AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the third “New-discovery” book about Swami

Vivekananda’s life and work in the west to be published. It has
been in the making. In fact, some parts of it have appeared over
the last twenty years in Prabuddha Bharata. Chapter five , for
instance, is reworked and enlarged version of an article that
appeared in the April 1963 issue under the little “Swami
Vivekananda in New York-December 6 to December 24,
diminished version of article published by Prabuddha Bharata in
march 1972 under the title “Swami Vivekananda, Sarah
Brenhardt, and the Nikola Tesla,” and chapter nine in an enlarged
and reversed version of a Prabuddha Bharata (May, June, July
1973) “ Article entitled “Swami Vivekananda in Boston, March
1896.”
Actually, although this is the third (and last) book to be published
, it is the second in the chronology of Swami Vivekananda’s life,
covering , as it does , the years 1895 and 1896.The last book
published in 1958 and entitled Swami Vivekananda in America,
covered the years 1893 and 1894 : The second book, which come
out in 1963 under the title ,Swami Vivekananda , his second Visit
to the West, dealt with most of 1899 and all of 1900. In the
present series, which has the over-all title Swami Vivekananda in
the west, matter have been simplified by presenting the three
books in their proper chronological order; they have , moreover
been made easier to handle by dividing each into two volumes.
There is then six volumes in the present series. Volumes one and
two are an enlarged and revised edition of Swami Vivekananda in
America and are subtitled Hic prophetic Mission ; volume three
and four are constitute the present book , subtitled The World
Teacher ; and volume five and six will be a revised and enlarged
edition of Second Visit and will be subtitled A New Gospel.
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Each of the three books , it has seemed to me , is quite different

in tone from the other two . I think this is so because , for one
thing , as Swami Vivekananda pursued his mission he himself
changed in mood , and for another thing , the of new material
available to me differs quite radically with each book. The “New
discoveries” of the first consisted largely of old newspaper
reports that chronicled the Swami’s tour through the mid-west
and the East Cost of America and gave least a partial History of
the battle he fought and own. In that book he was seen both as a
“warrior monk” and a divine prophet seeding the country with
his blessings. The new material of present book consists largely a
newly discovered letters written both by himself to some of his
disciples and friends; and by his disciples and friends to one
another. His mood , as the title may indicate is that of the
teacher ,nurturing the seeds he had planted into a strong tree. The
story is that of the growing tree, and concerned to only the
Swami’s fully developed message and the in which he gave it ,
but the early growth of the vedanta movement in the west; thus
it necessarily involves the story of the disciples and their
difficulties, as well as of the Swami himself- of his transcendent
forbearance and of his but never heavy pace through a world in
deep need of his guidance. The new material of the third book
consists, fittingly enough, primarily of intimate reminiscences and
journals. Fittingly ,because during his period Swami Vivekananda
was ,as it were at play. The main burden of his work was over, he
was emerging from a period of severe physical and mental
suffering and was reaching a state of supreme peace – an “infinite
ocean of peace, without a ripple, a breath.” Although Swami’s
teachings during this latter period of his life seemed to be an
emphatic underscoring of what he believed to be the most
important part for the world today, the tone is lyric and personal
as opposed to that of the first book , which might be called epic
in quality , chronicling, as it does , the waging of mighty battles,
and that of the present book , which is , in part at least, a sort of
treatise-an attempt
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To explore his teachings of 1895 and 1896-teachings that

constitutes the main body of his message to Western culture ,that
is , to a scientific culture that even in his days was rapidly
spreading over the entire globe .
Insofar as the theme of the present book involves interpretation, I
am keenly aware of my inadequacy. Any attempt on my part to
interpret the teachings of a Vivekananda is to say the very least,
like lighting a candle to illuminate the sun. I have therefore, tried
to keep interpretation to a minimum and simple to tell the fact
with as much accuracy and objectivity as possible. Further, I have
tried on the whole to let everyone , including Swamiji-
particularly Swamiji- speak for himself or herself and thus , by
quoting a great deal from letters and lectures ,I have managed to
stay out of the picture as far as any author can stay out of his own
work ,which (unfortunately in this case) is not very far.
Because these books are all concerned with the presentation of
the “new discoveries ,” the reader will now and then find
discrepancies between the stories as told here and as it is told in
even the most recent edition of The life of Swami Vivekananda
by his Eastern and Western Disciples . As long as new materials
and information keep surfacing , discrepancies between old and
new histories are unavoidable ; but they imply only that certain
facts were not available when the old books were written .
There are also , of course differences of detective work regarding
such things as dates. I should mention here particularly the dating
of Swami’s letters. Swamiji himself seldom gave importance to
the actual date ,sometimes being as far off as a year; as a
consequence, the dating of his letters has always been a feat of
detection and guesswork for later-day editors. Yet only when
Swamiji’s letters are correctly dated can only rightly comprehend
what was going on in his thought and life at any given time . For
this reason I have tried to ascertain at least their approximately
correct dates. This attempt has been particularly difficult in regard
to his Bengali letters, quoted in chapter fifteen , which he wrote
from the West to his brother

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disciples and to which he gave no dates at all. In the effort to give

a chronological sequence to these letters, I have found myself at
times at variance with the dates assigned to them in the complete
Works in no way claim infallibility for my own guesses; all say is
that 1 have tried to sort things out through a study of internal
evidence-as far as that evidence can be ascertained in the
expurgated English translations- and my conclusions have often
differed from those of earlier efforts. 1 must admit that 1 have not
always explained the processes of reasoning that took place
during my struggle with the chronological sequence of letters
(both those written originally in Bengali and those in English) for
to have done so would have resulted in long ordeals of boredom
for the reader. But let me assure him that complicated reasoning
processes did take place.
Not only are the dates of Swamiji's Bengali letters a. problem, so
also are their addressees: one does not always know to whom he
was writing. 1 have been told by a very helpful Bengali swami
(Swami Prabhananda) that the extant originals are never
addressed to a group, such as "Brother Disciples," but always to
an individual, and in those instances where the first page of the
original is non-extant, one can only guess at the identity of his
correspondent. In such cases, which are rare, 1 have made the
general assumption that Swamiji's early letters from America,
which were indeed meant for all his brother disciples, were
addressed specifically to Swami Ramakrishnananda, who was the
only one of that brotherhood who remained steadily at the Math
in its early years. Internal evidence seems also to point this way,
but here, again, 1 have refrained from going into an elaborate
discussion of tangled clues.
The reader will also find a few discrepancies between some
passages of Swamiji's lectures as given in his Complete Works
and the corresponding passages as given in this book. Such
discrepancies are due to the fact that wherever possible and
wherever it has seemed important to do so 1 have quoted from the
very first editions of his lectures and classes, which, short
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of the typed transcripts, come as close to Swamiji's original

wording as we can get today. Many of the first pamphlet editions
of the New York and London lectures were collected and made
available to the Vedanta Society of Northern California through
the efforts of Michael Smith and David Kalins, who were at the
time living at the Vedanta Monastery in San Francisco and to both
of whom I am much indebted.
In addition to the importance of a correct dating of Swamiji's
letters, a correct dating of his lectures is also, believe, of
importance, particularly to an understanding of his thought, not as
it unfolded, but as he unfolded it step by step for the easy
comprehension of his listeners. To read his lectures in the
chronological order in which he gave them, rather than in the
order in which they have found their way into the Works ,is to
discover that he presented the new and difficult ideas of Vedanta
to the modern world in a coherent, orderly, almost methodical
way, and not, as some have supposed, haphazardly, as the spirit
moved. Swamiji was, to be sure, a genius and a poet, but he was
not a mad genius, or an un- disciplined poet (if there be such a
thing); his effort was always to benefit his listeners, never simply
to give expression to his own inner fire and light. Above all, he
was a Teacher, delivering his message in accordance with the
measure of his. listeners' intellectual and spiritual comprehension
and in a such a way that that comprehension would expand bit by
bit, until it could grasp the final truth and see it whole. It is only
recently that one has been able to date accurately almost all of
Swamiji's talks in both America and England, and since I believe
this chronology is of great importance to a study of his teachings,
I have not only stressed it throughout this book but have provided
a chart of his 1825 and 1896 lectures and classes at the back of
both Part One and Part Two.
I should say here that while I have made every effort in these
books to give facts and dates as accurately as possible, I cannot
guarantee that mistakes have not somehow crept in. For one
thing, it is the very nature of mistakes to creep into

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things—that is what they do. And for another thing, we do not

yet (and perhaps never will) know all the facts, and unless we are
possessed of full knowledge, whatever knowledge we may not
only incomplete but often askew. Still, mistake, whatever their
causes, are deplorable, and as I said, I have done my best to keep
then out, for it is my earnest hope that these books will serve as
trustworthy steps toward the completeness and certainty that
future historians of Swami Vivekananda's life may someday
achieve.
I have been extremely fortunate in being able to present in both
parts of this book some heretofore unknown material. This
consists, as I mentioned above, primarily in letters written by'
Swamiji to his disciples and by his disciples and friends to one
another. It is through these letters that one gets an idea not only of
his disciples themselves but of what was taking place around him
in the rarefied and highly charged atmosphere he created. I am
deeply indebted to Mrs. Sylvea Bull Curtis, the granddaughter of
Mrs. Ole Bull, for a large number of these letters. Many of
Swamiji's disciples wrote to Mrs. Bull, telling her of the Swami's
work and also (sometimes More often and at greater length) of
their own problems and difficulties. Mrs. Curtis very graciously
allowed me to rummage freely through her large collection and to
make use in the present book of whatever I found of interest. I
found a great deal. Apart from letters, Mrs. Bull's papers included
several of Swami Kripananda's transcripts of Swamiji's New York
classes, one of which had not been published, as well as
J.J.Goodwin's transcript of his London class of May 7, 1896.
I am .also much indebted to the late Mrs. Boshi (Gertrude) Sen,
who very kindly allowed me to read and to copy her extensive
collection of letters written by Swamiji to Sister Christine, Mrs.
George Hale, Sister Nivedita, and others. Mrs. Sen later made this
collection available to the Ramakrishna Math as well as to me,
and 1 am indebted to the authorities of the Math and to the
President of Advaita Ashrama for kindly withholding from
publication the letters pertaining to the years
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1895 and 1896 until they could be presented in this book. 'Still I
another source of material has been the Vedanta Centre of
Cohasset, Massachusetts. The most important and largest part of
this material consists of seven of J. J. Goodwin's transcripts of
Swamiji's New York classes, two of which have not previously
been known. Sister Suradhuni of the Vedanta Centre very kindly
made this material available to me and to the Vedanta Society of
Northern California, and with equal kindness Srimata Gayatri
Devi gave me permission to make free use of it.
I should also mention here the new material contained in the five
London chapters of this book-chapters four, eleven, twelve,
fourteen, and sixteen. A part of this material was unearthed for me
by the hard and prolonged labor of my friend and expert (often
heroic) researcher, Miss Eveline W. Fraser, of London. The other
part was gathered in London by Swami Yogeshananda for use in a
proposed book of his own. With the utmost generosity the swami
turned all his hard-come-by material over to me, renouncing his
own purpose. Further, he made available to me his translated
precis of Sri Mahendranath Datta's three volumes on Swami
Vivekananda in London, from which 1 have quoted liberally with
the kind permission of the Mohendra Publishing Committee and
which has proved of the utmost value in providing a picture of
Swamiji's menage during the spring of i8q6. Obviously, it is only
fair for me to acknowledge with gratitude that the chapters that
deal with Swamiji's life and work in London owe much of their
"new-discovery" quality to Swami Yogeshananda and Eveline
Fraser, and also (1 should add) to my friend Elma Louise
(Bobbie) Day, who did a good deal of on-the-spot research for
this book during two or three of her visits to London. The floor
plan of 14 Greycoat Gardens, among other things, is from her
hand.
That by no means finishes the list of those to whom this book
owes a large debt for much of its material and information. There
is, for instance, Miss Rachel Minick, who many years ago, when
she was on the staff of the New-York Historical
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Society, tirelessly researched my innumerable questions regarding

the appearance of New York City as Swamiji knew it in 1895 and
1896. Her correspondence with me on this subject has been
invaluable.
Then there has been my friend Professor Sankari Prasad Basu,
who has been ever helpful to me in my attempt to portray an
accurate picture of Swamiji, and has supplied much material –not
only through his monumental work Vivekananda in Indian
newspapers but through his unpublished interviews with Swami
Vijyananda, who in turn had heard many stories of Swamiji
from Miss Josephine MacLcod.
Nor am I forgetting the eye-reddening labor of Dorothy Murdoch
(now Brahinacharini Medha) who spent many hours in the
Library and Newspaper Room, of the University of California in
Berkeley cheerfully and expertly looking things up at my request
and in devotion to Swami Vivekananda.
I should mention here also Swami Chetanananda, whose interest
and encouragement has itself been of help, but who in addition
made available to me, during his ministry at the Vedanta Society
of Southern California, the Leggett Collection of letters to and
from friends of Swaniiji.
Many others have given me their kind permission to publish
excerpts from their own publications.' among them are Swami
Prajnanananda of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math; Swami
Adiswarananda of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New
York; Swami Swahananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern
California; Bea Howe, author of Arbiter of Elegance, a
biography of Mrs. Hugh Reginald Haweis; Swami
Vidyatmananda whose carefully researched articles on
Swami Vivekananda in Europe have been of immense help;
and, of course, Swami Ananyananda, President of Advaita
Ashrama, quotations from the publications of which form, it
seems to me, a good fifty percent of this book.
This brings me to sonic technical matters, which 1 should
mention before continuing with an account of my unpayable debts
of gratitude. In quoting from Swami Vivekananda's

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Complete Works as published by Advaita Ashrama, I have taken

the liberty of doing a little editing of my own in respect to
punctuation. Since Swamiji himself did not punctuate his lectures,
but left this to others-indeed, to generations of others –there is
little to he lost, I believe, in modernizing the distribution of
commas, and perhaps there is clarity to be gained. In any event, it
is only commas and the like with which I have meddled, and this
only when a change seemed called for, or, at least, was
irresistible. Here and there, it is true, I have inserted bracketed
words in quoted material from, Swamiji. 1 have done this only in
order to help the reader more readily understand Swamiji's
references without my having to quote unnecessarily lengthy
passages. As for Swamiji’s letters, wherever possible and
wherever it has seemed desirable, I have followed his wording,
his spelling, and (except where clarity has made a change
imperative) his punctuation as given in his original letters-and
here again, the reader will find discrepancies between this book
and the Complete Works. In such cases, I have indicated the
source of the quotation in the references. In fact, all letters, not
only those of Swamiji, have been quoted as they were written. I
have refrained to a great extent from inserting sic after every
misspelled word or in-coherent sentence, for to do so would
require a large sprinkling of sics over the pages. Therefore let me
ask the reader to be assured that the many mistakes he will find in
the letters quoted herein-mistakes of spelling, punctuation, and
syntax-are the doings of the original authors and not of the
printers or proof-readers. Above all, 1 have not touched the
original transcripts of Swamiji's classes that 1 have had the good
fortune to present here. They are obviously, as are all verbatim
transcripts of extemporaneous talks, in need of editing, but 1 have
felt that this is a task better left to hands more authorized than
mine to undertake that responsibility, and therefore (except for the
correction of very obvious errors) 1 have presented the transcripts
in their original state.
Much of the work that has gone into this book has been
done
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by my good friend and fellow-devotee Kathleen Davis. The

glossaries, the indexes, and the entire manuscript in its final
carefully copy-edited and neatly typed form owe their existence
to her. I should also, say that her companionship and
encouragement through the writing of this book have been as
important to me as has been her always cheerful and steady
cooperation.
In conclusion, 1 want to offer my heartfelt thanks to Swami
Gambhirananda, Vice-President of the Ramakrishna Order, who
very kindly read both parts of this book and made a number of
valuable suggestions for its improvement. I am also deeply
grateful to Swami Dhyanananda, who read the full manuscript
with meticulous care and gave it the benefit of his scholarship and
his keen detection of errors both large and small. My gratitude is
also extended to Swami Vandanananda, General Secretary of the
Ramakrishna Order, who gave me the advantage' of his counsel
during the final polishing-up stages, and who devoted to my
creative dilemmas a great deal of his time, which was already full
to overflowing. 1 am, of course, also deeply indebted to this
book's publisher and editor, Swami Ananyananda, President of
Advaita Ashrama, who has given it his very careful attention, and
has very kindly accepted it for publication.
But in acknowledging the great help I have been given in
completing this book, I should make it clear that the assistance of
the swamis of the Ramakrishna Order and their kind acceptance
of this book does not imply any responsibility for it on their part.
The opinions expressed herein are my own, not those of anyone
else. And at that statement I find myself aghast, for I am well
aware of the absurdity of my having any opinion at all of so vast a
being as Swami Vivekananda. Indeed, in writing these books I
have often felt that I have been attempting to empty the ocean
with a blade of grass; but if only a few drops of that immense
ocean have fallen upon these pages, if 1 have somehow succeeded
in bringing something of Swamiji into them for the delight of his
devotees, then my efforts will not have been in vain.

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PROLOGUE

When Swami Vivekananda first arrived in America in the summer

of 1893, mankind was on the eve of a new age. The great World's
Columbian Exposition at Chicago, whose gates had been thrown
open to an eager public on May 1 of that year, was a vast display
of human achievement, most of which had taken place during the
past forty years. The Hall of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, a
"huge palace of industry," dominated the White City, as the Fair
was called, not only in size and grandeur but in significance, for it
housed "the most ample and valuable illustrations of industrial
progress ever beheld by man."1 Within its galleries were exhibited
machine products galore from "all the civilized nations of the
earth" and most notably from the United States. There were
textiles, furniture, stoves, iceboxes, hardware of all sorts,
glassware, firearms, sewing machines, typewriters, paints,
oilcloths, celluloid-a complete list of articles would go on and on,
as did the building that housed them. The White City also
contained, among other "snowy palaces vast and beautiful "s a
Palace of Electricity, which displayed huge dynamos, electric-
powered printing presses, elevators (that were to make possible
the skyscraper), streetcar motors, drills, hoists, pumps, blowers,
compressors, fans . . . A Palace of Mechanic Arts held massive
motor-driven arrangements of wheels, belts, shafts, pistons, and
gears, which had produced many of the marvelous objects
displayed in the Hall of Manufactures. The main import of it all
was that the manufactured goods of the United States had
"increased . . . seven to eight-fold within forty years." "And with
improved methods and machinery constantly adding to their
volume," the author of a book describing the Fair went on to ask,
‘’ who shall forecast the
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story which another two-score years will tell?" 3 Who indeed?

The Chicago Fair was but the forerunning ripple of a huge,
inexorable, all-engulfing, all-transforming tidal wave of tech-
nological progress, the effects of which no one-neither the
cheeriest of optimists nor the dourest of pessimists - could have
foreseen. Almost immediately, as though the White City had been
a giant milestone setting off one epoch from the next, a series of
culture-changing discoveries, theories, and inventions began to
mushroom out of nineteenth-century science and industry with
ever-accelerating speed. Before the century came to a close a
motion picture had been shown for the first time; radio-telegraphy
had been invented; the gasoline automobile became something
more than a horseless carriage; the X-ray, radioactivity, and the
electron had been discovered, and radium had been isolated. The
Quantum Theory was propounded in 1900 and five years later
came the Special Theory of Relativity-the two theories basic to
modern physics.
By 1934, two score years after the Fair, the United States, as well
as other technologically advanced nations of the world, was
producing and consuming enormous quantities of good; many of
which, undreamed of in 1893, were changing man's way of life.
The next two-score years saw not only greater wonders still, but
their proliferation at higher and higher rates of speed, until today
any description of human achievement along the lines of
knowledge and power is outdated almost during the telling.
One cannot exaggerate the magnitude of the change that has
swept over, and is sweeping over, Western civilization since the
first ripples were seen in 1893 : the modes and patterns of human
life have been radically altered. To quote a popular sociologist
writing in 197o, "A growing body of reputable opinion asserts
that the present movement represents nothing less than the second
great divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with
that first great break in historic continuity, the shift from
barbarism to civilization."4 One may
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also quote here the words of the archeologist Kurt W. Marek: “lt
is important for m to realize that we, in the twentieth century, are
concluding an era of mankind five thousand years in length--the
age of the high cultures--and are entering upon a new era. . . . The
future will admit of no analogy with this group of historical high
cultures [i.e., the civilizations of the past]--or with any one of
them; we may speak not of a new kind of soul that will fulfill
itself in the historically molded body, but .of a new soul in a new
body. . . . We are not, as Spengler supposed, in the situation of
Rome at the beginning of the Christian West, but in that of the
year 3ooo before Christ. We open our eyes like prehistoric man,
we see a world totally new, and Feel within ourselves the
potentiality of enormous deeds."5
But this world totally new has swept away the past with
shattering rapidity. A way of life centuries old, with its ingrained
traditions, religious beliefs, philosophical assumptions, habits of
thought, social patterns, and moral conventions has been pulled
from under the feet of Western man with a jerk. Today, he
staggers off balance, bewildered and insecure, toying the while
with instruments of terrible power and tampering heavy-handed
with his planet's delicate and complex life-support systems that
took billions of years to evolve. The world his culture dominates
has, moreover, become a tangled, incomprehensible network of
interacting threads, any one of which, stretched taut, could trigger
a global catastrophe.
This new age can, in fact, be called a global age: the problems
that attend it are global and intricately interrelated; failure to
solve them would be globally disastrous; and their solution, or at
least their containment, is a global task requiring the continual
and willing cooperation of all people on earth. Nor is it man's
task merely to prevent disaster; related to this is his deeply felt
responsibility to enable his fellowmen everywhere to live in
dignity and freedom. No longer can a cry anywhere in the world
go unheard and unanswered. There is no longer a place in the
culture of mankind for the separate,
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private individual, or the separate, private group; no longer is

there moral justification for fragmented perception and
privileged, self serving action. In short, the imperative 're-
quirement of this totally new age, if its potential is to be realized
-indeed, if we are to survive-is not only a totally new philosophy
and world outlook to replace the old, but a totally new kind of
man. Large numbers of men and women of deep vision and great
unitary understanding and compassion must inhabit the earth. In
the words of one of Swami Vivekananda's twentieth-century
exponents: "Giants among men they must be, and cosmic must be
their vision!"6 And the making of such men and women requires,
in turn, the infusion of a new kind of power.
It seems no mere coincidence, then, that at the precise turning
point in human history Swami Vivekananda, the principal disciple
and apostle of Sri Ramakrishna, came to the Western world.
Millions today look upon Sri Ramakrishna as a huge channel of
the awakening and transforming power that floods mankind again
and again throughout history. This time, that redeeming power
was (and is) exceedingly great and its form and emphasis, in
keeping with the genius of the age, are new. Swami Vivekananda
carried that power to the West in its full measure and infused it
deep into the mainstream of Western culture.
After he had been for a time in America the Swami himself wrote
in a letter to India that he was "to create a new order of humanity"
in the West7 From all that he said elsewhere, one can be certain
that he meant not an order (or type) of men and women who
would retreat firm the world into cloisters, but a large number of
individuals who would work in the world in every capacity and
whose action would spring from deep and awakened levels of
consciousness, bringing about a highly advanced spiritual culture.
Can these two types of advancement-spiritual and material-go
hand in hand? Swami Vivekananda answered this question with a
resounding yes-not only can, but must. Indeed, his affirmation of
man's
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innate capacity to achieve richly and harmoniously on every level

of human life lay at the very heart of the mission for which he had
come.

The present volume the next will try in some measure to tell the
story of Swami Vivekananda's life and work in the Western world
during the year 1895 and 1896, when he delivered the most
signifcant part of his message to the West. But first, let us briefly
review the year and a half prior to 1895·*
When he first came to America from India in the summer of 1893,
the Swami was not, to all appearances, aware of the immensity of
his world mission. He was at that time aflame with the desire to
lift his countrymen from the misery- physical, mental, spiritual-
into which they had fallen. His was not, certainly, an ordinary
patriotism; the idea that burned in his mind and heart was to
reactivate the great spiritual genius of India, in which alone, he
knew, lay the vitality of the country. Many ideas he had of the
means by which that regeneration could be brought about. "That I
went to America and England," he was to say in Madras after his
return in 1897, "was simply for propagating those ideas. I did not
care at all for the Parliament of Religions or anything else; it was
simply an opportunity; for it was really those ideas of mine that
took me all over the world."8 The implementation of those ideas
required an organization and money.
To his friend Haridas Viharidas Desai, the Dewan of Junagadh, he
wrote in June of 1894, "Primarily my coming [to America] has
been to raise funds for an enterprise of my own. Let me tell it all
to you again."9 He went on to elucidate his plan in some detail.
But to say that Swami Vivekananda came to the West for the sake
of raising money for his Indian work is not to say that he did not
intend to scatter broadcast the spiritual riches of India's ancient
wisdom. He did this as
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he breathed. Moreover, deep forces such as guide the destiny of

nations and civilizations were certainly the invisible, compelling
power behind his Western visit. Later in Madras he was to say to
his countrymen: "It is not only that we must revive our own
country-that is a small matter; I am an imaginative man-and my
idea is the country of the whole world by the Hindu race… Up,
India, and conquer the world with your spirituality!… Spirituality
must conquer the West"10 But while these fires were burning in
the depths of Swami Vivekananda's mind, the flame in his heart
that summer of 1893 was a flame of anguish for his countrymen,
the downtrodden masses. It was for them that he crossed the
Pacific Ocean.
The Parliament of Religions, which opened in Chicago on
September II of 1893, was, it so happened, the grandest, most
arresting introduction to the West he could have had. An adjunct
of the World's Columbian Exposition, the august gathering of
religious leaders and prelates from all parts of the world was an
attempt (in theory at least) W create a spirit of harmony on the
highest levels of human culture. But it was not the Christian
ministers who sounded the keynote of the Parliament; it was the
young, unknown heathen monk from, of all places, India-that
prize field of Christian missionary endeavor. Swami Vivekananda
in his flaming robe, "an orator by divine right;” captured the huge
audiences with his spirit of harmony and unity. He addressed
them as "Sisters and Brothels"; they thrilled to his words--such
words as these:
Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name "Heirs of
Immortal Bliss " Yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Yea
are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and
perfect beings. Ye divinities of earth-sinners! It is a sin to call a
man so; it in a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions,
and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls
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immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter; ye are
not bodies ; matter is your servant , not you the servant of
matter.11
The applause of the audience was as thunderous as the words.
From the very beginning, he touched the souls of the people with
fire. Men and women rushed forward to shake his hand; crowds
followed him in the streets of Chicago; hundreds bowed down to
his poster-photograph. It was as though pure, life-giving water
had suddenly appeared in a desert. (Not everyone, of course, was
thirsty; some sections of the Christian clergy, for instance,
responded with virulent name-calling.)
After the close of the Parliament of Religions--or perhaps before-
swami Vivekananda realized that a direct plea for. financial aid
for his Indian project was unavailing. Therefore, he set out on a
lecture tour of the United States (east of the Missouri River) to
earn the needed money. This, again, is not to say that ha did not
simultaneously give of his own wealth. Indeed, his spontaneous,
abundant giving was the sole significance of that tour-whatever
its more immediate purpose may have been. That purpose was, in
fact, not achieved; the Swami earned very little money. In his
letter of June, 1894, to Haridas Viharidas Desai he wrote, "Now
lecturing for a year in this country, I could not succeed at all (of
course, I have no wants for myself) in my plan for raising some
funds for setting up my work."12
But whether or not Swami Vivekananda obtained enough money
to set his Indian work in motion as he moved through the country,
he accomplished something infinitely more important. To put it
briefly, he altered the course of deep-lying thought-currents in
America. The very radiance of his spirituality and intellect-a
radiance no one could miss-gave the lie to the fantastic and
mendacious stories that had been circulated for years by Christian
missionaries about India's religion, culture, and everyday life.
Everywhere he explained
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Hinduism in its true light and its true depth. In doing so he

opened a channel, long clogged with bigotry, misconception, and
suspicion, between West and East.
More, born a World Teacher, the Swami taught spiritual truths
wherever he went, to whomever he spoke. He taught the
fundamental meaning of religion and the basic unity of all creeds;
he spoke of man's divinity and his profound need to realize God;
he spoke of divine love; he spoke often of Buddha, the
embodiment of the unqualified compassion that he knew must
enter the heart of modern man. He came to be called the "cyclonic
Hindu" and, indeed, he moved from place to place with hurricane
speed, lecturing like some elemental force. And yet, many spoke
of his gentleness, of "the low, earnest delivery" of his lectures, 13
of his simplicity and charm. His force was of a subtle kind,
moving on the levels of consciousness where ideas are formed.
It was this silent, invisible power more than anything else that
spelled the true significance of the Swami's lecture tour among
the people of the United States. By his glance, his touch, a single
word, by his very presence, he stirred, as a Teacher of his stature
necessarily does, some deep-lying memory in the souls of
thousands of people, a memory of a supreme, all-fulfilling joy. He
planted the seeds of a spiritual longing that would thenceforth
work its transforming miracle of unfoldment. As he himself wrote
to one of his brother disciples, "There is no end of work here-I am
careering all over the country. Wherever the seed of [Sri
Ramakrishna's] power will find its way, there it will fructify—‘be
it to-day, or in a hundred years.' "14
His work throughout 1894 -- his vindication of his country,
his spreading the teachings of Hinduism, his unstinting and
spontaneous scattering of his power-may have been all he had
wanted to do. Off and on during that year he thought of returning
to India. As late as September he wrote to the Dewan, "I do not
know when I come back, but I have seen enough of this country, I
think, and so soon will go over to
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Europe and then to India."15 Meanwhile, however, he was seeing

at firsthand the living pattern of Western thought and culture,
which stemmed from a millennia-old world outlook and
psychology drastically different from those of the East. Inevitably
he pondered over the means by which the Sanatana Dharma (the
Eternal Religion), for so long couched in an Eastern idiom, could
be translated into the cultural terms of the West so that the
Western mind could make it its own and, above all, directly apply
it to the age just then being born. The task of translation was, and
would continue to be, a formidable one; but it was a task that the
Swami, World Teacher that he was, could not by any means fail to
undertake. Moreover, a bond was growing between this flame-
robed sannyasin and the people of America. "By this time," he
wrote to an Indian friend in October of 1894, "I have become one
of their own teach. "16 And thus there came a point toward the end
of 184 when he knew he would stay on--for a time at least.

On the last day but one of that year he was to make a public
statement awesome in its implications: "I have a message to the
West as Buddha had a message to the East!" 17 And a few days
later he wrote to a friend in Madras: "I find I have a mission in
this country also. . . . I do not know when I shall go over to India.
I obey the leading of the Lord. I am in His hands."18

In the last week of January, 1895, the Swami settled in New York
in humble quarters to teach intensively and to develop his
presentation of a cohesive, detailed, and comprehensive religion
and philosophy for the modern West and through the West for the
world.

We have spoken of Swami Vivekananda in the foregoing as an

immense spiritual power, an almost impersonal force. But he was
also Swamiji, intensely human, an adored non and brother to
many families in America, an infinitely compassionate, ever-
approachable teacher to hundreds of his Western
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followers, a beloved and ever-sympathetic friend to countless

men and women. Wherever ho stayed for any length of time there
was a family or some person whom he looked upon in a special
sense as his own and who befriended him as a beloved relative. In
Chicago there was the Hale family-Mr. and Mrs. George W. Hale,
their daughters Mary and Harriet, their son Sam, their nieces
Isabelle and Harriet McKindley toward all of whom he felt a deep
affection. Their home was always open to him to come and go as
he liked. In Detroit, where he lectured in February and March of
1894, Mrs. John Bagley took him into her family, defending him
when necessary (as it all too often was) against those who sought
to malign him. In New York there were Dr. and Mrs. Egbert
Guernsey, who saw in him the son they had recently lost. Also in
New York was Miss Mary A. Phillips, whose house was at times
his headquarters; and there would be the Francis Leggetts and
Miss MacLeod, whose close friendship was invaluable to him
both in America and, later, abroad. In Boston and Cambridge,
there was Mrs. Ole Bull, widow of the famous Norwegian
violinist, who well understood the unpredictable temperament of
genius and whose judgment in secular matters Swamiji trusted
implicitly.

When one views the Swami's mission as divine (and it is difficult

not to view it so), then the readiness and fitness of the people who
came forward to befriend him in exactly the right place at exactly
the right time seems providential in the fill sense of the word. His
relationship with them had, moreover, a purity and beauty about it
that makes them seem to be themselves exalted beings, somehow
touched from the start by the same divine hand that guided his
mission. And yet these people were not too unlike you and me;
they were recognizably human, and his affection for them, and
theirs for him, brings him close to all humanity. Infinitely lovable,
endlessly loving, he walked among us as a child, a teacher, a
friend, a brother; it is in such ways, it is said, that God makes His
accessibility known to man..
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NOTE FOR PROLOGUE

P.5 * The story of the Swami's life in America from

his arrival in Chicago at the end of July, 1893, to
the close of 1894 has been told in detail in the
first and second volumes of this series-parts one
and two of His Prophetic Mission.
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CHAPTER ONE
NEW YORK : SPRING 1895

"New York is a grand and good place," Swami Vivekananda had

written in August of 1894. "The New York people have a tenacity
of purpose unknown in any other city."1 New York was also, he
had remarked a few weeks later, "the head, hand, and purse of the
country."2 The great, sophisticated, and polyglot metropolis was
indeed a wellspring of new ideas; it was creative and enterprising;
it was the center of all the arts; it was rich, generous, and
throbbing with vitality; everything was there. Thus when Swami
Vivekananda decided in the beginning of 1895 to settle down to
teach, after a year and some three months of strenuous lecture
touring throughout the Midwest and East, he chose New York for
his headquarters, rather than, say, Boston or Chicago; and it
would be here that his mission to the West would enter its years of
full maturity:

It was in Chicago, however, that Swamiji opened the year of

1895. To what must have been the unutterable delight of the Hale
family, who loved him as their own, he had given them "a little
surprise by dropping in on New Year's day," 3 unannounced and
straight from the East Coast. He stayed in Chicago for almost
three weeks, a period of which virtually nothing had been known
until the recent discovery of the following letter written to his
friend Miss Emma Thursby. From it we gather a little information
about what appears to have been a very active time.
Chicago 541 Dearborn Avenue
17th Jany 95

Dear Miss Thursby

I am very sorry to learn about the passing on of Mr Thorp

[Mrs. Ole Bull's father]. Mrs. Bull must have felt
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it deeply. Still he has passed on after a good and useful life. All is
for the bat.

I have been lecturing every day to a class in Mrs Adams rooms at

the Auditorium. Today I also lecture there and in the Evening to a
class of Miss Josephine Locke's at the Plaza hotel.*

Have you seen Mrs. Peake in New York. She is lecturing to a

class at Mrs Gurnsey's

Miss Locke is as kind as usual. She is enamoured of Mrs Peake as

are many of Miss Locke's friends you will be glad to learn.

Mrs Peake has made a very favourable impression on Chicago;

So she does wherever she goes.

Mrs Adams invited me to an organ concert in the Auditorium. She

is so good & kind to me. Lord bless her.

I have not seen Mr Young nor I am afraid I have time to see as I

start for New York on Friday next

I will hear him once (?) in New York

I was so busy here these two weeks

I have got a new scarlet coat but can get no orange here Ever,
with blessings

Your brother4 Vivekananda

Swamiji may not have stayed with the Hale family during these
January weeks in Chicago. In a passage that seems to apply to this
period, Miss Cornelia Conger, granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs.
John B. Lyon, with whom he had stayed during the days of the
Parliament of Religions, writes in her reminiscences:" When
Swamiji returned to Chicago a year or so later [after 1893] to give
lectures,…. he only stayed with us for a short time. He knew he
could teach better if he lived in his own regime of fond and of
many hours for meditation. It also left him free to receive many
who came to him for help. So my grandmother helped him find a
simple but comfortable little flat, but I do not recall that I ever
saw it."5

If this passage pertains to January of 1895 (and there seems to be

no other time to which it could reasonably apply), then
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here one finds the beginning of Swamiji's new, independent way

of work. Meanwhile, plans were being made in New York for his
coming classes and parlor lectures by two groups of his friends.
First, there was the infant Vedanta Society, which he had founded
in November of the previous year and which, as far as can be
understood, consisted of officers only. Who its president was, we
do not know, but possibly it was Mr. Charles M. Higgins of
Brooklyn, who was much interested in Swamiji's work.* Its vice-
president was Dr. Edward G. Day, of whom we know at present
regrettably little; its secretary was Miss Mary Phillips, at whose
home in New York Swamiji had given a lecture in the spring of
1894; and its treasurer, there is ample reason to believe, was Mr.
Walter Goodyear, a young man from New Jersey.** This Society,
inexperienced and nebulous, was trying to make arrangements for
Swamiji's regular classes. As for his parlor lectures, these were to
a large extent in the hands of Miss Emma Thursby, the famous
concert singer, whom Swamiji had known for many months, and
her friend Miss Sarah Farmer, founder of the Greenacre Religious
Conferences, which he had attended the previous summer. Both
Miss Thursby and Miss Farmer were close friends of Mrs. Bull,
who, though living in Cambridge, seems to have been a guiding
spirit behind the New York scenes and also, at times, a presence
on its stage.

In her middle forties in 1895 (she had been far younger than her
world-renowned husband), Sara Chapman Bull was a charming,
wealthy, and idealistic woman, well known for her grace as a
hostess and for her Cambridge salons, at which she brought
together writers, philosophers, musicians, social thinkers, and
anyone else she deemed worthy-people who were set upon
reforming the world, and others who were simply trying to make
it more livable. She herself belonged to the latter group, giving in
an unobtrusive, gracious, and somewhat vague way whatever
support she could-financial, social, and moral-to anyone with
noble thoughts and the gift of expressing them well. She had first
met Swamiji in
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Boston in the spring of 1894 and had come to know him better at
Greenacre in the summer of that year. In October she had invited
him for a week or so of rest at her spacious home in Cambridge,
where house guests abounded, and in December she had asked
him to participate in the month long lecture series which she was
sponsoring in memory of her mother and which she thought of as
a sort of miniature Greenacre Conference. She was much
impressed by his teachings and his personality and was anxious to
help his work in any way she could. He and others kept her
informed of the plans afoot in New York. "The New York course
for me is nearly ready;" he had written to her from Chicago on
January 3, "but I do not wish to fix the dates until Miss Thursby
comes to New York. As such Miss Phillips who is a friend of Miss
Thursby's and who is arranging the New York course for me will
act with Miss Thursby in case she wants to get up something in
New York."6 And on January 15 Swamiji's disciple Leon
Landsberg wrote from New York, "Miss Thursby expects here
Miss Farmer, with whom she will arrange for group meetings"--
that is, for parlor lectures.

One does not know what well-meaning plans the Vedanta Society
was making for Swamiji's work, but whatever they were, they
proved, according to Leon Landsberg, to be "a miserable failure." 7
Shortly after his return from Chicago, Swamiji took matters into
his own hands. He asked Landsberg to rent some rooms where
regular classes could be held, and forthwith Landsberg did so.

Leon Landsberg, a bachelor in his early forties, a Russian Jew by

birth, European by culture and education, and American by
citizenship, was a year later described by a newspaper reporter as
being "of medium height, possessed of a shock of curly hair and a
pair of eyes in which the fire of the true fanatic undoubtedly
burns."8 He had first met Swamiji in May of 1894 at Miss Mary
Phillips's parlor lecture-the second talk Swamiji had ever given in
New York City. Whether Landsberg, who had been at the time a
Theosophist and was
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on the staff of the New York Tribune, had attended the lecture out
of personal interest or on a newspaper assignment, we do not
know, but whatever had brought him there, his meeting with
Swamiji had been for him a galvanizing event. In his own words,
written to Mrs. Bull a year later:

. . . At last I had found the ideal vainly sought for during all my
past, an object worthy of pursuit, an aim to work for and bestow
upon its realization all the stored up energy of years of inactivity.
He became to me an object of divine worship. 9

Landsberg soon became a brahmacharin disciple of Swamiji's and

thenceforth, as he was to write to Mrs. Bull in February of 1895,
"made it a rule not to have more than two suits of clothing, which
is even too much for a Brahmacharin, who care not for the things
of this world."10 The second suit had no doubt been purchased on
Swamiji's insistence. Sending his disciple the necessary money,
Swamiji had written to him on September 13, 1894 "Forgive me,
but I have the right, as your Guru, to advise you, and I insist that
you buy some clothes for yourself, as the want of them stands in
the may of your doing anything in this country. Once you have a
start, you may dress in whatever way you like. People do not
object. You need not thank me, for this is only [the Guru's]
duty."11

With characteristic intensity, Landsberg now took over the burden

of the practical details of Swamiji's New York work and became,
for a time, his right-hand man. On January m, 1895, he wrote to
Mrs. Bull a long letter of sympathy on the death of her father and
added this paragraph of information:

The Swami has arrived here on Friday [January 18]. He is in good

health and happy. Last night (Sunday) he held the first of his
series of lectures before the Ethical Society at Brooklyn. In spite
of the strike on account of which all traffic has stopped, the house
was crowded. His lecture
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on "Ideals of Womanhood" was a success. He was at his beat. He

is urged from all sides to give parlor lectures. 12

Two days later, carrying out his duties as Swamiji's secretary,

Landsberg wrote to Isabelle McKindley, a niece of Mr. and Mrs.
Hale-one of the four "Hale sisters." His letter, from which we
learn something of what was taking place in New York, read in
part:
144 Madison Ave New York, Jan'y 23d 95

Dear Madam,
I received your kind note with express notice, for which many
thanks.
That I am ready to comply with your wishes va sans dire. You are
the Swami's friend, and this is sufficient reason for me to do
anything in my power to please you. So if there is anything I can
do for you, know that my services are always at your command.
I mailed to you two newspaper reports of the Swami's Brooklyn
lectures. . . . He gains daily more friends. I am sure that his
sojourn in New York will not only add to his glory, but also leave
a permanent impress on all those who are favored to hear him.
Miss Thursby and Miss Farmer are arranging parlour lectures for
New York.
It will interest you to learn that I have rented two rooms, one for
me and the other to serve as the Swami's headquarters, which we
are going to occupy from Sunday next [January 27]. The Swami
will board and sleep at the Guernseys, and only use new engaged
room as his business office and to hold group meetings in Yoga. It
would therefore be advisable to address your letters to the new
place, 54 West 33d Street, where I shall be constantly present to
receive them, and to answer all the inquiries concerning the
Swami.
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Don't you think that this was a good idea?

The Swami is in good health and happy, and in speaking of you

and your family he has only words of love and blessings '

It might be noted here parenthetically that while Swamiji was

surely happy, he was not altogether in good health. In a letter to
Isabelle McKindley, written three days after the above, Landsberg
admitted that Swamiji had been suffering from a series of colds,
and Swamiji himself wrote to Isabelle on January 24, "I have got
again a little cold."14 Traveling back and forth on the Brooklyn
Bridge cable car in the bitterness of a New York January did not
perhaps make matters any better.

But a cold was no deterrent to Swamiji's plans. Everything had at

last been arranged, and on Sunday January 27, he established his
headquarters in the rooms that Landsberg had rented at 54 West
Thirty-third Street and there started his classes on Vedanta and
Yoga, beginning the second phase of his Western work, into
which he was to pour heart, mind, and soul.

Built around 1850, 54 West Thirty-third Street was a narrow,

three-story brick house with a brownstone front. It stood four
doors east of Sixth Avenue on the south side of the street and was
the twenty-eighth house west of Fifth Avenue in that long and
uninviting block. In the 1890s this was none too good a
neighborhood. On the West Side the rich and fashionable were
moving north beyond Fifty-ninth Street; trade was sweeping up
Fifth Avenue toward Thirty-third Street, and many of the once
luxurious old mansions had been replaced by business buildings.
Worse, the district known a: the Tenderloin was well entrenched
in the area lying between Fifth and Eighth avenues, bounded on
the south by Twenty-
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fourth Street and on the north by Fortieth Street. Peppered with

saloons, bagnios, dance halls, and gambling houses, the
Tenderloin was the center of Manhattan's more earthy night life
and, with the notable exception of a few years in the midnineties,
carried on its activities with a zest unrestrained, indeed
encouraged, by the city police. Those few exceptional years-the
period, as it happened, between November of 1894 and
November of 1897-marked an interlude of law, order, and
decorum such as had never before been seen in this otherwise
obstreperous district and was never to be seen again.

The man who had served to bring about this remarkable hiatus in
the life of the Tenderloin was the Reverend Dr. Charles H.
Parkhurst, whom Swamiji had met at a dinner party in the spring
of 1894.15 If Dr. Parkhurst had deliberately timed hie efforts (as,
of course, he did not) so that the district would present a scrubbed
face by the beginning of 1895, he could not have timed them
better. He fired off what he was to call "the first gun of the
campaign" on Sunday, February 14, 1893, delivering from the
pulpit of his fashionable Madison Square Presbyterian Church a
vigorous and resounding denunciation, not of New York's districts
of vice themselves, as many a minister had done before him, but
of the city's corrupt political leaders. Having struck at the
formidable powers of Tammany Hall, the reverend was called
before the grand jury and told either to retract his statements or to
substantiate them with concrete facts. A courageous man, he
chose the latter course. Disguised as a roisterer, the frail,
fastidious, and scholarly pastor underwent a three-weeks' "going
down into the disgusting depths of this Tammany debauched
town."16 He emerged with sufficient eye-witness evidence of the
collusion between the City Hall, the Police Department, and the
leaders of vice and crime to convince any jury of the validity of
his charges. "In one day less than a month," a historian of the
period writes, "Dr. Parkhurst had stirred up more controversy,
more recrimination and denunciation over commercialized
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vice than any of his crusading predecessors in the past thirty

years.”17

If was not, however, until November of' 1894, when the

Tammany Hall politicos were voted out of power by a now
aroused electorate, that a reign of law and order descended upon
the Tender1oia. The change under a new reform administration
was drastic. The street became safe, the police incorruptible, and
scores .of the more prominent denizens of the district fled-many
of them to Chicago. It was, of course, only a matter of time before
the old state of affairs returned. At the next city election in
November of 1897, the Tammany Hall "bosses" were restored to
power, and the Tenderloin burst once again into riotous: life. But
Dr. Parkhurst's sudden and inspired crusade had served to dean up
the thereto- uncleanable Tenderloin for a three-year period-a
period which embraced the yeas of swamiji’s residence in its
vicinity

With the disappearance of the more disreputable characters and

activities of the neighborhood, 54 West Thirty-third Street was
not an unthinkable place to live. The block’s respectable elements
were now predominant; toward Fifth Avenue stood the small and
exclusive Cambridge Hotel, so sedate and reserved that it had no
lobby is which to loiter. Directly across from this “squat red-brick
establishment," on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and
Thirty-third Street, the towers of the brand-new and opulent
Waldorf Hotel rose a spectacular thirteen stories above the
cobbled street. The shiny black carriages and hansom cabs drawn
up at its Thirty third Street entrance and the coming and goings of
the fashionable shed a certain luster over its surroundings. Still,
Swamiji's quarters far down the block, bordering not only on the
shadow of the Sixth Avenue El but on that of a bad reputation,
could not by any stretch the imagination be called select. It has
been generally assumed that Landsberg, with Swamiji's consent,
chose such quarters because of financial considerations, and this
may have been largely the case.*
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For a time after opening his New York classes, Swamiji continued
to deep at the Guernseys' house at 528 Fifth Avenue, but soon, no
doubt for the sake of convenience, as well as for total
independence, he moved, bed and board, to his lodging. Like the
Hales, the Guernseys. whom Swamiji had first met in New York
in the early part of 1894, had opened their house to him. Dr.
Egbert Guernsey was a prominent physician, a well-known
philanthropist, writer,

Editor, and founder-director of various important journals, clubs,

and medical institutions in New York. He was, moreover, well
loved for his large heart and nobility of soul.* That the Guernseys
looked upon Swamiji with parental affection and held him in high
esteem and that his move from their home had caused no rupture
or misunderstanding between himself and these good people is
clearly seen by the following letter that the doctor wrote to Mrs.
Bull in March of this year, shortly after one of her visits to New
York.
Union League Club
New York

Dear Mrs. Bull

I was sorry not to have had the pleasure of meeting you when you
called the other day renewing our Alaska [?] acquaintance, which
will ever remain a bright spot in my memory, and thanking you
for your interest in, and kindness to the Swami who by his
kindness of heart, great intelligence, purity and nobility of
character has endeared himself to me almost like a son. It is a
gratification to me to know that ladies like yourself fully
appreciate the rare qualities of head and heart, of one, whom I
shall always be proud to call my friend.

The Swami from time to time has formed a part of my family for
several months. Always welcome, we have all of us derived both
profit and pleasure from the rich stores of a mind full of thought
in which he seemed to have been able in his investigations of
spiritual matters
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to have eliminated the discordant elements for the true and

harmonious. Hoping to meet you at no distant day
Very truly18
Egbert Guernsey

Even apart from its location, the lodging at 54 West Thirty third
Street was a far cry from the Guernseys' Fifth Avenue mansion.
From a few hints found in various sources one can deduce that
Swamiji's rooms were on the second floor. The front room, facing
the street, served as his headquarters; the other was Landsberg's
bedroom, for which he (Landsberg) paid half the rent and which
doubled at times as a kitchen, there being nowhere else to install
the gas cooking stove that a kind friend had donated. (There was
also a community kitchen in the house for the use of lodgers,
where, more than likely, Swamiji created many a meal.) His room
contained, we know, a sofa, a marble-topped dresser, and a corner
washstand with drain boards. Most probably it also possessed a
couch, a small round table, one or two upholstered chairs, a
patterned carpet, net curtains at the window, gaslight fixtures,
and, one trusts, a heating arrangement of some sort, for the winter
was cold, and in early February a heavy blizzard whipped the city.
The room could not have been large-the house itself was only
twenty feet wide-but here Swamiji held classes (until they
overflowed), received visitors, gave interviews, wrote articles,
translated passages from the Sanskrit books which he was now
having sent from India, read, studied, and often entered into the
state of deep meditation that was natural to him and always at his
command.

The house (and no doubt its furnishings) being almost fifty years
old and having seen many lodgers come and go, must, on the
whole, have been worn with use and time. But whatever its lack
of elegance; Swamiji was content with it; that there were those
who strongly disapproved made no difference to him at all. Two
months or so later he was to write to Mrs. Bull in retrospect:
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Every one of my friends thought it would end in nothing, this my

getting up quarters all by myself, and that no ladies will ever
come there. Miss Hamlin [a friend of Mrs. Bull's] especially
thought that "she" or "her right sort of people" were way up from
such things as to go and listen to a man who lives by himself in a
poor lodging. But the "right kind" came for all that, day and night,
and she too. Lord, how hard it is for a man to believe in Thee and
Thy mercies! Shiva! Siva! Where is the right kind and where is
the bad, mother? It is all He! In the tiger and in the lamb, in the
saint and sinner all He! In Him I have taken my refuge, body,
soul, and Atman.19
3

Swamiji opened his classes most probably on Monday, January

28.* At first, for one day at least, his friends seemed to have been
correct in their judgment: only a few people came. Among them
was Miss Sarah Ellen Waldo, who had first heard him lecture at
the Brooklyn Ethical Association (of which she was a member)
and who was to become one of his closest American disciples. Of
those first classes she wrote in her reminiscences:

The Swami was living very simply in New York, and his earliest
classes were held in the small room he occupied, and in the
beginning were attended by only three or four persons.

But that was only the beginning. Word quickly spread, and in no
time the "right sort," in every sense of the term, were crowding
into Swamiji's small room.

[The classes] grew with astonishing rapidity [Miss Waldo

continued], and as the little room filled co overflowing, [it]
became very picturesque. The Swami himself always
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Sat on the floor, and most of his audience likewise. The marble-
topped dresser, the arms of the sofa, and even the corner
washstand helped to furnish seats for the constantly increasing
numbers. The door was left open, and the overflow filled the hall
and sat on the stairs. And those first classes! How intensely
interesting they were! Who that was privileged to attend them can
ever forget them? The Swami so dignified yet so simple, so
gravely earnest, so eloquent, and the close ranks of students,
forgetting all inconveniences, hanging breathless on his every
word! It was a fit beginning for a movement that has since grown
to such grand proportions. In this unpretentious way did Swami
Vivekananda inaugurate the work of teaching Vedanta philosophy
in New York.20

To Swamiji’s early classes also came Josephine MacLeod, who,

like Miss Waldo, though in her own unique and spirited way, was
to become one of his most devoted friends and helpers. She, too,
became, it can be said, his disciple, for while she often
emphasized in later years that she was his friend, not his disciple,
in her own reminiscences she speaks of some early spiritual
instruction she received from him and of an experience she had as
a result of following it; one also knows that he gave her a
mantra.* To receive instruction and a mantra from Swamiji was
surely more than enough to make one his disciple. But however
that may be, Miss MacLeod’s memories of her first meeting with
him and of his early classes are contained in her reminiscences.
First, the following excerpt from the notebooks of her
reminiscences. First, the following excerpt from the notebooks of
her friend the late Mme Paul Verdier will serve as a sort of
prologue. Immediately after a conversation with Miss MacLeod
in 1947, Mme Verdier jotted down the following:

Tantine [as Miss MacLeod was universally known in later years]

was living with her [elder] sister [Besse or Betty Sturges] at
Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson…. Her
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sister [a widow] had two children, a boy [Hollister] and Alberta.

She was friendly with Mrs. Dora Roethlesberger, who was very
spiritual and alto very psychic. . . . Around the e5tb of January,
1895, Tantine received a letter from Mrs. Roethlesberger while in
Dobbs Ferry, asking her and her sister to come down to New York
and to hear and see a wonderful man from India. They both came
down and on January 29 the three of them went to 54. W. 33rd
Street, where Tantine saw Swamiji for the first time. 21

The class held on Tuesday, January 29, was probably Swamiji's

second, and if the memories of both Miss Waldo and Miss
MacLeod were accurate in regard to the number of people
present, then there was already a considerable increase in
attendance. Miss MacLeod wrote:

On the twenty-ninth of January 1895, I went with my sister to 54

West 33rd Street, New York, and heard the Swami Vivekananda
in his sitting room where were assembled fifteen or twenty ladies
and two or three gentlemen. The room was crowded. All the arm
chain were taken; so I sat on the floor in the front row. Swami
stood in the corner. He said something, the particular words of
which I do not remember, but instantly to me that was truth, and
the second sentence he spoke was truth, and the third sentence
was truth. And I listened to him for seven years and whatever he
uttered was to me truth. From that moment life had a different
import. It was as if he made you realize that you were in eternity.
It never altered. It never grew. It was like the sun that you will
never forget once you have seen. . . .

