Welcome back, this time to the final installment of the Vivekananda series!

Last time we took a look at Vivekananda’s post-Parliament tour of the US. From causing a stir in Christian circles to fostering drama within his followers, Vivekananda was not without his fair share of controversy. He then briefly hopped over to London, taught some classes and picked up some followers, before coming back to the US and getting involved in publishing issues.

For more of the details, I’ll reference you back to the last article. If you need to get caught up on everything from the beginning, here is where you can start.

One thing to note about this particular period of time is that Vivekananda spent the last few years of his life in India. Unfortunately, Chattopadhyaya does not cover this period of time and so the only real coverage comes from Nikhilananda. This isn’t too much of a difficulty to get around as in the last year and a half of his life Vivekananda was largely confined to his room at the Belur Math.

Given that this is the case, I’ve done my best to eliminate the embellishing that Nikhilananda is prone to doing. If you’re looking for or hoping to read about the supernatural abilities Vivekananda was said to possess, I would encourage you to go read Nikhilananda’s second hand and posthumous accounts of Vivekananda’s life.

We’ll pick up where we last left off: Vivekananda’s second trip to London.

Vivekananda in London 1896

Resolving the Publication Drama

At the end of 1895, Vivekananda had upset the New York Vedanta Society by allowing Mr Sturdy of England the exclusive rights to publish Vivekananada’s lecture notes. The New York Society had been working for months to prepare four books on the different yogas, and they had already secured the publishing rights, so they were rightfully quite upset at this turn of events.

Things would get resolved at this point, though it doesn’t seem like anyone was particularly happy about the result. It was decided that Mr Sturdy would handle the issue of finding a publisher, while Mr Leggett and Mrs Ole Bull would retain exclusive rights to the content and pay for the publishing. In the end, Mrs Ole Bull would hand over power of attorney to Mr Leggett, giving him sole exclusive rights to the content.

Settling In

After a long journey by ship, Vivekananda finally arrives in London again.

He would settle into a small place with Swami Saradananda and his brother, Mahendranath Datta. Mahendranath, while studying law, would also use this time to begin taking notes on his brother. These notes would eventually become a three volume collection that would get published in Bengali.

These notes would largely get pulled from the lectures Vivekananda held in the house that the three rented. Very few lectures were given elsewhere as Vivekananda did not seem to garner the same amount of attention as he had in America. Only two ladies magazines gave him any press time and that didn’t help his reputation of only being interesting for middle-upper class ladies.

Speaking of the well-off, Vivekananda would get to enjoy many benefits of their attention while in London. One such benefit that was provided by Mr and Mrs Sevier was the chance to climb the Himalayan Alps. The purpose of this excursion was to look for a remote monastery in the Alps that could be turned into a new ashram, a task the group was able to complete and one which would become the Sevier’s responsibility.

The trio left on their trek in July but made a quick stop-over in Switzerland before continuing on their journey.

While on their stop-over, Vivekananda would meet Professr Deussen, a famous Indologist of the time. The professor and his wife were holding a lunch that Vivekananda was invited to along with the Seviers. If you recall, there was a story about Vivekananda being able to recite anything from memory. This lunch seems to be the point where that story first originated and would be popularized from.

Famous People He Met and The Drama

Professor Deussen would not be the only famous person Vivekananda had the pleasure of meeting on this trip.

During his time in London, Vivekananda would have the pleasure of meeting Victoria Woodhull – leader of the American suffrage movement – and Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society. Thanks in part to this latter connection, Vivekananda would be invited to give a lecture on bhakti at the Theosophical Society, despite having snubbed them in the past. The most prominent of the people he would meet, however, was Professor Max Müller.

Müller had just completed an article focused on Ramakrishna and was eager to learn more about him from Vivekananda. The two began discussing Vivekananda’s late master and these recollections would be used in a book that Müller was writing on Ramakrishna. Once it was published, however, drama emerged.

Essentially, the Christian missionaries and Bhramo Samaj would take issue with Müller’s accounting of Ramakrishna’s life. Müller would defend it by saying that even Vivekananda’s recollections are skewed, as is the way of oral traditions. This upset Vivekananda and he wrote a review of the book that downplayed Müller’s contribution to spreading Ramakrishna’s word.

No one knows for sure how their relationship fared after that point, but given there were no further correspondences after that point it may be safe to assume things soured between the pair.

