Vivekananda: Awake, Arise

We left a fire burning in the hearts of young men at Dakshineswar. Now we follow the one who carried it furthest. His birth-name was Narendranath Datta, born in Calcutta in 1863, into comfort and a fine modern education. He was clever, proud, and full of doubt, and when he first came to Ramakrishna he came half to test him. He left, in time, wholly changed. Vivekananda

After his master died, the young monk took the name Vivekananda and went walking. For years he wandered the whole of India on foot, a mendicant with nothing, a parivrajaka. And the walking taught him something the books had not. He saw the ancient glory of this land, yes, but he also saw its poverty, village after village of hunger and neglect. It broke his heart and forged his life's purpose. A faith that could not lift up the poor, he came to feel, was not yet worth its name.

Then came the moment that changed everything. In 1893, a great gathering was called in the city of Chicago, far across the sea: the Parliament of the World's Religions, where the faiths of the earth would speak, each for itself. The young monk, almost unknown and nearly penniless, made his way there. And on the eleventh of September, he rose to speak.

He did not begin with doctrine. He began with five warm words. And a hall of thousands rose to its feet and thundered before he had said another thing.

Then he told them what he had come to bring. Not a plea for his religion against the others, but a gift for them all: the great Hindu conviction that the many faiths are not enemies, but so many true roads to the one God. Hear his own words.

You can hear in that the very teaching of his master, Ramakrishna, as many faiths, so many paths, now lifted onto a world stage. He gave it an image old as the Vedas, of the rivers and the sea.

He became famous overnight, and lectured for years across America and Britain. And the heart of what he taught was a practical Vedanta. The Upanishads, you remember, taught that the Self within is one with the boundless Brahman, that each person is, at the deepest level, divine. Vivekananda took that soaring truth and brought it down to earth. If God is within every being, he said, then to serve any living creature is to worship God. He had a phrase for it: service to the living being in the knowledge that it is God. seva

He taught, too, that there is not one single road for everyone, but four great paths suited to four kinds of heart: the path of selfless action, the path of devotion, the path of meditation, and the path of knowledge. Remember the four paths; you met them before, and here they are gathered into one clear teaching for the modern seeker. Choose the road that fits your nature, he said, and walk it with all your strength. the four paths (yogas)

He was no preacher of weakness. Again and again he called his people to strength, to courage, to standing upright. One of his sayings rings like a bell: strength is life, weakness is death. And he loved to repeat, adapting an old line from the Katha Upanishad you met long ago, the cry: Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.^[2][3]

He turned his vision into something lasting. He founded the Ramakrishna Mission, an order that joined the heights of the spirit to plain, hard service, building hospitals and schools, carrying relief to the starving and the sick. Its ideal he set in a single line: for one's own freedom, and for the good of the world. Then, his work done, he died young, at only thirty-nine, in the year 1902.

One honest question follows him still, and a careful teacher must name it kindly. Was this oneness of all faiths, this Vedanta made practical, the ancient truth of the Upanishads simply spoken anew for a new age? Or was the emphasis on it, religion as universal harmony, itself partly new, shaped in the modern world? The tradition holds the first. Some scholars argue the second. Let us step to the Threshold.