Swami Gambhirananda

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

If you have ever read Śaṅkara's commentary on an Upaniṣad in English and found that it actually made sense — that the objections were traceable and the replies followed — you have probably been reading him. He was born Jatindranath Dutta on 11 February 1899 at Sadhuhati, in the Sylhet district of what is now Bangladesh, and he came to monastic life by way of an accounts office in the army. He joined the Order at Belur Math in March 1923. The next decades read like a map of the Ramakrishna movement's working parts: Deoghar, where he was principal of the Vidyapith; Bagbazar in Kolkata; the Himalayan Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati, where he edited Prabuddha Bharata from 1942 to 1944 and which he led from 1953. At the Advaita Ashrama in Varanasi he studied the Advaita texts formally, with traditional scholars. That training is visible in the translations. His rendering of a bhāṣya does not paraphrase and does not decorate; where Śaṅkara is dense, the English is dense, and the reader is trusted. It is the opposite instinct to the one this site works with — and both are needed, because a distilled version is only honest if the unabridged thing is available to check it against. He served as General Secretary, then as the eleventh President of the Order from 1985, and died on 27 December 1988, close to ninety.

The turn it rests on

He was initiated by Swami Shivananda, and his own first teacher was Swami Jagadananda, a disciple of the Holy Mother; he headed the Order from 1985 until his death on 27 December 1988, at almost ninety.

What was taught

Put Śaṅkara's own commentaries on the Upaniṣads and the Gītā into careful English, so that a reader outside the Sanskrit world could follow the argument line by line.