BLISS OF DISCRIMINATION:
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902)
Narendra was born in Calcutta in 1863 to a solid, upper-middle class family. Although he’d never left India before, Vivekananda wasn’t exactly a hayseed when he arrived in the US. He was educated at a British-run schools, reportedly was a top-notch student, and spoke fluent English. He also had something going for him that can’t be taught or bought, charisma, which attracted people to him–especially women–like bees to honey.
The original plan was for Narendra to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. But when he met Ramakrishna at age 18, that plan went out the window, though not right away. The attraction between the mid-40s sage and the teenager was very curious, because in many ways they were negative images of each other. Ramakrishna was a coarse, even crude, illiterate peasant who without warning and at the slightest provocation fall into a trace. Initially Narendra was repulsed by his behavior, but in the end he became the teacher’s pet, and was the natural choice to assume leadership of the ragged crew of disciples after the Master’s demise.
Just before coming to the US, Vivekananda had spent nearly three years as a mendicant wandering through India, coming to roost finally on a rock just off the southernmost tip of the country. After meditating there for three days he received a “Divine Command”–one account says he plainly heard Ramakrishna command him “Go!”– to travel to the US, the first of many Indians to receive such a directive from God. He offered two reasons for his trip: one, he was encouraged by several acquaintances to represent Vedanta at the Parliament; and two, more importantly, he was hoping to raise funds for his social uplift projects in India (after failing to convince local rulers to contribute, and not knowing about the American financial panic). But like many best laid plans–and Vivekananda’s plans were poorly laid–his definitely went awry, at first. For starters, when he reached Chicago at the end of July, 1893, he discovered that the Parliament’s opening was still six weeks off, and he was already near the end of his bankroll. Then soon after he was told that he couldn’t just pop in to the Parliament, that he had to be formally invited and approved by a delegate selection committee which had long since stopped inviting and approving.
But Vivekananda was incredibly persistent and, on top of that, incredibly lucky, or at least he was cashing in on some large reserve of good karma. Back on the train coming to Chicago from Vancouver, his port of entry, he’d met and charmed a woman by the name of Kate Sanborn, a well-off writer and former college English professor, who invited him to visit her in Boston. So after cooling his heels for 10 days in Chicago, and running frighteningly low on money, he hopped a train for Boston and presented his desperate self to Sanborn. She immediately took him under her wing, fixed him up with several speaking dates, and introduced him to some very influential friends. One in particular was John Henry Wright, a distinguished Harvard professor of Greek, who was so impressed by Vivekananda he reputedly commented: “To ask you, Swami, for your credentials [i.e., for the Parliament] is like asking the sun about its right to shine.” Wright immediately wrote his good friend, the one who happened to be the chairman of the Parliament’s delegate selection committee, urging him to add Vivekananda to the program, then arranged for a place for Vivekananda to stay while attending the Parliament, and finally bought him a ticket back to the Windy City.
If you think that’s fortunate, just wait. When he got back to Chicago, to his horror Vivekananda found he’d lost the addresses of his contacts. Alone, ignored and not knowing where to go, he spent the night in a boxcar and the next morning, forgetting he wasn’t in India any more, ventured out to knock on doors and beg for breakfast. Just imagine the reaction of the average Chicagoan, circa 1893, who opened the front door to a dark-skinned, unshaven stranger wearing a rumpled orange bathrobe and yellow towel wrapped around his head. After being repeatedly turned away, hungry and tired, Vivekananda decided to take the only reasonable course of action: he sat down on the street curb and resigned himself to God’s will. Within minutes God responded in the person of a Mrs George Hale–Kate Sanborn’s fairy godmother successor–whose upscale home was just across the street from Vivekananda’s curb. Chancing to look out a window, Mrs Hale perspicaciously surmised, based on his out-of-the-ordinary attire, that he was a Parliament delegate. She thereupon offered her help and in a trice, Vivekananda was cleaned up, fed, and introduced to the Hales’ good friend, Presbyterian minister John Barrows, who was the chairman of, yes, the World’s Parliament of Religion.
And so through a seemingly miraculous chain of events, self-proclaimed Swami Vivekananda had his ticket to the Parliament. We’ll say goodbye to him for now, and pick him up again down the road to talk about his teaching and answer the $64 question: Did Vivekananda really introduce Yoga to the US? Or put another way: What kind of Yoga did he introduce?
But before we go into this question, we have to pause here for awhile and consider the other half of the Vivekananda equation, which is often overlooked in popular histories; that is, who were the people constituting his audience? Or maybe the question is: Who were we back then? And why were we so receptive to what Vivekananda had to say? By audience I don’t mean just the folks who attended his sessions at the Parliament. Vivekananda stayed in the US for about two-and-a-half years after the Parliament ended and toured extensively, his talks usually attracting large crowds and at least some comment, for good or ill, in the local newspapers. His audience then included a not insignificant segment of the American public, from Hartford and Boston, down along the East Coast to Baltimore and DC, and out to Minneapolis, Detroit, and even Des Moines.