…His power Jay, perhaps, in the courage he gave others. He did

not ever seem to be conscious of himself at all. It was the other
man who interested him. "When the book of life begins to open,
then the fun begins," he
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would say. He used to make us realize there was nothing secular

in life; it was all holy. "Always remember, you are incidentally an
American, and a woman, but always a child of God. Tell yourself
day and night who you are. Never forget it." That is what he used
to tell us. His presence, you see, was dynamic. You cannot pass
that power on unless you have it, just as you cannot give money
away unless you have it. You may imagine it, but you cannot do
it.22

According to another of Miss MacLeod's memories, Swamiji's

power once assumed for her concrete form, vivid and
overwhelming: Although this reminiscence comes to us third -
hand, its main point has no doubt remained intact through its
retelling. To judge from Miss MacLeod's description of the size of
Swamiji's audience at the time, her experience occurred not at the
first class she attended, but at one held several weeks later in the
downstairs rooms of the lodging house. The story as she told it
years afterward to a swami of the Ramakrishna Order (then a
brahmacharin) and as he, in turn, retold it years later to a group of
devotees at Belur Math, one of whom took notes, has come out
thus:

I first met Swamiji in New York when my elder sister Mrs.

Sturges had her days of courtship with Mr. Leggett. . . . At that
time I used to read the Gita, translated by Mohini Mohan
Chatterjee. One day we two sisters came to New York by the
Hudson River, and went to listen to Swami-Vivekananda's lecture.
The subject of the talk was the Gita. More than one hundred
persons were Present, they were all scattered in the room: When
Swamiji started speaking . . . I lifted my eyes and saw with these
very eyes (she pointed to her own eyes) Krishna himself standing
there and preaching the Gita. That was my first wonderful vision.
I stared and stared . . . I saw only the figure, and all else
vaniashed.23

36
 37

The parlor lectures that Swamiji gave in the early part of this
season must have greatly helped to increase the attendance at his
classes, for they served to introduce him to new people, and those
who heard him speak once almost invariably wanted to hear him
again and yet again. Not all of these parlor lectures had been
arranged by his New York friends; some took place in Brooklyn.
On January 26 Leon Landsberg wrote to Isabelle McKindley:

Yesterday the Swami held the first of a series of parlor lectures at

Mrs. [Charles] Auel's residence in Brooklyn. The lecture was
attended by about sixty five persons, most of them ladies. The
Swami gave an outline of the Upanishads and the Yoga systems,
and his conversation was highly appreciated. His next
conversation will be on Tuesday next [January 29]. 24

These Brooklyn "conversations," to which an admission fee of

fifty cents was charged, were arranged after Swamiji had given
his first lecture at the Brooklyn Ethical Association on December
30, 1894. As Miss Waldo wrote, "his success was immediate, . . .
and a course of lectures there and at other places in Brooklyn
soon followed."25 Although we have no more information at
present about Swamiji's course of parlor lectures in Brooklyn,
many of those who attended them no doubt came also to his
classes across the Bridge, as did Miss Waldo herself.

But his parlor lectures in New York City must have drawn even
more people to his lodgings. What was probably the earliest of
these he gave in the last week of January at Miss Thuraby's
apartment in Gramercy Park, one of the roost exclusive
residential squares of the city. (Mia Thursby no doubt invited
many of her friends, including Sara Bull, who was then in New
York, and it may well have been on this occasion that an incident
took place which led to a fiery scene and a fiery letter--but of this
more later.)
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There is some evidence that in the early months of the year

Swamiji also gave a parlor lecture at the Guernseys’ and that it
was this lecture which drew to his classes Mrs. Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, a well-known popular poetess of the day, and her
husband, to whom she referred as “the Man.” In her memoirs
written in 1907 Mrs. Wilcox recalled:

Twelve years ago I chanced one evening to hear that a certain

teacher of philosophy from India, a man named Vivekananda, was
to lecture a block from my home in New York.
(Let us interrupt Mrs. Wilcox here with the observation that in
1895 she and her husband lived at 125 West Fortyfourth Street.
As far as can be determined in the light of our present knowledge,
there was only one place a block away from the Wilcox home
where Swamiji might have given a lecture at this period, and that
was the Guernseys’ house at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.
One comes to the tentative conclusion, then, that the Wilcoxes
had heard that Swamiji was giving a parlor lecture at the
Guernseys’ house.* That this took place early in the year becomes
evident as Mrs. Wilcox’s memoirs continue:)

We went out of curiosity,… and before we had been ten minutes

in the audience, we felt ourselves lifted up into an atmosphere so
rarefied, so vital, so wonderful, that we sat spell-bound and
almost breathless, to the end of the lecture.

When it was over we went out with new courage, new hope, new
strength, new faith, to meet life’s daily vicissitudes. “This is the
Philosophy, this is the idea of God, the religion which I have been
seeking,” said the Man. And for months afterwards he went with
me to hear Swami Vivekananda explain the old religion and to
gather from his wonderful mind jewels of truth and
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thoughts of helpfulness and strength. It was that terrible winter of

financial disasters, when banks failed and stocks went down like
broken balloons and business men walked through the dark
valleys of despair and the whole world seemed topsy-turvy. . . .
Sometimes after sleepless nights of worry and anxiety, the Man
would go with me to hear the Swami lecture, and then he would
come out into the winter gloom and walk down the street smiling
and say, "It is all right. There is nothing to worry over." And I
would go back to my own duties and pleasures with the same
uplifted sense of soul and enlarged vision.26

Later in the season, as Swamiji's classes would be drawing to a

close, Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote of them to her friend Mrs. Rate
Tannatt Woods of Salem, Massachusetts, who, in the days before
the Parliament of Religions, had been Swamiji's hostess. One of
her letters, dated "May, 1895," read:

I was listening to Vivekananda this morning an hour. How

honored by fate you must feel to have been allowed to be of
service to this Great Soul. I believe him to be the re-incarnation of
some great Spirit--perhaps Buddha -perhaps Christ. He is w
simple--so sincere, so pure, so unselfish. To have listened to him
all winter is the greatest privilege life has ever offered me. It
would be surprising to me that people could misunderstand or
malign such a soul if I did not know how Buddha and C6riat were
persecuted and lied about by small inferiors. His discourse this
morning was mat uplifting-his mere presence is that. His absolute
sinking of self is what I like. I am so tired of people who place the
capital "I" before truth--and God. "To do good for good's sake"-
with no expectation or desire of reward, and never to speak of
what we have done-but to keep on working for the love of doing
God's work--is Vivekananda's grand philosophy of life. He always
makes me feel ashamed that I have ever thought
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for one moment I was burdened or that I ever spoke of any good
act of my own.27

During the first week of his New York classes Swamiji gave
another parlor lecture on the night of Friday, February I. It was
very probably of this occasion that Miss Thursby wrote in the
following letter to Mrs. Bull. Dated simply "Monday," her letter
read in part:
34 Gramercy Park
Monday [February 4(?), 1895]

My dear friend

We are still going at the same rate or I should have had time to
write you before this. The dinner at Miss Corbin's Saturday
(Friday?] night was a great success, but we were there until nearly
two o'clock as she asked us to remain until all the people went, as
she was alone. Vivekananda was very fine, spoke to the people
who came after dinner most impressively. There was the most
wrapt [sic] attention on the part of the 4oo--who seemed to feel &
expressed the great delight at the change from the ordinary
fashionable gathering. He has made many new and valuable
friends. Miss Corbin was too happy to express. She has offered
the Conservatory, which is lovely -for classes in the Upanishads.
Last night's [February 3?) lecture in Brooklyn was a splendid one.
He seems to have come to the realization that he must work in the
spirit of his Master. I wrote him in sending a check for $ 25 [for
his parlor lecture in January?]--some days ago -how much my
friends had enjoyed his talk and how we all felt the uplift when he
spoke to us only in the spirit of his Master. Landsberg said last
night that he would never talk again in the old antagonistic spirit.
They seem so earnest. L[andsberg] told Miss Farmer that they
were going to give up smoking for six weeks from today. So all
seems to be going well. . . . There seems a lovely spirit
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about Vivek now. It was so kind of you to send check for him, but
I should prefer not taking it.28

Miss Anna Corbin was the daughter of Austin Corbin, one of the
wealthy railroad tycoons of the era, who lived, needless to say, in
a mansion on Fifth Avenue. The Four Hundred, whom Miss
Thursby mentioned, were the cream of New York society, but
Miss Corbin's circle would have been, on the whole, of a younger
generation, one in which the once rigid and impenetrable walls of
New York society had broken down and new life was pouring
through the breaches crowding across the boundaries. While Miss
Corbin's guest list would surely have included members of the
Four Hundred (itself no longer unassailable), it would' have
included as well heirs and heiresses of the new-rich and a number
of impoverished but titled sons of European noblemen-two
groups that had a symbiotic relationship with one another and that
brought to New York society enormous wealth on the one hand
and bona fide blue blood on the other. "[The Corbins'] house is
always choke full of swells and foreign aristocracy," Swamiji
would write to Mrs. Hale. "Princes and Barons & what not from
all over the world. Some of these foreigners are very bright. I am
sorry your home-manufactured aristocracy is not very in-
tereting."29

Swamiji did not get home until late on the night of his parlor
lecture at Miss Corbin's. "The 5wami arrived this morning at t
o'clock . . . ," Landsberg wrote in a postscript of a letter to Mrs.
Bull, dated February 2. "He is delighted with the success he had.
Miss Corbin intends to have classes in her house."30

MISS THURSBY'S REFERENCE TO SWAMIJI'S HAVING SPOKEN

"ONLY IN THE SPIRIT OF HIS MASTER" AND HAVING "A LOVELY
SPIRIT" ABOUT HIM "NOW," IMPLIES THAT THERE WERE TIMES
WHEN SWAMIJI HAD
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had something different from "a lovely spirit." And indeed to

Miss Thursby and Mrs. Bull, as well as to others brought up in a
tradition that associated holiness with meekness and mildness,
this might have seemed to be the case. Swamiji was at times as
puzzling to Christians as was Christ himself: The previous year,
during his lecture tours, and possibly also during his stay in
Cambridge in December, he had not hesitated to speak
forthrightly When forthright speech was called for. He spoke out
not only against bigotry and hypocrisy, but against the
superficiality and worldliness of those who professed to be
religious. In bringing his Master's message of universality to the
whole world, he had had to be a warrior and a hero, intensely
active, fearlessly outspoken, indomitable. At times his spirit was a
fire that scorched, as well as a light that awakened. "He seems to
be walking with an unsheathed sword in his hand," 31 Sri
Ramakrishna had once proudly said of his youthful and beloved
disciple, and an unsheathed sword was essential to a world
teacher--he whose mission was to destroy all that was false and
limiting as well as to give power and direction to the true spirit of
mankind. It was essential also for one whose related task was to
set India's record straight in the Western mind. "I am the one man
who dared to defend his country," he would write to Leasing in
May of 1895, "and I have given them what they never expected
from a Hindu-giving them tit-for-tat, with a compound
intereast."32

At the beginning of 1895, however, Swamiji's days of hard won

battle against the forces of bigotry in America were' winding to a
close. The opposition had, by and large, retreated; he was entering
now into a new and essentially unchallenged phase of his mission,
quietly teaching those who came to him and who hail no quarrel
with him. But however loving and compassionate he was,
however serene, it would never be his way to be politic.
"Success" as the world conceives it was his for the asking; yet he
scorned it. "Now, my children," he was to write to hie Madras
disciples in May of this year, "I could have made a grand success
in the way of organising here, if I
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were a worldly hypocrite."33 He refused to comply with the

conventions and Prejudices of society; nor would he compromise
his message in the slightest or blunt the keen edge of hie teaching
for the sake of harmonious relations with the more bigoted
members of the established clergy. Although he never sought a
confrontation with his adversaries, he stood his ground when he
found himself challenged in face-to-face argument, thereby
confounding and angering his opponent. Naturally enough, those
who loved him remonstrated with him, seeking to advise and
warn him. It was much like advising the lion to accommodate
himself to the ways of sheep, and at the very outset of his first
season in New York two such admonitions drew forth from him a
resounding roar of independence. The first reproving suggestion
that he mend his ways probably occurred after the parlor lecture
at Miss Thursby's in the last days of January. In his own words:

The other day at Miss Thursby's I had an excited argument with a

Presbyterian gentleman, who, as usual, got very hot, angry, and
abusive. However, I was after wards severely reprimanded by
Mrs. Bull for this, as such things hinder my work. So, it seems, is
your opinion.34

The above was addressed to Mary Hale, in reply to a letter of

rebuke in which she sums to have taken alt the privileges of a
sister, and more, one thinks, than would become a younger sister.
A fragment of what appears to be this particular letter of hers
reads:*

My dear Swami

I did not intend answering your first letter. I thought best to let the
matter drop & have no more words on the subject but now that
the second one has come, beginning with the same story, full of
the same spirit, not of love, but of hate-of revilings, of bitterness
& of rancor, I cannot but express myself: I confess dear Brother,
to a
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feeling of terrible disappointment--a year ago such a letter from

your pen would have been an utter impossibility. I am glad to
have that time to look back upon! Where is the great & glorious
soul that came to the Parliament of Religions, so full of love of
God, that his face shone with Divine light, whose words were 6re,
whose very presence created an atmosphere harmony & purity,
thereby drawing all souls to himself? It is our turn to cry "My!!!"
Where now is your illustration of the light in the lamp? The force
of the Lord reflected in all his creation?35

Swamiji's reply of February I was a blazing declaration that left

no question of how he intended to conduct himself and his work.
Although this letter is well known, it will bear quoting here in
part, fox it was, in effect, Swamiji"s proclamation of the stand he
would take during his next two years of teaching in the West-the
period with which this book is concerned.

I am very glad of your criticisms [he wrote] and am not sorry at

all. . . . I am glad you write about it just now, because I have been
giving a good deal of thought to it. In the first place, I am not at
all sorry for these things perhaps that may disgust you--it may. I
know full well how good it is for one's worldly prospects to be
sweet, but when it comes to a horrible compromise with the truth
within, then I stop. I do not believe in humility. I believe in
samadarshitvam--same state of mind with regard to all. The duty
of the common man is to obey the commands of his God--society;
the children of Light never do it. This is an eternal law. One
accommodates himself to surroundings and social opinion and
gets all good things from the giver of all good society. The other
stands alone and draws society up towards him. The accommo-
dating man finds a path of roses; the non-accommodating, one of
thorns. But the worshippers of Vox populi go to
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annihilation in a moment; the children of truth live forever.

I will compare truth to a corrosive substance of infinite power. It

burns its way in wherever it falls—in soft substance sooner, in
hard granite later, but [it] must. What is writ is writ. I am so, so
sorry, Sister, that I cannot make myself sweet and accommodating
to every black falsehood. But I cannot. I have suffered for it all
my life, but I cannot. I have essayed and essayed, but I cannot. I
have given up. The Lord is great. He will not allow me to become
a hypocrite. New let what is in come out at last. I have not found
a way that will please all, and I cannot but be what I am, true to
my own self…. God of truth, be Thou alone my guide! I am too
old to change now into milk and honey. Allow me to remain as I
am . . . . I have no desire for wealth or name or fame or
enjoyments, Sister, they are dust to me. I wanted to help my
brethren. I have not the tact to earn money, bless the Lord. What
reason is there for me to conform to the vagaries of the world
around me and not obey the voice of Truth within?…

The last fight with the Presbyterian priest and the long fight
afterwards with Mrs. Bull showed me in a clear light what Manu
says to the Sannyasin, “Live alone, walk alone.” All friendship,
all love, is only limitation. There never was a friendship,
especially of women, which was not exacting. Oh, great sages!
You were right. One cannot serve the God of Truth who leans on
somebody. Be still, my soul! And the Lord is with you…

…In one word, I have a message to give, I have no time to be

sweet to the world, and every attempt at sweetness makes me a
hypocrite. I will die a thousand deaths rather than live a jelly-fish
existence and yield to every requirement of this foolished world
—my own country or a foreign country. You are mistaken, utterly
mistaken
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if you thing I have a work as Mrs. Bull things- I have no work

under or beyond the sun. I have a message, and I will give after
my own fashion. I will neither Hinduise my message, nor
Christianise it, nor make it any “ise” in the world. I will only my-ise it
and that is all. Liberty, Mukti, is all my religion, and everything that tries
to curb it I will avoid by fight or flight.36

Mary Hale may have been momentarily stunned by the above

blast from Swamiji; but what “sister” of his would not in her heart
“cheer those that dare dash this false God, society, onto the earth
and trample on its unmitigated hypocrisy” ? 37 And to be sure, she
would cheer. Thinking he might have been too harsh, Swamiji
sent her a conciliatory poem on February 15, the first verse of
which read:

Now Sister Mary,

You need not be sorry
For the hard raps I gave you,
You know full well,
Though you like me tell,
With my whole heart I have you.

(This poem, which went on for thirteen more stanzas, included

the famous lines: “The wounded snake its hood unfurls, The
flame stirred up doth blaze,/ The desert air resounds the call / Of
heart-struck lion’s rage.”)38

Mary replied in verses of her own, applauding, teasing, and

remorseful. The pertinent lines read:
One day he sat and mused alone
Sudden a light around him shone,
The “still small voice” his thoughts inspire
And his words glow like coals of fire.

And coals of fire they proved to be,

Heaped on the head of contrite me-
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My scolding letter I deplore

And beg forgiveness o’er and o’er.39

Although Mary Hale seems not to have written to Swamiji for a

few weeks after this exchange,* soon all was well, as it always
had been and ever would be, between Swamiji and the Hales.

As for Mrs. Bull, who had probably received the first full throated
roar of the “heart-struck lion’s rage,” she did not leave New York
without seeing Swamiji again after their “long fight.” From a
small item in the social columns of the New York Herald one
learns that on Wednesday, January 30, a Mrs. A. B. Weaver gave a
luncheon in her honor, at which Swamiji and Miss Thursby were
among the guests.40 It is true that a social function does not imply
peace, but Swamiji’s benign presence could have brought about
nothing else. He had said what he had had to say, and that was all.
Moreover, if Mrs. Bull still felt dismay when she returned the
following day to Cambridge, such dismay would have sprung
only from the abundance of her good will and concern. Indeed,
she had at heart even the welfare of Swamiji’s disciples: almost
immediately upon arriving home she wrote to Leon Landsberg,
dispatching to him an overcoat that had belonged to her father.
Landsberg’s reply read in part:
54 W. 33rd Street
New York, February 2d—95

My dear Mrs. O. Bull.

Your kind note of yesterday as well as the Ulster sent by express

received. Many thanks for the gift which was deeply appreciated.
Many thanks for the gift which was deeply appreciated. But even
deeper I appreciate the spirit that animated you in making it. It is
the spirit of love that spreads joy and happiness—even among the
undeserving; for so far I have not done anything for you to de
serve your solicitude for my welfare. Nor do I know how to repay
your kindness, unless it be with my
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blessings which I give you from the innermost of my soul . . .

…I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mr. A. S.
Gron from Harvard who came to call on the Swami. He made
upon me the impression of an energetic, high souled young man
in whom the Swami’s teachings have taken deep root. Wish to
God the Swami had more of such disciples! Full of vigor and
enthusiasm, they are the best agents to propagate our high ideals
among the coming generation.

We had a number of callers in our new residence which seems to

have become the Mecca not only of the devoted truth seekers, but
also of all curiosity seekers who imagine the Swami can in one
lesson, impart them the art to work miracles. Men are mostly
children who want their toys.

The Swami has written an interesting article on Ether for Dr.

Gurnsey’s [Guernsey’s] medical Journal, which I shall send you
next week. He is now writing a very learned essay on
Reincarnation for the Metaphysical journal.

Miss Hamlin was kind enough to send us, a gas stove. I am sorry
that the adjoining room of which we intended to make a kitchen,
has been rented, and so we’ll have to do our cooking in the
bedroom.

With kindest regards and many blessings.

Although Mrs. Bull’s concern over Swamiji’s outspokenness was

natural enough, it was unavailing; he would always oppose
whatever he found to be false wherever he found it. But while he
went his own way and while the word power has often been used
in describing him, that independence and that power had their
source in profound inner peace and were, for this very reasons,
unerring and beneficent. It had always been so, but now, as he
started and conducted his work in New York, his spirit seems to
have been more luminous, his power more benevolent than ever.
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A year and a half of mixing with hundreds, thousands of people

had created within him, on the one hand, a strong desire to bless
and enlighten the common man, and, on the other hand, a
resistance to Public life and a need to throw off the restricting
and burdensome circumstances of a traveling lecturer. By the time
he arrived at New Your he felt a great urge to teach Americans
and, simultaneously, as great an urge to live once again the
unfettered life of a Hindu monk. To Swamiji the satisfaction of
both these urges was possible. Breaking away from the demands
of his rich and fashionable friends and taking up his own quarters,
he there lived the austere and spiritually intense life of the
sannyasin. Not only did he remain in a high state of spiritual
consciousness, but he would plunge at the slightest opportunity
into the depths of meditation. He would recite texts from Sanskrit
scriptures, he would repeat the name of God, or caught up in a
mood of divine love he would sing devotional songs from the
depths of his heart. And who can say how many hours in the
silence of the night he remained lost in the abyss of divine union
or what experiences were his while the world slept? And when
one thinks of his exalted state one cannot but feel that he lived
both day and night on the very edge of the Infinite. “He literally
radiated spirituality. . . . An atmosphere of benediction, of peace,
of power and of inexpressible luminosity was felt by one and all
who came to his classes.”42

“One sees him in his New York retreat,” reads the Life, “in the
morning or the evening quiet, or at dead of night, meditating.
Oftentimes he was lost in meditation, his unconsciousness of the
external betraying his complete absorption within.” 43 Even while
holding a class he would plunge into profound contemplation.
“When the Swami emerged from such states,” the Life relates, “he
would feel impatient with himself, for he desired that the Teacher
should be uppermost in him, rather than the Yogi. In order to
avoid repetitions of such occurrences, he instructed one or two ho
to bring him back by uttering a word or a Name, should he be
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carried by the force of meditation into Samadhi."44

One can well imagine that to attend Swamiji's classes was no

simple matter. To come suddenly from a cluttered, urban life and
from noisy, winter-dreary streets into the rarefied atmosphere of
his room, which literally vibrated with spirituality; to be day after
day in the presence of a radiant prophet and to have one's mind
suddenly lifted and expanded to where it might behold a realm
never dreamed of before, was an experience that could be
overwhelming. But it was Swamiji's greatness as a teacher to
guide his students in such a way that their bodies and minds
became fit vessels to receive the almost terrible gift of his
liberating power.

Those who came to argue or to scoff, those who came out of

curiosity, those who came to learn some psychic trick or
mysterious lore remained to sit at his feet and to drink the pure
water of spirituality that he gave to one and all without stint.
"Some Theosophists came to my classes in New York," he was to
write the following August to Mr. E. T. Sturdy, "but as soon as
human beings perceive the glory of the Vedanta; all abracadabra’s
fall off of themselves. This has been my uniform experience." 45
And some who came with open and ready minds were made at
once aware of their own infinitude and forthwith were
transformed. "I think that is what happened to me 41 years ago,
January 29, when I saw and heard Swamiji," Miss MacLeod
wrote to a friend when she was an old woman. "Somehow one
was lifted above the body and time and space."46

As far as can be determined, Swamiji at first held classes every

morning from eleven till one o'clock and often till later; as he
wrote to Mrs. Hale on February 18, "I talk [to] them until they
[grow] tired."47 Later this schedule was changed to the mornings
and evenings of Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. No program
of these classes has been discovered, but from various hints here
and there, we can be almost certain that he taught the four yogas-
jnana, bhakti, karma, and raja. He may have held a class on the
Gita as well, and, as
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Miss Waldo wrote, "there were `question' classes to help those to

whom the teaching was so new and strange that they were
desirous to have an opportunity for more extended explanation."48

It has been thought that no notes of Swamiji's first season of

classes in New York have come down to us. There is a good
possibility, however, that most of the nine sections of "Discourses
on Jnana-Yoga," as published in volume eight of the Complete
Works, were taken down in longhand by Miss Ellen Waldo at 54
West Thirty-third Street in the early part of 1895.* If this was
indeed the case (and let us assume here that it was), then we have
an excellent record of at least some of Swamiji's early jnana yoga
classes. And what classes they were!

It is small wonder that those who attended them hung "breathless

on his every word" and felt that they "were in eternity." If one
took Swamiji's statements as revelations of fact, not as beautiful
ideas, but as actual facts applicable to oneself here and now, if
one listened not with one's mind only, but with one's inner being
(and who could not so listen to Swamiji, for it was to the inner
being that he spoke?), then from that moment forward life would
indeed have had a "different import" His teachings, spoken with
the penetrating authority of a prophet, turned the accustomed
universe upside down and inside out, and one's life with it. Nor
were there any philosophical arguments here or scholarly
dissertations; there was simply, as Miss MacLeod said, truth and
again truth. Here are a few passages:

The highest good is the realisation of the Self. It is beyond sense,

beyond thought. The real "I" cannot be grasped. It is the eternal
subject and can never become the object of knowledge, because
knowledge is only of the related, not of the Absolute. All sense-
knowledge is limitation, it is an endless chain of cause and effect.
This world is a relative world, a shadow of the real; still, being
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the plane of equipoise where happiness and misery are about

evenly balanced, it is the only plane where man can realise his
true Self and know that he is Brahman.

This world is "the evolution of nature and the manifestation of

God." It is our interpretation of Brahman or the Absolute, seen
through the veil of Maya or appearance. The world is not zero, it
has a certain reality; it only appears because Brahman is.

When the delusion of this world is once broken, it will come back
to us, but no longer will it hold any reality for us. We shall know
it as a mirage. To reach behind the mirage is the aim of all
religion.

To separate ourselves utterly from matter and all belief in its

reality is true Jnana. . . . Abstract unity is the foundation of Jnana-
Yoga. This is called Advaitism ("without dualism or dvaitism").
This is the cornerstone of the Vedanta philosophy, the Alpha and
the Omega. "Brahman alone is true, all else is false, and I am
Brahman."

The essence of Vedanta is that there ie but one Being and that
every soul is that Being in full, not a part of that Being. All the
sun is reflcted in each dew-drop. Appearing in time, space, and
causality, this being is man, as we know him, but behind all
appearance is the one Reality. Unselfishness is the denial of the
lower or apparent self. We have to free ourselves from this miser-
able dream that we are that bodies. We must know the truth, "I am
He." We are not drops to fall into the ocean and be lost; each one
is the whole, infinite ocean, and will know it when released from
the fetters of illusion. Infinity cannot be divided, the "One without
a second" can have no second, all is that One. The knowledge will
come to all, but we should struggle to attain it now, because until
we have it, we cannot really give mankind the beat help. The
Jivanmukta ("the living free" or' one who knows) alone is able to
give real love, real charity, real
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…Our real nature is all bliss, and all the pleasure we know is but
a reflection, an atom, of the bliss we get from touching our real
nature.

When everything has been thrown away until what cannot be

thrown away is reached, that is the Self… Ask not for healing, or
longevity, or prosperity, ask only to be free.

"Comfort" is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far

from being "comfortable". of one intends to really find truth, one
must not cling to comfort It u hard to let all go, but the Jnani must
do it. He must become pure, kill out all desires and cease to
identify himself with the body. Then and then only, the higher
truth can shine in his soul. Sacrifice is necessary, and this
immolation of the lower self is the underlying truth that has made
sacrifice a part of all religions…

…Time and apace exist only in m, we are the one Permanent

Being.

If a thing happens once, it can happen again. If any human being

has ever realised perfection, we too can do so. If we cannot
become perfect here and now, we never can in any state or heaven
or condition we may imagine.

Do not pity anyone. Look upon all as your equal, cleanse yourself
of the primal sin of inequality…. Equality is the sign of the free…
Only sinners see an. See not man, see only the Lord… Realise "I
am Existence Absolute, knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute--I
am He, I am He". Be glad at birth, be glad at death, rejoice always
in the love of God.

The Vedas . . . assert in the plainest terms that man can and does
transcend this sense-bound, frozen universe. He can, as it were,
Sad a hole in the ice through which he can pass and reach the
whole ocean of life. Only by so transcending the world of sense,
can he reach his true Self and realise what he truly is.
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Time is but the method of our thinking, but we are the eternally
present tense. . . . The secret of Jnana is to give up all and be
sufficient unto ourselves.

…There is only one Individual, and each of us is That. Oneness

alone is love and fearlessness; separation leads us to hatred and
fear.49

If the "Discourses on Jnana Yoga" are in fact notes of Swamiji's

classes held in the winter and spring of 1895, then they are among
the first substantial records we have of his classes in the West.*
And we find that here, as in all his subsequent teachings, the key
word was realization. He did not preach moral sermons; he did
not exhort man to be good; rather, he showed him how to raise the
level of his consciousness to the point where his actual perception
of himself and of his world was not of matter, limited and gross,
but of spirit, for only at that high level of perception could moral
action, untainted by self interest, be spontaneous, consistent, and
fraught with the power for good. Even the struggle to attain to
that level, even the persistent undertaking of spiritual disciplines,
could not but lessen, La at least some degree, the agony of the
world. "The heart must be pure," he said in his jnana yoga class,
"and the pure heart sees only good, never evil. We should never
try to be guardians of mankind, or to stand on a pedestal as saints
reforming sinners. Let us rather purify ourselves, and the result
must be that in so doing we shall help others" 50 Though he does
not seem to have yet used the term, his mission now and always
was "man-making." "It is the patient up-building of character; ' he
would write to a friend in regard to his New York work, "the
intense struggle to realise the truth which alone will tell in the
future of humanity. SO this year [1895] I am hoping to work
along this line practically training into the Advaita realisation a
small band of men and women."51

As the weeks went on, more and more people poured into
Swamiji'a classes,' and, as Miss Waldo noted, "Long before
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[June], they had outgrown their small beginnings and had

removed downstairs to occupy an entire parlour floor and
extension." But though the classes were crowded, the collections
or contributions were sometimes not large enough to pay
expenses. "The Swami gave his services Free as sir," Miss Waldo
continued:

The rent was paid by voluntary subscriptions and when these

were found insufficient the Swami hired a hall and gave secular
lectures on India and devoted the proceeds to the maintenance of
the classes. He said that Hindu teachers of religion felt it to be
their duty to support their classes and the students, too, if they
were unable to care for themselves, and the teachers would
willingly make any sacrifice they possibly could to assist a needy
diaciple.52

6
ON THE SUNDAYS OF JANUARY 20, FEBRUARY 3 AND
17, AND APRIL 7, AS WELL AS ON THE MONDAY OF
FEBRUARY 25, SWAMIJI DELIVERED LECTURES
BEFORE THE ETHICAL ASSOCIATION IN BROOKLYN,
WHICH MIGHT BE CALLED "SECULAR" AND WHICH
WERE PRIMARILY ON THE SUBJECT OF INDIAN
CULTURE AND RELIGION. ALTHOUGH HE GAVE
THESE LECTURES DURING THE PERIOD UNDER
DISCUSSION, THEY DO NOT IN SUBJECT MATTER OR
TONE BELONG TO THE SECOND PHASE OF HIS
WESTERN WORK, WITH WHICH THIS BOOK IS
CONCERNED, AND THUS THEY HAVE BEEN DEALT
WITH IN A PREVIOUS VOLUME.53 NEVERTHDESS, THE
MONEY SWAMIJI EARNED BY THEM MUST HAVE
HELPED IN SOME MEASURE TO SUPPORT HIS NEW
YORK WORK.

How many "secular" lectures Swamiji gave in a hired hall in New

York is not known at present. We do, however, learn from a letter
written to Mrs. Bull on Sunday, March 24, by Elizabeth L.
Hamlen (of whom more later) that he was to give a lecture that
evening on India. "I am to take the tickets at the door; ' she wrote,
not specifying what door, "while Prof Landsberg and Mr.
Friedeberg [a friend of Landsberg's] seat
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People.”54 And from the published memoirs of' Sister Devamata

(Laura Glenn in l895)* we learn of two lectures on Vedanta and
Yoga that Swamiji delivered in a small hall. Sister Devamata was
vague as to dates, but it seems almost certain that the following
pertains to the early months of 1895. She wrote:

One day, as I was walking up Madison Avenue, I saw in the

window of the Hall of the Universal Brotherhood a modest sign
saying: "Next Sunday at 3 p.m. Swami Vivekananda will speak
here on `What is Vedanta?' and the following Sunday on `What a
Yoga?' " I reached the hall twenty minutes before the hour. It was
already over half full. It was not large, however-a long, narrow
room with a single aisle and benches reaching from it to the wall;
a low platform holding reading desk and chair at the far end; and
a flight of stairs at the back. The hall was on the second story and
these stairs gave the only way of access to it-audience and
speaker both had to make use of them. By the time three o'clock
had arrived, ball, stairs, window-sills and railings, all were
crowded to their utmost capacity. Many even were standing
below, hoping to catch a faint echo of the words spoken in the hall
above.

A sudden hush, a quiet step on the stain and Swami Vivekananda

passed in stately erectness up the aisle to the platform. He began
to speak; and memory, time, place, people, all melted away
Nothing was left but a voice ringing through the void. It was as if
a gate had swung open and I had passed out on a road leading to
limitless attainment. The end of it was not visible; but the promise
of what it would be shone through the thought and flashed
through the personality of the one who gave it. He stood there-
prophet of infinitude.

The silence of an empty hall recalled me to myself. Everyone was

gone except the Swami and two others standing near the platform.
I learned later that they were
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Mr and Mrs. Goodyear, ardent disciples of the Swami. Mr.

Goodyear made the announcements at the meetings. 55

The public lectures were not of much financial help. "I am faring
well," Swami wrote to Mrs. Hale three weeks after opening his
classes. "Financially I am making the ends meet and nothing
more because I do not charge anything for the classes I have in
my rooms. And the [proceeds from the] public lectures have to go
through so many hands."56

But to make ends meet was enough, for Swamiji had relinquished
for the time being any attempt to raise money for his Indian work
and was satisfied, indeed overjoyed, to have nothing for himself.
Supporting his classes at Thirty-third Street through his own
labor, he lived as he wanted and taught on his own terms. He
refused at this point to accept money even from Mrs. Bull, whom
he held in high esteem. He refused as gently as possible, but he
repeated in effect the cry of freedom that had resounded
throughout his letter to Mary Hale two weeks earlier: " `Live
alone, Walk alone.' . . . Oh, great sages! you were right. One
cannot serve the God of Truth who leans on somebody." Now, on
February 14, he wrote to Mrs. Bull:

Accept my heartfelt gratitude for your motherly advice. I hope I

will be able to carry out them in life.

How can I express my gratitude to you for what you have already
done for me and my work, and my eternal gratitude to you for
your offering to do something more this year. But I sincerely
believe that you ought to turn all your help to Miss Farmer's
Grenache work this year. India can wait as she is waiting
centuries and an immediate work at hand should always have the
preference.

Again, according to Manu, collecting funds even for a good work

is not good for a Sannyasin, and I have begun to feel that the old
sages were right. "Hope is the greatest misery, despair is the
greatest happiness." It appears like
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a hallucination. I am getting out of them. I was in these childish

ideas of doing this and doing that…

Perhaps these road desires were necessary to bring me over to this

country. And I thank the Lord for the experiences.57

In this mood Swamiji let things happen as they would, which is,
in fact, what he had always done. He accepted invitations to speak
outside his lodgings as they came, neither courting them, nor
avoiding them. In the same letter of February 14 to Mrs. Bull he
wrote, "I went to see Miss Corbin the other day, and Miss Farmer
and Miss Thursby were also there. We had a nice half-hour and
she wants me to hold some classes in her home from next Sunday.
I am no more seeking for these things. If they come, the Lord be
blessed, if not, blessed more be He."58

Swamiji started his classes in Miss Corbin's conservatory at 425

Fifth Avenue not on Sunday, February 17, as first planned, but on
the Sunday following. "Behind [Miss Corbin's] parlor," he wrote
in his letter of February 18 to Mrs. Hale, "she has a long arbour
with all arts of palms & seats d: electric light. There I will have a
little class next week of a score of long-pockets. The fun is not
bad."56 Some of Swamiji's New York friends must have been
highly pleased, for these "long pockets" were indeed the "right
people." But within a month he threw over the whole thing. On
March 16, after four Sunday classes in the Corbin conservatory,
he called on Miss Corbin "and told her," as he wrote to Mrs. Bull;
"that I should not be able to come to hold classes any more."
"Was it ever in the history of the world that any great work was
done by the rich?" he exclaimed. "It is the heart and the brain that
do it ever acid ever and not the purse. My idea and all my life
with it-and to God for help; to none else! This is the only secret of
success. I am sure you are one with me here." 60 In this same letter
(dated March 21) he informed Mrs. Bull that he would have a
series of paid Sunday lectures
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(to take the place of the Corbin classes?) in the downstairs rooms
of his lodging house, which would seat about a hundred persons
and where all were welcome; he expected these lectures to cover
his expenses.

Meanwhile, Swamiji had given other outside talks. There had

been, for instance, the lecture course at the large house of Mr.
And Mrs. Amzi Lorenzo Barber on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-eighth
Street, which was sponsored by Mrs. Bull and which consisted of
five lectures—two by Swamiji, two by Mrs. Florence Adams, and
one by Mrs. Ernest Fenollosa, the well-know connoisseur and
curator of Oriental art. Except for lending her spacious and, it was
said, handsome drawing rooms for this series, Mrs. Barber seems
to have had little to do with it. To judge from the following
invitational announcement, it had been Miss Farmer and Miss
Thursby who (in consultation with Mrs. Bull) had organized the
series, and Mrs. Bull who presided over it:

Three weeks spent at Grenacre, Eliot, Maine, during August,

1894, suggested to Mrs. Ole Bull of Cambridge, Mass., the
benefit of lectures given in December at Cambridge under her
auspices led her to consent to preside over a similar course in
New York.

Trough the courtesy of Mr. And Mrs. A. L. Barber, these lectures

will be given at their residence, 871 Fifth Avenue.

On receipt of an acceptance and five dollars (addressed to Miss

Farmer, in care of Miss Emma Thursby, 34 Gramercy Park), a
ticket of admission will be forwarded to those desiring to attend
this course. A prompt response is requested, that the waiting list
may be supplied.

In connection with these lectures, classes and private lessons on

the following subjects will be given. Those desiring to attend can
arrange hours and terms with miss Farmer.
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Classes may begin February 18

Mrs. Milward Adams: The Study of Expression.

Miss Emma Thursby: Musical Expression and Phrasing.
The Swami Vivekananda: The Vedanta Philosophy.

PROGRAM.
February 23, 8 p.m.— Mrs. Milward Adams of Chicago.
Orderly Thought and Personal Culture.

February 28, 3 p. m.—Mrs. Milward Adams of Chicago.

The conversational Voice and its Possibilities.

March 7, 8 p. m.—The Swami Vivekananda of India.

The Vedanta Philosophy: God.

March 9, 8 p.m.—Mr. Ernest F. Fenollosa of the Art

Museum, Boston.
Art as Related to Religion.

Music: Miss Emma Thursby and Other Artists.

871 Fifth Avenue.61

According to a report in the social columns of a New York

newspaper, Mrs. Ole Bull, “a delicate, sweet-voiced woman with
a tender, dreamy face and masses of dark hair,” introduced Mrs.
Milward Adams to the audience. One can infer that she
introduced Mr. Renollosa and Swamiji as well, but this, together
with the above announcement and program (which was repeated
in part in the society news), is all we know at present about
Swamiji’s two ‘Barber House” lectures, for which he received,
almost tow months after giving the second one, a check for $ 100
from Miss Farmer.62 As for the related classes and private lessons
mentioned in the announcement, we have no further information
about them.

On the evening following his second Barber House lecture

Swamiji gave a talk at Unity Hall in Hartford, Connecticut (one
hundred miles or so by train from New York City). His
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subject, as announced in the Hartford newspapers, was "God and

the Soul." The text of the lecture as reported is the Hartford Times
of March 11, 1895, has been published in volume one of the
Complete Works under the title "Soul, God, and Religion," but the
newspaper report had an opening paragraph not found in full
elsewhere. It read:

Vivekananda was greeted by a fine house last night [March 8],

and all who went will be glad they did, for talks by high caste
Brahmans are not a common occurrence in this latitude. The
Brahmans seldom leave their native land: they lose caste by
crossing the ocean. But Vivekananda was willing to submit to that
to get to Christian lands, for his views are more in consonance
with those of Christ than those of many so-called Christians, His
broad charity takes in all religions and all nations. The simplicity
of his talk last night was charming, and in his long red gown and
yellow turban, with his handsome Asiatic face, he was
picturesque to the eye as well as fascinating to the ear through his
high spiritual ideas. He speaks excellent English, and with an
accent that gives added zest to his talk.

Mr. Frank G. Burnham of the South Baptist choir sang very

finely, and to the evident delight of the audience, and Mr. C. B.
Patterson introduced the speaker, who said:

[Here follows Swamiji's talk as later published in volume one of

the Complete Works.]

The Complete Works title "Soul, God, and Religion" does in fact
more accurately describe the substance of this lecture than did its
original title, its main theme being the unity of the essential
principles of religious thought throughout the ages and in all parts
of the world.

The harmony of religions was a subject Swamiji spoke on again

and again during his first visit in America; it was not only one of
the primary elements of his Master's message, but
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was a subject thc vital importance of which bad been repeatedly

borne in on him during his tours in 1895 and 1894 of midwestern
America, when he had come up against the extremes of religious
narrowness and bigotry-attitudes which he of course knew to be
rooted in ignorance and potentially dangerous to the entire world.
The new age that mankind was entering would call for a universal
understanding of the harmony, if not the unity, of the ideals and
aspirations most Fundamental to the human race, those which
concerned man's essential nature, his God, his ultimate purpose,
and his destiny-those, in short, that constituted his religion.
Without a recognition that the basic principles of these most
deeply felt of human ideals were common to all mankind, that
only the nonessentials differed-and should differ-there could be
no harmony among peoples and nations in any field of human
life. "My master used to say that these names as, Hindu,
Christian, etc., stand as great bars to all brotherly feelings
between man and man," Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Bull in March of
1899. "We must try to break them down first. They have lost all
their good powers and now only stand as baneful influences under
whose black magic even the best of us behave like demons. Well,
we will have to work hard and must succeed. That is why I desire
so much to have a centre. Organisation has its faults, no doubt,
but without that nothing can be done."63

In the last chapter of the volume preceding this one, 64 we

discussed Swamiji's developing attempt to define for the Western
world the essential principles underlying the rich variety of
religious expressions and forms that had evolved throughout
world history. It had not been enough, he seemed to feel, to say
that each religion was a way to God and should be respected,
even accepted, as such by the followers of other religions. In
addition to this, he sought to give meaningful expression to a
deeper interpretation of his Master's message and to formulate a
coherent body of principles that could be shown to underlie all
religious paths and that could be called
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Religion, with a capital R. As far as we can judge from the

sources available to us--primarily newspaper accounts of his
lectures in 1893 and 1894--it was not until the latter part of 1894.
that he spoke in America of the dualistic, qualified monistic, and
monistic views of God as ascending stages of experience and
understanding, together embracing the entire spectrum of
religious aspiration.45

In his Hartford lecture Swamiji pursued this line of thought,

pointing out concepts common to all living religions of the world.
"We find that all religions teach the eternity of the soul," he said,
"as well as that its lusture has been dimmed, and that its primitive
purity is to be regained by the knowledge of God." 66 And as for
God, he traced the evolution of man's concept of God from that of
early tribal deities through that of the monotheistic, extracosmic
God, to that of God immanent in nature, and, finally, to the
realization that man is God Himself, that "al! that is real in me is
He; all that is real in Him is I." 67 Behind all religious struggle was
the universal human need to reach that goal. "The end of all
religions is the realising of God in the soul. That is the one
universal religion. If there is one universal truth in all religions, I
place it here-in realising God. Ideals and methods may differ, but
that is the central point. . . . There is that beyond all books,
beyond all creeds, beyond the vanities of this world, and it is the
realisation of God within yourself."68

As time went on Swamiji was to define and explore in detail

every aspect, theoretical and practical, of this universal religion.
Indeed, to formulate the essential principles of Religion into a
comprehensive teaching that would meet all the needs of heart,
reason, and will and that would accommodate all ideals was the
very crux of his world mission.

Many streams entered the current of Swamiji's message, which

was as rich and broad as the age it was meant for, and
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It is unfortunate that we know but little of his teachings in the

early part of 1895. But although only a few of his any talks were
taken down, he wrote three articles during this season, each of
which reveals a different aspect of his thought. These writings,
which were not connected one with the other, pertained—
successively, as it happened—to (I) the cosmos, (2) the individual
soul or jiva, and (3) the Atman, all of which subjects he was to
expand, develop, and combine in great detail the following year.
The first article has not heretofore been known.

As the reader may recall, in his letter of February 2 to Mrs. Bull,

Landsberg wrote, “The Swami has written an interesting article
on Ether for Dr. Gurnsey’s medical Journal.” Dr. Guernsey’s
medical journal was the New York Medical Times, a prestigious
monthly, of which Guernsey was fonder and editor-in-chief.
Whether or not Swamiji chose the subject of this article, it was
one in which he was no doubt much interested, dealing as it did
with science—the ruling faith and dogma of the day. His article,
which appeared anonymously in the February 1895 issue of the
Medical Times, was, as far as is known, his first (and by no means
his last) attempt to point out the similarities between Western
science and Eastern thought and, further, to point ahead to the
meeting, if not merger, of physics with metaphysics, which he
knew must eventually take place. Some details of the scientific
theories that Swamiji cited in his article have, it is true, since been
modified by more recent findings; indeed the concept of the
“ether” itself, which was then still a matter of controversy
among scientists, was finally discarded in the early part of the
present century and is still (1893) in unanimous disrepute. As for
the electron, in 1895 its existence, though hypothesized, had not
yet been verified. Thus, while the most technical part of the
article—Swamiji’s summary of the calculations of Johann
Zollner, to the effect that the ether consists of “electric
particles”—must have been of much interest to readers of the
Medical Times, perhaps its primary interest today
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lies in its indication that Swamiji had a detailed knowledge and

grasp of these matter far beyond that of most laymen. Because of
its value in this respect his succinct exposition of Zollner’s
theories has been retained here in its entirety, but because the
reader may like to skim over it, it has been set in smaller type.
These paragraphs are, in any event, not necessary today to
Swamiji's conclusions, which are, one ventures to think, as valid
and important now as when he drew them and, ether, far more in
tune with present-day scientific thought than with that of the
nineteenth century. The article read:

THE ETHER.
Classification or grouping of phenomena by their similarities is
the first step in scientific knowledge-perhaps it is all. An
organized grouping, revealing to w t similarity running through
the whole group, and conviction that under similar circumstances
the group will arrange itself in the same form-stretched over all
time, past, present and future-is what we call law.

This finding of unity in variety is really what we call knowledge.

These different groups of similars are stowed away in the pigeon
holes of the mind, and when a new fact comes before us we begin
to search for a similar group already existing in one of the pigeon
holes of the mind. If we succeed in finding one ready made we
take the newcomer in immediately. If not, we either reject the new
fact, or wait till we find more of his kind, and form a new place
for the group.

Facts which are extraordinary thus disturb us, and when wt find
many like them, they cause to disturb, even when our knowledge
about their cause remains the same as before.

The ordinary experiences of our lives are no less wonderful than

any miracles recorded in any sacred book of the world; nor are we
any more enlightened as to the
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cause of these ordinary experiences than of the so-called miracles.

But the miraculous is “extraordinary,” and the every day
experience is “ordinary.” The “extraordinary” startles the mind,
the “ordinary” satisfies.

The field of knowledge is so varied, and [the] more the difference

is from the center, the radii diverge the more widely.

At the start the different sciences were thought to have no

connection whatever with each other, but as more and more
knowledge comes in, that is, the more and more we come near the
center, the radii are converging more and more, and it seems that
they are on the eve of finding a common center. Will they ever
find it?

The study of the mind was above all the science to which the
sages of India and Greece had directed their attention. All
religions are the outcome of the study of the inner man. Here we
find the attempt at finding the unity, and in the science of religion,
as taking its stand upon general and massive propositions, we find
the boldest and the most vigorous manifestation of this tendency
at finding the unity.

Some religions could not solve the problem any more than the
finding [of] a duality of causes, one good, the other evil. Others
went as far as finding an intelligent personal cause, a few went
still further beyond intellect, beyond personality, and found an
infinite being.

In those, and only those systems which dared to transcend beyond

the personality of a limited human consciousness, we find also an
attempt to resolve all physical phenomena to unity.
The result was the “Akasa” of the Hindus and the “Ether” of the
Greeks.

This “Akasa” was, after the mind, the first material manifestation,
said the Hindu sages, and out of this “Akasa” all this has been
evolved.

History repeats itself, and again during the latter part

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of the nineteenth century the same theory is coming, with more

vigor and fuller light.

It is being proved more clearly than ever that as there is a co-

relation of physical forces there is also a co-relation of different
[branches of] knowledge, and that behind all these general groups
there is a unity of knowledge.

It was shown by Newton that if light consisted of material

particles projected from luminous bodies, they must move faster
in solids and liquids than in sir, in order that the laws of refraction
might be satisfied.

Huyghens, on the other hand, showed that to account for the same
laws on the supposition that light consisted in the undulating
motion of an elastic medium, it must move more slowly in solids
and fluids than in gases. Fizeau and Foucault found Huyghens'
predictions correct.

Light, then, consist in the vibrating motion of a medium, which

must, of course, fill all space. This is called the ether.

In the fact that the theory of a cosmic ether explains fully all the
phenomena of radiation, refraction, diffraction and polarization of
light, is the strongest argument in favor of the theory.

Of late, gravitation, molecular action, magnetic, electric, and

electro-dynamic attractions and repulsions have thus been
explained.

Sensible and latent heat, electricity and magnetism themselves,

have been of late almost satisfactorily explained by the theory of
the all-pervading ether.

Zollner [Johann K. F. Zollner, 1834-82], however, basing his

calculations upon the data supplied by the researches of Wilhelm
Weber, thinks that the transmission of life force between the
heavenly bodies is effected both ways, by the undulation of a
medium and by the actual evidence of particle.

Weber found that the molecules, the smallest particles of bodies, were composed
of yet smaller particles, which he called the electric
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particles, and which in the molecules are in a constant circular motion.

These electric particles are partly positive, partly negative.

Those of the same electricity repulsing those of different electricity, attracting

each other, each molecule containing the same amount of electric particles, with
a small surplus of either positive or negative quickly changing the balance.
Upon this Zollner builds these propositions:
(1) The molecules are composed of a very great number of particles, the so-
called electric particles, which are in constant circular motion around each
other within the molecule.
(2) If the inner motion of a molecule increases over a certain limit, then electric
particles are emitted. They then travel from one heavenly body through
space until they reach another heavenly body, where they are either
reflected or absorbed by other molecules.
(3) The electric particles thus traversing space are the ether of the physicist.
(4) These ether particles have a two-fold motion: first, their proper motion;
second, an undulatory motion, for which they receive the impulse from the
ether particles rotating in the molecules.
(5) The motion of the smallest particles corresponds to that of the heavenly
bodies.
The corollary is:
That the law of attraction which holds good for the heavenly bodies also holds
good for the smallest particles.
Under these suppositions, that which we call space is really filled with electric
particles, or ether. Zollner also found the following interesting calculation for the
electric atoms:
Velocity, 50, 143 geographical miles per second.
Amount of ether particles in a water molecule, 42,000 millions.
Distance from each other, 0.0032 millimeter.
So far as it goes, then, the theory of a universal cosmic ether is
the best at hand to explain the various phenomena of nature.
As far as it goes, the theory that this ether consists of particles,
electric or otherwise, is also very valuable. But on all
suppositions, there must be space between two particles of ether,
however small, and what fills this interethereal space? If particles
still finer, we require still more fine ethereal particles to fill up the
vacuum between every two of them, and so on.
Thus the theory of ether, or material particles in space,
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though accounting for the phenomena in apace, cannot account

for apace itself.
And thus we are forced to find that the ether which comprehends
the molecules explains the molecular phenomena, but itself
cannot explain apace, because we cannot but think of ether as in
apace. And therefore, if there is anything which will explain this
space, it must be something that comprehends in its infinite being
the infinite space itself. And what is there that can comprehend
even the infinite space but the Infinite Mind? 69
In his letter of February 2 to Mrs. Bull, Landsberg also mentioned
that Swamiji was "now writing a very learned essay on
Reincarnation for the Metaphysical journal." Swamiji's article,
which he wrote after beginning his New York classes, was a
closely reasoned argument in favor of t6e theory of reincarnation
and the soul's beginningless independence of the body. He traced
through history the various views on the subject, and although he
had an abundance of historical knowledge at his finger tips, the
article required research. On February I he wrote to his good
Friend Professor John Henry Wright, whose knowledge of ancient
history was encyclopedic, for bibliographical help. His letter, not
heretofore published, read:
54 W· 33 street
New York 1st Feb 95
Dear Adhyapakji

You must be immersed in your work now, however taking

advantage of your kindness to me I want to bother you a little.

What was the original Greek idea of the soul both philosophical
and popular? What books can I consult (Translations of course) to
get it?
So with the Egyptians & Babylonians & Jews?
Will you kindly name me the books? I am sure you
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are perfectly well and so is Mrs. Wright and the children.

