Swami Nikhilananda

The Noakhali he was born into

He was born in 1895 in the district of Noakhali, in the delta country of East Bengal where the Meghna spreads into the Bay of Bengal — land that is now Bangladesh and was then, as the Delhi Math's note on him puts it, a part of India. The Ramakrishna Order's own notice of his life says simply that he was born in a small Indian village, and gives no family name; booksellers' notes give it as Dinesh Chandra Das Gupta, and the name is repeated here only with that caution, since the Order's records consulted for this page do not supply it. What the records do supply is the atmosphere of the house. He was brought up, the Order's account says, by pious parents, and through them he became acquainted as a boy with the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which made an indelible impression on his young mind.

The year of his birth deserves a moment. In the summer of 1895 Swami Vivekananda was sitting with a dozen students in a wooden cottage at Thousand Island Park, on an island in the St Lawrence river in New York State, giving the informal evening talks that were written down as the Inspired Talks. Seventy-eight years later the child born that year in Noakhali would die in that same park, having bought the cottage, rebuilt it, and made it a place of pilgrimage. Nobody planning a life could have drawn the line so neatly. He was two when the Ramakrishna Mission was founded in 1897, ten when Bengal was partitioned in 1905 and the province rose against the partition, and a young man of the exact generation that went from the University of Calcutta into the freedom movement and, in many cases, into prison.

East Bengal in the 1890s was also, quietly, the home ground of the Order's future. Swami Gambhirananda, who has his own page on this site, was born four years later in the neighbouring district of Sylhet; both grew up in the river country east of Calcutta, both were drawn to the Order through its literature before they ever saw a monk, and both became, above all else, translators. It is one of the recurring patterns of this lineage that its great translators came from the provinces rather than the capital, and read their way into the monastery.

Where the life was lived

The life has two halves and two continents. The first half is Indian: Noakhali; Calcutta, where he studied and worked as a journalist; the Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati in the Kumaon Himalaya, where he joined the Order in 1922; and the Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama at Mysore, where he spent two years in the special study of Vedānta and published his first translation. The second half is American: Providence, Rhode Island, from October 1931; a rented chapel on West 57th Street in Manhattan from May 1933; the five-storey house at 17 East 94th Street from 1939; and Thousand Island Park, where he restored Swami Vivekananda's cottage in 1947–48 and where he died in July 1973. India is pinned below; the American places are on the second map further down the page.

The journalist who went to prison

He was educated at the University of Calcutta, and as a graduate, the Order's account of him says, he chose the profession of journalism. Then he joined the Indian freedom movement, and for a period he was incarcerated in an English prison camp. The account gives no dates, no newspaper and no charge, and this page adds none; but the bare facts are enough to fix the kind of young man he was. He was not a boy who drifted into a monastery. He was a writer with a public cause who had already paid for it, and who came to Sri Ramakrishna, as Swami Vivekananda's own generation had, by way of the nation before the monastery.

What turned him was contact. The teachings he had absorbed at home, the account says, brought him into contact with the direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, and the list it gives is remarkable for a man born nine years after the Master's passing: Swami Brahmananda, Swami Saradananda, Swami Shivananda, Swami Turiyananda, Swami Premananda, Swami Akhandananda, Swami Abhedananda — and Mahendranath Gupta, “M”, the schoolmaster who had written down Sri Ramakrishna's conversations in his diaries and was still, in the years after 1900, publishing them volume by volume in Bengali as the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita. The young journalist met the recorder while the record was still being made. He would spend the years 1938 to 1942 turning it into English.

And he was initiated by the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi, at Jayrambati or at the Udbodhan house in Calcutta — the Order's notice does not say which — and therefore before her passing in July 1920. This is the fact from which everything else on this page descends. The Order's own summary of his life begins with it: he was a disciple of the Holy Mother. His centre in New York would keep her birthday among its festivals; his last major original book would be her biography; and the sentence he found for her, quoted below, is the sentence of a man describing his own teacher.

