Swami Shivananda

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

Born Taraknath Ghosal in the 1850s into a family of Barasat, north of Calcutta, he had a working life before he had a monastic one — employment in Delhi, a long way from home in the 1880s — and he visited Sri Ramakrishna at Dakṣiṇeśvar whenever he could until 1885. After his teacher's death he joined the monastery at Baranagore, and what the brother monks recorded about him was constant: a steadiness that did not vary with circumstance. They called him Mahāpuruṣa Mahārāj. When plague came to Calcutta in 1899 he did relief work in the affected quarters, which at that date meant walking into houses people were fleeing. He became the second President of the Order, and he started a practice that tells you most of what you need to know about him: he began celebrating the birthdays of his brother disciples, on the grounds that gratitude is not a sentiment but part of the discipline. A tradition that talks constantly about the unreality of persons had, in him, someone insisting that the people beside you be honoured by name and on the day. He is also one of only two of Sri Ramakrishna's direct disciples ever captured on film — a few seconds of an old monk at Belur, which is as close as anyone now will come to seeing that generation move. He died on 20 February 1934.

The turn it rests on

He was among only two direct disciples of Ramakrishna ever captured on film.

What was taught

A direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna; guided the Order through its expansion in India.