Narendra was born in Calcutta in 1863 to a solid, upper-middle class family. Although he’d never left India before, Vivekananda wasn’t exactly a hayseed when he arrived in the US. He was educated at a British-run schools, reportedly was a top-notch student, and spoke fluent English. He also had something going for him that can’t be taught or bought, charisma, which attracted people to him–especially women–like bees to honey.
The original plan was for Narendra to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. But when he met Ramakrishna at age 18, that plan went out the window, though not right away. The attraction between the mid-40s sage and the teenager was very curious, because in many ways they were negative images of each other. Ramakrishna was a coarse, even crude, illiterate peasant who without warning and at the slightest provocation fall into a trace. Initially Narendra was repulsed by his behavior, but in the end he became the teacher’s pet, and was the natural choice to assume leadership of the ragged crew of disciples after the Master’s demise.
Just before coming to the US, Vivekananda had spent nearly three years as a mendicant wandering through India, coming to roost finally on a rock just off the southernmost tip of the country. After meditating there for three days he received a “Divine Command”–one account says he plainly heard Ramakrishna command him “Go!”– to travel to the US, the first of many Indians to receive such a directive from God. He offered two reasons for his trip: one, he was encouraged by several acquaintances to represent Vedanta at the Parliament; and two, more importantly, he was hoping to raise funds for his social uplift projects in India (after failing to convince local rulers to contribute, and not knowing about the American financial panic). But like many best laid plans–and Vivekananda’s plans were poorly laid–his definitely went awry, at first. For starters, when he reached Chicago at the end of July, 1893, he discovered that the Parliament’s opening was still six weeks off, and he was already near the end of his bankroll. Then soon after he was told that he couldn’t just pop in to the Parliament, that he had to be formally invited and approved by a delegate selection committee which had long since stopped inviting and approving.
But Vivekananda was incredibly persistent and, on top of that, incredibly lucky, or at least he was cashing in on some large reserve of good karma. Back on the train coming to Chicago from Vancouver, his port of entry, he’d met and charmed a woman by the name of Kate Sanborn, a well-off writer and former college English professor, who invited him to visit her in Boston. So after cooling his heels for 10 days in Chicago, and running frighteningly low on money, he hopped a train for Boston and presented his desperate self to Sanborn. She immediately took him under her wing, fixed him up with several speaking dates, and introduced him to some very influential friends. One in particular was John Henry Wright, a distinguished Harvard professor of Greek, who was so impressed by Vivekananda he reputedly commented: “To ask you, Swami, for your credentials [i.e., for the Parliament] is like asking the sun about its right to shine.” Wright immediately wrote his good friend, the one who happened to be the chairman of the Parliament’s delegate selection committee, urging him to add Vivekananda to the program, then arranged for a place for Vivekananda to stay while attending the Parliament, and finally bought him a ticket back to the Windy City.
If you think that’s fortunate, just wait. When he got back to Chicago, to his horror Vivekananda found he’d lost the addresses of his contacts. Alone, ignored and not knowing where to go, he spent the night in a boxcar and the next morning, forgetting he wasn’t in India any more, ventured out to knock on doors and beg for breakfast. Just imagine the reaction of the average Chicagoan, circa 1893, who opened the front door to a dark-skinned, unshaven stranger wearing a rumpled orange bathrobe and yellow towel wrapped around his head. After being repeatedly turned away, hungry and tired, Vivekananda decided to take the only reasonable course of action: he sat down on the street curb and resigned himself to God’s will. Within minutes God responded in the person of a Mrs George Hale–Kate Sanborn’s fairy godmother successor–whose upscale home was just across the street from Vivekananda’s curb. Chancing to look out a window, Mrs Hale perspicaciously surmised, based on his out-of-the-ordinary attire, that he was a Parliament delegate. She thereupon offered her help and in a trice, Vivekananda was cleaned up, fed, and introduced to the Hales’ good friend, Presbyterian minister John Barrows, who was the chairman of, yes, the World’s Parliament of Religion.
And so through a seemingly miraculous chain of events, self-proclaimed Swami Vivekananda had his ticket to the Parliament. We’ll say goodbye to him for now, and pick him up again down the road to talk about his teaching and answer the $64 question: Did Vivekananda really introduce Yoga to the US? Or put another way: What kind of Yoga did he introduce?
But before we go into this question, we have to pause here for awhile and consider the other half of the Vivekananda equation, which is often overlooked in popular histories; that is, who were the people constituting his audience? Or maybe the question is: Who were we back then? And why were we so receptive to what Vivekananda had to say? By audience I don’t mean just the folks who attended his sessions at the Parliament. Vivekananda stayed in the US for about two-and-a-half years after the Parliament ended and toured extensively, his talks usually attracting large crowds and at least some comment, for good or ill, in the local newspapers. His audience then included a not insignificant segment of the American public, from Hartford and Boston, down along the East Coast to Baltimore and DC, and out to Minneapolis, Detroit, and even Des Moines.