Ever gratefully & fraternally
Yours" 70
Vivekananda

Professor Wright no doubt sent on a list of books some of which

Swamiji may have found in one or another of New York's three
libraries-the Astor, the Lenox, or the Mercantile. ("Every little bit
of time I get I spend in the library," he wrote around this period to
Mary Hale.)* His scholarly essay, written in other rare hours
when he had no classes, visitors, or outside engagements, was
published in the March 1895 issue of the Metaphysical Magazine,
then a new monthly, and subsequently in volume four of the
Complete Works. In its course he pointed out that the theory of
reincarnation (a theory much stranger to the average American
then than it is today) had arisen only among those ancient people
who believed in the independent and eternal (beginningless as
well as endless) existence of the individual soul. A sure indication
of such a belief, ha pointed out, was that thou who held it made
no attempt to preserve the bodies of their dead by careful burial,
as did, for instance, the Egyptians, but quickly burned them, as
did the Aryans. "It was in India and among the Aryans," he said,
"that the doctrine of the preexistence, the immortality, and the
individuality of the soul first arose . . . . This soul is without birth
and without death; it is not a compound or combination but an
independent individual, and as such if cannot be created or
destroyed."71 Given a belief in the soul, independent and eternal,
"the question arises: Where was it all this time? The Hindu
philosophers say," he continued, " `It was passing through
different bodies in the physical sense, or, really and
metaphysically speaking, passing through different mental
planes.' "72

To convince Western readers, Swamiji quoted from Fichte,

Schopenhauer, and, "nihilistic though he was," David Hume,
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all of whom, though Christian background, endorsed the theory of

reincarnation.

Nor was the matter of reincarnation merely one of academic

dispute; an important issue was at stake. In concluding his essay,
Swamiji succinctly set it forth:

So far as explaining the tendencies of' the present life by past

conscious efforts goes, the reincarnationists of India and the latest
school of evolutionists are at one; the only difference is that the
Hindus, as spiritualists, explain it by the conscious efforts of
individual souls, and the materialistic school of evolutionists, by a
hereditary physical transmission. The schools which hold to the
theory of creation out of nothing, are entirely out of court. . . .

It is thus that the doctrine of reincarnation assumes an infinite

importance to our mind, For the fight between reincarnation and
mere cellular transmission is, in reality, the fight between
spiritualism and materialism. If cellular transmission is the all-
sufficient explanation, materialism is inevitable, and there is no
necessity for the theory of a soul. If it is not a sufficient
explanation, the theory of an individual soul bringing into this life
the experiences of the past is as absolutely true. There is no
escape from the alternative, reincarnation or materialism. Which
shall we accept?73
(To accept the theory of reincarnation did not, of course, mean to
deny the hereditary transmission of certain tendencies. In his
lecture in Brooklyn on December go, Swamiji had explained this
point. He is reported as having said: "We cannot deny that bodies
inherit certain tendencies, but those tendencies only mean the
physical configuration through which a peculiar mind alone can
act in a peculiar way. . . . A soul with a certain tendency will take
birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of
that tendency, by the laws of affinity.")74

71
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Swamiji wrote his third article of this New York period in May in
response to a request that he contribute to a discussion that was
being carried on in the ,New York Morning Advertiser. "Is the
Soul Immortal!?" was the question, and a number of illustrious
thinkers were asked to present their views. Among the invited
contributors, aside from Swamiji, were Dr. Charles August
Briggs, then America's leading theologian; Dr. E. Benjamin
Andrews, President of Brown University; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
a well-known author; Cardinal Gibbons; Bishop John P. Newman;
and Professor Max Muller. Swamiji's article was introduced with
the words:

The main discussion is continued to-day by Swami Vivekananda,

the learned and thoughtful Hindu. He argues that there can be no
annihilation of the soul, with picturesque force. 75

Swamiji's article, the force of which was, one thinks, more

eloquent and logical than picturesque, has been republished in
volume four of the Complete Works under the title "Is the Soul
Immortal?" It was short and concise, and though every word of it
was of importance (as was always so with his words, written or
spoken], let us quote from it here only briefly:

Now the problem resolves itself into this dilemma: either the
whole universe is a mass of never-ceasing change and nothing
more, irrevocably bound by the law of causation, not one particle
having a unity of itself, yet is curiously producing an ineradicable
delusion of permanence and freedom, or, there is in us and in the
universe something which is permanent and free, showing that the
basal constitutional belief of the human mind [that we are
immortal and free] is not a delusion. . . .
. . . Any explanation that wants to overlook the fact of this
persistent and all-necessary idea of freedom com-
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mits the . . . mistake of denying a portion of the fact in order to

explain the rest and is, therefore, wrong. The only other
alternative possible, then, is to acknowledge, in harmony with our
nature, that there is something in us which is free and permanent.

. . . It is not the body; neither is it the mind . . . . But beyond this

momentary sheathing of gross matter, beyond even the finer
covering of the mind is the Atman, the true Self of man, the
percolating through layers of thought and matter, and in spite of
the colourings of name and form, is ever asserting its unshackled
existence. It is the his deathlessness, his bliss, his peace, his
divinity, that shines out and makes itself felt in spite of the
thickest layers of ignorance. He is the real man, the fearless one,
the deathless one, the free.

. . . This Being, this Atman, this real Self of man, the free, the
unchangeable, is beyond all conditions, and as such, it has neither
birth nor death.76

“I am very happy now,” Swamiji had written to Mrs. Bull in his

letter of February 14, in which he had declined with thanks her
offer of help. “Between Mr. Landsberg and me, we cook some
rice and lentils or barley and quietly eat it, and write something or
read or receive visits from poor people who want to learn
something, and thus I feel am more a Sannyasin now than I ever
was in America.”77

A meal of “rice and lentils or barley” was a great relief to

Swamiji. In the first half of February he had attended a number of
dinner parties, some of which may have been given in his honor
by Miss Corbin’s “long-pocket” friends. In a letter written to Mrs.
Hale on February 18, he tells a little of these unavoidable
occasions and of much else besides. We have earlier quoted
several passages from this long and informative
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letter, but since it has not been heretofore published as a whole, it

is given here in full:

54 W· 33· Newyork
[sic]
The 18th March [February] 95
Dear Mother
I am sure you are all right by this time. The babies write from
time to time and so I get your news regularly, Miss Mary is in a
lecturing mood now, good for her. Hope she will not let her
energies fritter away now-a penny saved is a penny gained. Sister
Isabell has sent me the French Books and the Calcutta pamphlets
have arrived but the big Sanskrit books ought to come. I want
them badly. Make them payable here if possible or I will send you
the postage.

I am doing very well. Only some of these big dinners kept me late
and I returned home at 2 o'clock in the morning several days.
Tonight I am going to one of these. This will be the last of its
kind. So much keeping up the night is not good for me. Every day
from II to I o'clock I have classes in my rooms and I talk [to]
them till they [grow] tired. The Brooklyn course ended yesterday.
Another lecture I have there next Monday.

Bean soup and rice or barley is now my general diet. I am faring

well. Financially I am making the ends meet and nothing more
because I do not charge anything for the classes I have in my
rooms. And the public lectures have to go through so many hands.

I have a good many lectures planned ahead in New York which I

hope to deliver by and by. Sister Isabel wrote to me a beautiful
letter and the does so much for me. My eternal gratitude to her.

Baby [Harriet McKindley, youngest of the "sisters" ?] has stopped

writing I do not know why.
Kindly tell baby to send me a little Sanskrit book
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which came from India. I forgot to bring it over. I want to

translate some passages from it.

Mr. Higgins is full of joy. It was he who planned all this for me
and he is so glad that everything succeeded so well.

Mrs. Gurnsey is going to give up this house and going to some

other house. Miss [Florence] Gurnsy wants to marry but her
father and mother does not like it at all. I am very sorry for her,
poor “Sister Jenny”* and so many men are after her. Here is a
very rich railway gentleman called Mr Corbin, his only daughter
Miss Corbin is very much interested in me. And though she is one
of the leaders of the 400, she is very intellectual and spiritual too
in a way. Their house is always choke full of swells & foreign
aristocracy. Princes & Barons & what not from all over the
world. Some of these foreigners are very bright. I am sorry your
home-manufactured aristocracy is not very interesting. Behind
her parlor she has a long arbour with all sorts of palms & seats &
electric light. There I will have a little class next week of a score
of long-pockets. The Fun is not bad. “This world is a great
humbug after all” Mother. “God alone is real everything else is a
dream only.” Mother temple [Mrs. James Matthews, a married
sister of Mr. Hale’s] says she does not like to be bossed by you
and that is why she does not come to Chicago. She is very happy
nearby. Between Swells and Delmonico & Waldorf dinners my
health was going to be injured. So I quickly turned a thorough
vegetarian to avoid all invitations. The rich are really the salts of
this world—they are neither food nor drink. Goodbye for the
present.
Your ever affectionate Son78
Vivekananda

It is small wonder that Swamiji began to avoid all dinner

invitations. A dinner party in the 1890s was a formidable affair,
particularly at ultrafashionable places like the Waldorf
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Hotel and Delmonico's restaurant (then on the corner of Fifth

Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street). The menus at either place
would have been elaborate, rich, and endless. But even if the food
had been moderately simple, Swamiji, sannyasin that he was,
would have much preferred home-cooked lentils and rice to
dining out; moreover, he enjoyed the company of his disciple, at
least at first.

To judge from Swamiji's letters written in February and March,

his life with Landsberg had started out harmoniously, and one can
think of few greater blessings than to have been in Landsberg's
shoes. But was the blessing too great? Perhaps in the spiritually
rarefied and vibrant atmosphere that Swamiji created around
himself, no one other than his own brother disciples could easily
live at close quarters with him week after week. In any event,
Landaberg's naves appear to have grown more taut than usual.
"May I suggest," Mrs. Bull wrote to him around April I t, "that if
you will not permit yourself to expect prejudice, you will meet all
in a gentler mood yourself? Sometimes you seem very forbidding
& dictatorial--a spirit you do not cherish. Your nervousness is
physical & from physical causes, and if you wilt not permit
yourself to think others are opposed to you because of race or
religion, you will carry with you the calm love of God and man
that the Swami has taught us all. When your face radiates this you
have a dignity and sweetness and help all. And you will know that
he never means to wound. You spoke to me of words that had hurt
you, but is it not the least of our duty to remember only the
gentleness and generosity of his great heart that beats with love
and gives itself in service to God and man as we know?"79

In reply, Landsberg wrote on April 14 a many-paged letter in a

fine Spencerian hand, pouring out his heart, recounting his
grievances, and justifying the action he was about to take. One
difficulty had been the matter of eating at home.

As to the little "family brawls" we had with regard to the cooking

[he wrote], I lost my patience not on account
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of the work which I had to perform, but because I regarded it as

unworthy of men of spiritual aspirations to waste the greatest part
of their time with thinking and speaking of eating, preparing and
cooking the food, and washing dishes, while the frugal meals
required by a Yogi could be had quicker and cheaper in any
restaurant. We need not look far for the cause of my nervousness;
I only wonder that this "doing our own cooking" suggested by
some evil demon, did not land me in the lunatic asylum. 80

Swamiji bore his disciple's outbursts with equanimity. "The one

with whom he lived had a violent temper," Sister Christine was to
write in her Memoirs (and one cannot think who this could have
been if not Landsberg). " `Why do you live with him?' someone
asked. `Ah,' he replied, `I bless him. He gives me the opportunity
to practice self-control.'"81 The cooking problem was the least of
Landsberg's grievances. "This trouble, too, past [sic] by," he
continued in his letter of April 14, "not, however, without
aggravating the already strained relations between me and the
Swami."

Reading this letter-both what is written and what lies between

those meticulously penned lines--one tends to think with Mrs.
Bull that the problem was indeed Landsberg him. self: Although
his hypersensitive temperament did not in the least conceal from
Swamiji a sincerely generous, affection starved, and deeply
devout soul, it seems in those early New York days to have
antagonized almost everyone else. To quote further from his long
letter to Mrs. Bull is perhaps the best way to relate what took
place during his stay with Swamiji; we have, in fact, no other
account of it:

It is not my rule to excuse my conduct before the world [he

began]. I act to the best of my knowledge of what is right, and the
praise or blame of men leaves me entirely indifferent. It is my fate
to be misjudged. However good, noble, and unselfish my motives
I know that they will be
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interpreted as bad, mean and selfish, and so I have learned to be

satisfied with the verdict of my own conscience If, now, I attempt
to set myself aright in your opinion it is because you are the only
woman, nay, the only person I have met with in my life for whom
I have felt the greatest respect and admiration on account of your
nobility of soul and the purity and unselfishness of all your
motives...

I stand alone in the world. Father and mother are long dead. No
wife or child that make life worth living and spurs us to restless
action! Money, name, and fame, no more entice and snare my
soul with vain visions. Ambition wherewith the mind deludes
itself has vanished with the realization of the vanity of its
objects. . . . But it is in our nature to love something, and so, when
I met the Swami . . he became to me the object of divine worship.
My whole being was absorbed in his personality and work: no
thought but for his happiness, no aspiration but for his grandeur,
no effort but for his cause. . . .

Thin devotion to my master should not be in vain. You know how

the organization started with great flourish of trumpets for the
propagation of the Swami's teachings proved a miserable failure.
President, Vice President, Secretary and all the rat's tail of trustees
and committees did not draw one soul into the camp of the holy
cause. Then the Swami and I went to work. Our only reliance was
the Lord, our only means to work with our strong and inflexible
will to make New York a center for the propagation of His truth.
And-needless to tell you the result, since you yourself have
attended the large classes that had sprung up within a few weeks
I do not write you all this in order to boast with the success t6at
accompanied my efforts but to simply state the fact that my
association with the Swami was not detrimental to our cause, . . .
that all the later reproaches made as to my being unfit for this
work are not based
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upon fact but excuses to hide-uncharitableness.

But the happy state of my mind resulting from the progress of our
work should not last long. To my surprise I found that I had made
many enemies, enemies of the very people whom I myself had
first initiated into the Swami's teachings. There did not pass a day
when the Swami did not report to me, "Mrs. so and so does not
like you, Mr. so and so hates you, Miss so and so has become
your enemy." In vain did I try to find out the cause of this enmity
springing up against me on all sides. I was not aware of having
willfully wronged or hurt any one of all those who though
assuring me of their eternal friendship nevertheless nourished
such bad feelings against me. First I did not care what the Swami
said people spoke about me, For knowing my pure motives I
came only to realize the truth of the words in Luke: "Blessed are
those who make enemies"; but finally it occurred to me that my
presence might prevent some prejudiced people of learning of the
Swami's glad tidings. Should I stand in the way of a soul that
wanted to approach the Lord? God forbid! rather would I suffer a
hundred hells. . . . And so I made up my mind to withdraw from
the movement. But the Swami would not listen to my thousand
and one arguments in favor of my withdrawal, and besides he was
so helpless that I had not the heart to leave him. And so I stayed,
resolving to keep afar from all those persons to whom my
presence might give offense. . . .

But now arose a new trouble, .a trouble caused by our very

friends and those who were sincerely interested in the Swami's
work. You will find that most of our troubles are caused by our
friends. After the Swami and I, single handed, had succeeded in
awakening here a wide spread interest in the Yoga philosophy,
there came the advisers with their schemes how to improve
things. They could not accuse me of insincerity, a lack of
devotion, or neglect in the performance of my duties, but-but-and
with
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these "buts" they poisoned his mind and made his life unbearable.
On the one hand he was loth of offending his friends by refusing
to listen to their advice, on the other hand it pained him to wound
the feelings of his disciple whom he loved and whose sincerity he
had tested. He became nervous, and not knowing how to get out
the dilemma, he threw the whole work overboard. On Saturday
morning [April 13] he left. He intended to go to Mr. Legget's, but
then he told me he would go to Chicago. Where he has gone and
how long he will stay away I know not. He left without telling me
even good bye. He left no instructions about his letters, his
classes. May be he will write to you about his plans for the future.

As to myself I have now determined to break once for all my

relations to him. Not that I bear any grudge to him, but in the
interest of the peace of our souls, in the interest of the cause it is
necessary that I keep away from him. Though loving him, I shall
flee his presence as if he were my greatest enemy. From to--day I
am non-existent for him or his friends. I shall sink back into the
oblivion from which he has dragged me; no more enemies, abuses
and humiliations, again I shall stand in the world alone! In my
solitary life I shall always remember you with gratitude. You have
been so kind to me-God bless you! You alone were able to
discover under the crudeness of my appearance a soul worthy of
your sympathy and friendship. You have made a good karma.

All in all, it seems clear that Swamiji had done his best to
admonish his disciple, but it is not likely that he told him, except
perhaps as a last resort, that certain members of the class disliked
him. Nor, of course, was it true that he "threw the whole work
overboard." Swamiji does, however, seem to have been seeking to
resolve the unpleasant situation at Thirty third Street. One
solution to this problem (and perhaps to
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others as well) was for him (not Landsberg) to move to different

quarters. We learn a few detail of a proposed move at this time
from the letters of Elizabeth L. Hamlen to Mrs. Bull. Miss
Hamlen, whose name Swamiji spelled Hamlin, was helping him
at Mrs. Bull's instructions and in her employ. She seems to have
been a rather simple and unremarkable young lady, effusive,
eager to be liked, and apt to be misunderstood in her frequent
protestations of sincerity. But Miss Hamlen meant well and
worked conscientiously at the task assigned to her. As far as one
can make out, her primary duties were those of public-relations
secretary and door keeper at Swamiji's Monday and Saturday
classes. (Miss Waldo was in charge on Wednesdays.) She took
down the names and addresses of all who came, seated them, kept
an eye on them, wrote and mailed scores of notices when
necessary (telephones were a rarity), helped Miss Waldo, and out
of money given to her for the purpose by Miss. Bull, paid for the
printing of tickets, the renting of chairs and stools, the purchase
of "writing material, paper, postal cards and stamps." ("If it
weren't for your fifty dollars," she would write to Mrs. Bull
during Swamiji's absence in April, "I could not even now do what
must be done to hold S.V. together here.") In addition, she
persistently gave Swamiji advice in regard to the social aspect of
his work, an aspect about which he cared, as We have seen earlier,
leas than nothing.

Miss Hamlen was herself neither wealthy nor socially prominent;

yet apparently she knew New York and had connections among
the city's "best people." She lived modestly with her widowed and
impoverished mother and made ends meet by taking whatever
ladylike job offered itself. At first, she accepted money from Mrs.
Bull for assisting at Swamiji's classes, but later she refused. "I can
not take any money to work for this spirituality," she wrote to her
benefactress on the evening of April 9. "It was all right for the
Lectures (the "secular" lectures?], but now I can not." In this same
letter she told Mrs. Bull of Swamiji's intended move from 54
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Thirty-third Street to another and far more acceptable neigh-

borhood.

[In the late morning of April 9) I went to 33 St. and found two
friends [Swamiji and Landaberg on good terms with one
another?]. My opinion is that this understanding of his friend has
made the Swami more practical. He wishes Prof: (Landsberg) to
be his personal friend, and a member of classes, and he is glad to
have Miss Waldo and me work as we think beat.

[In other words, Landaberg was no longer to function as

Swamiji'a assistant. "I am so glad the Swami and Prof. Landaberg
are good friends," Miss Hamlen would write to Mrs. Bull two
days later, "and that Prof: L. is not to be annoyed by class
arrangements which his nervous constitution can not endure."]

He [Swamiji) was lovely to me. We went to call on Dr and Mrs

Moore at one o'clock and he talked beautifully, and they did. He
will go there to live.

But we must find a class room west of Madison Avenue, and a

little larger than the room at 33 St. Then we went to see Mrs.
Guernsey and saw her and the Doctor and they approve our plan,
and are glad he is to be at Dr. Moore's. Dr Moore was making
bread, so he will invite the Swami to make his kind of bread.

I walked down with the Swami to 33 St. and then rode home (to
120 West Sixteenth Street). It is all right, and I am tired and glad.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) Miss Waldo will be [in attendance] at the
Class, and I will look for a Class room (between 40th and 50th
State). . . . The Swami said he had told Prof. L. to stay in his
present room and he will pay the two dollars extra. I think that is
fair, as Prof. L. has done and will do a great deal for the Swami. 82

Thus it was' (or thus it seemed) that on Tuesday, April 9,

Swamiji's change of quarters and classroom to a, fashionable
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neighborhood was settled to everyone's satisfaction. But Swamiji

was not bound by plane. The next day he announced that he was
not moving to the Moores', that he was leaving town, that there
would be no classes on the following Saturday. And on Saturday
he left, to return, he thought, on Monday. "I am going away to the
country tomorrow to see Mr. Leggett for a few days," he wrote to
Mrs. Bull on Friday. "A little fresh air will do me good, I hope. I
have given up the project of removing from this house just now,
as it will be too expensive, and moreover it is not advisable to
change just now. I am working it up slowly." It would seem clear
from the rest of this letter that on Tuesday the ninth, walking
down the Avenue with Swamiji, Miss Hamlen had talked too
much. Indeed, she was to tell Mrs. Bull that she had made "many
suggestions" to him before he went away "about seeing people."
"The only `right sort of people' are those whom the Lord sends "
he now thundered, "that is what I understand in my life's
experience. They alone can and will help me. As for the rest, Lord
help them in a mass and save me from them. . . . Truce to this
`right sort of presentation.' Thou art my right, Thou my wrong,
my Shiva."83

Swamiji would be away from New York for ten days, but it had
not been to escape from Miss Hamlen's advice, or, for that matter,
from Landsberg's temper, that he had left town. The explanation
was simple enough: he was tired to the point of exhaustion, and
he had received an invitation from Mr. Francis H. Leggett to
spend the Easter holidays at his country place in the Hudson
River Valley, eighty mild or so above New York. One might say
that Swamiji jumped at this godsent chance for rest and peace. He
had been working steadily for many months-in December in
Cambridge, in January in Chicago, in February, March, and a part
of April in New York, not to speak of his five public lectures and
possibly many classes in Brooklyn during this period' Nor were
the conditions under which he worked always healthful. "I know
the [New York class] lectures in those close rooms were very
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exhausting," Miss Hamlen would write on April 19, "and I do not

like the Restaurant food for the Swami." (Landsberg had
evidently won out, for a time at least, in respect to the cooking.)
Indeed, Swamiji sorely needed "a little fresh air." "He worked
continually and faithfully; ' Mrs. Bull wrote to Mary Hale in
April, a few days after he had left town, "his lectures requiring on
his part reading and careful thought "

His teaching in class [she continued] was so clear and gentle in

spirit that I felt it to be perhaps the best of all his work. It has
served to call together earnest people among those who came to
him, and I hope that a center of work for him in this country may
be the permanent result of it all. He is tired now, but rest will soon
make all the positive good apparent to him. The real character of
the man and his work are now known to many and at any time
[his work] may be resumed, as there are those who would always
gladly welcome and assist him. . . . All who know him love the
beauty of his life and he brings with him the realization of all
good and noble endeavor Godward.84

Mrs. Bull also wrote to Miss Hamlen, evidently explaining to her

that Swamiji did not wish to be advised about the best people.
"What a child he is!" Miss Hamlen replied on Tuesday April 16,
and continued:

A wonderful teacher-inspired-and a boy combined. I said so last

Tuesday [April 9] to him when he was so beautiful to me. I told
him I could only explain my desire to help him in this stranger
land, as coming from my care-taking of a younger brother. . . . I
am trying to keep the 33 St. Class people, and have written to
them all that I will notify them what day the Swami will
recommence classes. He did not return today, so I feel his return
is indefinite. But his rooms at 33 St. are waiting for him. . . .
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He does not understand our point of view, our "best society"-and

he does not trust my judgement, although he seemed to accept me
for what I am both on Sunday the 7th and on Tuesday the 9th
when we were together.85

Before long, Miss Hamlen learned Swamiji's address and at once

wrote to him, "asking him if I could send hie letters to him or do
anything about 33 St. for him." "And I told him," she continued in
a letter to Mts. Bull, "how satisfied I am with the class work as a
corner stone of a larger work in New York."86

As for Landsberg, he moved to a lodging house at as8 West

Thirty-ninth Street on Friday, April 19. "I would have removed
sooner," he wrote to Mrs. Bull, "but my weeks rent was paid in
advance, and I could not well afford to pay rent twice." 87 He was
instantly happy. "Again I am alone," he wrote, "and after the
moral tempest that shook my soul to its very foundation, I am
regaining the calm and peace which had fled me for such a long
time. Again I feel myself carried by a spiritual wave, again after a
long period of spiritual death, my soul is reborn to a higher life. . .
. Yes, I shall preach and teach the Lord."88

He had a small following, which included, for a time at least,

Miss Ellen Waldo, "a soul filled with love of God and all
mankind." (Miss Waldo had, it would seem, been momentarily
upset by Swamiji's prolonged absence. "Miss Waldo is serene
again, evidently," Miss Hamlen would write to Mrs. Bull on April
24, "and very sorry for the Swami's exhaustion etc.' She is a very
good woman to do work in regular classes.") 89 Among
Landsberg's followers was also; he wrote, "Friedberg, my faithful
disciple. . . . and a Few other gentlemen, lawyers and physicians,
whose materialism I succeeded to supplant by true religious
devotion. They will meet in my room once a week. . . . Of course
we shall select an evening that will not interfere with the Swami's
classes; for-needless to say-I shall
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Always direct to the Swami as to the master from whose treasure

house of divine knowledge I picked up but a few precious
jewels.90
On the bright side, Landsberg returned to Mrs. Bull a check she
had sent to him for his personal use. It was not that he did not
need the money; though he earned a salary from his job with the
Tribune, it was small, and he gave most of it to those who had
less than he. He had true compassion for the poor and very little
care for his own physical comfort, and for these qualities alone
Swamiji would have cherished him.

Swamiji was surely relieved to get away from the noisy and soot-
filled city into the country, green and blossoming with spring. His
host, Mr. Leggett, was a prosperous New York businessman,
president of a high-quality wholesale grocery firm, which he and
an elder brother had founded in their youth in 1861. Ordinarily
totally absorbed in his business, he had at the time of our story a
second interest—the beautiful, recently widowed Besse MacLeod
Sturges, whom he was courting, and it was through her that he
had met Swamiji. The circumstances of the meeting were told by
Josephine MacLeod in her memoirs.

After relating how she and her sister started coming to Swamiji’s
classes in late January, Miss MacLeod continued:

I heard him all that winter, three days a week, mornings at eleven
o’clock. I never spoke to him, but as we were so regular in
coming, two front seats were always kept for us in this sitting
room of the Swamiji. One day he turned and said, “Are you
sisters?” “Yes,” we answered. Then he said, “Do you come very
far?” We said, “No, not very far—about thirty miles up the
Hudson.”* “So far? That is wonderful.” Those were the first
words I ever spoke to him.91

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They had kept their discovery of this godlike man a secret, telling
no one where it was they went three mornings a week. “Don’t you
recall ho we hid Swamiji all that first few weeks even from
Francey [Mr. Leggett]?92 Josephine MacLeod wrote years later to
her niece Alberta. But Swamiji could not be hid for long. Miss
MacLeod continues in her memoirs:
We never spoke to [Swamiji], had nothing much to do with him;
but during that spring we were dining one night [at the Waldorf,
as she told it another time] with Mr. Francis H. Leggett, who later
became my brother-in-law. “Yes, we can dine with you but we
cannot spend the evening with you,” we had told him. “Very
well,” he answered, “just dine with me.” When dinner was over,
he said, “Where are you going this evening?” We told him we
were going to a lecture; and he asked, “Mayn’t I come?” We said,
“Yes.” He came, he listened; and when it was over, he went up to
Swamiji, shook hands with him and said, “Swami, when will you
dine with me?” And it was he who introduced us to Swami
socially.93

This must have occurred shortly before Mr. Leggett invited

Swamiji to his country home, Ridgely, along with Miss MacLeod,
Besse Sturges, and the latter’s two children alberta, eighteen, and
Hollister, sixteen. Swamiji was to leave New York on April II, but
owing to a mix-up, his date of departure was postponed to the
thirteenth. On the eleventh he had a class at the home of a Miss
Andrews at 40 West Ninth Street. “As I was given to understand
by Miss MacLeod that that class could be postponed, I was only
too glad at the prospect of joining the company tomorrow,” he
wrote to Mr. Leggett on April I 0. “But I find that Miss MacLeod
was mistaken and Miss Andrews came to tell me that she could
not by any means stop the class tomorrow or even give notice to
the members, who are about 50 or 60 in number.”94 (this mention
of a class at Miss Andrews’s, which must have been
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one of a series, is; at present, our only information about it.)

The country estate that Mr. Leggett named Ridgely had been
purchased by him in 1895 as a place of recreation for himself and
his friends. Although the property already had a number of houses
on it, he had built not only the spacious and hospitable "Manor,"
but the "Casino " a large playhouse equipped with bowling alleys,
space ,for gymnastics, and adjacent tennis courts. The
landscaping of Ridgely was still in embryo in 1895; many of the
trees that would later be tall and spreading were mere saplings
and the shrubs and flower beds hardly visible. The house had the
bare look of newness; but the countryside was wooded, old, and
lovely, and to the north in the not-too-far distance were the rolling
Catskill Mountains.

This was Swamiji's first visit to Ridgely; the second would take
place at Christmas of the same year, when Miss MacLeod . and
the children would be away is Europe; and the third, longest, and
most memorable, in the late summer of 1895, when he would
spend there ten golden weeks.* Of this first stay very little is
definitely known; Swamiji wrote no letters to New York or
Cambridge (and left no address). Through the grapevine,
however, word reached Miss Hamlen of his exact whereabouts
and his state of health. On April 16 Jehanghir Cola, returning to
New York from, presumably, Ridgely, reported to Miss Mary
Phillips that Swamiji "had been really ill" during his first days in
the country. A few days after relaying this information to Mrs.
Bull, Miss Hamlen wrote " to her, "I saw Mrs. Guernsey Saturday
[April 20] . . . and they had a letter from Mr. Francis H. Leggett
(who is a patient of Dr Guernsey) expressing his pleasure to have
with him among other guests, the Swami Vivekananda, and that
the ! Swum was enjoying himself since he had recovered from his
illness and prostration. I think the letter was written on Friday."95
It was probably in connection with this much needed vacation
that two stories were told in later years by Miss MacLeod, both of
which illustrate Swamiji's recovery-
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his rested, relaxed, and playful mood. They come down to us not
through her reminiscences, but through the swamis at Belur Math
to whom she told them.

The first (of which there are two versions) concerns some lively
acrobatics performed by Swamiji and his host, who were, clearly,
getting along famously. One day Miss MacLeod opened the door
of Mr. Leggett's study (which she thought unoccupied) and had a
fleeting vision of Francis Leggett flying (literally, she thought)
through the sir and landing with a crash on the floor and of
Swamiji lying on his back, his feet aloft, trouser legs fallen to his
knees. Then with a bound Swamiji jumped up, straightened his
clothes, and in a severe tone rebuked the female intruder. "This is
a man's drawing room! Why did you not knock?" Then, after a
pause, during which Miss MacLeod ad nothing to say, he laughed.
"Come, Joe," he said, "let us pick up what is left of Francis."
Swamiji had, of course, been balancing Mr. Leggett on his feet,
and because his trouser legs had fallen back to the knees and be-
cause this was the prim 1890s, he had instantly sent his host
flying and jumped up, all in one motion, at the unexpected
appearance of a woman."

In the other version of the same incident (or might it have been
another incident altogether?) Miss MacLeod and her sister came
upon Swamiji and Mr. Leggett in the "Casino" engaged in
acrobatics, no doubt in their shirt sleeves, trousers rolled up. The
women, caught watching, were sent away by the outraged men.
"They were making peacocks of themselves," Miss MacLeod
disdainfully remarked years later.97

The second story was about Swamiji's first spectacular try at golf,
which almost certainly took place during thin Easter vacation
(rather than during the summer of 1899, when he would also play
golf at Ridgely). One day he went for a walk with Hollister on
Mr. Leggett's private and well-kept ninehole golf course. Seeing a
small flag at a distance, Swamiji, not knowing the game, asked,
"Why that flag flutters there?" Hollister explained the procedure
and went to get a club and
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ball in order to demonstrate it. Returning, he told Swamiji that par

for that particular hole was four, and seven or eight for beginners.
Swamiji smiled. "I will make you a bet," he said. "I shall put the
ball in the hole with one stroke." Hollister produced fifty cents,
Swamiji took a dollar from his pocket. At this point Mr. Leggett
appeared and asked what these two were plotting. Being told, he
informed Swamiji that what he proposed was an impossibility
even for good players. "What is your bet?" Swamiji said. Mr.
Leggett took a ten dollar bill from his wallet, and the bet was
made. Swamiji told Hollister to stand by the hole-not too close.
Hollister took his position, Swamiji pulled up the sleeves of his
robe, looked intently at the Hag, and swung at the ball. It entered
the hole.

When Mr. Leggett was able to speak, he said, "Has your yoga got
something to do with it, Swami?"

"I don't use yoga for so trifling a thing," Swamiji replied. "What I
did I will tell you in two sentences. First, I measured the distance
by sight, and I know the strength of my biceps. Second, I told my
mind that I would be richer by ten dollars and a half. And then I
swung.”98

And there was the time at Ridgely-an incident not related by Miss
MacLeod, but by Hollister-when the young boy walked by
Swamiji's closed bedroom door and heard peals of laughter
coming from the room. When Swamiji emerged later, Hollister
asked, "Whom were you talking to?" "I was alone in meditation,"
Swamiji said. "But what was all that laughter about?" Hollister
persisted. And after a pause to recall his laughter in meditation,
Swamiji replied, "Oh, God is so funny!"99

After witnessing at an impressionable age a Variety of such

incidents taking place casually every day, indeed after knowing
Swamiji at all, one would ever afterward believe in him-and in
God. Hollister would never be much given to metaphysical
thinking, but years later when he was asked by his young son
what he thought about certain philosophical questions, he replied,
"I've never thought about them, really, but I know there is a God
because Swamiji told me so."100

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The young Hollister, of whom Swamiji was later to say, “I never

saw a sweeter boy,”101 had been entranced and perhaps awed by
this monk who shot a hold in one and laughed with God. The
businessman, Mr. Leggett, was equally impressed, but in a
different way. “Vivekananda is the greatest man I ever saw,” he
remarked shortly after this Ester Vacation, and when someone
asked him why, he replied, “He has more common sense than
anyone I’ve ever known.”102 In a man-to-man gesture, he sent
Swamiji a box of cigars—“a thousand cigars,” Miss Hamlen
heard, though one thinks she took the word thousand too literally.
On May 4 Swamiji, whose six weeks of nonsmoking were well
up, wrote a note of thanks from New York:

Dear Friend,

Many thanks for your kind present. The cigars are indeed
delicious and a hundred times so as coming from you.
With everlasting love and regards,
I remain yours truly,103
Vivekananda
10

Swamiji returned to his lodgings in New York on April 23 and

found Landsberg gone. But he had only blessings for his disciple.
“The trip did me good,” he wrote to Mrs. Bull, “and I enjoyed the
country and the hills, especially Mr. Leggett’s country-house in
New York State. Poor Landsberg has gone from this house.
Neither has he left me his address. May the Lord bless Landsberg
wherever he goes! He is one of the few sincere souls I have had
the privilege in this life to come across. All is for good. All
conjunctions are for subsequent disjunction. I hope I shall be
perfectly able to work alone. The less help from men, the more
from the Lord!”104

But Swamiji’s New York work did require helpers. Even during
his absence he had, as Miss Hamlen put it, “to be held together.”
Dutifully, she had written in her flowing hand to
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all the class members in both New York and Brooklyn, letting
them know that there would be no class on Saturday, April 13.
She sent out fifty or more letters again in regard to the Monday
class, and on Tuesday she wrote to everyone yet again, assuring
them this last time that she would inform them when the classes
would reopen. Miss Hamlen did her best to push Swamiji to
success. She never understood, she had no way of understanding,
that her concepts of success were meaningless vis-à-vis his work.
Nor could he brook them.
Replying to his letter of April 23, Mrs. Bull seems to have put
in a good word for Miss Hamlen and her services. Swamiji
answered at once:

Taking down names and giving notices is a big task, no doubt,

and I am very thankful to both [Mr. Landsberg and Miss Hamlen]
for doing that for me. But I am thoroughly persuaded that it is
laziness. So henceforth I am doing and will do it all myself and
thus avoid all further disturbance to others and to myself. . . . .
After all, though I am very, very grateful to the young lady, Miss
Hamlin, for the great hope and encouragement she gave me of
introducing me to the “right sort of New Yorkers” and for the
practical held she has given me, I think I had better do my little
work with my own hands. It is nothing yet to seek others’ help. It
is only a very very small bit of work.

Continuing in a sterner tone, he reminded Mrs. Bull that he would

work in his own way, accepting help and advice only from a very
few, whom he himself would choose:

Through the mercy of Ramadrishna, my instinct “sizes up” almost

infallibly a human face as soon as I see it, and the result is this:
you may do anything you please with my affairs, I will not even
murmur;--I will be only too
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glad to take Miss Farmer's advice, in spite of ghosts and spooks.

Behind the spooks I see a heart of immense love. . . . Even I will
allow Landsberg to "monkey" with my affairs from time to time;
but here I put a full stop. Help from any other persons besides
these frightens me. That is all I can say. Not only for the help you
have given me, but from my instinct (or, as I call it, inspiration of
my Master), I regard you as my mother and will always abide by
any advice or command you may have for me--but only
personally. When you select a medium, I will beg leave to
exercise my choice. That is all.105

And so Miss Hamlen lost her job. Her first knowledge Swamiji's
return to New York came to her by way of a plain postcard (in
itself offensive to her) from Miss Waldo. Dated April 23, it read:

You will be pleased to know that the Swami has returned and will
hold a class tomorrow as usual, He asked me to notify the
members of the classes, so as I fortunately had the list of the Wed.
class [of which she had charge], that you sent me last week, I was
able to do so. If you will kindly let me have the lists of the Sat. &
Mon. classes, I will send them postals too. I will be over early
tomorrow morning.
Yours sincerely,
S.E.W.
But Miss Hamlen had had an agreement with Miss Waldo about
the notices, and she meant to carry out her part of it. She replied
to her ("on a portal out of respect to myself," she told Mrs. Bull)
as follows:
8 p.m. April 24th
I will send notices by Thursday evening's mail (as I agreed) to the
Class Members of the Saturday morning
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and evening classes, and the Monday morning class, that those
classes will meet again—and I will then send to 33 St. the
complete lists I have made of all class members.

Thanks for the papers, and I will send the money due.
Yours truly,
E.L..H.

There it ended. “Do not think I am discouraged,” she wrote in her

letter to Mrs. Bull. “I am amused by Miss W., so good, and
so------!! To let herself be rude to me!” 106 Amused, perhaps. More
likely brokenhearted. But Miss Waldo had had her orders from
Swamiji, and there had been no way to soften that blow.

Miss Hamlen took it valiantly. “I have sent the notices ‘as I

agreed,’” she wrote to Mrs. Bull on April 26, “and will send the
Class list book to 33 St. tomorrow morning.* But if Miss Farmer
or Miss Thursby go to the Saturday evening class, I will go also,
as I am a member of that class.”107 In a very real sense, though
perhaps unaware of it, she won a victory. “I saw Miss H.
subjected to a test which few women could stand and she came
out pure gold,” Ruth Ellis, show took over Miss Hamlen’s work
in Swamiji’s classes, would write later to Mrs. Bull. “I consider
myself fortunate in knowing her and having her for a friend.” 108

I am glad Miss Ellis (140 East 49 St.) is now assisting about the
classes at 33 st. [Miss Hamlen wrote to Mrs. Bull on May 4]. She
seats the people and attends to the door, etc, and Miss Waldo sits
as usual by the Swami, with her note book. The Swami looked
well and gave a very good lesson. [And on May 9:] I learn so
much more since I sit quietly in a corner and have my mind only
on his teaching. The other ladies, Miss Waldo and Miss Ellis,
have been to classes since the beginning in January, so I feel
conscientious about not working during the class hour.109

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And Swamiji was "lovely" to Miss Hamlen. "He talked with me

when everybody was gone [after the Wednesday morning class],”
she wrote happily. "I ate rice with him, and he said he wishes to
give me two books. I said no he must not, but he said I must not
say any more against a present from him." And in another letter
written on this same day: "What a dear child he is he is really
lovely to me now, and I shall never again let myself seem
practical."110

All was well with Landsberg, too-or almost so. He came to see his
guru on the evening of May 8 and, according to Miss Hamlen,
who heard it from Swamiji, they had a long and good talk
together. But it was to be another week or so before the disciple
was fully soothed.

After his return from Ridgely, Swamiji wrote two letters to Mrs.
Hale. Neither is dated, but their envelopes bear the postmarks,
respectively, of April 25 and 26. (It is, incidentally, clear from
both letters that he had had no intention of going to Chicago at
this time as Landsberg had thought.) Since neither letter has been
heretofore published, both are given here in full.

[April 25]

Dear Mother

I was away a long time in the country. Came back day before
yesterday.
I think the summer coat is in chicago. if so will you kindly
send it over c/o Miss Phillips 19 W. 38 str New York? It is getting
hot here every day

I will remain in New York till the end of May at leant Hoping
you are all in perfect health I remain yours tly111
Vivekananda
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54 W. 33.
New York
[April 26]

Dear Mother

Perhaps you did not receive my letter asking you to send the
Calcutta pamphlets about the Paramhansa Ramkrishna. Kindly
send them to me at 54 W. 33. And also the pamphlets about the
Calcutta meeting if you have any. Also the summer coat to the
care of Miss Phillips 19 W. 38.
As I do not see any probability of my going soon to Chicago—I
am thinking of drawing all my money from the Chicago bank to
New York. Will you kindly ascertain the exact total amount I have
in Chicago? So that I may draw it out at once and deposit it in
some New York bank.

Kindly do these and I will bother you no more. I have written to

India long ago about the rugs. I do not know whether Dewanji
[Shri Haridas Viharidas Desai, Dewan of Junagadh] is alive or
dead. I have no information.

I am all right and will be more than a month yet in Newyork.

After that I am going to the Thousand Islands wherever that place
may be for a little summer quiet and rest. Mrs. Bagley has been
down here to see me and attended several of my classes.

The classes are going on with a boom; almost every day I have
one, and they are packed full. But no “money” except they
maintain themselves. I charge no fees. Except as the members
contribute to the rent & c voluntarily.

It is mostly probable that I will go away this summer. With my

love to all Ever gratefully yours112
Vivekananda

The light-weight orange robe that Mrs. Hale had had made for
Swamiji in Chicago soon arrived, but not so the rugs from
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India, which (the previous year) he had asked his good friend the
Dewan of Junagadh to send to the Hale family. In a heretofore
unpublished postscript to a long letter from Chicago, dated June
20, 1895, Swamiji had written to the Dewan:

P.S. I would ask a favour of you. I am going off now to N.Y. This
family [the Hales] have sheltered me all the time and loved me as
their son-and that in spite of the calumny of our countrymen and
their own priests and that I came to them without any credentials
or introductions or anything of that sort.

I would like to make them a little present-if you can send me

some beautiful rugs made in Agra or Lahore-2 or 3 pieces-they
are very fond of Indian rugs for their floors. It is a great luxury.
There is one difficulty-the Americans allow nothing in without
taxing duty. Perhaps the consul at Bombay can make it come free
by permitting it as a present to friends-if not you may send them
over-I will pay the duty here. If they are too expensive, I do not
care to have.113

The rugs were to arrive in America a year later-in June of 1995.

Meanwhile, Swamiji seems to have had an uneasy feeling about
the Dewan-a premonition perhaps. On May I, 1895, he again
wrote to Mrs. Hale:

54 W· 33 Newyork
The Ist of May 1895
Dear Mother

Many many thanks for sending the coat. Now I am well

equipped for summer. I am so sorry the rugs could not come
before I leave this country. They will come if Dewanji is alive.
I have been out of town a few days and am now come back all
right healthy as ever.
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Lord bless you ever & ever for your untiring kindness to me.
Ever Yours grateful Son
Vivekananda

P.S. The History of Rajasthan [by James Tod, given to him by

Mrs. Potter Palmer] I present you and the sachel [sic] to the
babies. Yours114-- Vivekananda

As Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Hale on April 26, his classes, though

flourishing, were bringing only enough money to pay for the rent
of the parlor rooms where they were held. Sometimes, as we have
seen earlier, they had not brought even this much; and now again
the collections fell short. A week later, on May a, he wrote to Mrs.
Bull, "The classes are going on, but I am sorry to say, though the
attendance is large, it does not even pay enough to cover the rent.
I will try this week and then give up." 115ma But help came. A few
days later Swamiji wrote again to Mrs. Bull: "Since writing to
you my pupils have come round me with help and the classes will
go on nicely now no doubt. I am so glad at it because teaching has
become a part of my life, as necessary to my life as eating or
breathing."'1" Just as his Master had said. One recalls that leas
than ten years earlier Swamiji had vehemently declared to Sri
Ramakrishna that he would not teach. "Your very bones will do it,
“117 Sri Ramakrishna had replied. And to be sure, his mission as
world teacher was now the uppermost reason in his mind for
staying in the Western world. On this same date, May 6, he wrote
in a letter to Alasinga, "I am to create a new order of humanity
here who are sincere believers in God and care nothing for the
world. This must be slow, very slow." 118 But Swamiji's mission
was not for a day.
He went on holding classes throughout the month of May, and in
order to supplement the contributions of his students, perhaps also
to earn a little money for his Madras disciples, whom he was
urging to launch an English-language magazine, and, above all, to
touch a wider public, he gave more outside
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Lectures. “I am going to have tow public lectures more in New

York in the upper hall of the Mott’s Memorial Building,” he wrote
to Mrs. Bull on May 7. “The first one will be on Monday next, on
the Science of Religion. The next, on the Rationale of Yoga. 119
Mott Memorial Hall was an unprepossessing three-story building
on Madison Avenue near Twenty-seventh Street and had possibly
been selected for Swamiji’s lectures by the Vedanta Society’s
vice-president, Dr. Edward G. Day, for it was a renowned medical
headquarters. Unfortunately, everything that we known at present
about Swamiji’s two lectures in this building is contained in the
following announcement, which appeared on May II in the
Religious Notices of the New York Herald:
ATTENTION!—The Swami Vivekananda of India will deliver
two lectures at Mott Memorial Hall, 64 Madison av., on Monday
evenings, May 13 and 20, at 8:15, subjects, “The Science of
Religion” and “The Rationale of Yoga.” Course ticket, $I; single
tickets, 75 cents; for sale at the hall.

(The same information appeared in a handbill that Miss Phillips,

secretary of the Vedanta Society, had had printed. The only copy
known to be extent had belonged to Mrs. Bull, who, for her own
satisfaction, crossed out a laudatory paragraph, the inclusion of
which she considered, perhaps rightly, to be “bad judgment.” Mrs.
Bull’s copy, which had been sent to her by Miss Hamlen on May
12, is here reproduced.)

Mrs. Bull was in New York to hear the second of these lectures.
In her sporadic diary, Miss Thursby noted on May 15: “Mrs. Bull
arrives.”120 A week later she was back in Cambridge, for on May
23 Landsberg worte one of his interminable letters to her, in
which it is clear he had talked with her of his troubles. “Explain
[it],” he wrote, “by instinct, intuition or my ardent desire to hear
soon from one with
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whom during the last eight days my mind was constantly

occupied-whatever may have been the cause of my
expectation . . . I was as sure that you would write me at your
earliest convenience as I was sure of the nobility of your soul and
your unselfish love of which you have given me so many marked
examples." His letter goes on in this vein at some length; in total
sincerity he poured out his gratitude. "I was thirsting my whole
life long after a little sympathy, a little love, warm unselfish love,
but never could find it. And now you give me all this in
abundance, to me a stranger, a tramp, who has done nothing to
deserve it."121

Although Landsberg had talked with Swamiji as early as May 8

and had attended a class or two, it was Mrs. Bull who, somehow,
in her gentle, sympathetic, and persuasive way had stilled the
tumult in his mind and heart. "Just see the effect of your broad
unselfish love!" he now wrote to her. "It has calmed the storm
that, on account of the recent events, was raging in my soul and
stirred it up to its very foundations. It has brought me back, not
only to my Guru, but also to God." 122 So it was that Landsberg
fully returned, not at this late date to Thirty-third Street, but to
Swamiji. Once again he regularly attended hie guru's classes, and
in this long letter of May 23 he devoted three sentences to them.
"The Swami's classes ,"

He informed Mrs. Bull, "are going on smoothly. Last Wednes-

day's Class [May 22] for men, in spite of the inclemency of
weather, was attended by over twenty persons, lawyers, physi-
cians, clergymen, all men of good moral and mental caliber. I am
sure that in next class we will have at least twice this number." 123
Again, in a letter to Mrs. Bull dated June 4 he wrote, "The classes
were closed on Saturday (June I), both here and in Brooklyn, and
the Swami's last lectures were permeated with the spirit of his
master"124 which last phrase he must have picked up from Mrs.
Bull herself.

(Of Swamiji's Brooklyn classes we know only that toward the end
of January he had given, as mentioned earlier (page 27), two
parlor lectures at the residence of a Mrs. Auel,
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whose address was 65 Lefferts Place. These may have ban the
beginning of a course of classes that continued through May.)
While Swamiji may not always have been "sweet," his classes
and lectures could not fail to be permeated with the true spirit of
his Master-an immense force, of which he had had intimate
firsthand knowledge and which had been transmitted to him in
full. He was well aware of the incalculably effective spiritual
power that flowed through him. Two weeks before the close of his
New York classes he summed up the season's work in a letter to
Mrs. Hale. "Financially," he wrote, "this winter's work was no
success at all. I could barely keep myself up, but spiritually [it
was] very great "125 a Was it not Swamiji's task to infuse the
"force" that was Sri Ramakrishna into the underlying spirit of the
age, to articulate the two into one tremendous surge toward unity
and freedom? Was it not for this that his Master had come to earth
and that he himself had come?

In any event, Swamiji's active life was entirely absorbed in the

task of applying his Master's message (the full significance of
which perhaps he alone understood) to all aspects of Western and
Eastern life. Eastern life he well knew; about Western life he
never ceased to learn. When he was not holding classes or giving
lectures, or granting private interviews, or meditating, he spent
much of his time in the study of Western culture and history.
Indeed, as a world teacher, he was also a world student;
everything pertaining to humanity interested him, and, as always,
he read prodigiously, retaining all he read and relating every facet
of man's life and thought W spiritual ideals. In the spring of 1895
he was also organizing his work in India by means of long
heartening and rousing letters; this period was, in fact, one of
intense activity in this regard, and his work of planning, of
finding practical solutions to India's complex problems, and of
directing and inspiring his brother monks and his disciple, was in
itself a stupendous task-one that requires a chapter of its own to
do it justice.
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But in the midst of furious work, of teaching, studying, writing,

carrying on a voluminous correspondence, in the midst of bitter
opposition which lasted in some quarters into the spring of 1895,*
in the midst of adulation from both those who looked upon him as
a "social lion" and those who knew his true worth, he remained
always in the blissful repose that asked nothing of and took
nothing from the world. He never compromised his
message--"What!" he exclaimed, "measure my soul according W
what the bond-slaves of the world say? Pooh!" 126-but his message
in its vastness embraced all; he gave everything to everyone, and,
with the unstudied precision which is, surely, a quality of grace,
he gave to each in the right way at the right time.

He cared nothing for praise and nothing for blame. "No one ever
succeeded in keeping society in good humour and at the same
time did great works," he had written to Mrs. Bull in March. "One
must work as the dictate comes from within, and then if it is right
and good, society is bound to veer round, perhaps centuries after
one is dead and gone. We must plunge heart and soul and body
into the work. And until we be ready to sacrifice everything else
to one Idea and to one alone, we never, never will see the Light
"127

As we have seen above, Swamiji's first season of New York

classes came to a close on the first of June. He was pleased with
the work he had done and the response he had received. "This
winter's work in N.Y. was splendid," he was to write to Mary Hale
later in the month, "and it may die if I suddenly go over to India,
so I am not sure about going to India soon."128 Indeed as early as
May 14 he had written to Alasinga, "Now I have got a hold on
New York, and I hope to get a permanent body of workers who
will carry on the work when I leave the country. . .

Of course financially it is a failure, but men are more valuable

than all the wealth of the world."129

Summer was beginning to press down upon the city; people were
leaving for the mountains and seashore, and Swamiji himself
longed for rest. Yet more urgent than his need for
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an extended vacation was his desire to place his work on a

permanent footing. Since many of his students themselves
disliked the thought of his classes being discontinued during the
summer months, a plan had evolved which made it possible for
him to escape from the sweltering city and, at the same time, to
train the group of men and women who, he hoped, could
eventually carry on his work--a plan which was to result, in any
case, in some of the most spiritually fruitful days of his American
mission. One of his students, a Miss Dutcher, offered him a
cottage that she owned at Thousand Island Park, a small
community on one of the "Thousand Islands" in the St. Lawrence
River. The house was to be for his own use and that of as many of
his students as it would accommodate. Swamiji accepted,
agreeing to join at Thousand Island Park any students earnest
enough to travel the three hundred miles from New York City.
In the meanwhile, he accepted an invitation from Mr. Francis
Leggett to visit his fishing camp in the White Mountains of New
Hampshire. He left New York on June g, as we learn not only
from Landsberg, but from two heretofore unpublished notes that
he wrote to Mrs. Bull. The first, partially published elsewhere,
was dated May 28; the second, June 4 :
The 28th May'95
Dear Mother
Your last kind letter to hand. This week will be the last of my
classes. I am going next Tuesday with Mr. Leggett to Maine. He
has a fine lake and a forest there. I will be two or three weeks
there. From thence I go to the Thousand Islands. Also I have an
invitation to speak at a parliament of religions at Toronto Canada
on July 18th. I will go there from Thousand Islands and return
back.
So far everything is going on well with me
Ever your grateful son
Vivekananda
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P.S. My regards & love to your daughter and pray for her speedy
recovery'"130

4th June'95
Dear Mother

Today I leave New York at 5 p. m. by steamer with Mr. Leggett.

The classes were closed on Saturday last [June 1] and so far the
work has been very successful, no small part of which is due to
you.