Mayavati, 1922, and the two years at Mysore

He joined the Order in 1922 at the Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati, high in the Kumaon Himalaya near Lohaghat — the monastery Swami Vivekananda had wanted as a place where the non-dual teaching alone would be taught, and the home of the Order's English monthly, Prabuddha Bharata. The New York centre's account says that after his ordination he spent several years in the Himalayan monastery of his Order, where he studied Hinduism and other systems of philosophy and religion; the Order's notice says that he had sannyāsa in 1924 from Swami Saradananda, the Master's direct disciple who was then the Order's General Secretary and the author of the great Bengali life of Sri Ramakrishna. The two statements fit together: a novice at Mayavati from 1922, a monk from 1924, and a reader of philosophy in a library above the clouds.

Then Mysore. The Order records that he was at the Mysore Ashrama for two years for the special study of the Vedānta philosophy. The Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama at Mysore, under Swami Siddheswarananda, was at that time an unusual place: a study circle for monks met there, and the philosopher V. Subrahmanya Iyer — “uncle”, the monks called him — taught Sri Śaṅkara's and Sri Rāmānuja's commentaries on the Brahma-sūtra to, among others, the young men who would become Swami Bhuteshananda, Swami Tapasyananda and Swami Ranganathananda, as the Order's life of the last of them records. Nikhilananda's first published translation came out of that setting. Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka: An Inquiry into the Nature of the ‘Seer’ and the ‘Seen’ was published by the Mysore Ashrama in 1931, with the Sanskrit text, an English translation and notes drawn from the two classical commentaries, a foreword by Subrahmanya Iyer, and a dedication to the Maharaja, Sri Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, “in high admiration of his great devotion to Vedantic truth.”

It is a small book about a small book — forty-six verses on the distinction between the seer and the seen, which the tradition ascribes variously to Sri Śaṅkara, to Sri Bhāratī Tīrtha of Sringeri and to Sri Vidyāraṇya, and which Nikhilananda, after weighing the evidence of the commentators and the colophons, assigned to Bhāratī Tīrtha. He called it “an inquiry which is of the utmost importance for the understanding of the higher Vedanta Philosophy,” and described it as “an excellent vade mecum for the study of higher Vedanta.” Subrahmanya Iyer's foreword insisted that the highest truth of Vedānta could be reached by no path other than reason, sharpened, in the words of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, beyond the edge of a razor. That is the school in which the translator was formed: Advaita as an argument to be followed, not a mood to be enjoyed. He carried it to America the same year.

Providence, and the chapel on 57th Street

He was sent to the United States in 1931. The Ramakrishna Mission's General Report for 1933–34 gives the circumstances: Swami Akhilananda, who had charge of the Vedanta Society of Providence, Rhode Island, had opened a second centre in Washington in 1930, and headquarters sent Swami Nikhilananda to Providence in October 1931 to help. In 1932, during Akhilananda's frequent absences in Washington, he conducted the Sunday services and the weekday classes at Providence, besides his own regular classes, until the season ended in June. It was an apprenticeship in the peculiar craft of the American Vedānta centre — the Sunday lecture, the weekday class, the small congregation of educated New Englanders who had read Emerson and wanted to know what Emerson had been reading.

The season of 1932–33 he spent in New York, where the old Vedanta Society founded by Swami Vivekananda in 1894 was led by Swami Bodhananda. The Report says that the work of the Society received a great impetus from his activities, and that he and Bodhananda were invited to speak before different churches and associations of the city. The demand outgrew the Society. Accordingly, in May 1933, a chapel was arranged for in a centrally located building at 200 West 57th Street, a few steps from Carnegie Hall, and Swami Nikhilananda was invited to act as the leader of the new centre — the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, a branch of the Ramakrishna Mission, which he would lead for forty years.

The Report describes the first season with the precision of an annual return, and the description is worth keeping because the pattern it fixed never changed. In addition to his Sunday lectures on general topics, the Swami conducted classes on Tuesday and Friday evenings, on the Gītā and on Rāja-Yoga respectively, the latter preceded by a period of meditation; questions were answered after both classes. He spoke before numerous cultured groups in the city. During the autumn recess he gave a series of Sunday lectures on Hindu culture. And the centre celebrated the Durgā Pūjā and the birthdays of the Buddha, Christ, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, with speeches, Hindu music and, the Report adds, generally a Hindu dinner. Thirty-five years later the Report for 1967–68 lists the same Sunday services, the same Tuesday and Friday classes, and the same festivals, with Easter and the Holy Mother's birthday added. A centre that keeps the same timetable for a generation is a centre with a settled idea of what it is for.

