Vivekananda, Swami

(b. Narendranath Datta 1863–1902) Bestknown disciple of the Bengali mystic
Ramakrishna and also the first Hindu
missionary to the West. Narendranath had
received a good education and had originally intended to be a lawyer; on meeting
Ramakrishna he was initially skeptical and
questioning but in the course of a year
became transformed. After Ramakrishna’s
death he spent several years roaming
through India, gradually coming to the
conclusion that religious life had to
address India’s material needs as well as its
spiritual ones. Vivekananda is most
famous for his address to the First World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in
1893, in which Hinduism—in its rational,
Vedantic form—was first seriously
received by his Western hearers. For the
next four years, he lectured in America
and in England and returned to India to
widespread acclaim. He devoted the rest
of his short life to fostering the
Ramakrishna Mission, a religious organization intended to promote social uplift as
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Vivekananda, Swami
well as religious education. For further
information see Christopher Isherwood,
Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 1965;
Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works
of Swami Vivekananda, 1970; and George
M. Williams, “Swami Vivekananda,” and
“The Ramakrishna Movement: A Study in
Religious Change,” both in Robert D. Baird
(ed.), Religion in Modern India, 1998.