Ever praying for you & yours

I am ever your Son
Vivekananda
P.S. I will acquaint you with my whereabouts as soon as I know it
myself.l31

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p. 13 * The Mrs. Adams whom Swamiji mentioned in his letter of

January 17, 1895, was Florence Adams, wife of Milward Adams,
house manager of the Opera House in Chicago. (See Burke,
Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries, His Prophetic
Mission Part Tow [henceforth called Prophetic Mission—2],
chapter twelve, section four.)

Miss Josephine Locke, mentioned in the same letter by Swamiji,

was Director of Art in the Public Schools of Chicago.
Mrs. Peake was an itinerant teacher of metaphysics, holding
classes in various large cities of the United States. In July of
1897, the Theosophist magazine would run the following notice:
“Mrs. Peake, pupil of Vivekananda, has had classes and lectures
here [in Chicago] this Winter. She is able.”

p.14 * For more about Mr. Charles M. Higgins see Prophetic

Mission-2, chapter thirteen, section one.
**For a discussion of the beginnings of the New York Vedanta
Society, see chapters five and seven of this book.

p.20 *In her “ Memories of India and Indians” (Prabuddha

Bharata, May 1932) Sister Devamata gives another reason for
Swamiji’s choice of lodging. “When Swami Vivekananda came to
New York,” she writes, “he encountered a strong racial prejudice,
which created many hardships for him both in his public and his
private life. Among other things it was extremely difficult for him
to secure a proper lodging. Land ladies invariably assured him
that they had no feeling
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p. 20 themselves, but they were afraid they would lose (cont.)their

boarders if they took an Asiatic into the house. This forced the
Swami to accept inferior quarters." There is not much evidence
for this view, While Swamiji did indeed encounter a strong racial
prejudice in the southern cities of America, notably Baltimore, he
seems to have had little difficulty in this respect in cosmopolitan
New York, where he knew many influential people. Nor, as we
know, did he go from door to door in New York, seeking a place
to live; whether or not he would have been turned away if he had
done so is a moot point.
p.21 * For more about Dr. Egbert Guernsey, see prophetic
Mission-2, chapter nine, section two.
p. 23 *According to the reminiscences of Sarah Ellen Waldo,
Swamiji's New York classes began in February of 1895.
(Reminisces of Swami Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western
Admirers, first edition [hereafter Ram.], page 128]. But according
to the reminiscences of Josephine MacLeod, she first attended
Swamiji's New York class on January 29 (Rem., Page 235)·
One is inclined to take Miss MacLeod's word for it. Forty-six
years later she wrote to her niece Frances, "The one vivid event in
my life was meeting Swamiji January 29, 1895 " This was her
"spiritual birthday," as she called it, the mat important day in her
life, and she would not be apt to forget or mistake its date. Nor is
it likely that Swamiji wasted any time in opening his classes, He
moved into the rooms at 54 West Thirty-third Street on Sunday,
January 27; it would have been natural for him to start classes the
following day.

p. 24 * In connection with Miss MacLeod's initiation; the

following conversation took place at Belur Math in
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p. 24 March of 1917 between Swami Abhayanandaji (Revered

Bharat Maharaj), a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order, who
had known Miss MacLeod, and two devotees:

First devotee: Miss McAllen often said, “I am not Swamiji’s

disciple; I am his friend.’ Wasn’t she his disciple?

Swami Abhayanandaji: She was his disciple; I know it very well.

But she looked upon him as more than her guru—as her own self.

Second devotee: Didn’t Swamiji give her a mantra in a dream?

Swami Abhayanandaji: Swamiji himself gave her a mantra. I

heard from her that Swamiji had given her something, and a little
later she came to him and said, “Swamiji, I can’t do this.” And he
said, “All right; don’t worry.” Then many years later when she
was staying at Belur Math that mantra began to well up within her
without any effort on her part. Every day she would meditate in
the early morning, and it would come automatically. This she told
me.

p. 28 * In her autobiographical book The Worlds and I (1918) Ella

Wheeler Wilcox gives a somewhat different account of the first
time she heard Swamiji lecture. The pertinent paragraphs read:

“The year following the Chicago Exposition and Congress of

Religions, the East Indian Monk, Swami Vivekananda, came to
New York and gave a course of lectures. My husband was then
passing through a business crisis which required all of his courage
and self-control. We first heard of these lectures in a some what
curious way. One evening, just after dinner, the postman brought
a letter; it was from a stranger, addressed to me, and had been
three times forwarded. It told of a lecture to be given by
Vivekananda,
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p.28 giving the time and the place, and closed, saying; (cont) `I
feel sure, from what I read of your writings, that you will be
interested.' The hall where the lecture was to be given was just
two blocks from our apartment, and the date was just one hour
from the time I received the letter. We had no other engagement
for that evening, and my husband proposed going.

"We reached the hall just as Vivekananda was going on the stage
in his robe and turban. We sat in the very last seat of the hall,
clasping each other's hands as the impressive orator gave a never-
to-be-forgotten talk on things spiritual. When we went out my
husband said: 'I feel that man knows more of God than we do. We
must both hear him again.'

"My husband attended with me not only a number of evening

lectures, but on several occasions came from his business office
during the day to listen to the Swami. I remember him saying, as
we went out on the street one day: 'This man makes me rise above
every business worry; he makes me feel how trivial is the whole
material view of life and how limitless is the life beyond. I can go
back to my troubles at the office now with new strength.’ "
(Wilcox, The World and I, New York: George H. Doran Co.,
1918, pp. 110—I I).

According to the above, the first lecture the Wilcoxes heard does
not seem to have been given in a private residence. Where it was
given, then, one cannot say with any certainty at all. We can,
however, be reasonably certain that the time was the early part of
1895.
P· 33 *This message of dismay and reproach was included in the
first edition of Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries
(page 558) and, on further thought, was
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dropped by the author from the second edition. The (cont.) reason
for its omission was that the date assigned to it in an early typed
copy (the earliest copy available) was not consistent with two
facts mentioned within the last part of the letter itself-facts that
pertained not to 1895 but, rather, to the end of 1899 or the
beginning of 1900. Its date (February 26, 1895) thus became
highly uncertain. Since this was the case, it seemed to me better
to withhold the letter, pending further investigation or, at least,
further thought. Unfortunately, the original is not available and,
very possibly, no longer extant; thus investigation has been
somewhat frustrated. There is, however, certain evidence in the
copy that the first and last parts of the letter are not continuous, a
large portion having been excised from the original. It is
possible, therefore, that we have here not one letter but fragments
of two, brought together through one of those accidents that can
so easily occur in the handling of correspondence--preserving two
letters in the same envelope, and so on. With this in mind, one
can, I think, suppose that the first part of the letter is more or less
correctly dated (and indeed it seems to pertain to the moods and
events of early 1895 and, as far as I can imagine, to no other
period), and that the second part forms the close of an entirely
different letter (dated, I would guess, January, 1900).

But the difficulty does not end here. The specific date, February
26, 1895, is not plausible in connection with even the first part of
the letter. By February 26 Mary Hale and Swamiji were, to the
obvious enjoyment of both, deep into a rhyming correspondence;
as for Mrs. Hale, in mid-February Swamiji was writing cheerful
and amiable letters to her, telling her of his life and work in New
York and saying nothing that could bring forth a shocked rebuke.
Because of the
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unlikelihood of its present date, I have ventured to guess that

somewhere along the line the early copy has been misdated and
that it was actually written in late January of 1895. I believe,
moreover, that it was written by Mary Hale, not Mrs. Hale.
Swamiji’s letter of February I, 1895, to Mary seems clearly to be
a reply to a criticism from her, which he by no means accepted.
Their ensuing rhymed correspondence seems also to refer directly
to Mary’s “scolding letter,” which she deplored. It is on the basis
of these various speculations that I have restored to this chapter of
the book what I believe to be Mary Hale’s sisterly and ill-advised
reproof. Future researches may prove that I have wrongly dated,
assigned, and placed the letter, but for the time being it seems to
fit admirably into this niche.

p. 37 * “I am afraid you are offended and did not answer any of

my letters,” Swamiji wrote to Mary Hale in a letter from New
York that one guesses should bear the date March 12, 1895, or
thereabouts. As presently published in the Complete Works (8:
375), this letter is undated but is placed between those dated
March 17 and April 14, 1896. It seems clear from its contents,
however, that Swamiji wrote it in March of the previous year.
Compare, for instance, his letter to Isabelle McKindley, dated
March 12, 1895 (Complete Works, 5: 75-76).

p. 41 * “Discourses on Jnana-Yoga” as published in volume eight

of the Complete Works is accompanied by an editor’s note that
reads “These were originally recorded by . . . Miss S. E. Waldo.
Swami Saradananda, while he was in America (1896), copied
them out from her notebook.” There is no specific indication of
when or where Swamiji gave these “Discourses,” but since they
were recorded by Miss Waldo, we can
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safely assume that they were give in either spring (cont) of 1895
or early 1896.

At one time I made a guess that the "Discourses" were the jnana
yoga classes that Swamiji held during his second New York
season (1895/96)· (See Prabuddha Bharata, April 1963, Page
150·) Further research and thought, both on my part and on the
part of others, has made it clear that this could hardly be so: All
the jnana yoga classes--both beginners' and advanced—of the
second season are now almost certainly accounted for (see
chapters five and six of this book), and there is no place in this
accounting for the.”Discourses." It would seem clear, then, that
Swamiji held them in the spring of 1895, and it. highly probable
that he held them in New York, rather than in Brooklyn, where he
was also holding classes during this period.

The "Discourses" appear to represent seven jnana yoga classes,

with notes from Swamiji's classes at Thousand Island Park added
on at the end. The switch from the jnana yoga class notes to the
Thousand Island class notes occurs in the next-to-last paragraph
of section seven of the “Discourses” with the words “Let us then
be brave and sincere . . . “ (Complete Works, 8:27). At this point
the Thousand Island Park notes begin and continue with
variations to the end. The passages adopted from the notes are
from the Thousand Island Park classes of June 23, 25, 26, 27, 29,
30, and July 3 and 5 (Complete Works, 7:6-22, passim). The
afternoon talk of July 29 is also drawn upon for a sentence or two.
Students of Swami Vivekananda’s teachings may have discovered
other passages in the “Discourses” from the Thousand Island Park
notes as given in Inspired Talks. Those mentioned above;
however, will indicate the extent of the borrowing.
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p.44 * The small book Six Lessons on Raja Yoga, first printed
in Sap Francisco in 1913 and subsequently published by the
Udbodhan Office in Calcutta , as well as in volume eight of the
complete works, may be notes taken during Swamiji’s classes of
December 1894 in Cambridge Massachusetts (see Prophetic
Mission-2, chapter twelve , section four).If this is the case ,Six
lessons constitutes to date the first known set of notes of
Swamiji’s classes in the western world.
46 * Laura Glenn attended Swamiji’s classes in New York City
in 1895 and 1896, but did not b ecome his disciple or draw close to
him. A few years later she took an active part in the work he had
left behind in America and became a friend of Miss Waldo’s. Later
still, she became a follower of Swami Paramananda and took
monastic initiation from him in 1909. It was then that she became
Sister Devamata.

p. 60 * This letter, published in the Complete Works (8:375), is

undated. As far as can be determined by its contents, it was
written in mid-March of 1895. See note * for page 37.

p. 65 * One’s guess is that in likening Miss Florence Guernsey to

“Sister Jenny” Swamiji was referring to the old nursery rhyme,
which the Hale sisters may have taught him. Robin Redbreast
promised Jenny Wren that if she would be his wife he would
dress her “like a goldfinch or any peacock gay.” She replies that
that is all very nice, but “I must wear my plain brown gown and
never go so fine.”

p. 73 * For Swamiji’s Brooklyn lectures in the early part of 1895,

see Prophetic Mission—2, chapter 13.

p. 76 * Dobbs Ferry, where Josephine MacLeod and Besse

Sturges were living, was closer to twenty miles up
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p. 76 The Hudson from New York than to thirty. But even (cont.)
this was far to come.

p. 78 * For a detailed account of Swamiji’s stay at Ridgely in

1899, see Burke, Swami Vivekananda, His Second Visit to the
West, chapter three.

p. 84 * Miss Hamlen’s notices of Swamiji’s return to New York

read:

April 25th, 1895

New York City.

The Swami Vivekananda has returned, and has his Classes at the
usual hours, Saturdays Mondays and Wednesdays.
All interested to learn are welcome, but a basket is hung near the
door of the class-room, to receive voluntary contributions from
those who can contribute to the financial support of the work.
Miss S. E. Waldo,
249 Monroe Street,
Brooklyn, N.Y.,
has charge of the classes at
54 W. 33 St.
Yours truly,
Elizabeth L. Hamlen
p. 92 * The last serious opposition to Swamiji came from the
Ramabai Circle of Brooklyn in the early part of 1895. For details
of this controversy, see Prophetic Mission—2, chapter thirteen.

p. 93 * Swamiji stayed at Mr. Leggett’s camp for twelve days.

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CHAPTER TWO
THOUSAND ISLAND PARK

On June 4, 1895, Mr. Francis Leggett’s party of five took a

steamer from New York to Portland, Maine, a train from Portland
to the small village of Percy, New Hampshire, in a remote region
of the White Mountains, and a rowboat to Mr. Leggett’s rustic
cabin, known as White Birch Lodge. The Lodge stood on the very
edge of the lake; behind stretched woods of laurel, birch, and
pine, and across the lake itself were forest-covered hills,
luxuriantly green in the first weeks of June. The party arrived at
one o’clock on the afternoon of the sixth; they recorded the event
in the Lodge’s Log Book, and signed their names: “Besse
MacLeod Sturges; Francis H. Leggett; Josephine MacLeod;
Georgia Waitham Spence [an elder cousin of the MacLeod
sisters]; Swami Vivekananda, India, Heathen Hindu.”1

Swamiji’s twelve-day stay at Camp Percy among congenial

friends would give him more than a rest of body and mind, it
would provide as well the freedom of time and space in which his
spirit could soar. Indeed, in some respects Camp Percy, with its
quiet, its woods, its lake, and its remoteness from civilization (one
could reach the house from the nearest village only by rowing for
nearly an hour to the far end of the long lake) was like a hidden
forest ashrama in India. The day after his arrival, Swamiji wrote
to Mrs. Bull, “This is one of the most beautiful spots I have ever
seen. . . . So lovely, so quiet, so restful! And you may imagine
how glad I am to be here after the bustle of cities. It gives me a
new lease of life to be here. I go into the forest alone and read my
Gita and am quite happy... I will meditate by the hours and
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days here and be all alone to myself. The very idea is ennobling."2
He could be alone to walk in the woods or sit by the late as
often and for as long as he wished. At other times he enjoyed the
companionship of his friends and was as merry as they. And they
were merry indeed; this sojourn at Camp Percy was a sort of
betrothal party in the wilds. Besse (or Betty) MacLeod Sturges
and Francis Leggett had just become engaged and were planning
to be marred in Paris in September. To Alberta Sturges (Betty's
eighteen-year-old daughter) Swamiji wrote a few weeks later of
those cloudless days at the Camp. "We had such jolly good times
up there at Percy with Mr. Leggett-isn't he a saint? . . . We had a
good deal of rowing . . . and I learnt a point or two in rowing.
Aunt Joe Joe had to pay for her sweetness; the flies and
mosquitoes would not leave her a moment. They rather gave me a
wide berth I think because they were very orthodox sabbatarian
flies and would not touch a heathen. Again, I think I used to sing
a good deal at Percy and that must have frightened them away.
We had such fine birch trees. I got up an idea of making books
out of the bark as used to be done in ancient times in our country
and wrote Sanskrit verses for your mother and aunt " 3 Apropos of
Swamiji's learning a point or two in rowing, the story is told that
he once missed his stroke and nearly capsized the boat, falling
backward, hitting his head on the aide-and laughing.4

But Swamiji could move without effort from the playful mood of
a summer vacation to immergence in the highest bliss. He who
had had to restrain himself (not always successfully) from
entering into samadhi during his classes in New York City could
now give free rein to his mind, and it at once rushed, as it were, to
its "own abode." In later years, during her stays at Belur Math,
Miss MacLeod sometimes told of Swamiji's samadhi at Camp
Percy. The following account of her words was given by Swami
Vijayananda:
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One morning before breakfast Swamiji came out from his room
with a Sanskrit Gita in his hand. I (Josephine MacLeod] was
behind him. Seeing me, he said, "Joe, I am going to sit under that
pine (pointing to a nearby pine) and read the Bhagavad Gita. See
that the breakfast is sumptuous to-day." Half an hour later I went
over to the pine tree and saw Swamiji sitting there motionless.
The Gita had fallen from his hand and the front of his robe was
wet with tears.

I went nearer and saw that his breathing had stopped altogether. I
trembled in fear-Swamiji must be dead. I did not shout, but ran to
Francis Leggett and told him, "Come quick, Swami Vivekananda
has left us." My sister ran to the spot with loud cries and my
[future] brother-in-law also came with tears in his eyes. By now
seven or eight minutes had passed. Swamiji was still in the same
position. But my brother-in-law said, "He is in a trance; I will
shake him out of it" I stopped him, shouting, "Never do that!" I
remembered that Swamiji had said once that when he would be in
deep meditation one should not touch him. Another five minutes
or so passed, then we saw the signs of breathing. His eyes had
been half closed; now slowly they opened. And then Swamiji, as
if soliloquising, said, "Who am I, where am I?" Thrice he spoke
like that, and then, wide awake, he saw us, was very much
embarrassed, stood up, and said, "I am sorry to have frightened
you all. But I have this state of consciousness now and then. I
shall not leave my body in your country. Betty, I am hungry, let's
hurry."5

According to another version, also related by Miss MacLeod, the

gardener (or caretaker) had found Swamiji by the lake to all
appearances dead and had called the other, who did indeed touch
him in an attempt to restore him. But in what ever way Swamiji
was brought back to normal consciousness, he may well have
been in nirvikalpa samadhi, in which state
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(if one may so call it) the body appears in all respects to be dead
and the mind itself is merged in Brahman. This was not to be the
only time that summer of 1895 that Swamiji lost all outer
consciousness. But never (as far as is known) was he to remain
long in the highest state; for his Master had "kept the key." It had
been at Cossipore, Calcutta, that Swamiji (then Narendra Nath
Datta) had first entered into nirvikalpa samadhi. His Master, Sri
Ramakrishna, had then said to him, "Now then, the Mother has
shown you everything. Just as a treasure is locked up in a box, so
will this realisation you have just had be locked up and the key
shall remain with me. You have work to do."6 And to be sure, we
find in Swamiji's biographies that he was, as it were, thrown
down from that state, or from its threshold, again and again (a
return possible only to the world's great spiritual Teachers), in
order that he might carry out his mission. It may have happened
so at Camp Percy. Later, when he was in India, Swamiji was to
say to his disciple Sharat Chandra Chakravarty: "A time comes
when what you call differentiation vanishes, and we cannot per-
ceive it at all. I have experienced that state in my own life."
"When have you done so?" the disciple asked, and Swamiji
replied:

One day in the temple-garden at Dakshineswar Shri Ramakrishna

touched me over the heart, and first of' all I began to see that the
houses-rooms, doors, windows, verandahs-the trees, the sun, the
moon-all were flying off, shattering to pieces as it were-reduced
to atoms and molecules-and ultimately become merged in the
Akasha. Gradually, again, the Akasha also vanished, and after
that, my consciousness of the ego with it; what happened next I
do not recollect. I was at first frightened. Coming back from that
state, again I began to see the houses, doors, windows, verandahs,
and other things. On another occasion, I had exactly the same
realisation by the side of a lake in America. . . . Know-this
knowledge of
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Oneness is what the Shastras speak of as realisation of the

Brahman, by knowing which, one gets rid of Fear, and the
shackles of birth and death break for ever. 7
Was not Swamiji speaking here of his experience at Camp Percy?
(On the shore of Late Michigan he had also entered into samadhi,
but on that occasion it was Sri Ramakrishna who, appearing to
him, drew him back "to the Work for which he had come to the
world.")8

On the morning of Tuesday, June 18, Swamiji left the White

Mountains of New Hampshire (by train) for Thousand Island
Park, about zoo miles to the west, where a number of his students
awaited him. Everything at the Park had, it would seem, been
made ready for his coming. The steamer St. Lawrence, on which
he arrived from Clayton, four miles up the river, had been newly
painted a gleaming white, elegantly reaccoutered, and gaily
beflagged. The Dock, with its jaunty two-story pavilion, had been
entirely rebuilt. The electric lights of' the Park's completely
renovated system were perhaps already glowing (for it was late
afternoon or early dusk) in the grand, three-year-old Columbian
Hotel and casting circles of light along the short elm-lined avenue
that led straight back from the Dock to the Tabernacle at its far
end. The whole village had been brushed up for that summer.
Even the sewer system (in a "deplorable state" the summer
before) had been entirely reconstructed, placing the "sanitary
conditions of the Park above par with those of other resort. "
Some might say it all happened by coincidence; but however that
may be, it was a newly cleaned, brightly lighted, refurbished
community to which Swamiji came on Tuesday, June 18, 1895. 9

Almost certainly, his hostess, Miss Mary Elizabeth Dutcher, and

the two or three other disciples who had gathered at Thousand
Island Park ahead of him were on the Dock to
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greet him and to escort him (no doubt by horse and buggy hired
for the occasion) the short half toile to Miss Dutcher's cottage,
which stood, set apart from hundreds similar to it, on the wooded
sod hilly edge of the community, behind and to the west of the
Tabernacle. The little two-story house, built in 1885, was also
ready to receive Swamiji-and this, without any doubt, by design.
As soon as he had accepted ha invitation to make her cottage at
Thousand Island Park his summer retreat,* Miss Dutcher had
made arrangements to add a wing to the cottage for his comfort.
There had been ample time. Swamiji's earliest known mention of
hie acceptance of Miss Dutcher's invitation is found in a
published letter to Mrs. Ole Bull:

... I cannot go to Greenacre now; I have arranged to go to the

Thousand Islands, wherever that may be. There is a cottage
belonging to Miss Dutcher, one of my students, and a few of us
will be there in rest and peace and seclusion. I want to
manufacture a few "Yogis" out of the materials of the classes, and
a busy farm [fair?] like Greenacre is the last place for that, while
the other is quite out of the way, and none of the curiosity-seekers
will dare go there.10

This letter was dated April 25, 1895; thus there were about seven
weeks at the least in which to build a wing of three sizable rooms,
each about twelve by fifteen feet, one above the other.** The top
room, Which was for Swamiji's personal use, was served by an
outside staircase and opened, also, onto an upper veranda of the
cottage. The room directly below opened onto the first-floor front
parlor and was to be used as a study and classroom. The room
beneath that, which was to become an extra guest room, stood
below the first floor of the house and had its own entrance, for the
cottage proper had been built, literally, on a rock-a huge granite
boulder, such as crop up throughout the area. The lattice skirts of
the
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cottage, together with its floor, hugged and enclosed the rock;
whereas the new wing stood behind it and could rest on lower
ground. Although the biblical symbolism of building on a rock
very likely appealed to Miss Dutcher, the architecture of the little
cottage did not lend a sense of stability. It was that of the late
1870s-the steeply pitched roof, the tall doors and windows, the
slender, lathe-turned veranda posts, the adorning wooden lace and
froufrou all conspired to produce a Fragile and charming
storybook effect. The earliest known photograph of the cottage,
which is reproduced here, shows it after Swamiji's wing had been
added. If one covers over the wing (the left side of the house
beyond the verandas), the original cottage stands clear. (The large
rock in the foreground of the photograph is not a part of that upon
which the cottage stands.)

As a finishing touch to the preparations for Swamiji's arrival a

homemade banner proclaiming in large letters "WELCOME
VIVEKANANDA" had been tacked up to greet him as he entered
the front parlor. He was welcome indeed! But perhaps not even in
their fondest dreams could his disciples have foreseen the
spiritual bonanza in store for them.

Swamiji had been right in thinking that Thousand Island Park was
"quite out of the way"; it was not, certainly, a fair for religious
curiosity-seekers, as was Greenacre. But it was not, on the other
hand, a remote or unpeopled spot. The 1700-and-more islands,
"scattered," as it was said in an 1894 guidebook, 11 "in prodigal
profusion along the noble St. Lawrence River," had during the
past twenty years become a popular resort area, beautiful, easy of
access, and pervaded by "a spirit of rest and freedom from care."
"During the summer season," the guidebook informed the
vacationer, "the Islands teem with life, and the reticulated channel
of the sparkling blue river is flecked with the white wings of little
sailing yachts and pleasure boats which, like birds, of passage,
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flit hither and thither among the Islands, in search of pleasure and
new delights." The Islands varied in size "from a small mass of
rock . . . to picturesque islands miles in extent, overspread with a
rich and luxuriant vegetation." Wellesley Island, on which
Thousand Island Park was situated, was the second largest of
these "island gems," and according to an item in a contemporary
newspaper, if the Park was the most popular summer resort of all.

In June of 1895 Thousand Island Park was exactly twenty years

old. On June 9, 1875, the sale (or long-term lease) of its first lots
(each 40 by 80 feet) had begun. The area, comprising at the time
980 acres, had recently been purchased by the Thousand Island
Camp Meeting Association for the purpose, precisely, of holding
religious camp meetings during the summer months. The plan,
thought up by a Methodist minister, the Reverend John Ferdinand
Dayan, was to establish a permanent campground somewhat on
the order of the Chautauqua Institute, which had been founded the
year before in Chautauqua County, New York. Other such camp-
grounds were putting down roots here and there on the East
Coast; indeed in the latter half of the nineteenth century religious
camp meetings were taking on an air of sobriety. No longer were
they the frenzied itinerant revival meetings of the early 1800s
with their shouting ministers, their screaming and convulsive
congregations. Things had quieted down considerably, and an
element of thought was tempering the old time evangelical
madness. Prepared sermons often took the place of emotional
tirades, the meetings became more like study sessions than
religious orgies and were held over a longer period of time-say, a
week or two, rather than a day or two. Accordingly, lodgings for
large crowds were set up in the vicinity of the revival tent. At
first, the meeting-goers lived in tents themselves; later on, family
cottages and rooming houses were built, and a sort of religious
summer resort came into existence.

The Thousand Island Camp Meeting Association had the

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establishment of just such a resort in mind, “free from the

frivolities and extravagances of fashionable watering places.” 13 It
was a resort in which the highly moralistic (some said
“bluenosed”) restrictions of orthodox Protestant Christianity were
rigidly observed and in which religious camp-meetings were the
principal recreation. At first there was no drinking of liquor,
playing of cards, or selling of tobacco at any time or at any place
in the Park; there was a curfew for noise at nine o’clock at night
and for lights at ten o’clock; there was to be no nonsense
whatsoever on Sundays, not even croquet, boating, or landing at
or embarking from the premises. (Later on, some of these laws
were relaxed: Swamiji could have bought a cigar in the village
store had he wished, and every Saturday night, there was a full-
dress “hop” at the Columbian Hotel, at which couples blithely
waltzed or danced the two-step to orchestra music and carried on
till well after nine o’clock.)

The Thousand Island Camp Meeting Association, which changed

its name to the Thousand Island Park Association in 1879, owned
the land, the Dock, the main communal buildings, and the many
tents that it rented to campers. On the liability side, the
Association was responsible for the care, maintenance, and
improvement of the Park and for various kinds of public service.
Through the lease of lots, the granting of franchises to stores,
boardinghouses, and so on, the charge of a commission of profits,
the levying of a low (today very high) tax on leased land, and a
sporadic (and hotly debated) entrance fee, the Association became
a going concern, and in no time the Park grew into a healthy,
thriving community, its character changing rapidly from camp-
meeting ground to “Christian Summer Resort.” Indeed, despite its
persisting blue laws, which preserved it as “a place where ‘the
assassins of society’ would have no inducement whatever to
come,”14 the community had never been excessively hidebound.
Outdoor sports (except on Sundays) had always been encouraged,
and from the beginning much stress was laid on the Park’s non-
denominational aspect and its “international character,” by
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which last was meant that Canadians from across the St.
Lawrence were welcome to buy lots.

In 1875 no one, of course, dreamed that in twenty years a Hindu

monk would be teaching a heathen creed in one of the Park's very
own cottages! And yet during the course of the first series of
lectures held at the vast Tabernacle tent in the summer of 1875 a
hymn was sung in, of all things, the Hindi language. To quote
from a history of the Park:

Among [the] speakers was Mrs. J. L. Humphrey, a missionary

recently returned from India, who spoke on the activities of the
Ladies' Foreign Missionary Society in India and then "sang a
hymn in the Hindoo language, the words being set to their
music"; a Park Missionary Society was formed on the spot. 15

Although the quoted words in the above passage are ambiguous,

it is not likely that Mrs. Humphrey sang a Hindu bhajan; more
probably the song was a Christian hymn translated into Hindi and
set to what passed for Indian music. Nevertheless, a hymn in the
Hindoo language had been sung in the Tabernacle during the first,
christening, services of the campground. While the intent, to be
sure, was not to bring India to the Park, there she was.*

Thousand Island Park grew apace. In 1883 the large and grand
Thousand Island Park Hotel was opened, its four stories and
impressive central tower facing the river. Seven years later, the
hotel burned to the ground, and in its place was built the even
grander and larger Columbian Hotel. In 1884 a permanent
Tabernacle replaced the huge tent of the early days. The wooden
facade of this new structure stood squarely across the end of the
Park's central avenue and accommodated the platform, with
podium and seats for a choir of several hundred. Extending back
from the platform was the slightly sloped earth floor of the
auditorium, the plank benches of which could seat 3,000. This
immense area was
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covered by a pitched wooden roof, supported by hand-hewn

posts, beams, and rafters; its back and sides were wide open to the
woods, though canvas curtains could be lowered in case of heavy
rains and gales. That was the Tabernacle as Swamiji knew it.

The 1880s and the early 1890s saw rapid improvements in the
Park’s public facilities. At first, a few scattered wells and rain
barrels had provided water, but in 1883 a wood-burning steam
engine pumped river water to a reservoir stop Sunrise Mountain
(which rose behind the Tabernacle and was nearly 200 feet high at
its summit), from where it was piped, for a fee, to individual
cottages. A gas system provided lights on the main avenues, as
well as in the hotel. (Electricity of sorts took over this task in the
early 1890s.) A sewer line was installed in the populous part of
the Park, and garbage, it was decreed, would be picked up “at
least twice during the months of July, August, and September of
each year.” Streets were graded and graveled; there was a
telegraph office in the hotel; the Park had its own post office, its
general store, its lumber dock and yard, tin shop, bookstore and
circulating library, photograph studio, chapel, museum, art
gallery, glass blower, basket maker, baseball field, tennis courts,
taffy stand, and almost anything else a summer resident might
desire. In short, by the 1890s Thousand Island Park was a summer
resort par excellence. As one historian was to write in 1898, “The
village, for such it is in fact, has . . . every adjunct of a completely
appointed municipality, and far better than the majority of them in
this state.16

Competing for attention with the tennis courts and the luxurious
Columbian Hotel at the river end of St. Lawrence Avenue, the
Tabernacle programs tended to become more diversified and, one
might say, secular. Although the religious meetings continued,
lectures on various nonreligious topics, such as Shakespearian
Drama, the Laws of Storms, New Electrical Devices, and the
Woodpecker, appeared on the scene, as did Glee Club Programs
and Recitations. Thousand Island Park
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began to be referred to as the "Chautauqua of the North," and the

crowds kept pouring in, Meanwhile, as has been km earlier, the
entire area of the Thousand Islands had also been transformed
during the past twenty years from a remote wilderness to a
popular resort-laud where people played games, danced, fished,
went boating, and otherwise enjoyed themselves. By 1895, the
Islands as a whole drew thousands of excursionists every day;
Thousand Island Park (now 800 acres in area, 100 acres of which
were plotted for cottage lots) had a summer population of around
10,000; its cottages, large and small, numbered well over 600, and
in addition to the hotel, there were at least a dozen rooming
houses. "It is a very beautiful spot," Swamiji was to write in early
July, "but I am afraid it becomes too crowded during the
season,"17 The Park would, indeed; scarcely seem the place for a
summer retreat. But most of the cottages lay jam-packed between
the river and the base of Sunrise Mountain; whereas Miss
Dutcher's little house, perched alone a short way up the hill, was
quiet and relatively secluded.

Inside, the cottage was simplicity itself and typical of many others
in the Park. One entered from the front porch into a small,
rectangular parlor, about nine by fifteen feet, whose windows
looked out over the south veranda into the trees, Adjoining it was
a slightly wider second parlor, or dining room, most of whose
light came through the open archway between the two rooms.*
Alongside this was a small, shed like kitchen, which Miss
Dutcher had added after the cottage was built. 18 At the front end
of the second parlor a narrow, enclosed staircase led to the upper
floor. Here, normally, there would have been two bedrooms, one
on either side of a narrow hallway, but Miss Dutcher had chosen
to divide these rooms into four small cells to accommodate her
guests. That was all there was of the cottage before the summer of
1895, except
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for the wide verandas which ran along the front and the side that
faced the river.

An outside staircase led to the upper verandas for the benefit,

perhaps, of the villagers, who came from time to time in
neighborly fashion to see the view. 19 Today, the trees surrounding
the cottage hide the river, but such was not the case in 1895, for
some forty years earlier, the then owner of the Park site had
thoroughly lumbered its rich forests, until by 1864 there was only
“pasture land and areas covered by brush.” The trees had grown
up again, but slowly. By the 1890s the tallest tops of the maples,
elms, and oak on the slopes below Miss Dutcher’s cottage were
barely on a level with the second floor. Thus the upper verandas
were the highest lookouts in the Park, commanding a wide vista
of the river and its opposite shore. Everyone was welcome day
and night to come and gaze, and Miss Dutcher had thoughtfully
screened off Swamiji’s porch from the one that ran along the front
of the house, to which the neighbors had access.

In the various memoirs that have come down to us, no one

described the living conditions in 1895 in a Thousand Island Park
cottage, perhaps because they were not unusual for the age.
Eighty-odd years later, however, they are worthy of note, and it is
possible to make some educated guesses in regard to them. We
know, for instance, that water was almost certainly piped to the
cottage from the reservoir higher on the hill, but it is not likely
that there was more than one faucet, which would have been in
the kitchen. Each bedroom would have had a bowl and ewer for
washing, but there was no bathroom. Sunk in the rock under the
house was a cistern where rain (Miss Dutcher’s only water source
in the days before the reservoir) had been collected. The cistern
was still functional in 1895, and one could shiveringly bathe there
with a dipper and bucket. As was the case with most country
houses of the era, there was an outhouse, and since the cottage
was not connected with the Park’s new sewer system, it was
probably primitive. There are no existing records to show whether
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or not the village gas lines reached as far as the cottage (it is
certain that the electric lines did not); so kerosene lamps and
candles may have given the only light. As for heat, because of a
Park ordinance, there were no open fireplaces to cheer a rainy or
chilly evening.20 But such evenings were rare in the summer
months, and in the winter the whole Park closed down,
hibernating under a cover of deep snow.

It was in a state of spiritual joy and, certainly, spiritual power that

Swamiji came from the White Mountains to Thousand Island
Park-a state in which he stood at the open door of the highest
samadhi, holding back, as it were, in order to teach, and at the
same time, though not in contradiction, in which he was like a
carefree boy. As for his physical health, even as his spirit soared,
his body and mind relaxed after the tensions of his city work. "All
the sleep in the world has come upon me," he wrote to Betty
Sturges in early July from the Park. "I sleep at least two hours
during the day and deep through the whole night se a piece of log.
This is a reaction, I think, from the sleeplessness of New York. I
am also writing and reading a little, and have a class every
morning after breakfast. The meals are being conducted on the
strictest vegetarian principles, and I am fasting a good deal I am
determined that several pounds of my fat shall be off before I
leave."21 Swamiji, in fact, wanted to lose thirty to forty pounds
that summer, as he had written to Mary Hale from New York
earlier in the year. "That will be all right for my size," he assured
her.22

A week or so after arriving at Thousand Island Park Swamiji

wrote two letters to Mary Hale, both of which are dated in the
Complete works June Rs. 26, 1895, but which must have been
written a few days apart. In what appears to be the first, he wrote
in a somewhat low key: "Nothing noticeable has happened during
this visit to the Thousand islands. The scenery is very beautiful
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and I have some of my friends here with me to talk about God

and soul ad libitum. I am eating fruits and drinking milk and so
forth, and studying huge Sanskrit books on Vedanta which they
have kindly sent me from India.”23

In this same letter he spoke philosophically, somewhat in the

tone of his classes as we know them from Inspired Talks: “The
more the shades around deepen [and] the more the ends approach
[,] the more one understands the true meaning of life, that it is a
dream; and we begin to understand the failure of everyone to
grasp it, for they only attempted to get meaning out of the
meaningless. . . . Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the
trinity of bondage.

“Denial of the will to live, knowledge, and same sightedness is

the trinity of liberation.

“Freedom is the goal of the universe.”24

In the second letter dated June 26, Swamiji suddenly bursts

through the page, revealing the exalted state of a Paramahansa, a
Knower of Brahman:

A wonderful calmness is coming over my soul. Every day I feel I

have no duty to do; I am always in eternal rest and peace. It is He
that works. We are only the instruments. Blessed be His name!
The threefold bondage of lust and gold and fame is, as it were
fallen from me for the time being, and once more, even here, I
feel what sometimes I felt in India, “From me all difference has
fallen, all right or wrong, all delusion and ignorance has vanished,
I am walking in the path beyond the qualities. What law I obey,
what disobey?” From that height the universe looks like a mud-
puddle. Hari Om Tat Sat. He exists; nothing else does. I in Thee
and Thou in me. Be Thou Lord my eternal refuge! Peace, Peace,
Peace!25

From that height Swamiji taught the twelve students who

followed him to the Park, wanting, as he said, to “train them in
Advaita realization” so that later they could carry on his
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work in his absence. How far he would succeed in this immediate

purpose, he himself did not know. Nor, perhaps, did it matter.
Later he was to say that he had been at his beat at Thousand
Island Park," and we know from the notes of his classes and from
the few available memoirs of the seven weeks he spent there that
he poured out continuously a torrent of spirituality. "Day by day I
am experiencing a manifestation of power in me," he was to write
in July to his Madras disciple Alasinga. 27 And the power
manifested in a Swami Vivekananda could not be contained in a
small place or be effective for only a limited time. Was not his
stay at Miss Dutcher's cottage only the occasion then, for
releasing a flood of spiritual energy into the very heart of the
nation? Was he not teaching generations of Americans in those
few weeks? One cannot but think that the immense power
generated by Swamiji'e teaching day and night at the height of
spiritual consciousness must have far transcended and
outdistanced its effect in the lives of the twelve students who
gathered around him and who asked themselves the unanswerable
question, "What have we ever done to deserve this ?" 28

Let us recall here what we know of those disciples, First, Miss

Dutcher, who was, Sister Christine tells us, "a conscientious little
woman [and] a devout Methodist."29 Her whole outlook on life
had been conditioned by one of the mat orthodox, missionary
minded Protestant denominations. It was a matter for amazement
not only that she was among the group at Thousand Island Park,
but that she had herself proposed the retreat and added a wing to
her cottage to accommodate Swamiji. But there was, perhaps,
more to Miss Dutcher than met the eye. Indeed, considering the
age in which she lived, her background, and her religious
upbringing, she seems to have been something of a rebel.
Born about 1895 in Oswego County, New York (not far
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from the Thousand Islands), she was the daughter of a poor

farmer and no doubt spent her girlhood as did other country girls
of that era, attending a one-room school, helping with the chores,
and regularly going to church on Sundays. She very likely also
attended with her parents many a Methodist Camp Meeting,
which in her girlhood would have been extravagances of
"jumping, jerking, and roaring," interspersed with terrifying,
guilt-forging sermons on sin, responsibility, and hell-fire.
Not easily in the early half of the nineteenth century did a country
girl break away from such an upbringing to attend art school in
New York City. But Mary Elizabeth Dutcher went off to New
York to study art at the Art Students' League and also at the
Academy of Design. She did not return to the farm, but moved to
Rochester, where she taught art and on occasion exhibited her
own paintings.30 Prim and proper she may have seemed to a later
generation; actually she must have had daring and courage. She
managed to support herself through her art work and had enough
money left over to buy the lot at Thousand Island Park (for about
$100) and to build a cottage on it. Nor, presumably, did Miss
Dutcher care in the least what her God-fearing neighbors might
think of her harboring a Hindoo in t6eir very midst. Inevitably,
they had their opinions. The story goes that one day a young girl
of sixteen, living with her family at the foot of the hill, "expressed
the desire to talk to the Swami. 'Don't go near him,' her mother
said sternly. 'He is a heathen!’ ”31 Miss Dutcher held her ground.
Indeed, she was to invite many of the neighbors to her cottage one
Sunday to see and hear the heathen for themselves Here, it would
seem, was no "conscientious little woman" but a stalwart and
earnest soul. She was a gentle soul as well, who quite literally
would not hurt a fly: in her cottage she kept a humane fly trap,
which she took into the woods each evening to release the flies
imprisoned during the day.32

Having attended Swamiji's New York classes, Miss Dutcher must

have known, to some extent at least, that she was taking
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into her house a spiritual tornado. Surely she knew that much of
her lifelong religious conditioning, her ingrained beliefs and
assumptions, were about to be turned topsy-turvy. Yet to know
that a tornado is coming does not lessen its impact, and Miss
Dutcher seems to have been shaken to the very roots of her being
by Swamiji’s teachings at Thousand Island Park. He could not
spare her; he taught what he had to teach, much of which must
have seemed not only outrageous but blasphemous to her. And yet
his words rang with an authority she could not deny. The conflict
was shattering. Sometimes she would disappear (to a neighbor’s
cottage, perhaps) for two or three days at a stretch. “Don’t you
see,” Swamiji explained to the others, “this is not an ordinary
illness? It is the reaction of the body against the chaos that is
going on in her mind. She cannot bear it.” 33 Yet she held on,
playing in her own way an essential role in Swamiji’s Western
mission.*

Just as there could not have been the weeks at Thousand Island
Park without Miss Dutcher, so there could not have been the book
Inspired Talks without Sarah Ellen Waldo. Miss Waldo, who was
nearing her fiftieth birthday in the summer of 1895, 34 was, like
Miss Dutcher, a spinster. Unlike her, however, she apparently had
no need to earn a living, or to supplement a private income. She
had her own house in Brooklyn at 249 Monroe Street and spent a
good deal of time in intellectual pursuits. She was a close student
of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom she was
distantly related, and most probably had studied the works of
other Transcendentalists as well. Thus she was familiar, even
before meeting Swamiji, with a mode of thought derived, in part
at least, from India. She had also read the writings of Professor
Max Muller, including, perhaps, his then recent Vedanta
Philosophy. Such interests, together with her membership in the
Brooklyn Ethical Association, made it almost inevitable that she
would attend Swamiji’s first lecture before that learned gathering
on the night of December 30, 1894, and that, subsequently,
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she would regularly attend his classes in New York.

Although we know almost nothing of Miss Waldo's life before she

met Swamiji, it does not appear to have had any particular focus.
Now it became centered in his mission. As we shall see in a later
chapter, she was to serve Swamiji and the early New York
Vedanta Society as a tireless factotum. Tall, "very portly,"
efficient, and inclined to be somewhat domineering, Miss Waldo
may have vexed others at times, but it was she who did most of
the work.
Ruth Ellis was a close friend of Sarah Ellen Waldo and was
probably about the same age. Almost all we know of her comes
from a brief description in Sister Christine's reminiscences. "Ruth
Ellis was on the staff' of one of the New York newspapers,”
Christine wrote. "She was gentle and retiring and seldom spoke,
yet one knew that her love and devotion were unbounded:'” 35
Miss Ellis, a Dr. L. L. Wight, to whom she was like a daughter,
and Miss Waldo had been attending lectures on philosophy
together for thirty years, and together they came to Swamiji's
New York classes, finding at last what they had sought for so
long.

Of Dr. Wight we know only that in 1895 he was "well over

seventy but as enthusiastic and full of interest as a boy." 36 Indeed
"little old Docky Wight," as his fellow-disciples called him,
seems to have been stunned by Swamiji's teachings, not
devastatingly, as was Miss Dutcher, but with a kind of awe. "At
the end of each [morning class at Thousand Island Park],"
Christine wrote, "there was usually a pause, and the little old
`Docky' would stoop down and rub his bald head and say, with
the most pronounced nasal twang, `Well, Swami, then it all
amounts to this, "I am the Absolute!"' We always waited for that,
and Swamiji would smile his most fatherly smile and agree.” 37

Then was Stella. If anyone among the group was a misfit, it

seems to have been this one-time actress, who was past her prime
and who, according to Sister Christine, may
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have been hoping to "restore her fast-fading beauty and bring

back her lost youth" by becoming spiritual. Sizing up Stella, the
others doubted that Swamiji understood her motives in coming to
Thousand Island Park. How could he understand "that anyone
could put such an interpretation upon his lofty teachings?" Then
one day he said, "I like that Baby. She is so artless." This remark,
Christine relates, met with a dead silence. "Instantly his whole
manner changed, and he said very gravely, 'I call her Baby hoping
that it will make her childlike, free from art and guile.' " 38 There
was very little Swamiji did not understand, and there was no one
for whom he did not have compassion and blessings.

Sister Christine tells us that at Thousand Island Park Stella lived

"in a room below." Whether this means that she occupied the
relatively large room on the ground floor of Swamiji's wing or
that she lived in a room in the village is not clear. The latter
meaning may be the more probable one, for Christine goes on to
say, "It was several days before we saw her, for she seldom came
up to the classes, being, as we were given to understand, too
deeply engrossed in ascetic practices to break in upon them." 39
Apparently Stella did not appear for any meal during those
several days, and unless she was fasting even from water, she
must have been rooming and boarding in the village--and no
doubt scandalizing the good natives with her bizarre behavior.
But we cannot know for certain; Christine's sentence leaves us
only with a question unanswerable at the present time.

After leaving Thousand Island Park at the end of the summer,

Stella (whose last name was Campbell) built a tiny cabin on an
island in Orchard Lake near Detroit and there continued her yoga
practices. This created a sensation. Among the newspaper stories
written about her was one by the then young and unknown
novelist Will Levington Comfort, who later on came to know
Swamiji and to love India. It was he who once told Christine (as
she was to write in 1924 to Miss MacLeod) that "everyone
connected with Swamiji whom he
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had ever known had a glow.”40 Perhaps he included Stella in this

observation; she was the first he had known.

In any event, Swamiji did not take Stella's aspirations lightly. In

July of 1897 he was to write to Josephine MacLeod from Almora,
"There is a young lady, Miss Campbell,Orchard Lake, Orchard
Island, Michigan, who is a great worshipper of Krishna and lives
alone in that Island, fasting and praying. She will give anything to
be able to see India once, but she is awfully poor. If you bring her
with you, I will anyhow manage to pay her expenses.” 41 Although
Stella did not make the voyage with Miss MacLeod, Swamiji did
not abandon the idea of brining her to India. Now and then he
inquired of Christine about "Baby." "I am sorry she state of mind
of' Baby is so unsettled," he was to write to her on May 20 of
1898. "I hope to find a home for her in India very soon and one
for you if you like and your duties permit "42 And again, in August
of that year, "I had a very beautiful letter from Baby-I am so glad
she is happy and has helping friends. Lord bless the dear child." 43
And in July of l899 he would write, again to Christine, that he had
had another "beautiful letter from Baby" and that he was soon
going to "pen a reply in [Christine's] care as directed." 44
After her experiments with yoga, Stella went back for a time, at
least, to the stage, "and none of us knew anything of her
afterwards," Christine wrote, "until news came of her death a few
months ago."" This undated statement, like "a room below,"
leaves us with a question. But Stella's death must have come
sometime between 1927, when Christine started writing her
memories, and 1930, when she herself died.

In her reminiscences of Thousand Island Park, Sister Christine

mentions many of her fellow-students, but not Walter and Frances
Goodyear, who, as we know from another source, 46 were
members of the group at Mia Dutcher's cottage for two weeks.
They were at the time a young, childless couple (not until 1897
was a son born to them), who lived in Upper Montclair, New
Jersey. As has been seen in the preceding
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chapter, the Goodyears were among those who had given

Swamiji practical help during the spring of 1895. In September of
this same year, Walter Goodyear was to become the New York
agent for the Brahmavadin, the English-language magazine newly
launched by a group not Swamiji's Madras disciples. He seems
also to have been treasurer of the New York Vedanta Society from
its very beginning in the fall of 1894 and was almost certainly one
of the trustees who constituted the Society's Executive
Committee, which would be formed in December of 1895 to
handle all business matters Inasmuch as Walter Goodyear was
treasurer of the New York branch of the Goodyear Sewing
Machine Company of Canada, he was a logical choice for these
responsibilities and, together with his wife, was to be helpful in
the secular side of the work-which side, Swamiji said, "nearly
breaks me to pieces."47
7

In the last week of June or first week of July came Mme Marie
Louise, brining along a small pet tortoise, which instantly took off
into the alluring woods and disappeared. One can well imagine
that the whole household was set to searching for the errant pet, to
no avail. "[Marie Louise] was a little sorry at first,” Swamiji
worte to Betty Sturges, "`but we preached liberty with such
vigour that she had to come round quich."48

Mme Marie Louise; who for reasons of her own, always refused
to divulge her family name (which she would soon no longer
need), "was, in some respects, the outstanding personality in this
small community," Sister Christine recalled.

A tall, angular woman, about fifty years of age [she continued], so

masculine in appearance that one looked twice before one could
tell whether she was a man or a woman. The short, wiry hair, in
the days before bobbed hair was in vogue, the masculine features,
the large bones,
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the heavy voice and the robe, not unlike that worn by men in
India, made one doubtful. Her path was the highest, she
announced, that of philosophy--jnana. She had been the
spokesman for ultra-radical groups and had learning and some
degree of eloquence. "I have magnetism of the platform," she
used to say. Her vanity and personal ambition made her unfit for
discipleship, and useless as a work in Swami Vivekananda's
movement.49

This strange Frenchwoman seems to have exasperated some of

Swamiji's other disciples as well, including, later on, Sister
Nivedita, who was to write of her from India in 1899, "Such
egotism I have new imagined!" 50 But Swamiji's attitude toward
her was equally unimaginable. Nivedita remarked upon it a week
later with almost the same exclamatory phrase: "Such greatness,
such sweetness, such humility as I see in him towards her, I could
not have imagined!"51

As is well known, Swamiji gave the vows of sannyasa to Mme

Marie Louise and the name Abhayananda at Thousand Island
Park. The ceremony took place on Sunday, July 7, very possibly
at sunrise, with a homa fire outdoors.52 "One of my new
Sannyasins is indeed a woman,"53 Swamiji was to write in March
of 1896 to his apparently astounded Madras disciple Alasinga
Perumal, who had read the news in the New York Herald of
January 19, 1896. "She was a leader of the labourers," 54 he added
in a heretofore unpublished sentence, which must also have struck
Alasinga dumb.

The newspaper article Alasinga had read and had reprinted in the
Brahmavadin was a review of Swamiji's work in New York. The
paragraph that concerns us here gives us what little we know of
Mme Marie Louise’s background. For the past twenty-five years
she had been an American citizen living in New York City and
known to liberal circles as "a materialist, socialist (some say
anarchist), friend of Emma Goldman and others of that ilk." At
the beginning of 1895 she had been
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a prominent member of the Manhattan Liberal Club and was

known in the press and on the platform as "a fearless, progressive,
advanced woman, whose boast it was that she was always in the
forefront of the battle and ahead of her times."55

The rumors that Mme Marie Louise was an Anarchist were

probably untrue; she could not have been a Socialist and an
Anarchist at the same time, for the latter contemptuously, and
necessarily, rejected all forms of political organization. Still, if
she was a friend of the young Emma Goldman (an Anarchist
loader of fiery disposition) "and others of that ilk," she very likely
sympathized with the wildly unrealistic and utopian ideals of
theoretical Anarchism. At any rate, she clearly had been a
vociferous and, it would appear, by no means self-effacing
champion of the oppressed and desperate laboring classes, who
had not yet found a united voice of their own. When and how she
first came to Swamiji, whom she was to call "Mon Papa," we do
not know; but once she had found her way to him, the direction of
her life altogether changed, though not overnight her nature. "She
is impetuous, and quick to take offense where no offense is
intended," Ruth Ellis would write to Mrs. Bull from the Park on
Monday, July 29, "but withal she has splendid qualities and I
expect much from her. She can reach the masses and her work
will probably lie in that direction. She has softened wonderfully
since her initiation and the Swami seems satisfied with her." 56
Leon Landsberg, whom Swamiji also initiated into sannyasa at
Thousand Island park, giving him the name of Kripananda,
arrived on July 11. "The Master calls," he had written to Mrs. Bull
from New York the day before, "and I am ready to do his will. I
just received a letter from the Swami asking me to come to
Thousands' Island. I suppose you know the object. I shall
probably leave to-night "57 The storm that had earlier raged in his
soul, stirring it up, as he said; "to its very foundations," may have
been salutary. In a second letter to Mrs. Bull that will be given is
full later on, Ruth Ellis was to remark upon the great change
"which has taken place in
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Landsberg. We all noticed it and were touched by it."58

But as will be clear in later chapters, Leon Landsberg did not

remain (on the surface, at least) greatly changed-no more so than
did Mme Marie Louise. Indeed, in view of what is known of these
two disciples, both of whom were eventually to turn against
Swamiji, the question of why he gave them sannyasa is bound to
arise. Presumptuous and ultimately unanswerable though such a
question may be, one cannot help reflecting over it, hoping that
such refection, however short it may fall of the mark, may lead to
some small understanding of Swamiji himself.
We can be sure at the outset that Swamiji knew these disciples far
better than did anyone else, seeing in them virtues and strengths
hidden from others by an overlay of faults and weaknesses-which
weaknesses themselves he may have seen as latent strengths. His
choice of these two, Sister Christine writes, "grew out of the
theory which he then held that fanaticism is power gone astray," a
force that "can be transmuted and turned into a higher channel." 59
No doubt Swamiji was moved by the inner worth and potential
powers of these disciples, seeing therein their capacity for good
work. But did he not a1w see the flaws that would make it
unlikely that either Abhayananda or Kripananda would be able to
carry on his work successfully? One cannot but think that he of
course did (though differently than we) ; nor can it be thought that
he had no motives for giving sannyasa other than to mate good
workers. Such initiation from him was a rocketing into spiritual
freedom for the disciples-though fire if need be. It was an event of
supreme importance in the long journey of the soul, the meaning
of which soul hardly be read in terms of one lifetime alone.