The house on East 94th Street

After six years in the rented rooms on 57th Street the centre needed a home. In 1938, after seven years in America, Nikhilananda paid an extended visit to India, renewing, the Mission's Report says, his contacts with his brother monks, and addressing public meetings and groups of devotees at the centres he visited. He came back to a purchase. In June 1939 the centre acquired a fine five-storey house at 17 East 94th Street, close to Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side; after extensive alterations it was occupied in August, the first service was held in September, and the formal dedication took place in October, with the swamis in charge of the Boston, Providence and Chicago centres as guests, speaking both at the centre and at the dinner held to mark the occasion. The house contained a specially designed chapel and a library and reading room for members, and the Report notes drily that on account of its location a new class of people was being attracted. The New York Times, reporting the centre's fiftieth anniversary in 1983, still found it in the same townhouse, and called it among the earliest of the twelve prominent organisations associated with the Ramakrishna Order in the United States.

From that house came the books. The Center had its own publication department, and it was as publisher as much as pulpit that it changed what English-speaking readers could know of this tradition: the Gospel in 1942, the Gītā in 1944, Self-Knowledge in 1946, the Vivekananda biography in 1953 and the one-volume selection Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, and, in partnership with Harper in New York and Allen & Unwin in London, the Upaniṣads, Hinduism and Man in Search of Immortality. The house on 94th Street was a monastery with a printing list, and the list was the mission.

Swipe sideways to pan the map

Swipe sideways to pan the map

Four years with M's diaries: the Gospel, 1942

The book for which, the Center says, he will ever be remembered is The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the complete English translation of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita. Its preface, signed in New York on Sri Ramakrishna's birthday in February 1942, explains what he had done and why. Mahendranath Gupta, “M”, a Calcutta schoolmaster, had sat in the room at Dakṣiṇeśvar and elsewhere between March 1882 and 24 April 1886, gone home, and written down in his diary what had been said; the record filled five Bengali volumes, the first published in 1897 and the last shortly after M's death in 1932. Two volumes of selected chapters had been translated into English by the Sri Ramakrishna Math at Madras, and Nikhilananda consulted them. But he set out to translate the whole, and to translate it literally, omitting only a few pages he judged of no particular interest to English-speaking readers, and sacrificing literary grace, where he had to, for literal accuracy.

The method matters, because it was a choice against the fashion of the day. The 1940s were the decade of the paraphrase, the “spirit” of the East rendered into soothing English. Nikhilananda chose the opposite discipline. He kept the Indian terms where English had no equivalent, and explained them in a glossary and in footnotes; he supplied notes on pronunciation and diacritical marks; and he wrote a long Introduction — a life of Sri Ramakrishna, portraits of the people who came to him, and short explanations of the systems of Indian religious thought that bear on the conversations — drawing on the Life of Sri Ramakrishna published by Advaita Ashrama and on Swami Nirvedananda's essay in the second volume of The Cultural Heritage of India. The Introduction was written to be read first, and has since been published on its own. The songs, which he called an important feature of the spiritual tradition of Bengal, written for the most part by men of mystical experience, were given their English form with the help of the poet John Moffitt, Jr.

He named the others who helped. Margaret Woodrow Wilson, the daughter of the former President, and Joseph Campbell, later the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, worked with him in editing the translation; Elizabeth Davidson typed the whole manuscript more than once; and Aldous Huxley wrote the foreword. The Joseph Campbell Foundation's own account of Campbell's life records that through the 1940s and 1950s he helped Nikhilananda translate both the Upaniṣads and the Gospel. It is one of the odder collaborations in the history of American letters — a Bengali monk, a President's daughter and the future theorist of myth, sitting over the diaries of a Calcutta schoolmaster — and it produced a book that Time magazine called “One of the world's most extraordinary religious documents,” and that Thomas Mann and Henry Miller, the Center records, praised highly. The Holy Mother herself, in a saying Nikhilananda records in his life of her, sent people to this book: “I do not know anything. I repeat only what I have heard from the Master. Read The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and you will know all you need.” Her disciple made it possible for the sentence to be obeyed in English.

