Guru to the World
Where I review a major new biography of Swami Vivekananda by Ruth Harris
Swami Vivekananda came to a postbellum United States in flux. Memories of Civil War carnage made Protestant elites question God’s benevolence. Darwin and inconsistencies in the Bible obliterated old certitudes and encouraged scientific skepticism. But even so, a deep spiritual yearning remained. Seances, ghosts, mediums and the search for the God within transfixed seekers in the parlors of New York and New England. Even William James, the foremost American intellectual at the time of Vivekananda’s arrival in 1893, relentlessly explored the spirit world and studied mediums.
This world comes alive in Guru to the World, a large new biography of Vivekananda by Ruth Harris, a historian at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College. According to Harris, one of Vivekananda’s key goals was to set his teachings apart from what he considered the worst elements of this fervor.
A key ingredient in the spiritualist brew was Transcendentalism, especially its Emersonian variant. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an early adopter of Indian wisdom, believed, like the Upanishads, in a universal self at the heart of all beings and in karma, which he called “Compensation.” Transcendentalism, highly influential in fin-de-siècle United States, “Indianized '' several American spiritual currents and primed elite American disciples for Vivekananda, many of whom studied Emerson and were open to an inner spirituality freed from churchy constraints.
Most prominent among these currents were Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, which touted an Indian-ish metaphysics coupled with faith healing through prayer, and a series of movements called New Thought, which promoted the Emersonian inner divinity while proffering a variety of techniques to make good things happen through positive thinking. If you’ve heard of “The Secret” or the law of attraction, you have a sense of what New Thought was trying to do. There was also Theosophy, a jumble of eastern and western esoteric doctrines jammed together with a good dose of spirit-world fakery. It was a doctrine of “raps and taps,” as Vivekananda described it.
When Vivekananda took to the lecture circuit, he emphasized the Indian teachings grafted onto these movements while distancing himself from seances, the search for ghosts and the obsession with contacting the dead. In a brilliant move, he also adopted some terminology from New Thought to advance his own vision.
The book is actually three biographies in one. Roughly the first third focuses on Ramakrishna, where Harris recalls well-known events from his life. The middle third zooms in on Vivekananda, both in India and the West. The concluding third limns the life of Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita, a Scots-Irish devotee who permanently decamped to India after an English career in education and activism. Sister Nivedita suffered both in adapting to India as a white female renunciate (an odd sight, I am sure, for the colonial masters) and in navigating her platonic but intimate relationship with Vivekananda. The book includes excerpts from her many anguished letters and observations about the vicissitudes of their unbreakable bond. I suspect “Three Lives” would not have been attractive title to publishers, and the middle third of the book is by far the most interesting.
Transcendentalism, highly influential in fin-de-siècle United States, “Indianized '' several spiritual currents and primed American audiences for Vivekananda, many of whom read Emerson and were open to an inner spirituality freed from churchy constraints.
The World Parliament of Religions in Chicago was meant to crown Protestantism as the pinnacle of all religion. But Vivekananda flipped the script: He universalized Advaita Vedanta by placing its central monistic insight at the pinnacle. He could thus assert, in his famous first address at the Parliament, that “all religions are true,” because all quests strode the path to the same Adviatic summit. This miffed, and continues to miff, some western scholars.
Vivekananda’s Hindu Universalism, as Harris calls it, with its pluralism, focus on experiential enlightenment and service orientation, did not resemble traditionalist Advaitic paths, so scholars dubbed this emerging form of Hinduism “Neo-Vedanta” and claimed aspects of its teachings derived from Western modernism and even Christianity. But Vivekananda’s approach, while modern, largely comes from his guru Ramakrishna, who valued experience over books and shastras and took mystical journeys through many faith traditions, including Christianity and a kind of Islam. Even so, there are differences between guru and disciple: Ramakrishna, always the ardent devotee of Kali, considered Advaita Vedanta one path among many and would not have placed it at the pinnacle. He would also have viewed some of Vivekananda’s social service activities as an encumbrance on the path to enlightenment.
He could thus assert, in his famous first address at the Parliament, that “all religions are true,” because all quests strode the path to the same Advaitic summit. This miffed, and continues to miff, some western scholars.
What makes Vivekananda worthy of large biographies such as this? To me, Vivekananda stands out for four reasons.
He was elemental in creating a pan-Indian Hindu consciousness. Not Shaiva or Smarta, Brahmin or Dalit, but “Hindu.” Given India’s long decline under colonialism, his success in the United States and to a lesser extent in England instilled pride in the nascent pan-Indian Indian middle class and inspired the independence struggle. He continues to inspire Indians of multiple political persuasions.
He mainstreamed seva as a spiritual practice, insisting that his fellow monks serve communities decimated by late 19th century famines. “He who sees Shiva in the poor, in the weak, and in the diseased, really worships Shiva; and if he sees Shiva only in the image, his worship is but preliminary.” Harris suggests Brahmo and Christian examples informed his approach, but in my reading, his strongest motivation came from the sense of fellow feeling he saw in the Upanishads and from his view of yoga, where (selfless) charity might both be a practice, or sadhana, and a sign of spiritual accomplishment. He was also drawing on a long tradition of Hindu giving. In fact, he rejected the idea that charity must come from a Christian sense of duty to a separate God who dictated rules from on high.
He re-centered social and religious reform in India by making it less Christian. He scoffed at traditionalist rules that barred women and sudras from obtaining Vedic knowledge. He railed against untouchability, which he called “don’t touchism,” and made fun of pandits beholden to unimportant details. But he also rejected the Brahmo Samaj’s rejection of “idolatry” as a step too far, and while he could be critical of caste, he did not seek to dismantle it.
He created the modern template for the expression of Hinduism in the West. He initiated white Americans, mainly women, as monks, and one of the best things about Harris’s account is that we get to meet so many who were critical for seeding Vedanta in the West. His writings on yoga, particularly Raja Yoga, informed both the theory and practice of various western meditation techniques. His belief that the central claims of yoga are verifiable and “scientific” inspired, in the 20th century, myriad controlled studies on the effects of meditation and mindfulness. The tens of millions of yoga practitioners, the believers in reincarnation, the seekers who declare themselves “spiritual but not religious” owe something to Vivekananda.
The modern template is like a gathering of clouds, visible but wispy and ephemeral. Despite Vivekananda’s efforts, Hindu Universalism remains enmeshed with other “alternative” spiritualities. Walk into any New Age store and you will still find Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga amid incense sticks, pyramids, crystals, Gurdjieff tracts and assorted spiritual kitsch. Westerners keen on fame and profit adapt Hindu Universalism for consumption in the secular culture by constantly flooding it with a hodgepodge of new “techniques.” Would he have wanted this? Definitely not. It would take a movement to set things right.