Heading to India

Autumn rolls around and with it another series of lectures from Vivekananda. These lectures, now that he was back in London, were slightly better received than the previous series even though they were largely ignored by the papers. Some classes had even been able to top out at 200 students. The lectures focused on the usual topics and transcripts of 15 of those lectures can be found in the Complete Works collection.

By the end of the season Vivekananda would decide it was time to return to India. With the arrival of Swami Abhedananda, Vivekananda was ready to try and establish a Vedanta teaching center in Calcutta. Thinking he was leaving the work in London in capable hands, he set out back to India.

Things wouldn’t pan out too well though. Swami Abhedananda would have a difficult time attracting the same crowds that Vivekananda had been able to. Without those same crowds, Abhedananda would be unable to continue the work in London and instead headed back to New York to run the New York Vedanta Society.

Vivekananda would spend about two years in India, going on lecture tours and establishing the Ramakrishna Math. During all that time he claimed to suffer from poor health, which is what eventually forced him to leave for London in June 1899.

Of note, there was some shifting of devotees around this time. Sarah Noble stayed on and became Sister Nivedita. Mr Sturdy, over the of a year and a half, eventually stopped contacting Vivekananda and correspondences went through a third party, a Miss Josephine MacLeod. When Vivekananda returned to England he had Miss Noble and a brother monk – Swami Turiyananda – in tow.

Drama in America

While Vivekananda was off in London and India, things in America were very different.

To start with, Kirpananda was having financial issues. He reached out to Mrs Ole Bull to request funds but the letters the two exchanged put a strain on their relationship. Though we don’t know the contents of the letters themselves, it was known that Kripananda began teaching things from books Mrs Ole Bull considered “unclean.” She thought that their contents largely went against Vivekananda’s teachings. We don’t know which books were being used to teach, only that whatever their contents were put Kripananda on the outs with the Vedanta Society.

As I previously mentioned, Mr Sturdy and Vivekananda were beginning to have issues in their friendship.

The first cracks appeared when Vivekananda requested funds from Mr Sturdy so that he and Turiyananda could travel back to America. This didn’t sit well with Mr Sturdy and he reached out to Mrs Ole Bull for the funds, stating that it hardly seemed fair to ask the London branch to pay for the pair to travel back to the main branch. Due to this, Vivekananda would write to Mr Sturdy and implore him to lend the funds – while also trying to encourage him to head to America himself, stating that Mr Sturdy was was essential to the mission.

Mr Sturdy was already on his own travels around Europe and did not cancel his plans to head to America. Vivekananda, who was in poor health at the time, remained a few more weeks in London before heading to New York in August.

This was only the start of the drama between the two men, however.

Mr Sturdy had made some comments in a letter to Miss Noble about Vivekananda and his brother monk’s lack of asceticism, and in a reply to her also intimated that he found Miss Noble to be a fanatic. Miss Noble then sent portions of this letter to Mrs Ole Bull. This got back to Vivekananda through Miss MacLeod.

The two men then engaged in a protracted series of letters in which Mr Sturdy repeated that he found Vivekananda lacking in the asceticism Vivekananda professed to have. Vivekananda continued to deflect with statements essentially saying that he was allowed to enjoy luxuries because he did not preach the torturing of oneself and that he felt like a scapegoat. It all culminated in Mr Sturdy and Vivekananda dropping correspondence.

This wouldn’t be the only issues that Vivekananda would find himself dealing with, however.

As mentioned a few times now, Vivekananda was not in great health. Little did anyone know that he was slowly approaching the last few years of his life. Dr Guernsey, who was a follower from Vivekananda’s first visit to America, said that his “heart was nervous” and this spurred Vivekananda into deciding to head to Detroit in search of newly manufactured health foods. Eventually though, Vivekananda would decide that ultimately he would travel to the West coast and California in specific.

Second US Tour – 1900 to 1901

Going to California

By December of 1899, Vivekananda had arrived in California. He stayed for a brief time in the San Francisco home of a Miss Spencer, a follower he had met sometime before this trip. While here, he would stay by the bedside of Miss Spencer’s mother until she eventually passed.

Within a few days of her passing, Vivekananda would begin teaching again. During this last month of the year he held a total of 12 classes. Some classes touched on Christian topics for the first time in awhile, but most were focused on Hindu and metaphysical concepts.

By this point, in a strange change, Vivekananda had begun teaching Raja Yoga under the guise of it being Applied Psychology. Perhaps in an attempt to attract a more serious and less woman-centered crowd. This didn’t seem to work in his favor as he would soon drop the attempt.