The Gītā of 1943 and the Upaniṣads in four volumes

The Gītā followed at once. Its preface is dated New York, 1 November 1943, and the book was published by the Center in 1944. “The aim of this new translation of the Bhagavad Gita,” he wrote, “is to present the book to the English-speaking public of the Western world as a manual of Hindu religion and philosophy.” Notes and explanations were added, the connection of thought between the verses shown, and the standpoint declared without apology: “The explanations follow, in the main, the commentary on the Gita by Sankaracharya.” The abstruse and technical parts of the commentary were omitted; the story of the Mahābhārata was told in full so that the reader would understand why a teaching on the highest good should be set on a battlefield; and the Introduction took up the meaning of duty, of action and actionlessness, from the relative and the absolute standpoints. He had consulted the translations of D. S. Sarma and A. Mahadeva Sastri and looked into Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita; Denver Lindley and Joseph Campbell revised the manuscript; and the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking wrote the foreword, calling the translation “natural and direct, conveying the sense in admirably idiomatic English.” Time called it “The first really readable, authoritative English translation of one of the world's greatest religious classics.”

The preface ends with the sentence that explains why a monk should spend his war years on a translation. “Men are confused and picture life as full of shreds and patches. But they feel a profound need of seeing life as a seamless garment.” The Gītā, he thought, might be a means of co-ordinating the apparently contradictory facts — this world and the other, secular duty and spiritual value — for those who sincerely sought. That was in November 1943, in a city full of men in uniform.

Then Sri Śaṅkara directly. Self-Knowledge, his translation of the Ātmabodha with a long introduction on the Vedāntic view of the Self, appeared in 1946; its preface is signed from Red Top, Lake George, New York, in September 1944, and Somerset Maugham, who had himself just published a novel with a Vedāntic hero, called it a “wonderful piece of exposition.” And then the Upaniṣads: four volumes from Harper & Brothers, the first in 1949 (Kaṭha, Īśā, Kena and Muṇḍaka) and the fourth in 1959 (Taittirīya and Chāndogya), with the Sanskrit-based notes resting on Sri Śaṅkara's commentary and, in the first volume, a general introduction to the whole literature. Among them sits the text this site's own Scriptures page singles out as the shortest and steepest of all, the Māṇḍūkya, with Sri Gauḍapāda's Kārikā and Sri Śaṅkara's commentary — the work that puts the non-dual conclusion of the Upaniṣads in its most uncompromising form, and which he rendered without softening it. The Center notes that the Gospel, the Gītā, Self-Knowledge, the Upaniṣads and Hinduism have since been translated into German, and several of them into Italian, Spanish and other languages: translations of a translation, carrying a Bengali diary and a Sanskrit commentary a second step out into the world.

Thousand Island Park: the cottage rebuilt

In 1947 he went looking for a house. Thousand Island Park is a summer colony on Wellesley Island in the St Lawrence, and in the summer of 1895 Swami Vivekananda had stayed there in Miss Dutcher's cottage, teaching a small group of students; the notes one of them kept became the Inspired Talks. The park's own historical society records what Nikhilananda, identified as the leader of the New York Center, found when he came searching for the site: the cottage in total disrepair. He arranged to buy it and had it completely restored to its condition at the time of Vivekananda's visit. Restoration began in the early spring of 1948; by July the cottage was ready, and that summer Swamis Aseshananda, Satprakashananda and Yatiswarananda spent the season there with him.

The Mission's Report for 1967–68 describes what the place had become: since 1947 “Vivekananda Cottage”, the house in which Swami Vivekananda imparted his Inspired Talks in 1895, had been used during the summer as a retreat and a place of pilgrimage, with daily meditation classes; a house nearby, called “Holy Mother Cottage”, was used in the summer vacation by the women workers of the centre. The park's history preserves one small human picture from the early 1950s: a girl staying at her grandmother's cottage on Prospect Point, who watched a tall, very erect, dark-skinned gentleman come down to the rocks each morning robed in terry cloth to take his daily swim, and who followed him up the hill and listened from below the cottage to what was being taught. Hundreds of students, the park says, now come to the cottage each summer, and thousands more have made the pilgrimage. It was his one act of architecture, and it was an act of restoration, which is what a translator does.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

The first difficulty was the one every translator of this literature faces, and he stated it in his own prefaces rather than concealing it. A literal rendering of the Kathamrita would be, in places, ungraceful; a graceful one would be, in places, untrue. He chose literalness and said so, and he admitted in the same preface that he had left out a few pages he judged of no particular interest to English-speaking readers. That is an editorial decision, openly made, and it means that his book is the record very nearly whole, not the record entire; a reader who wants every page must go to the Bengali. Nothing is hidden; but a reader should know it.

