Swami Nikhilananda

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

Two books, and between them almost the whole range of what this tradition is. The first is The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Its origin is remarkable in itself: a schoolmaster, Mahendranath Gupta, sat in the room, went home, and wrote down in Bengali what had been said that day, for years, with dates. It is not a memoir composed afterwards; it is a diary. His English translation is the form in which most readers outside Bengal have met Sri Ramakrishna — the parables, the songs, the jokes, the abrupt silences, the teacher contradicting himself for two different visitors and saying so. The second is the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad with Gauḍapāda's verses and Śaṅkara's commentary: twelve short sentences on waking, dream and deep sleep, followed by the most uncompromising reasoning in the whole tradition. Nobody comes to it first. It is where the argument ends. That he did both is the point worth keeping. The same lineage produced a man weeping before an image of the Mother and a text that dismantles the idea of causation, and it never treated these as belonging to different religions. He worked for years with the Vedanta Society of New York. The sources used here do not record his birth and death years, and this page will not invent them.

The turn it rests on

His translation of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad with Gauḍapāda's Kārikā and Śaṅkara's commentary put the shortest and steepest Upaniṣad within reach of English readers.

What was taught

Gave the English-speaking world the day-by-day record of Sri Ramakrishna's conversations, and translated the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad with Gauḍapāda's verses and Śaṅkara's commentary.