Some speculation paints that why he did this in the first place was to elicit more donations from those crowds he wasn’t previously reaching. Vivekananda had a plan to use funds he raised in the US to build more Vedanta teaching institutes in India, while also raising enough to enable him to be able to travel back to India and spend time with his aging mother. Unfortunately, though he was charging for these classes, Vivekananda was not as popular on the West Coast as he had been on the East Coast and was unable to gather enough funds to support either one of his dreams.

That luck would change, however, when we finally moved to Pasadena.

He moved into a full multi-generational home called the Mead Residence. This home would later be acquired and restored by the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Here Vivekananda would teach a few classes on various topics and host a few Q&A sessions. While he would only be in Pasadena for a month before heading north to Oakland.

The reason for heading north was that Vivekananda had been invited, at the last minute, to join a “Congress of Religions” that a Reverend Benjamin Mills was hosting at his Unitarian church. Rev Mills had heard that Vivekananda was in Pasadena and invited him as a replacement for his original speaker who canceled. Unsurprisingly, Vivekananda gave a speech about Vedanta.

Though Vivekananda was late to give his speech, likely due to the trains, there was already a large crowd gathered. Estimates of the crowd place the number of attendees somewhere in the 1500 to 2000 range. Despite his lateness, the speech was apparently such a success that he was invited to come back and give another lecture three days later. This would then lead to Vivekananda starting two different lecture series of three talks each.

These lectures, successful as they were, did not bring in any money. Most were given for free – a fact that Vivekananda lamented about in a letter to Mrs Ole Bull. As such, there was little money to advertise the lecture series and there were only a handful of newspaper articles that mentioned it.

The first series seems to be on Raja Yoga, then another series of three lectures on Advaita, and then a final series of three lectures on Raja Yoga again. At this same time, there was a larger discussion in the Christian circles in America about “practical religion” and Socialized Christianity. This is important because, as we’ve seen time and time again with Vivekananda, he can’t resist inserting himself into the discussion and railing against Christian ideas to prove how Hinduism is better. At least at this time, nothing much came of his ranting.

Additionally, thanks to the success of his lectures at the Unitarian Church, Vivekananda was in high demand for more practical instruction on meditation. He began offering classes three times a week for up to 2.5 hours – only part of that time would be spent in meditation with a Q&A session after where people would ask questions about things like diet, exercise, and how to rest. These lessons would occur in the morning before lunch and an afternoon nap. However idyllic things sound during this time, notes from his followers mention some roughness of manner and harsh words directed towards them.

Vivekananda was once again back to giving lectures every day and as a result his health was steadily getting worse. All told, from Feb to May, Vivekananda ended up giving 64 lectures during this time. By May, outside of private lectures, he would be done for the season.

A couple of anecdotes about Vivekananda being taciturn occur here, but nothing out of the ordinary. He largely seemed annoyed at all times and took what he wanted when desired. At the same time, he was providing money back to the Belur Math to deal with a lawsuit brought against the Math by the municipality, which wanted to impose a tax on the Math. It should also be noted that his brother monks were balancing the books there in order to help provide for people affected by a famine going on in India at the time.

I mention all this to show that while Vivekananda was consumed with generating wealth and attention, his fellow monks were busy doing actual goodwill. Many positives get ascribed to Vivekananda directly when it was those around him that were performing these good deeds.

Vedanta Societies of California

Before we can conclude this year, we need to take a brief moment to discuss the founding of the West Coast Vedanta Societies.

Though Vivekananda seemed to enjoy his time in Southern California, he made no attempt to formally create a Vedanta society. He seemed to not have the funds or the personal desire to begin anything. In fact, he had planned to travel back to Chicago but this lack of funding would prove to be an impediment to achieving that.

Vivekananda’s old friend the Maharaja of Khetri had stopped sending the monthly 100-rupees for Vivekananda’s personal expenses. This meant that he was forced to have to take on more lectures in order to afford his living expenses. In total, he was able to save around $1k for travel expenses as he had wanted to go back to Chicago.

Before he could leave, however, a couple of things happened.

The first was the establishment of the San Francisco Vedanta Society. After his final lecture in the area, he was approached by one of the disciples in attendance asking for his consent to being the society. Vivekananda was all too happy to allow someone else to start the society for him.