The second difficulty he printed at the front of his own Gītā. William Ernest Hocking, whom he had asked to write the foreword, used it to disagree with the commentator whose reading the translation followed. “In my personal judgment,” Hocking wrote, “Sankara missed the peculiar message of the Bhagavad Gita above referred to: his comments attempt to bring the Gita back to the supremacy of meditation over action as the condition of union with God.” Hocking thought the Gītā's genius lay in its justification of action, and that Sri Śaṅkara had pulled it back towards contemplation. Nikhilananda let the objection stand on page five of a book whose every note followed Sri Śaṅkara. That is not carelessness. It is the confidence of a man who believed the Advaita reading could bear being argued with, and who wanted his American readers to see that a great Western philosopher had read the text seriously enough to quarrel with it. This site takes the same view: the non-dual reading is the one it follows, and it is strong enough not to need the others silenced.

The third difficulty was success. To have Time magazine call a Hindu scripture “readable” and a Hindu saint's conversations “extraordinary” is to have entered the American marketplace of ideas, where a tradition can be admired into harmlessness. He guarded against it in the only way available, which was rigour: the glossaries, the diacritical tables, the insistence that the reader learn the Sanskrit words that English could not carry, the refusal to leave Sri Śaṅkara out of the Upaniṣads because he was hard. The Center's list of his lectures — universities, churches, interfaith conferences, the graduate class at Temple University — shows a man who accepted every platform and softened nothing on any of them.

The fourth was the body. The Report for 1967–68 records that classes had to be suspended from 11 June to 9 September 1967 because of his illness, and that Swami Adiswarananda joined the centre in August 1968 to assist him. The Order's notice says, with the care such notices take, that he was the spiritual leader of the New York centre until a short period before his passing away: that is, that at the end he stepped back. A man who had run the same Tuesday and Friday classes for thirty-five years did not stop them lightly.

And the fifth difficulty is the one this page has already met: the thinness of the early record. Where he was born, exactly; what his name was; when the Holy Mother initiated him; where he was imprisoned and for how long — the Order's own notices do not say, and the sources that claim to are not of the kind this site relies on. The gaps are left as gaps.

What he taught

He taught what he translated, and the order in which he translated it is the order of his teaching. First the Gospel: the fact of Sri Ramakrishna. In the speech he gave in New Delhi on 20 March 1949, at the celebration of the Master's birthday, he put it in one sentence: “Sri Ramakrishna was a living witness of the reality of God.” Everything on this page that looks like scholarship stands on that sentence. The Upaniṣads were not, for him, an ancient literature to be interpreted; they were a description of what a man in Dakṣiṇeśvar had experienced within living memory, and the Kathamrita was the laboratory notebook. “To Sri Ramakrishna religion, was realization,” he said in the same speech, and, in a phrase that a scientist in his audience would have understood exactly, “He was a true scientist in the field of religion.”

Second, the Gītā and the Ātmabodha: the Self. “Self-Knowledge is vital,” the preface of 1944 begins. “All other forms of knowledge are of secondary importance; for a man's action, feeling, reasoning, and thinking are dependent upon his idea of the Self.” This is Sri Śaṅkara's teaching in a New York sentence. Get the Self wrong — take it for the body, the mind, the nationality, the career — and every other piece of knowledge is built on the error; get it right, and the rest reorganises itself. He did not present this as a doctrine to be believed but as the one inquiry that cannot be delegated, which is why he began his American career with a book called An Inquiry into the Nature of the Seer and the Seen.

Third, the method: scripture, reason, experience, in that order and all three. In Man in Search of Immortality, whose first chapter was the Garvin Memorial Lecture he gave at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on 7 October 1964, he stated it with a plainness that should be read by anyone who thinks Vedānta asks for belief: “The Vedas teach the immortality of the soul. But the scriptural evidence must be supported by reason and finally experienced in the depth of meditation. It is the experience which gives the final stamp.” The scripture proposes; reason tests; meditation confirms. It is Subrahmanya Iyer's razor from the Mysore classroom of 1931, and the Master's realisation from the Dakṣiṇeśvar room of 1882, held together in one method.

