Swami Saradananda

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was born Sharat Chandra Chakravarti on 23 December 1865 into a family on Amherst Street in Calcutta, came to Dakṣiṇeśvar as a student in 1883, and took the vow of renunciation with the other young men at Antpur at Christmas 1886 — around a fire in a village courtyard, months after their teacher's death, with no institution to join and no money. He practised at Baranagore and at Purī, worked in the West with Swami Vivekananda, and then came back to become the first General Secretary of the Math and Mission, a post he held until he died. Read that plainly: he spent the rest of his life doing the paperwork of an expanding organisation, editing its Bengali journal, and organising relief work. And in the middle of it he wrote the Līlāprasaṅga — translated as Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master — the most careful biography this tradition possesses, written by a man who had been in the room and who nevertheless checked, dated and weighed his material like a historian. He also built the house at Bagbazar, called Udbodhan, so that Sri Sarada Devi would have a home in Calcutta, and he attended her there through her later years — a direct disciple of a famous teacher, spending his decades as a householder's servant to an elderly village woman he regarded as the Mother. He died in 1927.

The turn it rests on

He wrote Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master, the most careful biography the tradition has, while carrying the administration of the whole Order.

What was taught

Wrote Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master, the most careful account of his teacher's life.