A few years later Swamiji was to say to Sister Nivedita in

connection with his giving sannyasa to Westerners, "I am at heart
a mystic, Margot, all this reasoning is only apparent I am really
always the lookout for signs and things—and
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so I never bother about the fate of my initiations. If they want to

be sannyasins badly enough I feel that the rest is not my business.
Of course it has its bad side. I have to pay dearly for my blunder
sometimes-but it has one advantage. It has kept me still a
sannyasin through all this-and that is my ambition, to die a real
sannyasin as Ramakrishna Paramahansa actually was-free from
lust-& desire of wealth, & thirst for fame. That thirst for fame is
the worst of all folth."60

His bestowal of sannyasa, then, was not motivated. by an

evaluation of the candidate's potential for beneficent power nor by
his recognition of some special virtues; more simply, it was his
unreasoned response to the prayer of the disciple, the outflowing
of his grace that knew no calculation. This is not to say that
Swamiji gave initiation for the mere asking. He gave "if they
want to be sannyasins badly enough." In a letter written the
following year to the Brahmavadin, Kripananda mentions
Swamiji's "great reluctance to create Sanyasins in this country,
except upon the most urgent insistence of the applicants." 61 It was
the inner cry alone that tapped his grace.

Another point that can perhaps be ventured here is that aside from
Swamiji's immediate reasons of mind or heart for giving the vows
of sannyasa to any individual, his acts-the acts of a world teacher-
were far-reaching, establishing a pattern for the future. His desire,
as he often intimated, was to see many hundreds of men and
women of the West formally renounce the world. "The yellow
robe of the sannyasin is the sign of the free," he said in one of his
last classes at Thousand Island Park. "Give up the beggar's dress
of the world; wear the flag of freedom, the ochre robe." 62
Although Swamiji often said that in this age the highest of
Vedantic thought and practice must spread among nonmonastics
(this was indeed a vital part of his message), he wanted to see a
flowering of monasticism too. In March of 1896 he was to write
to Alasinga from New York, "Yellow-garbed sannyasins will be
common here and in England."63 Could not his first initiations of a
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man and a woman into sannyasa have nudged into being a culture
in the West where the ochre robe would be a common sight?
("Even now," he once said during a morning class in June, "we
can `give the push' in consciousness and it goes beyond and acts
in the superconscious"64 certainly Swamiji could give that push.)
One may still ask, why those two? But who else in America had
so far importuned him for sannyasa? As far as we know, there had
been no one else.

Christina Greenstidel* and Mrs. Mary Funke, of whom we shall

say more later on, were the last students to arrive at Miss
Dutcher's cottage, bringing the number of known disciples up to
eleven. But in her "Introductory Narrative" to Inspired Talks Miss
Waldo writes, "By a singular coincidence just twelve students
followed the Swami to Thousand Island Park.” 65 Who, then, was
the twelfth? At the date of this writing his or her identity is
unknown, and therefore when occasion arises, we shall refer to
this twelfth person as the Unidentified Student. It is probable, as
will be seen later, that he or she was present for only a week or
ten days in the first part of July.

The morning after he arrived at Thousand Island Park Swamiji

started to hold his classes in the new room just below his own. It
was a small group that gathered around him; aside From Miss
Dutcher, Miss Ellen Waldo must have been present, for it is her
notes of this class of June 19 that open the now famous book
Inspired Talks. "We had not yet all assembled there," she wrote at
the outset, "but the Master's heart was always in his work, so he
commenced at once to teach the three or four who were with
him."66 Who the other one or two were we can only guess, but for
a number of reasons, with which we need not bother the reader,
the best guess is that they were Ruth Ellis and Dr. Wight, close
friends of Miss
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Waldo's, both of whom very likely came with her from New York.

The room was relatively large and full of light. Five tall windows
(two of which can be seen in the photograph of the house) looked
out into leafy trees; a door opened onto the veranda, and another
onto the small front parlor.67 As we have seen earlier, there was no
fireplace (as there is today), and thus there was plenty of wall
space for a number of chairs and perhaps a sofa or two. Where
Swamiji's chair stood, no memoir has told us; yet perhaps that
spot is not more vibrant than any other in the room, for according
to the accounts that have come down to us, he seldom remained
seated when talking to the small informal group. As he became
absorbed in his subject, he would often pace back and forth,
propelled, as it were, by the force of his thought. The whole room
was his dais.

That first morning he came with a Bible in his hand. Those who
were present were all Christians, he said; so it was proper to start
with a Christian scripture. He chose the Gospel of John, "in the
first five verses of [which], is the whole essence of Christianity;
each verse is full of the profoundest philosophy."68 And it was not
long before Christianity and Vedanta were indistinguishable;
Religion itself, unlabeled and eternal, poured from his lips-and for
forty-three morning classes thereafter it continued to do so.

In Inspired Talks we have by no means everything Swamiji said

during those incomparable morning sessions, for Miss Waldo's
longhand lagged behind his flow of words, perhaps catching only
every other sentence or so. But if her notes were not speedy they
were expert. Aphoristic, often startling in their clarity, beauty, and
depth, they seem like scripture itself. Indeed one can find on
almost any page of Inspired Talks a wealth of Vedantic thought as
concentrated and sharply focused as in an Upanishad. Swamiji
was himself amazed at the faithfulness with which she captured
his thought, and one day he expressed his delight. The incident
has been related by Sister Devamata:
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. . . As [Miss Waldo] herself said, it was as if the thought of

Swami Vivekananda flowed through her and wrote itself upon the
page. Once when she was reading a portion of these same notes to
some tardy arrivals in the Thousand Island Park home, the Swami
paced up and down the floor, apparently unconscious of what was
going on, until the travellers had left the room; then he turned to
her and said: "How could you have caught my thought and words
so perfectly? It was as if I heard myself speaking." What need of
other commendation?69

No need. One only regrets that Miss Waldo did not take notes
throughout every day and well into the night; for according to all
accounts, Swamiji taught not only during the morning class, but
continually. "He told us," Miss Waldo later wrote, "that he
accepted us as real disciples and that was why he so constantly
and freely taught us, giving his best" 70 The morning classes,
however, perhaps represented the core of his teachings at
Thousand Island Park; they seem indeed to contain the core of his
teachings in the Western world, as though he wished to present to
this small group the very heart of his message.

It should be mentioned here in passing that Inspired Talks has not

come to us from Swamiji's lips entirely unedited. Some
unconscious editing was, for instance, inevitable even as Miss
Waldo took down his words, but the major editing was done in
1907 by Miss Laura Glenn (later Sister Devamata) with Miss
Waldo's permission and approval. "It is criminal for you to keep
these notes to yourself," Miss Glenn had exclaimed on hearing
them read. "They belong to the world." To which Miss Waldo had
replied:

"They have always seemed to me too Fragmentary, too

inadequate, to publish. . . . They would give a false idea of the
wonderful teaching Swamiji gave us during those six weeks at
Thousand Island Park." She remained silent
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for a moment [Sister Devamata recalled]; then her face lighted

up; she leaned forward in her chair, held out the book of notes and
said to me: "If you are willing to take them and work on them and
bring them out, I am glad to pass them over to you. If I tried to do
anything with them, I should be thinking all the time how lacking
they were."71

Expert as Sister Devamata's editing may have been, it did here

and there dampen the ring of Swamiji's voice. We are fortunate in
having a second set of notes, which was brought to light in recent
years by Swami Atmaghanananda. 72 Although these notes are
anonymous and indeed fragmentary, they not only provide a few
additions to Miss Waldo's notes as give in Inspired Talks, but
contain a few differences of expression. Such differences are, to
be sure, of no philosophical importance, but they seem to reveal
the vigor and freshness of Swamiji's diction and style. To give
two instances of what may have been a certain refining process in
Inspired Talks: Swamiji it quoted there as saying, "Three great
gifts we have: first, a human body. . . . Second, the desire to be
free. Third, the help of a noble soul. . . . When you have these
three, bless the Lord; you are sure to be free." 73 According to the
anonymous set of notes, what Swamiji said was not "bless the
Lord," but "you have made the lucky throw of the dice"-certainly
a more refreshing thing to say. Again, in Inspired Talks Swamiji is
quoted as saying, "There is a vast difference between saying
`food, food' and eating it, between saying, `water, water' and
drinking it."74 What he actually said was not "water, water" but,
more vigorously, "wine, wine." On the positive side, the
anonymous notes give strong evidence that (from July 2 forward,
at least) the sequence of Miss Waldo's notes as it occurs in
Inspired Talks is faithful to the sequence and dates of Swamiji's
classes-except for some minor and curious rearrangements.

(The question arises here of who took this second set of

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notes. They start on July 2, which would lead one to suppose, in

accordance with our knowledge of the comings and goings of the
students, that the note taker was either Stella or the Unidentified
Student's I believe we can at once rule out Stella, who, as far as
Sister Christine knew, seldom came to the classes; one does not
picture her as taking notes. Let us assume, then, that our note
taker was the Unidentified Student. We find that he or she
struggled manfully up to July 10. From then to the last class on
August 6 the notes are almost (but not entirely) identical with
Miss Waldo's, as we know the latter from Inspired Talks. It is
possible that the Unidentified Student remained at Thousand
Island Park until August 6. But it is also possible that he or she
left the Park on July 10 or 11 and copied Miss Waldo's notes at a
later date.)

For convenience, Swamiji's morning class can, I think, be divided

into three not altogether arbitrary parts. The first extends from
June 19 through July 5; the second, from July 6 through July 19;
and the third from July 20 through August 6. It is not that he was
teaching different subjects, or even different aspects of the same
subject; these different parts mark, rather, somewhat different
avenues of approach to the same persistent and compelling theme
that was to ring through all his teachings in the West during the
next year and a half. As far as we can know from Inspired Talks,
the first section (according to this scheme) consisted of twelve
classes.”76 During the course of these he took as his texts the
Gospel of John, the Narada Bhakti Sutras (summarizing the
entire book in one session), and the Bhagavad Gita. In addition,
he devoted one morning to a talk on Sri Ramakrishna and another
to a talk on the Divine Mother. He spoke of God, the path of
devotion, Divine Incarnation, Bibles, and Prophets. There was a
wonderful variety of religious thought, a symphony of many
themes, each exquisite in its own truth. And each was related in
its own way to a great pervasive master theme-or, one might say,
each was illumined from within by the same unwavering light:
through
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out these classes one basic instruction resounded: "Stand upon the
Self!""

To quote almost at random: "We are striving `to be' and nothing
more, no `I' even just pure crystal, reflecting all, but ever the
same. . . . Know you are the Infinite, then fear must die. Say ever,
`I and my Father are one.' "'a "All pleasures of the senses or even
of the mind are evanescent; but within ourselves is the one true
unrelated pleasure, dependent upon nothing. It is perfectly free, it
is bliss. The more our bliss with in, the more spiritual we are. The
pleasure of the Self is what the world calls religion” 79 Life and
death are only different names for the same fact, the two sides of
the one coin. Both are Maya, the inexplicable state of striving at
one time to live, and a moment later to die. Beyond this is the true
nature, the Atman."80" In short, as Swamiji was to say toward the
end of the summer, "The keynote running through the music is `I
am He, I am He'; all other notes are but variation and do not affect
the real theme."81 Indeed so monistic was the primary theme
running through Swamiji's first two weeks of classes (devotional
though they also were) that Miss Waldo used her notes of them to
give an ending to another set of notes taken down most likely
during his New York classes on jnana yoga, held earlier in the
year. (See note for chapter one, page 41.)

From the start he taught a doctrine of strength, spurning softness

of approach. "Get freedom, even at the cost of life," he thundered
while teaching from the Bible. ". . . All we can do is to put down
all desires, hates, differences; put down the lower self, commit
mental suicide, as it were. . . . Seek truth for truth's sake alone,
look not for bliss. It may come, but do not let that be your
incentive. Have no motive except God. Dare to come to Truth
even through hell."82
9

According to the scheme we arc here following, the second part

of Inspired Talks began on July 6. The group of students
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had become somewhat larger. "Marie Louise arrived yesterday,"

Swamiji wrote to Betty Sturges sometime before July 7. "So we
are exactly seven now including all that have come yet." 83 Was it
coincidence that with the arrival of the intellectual and intense
Frenchwoman Swamiji now took as his text the Brahma Sutra
Bhashya of Shankaracharya, or had the awaited book only just
arrived? In any event, the morning class now entered the deep
waters of Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

As is well known to every student of Indian philosophy, the

Brahma Sutras, or Vedanta Sutras, was an ancient attempt to
systematize the sometimes obscure and contradictory thought of
the Upanishads. These highly terse and elliptical sutras have been
ascribed to Badarayana Vyasa, of whom little is known, (Some
scholars place him in ancient times, and tradition identifies him
with Veda Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata.) Because of
their near impenetrability, the 550-odd aphorisms of this
compendious work have been interpreted down through the ages,
each commentator at times twisting the text a bit, as Swamiji
pointed out, to suit his own philosophical bent and
thesis-"conscious liars" all. The commentaries of Shankara
(monistic), Ramanuja (qualified-monistic), and Madhva
(dualistic) are the best known.

As early as March 6, 1895, Swamiji, in an unpublished passage,

had written to Alasinga Perumal, "Can you send me the books I
wrote you for?"84 And on April 4, "Send me the Vedanta Sutras
and the Bhasyas of all the sects." 85 a Alasinga had already sent the
first volume of the Bhashya of Ramanuja. On his receipt of the
book Swamiji wrote a long letter (dated May 6, 1895) to his
disciple, in the course of which he explained in some detail his
reason for wanting all the great commentaries. The passage is
well known, but can be repeated here, for it sounds one of the
main themes of his thought:

Now I will tell you my discovery. All of religion is contained in

the Vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the Vedanta philosophy,
the Dvaita [Dualism], Vishi -
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shtadvaita (Qualified-monism], and Advaita [Nondualism]; one

comes after the other. These are the three stages of spiritual
growth in man. Each one is necessary. This is the essential of
religion; the Vedanta, applied to the various ethnic customs and
creeds of India, is Hinduism. The first stage, i.e. Dvaita, applied
to the ideas of the ethnic groups of Europe, is Christianity; as
applied to the Semitic groups, Mohammedanism. The Advaita, as
applied in its Yoga-perception form, is Buddhism, etc. Now by
religion is meant the Vedanta; the applications must vary
according to the different needs, surroundings, and other
circumstances of different nations. You will find that although the
philosophy is the same, the Shaktas, Shaivas, etc. apply it each to
their own special cult and ,forms. . . I wish to write a book on this
subject, therefore I wanted the three Bhashyas; but only one
volume of the Ramanuja (Bhashya) has reached me as yet. 86
Swamiji was eager to receive the other volumes, which were long
in coming. In May he had written to Mrs. Bull about the expected
arrival of the Sanskrit works and his intention "to write a book in
English on the Vedanta Philosophy in its three states when I am at
Thousand Islands."87 Other Sanskrit books came from India, but
not, it would appear, the Bhashyas. In a heretofore unpublished
letter to Mrs. Hale, dated May 16, 1895, Swamiji had written
from New York in regard to the arrival and nonarrival of books
and other packages and packets from India-always a matter of
concern. His letter is given here in full:

54 W. 33
New York
16th May'95

Dear Mother

Your kind note duly reached. The books have arrived safe and
more are coming. The Sanskrit books pay no
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duty being classics. I expect a big package from Khetri. The big
packet was from the raja of Khetri sending me an address from a
meeting held of Rajput nobility at Mount Abu for my work in this
country.

I do not know whether I will be able to come over to Chicago or

not. I am trying to get a free pass-in case I succeed I will come,
else not. Financially this winter's work was no success at all. I
could barely keep myself up, but spiritually very great. I am going
to the Thousand Islands for the summer to visit a friend and some
of my pupils will be there.

I have got plenty of books now to read from India and I will be
quite engaged this summer.

The Khetri package will not arrive soon, so kindly make

arrangements that it will be received during your absence if you
go away. [There] will have to be paid a heavy duty for [it] I am
afraid.
Mrs. [Florence] Adams brought me the love from the [Hale]
Sisters on her way to Europe. She started this morning. A large
package of books also I expect soon: The original Upanishads;
there is no duty on them.

I have had some trouble with my stomach; hope it will be over in

a few days.

With love to all, I am ever your affectionate Sons88

Vivekananda

It was no doubt in regard to the same shipment of safely arrived

books that Swamiji had written from New York to Mary Hale,
who generally attended to forwarding to him his Chicago-
addressed letters and packages: "The letters from India and the
parcel of books reached me safe." In another passage of this letter
it is clear that those books were not the eagerly awaited Bhashyas.
"The three great commentaries on the Vedanta philosophy
belonging to the three great sects of dualists, qualified dualists,
and monists are being sent to me from India. Hope they will
arrive safe. Then I will have an
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intellectual feast indeed. I intend to write a book this summer on

the Vedanta philosophy."89

It is not clear from Swamiji's letters exactly when the Bhashyas

came into his hands. As late as June 26 he was still "expecting
some books from India," and asking Mary Hale to "kindly send
them over here [to Thousand Island park]. 90 But finally they
arrived. As has been said, we know that Swamiji began his
discussion of the Vedanta Sutras on July 6. And although Miss
Waldo does not always indicate in her notes on which days he
read from and elucidated the commentaries, it is possible to
discover (to some extent at least) the mornings on which he
brought one or another of the great tomes to the class. For
instance, on the morning of July 6, he went through the entire text
of Shankara's introduction to his commentary, in which is
discussed the subject of adhyasa, or the superimposition of the
object upon the subject, the latter of which is "the only reality;
the other [the object] a mere appearance." On this same morning,
he covered also Shankara's commentary on the first and second
aphorisms of the Brahma Sutras, bringing out the salient points
from the midst of long and weighty arguments and expositions,
which tend to confound the Western student, particularly in the
then available English translatio. 91 On July 10 he took up the
commentary on the third aphorism; on July 12 and 16 (jumping
around a bit) that on the fourth aphorism; and on July 18, that on
the fifth.

Interspersed, were classes on the Shri Bhashya of Ramanuja.

Although Miss Waldo made no note of it, Swamiji seems to have
begun his discussion of Ramanuja's philosophy, or theology, on
the morning of Sunday, July 7. He began to quote from
Ramanuja's Shri Bhashya on that afternoon and continued to
elucidate it on the following morning and the morning after that.
As for the Bhashya of Madhvacharya, he did not linger with it.
"Madhva is a thoroughgoing dualist or dualist," he said. ". . . He
quotes chiefly from the Puranas. He says that Brahman means
Vishnu, not Siva at all, because
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there is no salvation except through Vishnu. . . . There is no place

for reasoning in Madhva's explanation, it is all taken from the
revelation in the Vedas."92 That is almost all we find about
Madhvacharya in Inspired Talks.
It was the Bhashyas of Shankara and Ramanuja that claimed
Swamiji's attention from July 6 through July 19. Throughout
these classes he not only quoted from the commentaries but gave
his own harmonizing views. To Swamiji it was on the basis of
Advaita that the dualistic religions, from the most crude to the
most rarefied, had validity; they Were needed representations or
expressions of the soul's partial visions of itself at varying
distances-some far off and awesome, some close and enrapturing.
Ultimately, they led to the highest realization of all-that of the
identity of the unveiled soul with the Self or Brahman. Swamiji's
reconciliation of the three philosophical schools of Vedanta was,
as he himself was later to say, a contribution to Indian thought.
Previously each school had been considered a different, though
equally valid, path to the soul's liberation. Sri Ramakrishna had
demonstrated the actual truth of this in his life, verifying it
beyond all doubt. Swamiji now pointed out philosophically the
basis for the harmony of all religious ideals and paths, showing
them to be but stages on the way back to the One Reality as
taught by Advaita Vedanta. When asked in later years why, if this
view was correct, it had never before been mentioned by any of
the Masters, he replied, with the knowledge of his own stature,
"Because I was born for this and it was left for me to do." 93

In his classes at Thousand Island Park we find him dwelling on

this subject, explaining again and again the place of dualistic
religions in relation to Advaita Vedanta, the meaning of the
Personal God in relation to the Absolute Brahman. Indeed, the
views he expressed at Miss Dutcher's cottage perhaps constitute
an important part of the book he wanted to write that summer.
Here are a few passages pertinent to this particular theme.
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So long as I say "you" [he said on July 19] I have the right to
speak of God protecting us. When I see another, I must take all
the consequences and put in the third, the ideal, which stands
between us; that is the apex of the triangle. . . . The idea of
creation or change is inseparably connected with will. So long as
we perceive this world in motion, we have to conceive will
behind it. . . . From our present standpoint, this world appears to
us as will and consciousness. Personal God is as much an entity
for Himself as we are for ourselves, and no more. 94

And a few days later:

Separating ourselves from the Absolute and attributing certain

qualities to It gives us Isvara. It is the Reality of the universe as
seen through our mind.95

A week later:
Man does not manufacture God out of his own brain; but he can
only see God in the light of his own capacity, and he attributes to
Him the bat of all he knows. Each attribute is the whole of God,
and this signifying the whole by one quality is the metaphysical
explanation of the Personal God. Isvara is without form yet has
all forms, is without qualities yet has all qualities. As human
beings, we have to see the trinity of existence--God, man, nature;
and we cannot do otherwise.96

It is through God Himself that we can go beyond Him, back (as it

were) to the Absolute Brahman. "Some imaginations help to
break the bondage of the rest," Swamiji said in his last-but-one
day at Thousand Island Park. "The whole universe is imagination,
but one set of imaginations will cure another set. . . . The highest
imagination that can break all the links of the chain is that of the
Personal God."97

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There are many definitions and explanations of the Personal God,

both as Ishvara and as the Divine Mother, in Inspired Talks, but
let us quote just one more-one in which we find the illusory line
between God and Brahman-the "optical illusion," the difference
that does not exist and yet, because we see it, cannot be denied:
The sea calm is the Absolute; the same sea in waves is Divine
Mother. She is time, space, and causation. God is Mother and has
two natures, the conditioned and the unconditioned. As the
former, She is God, nature, and soul (man). As the latter, She is
unknown and unknowable. Out of the Unconditioned came the
trinity: God, Nature, and soul-the triangle of existence."

To the orthodox Vishishtadvaitist (qualified-monist) the triangle is

real; to the Advaitist, it is the magic spell under which, for a time,
man laughs and cries and prays-all the while, as Swamiji said,
eternally free. "Beyond [Maya] is the true nature, the Atman.
While we recognise a God, it is really only the Self, from which
we have separated ourselves and worship as outside of us; but it is
our true Self all the time-the one and only God.”99
Ramanuja would not have agreed. Nor perhaps would Shankara
have agreed with Swamiji's [and Sri Ramakrishna's] recognition
of the Vishishtadvaita stage as essential in the life of the aspiring
soul. Essential, but not permanent or prolonged. Swamiji never
tired of emphasizing that while the jiva (the individual soul) must
recognize a God, the effort must be ever toward freedom, toward
the Advaitic realization, not toward further and further
dependence, not , in the gravitational field of Maya, toward a
more and more crude and debilitating form of dualism.
"Fearlessness is not possible as long as we have even God over
us; we must be God.'”100 "We create God in our image; it is we
who create Him to be our master, it is not God who mates us His
servants. When we
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know that we are one with God, that we and He are friends, then
come equality and freedom. So long as you hold yourself
separated by a hair's breadth from the Eternal One, fear cannot
go."101 And again, "Never forget the glory of human nature. We
are the greatest God that ever was or ever will be. Christs and
Buddhas are but waves on the boundless ocean which I am. Bow
down to nothing but your own higher Self. Until you know that
you are that very God of gods, there will never be any freedom
for you."102

Swami completed his discussion of the Bhashyas of the Brahma

Sutras on July 18 or 19, and so ended (according to our division)
the second part of his morning class.

10

It appears to have been around this time that two strangers, wet,
bedraggled, and terrified by their own boldness, knocked one dark
and rainy night at the Front door. Miss Dutcher, who let them in,
called Swamiji from the upstairs veranda to see the "two ladies
from Detroit."1 He came down the stairs to the little parlor, and
the young women, overwhelmed in his presence, forgot all their
rehearsed speeches. The words tumbled out: "We have come to
you just as we would go to Jesus if he were still on the earth and
ask him to teach us.”9

"He greeted us so sweetly!" one of them was to write to a friend.

"It was like a benediction."3 And he said, "If only I possessed the
power of the Christ to set you free now!" 4 Then after a few more
words, he invited them upstairs to join the group to whom he had
been talking. "And what do you think?" the letter went on.
"Instead of our staying at a hotel or boarding house, as we
expected, those dear people insisted [the next day] upon our
becoming members of the household. Our hearts sang paeans of
praise."6

And thus it was that Mrs. Mary Funke and Miss Christina
Greenstidel came to Swamiji6--"my disciples," he would say
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in later years, "who travelled hundreds of miles to find me, and

they came in the night and in the rain."7

According to Sister Christine's memoirs, she and Mrs. Funke

arrived at Thousand Island Park on the night of July 6. Yet her
memory of the date was admittedly not certain, for when first
mentioning it she wrote, "It must have been the 6th of July, 1895,
that we had the temerity to seek him out."8 With due apologies to
Sister Christine, one must venture to say that there are a number
of reasons that the date could not have been the sixth of July. First
of all, July 6 was not a rainy night. The first time that rain fell in
the area after weeks of what the natives considered to be a
drought was on the night of Monday, July 8. It was an event
worthy of notice. "The blessed rains came last night beginning at
8 p.m.," the Watertown Times rejoiced.9 Nor could the two young
ladies have arrived on the evening of July 8, for it seems clear
from Sister Christine's memoirs that Leon Landsberg was there
ahead of them, and he, it is certain, had arrived not earlier than
July 11. Again, we learn from Sister Christine that Swamiji was
planning to initiate several people on the Monday following the
arrival of the two young women from Detroit. The two initiation
ceremonies that Swamiji held at Thousand Island Park took place
on Sunday, July y (when he gave the vows of sannyasa and the
name Abhayananda to Mme Marie Louise), 10 and Monday, July
22 (when he gave the same vows and the name Kripananda to
Leon Landaberg). In all probability it was the second occasion to
which Sister Christine was referring, and thus it could have been
on the rainy night of Saturday, July 20, that she and Mary Funke
arrived. According to another reference in Christine's memoirs,
however, it was not the twentieth, but the equally rainy
nineteenth. Writing of their first meeting at the cottage, she
precisely describes the class which is dated July 20 in Inspired
Talks. Indeed, her notes of this morning class coincide in places
almost word for word with Miss Waldo's.11 Nor in any of
Christine's writings about Thousand Island Park does she
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refer to classes or events earlier than those of July 20. So even if

we had only the inclusions and omissions in the memoirs of Sister
Christine to go by, we would feel confident in giving the date of
July 19 to that memorable dark and rainy night. But we have also
a series of letter fragments, interwoven with reminiscences,
written by Mary Funke. These "Reminiscences," as the
composition is called as a whole, appeared in Prabuddha Bharata
in February of 1927, only a few months before Mrs. Funke died.
The date that heads it is "July 19 [1895].” 12 It is clear enough that
the first letter fragment was not written on the day of arrival; but
it is also clear that the date does not belong to the first fragment
any more than to later, undated fragments; rather, its purpose, it
would seem, is to mark the beginning of that wonderful and
auspicious time. All in all, then, July 19 would seem to have been
the date of the arrival of the "two ladies from Detroit "

But late though they may have come, they stayed to the end and
were filled, as were all the others, to overflowing. Indeed it was a
time not to be counted in days or weeks; it partook of eternity-a
time they could never have imagined in anticipation and could
not easily recapture in memory.
Only if one's mind were lifted to that high state of consciousness
in which we lived for the time, could we hope to recapture the
experience (Sister Christine was to write in her memoirs]. We
were filled with joy. We did not know at that time that we were
living in his radiance. On the wings of inspiration, he carried us to
the height which was his natural abode. He himself, speaking of it
later, said that he was at his best in Thousand Islands. 13

As is well known to everyone familiar with Swami Vivekananda's

life, Christina Greenstidel and her friend Mary Funke had first
heard Swamiji in their home town of Detroit in mid February of
1894. A combination of conditions-religious and intellectual
boredom, the dreary monotony of Detroit's usual
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lecture season, Mary Funke's unquenchable sense of optimism

about what lay around the next corner, and, surely, some
imponderable element-had taken them one evening to the
Unitarian Church to hear "Vive Kananda, the Hindoo Monk."
They had gone hoping for a ray of light, and they found the sun
itself.

"Surely, never in our countless incarnations had we taken a step

so momentous!" Sister Christine was to write long after, the
wonder of the event only increasing with the passing years. "For
before we had listened five minutes, we knew that we had found
the touchstone for which we had searched so long. In one breath,
we exclaimed--`If we had missed this . . . !' "14

Swamiji was in Detroit that season from February 12 to 23 and

from March 9 to 30. He gave eight public lectures in the city, all
of which the two friends attended. They did not meet him
personally; it had been enough to be in the same auditorium with
that radiant power, to listen to that mind.

That amazing mind! (Sister Christine was to recall.] What can one
say that will give even a faint idea of its majesty, its glory, its
splendour? It was a mind so far transcending other minds, even of
those who rank as geniuses, that it seemed different in its very
nature. Its ideas were so clear, so powerful, so transcendental that
it seemed incredible that they could have emanated from the
intellect of a limited human being. . . . He burst upon us in a blaze
of reddish gold, which seemed to have caught and concentrated
the sun's rays. He was barely thirty, this preacher from far away
India.15

After Swamiji had left Detroit the two young women lost track of
him. It was not until the summer of the following year that a
friend happened to inform them that he was still in America and
was spending the summer at Thousand Island Park. One can
imagine that Christina Greenstidel and Mary Funke simply
looked at one another and without a word knew
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what they would do. Early the next morning they were on a train
headed east--to Niagara Falls (or perhaps to Buffalo), New York;
from there to Clayton, and thence by river steamer to the Dock at
the Park: a journey all told of more than five hundred miles.

Arriving in the early evening, they no doubt took a room and had
dinner; and then, for they could not wait, they made in inquiries at
the village stores about how to find Swami Vivekananda. At
length they learned that there were, yes, "some queer people
living up on the hill, among whom is a foreign looking
gentleman."16 They hired a man with a lantern, who led them
through the rain to the Tabernacle and thence along a wet and
slippery path--slick with mud in some spots, with wet granite in
others--up and across the wooded hill. They could not have gone
more than sixty yards before they saw a light through the trees
and heard the "rich, beautiful voice of the Swami, who was
talking to those who had gathered on his porch." "Our heart-beats
could have been heard, I truly believe!" Mary Funke later wrote
to her friend17 But their courage did not fail them. They reached
the cottage, walked up the front steps, knocked on the door--and
we know the rest.

These two pilgrims became dear to Swamiji, particularly

Christina Greenstidel. Gentle, "pure in soul," 18 as he said, and self
sacrificing, she would, he knew, become instrumental in his
Indian work. For Mary Funke he saw another road. Of her future
he was to say, dashing her romantic dreams of wearing yellow
robes in Himalayan caves-"You are a householder. Go back to
Detroit, find God in your husband and family. That is your path at
present." Eminently sensible, she acknowledged the rightness of
his words. "How foolish of me " she later wrote, "and how wise
Swamiji was!"19

Of Mary Caroline Funke's background and life we know only that

her husband, Charles F. Funke, was a wholesale grocer in Detroit
and an elder in the Presbyterian Church (which, on the whole, did
not look with favor upon Swamiji).
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We know also that Mary Funke was beautiful, gracious, and

charming, that she was somewhat older than Sister Christine, that
she suffered From ill health in later years, that she died a widow
in August of 1927 and was survived by a daughter. To judge from
her letters and reminiscences, together with the memoirs of
Christine, she had an optimistic and sunny disposition, a bubbling
sense of humor, the gift of giving herself to others, and the
blessed ability to amuse Swamiji. She had, as well, the "temerity"
to seek him out with Christina in his "retreat," the humility to be
aghast at her own boldness, and the courage, again, to knock upon
his door. "Mrs. Funke is a jewel," Swamiji was to write in a letter
to Christine years later, "--all blessings on her."20

Christina Greenstidel had the same courage, the same humility,

the same dauntless spirit as her friend, but she does not seem to
have had the same spontaneous cheerfulness. Indeed her life
(before Swamiji entered it) seems to have been without rapture,
burdened with external responsibilities, darkened by inward
depression, and propelled by an iron will. A sketch written by Mr.
Boshi Sen, a good friend of hers in later years, gives us the only
information we have of her early days. Mr. Sen, whose source
was, no doubt, Christine herself, wrote:

Sister Christine was born of German parentage, in Nuremberg,

August 17, 1866. Her father, Frederick Greenstidel, moved to the
United States when she was only three years old, and the family
settled in Detroit. [The home address of Christine's family was in
the heart of Detroit's German district, as was that of Mary and
Charles Funke.] She had a very happy childhood. Her father, a
noble, free-thinking German scholar, was the hero of her worship
and the object of her adoration. But he lacked business acumen
and as a result lost all his savings and inheritance. At the age of
seventeen, Sister Christine, faced with the responsibility of being
the sole
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provider for her mother and five [actually, four] younger sisters,
accepted the position of teacher in the Detroit Public Schools.
From this time on to the very end, life demanded of her heroic
struggles and noble self-effacement.21

According to Boshi Sen, Christina, outgrowing an early devotion

to the orthodox church, became “one of the first Christian
Scientists of Detroit.” But along with many another spiritual
seeker, she had ventured up other religious avenues and byways
as well. Indeed, in the summer of 1895 she and Mary Funke were
attending a class in Detroit held by Mrs. Peake, an occultist of
sorts. Mrs. Peake, whom Swamiji had once referred to as “a
simple good woman,”22 taught some wonders passing strange.
“The two ladies [so good and pure] who have come from Detroit
were in Mrs. Peake’s class,” he wrote from Thousand Island Park
on July 29, “and unfortunately were mighty frightened with imps
and other persons of that ilk. They have been taught to put a little
salt, just a little, in burning alcohol, and if there is a black
precipitate, that must be the impurities showing the presence of
the imps. However, these two ladies had too much fright from the
imps. It is said that these imps are everywhere filling the whole
universe.”23
It is small wonder that Mary and Christina ran to Thousand Island
Park. “Oh, the sublime teaching of Vivekananda!” Mary Funke
wrote from there. “No nonsense, no talk of ‘astrals,’ ‘imps,’ etc.,
but God, Jesus, Buddha. I feel that I shall never be quite the same
again for I have caught a glimpse of the Real.” 24

In her memoirs, Sister Christine tells how Swamiji happened to

initiate them (?) almost immediately upon their arrival at Miss
Dutcher’s cottage. “We came on Saturday, . . .” se wrote,
meaning, no doubt, the morning they joined the household.
“Swami Vivekananda had planned to initiate several of those
already there on Monday [July 22]. ‘I don’t know you well
enough yet to feel sure that you are ready for initiation,’
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he said on Sunday afternoon. Then he added rather shyly, `I have

a power which I seldom use-the power of reading the mind. If you
will permit me, I should like to read your mind, as I wish to
initiate you with the others tomorrow.' We assented joyfully."28

He told them a little of what he found. "He saw that one of us

[Christina] would be indissolubly connected with India. Important
as well as minor events were foretold for us, nearly all of which
have come to pass. In this reading the quality of the personality
was revealed-the mettle, the capacity, the character." 26 But
modestly enough, Sister Christine does not relate in her memoirs
what she confided to Boshi Sen:

The day after the arrival [Mr. Sen wrote in his sketch], Swamiji,
with Sister Christine's permission, read her life. When he asked:
"May I read all?" she replied: "Yes, of course." "Brave girl !" he
exclaimed. He told her then that she had only three veils left and
that her third eye would open in this life. The next day Swamiji
initiated her.27

The reference to "three veils" and "third eye" has an esoteric ring
uncharacteristic of Swamiji. But whether or not he actually used
these terms, their significance is clear: Christina had already
advanced far along the spiritual path. There may have been other
teats of her readiness as well. Would it not have been during the
first day or two after her arrival that Swamiji, perhaps wanting
quickly to plumb the depth of her spiritual sincerity, or perhaps
forcing her to plumb the depths of her own commitment,
outrageously blew cigarette smoke in her face? In her own words:

It is true that we were conventional and proper to the point of

prudishness. Still even one more Bohemian might have been
disconcerted. He, in the days when men did not smoke before
ladies, would approach, and blow the cigarette smoke deliberately
into one's face. Had it been
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anyone else, I should have turned my back and not spoken to him
again. Even so for a moment I recoiled. I caught myself and
remembered the reason for coming. I had come to one in whom I
had seen such spirituality as I had never even dreamed of. From
his lips I had heard truths unthought of before. He knew the way
to attainment. He would show me the way. Did I intend to let a
little whiff of smoke turn me back? It was all over in last time
than it takes to tell it. I knew it was over in another sense as
well.28

Did Swamiji initiate Christina then and there into brahmacharya?

According to Miss Waldo's reminiscences, written in 1905, it
seems almost certain that he did.

. . . Every one of the students (at Thousand Island Park) received

initiation at the hands of the Swami (Miss Waldo wrote). . . . The
ceremony of initiation was impressive from its extreme
simplicity. A small altar fire, beautiful flowers, and the earnest
words of the Teacher alone marked it as different from our daily
lessons. It took place at sunrise of a beautiful summer day, and the
scene still lives fresh in our memories. Of those who became
Brahmacharinis at Thousand Island Park, two are dead, and one is
now in India helping to carry on the work nearest to Swami
Vivekanauda's heart, the uplifting of his fellow countrymen. 29

As is well known, it was Sister Christine, alone among the

students at Thousand Island Park, who was working in India in
Igo5. (According to Miss Waldo, four others received the vows of
brahmacharya at Thousand Island Park.)30

11

The classes that Christina Greenstidel and Mary Funke attended

from July 20 through August 6 constitute what we
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have called the third part of Inspired Talks. There were only
eighteen classes (and two recorded after noon talks) is this last
section, but there was everything in them that had gone before, at
least in essence, and there was also more. There were discussions
on the necessity for a guru, and also, from a higher standpoint, on
the non necessity for a guru. (In a passage that one finds only is
the anonymous set of notes, Swamiji said on July 13, "We do not
require a guru. Know: I depend on no one; I have all I need, I no
more need a teacher. All a guru is for, is to teach us that we do not
need a teacher.")31 There were discussions, also, of Buddha,
Christ, free will, the art of teaching, the need for chastity, the
theory of raja yoga, the practice of karma yoga and bhakti yoga,
and, throughout, persistently and continuously, the fiery call to
discrimination and renunciation, the insistence on total spiritual
independence, the commands: Stand on the Self! Be Free! There
was little argumentation or philosophical reasoning in Swamiji's
classes; rather, there was the outpouring of one stunning spiritual
truth after another. He himself was proof of their validity. He
seems to have been drawing aside a curtain in the most simple
way to reveal the most simple (and most philosophically abstruse)
of all facts: "I am He"-the individual soul is Brahman. His words,
even as one reads them, convey power as well as knowledge; but,
as Sister Christine writes in her memoirs, "there was something
else, as influence, an atmosphere charged with the desire to
escape from bondage-all it what you will that can never be put
into words, and yet was more powerful than any words. . . .
`Azad, Azad, the Free,' he cried, Pacing up and down like a caged
lion. Yes, like the lion in the cage who found the bars not of iron
but of bamboo."32 Or, "walking up and down the room, getting
more and more excited, he would stop before some one, as if
there were no one else in the room. `Don't you see,' he would say
eagerly, 'there is a reason why chastity is insisted on in all
monastic orders? Spiritual giants are produced only where the
vow of chastity is observed: " 33 Or, again, "He would rush up to
one of us
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With blazing eyes and fingers printing and would exclaim,

‘Remember, God is the only Reality.’ Like a madman, but he was
mad for God.”34

From July twenty-first through the twenty-eighth Swamiji taught

from various texts: the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Bhagavad
Gita, the Brihadaranyaka and Katha Upanishads, and the
uncompromisingly monistic Avadhuta Gita. The following nine
days he seems to have taught without any particular text, creating,
as it were, his own scriptures. And through all ran the grand
theme of man’s innate divinity. It is sometimes said that Swamiji
taught both monism and dualism side by side, or one at one time
and the other at another time. But a reading of Inspired Talks
(among others of his works) would seem to leave no doubt that he
taught only the great fact that One Being alone existed, a Being
that included I and thou, even as the Personal God was included
in and stood upon the Absolute Brahman.

In bringing the teachings of Advaita Vedanta from the “caves and

forests of India” “into our everyday life, the city life, the country
life, the national life, and the home life of every nation,” 35
Swamiji never lost sight of the average man’s practical necessity
to act within the world as he perceived it the world of Maya
perceived at its best on the plane of Vishishtadvaita, where God,
the soul, and Nature form “the trinity of existence.” 36 “What we
need today,” he said, “is to know that there is a God and that we
can see and feel Him here and now.” 37 And again, “At the present
time God should be worshipped as ‘Mother,’ the Infinite Energy.
This will lead to purity, and tremendous energy will come here in
America.”38 But at the same time, as we have attempted to point
out earlier, he let no one lose sight of the One Reality, within
which all dreams—dreams of God, man, and the world—have
their existence. “The dream is only the dreamer, it has no other
basis.”39 Or, to pick another passage more or less at random, “He
who knows he is the Atman, he is a law unto himself. He knows
he is the universe and its c reator.”40 Again, “Atman
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is the reality of all; all we see is Atman, but not as we see it, as
name and form; they are all in our veil, in Maya."41

In Swamiji's teachings at Thousand Island Park one senses a

movement in and out, a swinging from the Formless Reality to
the Divine Illusion of Form magically patterned in Pure
Consciousness. "Learn concentration and use it in any direction,"
he taught. "Thus you lose nothing. He who gets the whole must
have the parts too. Dualism is included in Advaitism.* . . . You
must be able to sympathize fully with each particular, then at once
to jump back to the highest monism. After having perfected
yourself, you limit yourself voluntarily. Take the whole power
into each action. Be able to become a dualist for the time being
and forget Advaita, yet be able to take it up again at will." 42 "Give
up the waves and go to the ocean, then you can have the waves as
you please."43

This practical monism was, in Swamiji's view, essential to the

modern world. It by no means demanded a scornful rejection of
the world as unreal and worthless; it demanded, rather, the
renunciation of the false and narrow vision. It asked that man see
the world in its highest light, as permeated through and through
with divinity. "We divide ourselves into two to love God, myself
loving my Self," he had said on July 3· ". . . The very idea of God
is love. Seeing a cat loving her kittens, stand and pray. God has
become manifest there; literally believe this. Repeat `I am Thine,
I am Thine,' for we can see God everywhere. Do not seek for
Him, just see Him."44 And at a later date, "Everything is the living
God, the living Christ; see it as such. Read man, he is the living
poem."45 And, on the last day, “'The seeing of many is the great
sin of all the world. See alt as Self and love all; let all ideas of
separateness go."46
Was this not the very essence of Swamiji's Vedanta for the
intensely active, deeply involved men and women of the present
day? It was the Vedanta of applied monism, the assertion of one's
own divinity here and now: the persistent
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declaration of, and, consequently, the worship and service of, the
living divinity of all men everywhere and at all times; i was a new
path for a new world.

There are many more strands of Swamiji's world message in

Inspired Talks, but to attempt to trace them all is not my purpose
here. I want only to point out that this early record of his
concentrated teaching of Vedanta to the West announces the
essential theme, the "keynote" that he was to develop and
elaborate during the next year and a half of his Western visit.
There were to be many variations, many philosophical and
psychological explanations, many detailed instructions and
practical teachings, some of which I shall attempt to discuss in
later chapters, but the basic strength-and-freedom giving theme,
"I am , I am He!" was never to be overshadowed by its
expositions and variations. On the contrary, it was to grow more
and more emphatic. By 1900, when he would deliver his last
lectures in the West, he would be admonishing man to "stand
upon the Self" with such unqualified insistence and love that al!
other themes would be drowned out in that lion roar. 47 But that
would be the grand finale, far ahead of our story. Thousand Island
Park was the arresting clap of thunder at the start.

And during what informal and simple times it came! Up until

now, our information about the seven weeks Swamiji spent at
Thousand Island Park has been derived primarily from three well-
known memoirs: those of Ellen Waldo, Sister Christine, and Mary
Funke. In addition, some published letters of Swamiji have also
thrown light on his summer there, but it is mainly through
student-eye views that we (as students) can savor something of
those weeks. We are fortunate, therefore, to have another (though
brief) on-the-spot account in the form of a hitherto unpublished
letter from Ruth Ellis to her friend Sara Bull. Written from
Kingston, Ontario, and dated
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August 9, 1895 it reads in full as follows (Miss Ellis's spelling is

her own) :
My dear Mrs. Bull

We staid at The Park a week longer than we expected to when I

wrote you.* The Swami gave up his trip to Chicago and this
enabled him to lengthen his stay. He started for New York at 8--45
pm Tuesday last [August 6] and I came to this place the next
morning.

Our family at Miss Dutcher's cottage was never smaller than

eight, and sometimes we had ten or even twelve persons. Our
facilities for cooking were somewhat primitive and we had only
one small maid to help us, so you can see that with the classes our
time was fully occupied. It was a trying experiment too, to bring
under the same roof people of such strongly marked peculiarities
as we happened to possess. But we got along with less friction
than I dared to expect, and we all parted better friends than we
were when we came together.

A Mr. and Mrs. Goodyear, a young couple from New York, were
with us for two weeks and proved to be delightful people who put
into daily practice the Vedanta philosophy we were listening to.
Mr. G is a good business man and I think he will prove an
efficient helper to the Swami the coming winter. I wish you had
found it convenient to have come to us here if only for a few
days. Of the teaching itself I can hardly trust myself to dwell
upon. I am very sure that all of us who listened to it came away
better and nobler for having come in contact with the water of life
that could quench all our thirst. The Swami was in admirable
temper all the time; more tolerant than in New York tho' perfectly
fearless and outspoken. One Sunday Miss D asked in as many
people as her parlor would hold and the Swami talked to them of
the principles of Religion as understood by the Hindu people. The
address seemed to be well received and no
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objections could be made to any statement. The Methodist

clergyman Mr. Searls called on the Swami and proposed to have
him speak in the Tabernacle near us, but a Mr. Gracie a returned
missionary, made some objection and this put a stop to the
arrangement *

Two ladies from Detroit who had attended the Swami's lectures in
that place came to us, hardly daring to hope for a welcome yet
feeling that earnestness like theirs could not be refused. They
proved to be sincere and thoughtful and were very enthusiastic.

As to the making of Sanyasis, we were all taken by surprise as

none of us knew that this step was intended. Marie Louise was
ready to fulfill the conditions and the Swami was willing to
accept the responsibility. She seemed to be in dead earnest but she
has many characteristics of the untamed and the untamable, and I
confess a fear that the Swami has taken "a bigger bite than he can
chew."

I could not imagion a greater change than that which has taken
place in Landsberg. We all noticed it and were all touched by it. If
ever the deepths in human life were touched, it surely is in this
case. There was something awfully pathetic in his thin intense
face as he left us in the grey morning [of August 1] to begin his
new life and work. God bless him! I am sure he will do nothing to
dishonor the order he has united himself with. I gave Marie
Louise a part of the money you entrusted to me for her. I think she
was somewhat in debt in New York as she had been ill and unable
to earn anything most of the winter. Mrs Goodyear sees her and
will let me know if she needs' anything. If not I will return the ten
dollars to you or Miss Hamlen. The ten sent by Miss H, I returned
to Marie Louise before your letter containing the checque reached
me. On talking over the matter with her she came to see that Miss
H could still be her friend without congratulating her on
becoming a Sanyasin. I showed your last letter to the Swami
because I had given him the
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first to read & it seemed best that he should see the other as well.
I think he understands you thoroughly and have heard him say
several times that "Mrs Bull is the very best friend I have in
America. She understands my thought and appreciates all that is
good and true in me."

I shall be in Canada for some weeks and shall be very glad to hear
from you. Remember me to Miss Hamlen when you write to her
and tell her I think of her always as a noble woman.

Sincerely Yours48
Ruth Ellis

(Apropos of Swamiji's regard for Mrs. Bull, let us quote here in

passing some hitherto unpublished lines from an undated letter
that he wrote to her from Thousand Island Park:

(In India Raja Ajit Sing of Khetri & in America Mrs Ole Bull-
these are the two persons upon whom I can depend at any time.
Of all the friends I have in the world you two show such
wonderful steadiness of Purpose and both are so calm and silent,
both of your actions remind me of a passage of "Kalidas"-
speaking of a line of Kings-Their workings were so silent that it
was only when the result came, that people could infer that they
were working,--"just as we infer a past life by the results of the
present." The raja is taking very good care of my family.) 49

In connection with the Tabernacle from which Swamiji was

debarred from speaking, a story is told by one who heard it from
Mary Elizabeth Dutcher many years ago. 50 One Sunday morning
Swamiji attended the services at the Tabernacle with Miss
Dutcher (as he may have done more than once). This Sunday
there was a special drive for funds, and before the collection was
taken the minister rhetorically exhorted the members of the
congregation to "give all they
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had in their purses and pockets." When the collection plate came
to Swamiji he quietly put into it several silver dollars a very large
donation in those days, when ten cents was usual and fifty cents
munificent. Miss Dutcher was aghast. "Why did you give so
much!" she whispered. Swamiji looked at her with surprise. "The
man said to give all we had with us," he replied. "That is what I
had."*

Adding Ruth Ellis's letter to the three memoirs mentioned above,

we can perhaps form a more or less clear picture of the days as
they passed, particularly those days after Christina and Mary
Funke had joined the group. It would seem logical to assume that
when the newcomers from Detroit arrived almost everyone else
was there. "Our family . . . was never smaller than eight," Ruth
Ellis writes, "and sometimes we had ten or even twelve persons. "
Presumably she was including Swamiji in this count; so let us say
that at least once there were eleven students-which could have
been only when the Goodyears and "the two ladies from Detroit"
were all four present.51 But the little cottage could not have
accommodated so large a crowd for long, and it is more than
likely that the Goodyears soon left. Indeed, as mentioned earlier,
Sister Christine's description of her fellow students does not
include them; their presence at the cottage has been revealed to us
only through Ruth Ellis. Nor does Christine mention the
Unidentified Student, From which omission we can infer that he
or she had also left-possibly on July 11, as we have earlier
guessed. The others were all there: the two newly ordained
swamis, Miss Dutcher, Miss Watdo, Miss Ellis, Dr. Wight, Stella,
Christine, and Mary Funke-all of whom (with the exception of the
two swamis, who were to leave before Swamiji himself) stayed
on to the end, and some even beyond. Where did all the members
of this group, which was "never smaller than eight" (and often
larger) sleep? The reader already has an idea of the house with its
four tiny upstairs bedrooms, the comparatively large bedroom
(occupied by Stella?) on the ground floor of Swamiji's wing, the
small parlors and verandas.
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Even the voluminous clothes they wore would have required a

large amount of space: the ladies' long skirts and balloonsleeved
shirtwaists, the stiff brimmed straw hats, the many obligatory
petticoats and stays and chemises-where were they all kept? But
who cared? "We put up with some inconveniences, as it is so
crowded," Mary Funke wrote cheerfully to her anonymous
friend.52

They ate at the refectorylike dining table, which filled almost the
whole of the second parlor. Preparations for the midday meal
(always vegetarian) would get under way as soon as the morning
class was over. The bustling about in the little kitchen with its
cast-iron wood-burning stove, cold water sink, icebox, and cooler
was not without anguish for the students. In those days, when
only the poorest of families were without servants, few among the
group were accustomed to doing housework. Even Christine,
whose family had fallen upon hard times, was told by Swamiji in
later years, "You don't know a thing about cooking." 53 Chaos
ensued. One or two of the women were, perhaps, efficient, as, for
instance, Miss Waldo and the French Abhayananda. But these two
strong-minded women would not, certainly, have agreed as to
how things should be done, and the others, trying to be helpful,
would only have got in the way, or, struggling with their allotted
tasks such as slicing bread, would, as Sister Christne tells it, all
but weep.54 At length, as we have seen, "one small maid" was
engaged to help.

Even so, household tensions sometimes neared the breaking

point. Then Swamiji, with fatherly understanding, would give
everyone a respite and a treat. "After a morning in the classroom,
where it almost seemed as if he had gazed into the very face of
the Infinite,"55 he would say with the utmost sweetness, "Today I
shall cook for you."56 At thin Swami Kripananda would groan and
acclaim under his breath, "Heaven save us!" 57 As we have seen in
the last chapter, Kripananda, then Landsberg, had found that
Swamiji's cooking could call for many a utensil. But to the rest of
the students, a meal from
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Swamiji was worth the washing of every pot, pan, and dish in the
place.

"With what patience would he stand over the stove and prepare
some Indian tit-bit for us!" Mary Funke wrote. " .. What a lesson
to his disciples; the brilliant, the great and learned Vivekananda
ministering to their little wants! He was at those times so gentle,
so benign. What a legacy of sacred tender memories has he left
us!"58 And what great fun he was! At another time Mrs Funke
wrote, "He is a wonderful cook and delights in serving the
`brithrin.' The food he prepares is delicious but for `yours truly'
too hot with the various spices; but I made up my mind to eat it if
it strangled me, which it nearly did. If a Vivekananda can cook for
me, I guess the least I can do is to eat it. Bless him!

"At such times we have a whirlwind of fun. Swamiji will stand on

the floor with a white napkin draped over his arm, a la the waiter
on the dining cars, and will intone in perfect imitation their call
for dinner, `Last call for the dining cab. Dinner served.'
Irresistibly funny! And then, at table, such gales of laughter over
some quip or jest, for he unfailingly discovers the little
idiosyncrasies of each one-but never sarcasm or malice--just
fun."59

One thinks of Swamiji saying gravely when Dr. Wight would

appear at mealtime a trifle late, "Here is the Absolute!" 60 or telling
of his first (or second?) meeting with Landsberg, when the latter,
delivering a lecture on "The Devil" at a New York Theosophical
society, would every now and then say the word "devil" with
great emphasis and invariably point at a woman in the audience
who wore a scarlet blouse. 61 One can imagine Swamiji relating
the story with perfect mimicry, to the hilarity of all. He loved to
tell and hear comic anecdotes, at which he would laugh like a
boy; but again, his mood would abruptly change and he would be
telling tales of deep beauty from Indian mythology or history,
holding his listeners enthralled.