Fourth, the goal, which he named in Delhi with a Sanskrit word and an English claim: “The ideal of jivanmukti, freedom while living in the body, is the grandest contribution of the Hindu culture.” Not freedom after death, not freedom in another world, but freedom now, in this body, for a man with a job and a family — the ideal that the Gītā preface had called seeing life as a seamless garment. Fifth, and underneath all of it, the standpoint. Writing about Swami Vivekananda's American work in 1953, he defined it as “the interpretation of India's spiritual culture, especially in its Vedantic setting,” and the phrase describes his own forty years exactly. He was not a preacher of a new religion. He was an interpreter of a culture, and the setting he chose to interpret it in was Vedānta — the non-dual Vedānta of Sri Śaṅkara, followed openly, with other schools respected and never belittled, and with Sri Ramakrishna's harmony of paths always in view. The Gospel is full of the Master's insistence that every sincere path leads to the same goal; the man who translated every page of it was not going to forget it in his own.

And sixth, the Mother. “Holy Mother, in a unique way, fulfilled the duties of wife, mother, and nun.” The sentence is from his life of her, and it is the closest he came to describing the source of his own religion. She was not, in his account, a doctrine; she was a woman who had been all three of those things at once without contradiction, and he had been initiated by her. The Advaita of his books is severe. The devotion underneath it was hers.

The sayings, and what they were for

He was a translator, and a translator's sayings are mostly other people's. But his prefaces, introductions and the one preserved Indian speech give enough of his own voice to hear its pitch: short declarative sentences, no ornament, a scholar's care and a journalist's refusal to waste the reader's time. Every quotation below is taken verbatim from the source named.

“Sri Ramakrishna was a living witness of the reality of God.” From the New Delhi speech of 20 March 1949, published in Prabuddha Bharata that May. It was said to an Indian audience two years after Independence, and its point was that the nation's oldest claim — that God can be known — had been tested in their grandfathers' lifetime and had held.

“To Sri Ramakrishna religion, was realization.” Same speech. The comma is his. The sentence is the whole of his objection to religion as belief, ritual or membership: none of those was what the Master had meant by the word.

“He was a true scientist in the field of religion.” Same speech. Said in 1949, before the phrase became a commonplace, and meant precisely: hypothesis, discipline, verification, and the willingness to try every path in turn to see whether it reached the goal.

“The ideal of jivanmukti, freedom while living in the body, is the grandest contribution of the Hindu culture.” Same speech. He chose the Sanskrit word and then translated it in the same breath, which was his method in every book.

“Self-Knowledge is vital. All other forms of knowledge are of secondary importance; for a man's action, feeling, reasoning, and thinking are dependent upon his idea of the Self.” The opening of the preface to Self-Knowledge, written at Lake George in September 1944. It was for a reader who had never heard of the Ātmabodha and needed, in three sentences, a reason to read it.

“The Vedas teach the immortality of the soul. But the scriptural evidence must be supported by reason and finally experienced in the depth of meditation. It is the experience which gives the final stamp.” From Man in Search of Immortality, whose opening chapter was the Garvin Memorial Lecture at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in October 1964. It was for an educated public audience, and it told them that the tradition asked of them exactly what their own disciplines did: evidence, argument and test.

“Men are confused and picture life as full of shreds and patches. But they feel a profound need of seeing life as a seamless garment.” From the Gītā preface of 1 November 1943. It was for a wartime reader, and it offered the Gītā not as consolation but as a way of seeing the pieces as one thing.

“The explanations follow, in the main, the commentary on the Gita by Sankaracharya.” Same preface. A single sentence of declared allegiance, placed where every reader would see it, so that no one could mistake the standpoint for neutrality. Every page on this site tries to do the same.

“In America Vivekananda's mission was the interpretation of India's spiritual culture, especially in its Vedantic setting.” From the preface to Vivekananda: A Biography, dated 5 January 1953. It was written about his predecessor, and it is the best one-line description of his own life's work.

“Holy Mother, in a unique way, fulfilled the duties of wife, mother, and nun.” From his life of Sri Sarada Devi, reprinted in Vedanta and the West in 1962. It was for readers who would find a married woman's sainthood puzzling, and it resolved the puzzle by refusing to see a contradiction.