He then heads off for a quick forest retreat with a lady friend he had made. He doesn’t spend long out in the forest before returning to San Francisco in poor health. This cuts his plans to head to Chicago short, understandably, and while he recovers he gives some more lectures at the newly formed Vedanta Society. Once again, there isn’t much to note about these lectures, but they did spark a very generous spirit in his discipleship.

Though Vivekananda’s lectures weren’t much of a success, the society was gifted a large parcel of land out in the San Antone Valley of California. Vivekananda sent Turiyananda out to this extremely remote location – roughly 50 miles away from the nearest rail station or market – to have him develop it into an ashrama. This never came to be as it was too remote for water access and Turiyananda became too sick to continue the project, ultimately returning to San Francisco after only a few months.

Once Vivekananda was well enough, he was off to Chicago.

Chicago…But Mostly New York

Honestly, we have no idea what he was up to in Chicago. He arrives, we assume he stays with Mary Hale, and then he leaves in roughly four days time. That’s it. That’s Chicago.

Vivekananda then heads to New York. While he had been gone, the Vedanta Society of New York had finally managed to rent a whole building for themselves. There were also some notable absences in the society: Mr. Leggett had resigned, and both Swami Kripananda and Abhayananda were also absent.

During his time in New York Vivekananda gave 9 talks about subjects we’ve already covered, only introducing one new topic on ‘Mother Worship’ – which I take to mean the divine mother. Again, the papers in NY largely ignored him and attendance for the lectures at the society reached at most 100 people.

1900 Paris Exhibition

There really isn’t too much to say about the Paris Exhibition.

Vivekananda was invited to speak about Hinduism. He gave two speeches towards the end of the exhibition. Not much to really say about it; it doesn’t appear that it garnered much attention given all the other high profile discussions and inventions on display.

Mr Leggett and his wife hosted him on this trip, setting him up in their very fancy French home. They would host nightly parties where all the most well-connected exhibition attendees were invited. This would be where Vivekananda and Professor Patrick Geddes would meet – Geddes would later go on to write the preface for the French translation of Raja Yoga. Vivekananda would also give a few informal lectures to the guests, but overall it seemed more like he was on an extended vacation.

Time to Travel

Vivekananda would stay with the Leggett’s for a month before moving into an apartment by himself. He did this, apparently, to have more room to study French.

Either way, once the exhibition had concluded, Mrs Ole Bull insisted that he and several others in Paris go on a trip to Brittany. The reason for this insistence had been kept from him, but it was to facilitate a conversation between Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita who had also been in Paris. She had felt snubbed by Vivekananda because of her preoccupation on learning from Professor Geddes.

By the time Vivekananda arrives in Brittany, Sister Nivedita had already been in the area for some time. She had sent Vivekananda a letter that apparently ‘complained, blamed and sought guidance and solicitude from [her] guru’ to which Vivekananda responded defensively. He stated that he was totally not jealous of her new friends and had never been born with jealousy, despite whatever flaws he had been born with.

Not much is really known about what he was up to in Brittany, since he exchanged no letters during this time, but what is known is that whatever rift was between him and Sister Nivedita did not really heal. She wouldn’t see him again until March 1902, just before he died.

He then did some sightseeing at Mont St Michel before heading back to Paris and eventually onto the Orient Express. A humorous article was written about the departure, but little mention was made of it otherwise. He went with a small group of a few friends whose names were not listed.

The group did stop in Vienna for a few days, one of the planned destinations on the Orient Express, and then he caught the next available train to Constantinople (Istanbul) and would be there for about 10 days. They then went on to Athens for a few days before taking a quick jaunt to Egypt and Turkey. It’s unclear how long he stayed here, but he very suddenly decided it was time to head back to India.

Vivekananda’s fare was paid for by one of his traveling partners and the group parted ways. Foremost on his mind was that the Belur Math had seen better times and, as he had mentioned to one member of the traveling group, he felt like his time was coming to an end.

He arrived in India in December of 1900.

The End

At long last, we arrive at the conclusion of our tale.

Return to Belur

Vivekananda arrives at the Belur Math on Dec 9 1900 and quickly learns that Mr Sevier has passed. According to letters to Miss MacLeod, Mr Sevier was cremated and scattered into the river that ran near the Mayavati ashrama in the Himalayas. This left Mrs Sevier to run the ashram by herself.