Swamiji's conversation-his humor, his vivid story-telling,

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his recollections of his life in India, his flow of ideas on all

subjects—was invariably entertaining, instructive, and uplifting
all at once; no one who ever wrote of him found it to be less. Thus
those spicy meals, with him presiding over the “family,” would
have been veritable festivals. “It was a perpetual inspiration to
live with a man like Swami Vivekananda,” Miss Waldo wrote.
“From morning till night it was ever the same we lived in a
constant atmosphere of intense spirituality.”62

In the afternoons Swamiji had time to himself to rest, to read, to

write letters, to fill “two pretty [Camp Percy] birch bark books”
with Sanskrit texts and translations for Josephine MacLeod and
her sister,63 and perhaps to do other writing. One Sunday
afternoon, as we have already seen, he spoke to the good people
of Thousand Island Park, who had gathered to hear him in Miss
Dutcher’s parlors and who went away unable to object (hard as
some might have tried) to the Hindu views of religion. Often he
would go on a walk in the woods behind the house or down to the
river and perhaps along its bank. Generally, he would take only
Kripananda with him; but sometimes he would ask the whole
group, or perhaps just two or three. “We could walk in all
directions and meet no one,” Sister Christine recalled; 64 but her
memory could have been only three-fourths accurate, for during a
walk south through the village, which was not so far away as she
remembered (Christine’s memories of time and space at Thousand
Island Park were almost all exalted, like those of childhood), they
must have encountered dozens of people. In the last half of July
the Park was crowded with “pleasure a seekers.” This popular
resort,” it was said at that time, “now presents the aspect of a
small city.”65

We know of two such walks the group took through the village.
One of them took place before many people were abroad. They
stopped at the Thousand Island Park Studio, which specialized in
“Portrait Photography, Instantaneous Pictures, [and] Thousand
Island Park Views,”66 and at the request of his students
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Swamiji had tintypes taken of himself, two of which may well

have been the poses reproduced in these pages: one full-length
with a painted river-view for a backdrop, the other a Simple head
and shoulders.* "He was so full of fun, so merry," Mrs. Funke
wrote of this occasion.67 And it is clear to see.

During the other known stroll along the boardwalks of the village,
Swamiji was also Full often and merriment. Mrs. Funke tells of
this outing, which was for her particularly memorable:

One day, we all walked down to the village and passed a glass-
blower's tent. Swamiji was much interested in this and held a
whispered' conversation with the glass-blower. Then he asked us
to take a walk through the main street of the village, and upon our
return the glass-blower handed him sundry mysterious packages
which proved to contain a gift for each of us, a large crystal ball,
each one different with our names blown in the glass "With the
love of Vivekananda." Upon reaching the house, we opened our
packages. My name was spelled "Phunkey." We were convulsed
with laughter but not where he could hear us. He never having
seen my name written; "Phunkey" was the result.

And he was so sweet, so gentle and benign all that evening, just
like an indulgent father who had given his children beautiful gifts,
although many of us were much older than he.68

The favorite walk, one where indeed they might have met no
other person, was "back of the cottage down a hill [the present
roadway?) and then a rustic path to the river." "Sometimes we
stop several times," Mrs. Funke wrote to her friend, "and sit
around on the grass and listen to Swami's wonderful talks. A bird,
a flower, a butterfly will start him off and he will tell us stories
from the Vedas or recite Indian poetry." 69 Surely to walk or sit
under the trees with Swamiji, to gee through his eyes the sun--
splashed paths, the massive
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grey and pink boulders mottled with silver-green lichen, the wide
river-to see this loveliness as he saw it, if only for a brief moment,
was surely to have one's mind washed clear of all cluttering
thought and to taste something of the freedom in which he lived.
"We are taught to see God in everything," Mary Funke wrote,
"from the blade of grass to man-`even in the diabolical man.' " 70
His was never a sentimental view of natural beauty or the world.
Of this, Sister Christine wrote:

Did you in your immature enthusiasm see the world as beautiful,

and believe in the reality of good and the unreality of evil? He
was not long in destroying all your fine illusions. If good is real,
so is evil. Both are different aspects of the same thing. Both good
and evil are in maya. Do not hide your head in the sand and say,
"All is good, there is no evil." Worship the terrible even as now
you worship the good. Then get beyond both. . . . Terrible in its
sternness was this teaching. But soon there came glimpses of
something beyond, an unchanging Realty.”71

Swamiji's presence was in itself a breaking of bondage, but he

delivered palpable shocks for good measure, deliberately cutting
through ingrained and concealed obstructions to spiritual
freedom. The habitual helplessness, for instance, that came so
naturally to Victorian women, was in his eyes nothing but
worldliness, the worse for its guise of propriety. He refused to
take part in the game of chivalry:

. .. We found that this man whom we had set up in our minds as

an exalted being did not observe the conventions of our code
[Sister Christine wrote]. All fine men reverence womanhood; the
higher the type, the greater the reverence. But here was one who
gave no heed to the little attentions which ordinary men paid us.
We were allowed to climb up and slide down the rocks without an
extended arm to help us. When he sensed our
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feeling, he answered, as he so often did, our unspoken thought, "If

you were old or weak or helpless, I should help you. But you are
quite able to jump across this brook or climb this path without
help. You arc as able as I am. Why should I help you? Because
you are a woman? That is chivalry, and don't you see that chivalry
is only sex? Don't you see what is behind all these attentions from
men to women?" Strange as it may seem, with these words came
a new idea of what true reverence for womanhood means. . . .
Was not every woman to him a manifestation in one form or
another of the Divine Mother? . . . Knowing the criticism that
awaited him in India, he still dared in America to initiate into
sannyasa a woman, for he saw in her only the sexless Self.” 72
Swamiji's training of the individual students at Thousand Island
Park went on continuously, but its method was different in each
case. To quote Sister Christine again:

. . . With some, it was an incessant hammering. The severest

asceticism was imposed with regard to diet, habits, even clothing
and conversation. With others his method was not so easy to
understand, for the habit of asceticism was not encouraged. Was it
because in this case there was spiritual vanity to be overcome and
because good had become a bondage? With one the method was
ridicule-loving ridicule-with another it was sternness. We watched
the transformation of those who put themselves into line with it.
Nor were we ourselves spared. Our pet foibles were gently smiled
out of existence. Our conventional ideas underwent a process of
education. We were taught to think things through, to reject the
false and hold to the true fearlessly, no matter what the cost.” 73. . .

He refused to solve our problems for us. Principles he laid down,

but we ourselves must find the application. He encouraged no
spineless dependence upon him in any
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form, no bid for sympathy. "Stand upon your own feet. You have
the power within you!" he thundered. His whole purpose was-not
to make things easy for us, but to teach us how to develop our
innate strength. "Strength! Strength!" he cried, "I preach nothing
but strength. That is why I preach the Upanishads." From men he
demanded manliness and from women the corresponding quality
for which there is no word. Whatever it is, it is the opposite of self
pity, the enemy of weakness and indulgence. This attitude had the
effect of a tonic. Something long dormant was aroused and with it
came strength and freedom.74

"One afternoon," Mary Funke wrote in her memoirs, "when he

had been telling us of the glory of renunciation, of the joy and
freedom of those of the ochre robe, he suddenly left us and in a
short time he had written his `Song of the Sannyasin; a very
passion of sacrifice and renunciation." 75 Swamiji may have
written this now famous poem on the afternoon of July 23, the
day following his giving of monastic initiations, for on that
afternoon he had said during the course of a short conversation,
"'Let go the rope,' delusions cannot touch the Atman. When we
lay hold of the rope-identify ourselves with Maya, she has power
over us. Let go of it, be the Witness only, then you can admire the
picture of the universe undisturbed"76--a teaching which one finds
in two verses of his thirteen-verse poem:

There is but One-the Free, the Knower, Self! Without a name,

without a form or stain.

In Him is Maya dreaming all this dream. The Witness, He appears

as nature, soul. Know thou art That, Sannyasin bold! Say
"Om Tat Sat, Om!"
Where seekest thou? That freedom, friend, this world Nor that can
give. In books and temples vain
Thy search. Thine only is the hand that holds
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The rope that drags thee on, Then cease lament, Let go thy hold,
Sannyasin bold! Say
"Om Tat Sat, Om!"77
Two days later (July 25) Swamiji quoted his own poem in his
morning class: "We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it
go. Take refuge in God, only so can we cross this desert of Maya.
'Let go thy hold; Sannyasin bold, say "Om Tat Sat Om!"78

A few days thereafter he sent the poem to his disciple Alasinga,

accompanying it with a letter dated July go, 1895, in which he
wrote in part:

The "Song of the Sannyasin" is my first contribution for your

journal [the forthcoming Brahmavadin). Don't feel depressed.
Don't lose faith in your guru. Do not lose faith in God. Oh, Child!
As long as the inspiration and faith in the guru and God is within
you, nothing will be able to defeat you. Day by day I am
experiencing a manifestation of power in me. Oh, my courageous
children! Go on working.79

This letter, like Swami’s poem itself, has the ring of ecstasy in it.
And yet, on that very day (July 30) he wrote to Mr. Hale of a
great sorrow that had come to him. His letter read in part:

Oh Mother my heart is so sad the letters bring the news of the

death of Dewing. Hairdas Viharidas has left the body. He was as a
father to me. Poor man he was the last g years seeking the
retirement from business life and at last he got it but could not
enjoy it long. I pray that he may never come back again to this
dirty hole they call the Earth. Neither may he be born in heaven
or any other horrid place. May he never again wear a body good
or bad thick or thin. What a humbug & illusion this world is
Mother, what a mockery this life, I pray constantly that all
mankind will come to know the reality i.e., God, and this "Shop"
here be closed for ever.
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My heart is too full to write more. Write to me or wire if you like

Your ever obnt Son 8
Vivekananda
Swamiji had first met Haridas Viharidas Desai, the Dewan of
Junagadh, during his wandering days in India. The Dewan, whom
he looked upon as one of India's great men, had become his
admirer, supporter, and close friend. He had of his own accord
written to Mr. Hale the previous year, vouching for Swamiji's
probity, which the Christian missionaries had been doing their
best to bring into question.81 The following year, Swamiji was to
write from New York to Mr. Giriharidas Mangaldas Desai, a
nephew of the Dewan. The letter, dated March 2, 1896, read in
part:

Your uncle was a great soul, and his whole life was given to do
good to his country. Hope you will all follow in his footsteps.
I am coming to India this winter, and cannot express my sorrow
that I will not see Haridasbhai once more.
He was a strong noble friend, and India has lost a good deal in
losing him.82

But though sadness came to Swamiji even at Thousand Island

Park, nothing could overshadow the joyfulness that was always
his and that welled from an unalterable, unobstructed source, The
little group basked in it, and he gave himself to them fully. "It was
a most blessed summer," Mary Funke wrote. "I have never seen
our Master quite as he was then. He was at his best among those
who loved him."83

13

As far as can be reasonably ascertained, Swamiji did not leave

Thousand Island Park on any side trips or excursions during his
seven-week stay. Although he and. the students may
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have embarked on one of the daily boat excursions among the

scenic Islands, he did not, it would seem, go further afield. He
had, however, two invitations to speak elsewhere. One of these
was canceled, and the other is a matter of some mystery.
Of the first Swamiji had written to Mrs. Bull from New York in
his letter of May 28, which has been given in full in chapter one,
"I have an invitation to speak at a parliament of religions at
Toronto Canada on July 18th. I will go there from Thousand
Islands and return back."84

Toronto, on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, is about 150

miles from Thousand Island Park. Swamiji could have made the
round trip in one day, or a day and a half at the most. The
orthodox Christians, however, were not of a mind to let the Hindu
monk steal the show in Toronto as he had done in Chicago. Of
this turn of events Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Bull on July II from
Thousand Island Park. His letter, heretofore unpublished in full,
read as follows:

C/o Miss Dutcher

Thousand Island Park
13th [postmarked 11th] July'95, N.Y.
Dear Mother

The shirts arrived yesterday they are nice and fit me well.
Everybody liked them. Landsberg arrived this morning with a
picture of Sri Ramakrishna.

The Toronto affair has fallen through because the clergyman

objected to a heathen. There is one invitation from the Christian
Union of Oak Beach. I do not know whether I will go there.
As I intend to go to Chicago in August I ought to give to the
people here all the time I can.

I do not know yet the exact date when I start [for Europe] but
somewhere at the end of August I am sure. Landsberg sends his
love all the rest.
Ever yours in love & gratitude.85

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Swamiji's invitation from the "Christian Union of Oak Beach" (by

which he meant the Oak Island Beach Christian Unity
Conference) poses a problem. Oak Island Beach was a summer-
resort town on Fire Island, a small island near Babylon, Long
Island, New York. The Conference was a fairly important affair,
the purpose of which was briefly explained by the following item
that appeared in the Open Court of July 25, 1895:

The Christian Unity Conference is now in session at Oak Island

Beach, Long Island, N.Y. The idea of the Conference is to bring
the various denominational divisions of Christianity in the United
States close together, and to effect some kind of organic Christian
unity. Addresses will be made by the Rev. Josiah Strong, the Rev.
Madison C. Peters, the Rev. Franklin Noble, the Rev. J. Winthrop
Hegeman, the Rev. James DeWolf Perry, and many others. Swami
Vivekananda and Dr. Paul Carus will speak on the World's
Religions Parliament Extension.* The officers of the Conference
have chosen as their place of meeting one of the pleasantest
resorts on the Atlantic Coast and a large attendance may be ex-
pected, as also beneficent results.89

Reports of the Conference, which was held during the last week
in July, appeared in a number of Brooklyn and New York
newspapers. Two of these reports are of particular interest to us.
The first is from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Sunday, July 18,
1895, and read in part:

The bright little settlement under University Extension rule at

Oak Island Beach is profiting by cool sea breezes, several kinds
of lectures and good music. . . . The past week was devoted to the
Christian unity congress which began on Tuesday [July 23], the
Rev. Josiah Strong, secretary of the Evangelical alliance and the
Rev. Leighton
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Williams of Amity Baptist church, were speakers. Other

clergymen included . . . Swami Vivekananda and Dr. Paul Carus,
editor of the Monist. The character of the concerts at Oak Island
Beach is excellent as the names of the soloists would indicate. 87
[The italics are mine.]
The second report of note appeared in the .New York Tribune of
the same date and read in full:

A BASIS FOR WORLD-WIDE UNITY.

IT IS BEING AND DOING RIGHT,

SAYS SWAMI VIVEKANANDA,
AN ORIENTAL RELIGIONIST.

The Oak Beach Christian Unity was addressed yesterday

afternoon by the Oriental, Swami Vivekananda. He spoke of the
world-wide unity, and said that all religions were, at the bottom,
alike. This was so, although the Christian Church, like the
Pharisee in the parable, thanks God that it atone is right, and is
willing to admit that all other religions are wrong and in need of
Christian light. Christianity must become tolerant before the
world will be willing to unite with the Christian Church in a
common charity, he said. God had not left Himself without a
witness in any heart, and men, especially men who follow Jesus
Christ, should he willing, he said, to admit this. In fact, Jesus
Christ was willing to admit every good man to the family of God.
It was not the man who believed something, but the man who did
the will of the Father in Heaven who was right. On this basis -
being right and doing right-the whole world can unite, he
contended.

Dr. Paul Carus also spoke during the afternoon about the World's
Parliament Extension. This organization proposes to extend the
work of the Chicago parliament. It is proposed to hold such a
parliament in this city next
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spring. These parliaments will show the world that by taking

what is best in each religion and improving the various religions
up to this level there shall be had the religion of the twentieth
century.88

(As the reader may recognize, most of the above resume of

Swamiji's talk has been published in volume five of the Complete
Works under the title "World-Wide Unity.")89
We may also note here that in the Brahmavadin of September 28,
1895, there was this item: We are glad to learn that Swami
Vivekananda is still actively engaged in the propagation of the
Vedanta religion in the West. Both he and Dr. Paul Caurns [Carus]
are said to have recently addressed a large audience in New York
in connection with the Parliament of Religions extension. . . .

Now, if we were to judge by the newspapers alone, it would seem

clear that Swamiji spoke at Oak Island Beach on the afternoon of
Saturday, July 27. But looking into Inspired Talks we find that he
held a class that morning at Miss Dutcher's cottage on the Katha
Upanishad.90 Not by the fastest train could he have been at Oak
Island Beach that afternoon! Nor could he have been back at the
cottage on Sunday morning (when he also held a class), for no
steamers or boats were allowed to dock at Thousand Island Park
on Sundays. So here is something of a mystery. The most
probable explanation is that Swamiji did not appear in person at
the Oak Beach Conference but sent a short paper, which was read
by someone else, the reporters not knowing the difference. Until
more information comes to light, I think we shall have to suppose
that this was the case. It is, moreover, the most agreeable, as well
as the most reasonable, explanation, for one does not like to think
that Swamiji broke into those serene days at Thousand Island
Park to spend even a fraction of them at
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Oak Island Beach. At the very least he would have been away for
two days and two nights, and the nights at Miss Dutcher's cottage
were no less precious than the days.

14

After the supper dishes had been washed and Miss Dutcher had
released the day's catch of flies into the woods, everyone would
repair to the roofed-over, screened-off veranda outside Swamiji's
room. "At our feet, like a sea of green, waved the leaves of the
tree tops, for the entire place was surrounded by thick woods,"
Miss Waldo wrote. ". . . Beyond the trees spread the wide expanse
of the St. Lawrence, dotted here and there with islands, some of
which gleamed bright with the lights of hotels and boarding-
houses. All these were so far away that they seemed more like a
pictured scene than a reality."9l
When the students had assembled on the veranda, Swamiji would
soon come from his room and sit in a big chair by his door. And
then, "the nights all glowing with the soft mystery of moonlight
or golden starlight,"92 would begin some of the best hours of the
twenty-four. In the darkness no one could take notes of what
Swamiji said; thus only brief accounts have come down to us of
those marvelously informal and varied evenings. "None of us,"
Miss Waldo wrote, "can ever forget the uplift, the intense spiritual
life of those hallowed hours."93Swamiji spoke during those
evenings with the utmost freedom; he would seem at times to be
communing with himself, recalling his own struggles or
experiences, or perhaps thinking aloud, pro and con, about his
plans for his Indian work, to which a part of his mind was always
given. Or in his "wondrously beautiful" voice he would speak of
spiritual life and vision, pacing up and down the short stretch of
the veranda, "pouring forth a perfect torrent of eloquence," his
mind soaring to greater and greater heights as the hours passed.
One night-it could have been in early July or, more probably,
during the first few days of August (for Christine
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mentions it)-he talked to the spellbound group until the moon,

just past full, set in the west around two in the morning. On that
"glorious night" none of them had been conscious of the passing
time.94 Indeed, they seldom were-except perhaps when Swamiji
would call upon one of them to attempt to answer a question or,
worse, insist that one or another stand up and give an
extemporaneous talk. No one was excused from the latter ordeal,
not even Mme Marie Louise, who had had practice enough and to
spare in public speaking.

He was ever the loving, gentle father during these evening hours
when he trained and taught his disciples-all of whom, except
Christine, were older than he. Sometimes the young guru would
teach with words, sometimes in silence, as when he would enter
into a deep meditation that lasted for hours. The students would
meditate for a time with him and then, one by one, slip away,
knowing there would be no further words that night.

The last days of July were fiercely windy, cold, and rainy. At the
resort-hotels of the Thousand Islands the vacationers "huddled
indoors around fireplaces," and the river was empty of pleasure
craft.95 One could not take pleasant strolls under the trees or sit on
the veranda in the evening; nor, as noted earlier, was there a
cheerful fireplace in Miss Dutcher's cottage to huddle around.
But by the second of August the days were warm and fair again,
and at night the moon shone clearly. Thus the last few days of the
retreat were lovely ones-not excepting a sudden thunder shower,
of which more in a moment.

As we have seen from Miss Ellis's letter, these last days were an
unexpected boon for the disciples. Swamiji had originally
intended to leave the Park on the first of August for Chicago,
where he had planned to visit the Hale family; from Chicago he
would have returned to New York in time to sail to Paris with Mr.
Leggett. This had been the proposed schedule, with variations,
until July 30. Then, because of a change in
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Mrs. Hale's plans, Swamiji decided (at the last minute, it would
seem) to prolong his stay at Thousand Island Park and go directly
from there to New York.*

Thus he stayed at Miss Dutcher's cottage until the night of August

6.96 On that morning he held his class as usual, and here again he
explained with the crystal clarity and simplicity born of direct
experience the place (logical and psychological) of the Personal
God in man's spiritual journey to the realization of his own Being.
God was as real as the journey-no more, no less. Swamiji could
not, one thinks, have made this more clear. To quote a few
sentences:
Both matter and mind exist in a third, a unity which divides itself
into the two. This unity is the Atman, the real Self. 97

There is being, "x," which is manifesting itself as both mind and

matter. Its movements in the seen are along certain fixed lines
called law. As a unity, it is free; as many, it is bound by law. . . .
We must get out. Mukti is the one end to be attained. . . .98

While we think on the relative plane, we have the right to believe

that as bodies we can be hurt by relative things and equally that
we can be helped by them. This idea of help, abstracted, is what
we call God. The sum total of all ideas of help is God. . . . That
should be the sole idea. . . . Cry for help and you will get it, and at
last you will find that the one crying for help has vanished and so
has the Helper, and the play is over; only the Self remains. 99

And yet "To the end Ramanuja remained the favorite among
the students," Miss Waldo wrote in her "Introductory
Narrative:"100 That is to say, the favorite teaching was that of
qualified nondualism, in which the ultimate reality is sad to be an
organic unity composed of God, the individual souls, and the
world. Day after day, morning, noon; and night;
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Swamiji had taught a transcendent unity that both subsumed this

trinity and gave meaning to it. And did he not want those whom
he trained at Thousand Island Park to teach this allcomprehensive
religion in their turn? It had been his purpose at the start to train
these disciples in Advaita Vedanta in order that they might carry
on his work; he did not, apparently, change his mind in this
respect.

He felt [at Thousand Island Park] that he had found the channel
through which his message might be spread, the way to fulfil his
mission [Sister Christine wrote in her reminiscences], for the guru
had found his own disciples. His first overwhelming desire was to
show us the path to mukti (freedom), to set us free. . . . His
second object, not so apparent perhaps, but always in the under-
current, was to train this group to carry on the work in America.
"This message must be preached by Indians in India, and by
Americans in America," he said.101

On the other hand, Swamiji never dictated to his students what

they should teach. Although he often spoke to them (particularly
toward the end of his stay) on the art of spiritual teaching itself,
he gave them full freedom. "Each one is quite independent to
teach, quite free to preach whatever he or she likes," he was to
write to Swami Abhayananda (Marie Louise) later in the year. 102
And, then, what could any disciple do but teach what he himself
had understood and been set aflame by? Swamiji poured his
indestructible, boundless spirit into them all; the vessels, small or
large, rigid or malleable, were their own. And did the shape and
size of the immediate vessels really matter? Would not (as we
asked in the beginning) the spiritual power generated at Thousand
Island Park make its own trackless way throughout the Western
world ?

But let us return to Swamiji's last day at the Park. After the
midday meal, he took his walk as usual, this time-the last time-
asking Christine and Mary Funke to accompany him,
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for, as he said, the others had been with him all summer (from the
beginning), and he wished to have a last talk alone with these
newcomers. They "went up a hill about half a mile away," Mrs.
Funke later wrote. "All was woods and solitude." (In recent times
those who know the area well have guessed that Swamiji and the
two young women must have walked northeast, up and across the
hill, partly through woods and partly over huge outcroppings of
granite. They would have come to a spot, less than half a mile
from the house, where the branches of an oak tree today spread
above the flat top of an immense boulder. Here the hill drops
steeply away to the river, and the lovely green and wooded
country is visible for miles.) "Finally," Mary Funke continued,
"he selected a low-branched tree [in all probability, the same oak
that shelters the site today], and we sat under the low-spreading
branches. Instead of the expected talk, he suddenly said, `Now we
will meditate. We shall be like Buddha under the Bo Tree.' He
seemed to turn to bronze, so still was he. Then a thunderstorm
came up, and it poured. He never noticed it. I raised my umbrella
and protected him as much as possible. Completely absorbed in
his meditation, he was oblivious to everything."103

"It is reported," Swami Nikhilananda writes in his introduction to

the 1958 edition of Inspired Talks, "that one day at Thousand
Island Park (Swamiji] experienced nirvikalpa samadhi." 104 Was
not this the time? If so, Swamiji's emergence into the Impersonal
Brahman was once again interrupted. "Soon," Mary Funke
continued, "we heard shouts in the distance. The others had come
out after us with raincoats and umbrellas. Swamiji looked around
regretfully, for we had to go, and said, `Once more am I in
Calcutta in the rains.' "105 A seemingly simple statement-then one
remembers the rainy season at Cossipore, Calcutta, in 1886 and
the event the Life speaks of as "the greatest moment of Naren's
Sadhana, the very crest and glory of his spiritual realisations." 106
Had he touched upon that height again-only to be again called
back,
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"thrown out," as it were, to continue his mission in the world a

mission by no means done ?

That night at a quarter to nine Swamiji, accompanied by Miss

Waldo, boarded the river steamer for Clayton, where they would
take the train-Miss Waldo for Albany, Swamiji for New York.
Tradition has it that as Swamiji took leave of the Park he said, "I
bless these Thousand Islands." The words, though spoken in
gratitude for the peace he had known, cannot but seem redundant:
his very stay at the Park had been a long, sustained blessing. "The
presence of those who love God makes a place holy," he had said
in one of his morning classes, " `such is the glory of the children
of the Lord.' They are He; and when they speak, their words are
scriptures. The place where they have been becomes filled with
their vibrations, and those going there feel them and have a
tendency to become holy also."106 His parting words but put a seal
upon the fact. Then, as the steamer moved out into midstream,
"he boyishly and joyously waved his hat" to the five or six
disciples on the Dock.108 And he was gone.
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NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

p. 109 * To avoid confusion it should be noted that the

lower-case word retreat is used here to mean "a period of group
withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, and instruction under a
director." When capitalized, the word denotes a place for
withdrawal etc. The cottage at Thousand Island Park did not
become a Vedanta Retreat or Ashrama until it was purchased by
the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York in December
of 1947. The first Vedanta Retreat in the Western world was
Shanti Ashrama in California, established under the direction of
Swami Vivekananda in I goo and owned by what was then the
Vedanta Society of San Francisco (now the Vedanta Society of
Northern California).

p. 109 ** According to Mr. Thomas Mitchell, grandson of the

carpenter who built the addition to Miss Dutcher's cottage in
1895, six weeks would have been ample time for building the
wing.

p. 113 * It is possible that Mrs. Humphrey had learned in

Sanskrit a Vedic hymn that had been set to music by members of
the Pro-Christian Brahmo Samaj a possibility that makes matters
all the more remarkable.

p. 115 * In 1895 Miss Dutcher may have had the second parlor
extended two feet or so at the back (as it is today). The chances
are, however, that the room was not extended until years later
when further additions were made to the cottage. The floor plans
given in this book are based on the latter supposition.
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p. 121 * The information given here about Mary Elizabeth

Dutcher relies largely upon Malcolm Willis's article
"Historical Sketch of Vivekananda Cottage at Thousand
Island Park, New York," Vedanta Kasei, August 1963, pages 252--
56.

p. 130 * According to the Detroit directories, Sister Christine's

given name was Christina, not Christine. In his letters to her
Swamiji almost always addressed her as Christina, even as he
generally addressed Sister Nivedita as Margot.

p. 154 * Students of Swamiji's teaching may have been relieved

to learn through "Further Light on Swami Vivekananda's
Inspired Talks" by Swami Atmaghanananda that the lines from a
Persian Sufi poem which follow this sentence ("Dualism is
included in Advaitism")were transferred to this class of
August 2 from that of July 4. by either Miss Waldo or Sister
Devamata. Swamiji himself did not quote the lines here, for his
point was not that "the highest expression of love is unification"
(an idea that the poem illustrates), but, rather, that love is an
expression on a lower level of Oneness.

p. 156 * For Ruth Ellis's earlier letter to Mrs. Bull see page
127

p. 157 * The Reverend William Searls was a trustee of the Park

and responsible for the schedule of speakers at the Tabernacle.

p. 1590 * Swamiji seems to have had no capacity for holding

money to himself or for imagining it was his to hold, It is said in
the Life (1981, 2: 86) that at Thousand Island Park he was given a
handsome purse at the end of his class work. The whole sum was
spent in purchasing presents for his friends and disciples.
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p. 163 * The original print of this head-and-shoulders photo

bears the name of the studio: Lamsom & Van Camp, 1000 Island
Park, N.Y.

p. 170 * "The most substantial outgrowth of the 1893

Parliament was a series of organizations founded in the 1890's to
perpetuate the dialogue of religions inaugurated there. [Paul]
Carus was a leading spirit in practically every case. The most
significant of these, the World's Religions Parliament Extension,
was formed in 1894., with Carus as secretary." (Carl T. Jackson,
"The Meeting of East and West: the Case of Paul Carus,"
Journal of the History of Ideas 29 [1968] : 86.)

p. 175 * Swamiji's heretofore unpublished letters to Mrs. Hale

in which these plans are mentioned will be given in full in chapter
three; they pertain primarily to shipments from India and except
for their dates have little to do with Swamiji's stay at Thousand
Island Park.
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CHAPTER THREE
INTERLUDE

Wonderful though the retreat at Thousand Island Park had been

for the disciples as well as for Swami Vivekananda himself, it had
been hard work for him. "We are having a nice time here," he had
written on July 18 to Mr. Francis Leggett, "except as an oId
Hindu proverb says, , . . `a pestle must pound even if it goes to
heaven.' I have to work hard all the same." 1 Tired, he slept
soundly through the train trip from Clayton to New York City,
oblivious of jolting stops and starts and even of the engine's
derailment, which could not have taken place smoothly. From
New York, he wrote of the trip to Christina Greenstidel, who, with
Mary Funke, had stayed on for a while at Miss Dutcher's cottage.
His letter, heretofore published only in part, was his first in a
correspondence that was to continue for as long as he lived. His
many known letters to Sister Christine, whom he almost always
addressed by her given name, were to be filled with an
affectionate and tender concern, as though to a beloved and none-
too-robust daughter for whom life was hard. His first letter to her
read in full:

9th August'95
19 West 38th Street

Dear Christina

You must be enjoying the beautiful weather very much. Here, it

is extremely hot but it does not worry me much. I had a pleasant
journey from Thousand Islands to Newyork & though the Engine
was derailed I did not know anything of it being asleep all the
time. Miss Waldo
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went out of the train at Albany I did not see her off as I was
asleep. I have not heard anything from her yet. Hope to hear soon.
Dr and Miss Ellis must have gone home by this time.
We gave them telepathic message but Miss Ellis has not got it
sure else she would write. I am making preparations for my
departure. I came in time for one of the meetings here another one
last evening-going to have one more this Evening and almost
every evening till I go over. What is Mrs. Funkey doing and Miss
Dutcher? Do you go to meditate on the mountain as usual? Did
you hear from Kripananda? Write to me as soon as you can-I am
so anxious to hear from you. Ever yours with blessings & love
Vivekananda P.S. My love & blessings to Mrs. Funkey & Miss
Dutcher.8

Swamiji's references to "the meetings" was no doubt to his New

York class, which had been going on in his absence. "[The
members] have carried it bravely on, although I was not there," 3
he had written to Betty Sturges from Thousand Island Park.
Unfortunately, we have at , present no way of knowing where
Swamiji now held these evening classes, who attended them, or
what he said. Very probably, however, he held them at the home
of Miss Mary A. Phillips at 19 West Thirty-eighth Street, near
Fifth Avenue, where he was then staying.
Miss Phillips had been one of his first friends in New York. In
May of 1894. he had given his second New York lecture in her
parlor and through her had met many people who had
subsequently become interested in his work. As we have seen in
an earlier chapter, she was the first secretary of the New York
Vedanta Society, which Swamiji had founded in November of
1894. In the Life, Miss Mary Phillips is spoken
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of as "a lady prominent in many circles in women's charitable

and intellectual work in the metropolis."4 To this we can add that
she was a member of an old and distinguished New England and
New York family which traced its ancestry back to Colonial
times.5 Motherly and large-hearted, Miss Phillips seems at the
same time to have been something of a grande dame with the
spirit to defend what she felt to be right in the face of all
opposition. In the teachings of Vedanta she saw a "foundational
faith," as she would later say to a newspaper reporter, through the
study of which "we may better understand the religion of Jesus of
Nazareth." Once wealthy, she had tended to give away her
inherited fortune;6 thus it happened that at the time of our story
(when she was fifty one) she had found it necessary to take in
boarders. This being the case, it was almost certainly at her home,
and very probably in this August of 1895, that the famous
sculptress Malvina Hoffman saw Swamiji when she was a little
girl. Of that unforgettable evening Miss Hoffman wrote in later
years :

One of my vivid memories of childhood [is] an exciting evening

spent with a relative of my father's who lived in a modest
boarding-house in West Thirty-eighth Street. In the midst of this
group of old-fashioned city boarders was introduced suddenly a
newcomer-the oriental philosopher and teacher, Swami
Vivekananda. When he entered the dining room there was a hush.
His dark, bronzed countenance and hands were in sharp contrast
to the voluminous, light folds of his turban and robe.

His dark eyes hardly glanced up to notice his neighbors, but there
was a sense of tranquility and power about him that made an
imperishable impression upon me. He seemed to personify the
mystery and religious "aloofness" of all true teachers of Brahma,
and combined with this a kindly and gentle attitude of simplicity
towards his fellow men.7

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The fact that Miss Phillips took in boarders had, of course,

nothing to do with Swamiji's visit with her; from the beginning of
1895 he had made her home his New York headquarters,
receiving his mail there and coming and going as he pleased,
even as he did at the Hales' house in Chicago. Indeed, a large
bundle, redirected from the Hales, may have been awaiting him at
Miss Phillips's when he arrived from Thousand Island Park. It
was full of shawls, brocades, and knickknacks that he had asked
the Maharaja of Khetri to send to him from India.

Ever since May, Swamiji had been mentioning the coming of this
package in his letters to Mrs. Hale. His letter to her of May 16,
which contains his first known reference to the shipment, has
been given in full in the previous chapter, but the passage will
bear repeating here: "I expect a big package from Khetri. . . . [It]
will not arrive soon so kindly make arrangements that it will be
received during your absence if you go away. They [the various
articles] will have to be paid a heavy duty for I am afraid." 8

Throughout July Swamiji corresponded with Mrs. Hale about this

shipment, for it was she who, like a mother, attended to such
matters for him. Nor were such matters simple; even at Thousand
Island Park, anxious that his gifts for his friends arrive safely in
America, he was troubled with the complications of duty, bills of
Iading, receipts, and the like. His following four letters to Mrs.
Hale, which are published here for the first time, are, I believe,
for the most part self explanatory:

2nd July
c/o Miss Dutcher's
Thousand Island park
N.Y.

Dear Mother

You did not write to me a single line for a long time. Neither did
Sister Mary write about the duty paid on the rugs [from the
Dewan of Junagadh]. I am afraid the rugs are small.
Here is another consignment from Raja Ajit Sing [the
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Maharaja of Khetri] consisting of carpets shawls &c &c for which

the bill of laiding [sic] you sent me the other day. This
consignment has no duty to pay because it was all prepaid in
India and the bill of laiding says so expressly. I will send you the
bill of laiding & the receipt for the duty. Kindly take one more
trouble for me and get it out of the express company. And keep it
with you till I come. The goods have arrived in New York and I
had a notice of that. They are on their way to Chicago.
In two or 3 days' I will send the bill of lading & the receipt for
duty paid to you. I foolishly asked Miss Phillips as soon as I got
the Companies' notice to get them out before I got the bill of
lading. Now the bill of lading shows that it is bound for Chicago.
So I am bound to give you this trouble. I am so sorry. Again with
my usual business instincts-I forgot to note down the name of the
express company. So I have written to New York for the letters of
the Company. As soon as that comes I will send over to you.

I am going to Europe by the End of August or a little later.

I will come to see you by the End of August.

Lord bless you and yours for ever & ever
Your Ever aff Son9
Vivekananda

July 3 [?], 1895

Thousand Island Park , N.Y.
c/o Miss Dutcher
Dear Mother
Herewith I send you the bill of lading and the inventory of the
goods sent from India. The duty as you will find has been prepaid
so there is no botheration on that score. The goods have reached
Hull [England; not New York as Swamiji had thought]. They will
be here by the middle of this month. And if you see a letter with
the Morris American express co. name on the en-
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velope tear it open and need not forward it to me for that will be
the notice of arrival to Chicago. I am sure Dewanji's carpets were
too small but why do not you write to me about the duty if you
had to pay it? I insist upon paying it myself. The raja's things
seem to come very quick. I am so glad too I will have something
to present to Mrs. Bagley Mrs. Bull &c10

Enclosed in the above was the following:

541.
Dearborn Ave Chicago.
To the Morris Express Co

Dear Sir

Please permit Mrs. G. W. Hale of 541 Dearborn Ave Chicago to

act for me about the goods sent to me from India and receive the
same.

I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient servant Swami
Vivekananda

In addition to the Dewan's rugs and the Maharaja's package, there

was something else coming from India, of which Swamiji wrote
to

Mrs. Hale on July 27:

Thousand island park c/o Miss Dutcher
N.Y. 2'7th July'95

Dear Mother-I will be ever so much obliged if you kindly look

into the "bead" affair. I think there will be a little duty to pay. I
will pay it to you when I come.

I start from here next week. I will be in Detroit a day or two on

my way. I will be in by the third or fourth of August.
With Everlasting love your Son11
Vivekananda
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Enclosed in the above. was the following :

27th July'95
To the United States Express Company foreign department.

Dear Sir

Herewith I authorize Mrs. George W. Hale to take delivery of the

"beads" that has been expressed to me from India. Hoping they
will be regularly delivered to her I remain yrs obly
Swami Vivekananda

(The "beads" must have been a number of japa malas (rosaries)

that Swamiji wished to give to his Western disciples.)

A few days later Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Hale of the death of his
friend Haridas Viharidas Desai-the Dewan who had sent the rugs.
In chapter two (pages 167-68) we have quoted his sorrowing
paragraph about his friend. Following is the remainder of that
letter, which was postmarked July 30:

c/o Miss Dutcher Thousand island Park

3oth August [July) '95

Dear Mother

I was starting for Chicago thursday next (August 1) but your letter
stopped me. The letter & the package have safely arrived.

Write to me or wire if you want me to come to chicago. I will

then start for Chicago next week I e on Tuesday next (August 6). I
thought Sister Mary was at home. When are the other babies
[Harriet Hale and Isabelle and Harriet McKindley] coming? My
going to Europe is not yet settled finally. The babies have not
written me a line not one of them.
[Here Swamiji wrote of the Dewan.]
P.S. We will think of the coming package [from the
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Maharaja of Khetri] in chicago. How long will you be in chicago

more? If it is only a week or so I need not come. I will meet you
at Newyork. If more than that I come to see you

Yrs12 V.

On July 31 Swamiji's plans, so uncertain the day before, seem to

have suddenly jelled. He had no doubt heard from Mr. Leggett
regarding the date of the European sailing and had decided there
was not time to go to Chicago; nor was Mrs. Hale certain of her
own plans. The package from Khetri would, accordingly, have to
be forwarded to New York. Swamiji wrote to Mrs. Hale to this
effect in a letter postmarked July 31, 1895:

c/o Miss Dutcher Thousand island Park

N.Y. [July 31, 1895]

Dear Mother

I am afraid I can not come to see you and neither you will advise
me. I am going with a friend to Europe at his expense. We go first
to Paris and from there to London. My friend will go to Italy & I
to London. I will however come back to New York in September.
So I am not going away for good.

I start on the 17th. So you see it is impossible to come and go that

way for 3 or 4 days.

The package from India ought to have reached by this time. If

they come kindly take the delivery and send it back to New York
to Miss Mary Phillips 19 W. 38. If the package does not come to
Chicago before you go away then kindly send the bill of lading
&c to Miss Mary Phillips 19. W. 38. The babies [the Hale
daughters] did not write me a line nor did they intimate where
they are. I absolutely do not know anything about them. As
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they do not want it, it seems I ought not to disturb them with my
letters. But you kindly convey them my love & eternal undying
blessings. So to you Mother & Father Pope. I will pen a longer
episle [sic] in a few days. We will see each other next spring in
Chicago Mother if we all live.
Ever gratefully your Son13
Vivekananda

That was not quite the end of the Khetri package matter. On
August 2, Swamiji sent the following telegram to Mrs. Hale:

WHY ANY CHARGES DUTY PREPAID YOU HAVE DOCUMENTS WRITE FULL
l4
PARTICULARS. VIVEKANANDA,

How this duty charge was straightened out we do not know, but in
the long run, the package came into Swamiji's hands. If it was not
waiting for him at Miss Phillips's when he arrived in New York, it
must have come in a day or two, and it must have been enormous,
for besides shawls, brocades, and knickknacks, it contained two
large and heavy oriental rugs. One of these was a gift for Dr. and
Mrs. Egbert Guernsey and the other a wedding gift for Francis
Leggett. Of the latter, Mr. Leggett wrote to his betrothed, who,
with her sister, had gone on to Paris to buy a trousseau;

Swami made me another call yesterday at 7.30 a.m.; this is his

unconventional hour of visiting me of late. A porter accompanied
him hugging a very heavy rug from a prince of India. I have it
spread over my drawing room floor and it looks very well. It is
quite thick and heavy and of harmonious coloring and marked
with conventional flowers. This was one of two sent to him from
India, the other found its way to Guernseys. The gift and
presentation were truly oriental.15

(For many years this large rug, approximately 8. by 11 feet, was

used at Ridgely Manor, where Swamiji no doubt walked
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on it. Years later, it was given by Mrs. Frances Leggett [daughter

of Francis and Besse Leggett] to the Ramakrishna Vivekananda
Center of New York.) As for the shawls, how many there were we
do not know. We do know, however, that one went to Mrs. Bull,
one to Bagley, and one to Miss Phillips. The last, "a beautiful
Mrs,

cashmere shawl, embroidered in a wide band of gold thread " , is

today in the possession of her grandniece, who so described it. Of
the brocades and knickknacks, there is no indication in any letter
what exactly they were or to whom Swamiji gave them; nor has
the bill of lading and inventory come to light. But whatever
treasures the bundle contained, how happily and lovingly Swamiji
must have presented them to those who had befriended him in
America, and how touched those persons must have been to
receive his gifts! Mrs. John Bagley, at whose home he had stayed
in Detroit in February and March of 1894., wrote to him at once.
Her letter, dated August 16 and forwarded to England, read in
part:

My dear Swami Vivekananda

The box containing the beautiful shawl came this morning. Thank
you for the very kind and thoughtful remembrance. I shall wear it
with pleasure and it will not only "carry with it a thought of
India" but I shall always feel that in it is folded your blessings.
We all unite in wishing you a pleasant journey to England but
with it the hope that you will come back again to America to
Detroit and to us. When you come to Detroit we shall be glad to
have you make our house your home, and go from here as
occasion demands, on your visits to friends. If you have the time
write from England giving me your address there. We are always
glad to hear from you and if it should happen that you go to India,
before coming here again, do write us from there, and let us know
where we can reach you by letter.
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Can you not induce more of the learned men of India to come to
this country and teach us the higher truths of our own and other
religions? We need this ancient and true revelation of God's word
to quicken and make alive His spirit in us. I am sure your own
mother would be glad to know that her son had done so much
good in this faraway country. I should be very glad to send to her
cordial and kindly greetings.16

(Those last two sentences must have touched Swamiji deeply, for
his mother, he always felt, had been a sacrifice to his mission. Her
opinion alone he cared about.)

In the hot August days before his departure for Europe -days
which, he wrote, are "exactly like Calcutta. You perspire
profusely and there is not a breath of air" 17--he visited his New
York friends, held evening classes, and wrote letters, one of
which, heretofore unpublished, was to Mrs. Bull:

9th August '95

19 West 38th Street

Dear Mother

Your note duly received. I saw also Miss Thursby yesterday. After
the hard work at the Thousand islands, I am taking a few days
quiet & preparation for my departure. So I cannot come to Green
Acre. I am with Miss Phillips and will be till the 17th on which
day I depart for Europe. I have seen Mr. Leggett. You remember
Mrs. Sturges the widow in black in my classes. She is going to
marry Mr. Leggett in Paris. They will be married the 1st week we
arrive and then they go on a tour through Europe & I to England.
I hope to return in a few weeks back to New York.

Kindly give to Miss Hamlin to Miss Farmer Dr & Miss Howe and
all our friends my greetings love & good bye.
Ever sincerely your Son18
Vivekananda
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Swamiji's decision to go to England after attending his friends'

wedding was in response to an invitation he had received from a
Mr. Edward T. Sturdy, of whom we shall hear a great deal more in
the following chapter. "Since leaving Percy," he had written to
Francis Leggett on July 7 from Thousand Island Park, "I had
invitations to come over to London from unexpected quarters, and
that I look forward to with great expectations. I do not want to
lose this opportunity of working in London. And so your
invitation, coupled with the London one, is, I know, a divine call
for further work."19 That this London invitation was from Mr.
Sturdy alone is confirmed by a letter Swamiji wrote around the
same time to Mrs. Bull, the following passage of which is taken
from the original undated letter:* "Now here is another letter from
the same Mr. Hardy [Sturdy].** I send over it to you. See how
things are being prepared ahead. Do you think this coupled with
Leggett's invitation is a divine call? I think so and I am following.
I am going by the end of August with Leggett & then go to
London and try to work in both these countries."20

It would appear that on hearing of Swamiji's opportunity to visit

London, Mr. Leggett magnanimously offered to pay his passage
to England direct, releasing him from his agreement to attend the
Paris wedding. Swamiji would hear none of it. His heretofore
unpublished reply from Thousand Island Park read in full:

Dear friend,

I received your note duly. Very kind of you and noble to ask me to
have my own way to London. Many thanks for that. But I am in
no hurry for London and moreover I want to see you married in
Paris and then I go over to London.

I will be ready father Leggett at hand and in time never fear.

Yours affly ever,21
Vivekananda
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Afraid that Mr. Leggett did not receive the above note, as "it was
not posted carefully," Swamiji wrote another, dated July 31, again
protesting that his "principal object in going with you is to see
you married. When you go away for a trip, I go to London. That
is all."22

Although Swamiji was of course well aware of the English

prejudice against the Hindu, he does not seem to have had the
least hesitation in extending his Western work to London. One of
his friends, however, felt there was reason to fear for his
reception; the slander so abundantly heaped upon him by his
Christian enemies in America had, Mrs. Bull knew, drifted across
the Atlantic Ocean. In a manner characteristic of all Swamiji's
staunch and devoted friends, she took up her pen and did what she
could to protect him. The following letter was to Lady Henry
Somerset, who had met Swamiji in Mrs. Bull's Cambridge home
in December of 1894, and who, it so happened, had recently been
re-elected president of the British Women's Temperance Union.
Mrs. Bull's letter is given here in full, for it gives not only an idea
of Mrs. Bull herself, but an indication of the incessant and
niggling criticism Swamiji encountered in America from those
who tried to discredit him in every possible way:

August 22nd 1895

My dear Lady Henry

I am going to ask a personal favor of you. The Swami

Vivekananda has gone to England. Before he went he received as
he told me written word that you had spoken to an acquaintance
of his in London of your disappointment in him as drinking
champagne in your presence at dinner. I told him this was
impossible, because he had eaten with you only at my and your
table, but that you had spoken of that as being his reputation, was
quite possible. Since you were with us in December, it has come
in my way to know him and his work intimately. The discussion
and attacks likely to follow his
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Talk on the Ideals of Indian Womanhood at our house, came

about in Brooklyn, N.Y. He gave it again in a course of seven
lectures before the Ethical Ass. to large audiences, and the
Ramabai people attacked his utterances in print. His side was
fully sustained; but both sides are to my mind in the right, and
should be harmonized in the spirit of Max Muller. The estimate
against Vivekananda has been serious because of remarks
repeated from Mozoomdar, Lyman Abbot and Prof Estlin Car-
penter, remarks that have come directly to me, and from others as
well as these. The fact that V. has smoked for years & has at
luncheons and dinners a few times tasted wine (not with men
alone) with the impulsive , combative nature of the man-in large
part his own fault as I tell him*-and in part the prejudice of creed
and custom against any oriental not a converted Christian, have
contributed to this prejudice which had reached me before I knew
him. Clergymen both smokers and drinkers have spoken to me
most sharply of him. The most serious scandals unreservedly
repeated in Brooklyn by the Ramabai people were met and turned
to his credit, as the friends quoted against him wrote that his
presence had been a benediction to old and young of their house-
holds. His training under a holy and revered teacher make him in
philosophy and religion, the spiritual side of his nature, an
inspiring and, to my mind, a safe guide. His purity of thought and
life have been felt and given me unsought by the men of the
families with whom he has lived-physicians & men of the world
who know him intimately and love him. His caste was not the
Brahmin but the military Kshatriya. His faults are on the surface
and those of a noble not a mean nature. He has a large influence
at home-India. His life and work here among us are fitting him for
his return to India, and I feel that it is important that he should
understand our best and not think that philanthropists and
Christians will stab
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the heathen collectively and individually wherever opportunity

offers. Theosophists in general are opposed to him because he has
no interest in the occult, but deals with philosophy pure and
simple. I wrote to Mazoomdar and his letter in reply affirms his
reverence for the master of Vivekananda-Ram Krishna-and his
personal regard and best wishes for Vive-Kananda himself, and
says that the opposition to V. credited to him in India and this
country are unfounded.

Had a son of my own met the difficulties that this man has met as
nobly and ably I would be proud. He is very like my husband in
temperament and seems providentially to me to have been
brought within my knowledge both as regards his home status and
his associations in this country. I care for the Vedanta Philosophy
and have studied it for practical help for the last nine years. This
has helped to make him feel at home with me. His work as a
teacher among agnostics, atheists & working people, among
different creeds-Methodists, Presbyterians and Students of Ethics
will be of paramount value and gives what our Harvard
Professors do not give, a living reality to God and the Soul. The
essentials of his order, Chastity and poverty, his single purpose in
life in these. respects, are established to my own satisfaction; and
instances of practical help to there as an outcome thereof.
Therefore, I ask you dear Lady Henry, in reporting the
unfavorable estimate of him to add also the fact that he has made
for himself many friends here whose homes and hearts are open
to him and his ideals. So far, I have not been able to come upon a
single exception to the contrary among the men and women who
have known him intimately.

I count myself in sympathy with the work of Ramabai and

Mozoomdar. But I recognize that for India her great reformers
like Ram Mohan Roy and of later date, with the efforts to uplift
and educate women have been first and foremost as well among
the native religions of that
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country, whose old Philosophy and wisdom are helping us today

in our need. As I would regret to be counted other than a Christian
so I would regret to have their best workers come out of their own
Vedanta to the same truth in the New Testament, as I believe they
can best serve their people without doing so.
Believe me dear Lady Henry,
Ever sincerely with affectionate regards23
Sara C. Bull

As far as is known, Lady Somerset did not report unfavorable

estimates of Swamiji in England. Nor did Swamiji change his
ways. He went his own way. To the dismay at times of his well-
wishing, protective friends, he said what he wanted to say; did
what he wanted to do. The possibility of making a false step was
no longer a part of him-if ever it had been. How were Christian
ministers and missionaries ,and the good ladies of the nineteenth
century to understand the roaring fire that was Swamiji ? For the
most part, they could not; but he did not for that reason, or for any
other, stop blazing. Nor did he ever defend himself: first, he was a
sannyasin; more significantly, the power behind him, as he was to
say, "is not Vivekananda but He the Lord."24

It was not only in America that Swamiji was assailed by critics of

all kinds, but in India as well. The Christian missionaries, among
others, did their utmost to undermine his reputation and his
teachings, trying everything from petty and carping criticism to
calumnious accusations. He gave the matter his attention only to
enhearten his Indian disciples sometimes with ridicule and
scolding. "Why do you behave like babies," he had written to
Alasinga from Thousand Island Park.

If anybody attacks your religion why cannot you defend it and

give the devil his dues ? . . . Cowardice is not virtue. . . . I have
friends who will back me here and help me
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in India too. So you need not fear. Only so long as you only
shriek at the missionary attempts and jump without being able to
do anything, I laugh at you. You are little dollies, that is what you
are. Oh! Swami, missionary bites me, Oh, oh, ho ho ! ! ! ! What
can Swami do for old babies ! ! . . . `This Atman is , not to be
reached by cowards.' You need not be afraid for me. The Lord is
with me; you defend yourselves only, and show me you can do
that, and I will be satisfied. And don't bother me any more with
what any fool says about me. I am not waiting to hear any fool's
judgements of me. You babies, great results are attained only by
great patience, great courage, and great attempts. 25
Swamiji's American friends, those who had helped him, were well
satisfied that their trust in him had not been misplaced; about this
he had cared deeply; beyond this, he cared nothing for praise or
blame. "I sought praise neither from India nor from America," he
wrote to Alasinga shortly before leaving America for Paris; "nor
do I seek such bubbles. I have a truth to teach, I, the child of God.
And He that gave me the truth will send me fellow workers from
the earth's bravest and best. You Hindus will see in a few years
what the Lord does in the West."26

The Prophet had found his field of work. Throughout much of

1894., as has been said in the Prologue, Swamiji had often
thought of returning to India; he now had no intention of leaving
the West until the truth he had to teach had taken deep root in the
consciousness of the Western people. From India his brother
disciples, his disciples, and his friends urged him to return; his
reply was-not yet. "As to my coming to India," he wrote to the
Raja of Khetri on July 9, 1895, "the matter stands thus. I am, as
your Highness well knows, a man of dogged perseverance. I have
planted a seed in this country; it is already a plant, and I expect it
to be a tree very soon. . . . The more the Christian priests oppose
me, the more I am
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determined to leave a permanent mark on their country. . . . They

every day find me a hard bit to crush with all their wiles. . . . This
winter anyway has to be spent partly in London and partly in New
York, and then I shall be free to go to India."27

It was not that Swamiji had the Western people alone at heart; it
was, rather, that as time went on (to judge from his letters) he
came more and more to feel that his hope for all mankind lay in
the West. In a letter of August g to Mr. Sturdy he wrote, "I love
India no doubt, but my visions are being cleared every day. My
brother, what is India or England or America to us? We are the
servants of that God who by the ignorant is called man. He who
pours water at the root, waters the whole tree.