The books, and how to read them

Begin where the tradition begins, with The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York, 1942). Do as he asks and read the Introduction first; then read the conversations slowly, a day's entry at a time, in the order he gives. It is not a book to be finished but a room to be sat in, and its whole authority lies in its ordinariness — the dates, the visitors, the songs, the Master's jokes. The Sri Ramakrishna Math at Kashi has the preface and the full text on its e-library, free to read; the Center's own edition is still in print.

Then the two small Śaṅkara books, in the order he made them. Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka (Mysore, 1931) is the introduction to the whole inquiry: forty-six verses on how to tell the seer from the seen, with his notes from the two commentaries and Subrahmanya Iyer's foreword on reason. Self-Knowledge (New York, 1946) is the Ātmabodha with a hundred-page introduction that is, in effect, a short course in Advaita for a reader who has never met it. Both are free to read at the Internet Archive.

Then The Bhagavad Gita (New York, 1944), and read Hocking's foreword as well as the text, because the disagreement printed there is part of the education. Then the Upaniṣads, in the four Harper volumes of 1949 to 1959 or in the one-volume abridgement; read the general introduction in the first volume, then the Kaṭha and the Īśā, and leave the Māṇḍūkya with Sri Gauḍapāda's Kārikā until the others have been read twice. The Advaita Ashrama and the Center keep all four volumes in print.

The biographies come next. Vivekananda: A Biography (New York, 1953) is short, exact and free of legend, and its preface states its purpose; Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, which he compiled, is the one-volume selection through which many American readers first met the Complete Works. Holy Mother (1962) is the life of his own teacher; the chapter reprinted by the Vedanta Society of Southern California is the place to start. Hinduism: Its Meaning for the Liberation of the Spirit (Harper, 1958) is the systematic book — the whole tradition laid out for an educated Western reader — and Man in Search of Immortality (Allen & Unwin, 1968), the last, is the shortest and the most personal. The Center's list also carries Sri Ramakrishna: The Face of Silence, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother: Her Teachings and Conversations and the abridged and selected editions of the Gospel. Read the prefaces of all of them. They are where he speaks in his own voice.

The last years

He kept working. The Mission's Report for April 1967 to March 1968 finds him still Minister-in-charge of the centre at 17 East 94th Street, still taking the Sunday service and the Tuesday and Friday scripture classes, and also Adjunct Professor of Hindu Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lectured to the graduate class on Mondays — a monk in his seventies commuting a hundred miles each week to teach. Groups of students from colleges and churches came to the centre for special lectures. His latest book, Man in Search of Immortality, had just been published in London. The same Report records the summer's suspension of classes in 1967 for his illness, and the arrival in August 1968 of Swami Adiswarananda, who would succeed him.

He died on Saturday, 21 July 1973, at the centre's summer retreat at Thousand Island Park on Wellesley Island, in the St Lawrence — the place where Swami Vivekananda had taught in the summer of his birth, and which he had bought back from ruin. He was seventy-eight. The New York Times carried the obituary on the following Tuesday, noting that he was born in Noakhali in what is now Bangladesh, that he had founded the centre in 1933, that he lectured frequently at universities and churches on Hinduism and took an active part in interfaith conferences. The Order's own notice is shorter: a disciple of the Holy Mother; joined at Mayavati in 1922; sannyāsa from Swami Saradananda in 1924; two years at Mysore; sent to the USA in 1931; founded the New York centre in 1933; a good speaker and an impressive conversationalist; an erudite scholar who did much to spread the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement in the West; passed away on 21 July 1973 at the age of seventy-eight. Ten years later, in April 1983, the Times went back to the townhouse on 94th Street for the centre's fiftieth anniversary and found two hundred people, an altar heaped with flowers, and Sanskrit chanting on the Upper East Side. The timetable he had set in May 1933 was still being kept.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for people who want to read the sources and have been told they cannot. Most of what an English reader can know at first hand about Sri Ramakrishna, and a great deal of what can be known about Sri Śaṅkara's reading of the Gītā and the Upaniṣads, passes through his pen; and his method — the literal rendering, the glossary, the Introduction to be read first, the Sanskrit word kept and explained rather than smoothed away — is itself a teaching. It says: the text is harder than you would like, and you are more capable than you fear.

