananda in the old shrine: “O Lord! bless him.”
• 1926 — Mahapurush at Deoghar in January: “Here I feel the manifestation of divine Shakti”; “This is verily the Atman”; first speech, at Sonargaon, at Swami Akhandananda’s insistence; spectator at the Order’s First Convention.
• 1928 — sannyāsa at Varanasi on Swami Vivekananda’s birthday; a rupee for jilipi; named Gambhirananda.
• 1929–31 — Advaita Ashrama, Varanasi, under Swami Nirbharananda; six annas a day; Sanskrit with a paṇḍit.
• 1936–41, 1945–47 — Working Committee at Belur Math; office-master; Inspector of Branch Centres from 1945; the Ardha-Kumbha with Swami Vijnanananda, 1936.
• 1942–44 — editor of Prabuddha Bharata at Mayavati; Nandalal Bose’s paintings published; “Well, you can make corrections where necessary.”
• March–April 1947 — Trustee of the Math and member of the Mission’s Governing Body; Assistant Secretary to 1953; Advisory Finance Committee, 1949.
• 1953–63 — President, Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati: water, cows, bees, the Mayavati Road; 5 Dehi Entally Road bought 1958, opened 8 December 1961; Holy Mother (1955), History (1957), Eight Upaniṣads (1957–58).
• 5 October 1963 — Assistant Secretary again; 1965 — Brahma-sūtra Bhāṣya published.
• 16 February 1966 — General Secretary of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, for about thirteen years; new centres in Arunachal, Assam, Hyderabad and Raipur; the Arogya Bhavan; Seva-Yoga lecture at Bangalore, 1968; the Mysore debate, “Neither side.”
• 1969 — Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka; 1972 — the Order’s centres in America and Europe, August–November; retinal operation, Boston; Dhaka and Narayanganj (again 1977).
• 1973–77 — pilgrimages: Kedārnāth and Badrīnāth (October 1973), Pashupatināth (March 1976), Amarnāth (26 July 1976: “I had a vision of Sri Thakur sitting there!”), Kanyākumārī (March 1977), Gaṅgotrī (October 1977); the leg fracture, 1977.
• 1 April 1979 — Vice-President; lives mostly at Morabadi, Ranchi; begins initiating; Chandigarh lecture, 17 November 1980; Second Convention speech, 1980.
• 19 May 1981 — cataract operation at Madras; translates the Gītā and Chāndogya with Śaṅkara’s commentary (published 1984, 1983); consecrates the image at Mauritius; hernia operation, 1983.
• 22–23 March 1985 — collapse; pacemaker. 9 April 1985 — eleventh President: “I shall live at the most for four years.” 29 May 1985 — first initiations as President; first Youth Convention.
• 1985–88 — ten new centres: Agartala, Barasat, Midnapore, Antpur, Madurai, Palai, Lucknow, Shikra, Jaipur, Canada; the Gourhati temple; Śvetāśvatara (1986), Kah Panthah (1393 B.E.).
• 15 December 1988 — last tour: Bamunmura, Shikra, Barasat, Navadvīp; initiations 22–23 December: “Take off the socks.”
• 24 December 1988 — admitted to the Seva Pratishthan, Calcutta. 27 December 1988, 7.27 p.m. — dies; last words “I am feeling uneasy.” 28 December — under Swamiji’s mango tree at Belur; cremation on the Ganga bank.