"There is only one basis of well-being socially, politically, or

spiritually, to know that I and my brother are one, and this is true
for all countries and all people. And let me tell you that the
westerners will realize the idea quicker than the Hindus, who
have exhausted themselves almost in formulating the ideas and
bringing out a few cases of individual realisation. My hope is in
the West."28

One recalls in this connection a letter Swamiji had written to

Sturdy in April of the same year. "One Western man or woman
awakened," he wrote, "is equal to a thousand Hindus as the Hindu
is only a spent up inert bundle of nonsense. So the West is the
field of work if one wants to benefit humanity and not his
particular sect or country."28

As is clear from many other of Swamiji's writings and con-

versations, he by no means meant that the West would become the
spiritual leader of the world. His position is perhaps most clearly
stated in a talk that was to take place in 1899 in India with a
disciple, Priya Nath Sinha. When Mr. Sinha asked him if he was
going to deliver many lectures in India, Swamiji replied :

. . . Lectures won't do any good in this country. . . . What good

will hammering do on a piece of rusty old iron? It will only
crumble into pieces. First, it should be made
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red-hot, and then it can be moulded into any shape by hammering.

Nothing will avail in our country without setting a glowing and
living example before the people. What we want are some young
men who will renounce everything and sacrifice their lives for
their country's sake. We should first form their lives and then
some real work can be expected. . . .

. . . Then again, in these days, would you accept the words of a

Sannyasin clad in rags in the same degree as you would the words
of a white-face (Westerner) who might come and speak to you on
your own religion? . . . When my Western disciples after
acquiring proper training and illumination will come in numbers
here and ask you, "What are you all doing? Why are you of so
little faith? How are your rites and religion, manners, customs,
and morals in any way inferior? We even regard your religion to
be the highest!"- then you will see that lots of our big and
influential folk will hear them. Thus they will be able to do
immense good to this country. Do not think for a moment that
they will come to take up the position of teachers of religion to
you. They will, no doubt, be your Guru regarding practical
sciences etc., for the improvement of material conditions, and the
people of our country will be their Guru in everything pertaining
to religion. This relation of Guru and disciple in the domain of
religion will forever exist between India and the rest of the
world.30

Even now in 1895 Swamiji's vision had become global in its

scope. He was thinking not for the West, not for India, but for the
world-each part of which needed all the others. In the two years
since his arrival in America the vitality and freshness of the West
had captivated him, even as he had captured the inmost heart and
mind of the Western people. It was a meeting of greatness-East
and West-the consequences of which were to be of tremendous
import to the
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future of all mankind. There was little doubt at the close of the
nineteenth century that the technologically oriented culture of the
West would spread itself over the world-a potential life-giver, but
also, as Swamiji knew, a potential poison. It was in the heart of
the West, therefore, that the spirituality of the East, with its
saving insight into the deepest nature of man, must be implanted
if man himself was to survive in any real sense of the word. And
India, in turn, seeing its worth in the eyes of the West, as well as
in its own spiritual heroes, would again pour out its priceless
treasures, and in so doing, would, as Swamiji was so often to say,
renew its life force and "conquer the world" with its spirituality.
In this sweeping world movement, as he saw it, the West had a
vital role to play. There was nothing, then, least of all the
"rascally missionaries' nonsense," that could stop him from
fulfilling his destiny of world teacher. Nor was it a matter of his
own will as distinct from the Divine Will. "I am in His hands," he
had written earlier in the year to Alasinga. "What is the use of
going back to India? India cannot further my ideas. This country
takes kindly to my ideas. I will go back when I get the
Command."31

In Detroit on Saturday, August 17, Miss Christina Greenstidel

received a telegram which read:

SWAMI LEAVING SENDS YOU AND MRS FUNKE LOVE AND

BLESSINGS32

The message was signed "Kripananda," but in their mind's eye

Sister Christine and Mary Funke must have seen Swamiji
"boyishly and joyously" waving his hat to them as his ship sailed
away from a New York pier and headed for Europe.

The S.S. Touraine, a fairly new, deluxe ship of the French Line,
Ianded at Le Havre on August 24.33 The seven-day
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crossing from New York had no doubt been pleasant, for though
Swamiji and Francis Leggett were, to be sure, "a strangely
assorted pair" (as the latter's daughter-then unborn was to write
years later),34 they were good companions. For one thing, Mr.
Leggett, whose interests were ordinarily in hunting, fishing, and
business, was on his way to meet his betrothed and was in a state
of bliss; he was, moreover, an admirer of Swamiji's "common
sense."35 Thus, in "a strangely assorted" way, the two
complemented one another-Swamiji's common sense a balance to
Mr. Leggett's transports.

They took the train to Paris and were no doubt met at the St.
Lazare Station by Betty Sturges and her sister, Josephine
MacLeod, both of whom had been in France for over a month.,
The two women had plans for the coming weeks. "We four "
Betty Sturges had written to Frank, "will do many things for
instance we will take all the tramways on top and see Paris on
every corner from that perch. There is so much to be done when
we are four, more perhaps than a smaller number because of the
exchange of opinions and impressions which with intelligent
people is a rare addition to travel and sightseeing. So gather up
your Hindoo and come as soon as convenient."36

The opinions and impressions of the "Hindoo" must have been a

rare addition indeed as "the four" viewed every corner of Paris
from atop horse-drawn tramcars and omnibuses. There was
nothing pertaining to man and his culture in which Swamiji was
not intensely interested and very little of which he did not have an
extensive and penetrating knowledge. But while he had vast
stores of knowledge to give, these days were, as well, a time of
observing and learning for him. The European aspect of Western
civilization was new to him, and Paris was where he could best
feel its pulse. Yet it is not unlikely that in the bustle and crowds of
this "capital of modern civilisation" he would now and then take a
sip of Ganges water from a small vial.
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. . . Last time I went to the West [he was to write several years
later during his second visit], I took a little of [the sacred waters
of the Ganges] with me, fearing it might be needed, and whenever
opportunities occurred I used to drink a few drops of it. And every
time I drank, in the midst of the stream of humanity, amid that
bustle of civilisation, that hurry of frenzied footsteps of millions
of men and women in the West, the mind at once became calm
and still, as it were. That stream of men, that intense activity of
the West, that clash and competition at every step, those seats of
luxury and celestial opulence-Paris, London, New York, Berlin,
Rome-all would disappear and I used to hear that wonderful
sound of "Hara, Hara", to see that lonely forest on the sides of the
Himalayas, and feel the murmuring heavenly river coursing
through the heart and brain and every artery of the body and
thundering forth, "Hara, Hara, Hara!"37

At times in this hot city of Paris Swamiji must have longed to

plunge into the cold and clear Himalayan Ganges itself. In the
nineteenth century, Europeans bathed with even less frequency
than Americans; accordingly, even the most elegant of hotels,
such as the first-class Hotel Continental, where he and,
presumably, his host were staying, had no bathrooms. Of this
aspect of Western living he was to write later in his short book
Prachya O Paschatya ("The East and the West"):

. . . A millionaire friend of mine once invited me to come over to

Paris : Paris, which is the capital of modern civilisation-Paris, the
heaven of luxury, fashion, and merriment on earth-the centre of
arts and sciences. My friend accommodated me in a huge palatial
hotel, where arrangements for meals were in a right royal style,
but, for bath-well, no name of it. Two days I suffered silently -till
at last I could bear it no longer, and had to address my friend,
"Dear brother, let this royal luxury be with
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you and yours! I am panting of get out of this situation. Such hot
weather and no facility of bathing; if it continues like this, I shall
be in imminent danger of turning mad like a rabid dog."38

Mr. Leggett forthwith sought a hotel with a bathroom. "Twelve of

the chief hotels were seen," Swamiji recalled, "but no place for
bathing was there in any of them. There are independent bathing
houses, where one can go and have a bath for four or five rupees.
Good heavens !"39

But aside from this unpleasant state of affairs, Swamiji evidently

enjoyed his stay in Paris. His friends not only took him on
omnibus and tram rides and on visits to museums, cathedrals, and
churches, but introduced him to their Parisian friends, of whom
Mrs. Sturges and Miss MacLeod, no strangers to Paris, had a
number. Among them was very probably the Countess of
Caithness, or, as she was better known in Europe, the Duchesse
de Pomar. There is good reason to think that Swamiji went on a
drive into the suburbs with this sixty-five year-old dowager for a
change of air, and the most likely way for him to have met her
would have been through the MacLeod sisters. Like their close
friend Dora Roethlesberger, the countess was devoted to a study
of the occult in its various forms, taking dictation from Mary
Queen of Scots, with whom she communed at length and whose
incarnation she somewhat inconsistently believed herself to be.
One reads in an English journal devoted to "spiritualism, religion,
and reform," that she was "distinguished for her unbounded
hospitality to the elite of Paris society, and also for her earnest
and unwearied devotion Spiritualism, in the promotion of which
she was lavish in the expenditure of time, money, and talent." 40
And in the same journal of another date: ``Lady Caithness called
her palace here Holyrood. It contained the finest hall and concert-
room in Paris, where she used to gather her friends and their
friends to hear scientific, literary, and religious lectures. . . . One
saw there generals Dragomiroff and Annenkoff, . . . Rajas on their
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way to London; Cardinals who forgave Lady Caithness her

heresies, and Protestants of pulpit fame."41
Swamiji could well have been taken for one of the "Rajas on their
way to London," but whether or not he attended a reception given
by the Duchesse de Pomar we do not know. The only thing about
his acquaintance with her that has come down to us is a story of
the coachman who drove them into the suburbs.

According to Swamiji's brother Mahendra Nath Datta,* who was

often to hear Swamiji tell it, the coachman stopped the phaeton by
the side of a village road, along which a little boy and girl were
walking with a maidservant. The coachman got down from his
seat and caressed the children. Then he got back, took up the
reins, and proceeded along the road. With amazement, the
Duchesse de Pomar asked, "Why did you do that? Those are a
gentleman's children!" Turning in his seat, the coachman
explained that he had been the manager of a large bank in Paris
that had recently failed. With what little money remained to him,
he had bought the phaeton and horses and was working to support
his wife and children in a rented village house, engaging a maid
to look after them. The calmness and dignity of the man deeply
impressed Swamiji. Telling of the incident, he would say, "This is
what I call a Practical Vedantist. This man has understood the
essence of Vedanta. Falling from such a high estate to this low
condition, he is nonetheless unmoved. Thank God for such power
of mind! This man is really a Vedantist!"42

After a little over two weeks of sightseeing and, perhaps, of

conversing with the philosophers, scientists, cardinals., and
ministers of the Duchesse de Pomar's circle, Swamiji witnessed
the marriage of Francis Leggett and Besse (or Betty) Sturges,
which took place on Monday, September g, at the American
Cathedral (the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity), said to be
"the most beautiful example of English Gothic on the Continent."
This being the second marriage for both bride
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and groom, the ceremony was perhaps performed in the small

vaulted chapel of the cathedral-the Chapel of St. Paul, the
Traveler. There were perhaps not many witnesses--just Swamiji, a
few friends, and Alberta and Hollister Sturges, Betty's children,
who were attending school in Germany and had been brought to
Paris for the occasion by Mr. Leggett's special courier.

Among the wedding guests may have been the young artist Maud
Stumm, who was to give Swamiji drawing lessons four years later
at Ridgely Manor. She met him now for the first time in the living
room of the MacLeod sisters' suite at the Hotel de Hollande. Of
this event she was to write in her reminiscences :

It was in the fall of '95 that I first saw him, sitting with his back to
the light in Mrs. Leggett's sitting room in Paris.* I did not catch
his name, but presently found myself next to him, and being
asked if I spoke French. He said he didn't either; when I asked
him if in his opinion English would be the next dominant
language of the world-as they seemed to be the coming race-"The
next great leading force on earth will be the Tartars or the
Negroes"-was his astonishing reply; and he proceeded to give his
reasons. I found that he dealt not with decades or even centuries
but with vast ages and movements of races, as judged by his
knowledge of the past.

Then I inquired who this deep-voiced man was, and was told he
was a holy man from the East, Swami Vivekananda.43

A holy man, yes, and much more--a vast, fully awake being who
took in the unfolding centuries and races at a glance. "Mon
Prince," Mr. Leggett's courier used to address him. "I am no
prince," Swamiji told him, "I am a penniless monk. But the man
was not to be put off. "I have traveled with too many princes," he
replied; "I know one when I see one!"44

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He was right, of course; nor was he alone in recognizing nobility

when he saw it. "There were but two celebrated personages whom
I have met," Mrs. Leggett was to say later, "who could make one
feel perfectly at ease without themselves for an instant losing
their own dignity-one was the German Emperor, the other, Swami
Vivekananda."45 It is, actually, small wonder that Swamiji had the
bearing of a prince; he walked in the majesty of his mission. On
the day of the wedding he wrote to Alasinga, "I am a singular
man, my son; not even you can understand me yet. . . . I see a
greater Power than man, or God, or devil at my back." 46 A prince
indeed, and this by' divine right.
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NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

p. 193 * A portion of this letter to Mrs. Bull has been published

in the Complete Works (5: 93), where it is given the date August,
1895. The original letter (Sen Col.), written from
Thousand Island Park, was fairly long and bears no date.
** Mr. Sturdy had written to Swamiji earlier in the year (see
Complete Works 6: 307).

p. 195 * In the margin of this letter Mrs. Bull wrote in her must
elegantly abstruse style: "It is fair to add that his reasons are not
entirely in these matters self indulgent and his spirit as reasonable
concerning them as St. Paul; but will finally I hope put whoever
quotes aside--& should be judged fairly in the matter as nothing
is covered with him."

p. 205 * Mahendra Nath Datta placed this incident in 1896, but

it must have taken place at the time of our present story.
Swamiji did not stay in Paris for more than one day in 1896; more
conclusively, the Duchesse de Pomar died in November of 1895.
Maherdra Nath Datta spells her name "de Poma," but there can be
little doubt that the reference is to the Countess of Caithness, or
the Duchesse de Pomar.

p. 206 * In his article "Swami Vivekananda in France"

(Prabuddha Bharata, March 1967, page 127) Swami
Vidyatmananda suggests that this meeting "took place on
September 9, after the wedding, since before that day Mrs.
Leggett was Mrs. Sturges; and Swami Vivekananda went to
London the following day, the ioth." It is perhaps reasonable to
assume that the occasion was the wedding reception.
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CHAPTER FOUR

ENGLAND 1895

"I have a cordial invitation from Miss Muller,"* Swamiji had

written to Edward T. Sturdy from Paris on September 5, 1895,
"and as her place is very near to yours, I think it will be nice to
come to her place first for a day or two and then to come over to
you."1 It would seem that Mr. Sturdy had not taken to this idea,
for as things turned out, he met Swamiji in London on September
I o and escorted him by train from Paddington Station directly to
Reading, a town thirty-six miles southwest. There is no indication
in Swamiji's known letters that there was a break in the journey
for a stopover at Maidenhead, where Miss Henrietta Muller was
then living. "I arrived safe in London," he wrote from Sturdy's
home in Caversham to Miss MacLeod (not giving more of a date
to his letter than "September, 1895"), "found my friend, and am
all right in his home. It is beautiful."2

The borough of Reading in the county of Berkshire on the south

bank of the Thames was an ancient town, full of history that
reached back to the days of the first Danish invasion of England
in the ninth century. Yet, for all its antiquity, it was, in Swamiji's
day, predominantly Victorian, its older buildings trampled down
throughout the nineteenth century by the unheeding feet of
progress and prosperity. Still, the Victorian churches, halls, and
blocks of houses, some of them designed by celebrated architects
of the era, had their own charm, and certainly the people of
Reading, who in 1895 numbered some 64,000, were proud of
them.
Although Caversham, a parish of some 5,000 souls, was looked
upon as a part of Reading, it lay across the Thames in
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Oxfordshire, connected to the larger city by an iron bridge. It

would seem likely, indeed certain, that Mr. Sturdy hired a cab,
horse-drawn, to take his guest from the Reading Station across the
bridge to Caversham, and thence up the hilly road to "High
View," as his house was called. Exactly where "High View'' stood,
and whether or not it still stands, cannot at present be determined,
for there is no house in Caversham presently known as "High
View"; nor is there a listing in the old Reading-Caversham
directories of an Edward T. Sturdy. But to judge from its name,
Mr. Sturdy's house sat high on the Caversham hill, a then sparsely
settled residential district, and commanded a view of the lovely
river valley. That Mr. Sturdy was not listed in the Reading
directories is not altogether surprising, for he was not a permanent
resident of Caversham, but had leased the house only for a year or
so, from whom we do not know. It was fitting, however, that he
had chosen this neighborhood to set up house with his young wife
and infant son, for Reading was, in a sense, his ancestral seat, his
forebears having lived there from 1540 to about 1790.

Since Mr. Sturdy was to play a prominent part in Swamiji's life

and work in England, the reader may like to know a little about
his antecedents and early life. The following bare facts were
gathered primarily from interviews and correspondence in 1972
and 1976 with his son, Major Ambrose Sturdy (who had been the
infant at "High View" during Swamiji's stay there). 3 Although
Major Sturdy was far too young in 1895 to have been impressed
by his father's guest, he has been a generous source of reliable
information about his father himself. Yet, even here, his
knowledge was more general than detailed, for his father, he said,
had been a taciturn, uncommunicative man, not given to telling
his son tales of the past. It was Major Sturdy who had traced the
family tree back to its sixteenth century roots in Reading.
The earliest Sturdy on record was a freeman and master worker,
that is to say, he was self employed. Born around 1560, in the
early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he died in
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1633. The next six generations of Sturdys followed various

trades, such as tanner, weaver, miller, and baker, and prospered as
well as the times allowed, which was none too well for yeomen in
rural England. The Sturdy who brings us into the nineteenth
century was named Daniel. He moved from Reading to London
around 1790 and became a baker and corn chandler in the village
of Clapham in Lambeth, Surrey, then a group of rural villages
south of the Thames. Daniel Sturdy took advantage of the
progressive times of the early nineteenth century, when London
was expanding and "bricks and mortar were on the march across
the green fields."4 Speculating in real estate, he made a small
fortune and became, as his descendant Major Sturdy commented,
"a gent." This son of the Industrial Revolution was our Edward T.
Sturdy's great grandfather. He had two sons, the elder of whom
sired a line of highly affluent nineteenth-century Sturdys.

But it is with Edward, the second son of Daniel the Clapham

baker, that we are concerned. His self made father bought him a
flour mill in Berwickshire, Scotland, and there he raised a family
of three sons. The eldest, Daniel (our Edward's father), came
down to London around 1845 when he was in his early twenties
to sell his father's mill-products on the Corn Exchange. It was just
around this time that the Corn Laws, which had placed a high
duty on imports, were repealed, and for London grain merchants
times promised to be good. Daniel Sturdy sent for his two
younger brothers to join him. Sturdy Brothers, as the firm they
established in London was called, prospered, mainly by importing
oats from abroad. Indeed, the period between 1850 and 1875 was
one of great general prosperity in England, and despite the
pleasant fact that Daniel Sturdy spent much of his working life
yachting on the Thames Estuary, he did well enough in twelve
years to retire.

Following what was perhaps a long-held desire to become a

farmer, for like most Englishmen he much enjoyed country life,
Daniel Sturdy studied the art of farming in the British Museum
Library. He then took his family-his wife and two
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young daughters-to Canada to search for suitable farmland. And it

was in Toronto, on January 20, 1860, that our Edward T. Sturdy
was born-the "T" standing for the city of his birth.
Not finding Canada to his liking, Daniel Sturdy returned to
England and without more ado bought "Trigon," an eleven -
hundred-acre estate of farmland, water meadows, woodland, and
heath, in Wareham, Dorset, several miles inland from the south
coast. And though Daniel Sturdy may have learnt his farming out
of books, he was no dilettante. "He was a wonderful man," his
grandson Major Ambrose Sturdy writes. "As the farm was
practically derelict, he dug out the channels of the water
meadows, refrained all the fields, built the farm buildings from
clay bricks made on the estate and timber felled on it; he
gravelled the two-mile-long drives, and was using steam for farm
machinery as early as 1870, breaking up much heath--and all the
while spending the greater part of his time fishing and shooting." 5
That was Edward Toronto Sturdy's father-enterprising,
industrious, loving the land, and loving sport-an Englishman to
the bone.

The young Edward spent a happy boyhood at Trigon, swimming

in the river Piddle, playing in the woods, fishing and shooting
with his younger brother Richmond. He went to prep school at
Blackheath and from the age of twelve to fifteen attended Clifton
College in Bristol, one of the many public schools that were then
being founded throughout the country along the lines of the hoary
and prestigious Eton and Harrow. Edward's school life was short-
lived. After three years, he was brought to London to work in the
family business under his two uncles. Here, too, he stayed for
only three years; for living in lodgings, working in a city office
and market were not to the taste of a boy who had been brought
up in beautiful Trigon. At the age of eighteen he cut free and took
off in a slow sailing ship for New Zealand, to make his own way.
It was the first leg of the long voyage that was to lead him to
Swamiji.
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In New Zealand, a land of promise and open air, where British

colonization was still taking place at full tide, an enterprising
young man could make a good profit in a number of ways, and
Edward Sturdy did not fail to do well for himself. He took
contracts to drive sheep from one end of North Island to the other,
engaging drovers to assist in the herding. At the same time, he
bought up tracts of forest land, cleared them, built log houses on
them, and sold them for farms. In such ways, he was to save
about 2,000 within ten years or so. Meanwhile, in 1884, when he
was twenty-four, another kind of adventure opened to him. He
was living at his headquarters of Woodville, Hawkes Bay, a small
town in the approximate center of North Island, surrounded by
mountains and forests, when a good friend of his, an Edward Bold
(later Postmaster General of New Zealand), introduced him to the
world of Theosophy.

Sturdy was evidently at once caught up into the strong excitement

of Madame Helena P. Blavatsky's communications (or
"precipitations" as she called them) from Tibetan Mahatmas and
her flights into misty realms of the occult. But he was also
interested in the philosophical and more serious aspects of the
study and spent long hours reading the Bhagavad Gita with his
friend, poring over an English translation made in the time
of Warren Hastings. ("It was faulty," he recalled in later life, "and
its teaching wrongly applied to astrology. But it strongly appealed
to something `hidden by change of birth.'")6

He soon communicated with the Theosophical headquarters in

Adyar, Madras, and in October of 1885 received his diploma of
membership, thus becoming a Fellow of the Theosophical
Society, the fifth member on the New Zealand roll.

But to a restless, searching young man, it would not do to simply

read the Gita in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand. There was nothing
for it but to go to the source. Thus in 1886, Edward Toronto
Sturdy set off for India. There he met many of the top-ranking
Theosophists, including Colonel Henry
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Steele Olcott, the International President. Quickly Sturdy became

close to the center of things, and as Colonel Olcott recorded in
Old Diary Leaves, "played a prominent part in our Society's
affairs."' From India, he sailed to England, where he saw a good
deal of Madame Blavatsky herself and of the few disciples who
then surrounded her. (The London Theosophical Society was still
very small in those days and was suffering from a recent expose
of occult trickery at Adyar. Nor had Mrs. Annie Besant yet
appeared on the scene.) From England, Sturdy sailed to America,
where he met the leading Theosophists of the American section,
William Quan Judge and Dr. J. D. Duck. Then, completing his
trip around the world, which had been, in a sense, a pilgrimage,
he returned to New Zealand.

Sturdy could not have been away from home for much more than
two years, for we find that in 1888 he founded a Theosophical
Lodge in Wellington. The Lodge had about fifteen members from
the city, including the then Premier of the Colony, Sir Harry
Atkinson, and a number of members from other parts of the
island. Thus it was that through the efforts and contagious
enthusiasm of Edward T. Sturdy, Theosophy came to be
established in New Zealand, where it grew apace.
And now the time came for Sturdy to leave the untamed land he
had grown to love. In 1889 his father died, and he was called back
to England to run Trigon. For one reason or another, however, he
sold the estate-now well cultivated and rich with livestock and
fields of grain-to one of his uncles and moved to London and to
"H.P.B.," as Madame Blavatsky was known among her devotees.
By this time, Theosophy had many followers in London among
the upper and middle classes, including Miss Henrietta Muller
and, by now, Mrs. Annie Besant; the eloquent, fervent, and
famous (one might say notorious) atheist and socialist, who had
embraced the doctrine to the stupefaction of many of her old
friends and colleagues, such as Charles Bradlaugh, the famous
Secularist, and George Bernard Shaw, the young and brilliant
Fabian
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Socialist. (To such hardheaded; logical thinkers Theosophy was

the least imaginable of beliefs and "had only a very minor place
among the world's delusions."8 But Mrs. Besant took little interest
in what her old friends thought; like many others, she had fallen
deep under the spell of the extraordinary, fascinating, and
curiously lovable Madame Blavatsky.)

Mr. Sturdy was soon a familiar figure among the intimate group
of Fellows at the Blavatsky Lodge at 19 Avenue Road, St. John's
Wood. He was admitted not only into the select Esoteric Section,
but into its even more exclusive Inner Group, whose rites and
seances were cloaked in deep secrecy. He was, moreover,
appointed in 1890 to a seven member advisory council of the
"European Section," as the Blavatsky Lodge had come to be
called, and was made Treasurer. Thus within a short time, Mr.
Sturdy had plunged into the thick of things-both esoteric and
exoteric--and was thereby the more vulnerable to disillusionment.
It was to come fairly soon.

In May of 1891 Madame Blavatsky died in London, naming

Annie Besant her heir and "Chief Secretary of the Inner Group
and Recorder of the Teachings"--a very exalted position.
Thereupon ensued a power struggle involving the head of the
American Section, William Qnan Judge, Colonel Olcott, and Mrs.
Besant. The details of these wranglings need not concern us, but
they deeply concerned and stunned Mr. Sturdy and other
members of the Theosophical Society. Mr. Judge was accused of
forging a number of "precipitated" letters written in praise of
himself by the Tibetan Mahatmas Masters Koot Hoomi and
Morya--whose very existence was now suspect. He was called for
a hearing before the London Judicial Committee of the Society,
which met in July of 1894.. Mr. Judge was let off lightly, which
circumstance so incensed one of the members of the Society that
he forthwith divulged the whole affair, with documentation, to the
Westminster Gazette, one of London's leading newspapers. With
much glee and hilarity the Gazette ran a series of long,
anonymous articles
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entitled "Isis Very Much Unveiled"-an obvious parody of

Madame Blavatsky's first famous book, Isis Unveiled. Not
content with this expose, the paper continued to amuse itself and
all of London by flailing the Theosophical Society with ridicule,
referring, for instance, to "Theosophistry" and the foggy
"Mahatmosphere." Theosophists were themselves not amused by
the purported shenanigans of William Q; Judge. In chagrined
disillusionment, Edward T. Study, among many others, resigned.

News of the scandal spread, of course, to America, and in

Swamiji's letters of this period one finds that he was well aware
of what was going on. On November 19, 1894, he wrote to
Alasinga: "I read a nonsense in one of the Theosophical
magazines in India saying that they prepared the way for my
success!! Indeed ! ! ! I have never seen I o Theosophists here and
they are held in bad reputation by the public here. If I had mixed
with them, I would never have got a single high class man or
woman to follow me. Rot nonsense! Theosophists prepared the
way ! ! ! Rogues who will not give me even an introduction now
come for a share of the praise ! ! Even Annie Besant could not get
an audience here. There is a gloom over the Society on account of
the trickery of the founders and any amount of after work cannot
take it out. So take care! [You] must beware of everything that is
untrue at the start. Stick to the truth and we shall succeed, maybe
slowly, but surely."9

Meanwhile, the gods had been watching over Mr. Sturdy. After
the death of Madame Blavatsky, he had gone to Adyar, the
Theosophical headquarters in Madras, where the scandal was
breaking, and thence to Almora in the Himalayas to practice
sadhana. There he had come in contact with one of Swamiji's
brother disciples, Swami Shivananda, and a monk of the Sarasvati
group named Swami Sachidananda. Drawn to the two sannyasins,
he had had long talks with them, and through the former had
learned of Swamiji. He was ready at this point to become a monk
and in many respects was already
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living the life of sannyasa. Of this young and serious English-

man, Swami Shivananda wrote on May 9, 1893, to Babu Pramada
Das Mitra: "An English gentleman, a member of the London
Theosophical Society, has come here. I am charmed by his
manner, behaviour and steadfastness in the way of Yoga. They are
all like those of a Hindu Sannyasin, and he is a good companion.
He lives quite close to the ashrama where I am staying. Therefore,
very often we have a discussion on religious topics." And in
another letter to the same Mr. Mitra: "The name of the
Theosophical Englishman is E. T. Sturdy. .

. . He is of a very quiet nature and his modes and manners are just
like those of a Brahmin. . . . He is aged about thirty, and is
unmarried."10 In early 1894 Sturdy was Honorary Secretary of the
Indian Section of the Theosophical Society and had evidently
planned to remain for some time in India. Was it karma, was it
those watching gods, or was it the stars? Whatever power it may
have been, it, or they, had other plans for him. Returning to
London in an official capacity for the hearing of Mr. Judge,
Sturdy at once became seriously ill. Being a strict vegetarian, he
could find no one who would undertake his care, except, at last,
one Lucie Black, a young hospital nurse. She nursed him back to
health on vegetables, and in the spring of 1894. he married her.
Much later he was to describe this event in a letter to Miss
MacLeod as "the complete turning over of [a] page in my life." 11
Upon that turned page had been writ his "complete immunity to
woman's influence"--his chosen life of sadhana and renunciation.
On the following page was written his marriage. In February of
1895 a son, Ambrose, was born to him. And the next month,
about a year too late, as he came to believe, he wrote his first
letter to Swamiji. "Many things have come too late for me in this
incarnation," he was to write in October of 1898 to Miss
MacLeod; "there was a time when I had entirely got adrift from
all worldly ties and obligations : I ought to have met Swami then,
instead of only his gurubhais; what a gain it would have been to
everybody."12 One wonders what Lucie
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Sturdy would have said to this. But in any event, late or not, his
first known letter to Swamiji read as follows :

c/o King & Co

65 Cornhill, London
30/13/95

Respected Swamiji

I should be much obliged if you would let me know when you

arrive in England.

I was living for some time in India with two of your gurubhais,
Sivanandaji and Satchidanandaji [the latter was not a monk of the
Ramakrishna Order] and found them both good men and worthy
of respect. This was in Kumaon.

You must already know that the leader of the Theosophical

Society in America is given up to false claims of association with
Mahatmas and is leading the people there on a wrong path. The
evidence of his unscrupulous conduct are evident and are well
known in this country.

I hope that your good work in America will not be spoiled by

identification with the Theosophical Society there, as it is at the
present time constituted.

A magazine like the Metaphysical Magazine, to which I see you

have contributed,* will do much good, if it can be kept free of the
charlatanry either of false claims to mental healing, astrology,
association with Mahatmas & · other divine beings &c & c.

I am too ardent a lover of the pure adwaita philosophy of India

not to be jealous when I see it threatened in its interpretation by
Western bias or Western charlatans.

Since the Indian Section of the Theosophical Society has passed a

vote of censure upon Judge, he has been taking a position more or
less hostile to the whole of India.

It remains yet to be seen whether the Theosophical Society can be

put upon a thoroughly candid and honourable footing. It has
undoubtedly power to do much good
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if it can be made pure. There will be a big struggle for mastery

between Judge's party and the party who desire to act honestly at
the next European convention.

Yours in 13
Edward T. Sturdy

The Englishman's earnest tone touched Swamiji, nor could he be

indifferent to one who had lived with his brother disciple Swami
Shivananda in the Himalayas. He replied at once to the letter,
which, as he said, had taken more than three weeks to reach him.
His tone was open, friendly, almost confiding. Indeed, some
portions of Swamiji's first letter to Mr. Sturdy, dated April 24.,
1895, provide valuable information regarding his work and
thought at the time. In other portions, which have not been
previously published, he assured Mr. Sturdy that he had not been
misled by the more "mystical" aspects of Theosophy.

It goes without saying [he wrote] that the theosophists never had
any place-of respect in my soul. And as to the Mahatma letters
and things of that ilk, I always smelt something not safe about
them and kept aloof from them.

No doubt the theosophists could have done a great work in the

world-had they not been inextricably mixed up with uncanny
things and I am afraid it will be almost impossible to cleanse the
Augean stable now-seeing that its very foundation was on these
Mahatmas of the Himalayas and these ghost and demi-god stories
were the attractions that drew people round its standard. My little
experience in America shows to me that a great section of the
Western community especially of women are ever ready to have
their shattered nerves tickled with startling stories, but they are
always for a change.l4. . .

Sturdy continued his correspondence with Swamiji, urging him to

come to England, and eventually Swamiji accepted,
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if only for a short stay. "So far as I see now," he had written to
Sturdy on August 2, "I can stay only a few weeks in London. But
if the Lord wills, that small time may prove to be the beginning of
great things."15 And indeed, his visit to England in 1895 was to
result in an extension and intensification of his Western work-a
development that seems to have been an inseparable, and
extremely important, part of his mission.
And now, in September of 1895, Mr. Sturdy had Swamiji in
Caversham-his two incompatible lives, that of husband and father
and that of would-be monk, harmoniously contained for the time
being under one roof.

The purpose of Swamiji's first visit to England being, as he

himself remarked, "just to probe a little," 16 he spent several quiet
weeks at Mr. Sturdy's house on the heights of Caversham,
overlooking the tranquil, tree-bordered Thames and the gentle
downs and green fields of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. A guide-
book of the period devotes many paragraphs to describing the
historic buildings in and around Caversham and "the charming
walks, drives, or cycling runs" that could be had without too
much exertion. A visitor could, for instance, take a "very
enjoyable walk in bracing air, with a beautiful view of the river
Thames, the town of Reading, and the wooded hills all around."
He could return "by the Lower Warren Road, which runs parallel
with and close to the river, . . . [and which is] shaded by a row of
pines nearly the whole distance and forms a picturesque and
agreeable promenade." Or one could stroll in the opposite
direction "through Mr. Crashay's fine park," or, again, "up
Hamdean Road past the prettily laid-out Cemetery to Grove Hill"
and on to Dyson's Wood. If Swamiji did not visit the historic
buildings and houses of the neighborhood, he surely took some of
these charming walks in the English countryside, often
accompanied, no doubt, by his host.
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But such gentle ramblings would have been incidental to his main
occupation in these early weeks, which appears to have been to
help Mr. Sturdy with his study of Sanskrit, with his translation of
and commentary on the Narada-Bhakti-Sutras, and with his
pursuit of Indian philosophy. It was a restful time for Swamiji,
whose health was in much need of these quiet weeks, and
certainly it was a blessed time for Sturdy, whose talks with his
guest must have gone on for hours on end. Whether or not Sturdy
realized at the time how great a soul was living with him, walking
the country lanes with him, fondling his infant son, talking of
simple, everyday things as well as of philosophy, sharing his
strictly vegetarian meals (cooked "a la Indienne perfectly"),17 and
explaining to him the advanced intricacies of Sanskrit grammar,
we do not know, but he, Sturdy, seems to have been in no hurry to
bring these idyllic days to an end.
Swamiji was himself content to let matters follow their own
course. "My friend being a Sanskrit scholar, we are busy working
on the great commentaries of Shankara etc." he wrote to "Joe Joe"
(Miss MacLeod) shortly after his arrival. "Nothing but philosophy
and religion here."18 And again on September 24. to Mrs. Bull, "I
have not done any visible work as yet except helping Mr. Sturdy
in studying Sanskrit. . . . So far it is all right. Waiting for the next
wave, `avoid not & seek not-wait for what the Lord sends', is my
motto."19

Meanwhile, he was discovering to his relief and surprise that the

English people were, on the whole, "very friendly" unlike most of
their countrymen in India and also unlike many Americans.
"Except [for] a few Anglo-Indians, they do not hate black men at
all," he wrote to Mrs. Leggett in early October. "Not even do they
hoot at me in the streets. Sometimes I wonder whether my face
has turned white, but the mirror tells me the truth. Yet they are all
so friendly here."20 Even some Anglo-Indians (by which term was
meant in those days Englishmen who had lived or were living in
India) were unexpectedly courteous, How revealing of Swamiji's
earlier
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experiences in India was his comment in his first letter from

Caversham to Miss MacLeod : mentioning that he had already
met "several retired Generals from India," he added, "they were
very civil and polite to me."21

Swamiji also met at this time a "Prof. Fraser," who, as he wrote to

Mrs. Leggett from Caversham, was "a high official . . . [who] has
been half his life in India, and . . . has lived so much in ancient
thought and wisdom that he does not care a fig for anything out of
India! !"22 This was very probably Professor Robert Watson
Frazer, a retired Indian Civil Servant, who was then forty-one and
a lecturer in Tamil and Telugu at University College in London.
According to Professor Frazer's obituary, he "had a good
knowledge of the Sanskrit literature, especially in the sphere of
philosophic and religious ideas, and he was intimately acquainted
with Indian life."23 We also find in Professor Frazer's book
Indian Thought Past and Present, first published in 1915, what
may be snatches from his talks with Swamiji. In a paragraph on
Sri Ramakrishna, in which he quoted from Max Muller, the
Professor wrote:

... His [Sri Ramakrishna's] teachings were followed by his

disciple Swami Vivekananda, who attracted large audiences to his
lectures in England and America. In private conversation he
always maintained a quiet confidence that "Indian thought,
philosophical and spiritual, must once more go over and conquer
the world." To his Guru the image of Kali was a
consecrated and living image of God, to Vivekananda in the
worship of the idol: "we are struggling to get to the thing
signified, to get beyond the material to the spiritual; the spirit is
the goal not the matter. Forms, images, bells, candles, books,
churches, temples, and all holy symbols are very good, very
helpful to the growing plant of spirituality, but this far and no
farther."24

It is so difficult to believe that the author of the above

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passage was not the same "Prof. Fraser" whom Swamiji met and
talked with, that the present author is content to believe that he
was.

It also seems more than likely that Mr. Sturdy took Swamiji to
call upon Miss Henrietta Muller at Maidenhead sometime in
September. Maidenhead, an ancient market town in Berkshire of
about 12,000 people in 1895, was twelve miles northeast of
Reading on the main railway line. One could go there from
Reading by train, or by carriage, or, better still, by boat-for, as a
guidebook of the period told the visitor, Maidenhead was
"situated on the Banks of the Thames, in the midst of the most
charming scenery to be found on the whole of this charming
River." One hopes that Mr. Sturdy took Swamiji for a boating trip
down the "sweet Thames" to Maidenhead. From there they could
have walked or driven a mile or so along country lanes to Miss
Muller's house, "The Meads," in the village of Pinkney's Green.

Miss Muller was to figure prominently in Swamiji's English life

and will, accordingly, enter now and then into our present story.
As we have seen earlier, she had, like Mr. Sturdy, belonged to the
Theosophical Society-specifically, to the Madame Blavatsky
Lodge in London-and, like him, she had resigned. She had also
spent some time in India in the early nineties in connection with
Theosophy.

Born in Valparaiso, Chile, around 1850, Frances Henrietta' Muller

had spent a happy childhood in her parents' beautiful home in the
countryside a few miles outside the pre-eminently commercial
city. It was an idyllic life, interrupted only by a two-year visit to
Boston and London when she was between nine and eleven years
old and marred only by the frequent and alarming earthquakes to
which Ghile is subject. When she was about thirteen, the Muller
family moved permanently to London. Here Henrietta and her
younger sister, Eva (the education of both of whom had
previously been in the hands of governesses and tutor), attended
school with more or less regularity. Interspersed, however, were
many trips to Europe,
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for her parents loved to travel. "I cannot count," she later said,
"the number of times I have been on the continent" 25 which
sojourns no doubt contributed to her ability to speak fluently
French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

After she had left school and was, perhaps, around eighteen, her
father bought an estate in Shenley, Hertfordshire, to which he
moved the family. Henrietta disliked the place and as time went
on became increasingly dissatisfied and bored with the banal life
to which young women of that era were doomed. She passed her
time, she related, "in the usual round of social duties as girls
generally did then. I enjoyed social life very much for a short
time, . . . but after three or four years I began to weary of it all. I
was discontented with my idle life; I felt that I had something to
do for my fellow creatures, yet I could not find out what it was as
I did not feel very capable of doing anything, because as a young
girl I was very timid and wanting in self confidence." 26

"I have cured that tendency however now," Miss Muller added.
Indeed, she seems to have cured it even in young womanhood, for
the step she then took required considerable determination and
courage. That was an age when the typical and correct lady knew
very little, thought very little, and did almost nothing beyond
attending to her needlework. It was taken for granted as a fact of
nature that she did not have the brain or the emotional stability
for much else, and certainly she had no need for economic, legal,
or political rights, or, for that matter, the need for an education
beyond whatever was necessary to keep house for a husband,
under whose benevolent guidance and protection she would live
out her life. In the view of almost everyone, men and women
alike, that was the way things would forever be. But by mid-
century a faint suspicion had started to grow in a few English
minds that perhaps something was wrong with this divine
scheme. With the growth of the Humanitarian movement, in
which women had been accorded a small place, a few young
ladies were becoming aware that the world was crying out for
help. They were
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beginning to see the grim poverty, the extreme social injustice, the
deplorable and unrelieved working conditions that every where
prevailed-and they found themselves completely powerless and
unequipped to right these glaring wrongs. They began to
recognize that the enforced uselessness of their lives was a grave
injustice not only against their own sex but against the whole of
humanity. John Stuart Mill, a philosopher whom Swamiji admired
in many respects, was the first man to take up the cause of
women. "We have had the morality of submission, and the
morality of chivalry and generosity," he wrote in 1869; "the time
is now come for the morality of justice." 27 Although women were
politically and socially helpless to help themselves, the
awakening social conscience and restlessness of a small-a very
small-minority was in itself a force, and by the early seventies,
their desire for "a higher education" was finding its first, tentative
fulfillment.

It was at this juncture that Miss Henrietta Muller, though "past

girlhood," as the Girton Review put it, plunged into the advance
stream of history. She was among the handful of young women
who, in defiance of strong and outraged parental opposition
(Henrietta's parents were no exception), social censure, and
ridicule, enrolled at Girton, one of the two small colleges for
women that had recently been founded at Cambridge. In 1874,
Girton was in every respect still a pioneer venture; even the
building was hardly completed; the grounds were bare, without
trees or fences; the rooms and halls were unadorned, cold, and
uncomfortable. The girls and their house mistresses were keenly
conscious that the widened eyes of the nation were upon them,
watching for them to crumble under the strain of study-an
occupation for which only the male brain was fit-waiting for their
health, their morals, their tenuous sanity, and, above all, their
womanliness to visibly disintegrate. Seriously and eagerly the
girls pursued their studies; there were no outbreaks of scandal or
of madness, and no one died. As for their womanliness-they
seemed, on the whole, to retain it
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Although it was still unthinkable for women to receive university

degrees, they were individually permitted, with the unofficial and
rather grudging agreement of the Cambridge examiners, to take
regular, unmodified honors examinations, known in Cambridge as
tripos. To everyone's amazement but their own, almost all the
young women who were allowed to take these examinations in
the first years of Girton did well in them. Completing the usual
three-year course in 18'77, Miss Muller passed with third-class
honors in the Moral Science Tripos, which included such subjects
as Political Economy, Philosophy, and Psychology. It was a fair-
to-middling distinction, but a distinction nonetheless, and it
served somewhat to reconcile her parents and friends to this
willful and unladylike behavior.

But that was by no means the end of it. The great London School
Board, established in 1870, was the first, and for long the only,
place from which women could have an official voice in public
affairs. At the urging of some of her more radical friends, Miss
Muller stood for election at the end of 1879-a stand few Victorian
women were bold enough to take. She won by the largest vote in
the whole of London and thereby found herself presiding over the
new Board. The function of the School Board was to attend to all
matters concerning the London school system, many of which
matters were in vital need of reform. The work was said to be
heavy and exacting; it was also said that during Miss Muller's six
years on the Board she was one of its hardest workers, constantly
visiting the schools, becoming "in a real and intimate sense the
friend of the women teachers,"28 and bringing about a few
important, though inconspicuous, changes. Hard though she
worked, it would appear that Miss Muller had had energy to
spare. For her recreation in those days she would go down to the
River Thames and row upstream for twenty miles or so. Or, for
variation, she would go tricycling for 50 miles at a stretch. "It is
an amusing experience," she recalled, "to see the milestones pass
by so quickly-fifty in a day make a show." During
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holidays, she and her sister, Eva, would climb the Swiss Alps. "I
like exercise," she said to an interviewer.29

Her primary interest, however, was the Women's Movement for

which she worked and propagandized throughout most of her life.
She was closely in touch with the rather sporadic efforts to
establish women's trade unions; she founded the Society for the
Return of Women as Poor Law Guardians (another of the few
public positions for which women had been eligible), and in 1888
she started the Women's Herald, a penny weekly "conducted,
written, printed, and published by women" and devoted to the
women's cause, which she edited under the name of Helena B.
Temple. As editor, Miss Muller helped to bring about workhouse
and temperance reforms (both of which were within the province
of women), and once she killed both birds with one stone when
she charged an unfortunate Master of the Workhouse with
intemperance and compelled the School Board, against its wishes,
to oust him. A strong-minded woman, Miss Muller.
But the age called for "strong--minded women"--then a term of
opprobrium and derision in male circles. Women's rights,
women's education, women's trade unions, women's suffrage,
temperance movements, humanitarian movements, social
reforms-these were all more or less interconnected crusades and
enlisted, indeed required, the support of spirited, determined, and
courageous women. And such a one was Henrietta Muller. Even
during the 1880s-a decade of slow, steady, ladylike, and
frustrating work in the Women's Movement-she created
something of a sensation by adamantly refusing to pay taxes on
her newly purchased London house as a protest against being
denied the right to vote. As a result, much of her best furniture
was carted away, while a crowd of incensed working men and
women booed the bailiffs for so mistreating a poor defenseless
lady. But it was all for the good of the Cause. "The Press," as she
said, "took it up very generally, there was scarcely a newspaper in
England that had not a leading article on the question of women's
votes."30

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Indeed, Miss Muller's heroic stand against the tax-collector

attracted wide attention. She was one of the first English women,
if not the first, to attack the problem of women's suffrage in so
head-on a manner. It was the right approach, but far ahead of its
time. Not until the next century did the gentlewomen of England,
realizing that politeness and lawfulness were getting them
nowhere, become violently militant in their demands. By then,
however, Henrietta Muller had long since withdrawn from the
front line of battle.

It is not known at present when, exactly, she joined the

Theosophical Society, but it must have been sometime between
1887 (when Madame Blavatsky returned to London from India)
and 1891 (when she is known to have been Vice-President of the
League of Theosophical Workers). On September 14, 1893, she
read a paper entitled "Theosophy as Underlying all Scriptures”
before the Theosophical Congress at the Parliament of Religions
in Chicago. It is not certain that she met Swamiji at this time, but
one thinks she must have at least seen him and perhaps have
heard one of his shorter talks at the plenary sessions. It is not
probable, however, that she was present on the afternoon of
September 19 to hear his main address on Hinduism, for the
Theosophical delegation, Miss Muller included, sailed from New
York on September 20, returning to London.

The following month, Mrs. Annie Besant traveled to India for a

glorious lecture procession. Whether or not Miss Muller
accompanied her for the whole of this trip is not known; at the
end of 1893, however, she was at Adyar, Madras, for the
Theosophists' annual convention, where she was introduced with
pardonable exaggeration as "the renowned womansuffragist."
While in India, Miss Muller, wealthy, altruistic, and childless,
adopted a young Indian who she felt had great promise and who,
it so happened, was a disciple of Swamiji's. His name was Akshay
Kumar Ghose. Two years earlier, Swamiji, wanting to help him
and, as was his wont, seeing the best in him, had introduced him
to Haridas Viharidas
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Desai as "a very honest and intelligent boy and an undergraduate

of the Calcutta University."31 In the beginning of 1895 the
adoption, which had caused a good deal of gossip and controversy
in the Indian papers, became legally complete, and the young man
"fell heir to his new mother's ample fortune," as was noted in the
February Theosophist. The editor, Colonel Olcott, assured his
readers of "the purity and unselfishness of [Miss Muller's]
motives, however eccentric her actions might at any time appear."
"Her plan," he wrote, "is to have her protege educated for the Bar,
enter Parliament, and devote his life to social and political reform
in India."32

Things did not work out quite that way, though at the time of our
present story Akshay was studying at Cambridge in pursuance of
Miss Muller's plan.

Returning to England in mid--1894, Miss Muller was among

those Theosophists to be shaken by the resounding scandal of Mr.
Judge's alleged forgeries. It was around the time of the hearings
and the newspaper expose that she invited Swamiji to visit her, no
doubt at the urging of her new son. "Akshay Kumar Ghose is in
London," Swamiji wrote to Alasinga from Washington, D.C. on
October 27, 1894. "He sent a beautiful invitation from London to
come to Miss Muller's, and I hope I am going in January or
February next."33 As we know, it was not until September of the
following year that Swamiji was able to accept Miss Muller's
renewed invitation.

Swamiji's first meeting with Miss Muller at Pinkney's Green was

not altogether auspicious. She had, it seems, urged him to lend
support to the cause of the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
an anti-liquor organization imported from America in 1883.
Swamiji had demurred. "A lady called Miss Muller who has
adopted a disciple of mine might have been a great friend to me
but for the W.C.T.U. Ladies," he wrote to Mrs. Bull from
Caversham in a heretofore unpublished passage of his letter of
September 17. "All is for good," he continued, "I am trying for
men only. My object is to preach religion. I cannot identify
myself with any other movements."34

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But although Miss Muller did not have her own way, she
evidently soon forgave Swamiji. In his next letter to Mrs. Bull,
dated September 24,, he writes in another heretofore unpublished
passage, "Miss Muller is getting up a lecture for me in Reading &
there will be some lecturing in London too. [Let us] see what we
can slowly do. Then you know, I do not seek to know people; if
people are thrown in my way by the Lord all right. It is my
principle not to force myself on others."35

There were times; however, when Swamiji did not let things take
their own course. It would seem that he and Mr. Sturdy had gone
to visit Miss Muller a second time, and the temptation is great to
wonder if it was not while walking across the fields around
Pinkney's Green in those September days that he saved her from
the onrush of an angry bull. The incident as related by Sister
Nivedita is well known, but it will bear repeating here, for it was
characteristic of the unhesitating courage with which Swamiji
always "faced the brute." The story goes that he was walking with
Miss Muller and an Englishman across some fields when a mad
bull came charging toward them.

The Englishman frankly ran [Nivedita wrote], and reached the

other side of the hill in safety. The woman ran as far as she could,
and then sank to the ground, incapable of further effort. Seeing
this, and unable to aid her, the Swami-thinking "So this is the end,
after all"--took up his stand in front of her, with folded arms. He
told afterwards how his mind was occupied with a mathematical
calculation, as to how far the bull would be able to throw. But the
animal suddenly stopped, a few paces off, and then raising his
head, retreated sullenly.36

Apart from such perilous strolls across the green and pleasant
fields of Berkshire, Swamiji's life with Sturdy seems to have been
uneventful. Although he was at this time surely making new
friends through his host and perhaps giving some informal
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talks, there is no indication in his known letters that he was

holding classes in or around Reading in the month of September
or the early part of October. The slowness with which things were
moving was more or less deliberate. "Sturdy and I want to get
hold of a few at least very strong and intellectual men in England
to form a society and therefore must proceed slowly," Swamiji
wrote to Mrs. Bull in his letter of September 17. "We must take
care not to be run over with `fads' from the first. This you will
know has been my policy in America too. . . . Purity, perseverance
and energy-these three I want & if I get only half a dozen here my
work will go on. I have a great chance of getting such a few." 37 A
week later, as seen above, he wrote to Mrs. Bull of the possibility
of lectures in Reading and London, but nothing definite was as
yet planned. In another heretofore unpublished passage of this
same letter of September 24 he wrote, "The London Season is not
open yet. Then again Mr. Sturdy wants to go slowly--& build on a
sure foundation rather than make a good deal of noise for nothing.
So we are slowly moving on. By November I will come to
America surely."38

One reason Mr. Sturdy wished to move slowly upon London was
the adverse publicity the Theosophical Society had received less
than a year earlier. Theosophy had made a splash in London.
Many men and women, searching for an antidote to the arid
secularism and skepticism of the age, had found it in the "Secret
Doctrine," particularly in the theories of reincarnation and karma,
to say nothing of the Mahatmas: Indeed, so popular in fashionable
circles was the "fad" that a contemporary cartoon depicted
members of the smart set courteously inquiring of one another,
"How is your karma?" Thus when the scandal broke, the shock
was widespread; believers were crushed, and every scoffer was
more confirmed than ever in his scoffing. The Theosophical
vogue may indeed have popularized a few Eastern ideas and
familiarized the public with them, but it had also discredited
them. The very people whom Swamiji wished to reach-the
intelligent and
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the searching-had become, temporarily at least, wary of

everything Eastern. In a letter to Mrs. Bull, written on October 4
or 5, he briefly mentions the situation. The letter is given here in
full, for parts of it have not previously been published:

6 [4 or 5] Oct. 95
High View,
Caversham,
Reading.

Dear Mrs. Bull

I have not had any letter from you long.

I am coming in November next certain. In the meanwhile we are

prospecting work in Eng. We do not want to make any noise but
go silently, as the theosophists have spoiled the atmosphere with
their ludicrous revelations.