His practical counsel, as it can be gathered from the prefaces and the Delhi speech, is spare. Start with the Self, because every other piece of knowledge depends on your idea of it. Take the scripture as a proposal, test it with reason, and expect meditation to give the final stamp; do not stop at any of the three. Read the record of a realised man — he would say the Gospel — slowly, and let its ordinariness convince you that realisation is a fact about people and not a rumour about the past. Declare your standpoint and read the objections to it in your own book. And keep the timetable. Forty years of Tuesday and Friday classes is not a small teaching about how the mind is trained.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No photograph of Swami Nikhilananda that this site can verify as freely licensed has been found, and so the lamp is shown in place of a portrait rather than a generated or misattributed face; this site's rule, set out on the picture credits page, is that every portrait must be in the public domain or under a free licence and credited, and that where none exists a symbol is shown instead. Dates and places follow the Ramakrishna Order's own official notice of his life, the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York's account of its founder, the Ramakrishna Mission's General Reports of the 1930s and of 1967–68, the New York Times obituary of 24 July 1973, the Thousand Island Park historical society's account of the Vivekananda Cottage, and his own dated prefaces. Where the sources differ they are both given: the Order's notice says he joined the Order at Mayavati in 1922 and had sannyāsa in 1924, while the Center's account says he was ordained in 1924 and then spent several years in the Himalayan monastery; the Center says he was born in a small Indian village, the Times says Noakhali, and the Delhi Math's note says simply Bangladesh, at the time a part of India. His pre-monastic name is not given by the Order and is reported above only with that caution. The maps are drawn on present-day coordinates from public-domain coastline data; the India map shows the coastline of neighbouring countries faintly so that Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, can be pinned honestly, and draws no borders except India's.

The timeline, plainly

• 1895 — born in the district of Noakhali, East Bengal (now Bangladesh); the same summer Swami Vivekananda gives the Inspired Talks at Thousand Island Park.
• c. 1910s — educated at the University of Calcutta; becomes a journalist; joins the freedom movement; is interned for a period in an English prison camp (the Order gives no dates).
• Before July 1920 — initiated by the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi; meets Swamis Brahmananda, Saradananda, Shivananda, Turiyananda, Premananda, Akhandananda and Abhedananda, and M, the recorder of the Kathamrita.
• 1922 — joins the Order at the Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati, in the Kumaon Himalaya; years of study there.
• 1924 — sannyāsa from Swami Saradananda.
• c. 1929–31 — two years at the Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore, in the special study of Vedānta; 1931 — Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka published at Mysore, with a foreword by V. Subrahmanya Iyer.
• October 1931 — sent by headquarters to the Vedanta Society of Providence, Rhode Island; 1932 — conducts its services during Swami Akhilananda's absences.
• 1932–33 — the season in New York with Swami Bodhananda; invited to speak in churches across the city.
• May 1933 — the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York opens in a chapel at 200 West 57th Street; Sunday lectures, Tuesday Gītā and Friday Rāja-Yoga classes.
• 1938 — extended visit to India after seven years; talks at the Order's centres.
• June–October 1939 — the centre buys 17 East 94th Street; occupied in August, first service in September, dedicated in October.
• February 1942 — The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna; preface signed on the Master's birthday; foreword by Aldous Huxley.
• 1 November 1943 — preface to The Bhagavad Gita, published 1944; foreword by William Ernest Hocking.
• September 1944 — preface to Self-Knowledge (Ātmabodha) at Red Top, Lake George; published 1946.
• 1947–48 — finds Swami Vivekananda's cottage at Thousand Island Park in ruin, buys it and restores it; ready by July 1948; the summer retreat begins.
• 20 March 1949 — speech at New Delhi, “Sri Ramakrishna and India”; 1949 — The Upanishads, volume I (Harper).
• 1953 — Vivekananda: A Biography (preface 5 January); the one-volume Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works is compiled in these years.
• 1958 — Hinduism: Its Meaning for the Liberation of the Spirit; 1959 — The Upanishads, volume IV, completing the set.
• 1962 — Holy Mother, his life of Sri Sarada Devi.
• 7 October 1964 — the Garvin Memorial Lecture at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which becomes the first chapter of Man in Search of Immortality (preface 8 December 1966; published London, 1968).
• 1967–68 — Adjunct Professor of Hindu Religion, Temple University; classes suspended 11 June–9 September 1967 by illness; Swami Adiswarananda joins the centre, August 1968.
• 21 July 1973 — dies at the Thousand Island Park retreat, Wellesley Island, New York, aged seventy-eight.