Swami Turiyananda

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 Harinath Chattopadhyay in north Calcutta in 1863, he was drawn to the Vedānta texts as a boy — not to their atmosphere but to their arguments — and after his teacher's death he went where that temperament took him: Rishikesh, Hardwar, Uttarkashi, Almora. Years of solitary austerity along the upper Ganges and in the Kumaon hills, in caves and huts, with the discipline of a man who intended to settle the matter. Then in 1899 Swami Vivekananda took him to America, and the instruction he was given was unusual. He was not sent to lecture. He was told to go and live Vedānta in the West so that people could see what it looked like. He led the Shanti Ashrama in the San Antone Valley in California — dry hills, tents and a few wooden buildings, no comforts — and taught Advaita in plain speech to Americans who had walked into it with no preparation at all. It was one of the first places of actual Vedāntic practice on that continent. He came back to India, and to silence. He died at the Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama in Varanasi on 21 July 1922. The pairing is what is instructive: the most austere of the brother monks was the one sent to the most comfortable country, precisely because austerity is not a style but a capacity.

The turn it rests on

Vivekananda told him to go and live Vedānta in the West rather than lecture on it.

What was taught

A scholar of Advaita who established the Shanti Ashrama in California in 1900.