On Dec 27 Vivekananda left Belur to head to the Himalayas to visit her. The winter there, according to Nikhilananda, was particularly brutal that year. Without having pre-arranged transport to the monastery, Vivekananda was left to walk 65 miles in deep snowfall with Shivananda and Sadananda in tow. He wouldn’t reach the monastery until Jan 3 1901.

On the way to Mayavati, Vivekananda learned that his long-time financier the Maharaja of Khetri had passed. The Maharaja had been inspecting repair work done on Emperor Akbar’s tomb when he lost his footing and fell several hundred feet to his death.

Vivekananda stayed in Mayavati until Jan 18, then headed back to Belur and arrived by Jan 24. Once he was back, his mother asked to go on a trip to see all the holy sites, which Vivekananda obliged. By March, he was off to tour with his mother and to give lectures along the way.

His health began to suffer around then, as his asthma and diabetes (according to Nikhilananda) was getting worse. He eventually took some time off from the lecture circuit around May before returning to Belur.

From that point on, Vivekananda’s health began to fade. He was pressured by his brother monastics to live a quiet life from there on, in order to try to recover his health. Of course, Vive couldn’t resist the urge to teach, and he kept on lecturing through his final days.

Not too much happens during this period of rest. He receives some funds to establish other monasteries, including one for women, and a Vedic college. Otherwise, it was a constant stream of visitors to the Belur Math that kept him busy.

Vivekananda would pass July 4, 1902 due to heart failure.

Conclusion

If you’ve been reading this series from the start, thank you. This was a huge labor of love. Love for accuracy and presenting the most human version of religious leaders.

It’s unfortunately very common for religious and spiritual leaders to be presented in the most flattering light possible. We grant them so much more leniency than perhaps we ought to, all under the presumption that they must be holier than we are. As if they are closer to some sort of truth than we could ever know. Throughout this article series and others, we have seen time and time again the lengths that followers will go to when it comes to presenting their faith leaders in the most positive light.

Yet we also see that they are just as capable of egregious acts. While Vivekananda was not the worst, he was just a man — no more enlightened than you or I. He schemed, planned, and worked like the rest of us. He was the subject of benign racism and tokenism; things he used to gain prominence within Western society. He was vain and lazy in the same ways we can all be vain and lazy.

That does not make him a bad man. It makes him a human. Something which we, as fellow humans, feel the need to dispense with whenever we contemplate or elevate someone to the realms of divinity. But what are Gods if not just humans?

That is a question for a much deeper topic though.

Instead, as a final thought, I want to turn our attention to the silent swami’s that received no attention during this series. The ones that ran things while Vivekananda was away and made sure that the lights were on when he got back. The ones that were actually in the community, providing aid and resources to the masses when they were in need. Those are the real divine beings we should be praising.

Whenever you see a lone spiritual leader, you can be sure that there are hundreds of followers behind them that do all the work. Silently. Thanklessly. Those are the people doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

I want to take a moment to recognize them because of their dedication to the mission. They’re the reason we now have the Ramakrishna Mission which continues to try and enrich communities by providing healthcare to rural areas where there are no hospitals or clinics. They have established their own universities and vocational centers, support disaster relief for a wide variety of natural disasters, and run orphanages and homes for the elderly.

While I may not personally agree with religious organizations filling the gaps of what the government should be providing, it is undeniable that without their outreach efforts many areas would be worse off. Whatever your feelings may be about Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, I hope that we can recognize the work of the monks who are continuing to assist those who need it, rather than honor those who only served to enrich themselves.

In all, Vivekananda by far had the most research poured into his every move, which made this series far more in-depth than others. This is not something I plan on repeating for other series moving forward, though I will always try to find one source that praises and one that is critical of every figure we discuss.

As time wore on, I think it became more and more obvious that I trusted Chattopadhyaya’s work more than Nikhilananda’s. One of the major differences between the two works was the ability of Chattopadhyaya to remove himself from the work as he researched. I greatly respect his scholarship and dedication to piecing together the narrative, something which Nikhilananda felt the need to embellish whenever the details weren’t available.

Without that work, my task of presenting this story would have been a lot more difficult. I encourage you to read both sources, which I will be providing below, and make your own conclusions.

As always, stay safe and sane until next time!

Sources

Swami Vivekananda in India: a corrective biography; Chattopadhyaya, Rajagopal; Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited; Delhi; 1999

Swami Vivekananda in the West; Chattopadhyaya, Rajagopal; Houston; 1993

Vivekananda: A Biography – Nikhilananda – Ramakrishan-Vivekananda Center – 1953 – New York