Where are you now? Does Kripananda write you often? Has the
Green acre affair been successful this year? Kindly give my
eternal love & gratitude to Miss Farmer to Miss Hamlin & Miss
Thursby. You will be glad to know I am translating a little book
on Bhakti with Mr Sturdy which is going to be published soon
with copious commentaries &c.

This month I will have three lectures two in London & one in
Maidenhead. That will open up the way to some classes or parlour
lectures &c and that will be a good beginning.

My love to you & your daughter

May the Lord bless you & yours
my noble friend for ever & ever
Your ever loving son
Vivekananda

I haven't written to Mrs Adams yet, as I do not want to disturb

her; she has been always so good & kind to me-because (between
you & me) the ladies of the W.C.T.U. will be all against me &
they are her friends.
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Now if she helps me openly-they might think ill of it. I will be the
last to disturb the cause of a kind friend.39-- V.

Swamiji seems to have made the good ladies of the W.C.T.U. very
cross by not crusading for their cause. But as we shall see in later
chapters, Mrs. Adams, who lived in Chicago, continued to be as
helpful to him as ever.

The "little book on Bhakti" that Swamiji was translating with Mr.
Sturdy was the Narada ,Sutra, An Inquiry into Love. The
manuscript was to be in the press by March of the following year
and would be published at the end of April by Longmans, Green,
and Company. It turned out to be a well-printed sixty-eight-page
book, on the tan cloth cover of which was printed in gold: "Indian
Ideals-No. I." Mr. Sturdy intended to follow it with more
translations of Sanskrit texts, but as far as can be ascertained at
present, there were no further numbers in this particular series;
indeed, the words "Indian Ideals-No. I" were dropped from the
cover of future editions (but we shall return to the subject of Mr.
Sturdy's publications in a later chapter). The Narada Sutra was an
excellent little book, and considering that Swamiji devoted so
much time to the work, one might say that the author of the
commentary had been guided by him all the way, particularly as
Sturdy had by now taken initiation and looked upon Swamiji as
his guru. And to be sure, although in his introduction he assumed
all responsibility for the commentary, he "affectionately dedi-
cated" the work to Swamiji and acknowledged his assistance. The
book was well received: the comments of one critic, who
reviewed it in the July 1896 issue of India (an English monthly),
read in part:

No Christian could study "Narada Sutra" without gaining a new

sympathy, a new and strange sense of kinship, with those who
through many generations have regarded these maxims as
divine…
. . . One cannot but hope that this little series will
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reach a wider circle of students than has been touched by the

"Sacred Books of the East," or by Professor Max Muller's Hibbert
Lectures of 1878, and penetrate more deeply, if less widely, than
Sir Edwin Arnold's "Light of Asia." Perhaps in future volumes of
the series a little more help in the way of a historical introduction
might be given to the ignorant but interested Western reader. It is
not, however, for the translation alone that we owe something to
Mr. Sturdy. It would be ungrateful to pass over in silence the
extreme beauty of parts of his commentary. Here is one fine
saying: "He who loves equally everywhere need seek no
asceticism; it will seek him as long as he has a coin to spend, a
loaf to divide or a coat to give." And here is another: "No
religious system pretends to define Deity; it can at the best strive
with other systems to suspend some intellectual or emotional veil
through which, in shining, the light may take form. . . ."

Aside from helping Sturdy with his Sanskrit studies and

translations, Swamiji found time, as he always did, to write to his
brother disciples in India, his disciples East and West, and his
friends, sometimes penning a batch of letters all on one day. On
Friday, October 4, for instance, he wrote to Swami Brahmananda,
to Mrs. Bull (probably), and also to Sister Christine. This letter to
"Christina," only a sentence of which has been previously
published, was, as far as we know at present, the second letter he
had written to her. It read in full:

c/oE. T. Sturdy
High view
Caversham
Reading
Eng.

Dear Christina

I received your beautiful note regularly enough-but I was so buisy

[sic] in many things as to
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be unable to reply sooner. It is too long a delay to be decent,

kindly excuse me. I send my love every day to you-however & in
every letter I write to America.

I received another note from Kripananda Since then he is silent.

Where is he? Very glad to learn he did so well in Detroit he is
very correct & persevering Success always comes to such.

Things are coming up very slowly here in England as the Season

is over-I will be only a month or so more here and then start again
for America Give my love to Mrs. Funkey to Mrs. Phelps & all
the Detroit friends. Purity patience & perseverance overcome all.
All great things must of necessity be slow.

I am in good health happy, and as usual waiting for things to

develop themselves. Drop me a line when you find time. Hope
your sister has recovered perfectly this time. Lord bless her.

May the blessing of the Lord be ever & ever on you dear Kristina
& may your path in life be ever one of peace & purity is the
continuous prayer of
your Ever loving friend40
Vivekananda

Actually, the London season was not over, as Swamiji somehow

wrote in the above letter; it had only just begun, and in
anticipation, Swamiji's friends, Mr. Sturdy and Miss Muller, had
not been idle. By the beginning of October, as we have seen from
Swamiji's letter of the fourth or fifth to Mrs. Bull, three lectures
had been scheduled for later in the month-one in Maidenhead and
two in London. The first of these three was Miss Muller's
"Reading" lecture that Swamiji had mentioned to Mrs. Bull in his
letter of September 24.

This Maidenhead lecture took place on Thursday evening,

October 17, at the Town Hall, a building of neoclassic style,
constructed in the first half of the century and looking very grand
in its English-village setting. As far as Swamiji's work
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in England was concerned, the lecture was a sort of preliminary

talk and does not seem to have been too well managed in regard
to publicity, timing, and so on. An eye-catching announcement,
however, appeared in the weekly Maidenhead Advertiser on
October 9, 1895:

A Lecture
Will be delivered
ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17th,
At 8 p.m., in the
TOWN HALL, MAIDENHEAD,
BY
THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA,
An Indian Yogi,
Subject-"Eastern Doctrine of Love."
The chair will be taken by E. Gardner, Esq.,
J.P., C.C.,
Supported by Mrs. Eva McLaren, J. D. M. Pearce,
Esq., J. P., and Miss F. H. Muller, M.A.
Tickets, price zs. 6d and Is., may be obtained at
the door.

(In regard to the "supporters" listed above, Mrs. Eva McLaren

was Miss Muller's sister. Her husband, Walter Stowe Bright
McLaren [or M'Laren], was a nephew of the famous radical
political figure, John Bright, and brother of the first Lord
Aberconway. The two brothers and their father were for many
years Members of Parliament and regularly stood on the side of
liberal causes, including that of women's rights. The well-to-do
Walter M'Larens lived much of the time in Pinkney's Green in a
house called "The Nook." Mr. J. D. M. Pearce, and the Chairman,
Mr. E. Gardner, were, clearly, Justices of the Peace, and, it would
follow, of high standing in the community; at the present time,
however, nothing further is known of them. One finds that Miss
Muller, too, had impressive letters after her name. She was
entitled
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to them (at least to "B.A.")--but only in spirit; for neither

Cambridge nor Oxford, nor, for that matter, any other university
in Great Britain, granted degrees to women in the nineteenth
century. But according to Miss Muller, degrees should have been
granted to women; she seems therefore to have simply taken what
was hers by right.
For the subject matter of his talk Swamiji chose that aspect of
Vedanta which had been occupying his thought recently in his
work on the Narada Bhakti Sutras. Although this lecture was
brief and delivered to a small audience, it is nonetheless important
to us and fortunately did not go entirely unrecorded by the local
paper. A report of it, heretofore unknown, appeared in the
Maidenhead Advertiser on October 23, 1895, almost a week after
its delivery. The use of diacritical marks in Swamiji's name, a
certain lucid grasp of the subject, not usual with reporters, even in
England, and the insistence that Swami Vivekananda was not
associated with the Theosophical Society leads one to suspect that
Mr. Sturdy may have had a hand in the preparation of the article.
It read:
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON LOVE.
On Thursday the Swami Vivekananda delivered a lecture at the
Town Hall, Maidenhead, taking as his subject "The Eastern
Doctrine of Love." Owing to other attractions in the town the
attendance was not large. Many of the public also associated the
lecturer with the Theosophical Society, with which, however, he
has, we are informed, nothing whatever to do, nor with any other
society, neither does he propose forming any society himself. He
believes in expounding his views to whoever will listen to them
and leaving those individuals to advocate them as a whole, or
with whatever modifications they may deem fitting, or to reject
them altogether, believing that out of the strife of all opinions
truth at length prevails.

The chair was taken at 8 p.m. by Mr. E. Gardner,

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J.P., C.C., and he very brie8y introduced the lecturer, who was
clad in his native costume. The Swami then proceeded to express
his view upon devotion to deity, or, as more commonly expressed
in the East-love (Bhakti), to the following effect:-Religion may be
divided into two forms, the first almost entirely superstitious and
the second merely metaphysical, but if either of these is to have
any force it must be accompanied by love. Work alone without
this element did not satisfy. The land might be covered with
hospitals, penetrated by good roads; there might be great social
institutions well conducted, and good sanitation, but these were
all external physical processes and by themselves brought man no
nearer to Divinity. Both the realist and the idealist were necessary
and complementary one of the other. The idealist brought the bold
aspiration down to earth, the realist caused it to take form through
work. Love cannot be defined in positive terms, only negatively.
Its nature is of the form of renunciation. In its more general sense
it might be divided threefold : ( 1 ) That love which is for one's
own pleasure, irrespective of pleasure or pain to others-the purely
selfish, the lowest. (2) That love which exchanges--"I will love
you if you love me. We will make each other mutually happy"-the
partially selfish, the middle path trodden by the great majority of
mankind. ('3) That love which gives all and asks for nothing,
without premeditation and which never regrets, unconquerable by
any evil thing done to him from whom it emanates. It is the
highest, the divine. Only with this last kind are we concerned
here. The first is the path of the sensualist and the animal, the
second the path of struggling humanity on its way to better things,
the third the real path of love, trodden by those who renounce the
world and set out upon that road which leads to Eternal Peace. In
that love there is no fear. Love kills fear. A lion might stand over a
babe and threaten its life; the mother knows no
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fear, she does not fly, but she opposes. At that moment love
destroys terror; at other times the same woman would run from a
small dog. A fierce Mahomedan warrior went to a garden to pray.
In the same garden a girl had appointed to meet her lover. The
warrior lay prostrate on his face according to the prescribed form
of his religion. At that moment the girl espied her lover, and with
joy rushing to meet him, trod upon the prostrate form. He jumped
up and laying hand upon his sword would have slain the girl.
"How dare you ?" cried he, "vile wench, disturb my worship, my
devotion to God, with your base feet." "Worship ! devotion !"
cried the girl, "you do not know what they are. You had no
devotion, lying there, no spirit of worship. If I, a timid girl, could
so forget the presence of an object of dread like you, in my
worship and devotion to my earthly lover as to tread upon you
and not even know it, how much more should you, if your heart
had been absorbed in love and devotion to God, have been
ignorant that I touched you?" The warrior was humbled and
appeased and went away. Our highest ideal of love is the image
which we form for ourselves of deity. A barbarous people have a
tyrannical and cruel god. A wise and noble people see God in ever
and ever widening potencies. God is always God, but the views
which men and nations may take of Him vary. higher view is
known than that of love. The man who bears in his heart an
unrelaxing love to every creature, whether he recognize that that
creature is a manifestation of God, in which he is actually present,
or whether he look upon it merely as fashioned by Deity, that man
is on the path to Deity, on the great path of devotion and
renunciation. He cannot injure the creature of God, however
repulsive to his narrower view of what should or should not be.
He gives in love, not in pride; in loving Deity he loves its
manifestations, works with them and abides by them.
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The lecture was impressively delivered, and at the close a vote of

thanks was accorded the Chairman (on the proposition of Mr. E.
T. Sturdy, of Caversham).

The proceedings occupied only a little over half an hour. 3 The

formal meeting between Swami Vivekananda and England-the
beginning of what was to be a long and mutually satisfactory
friendship-took place on the evening of Tuesday, October 22, in
Prince's Hall, London. Fittingly, Swamiji chose for his subject
"Self Knowledge," the key, as he said in an interview, to his
philosophy.

Announcements for this first of his London lectures began to

appear in the London newspapers on October 15, on which date
the Westminster Gazette ran the following item;

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA, the Indian Yogi (connected with no

Society) will deliver an Oration on Vedanta Philosophy, entitled
"SELF-KNOWLEDGE", Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, TUESDAY,
October 22, at 8.30. Stalls, 5s.; reserved seats 3s; unreserved 2s,
Is. Tickets at Hall and Libraries.

The parenthetical information in the above announcement that

Swamiji was "connected with no Society" was, of course, Mr.
Sturdy's way of notifying the public that the Indian Yogi was not
associated with Theosophists of any shape or color; he was just
himself. The same announcement with the same assurance
appeared in the Westminster Gazette of October 19 and 22, and
also in the Daily Graphic of October 22. In addition, the Daily
Graphic, a smaller paper than the Gazette, but, as it said of itself,
"the most popular home newspaper in the world," published on
October 21 a brief article about Swamiji accompanied by a
photograph. (The Daily Graphic also boasted
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that it was "the only illustrated morning newspaper published in

the world.") Its article read:

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

An interesting figure has lately arrived in this country in the

person of Swami Vivekananda, an Indian Yogi one who formally
renounces the world, and gives himself to study and devotion: He
left India to express his interpretation of the Vedanta philosophy
to Western people at the Parliament of Religions held at Chicago
in 1893. Since that event he has been teaching and lecturing in
America. He has now reached England, but will, after a short
visit, return to America to carry on his self appointed task there
during the winter.

He will lecture at Princes' Hall, Piccadilly, tomorrow evening.

The portrait of Swamiji that accompanied the above was taken at

the Walery Photographers, then located on Regent Street in
London, and is all the proof needed that this now well-known
picture, which shows him in profile, wearing a black astrakhan
like hat and a clerical collar, was taken in London in 1895 and
not, as had long been supposed, in Cairo five years later. We may
judge, incidentally, that Swamiji had come into London some
time before Sunday, October 19, to sit for his photograph, for on
Monday, the twentieth, he wrote from Caversham to Miss
MacLeod, who had recently arrived in the city, that he would not
be able to come in to see her until the day of the lecture.

Swamiji must have been happy to learn that the newly wed
Francis Leggetts-the "Turtle-doves," as he called them, had come
to London after their honeymoon on the Continent, bringing "Joe
Joe" with them. "This note," he wrote to the latter, "is to welcome
the Leggetts to London. This being in a sense my native country, I
send you my welcome first; I shall
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receive your welcome next Tuesday the 22nd at Princes' Hall half
past eight p.m."41

Prince's Hall (just one prince) was a public auditorium in the

building belonging to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water
Colours, an august Society founded in 1831. The building,
constructed between 1881 and 1883, was a twostory, elegantly
classical structure on the south side of Piccadilly, a block or so
from the Circus. In Swamiji's day, the building faced six Georgian
houses (now the red-brick and stone building known as Nuffield
House). To the right of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water
Colours was St. James's Church, erected in 1689. by the famous
architect Christopher Wren, and on its left was the renowned
bookstore of Messrs. Hatchard, which has long since been rebuilt.
Indeed, except for the now restored St. James's Church and the
upper facade of the Royal Institute, this part of Piccadilly would
today be almost unrecognizable to Swamiji. The street was then
narrower in places than now and certainly more sedate. The
nearby Circus was, however, commercial and busy enough,
resounding throughout the day with the clop-clop of horses'
hooves, the shouts of cabbies, the clatter of iron wheels, the calls
of street-vendors, and the harsh cries of the cockney flower girls
who clustered around the fountain of Eros and hawked their
"luverly vi'lets, pennig-a-bunch."

Removed from the bustle and hurly-burly of the Circus, the Royal
Institute stood in Olympian dignity. Under its balustraded roof,
the words "Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours" were
carved across its facade. Under the letters were enshrined in
circular niches, offset by Grecian columns and a stone frieze of
garlands and urns, the busts of eight famous watercolorists,
sculpted by the then famous Onslow Ford. Two muses, carved by
a different hand, lounged languidly back to back over the main
doorway. (These muses still grace the building today, but their
position has been elevated.) The street-level facade must have
been equally imposing, but is now altered, and a huge commercial
sign
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spreads itself under the aloof noses of the artists and their muses.
In Swamiji's day, the ground floor, given over now to an airline
office, was occupied by six shops, each with its basement and
mezzanine, and, behind them, by Prince's Hall, named in honor of
Edward, Prince of Wales.

It was not much of an honor. The hall, in daytime, was a gloomy

cavern with a platform at one end and an overhanging balcony at
the other. Its windows were raised so far above the floor that one
could look out only with the aid of a ladder, and then all that met
the eye was the bare and unlovely yard of St. James's. Prince's
Hall was known as the "dismal cave of the Muses," and was soon
to be totally remodeled (indeed, 1895 was the last year of its
existence as a hall). But at nighttime, when all the gas lights were
lit and attention was focused on the platform, where a speaker or
musician brightened the atmosphere with new ideas or pleasant
songs, then Prince's Hall was as good an auditorium as most and
served its purpose well. From our standpoint, the most important
purpose of its thirteen years was served, of course, on the night of
October 22, 1895.

A few days before the event a correspondent of the Westminster

Gazette visited Swamiji for an interview. The result, in which the
essence and purpose of his teachings were stated with clarity and
succinctness, has long since been published in volume five of the
Complete Works. But we may recall here the heart of the matter:

"I propound a philosophy [Swamiji said during the course of the

interview] which can serve as a basis to every possible religious
system in the world, and my attitude towards all of them is one of
extreme sympathy-my teaching is antagonistic to none. I direct
my attention to the individual, to make him strong, to teach him
that he himself is divine, and I call upon men to make themselves
conscious of this divinity within. That is really the ideal-,
conscious or unconscious-of every religion."42
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During a large part of this interview, the interviewer so

persistently drew from Swamiji the assurance that he taught "no
authority proceeding from hidden beings speaking through visible
agents" that one is inclined to envision Mr. Sturdy sitting nearby,
guiding the flow of questions. For instance,

"Then you are connected with no society or sect in this country?

Neither Theosophical nor Christian Scientist, nor any other?"

"None whatever!" said the Swami in clear and impressive tones.

(His face lights up like that of a child, it is so simple,
straightforward and honest.) "My teaching is my own
interpretation of our ancient books, in the light which my Master
shed upon them.”43

Regrettably, this pre-lecture interview did not appear in the

newspapers until after the lecture had been given; nor was there
much advance publicity of any kind. As a consequence, few
people in the vast and busy metropolis of London knew about
Swamiji at all, let alone that he was not a Theosophist, arid the
Hall was not full. Nonetheless, the lecture was a great success.
One who attended it-an Indian named T. J. Desai (who appears to
have been Miss Muller's teacher in some capacity)-wrote a brief
memoir of the occasion, His memory was more of Swamiji than
of the lecture; yet, in some respects, Swamiji and his lectures
were indistinguishable, like lightning and its charge. Mr. Desai
wrote:

About this time (1895) I had an invitation from Miss Muller to

attend the two public lectures delivered by Swami Vivekananda. I
heard the first lecture at St. James' [Prince's] Hall with Mrs.
Ingall. That was the first time I saw the commanding figure of the
great Swami. He looked more like an Indian Prince than a sadhu
[holy man], He had a bhagva patka (ochre coloured turban) on his
head. He , electrified the audience by his grand and powerful
oratory. The next day the report appeared in
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the papers that he was the next Indian after Keshab Chandra Sen,
who had surprised the English audience by his magnificent
oratory. He spoke on the Vedanta. His large eyes were rolling like
anything, and there was such an animation about him that it
passeth description. After the meeting was over, the Swami took
off his turban and put on a huge and deep Kashmiri cap looking
like a big Persian hat.44

One can only imagine, for there are no detailed contemporary

accounts, that the audience that gathered at 8:30 that evening
consisted of men and women from various walks of society,
though mainly from the upper classes, as it was primarily the
upper classes in England, as well as in America, who were
interested in new ideas-religious, philosophical, political,
scientific, social. While such ideas directly touched the lives of
the working classes-particularly ideas bearing on political and
social reform-only the upper and middle classes had the education
and leisure to pursue them. And, certainly, only they were
interested in nonorthodox religions; for, generally speaking, only
the educated classes found orthodox Christianity unsatisfactory
and were seeking answers elsewhere. Some people, of course,
came simply out of curiosity; others hoping against hope for a
Tibetan Mahatma in the flesh; still others prompted by some
inner, inarticulate impulse. One can picture a late nineteen
-century audience of men in dinner jackets, women in hourglass
dresses and evening cloaks, dowdy matrons, dreamy ports, a
clergyman or two, and a sprinkling of faces familiar to the
speaker--Mr. Sturdy, Miss Muller and her sister, the Leggetts and
Miss MacLeod, perhaps some friends from Caversham.

There was as yet no one among Swamiji's English followers who

was able to take shorthand notes, or who thought to take them;
thus we have no verbatim transcript of this, his first
extemporaneous talk to the London public. However, in addition
to the interview mentioned above, the Westminster
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Gazette printed a report of the lecture on the following day. The

Standard also published a report on October 2g, which was
almost identical to that in the Gazette and which is given here in
full:*

AN INDIAN ASCETIC

Since the days of Ramahoun [Ram Mohan] Roy, with the single
exception of Keshub Chunder Sen, there has not appeared on an
English platform a more interesting Indian figure than the
Brahman who lectured in Princes' [sic] Hall last night. Clothed in
the long orange-coloured robe of the Buddhist priest, with a
monk-like girdle round his waist instead of the usual Indian
cummerbund, and wearing the massive turban of Northern India
on his had, the Swami Vivekananda discoursed for an hour and a
quarter, in the most faultless English, on the cardinal doctrines of
the school of religious philosophy to which he is devoting his life.
The name by which he makes himself known is a name assumed,
on his becoming an apostle of his school, in the style of many
philosophers and doctors of antiquity and the Middle Ages. As the
Chairman, Mr. E. T. Sturdy, explained, the first of his names is a
Sanskrit term signifying `the bliss of discrimination’.

The lecture was a most fearless and eloquent exposition of the

pantheistic philosophy of the vedanta school, and the Swami
seems to have incorporated into his system a good deal also of the
moral element of the Yoga school, as the closing passage of his
lecture presented in a modified form not the advocacy of
mortification, which is the leading feature of the latter school, but
the renunciation of all so-called material comforts and blessings,
as the only means of entering into perfect union with the supreme
and absolute Self. The opening passages of the lecture were a
review of the rise of the grosser form of Materialism in the
beginning of the present century, and the later
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development of the various forms of metaphysical thought, which

for a time swept materialism away. From this he passed on to
discuss the origin and nature of knowledge. In some respects his
views on this point were almost a statement of pure Fichteism,
but they were expressed in language, and they embodied
illustrations, and made admissions which no German
transcendentalist would have used. He admitted there was a gross
material world outside, but he confessed he did not know what
matter was. He asserted that mind was a finer matter, and that
behind was the soul of man, which was immovable, fixed, before
which outward objects passed, as it were, in a procession, which
was without beginning or end-in other words, which was eternal,
and finally which was God. He worked out this pantheistic
conception of the personal identity of man and God with great
comprehensiveness and an ample wealth of illustration, and in
passage after passage of great beauty, solemnity, and earnestness.
`There is only one Soul in the Universe', he said; `there is no
"you" or "me" ; all variety is merged into the absolute unity, the
one infinite existence-God.' From this, of course, followed the
immortality of the soul, and something like the transmigration of
souls towards higher manifestations of perfection. As already
stated, his peroration of twenty minutes was a statement of the
doctrine of renunciation. In the course of it he made some re-
morselessly disparaging criticism on the work that factories,
engines and other inventions, and books were doing for man,
compared with half a dozen words spoken by Buddha or Jesus.
The lecture was evidently quite extemporaneous, and was
delivered in a pleasing voice, free from any kind of hesitation.

The London Morning Post and the Daily Chronicle also com-
mented upon Swamiji's lecture, printing the following articles, ,
respectively, on October 23:
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NATIVE INDIAN LECTURER AT PRINCES' HALL.

Last night at Princes' [sic] Hall, Piccadilly, Swami Vivekananda,

an Indian Yogi, who is at present on a visit to this country,
delivered what was described as an "oration" on the subject of
"Self Knowledge." A Yogi, it was explained, is one who formally
renounces the world and gives himself up to study and devotion.
Swami Vivekananda originally left his native land for the purpose
of giving his interpretation of the Vedanta philosophy at the
Parliament of Religions which was held two years ago at
Chicago, and since that time he has been engaged in delivering
lectures on the same subject in America. In the course of his
address last night he declared that there were indications in these
closing days of the 19th century that the pendulum of scientific
thought was swinging back, for men all over the world were
rummaging in the pages of ancient records, and ancient religious
forms were again coming to the fore. To many this seemed to be a
case of degeneration, while others regarded it as one of those
outbursts of superstition which periodically visited society, but to
the scientific student there was in the present state of things a
prognostication of grand future benefit. The lecturer then
proceeded at considerable length to describe the peculiar system
of philosophy which he teaches, and traced the three different
stages of the religion which has grown out of it. He spoke with a
good deal of fluency, and his remarks were listened to with
attention by the somewhat small audience.

THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Attired in picturesque Oriental

costume, this famous preacher last night addressed an audience at
Prince's Hall on "Self Knowledge." He is an Indian Yogi, that is to
say, one who has formally renounced the world and gives himself
to study and devotion, and not, as he amusingly pointed out last
night,
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one who did juggling tricks or flew through the air. The Swami
Vivekananda originally left his native land to express his
interpretation of the Vedanta Philosophy at the Parliament of
Religions in Chicago two years ago, and since then has been
lecturing in America, where he will return to carry on his self
appointed task in a few weeks. It is stated that "his close
acquaintance with various lines of Western thought, as well as
the books of his own country, his broad teachings and stout main-
tenance of individual responsibility and self development,
combined with a tolerance to all living beings, his avoidance of
all mystery-mongering or identification with various societies,
have attracted to him a number of inquirers from all classes in
America." In his address last night he put forward the essential
doctrines which have for so long inspired India, and it is hardly
necessary to add there was much to interest students of
metaphysics.

As for the Church, its members reacted with restraint; no frenzied

outcry against the "heathen" greeted Swamiji's lecture. On the
contrary, there was a certain amount of coolheaded and friendly
interest, as evidenced by the following short item in a column
entitled "Men and Things" in the church Family ,Newspaper of
October 25:

Something new cropped up this week in the lecture line at

Prince's Hall, when an Indian Asiatic [Ascetic?], named Swami
Vivekananda, discoursed upon the evils of this material age and
the bliss of a pantheistic philosophy. Ever since Mr. Sinnett
published his "Esoteric Buddhism" [a Theosophical work], there
has been a growing interest amongst a certain class of minds in
the spiritual beliefs of the Asiatic world. Sir Edwin Arnold's
celebrated poem, "The Light of Asia," revealed much of the high
morality of Buddhism, and if Madame Blavatsky has soiled the
robe of Theosophy, there still remains much
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that is interesting in the whole study of Indian Asceticism. I shall

try and hear, at an early opportunity, "The Bliss of
Discrimination," for such is the meaning of the assumed name of
the new lecturer.

[Who the "I" was of the above is not known.]

Swamiji was satisfied with the interest his first lecture evoked,
restrained as it may have been. He sent the article that had
appeared in the Standard (as given above) to Alasinga in a letter
dated October 24. "So far I have delivered my first address," he
wrote, "and you may see how well it has been received by the
notice in the Standard. The Standard is one of the most influential
conservative papers."45 But public success, fame, the praise of
people, most of whom could not know of the profound and sacred
source from which Swamiji spoke, the brassy sound of popular
acclaim, always jarred upon him. In a heretofore unpublished
letter to Isabelle McKindley, also written on October 24., the day
after the London newspapers had accepted him, we see at
firsthand his reaction to success, as well as his general mood. On
the very eve of a new chapter in his Western mission, he was
longing to go-to be free. The letter reads in full as follows:
24th October 95
80 Oakley Street
Chelsea, S.W.
London.
We meet and part. This is the law
and ever ever be
I sadly ask O gentle ones
Do you remember me?

I haven't had any news from Chicago-nor did I write as I did not
want to bother you, also-I did not know where to.

Accompanying is a newspaper notice of a lecture I delivered in

London. It is not bad. The London audience
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are very learned and critical and the English nature is far from
being effusive. I have some friends here made some more-so I am
going on.

My bed is in the foaming deep

What care I, friend, the dew!

It is a queer life mine-always travelling no rest. Rest will be my

death-such is the force of habit. Little success here, little there-
and good deal of bumping. Saw Paris a good [deal). Miss
Josephine M'cLeod a New York friend showed it all over to me
for a month. [?] Even there the kind American girl! Here in
England they know us more. Those that do not like the Hindus-
they hate them -those that like, they worship them.

It is slow work here but sure. Not frothy not superficial. English
women as a rule are not as highly educated as the American
women, nor are so beautiful. They are quite submissive wives or
hidden away daughters or church going mothers the embodiments
of crystalized conventionality. I am going to have some classes at
the above address.

Sometimes and generally when I score a success-I feel a

despondence-I feel as if everything is vain-as if this life has no
meaning-as if it is a waking dream. Love, friendship, religion,
virtue, kindness everything a momentary state of mind. I seem to
long to go-in spite of myself I say-how far O how far! Yet the
body and mind will have to work its karma out. I hope it will not
be bad.

How are you all going on? Where is mother church? Is she
interviewing the ghosts of the Thotmeses and Rameseses in the
Pyramids-or calmly going her round of duties at home?

Yet the life seems to grow deep and at the same time loose its
hold on itself

Not disgust nor joy for life-but a sort of-indifference things will
take their course who can resist-only stand
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by and look on. Well I will not talk about myself so much.
Egregious egotist! I always was that you know. How about you
all? Great fun this life is isn't it? Don't go to the extremes. A calm,
restful, settled married life is good for the majority of mankind.
Mr. Sturdy the friend with whom I am living now-was in India
several times. He mixed with our monks and is very ascetic in his
habits but he is married at last and has settled down. And has got
a beautiful little baby. Their life is very nice. The wife of course
doesn't much care about metaphysics or Sanskrit but her whole
life is in her husband, husband's soul is in Sanskrit metaphysics!
Yet it is a good combination of theory and practice I think. Write
me all about yourselves if you have time and inclination and give
mother church my eternal gratitude.
My movements are so so uncertain. Yet I will be a month more in
London.

With never ending gratitude and love46

Vivekananda
4
According to some of Swamiji's early letters, he had intended to
return to America in the first part of November. It would appear,
however, that he and Mr. Sturdy had a plan: if the Prince's Hall
lecture should prove successful, then he would remain in London
for another month and there hold a series of classes. The lecture
was indeed a success, the response to it justifying the rental of
London quarters. Thus, on October 23, Sturdy, wasting no time,
sent off the following letter to the Editor of the Standard. It was
printed the next day:

AN INDIAN YOGI IN LONDON

To the Editor of the "Standard".

Sir, As Chairman on the occasion of the Swami Vivekananda's

recent oration at Princes' Hall, of which
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you gave so full and lucid a synopsis, may I be permitted to make

one short statement, for the convenience and assistance of your
readers who may desire to hear more of the Vedanta Philosophy
from this learned Oriental?

I merely desire it to be known that the Swami may be

communicated with, either by letter or personally, by anybody
whomsoever, at 80 Oakley Street, S.W., and that, his work being
wholly in the interest of Truth and for Love, no fees, costs, or
collections of any kind whatever fall upon those who attend his
classes or meet him privately.

No Society is being formed, nor is such meditated, nor does any

inquirer commit himself to any doctrine whatsoever.

I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
E. T. Sturdy.

Swamiji moved into his new quarters on Tuesday, October 29, as

we learn from a heretofore unpublished sentence in his letter of
October 24. to Alasinga: "I am going to be in London for a month
from next Tuesday [October 29] at 80 Oakley Street, Chelsea,
London, S.W."47 The building at 80 Oakley Street, which was
later numbered 61 and which today no longer exists at all, was
one of a block of identical four-story yellow-brick houses, each
with a stoop three or four steps above the sidewalk, a front door
flanked by wooden columns, and, above the doorway, a
balustraded balcony, running the full two-window width of the
house. In short, it was a tall and narrow dwelling, sharing its side
walls with identical neighbors. Although in Swamiji's day Oakley
Street was more of a thoroughfare (with wooden paving in sorry
disrepair) than a residential drive, the neighborhood was not
unfashionable. No. 80, which was very likely a lodging house,
was only a block from the aristocratic Cheyne Walk, the Chelsea
Embankment, and the Thames beyond. Inside, the house seems to
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have suited Swamiji very well. "I shall begin at my lodgings from
Saturday night next [November 2]," he wrote to Miss MacLeod
on October 31. "I expect to have a pretty good-sized room or two
for my classes."48

Meanwhile, as we learn from this same letter, Swamiji had been

holding classes at a Mr. Chamier's. At present, we can only guess
that these classes, which could not have lasted for more than a
week, had been arranged by Miss MacLeod. "Come over and try
to form a class,"49 Swamiji had written to her before her arrival in
London. And possibly she had arranged the Chamier classes for
the last week in October. But this is speculation. We do not really
know exactly who Mr. Chamier was, where he lived, how
Swamiji met him, what the subject of the classes was, how often
they were held, and by whom they were attended. We know only
that two American ladies living in London-a mother and daughter
named Mrs. and Miss Netter-came to the last class, held on the
evening of October 30, and were, as Swamiji wrote to Miss
MacLeod, "very sympathetic." We do not hear again of Mr.
Chamier until 1899, when Swamiji, quarantined on the deck of
his ship in the Madras harbor, spied him in one of the dozens of
small boats full of men, women, and children who had come out
to see him. In all those crowds, he was to write, "I found also Mr.
Chamier, my English friend who had come out to Madras as a
barrister-at-law."50

No sooner had Swamiji settled into his quarters at Oakley Street

than visitors began to come. On Thursday afternoon, October 31,
Miss Muller called, perhaps to see for herself that all was well.
That same afternoon, close upon her heels, came two strangers-a
Mr. Silverlock and a friend whose name Swamiji did not relay
and which is, perhaps, forever lost to us. These two young
gentlemen, one of whom was an engineer and the other in the
grain trade, were, as Swamiji wrote to Mr. Sturdy, "very fine,
intelligent, and educated men"-and withal, interested in religion.
He was filled with joy to find representatives of the class of
Englishmen he wished to reach.
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But in addition to this, the visit of Mr. Silverlock and his friend
was memorable-indeed historic-because of a question they asked,
a question which to this day remains unanswered. Swamiji had
wanted to find the answer at once. The moment the young men
left he sat down, full of enthusiasm, and dashed off a now well-
known letter to Sturdy.

"Both of them want to know," he wrote, "the rituals of my creed!

This opened my eyes. The world in general must have some form.
In fact, in the ordinary sense religion is philosophy concretised
through rituals and symbols." The ideal poured through his pen
with the urgency of his conviction behind it, brooking no delay.
"It is absolutely necessary to form some ritual and have a Church.
That is to say, we must fix on some ritual as fast as we can. If you
can come Saturday morning or sooner, we shall go to the Asiatic
Society library or you can procure for me a book which is there,
called Hemadri Kosha, from which we can get what we want, and
kindly bring the Upanishads."51 It was not the traditional Hindu
rituals that Swamiji had in mind. Months earlier an interviewer in
America had asked him : "Do you intend to introduce the
practices and rituals of the Hindu religion into this country?" And
he had replied: "I am preaching simply philosophy." 52 He
envisioned now a ritual that would symbolize to the Western
consciousness the sublimity and strength of that philosophy. "We
will fix something grand, from birth to death of man," he wrote.
"A mere loose system of philosophy gets no hold on mankind. If
we can get it through before we have finished the classes, and
publish it by publicly holding a service or two under it, it will go
on. They want to form a congregation, and they want ritual." 53

But Mr. Sturdy, cautious, conservative, and perhaps fearful lest

the atheists on the one hand and the orthodox Christians on the
other should become alarmed at anything like a new church,
promptly threw cold water on Swamiji's enthusiasm. Sturdy's
written reply is not available, but we have Swamiji's brief answer
to it, dated November 2. As published, his letter
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was addressed to "Dear Friend." "I think you are right," he wrote;
"we shall work on our own lines and let things grow." 54 It is
interesting to note that one never again hears of Swamiji's
wanting to "form some ritual" in the Western world.*

Another sentence in Swamiji's brief note of November 2 read: "I

shall come on Sunday if nothing extraordinary prevents me." It is
possible, then, that Swamiji went or the day to Caversham; if so,
he would have found there Miss MacLeod, who was spending the
weekend with the Sturdys (the Leggetts had by now returned to
America). This was the first meeting of Swamiji's American and
English disciples, and it was, we know, successful. Miss
MacLeod and Mr. Sturdy were to correspond off and on for many
years to come, their love for Swamiji, expressed so very
differently in each case, forming the bond between them. But
however that may be, and whether or not Swamiji spent Sunday,
November 3, in Caversham, the center of his life and work was
now London, and it was there that the "next wave" rolled in to
carry his mission forward.

As far as can be judged from his letters, Swamiji lived in his

lodgings at 80 Oakley Street alone. Yet no doubt Miss Muller saw
to his needs, and he was helped as well by a young Indian friend
by the name of K. Menon, of whom he wrote to Alasinga on
October 24, "I met K. Menon several times in London." 55 And,
again, on November 18, "K. Menon is as faithful as ever. He
comes very often and helps me a good deal." 56 But for the most
part Swamiji, working day and night, seems to have had no
personal help, and he accepted very little financial aid. "In
England," he was to write to Mrs. Bull after returning to New
York, "I . . . refused even the voluntary collection they made. Mr.
Sturdy being a rich man bore the major part of the expenses
[such] as lecturing in big halls the rest I bore. It worked very
well."57

One catches a glimpse of Swamiji this first season in London

through the eyes of the Reverend H. R. Haweis.
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This remarkable person [Haweis wrote] appeared in England in

the autumn of 1895, and although he led a very retired life,
attracted numbers of people to his lodgings, and created
everywhere a very deep impression. He seemed completely
indifferent to money, and lived only for thought. He took quite
simply anything that was given to him, and when nothing came
he went without, yet he never seemed to lack anything; he lived
by faith from day to day, and taught Yogi science to all who
would listen, without money and without price. His bright orange
flowing robe and white turban recalled forcibly the princely
Magians who visited the birthplace of the Divine Babe. 58

Throughout most of November Swamiji held eight classes a week

at 8o Oakley Street. Although no schedule has been found to date,
we know that there were two classes a day-the morning class, as
Swamiji was to tell his American friend Professor John Henry
Wright, was "for the high Caste people Lady This and Lady That
Honorable This and Honorable That"; whereas the evening class
was "for the low Caste people, who came pell-mell." 59 The
aristocratic people of the morning class seem also to have come
pell-mell, for as Swamiji was to write later on to Mary Hale, "I
had eight classes a week apart from public lectures, and they were
so crowded that a good many people, even ladies of high rank, sat
on the floor and did not think anything of it." 60 "I tell them," he
wrote to Alasinga, "to imagine that they are under the sky of
India, under a spreading banyan, and they like the idea." 61 And
who but Swamiji could evoke banyan trees and the skies of India
in a cold and gray London November? Notes of only two of the
probable twenty-five classes that he held during that month have
come down to us, but those notes (taken by Miss Margaret Noble)
are filled with the beauty and power of his thought, and I shall
quote from them later on.
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In addition to holding classes, Swamiji gave several talks

elsewhere in the city. His primary concern, as he had written in
his letter of October 31 to Sturdy, was to reach the philosophically
religious people of London. To have discovered through the two
young men, Mr. Silverlock and his friend, who had come
of their own accord to visit him, that such a class existed had
delighted him. "We must hurry the book through," he had written,
presumably referring to the Narada Sutra. '"We will touch a class
thereby who are philosophically religious without the least
mystery-mongering."62 But it was not the book that opened the
way; it was Swamiji's lectures themselves. Indeed, his first lecture
at Prince's Hall had been the open sesame to the very heart of
philosophically religious London. Almost immediately the
invitations came. On October 24. he wrote to Alasinga in a
heretofore unpublished passage: "I am going to lecture in [Mrs.
Haweis's] parlour."63 (This important "At Home" was to take
place on Saturday, November 16.) Another equally important
invitation came to him on or before October 31, on which date he
wrote to Miss MacLeod, "I have been . . . invited to Moncure
Conway's Ethical Society, where I speak on the roth." 64 What
Swamiji was referring to was the South Place Chapel in
Finsbury, London, which has been called by one historian "the
most pleasantly invigorating stopping place in metropolitan
Infidelity for nearly two decades." 65 South Place Chapel was
indeed the mecca of heretical London-the gathering place for the
philosophically religious and the philosophically irreligious as
well. Another invitation came from a less likely source and had
perhaps been issued at an earlier date; it may, in fact, have been
the second of the two London lectures to which Swamiji had
referred in his letter of October 4 to Mrs. Bull.* In any event, the
lecture, open to the public, was to be delivered at the Balloon
Society on Tuesday, November 5. Still another invitation came
from Lady Isabelle Margesson, who having heard the "Indian
Yogi" at Prince's Hall, asked to speak at her home in St. George's
Road, London, to a
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selected group of intellectual, religiously skeptical people mostly

women. Swamiji accepted all these invitations and accepted also
one from Miss MacLeod for lunch with Stanton Coit. Let us take
up these significant meetings and events in their chronological
order.

There was first the lunch with Stanton Coit. This took place on
Friday, November I, at the Albermarle Hotel, which then stood on
Piccadilly across from the Royal Institute of Painters in Water
Colours. Stanton Moses Coit was thirty-eight when Swamiji met
him and was well known in London, where he had been living for
nine years or so. An American born in Columbus, Ohio, he had
early in life absorbed the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, had
taught English literature at Amherst College in Massachusetts,
studied political science at Columbia University and philosophy
in Germany, and was a dedicated disciple of Felix Adler, the
founder in 1876 of the American Ethical Culture Movement in
New York.* It was his commitment to the ideals of Adler that
determined the direction of his life. In 1886 Coit had moved to
London, where he stayed for a time at Toynbee Hall, then a newly
founded University Settlement in East End London, whose
humanitarian work deeply impressed him. While there, he
inspired the founding of the first British Ethical Society, many of
the original members of which had been associated with the same
group of men who around this time had formed the socialist
Fabian Society. As set forth in its Prospectus, the aim of the
young and small Ethical Society was to make an "intelligent study
of the basis of morality, with a view to elevate and purify social
life." (It is interesting to note that in the small, heterogeneous, and
interrelated world of London's Freethinkers the early Ethical
Society had some of its printing done by the Women's Printing
Society, which Miss Muller had helped to start many years
earlier.)

The following year (1887) Coit was invited, on the recom-

mendation of Moncure Conway, to become minister at South ·
Place Chapel, a post from which Conway had retired two
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years earlier after a highly successful ministry of more than

twenty years. On taking over, Coit immediately changed the name
of the organization to the South Place Ethical Society and
affiliated it with Felix Adler's American Ethical Union. Further, to
the dismay of the old guard, Coit erased much of Conway's
mystical coloring from the services. He did, however, introduce a
wide variety of lecturers. It was during his ministry that two
extensive series of Sunday lectures entitled "Centres of Spiritual
Activity" and "Phases of Religious Development" were delivered
at South Place. The lectures, first published in December of 1889
in a collection entitled Religious Systems of the World, constituted
a sort of preliminary world parliament of religions all phases of
Christianity, all kinds of religious philosophy, all the great non-
Christian religions were represented. Even Theosophy had been
expounded by Annie Besant, who had given, as was her wont, an
excellent explanation of the philosophical aspects of the "Secret
Doctrine." The "parliament" was at the time a bold venture, and,
as it turned out, the collection of lectures was exceedingly popular
and ran into many editions.

Although Stanton Coit was a broad-minded, eloquent, and

stimulating preacher around whose leadership a liberal society
could flourish, Moncure Conway's long-standing congregation
had developed a distinctive and mellow personality of its own,
quite different from that of the young Coit. There was friendship,
but not love, between the two; thus after five years Coit resigned.
He went on to become an increasingly prominent leader of the
Ethical Movement in London; he helped to found the East
London Ethical Society at Mile End, as well as the South London
Ethical Society, and was an organizing lecturer for the West
London Ethical Society, drawing in this capacity large audiences
at Prince's Hall. The work of these societies and their branches
lay not merely in study, discussion, and lectures; it was primarily
practical and consisted mainly in conducting kindergartens and
Boys' and Girls' Guilds, or educational clubs, in an attempt to
raise the moral and
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intellectual level of the poor and, thereby, of the whole social

fabric.

In 1895 Coit was not yet even in mid-career; but he was well on
his way, his road clearly charted. He was among the last of those
late nineteenth-century "materialists" whom Moncure Conway
had earlier defended against the attacks of Christian prelates.
These "materialists," Conway had pointed out, were men of self
sacrifice, "giving up life and fortune in the pursuit of an ideal
society . . . men of plain living and high thinking, almost ascetic
in their self denial, and ever dreaming of high education, of co-
operation, and other schemes for the moral, intellectual, or social
advancement of mankind."66 Not only was Coit such a man
himself, but he moved among such men-all of whom agreed that
the world must (and would) become a better place, almost none of
whom agreed on how to make it so.

The conversation over lunch at the Albermarie between Swamiji

and Mr. Coit must have been lively with exchanged ideas, Miss
MacLeod joining in. We do not know if the two men met again,
but to judge from many instances of Swamiji's meeting with
intelligent and good-hearted men, Stanton Coit would have been
much taken with him and would surely have introduced him to
other thinkers, some of whom perhaps later attended his classes at
Oakley Street and many of whom were no doubt in the audience
at his lecture at South Place Chapel on November 10. (Stanton
Coit was himself not present, for that morning he was giving his
own lecture at the West London Ethical Society.)

Before November 10, however, Swamiji spoke at the Balloon

Society, which name, understandably enough, has been tran-
scribed in his published letters as "Balboa Society" and, again, as
"Balleren Society." Improbable though this engagement was, it
was not quite as odd as one might at first suppose. The Balloon
Society, which had been formed fifteen years earlier, was not
made up of balloonists, professional or otherwise (most of whom
in those days were barnstorming showmen), but was,
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rather, an illustrious society composed of members of other

specialist Societies, such as the Aeronautical, the Geographical,
the Astronomical, the Chemical, and the Meteorological. The
common bond of the members was an interest in aeronautics;
their common purpose to record and utilize scientific observations
made when in the air. Granted that the individual members were
men of learning and cultivation, one still cannot but wonder how
Swamiji happened to speak before them in their particular
aeronautical grouping. Our only clue at present to who might
have arranged the lecture lies in the not surprising fact that a
number of military men were members. Since, as we have seen
earlier, Swamiji had met several retired generals from India, who
had been "civil and polite" to him may we not put two and two
together and arrive at the Balloon Society lecture? In any event,
Swamiji spoke at the weekly meeting of the Society on the
evening of Tuesday, November 5.

"The Lord will help,"67 he had written to Miss MacLeod

in apparent reference to this engagement. And it would appear
that the Lord did indeed help, providing Swamiji with fuel at the
end of the lecture for a blaze that few who witnessed it would
soon forget

According to Swamiji himself, his subject was "Indian

Philosophy and Western Society," but according to the Indian
Mirror, which reported briefly on the lecture in its issue of
December I, 1895, the title was "Man and Society in the Light of
Vedanta." This article, which gives an idea of the gist of the
lecture, read as follows :

News and Notes

At the weekly meeting of the Balloon Society, an address on

"Man and Society in the Light of Vedanta" was given by Swami
Vivekananda. The Swami who wore the red robe of his sect,
spoke with great fluency and in perfect English for more than an
hour without the help of a single note. He said that religion was
the most wonderful factor in the social organism. If knowledge
was the highest gain
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that science could give, what could be greater than the knowledge
of God, or the soul, of man's own nature which was given by the
study of religion a It was not only impossible that there should be
one religion for the whole world, but it would be dangerous. If the
whole of religious thought was at the same level, it would be the
death of religious thought; variety was its life. There were four
types of religion-(1) the worker, (2) the emotional, (3) the
mystical, and (4.) the philosophical. Each man unfortunately
became so wedded to his own type that he had no eye to see what
existed in the world. He struggled to make others of the same
type. That religion would be perfect which gave scope to all the
different characters. The Vedantic religion took in all, and each
could choose in what his nature required. A discussion followed.
The discussion that followed turned out to be the most
memorable part of the evening-to the mind, at least, of Mr. T. J.
Desai. Mr. Desai, who had earlier attended the Prince's Hall
lecture and was now in the audience at the Balloon Society, tells
of the sudden burst of flame with which Swamiji reproved and
informed an ill-advised heckler:
The next time I heard him was at the Balloon Society (Mr. Desai
wrote). He spoke there for some time but not with his former fire.
A clergyman got up after the lecture and attacked the Swami, and
said that it would have been better if the Swami had taken the
trouble of writing out his lecture at home and of reading it there,
etc. The Swami got up to reply, and he was now on his mettle. He
made such a fiery speech that the clergyman was nowhere. He
said that some people had crude notions that the Vedanta could be
learnt in a few days! The Swami further said that he had to devote
about twelve long years of his life to the study of the Vedanta. He
' replied to the objections of the clergyman categorically
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one by one, recited the sonorous Vedic hymn beginning with

"Suparnam" [Taittiriya Aranyaka, 3. I I. I] and ended with a
triumphant peroration that still rings in my ears.68

Swamiji's next lecture engagement was on the following Sunday

morning, November 10, at the South Place Chapel the church
which had "the largest congregation in London" because, as
Moncure Conway pointed out, "every thinking man ought to
account for at least a dozen who attend churches or chapels as a
mere custom or fashion."69 And whatever else the members of the
South Place congregation may have been, they were all thinking
men and women. They were, moreover, free-thinking men and
women-children of the Enlightenment who were guided in their
search for the true and the good by their reason rather than by the
authority of a doctrine or a book; and their reason led them up
and down a variety of paths to an even greater variety of
conclusions. The group or society had been formed in 1793 as a
reaction to the harsh and rigid doctrines of Calvinism, and in
1802 it had become Unitarian. But it was not until 1816, when
William Johnstone Fox took charge, that the pulpit at South Place
became famous. For forty years thereafter, Fox led his large and
willing congregation further and further to the left on the wide
Unitarian scale of belief. It was during those years also that South
Place took on the intellectual and artistic flavor that was to
characterize it for the remainder of the century.

The actual Chapel in which Swamiji was to lecture was

constructed in 1822 and dedicated in February of the following
year. It was a simple but impressive building, its facade designed
in the classic revival style then in vogue, with a shallow gable
roof, the pediment of which was austerely plain, and four Ionic
columns fronting its portico. The auditorium, together with its
galleries, seated about a thousand, and the acoustics, as Moncure
Conway was later to pronounce, were excellent. The Chapel stood
in the East End of London near Finsbury Circle in what was then
a good neighborhood. Fox
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had drawn the "carriage trade," as did Moncure Conway after

him, despite the fact that in the latter part of the century the
district was to know its years of deterioration and decay.

In 1847 the stimulating and much loved William Fox left South
Place for Parliament, and for several years thereafter the Chapel,
led by a series of more or less mediocre ministers, was becalmed.
Not until South Place and Moncure Conway discovered one
another in 1864. did this Freethought vessel once again sail out
into a boundless and uncharted sea. With Conway at the helm, the
congregation was not only safe, it rode the crest of the wave.

An American, born in Virginia in 1832, Conway was a prototype

of many a nineteenth-century minister, progressing (or many
would have said degenerating) from hellfire-and brimstone
Protestant orthodoxy to a rich and broad agnosticism with, in
Conway's case, a touch of mysticism thrown in. After receiving
an M.A. from a college in Pennsylvania at the age of seventeen,
he had started out, in keeping with his background, as a Methodist
circuit rider-an itinerant preacher, spreading the fear of God
among the isolated and ill-educated country folk of the old South.
Before long, the young preacher happened upon a settlement of
Quakers in Maryland and was so deeply impressed with their
dignified, virtuous, happy, yet withal unorthodox lives that
"dogma paled [and] creedless freedom began to flush with warm
life."70 He was charmed away, as he said, "from the dogmatic
habit." Conway, however, did not remain with the small Qnaker
community. He went on to spend two years at the Harvard
Theological School, to become a Unitarian, to meet Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and, through him, to enter the roofless thought-world of
the Bhagavad Gita and other books of Eastern wisdom. As a
Christian minister he was, one might say, done for.

No longer could he accept, let alone preach, the tenets of the

established Christian Church. Even Unitarianism in its more staid
aspects was too orthodox for the new wideness and liberality of
his mind. Furthermore, he became an Abolitionist,
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advocating the immediate emancipation of all slaves, an

extremely unpopular stand in his home territory. Indeed, except
for an air of Southern "aristocracy" that clung about him, he was
in a class now with the robust and liberal New England
Transcendentalists of the first half of the nineteenth century, many
of whom he came to know. In the 1860s Conway went to England
with an impractical scheme of his own to end the Civil War in the
United States. Nothing came of this except embarrassment; but in
London he discovered, and was discovered by, the South Place
Chapel. The meeting, as one historian has observed, was "one of
those rare encounters between man and institution which seem
predestined."71 Indeed, the South Place congregation had been led
to almost precisely the same pitch of heresy to which Moncure
Conway was then tuned. He stayed on.

From 1885 to 1885, and then again from 1892 to 1897, South
Place and Conway thrived in a close, affectionate, and almost
symbiotic relationship. This rationalistic, mystical, warmhearted,
and deeply loved minister conducted Sunday services of his own
devising, which included reading from the Hindu scriptures and
other texts of the world's spiritual literature combined with a sort
of meditation in which the whole congregation joined. Crowds
came to the Chapel, drawn mainly, if not entirely, from London's
many intellectual and freethinking groups, which, in turn, were
drawn from the upper and middle classes. Conway moved with
ease among artists, scholars, scientists, and liberals of all kinds.
He opened his pulpit to every brand of religious dissension, and
many a prominent heretic spoke from it. So also did exponents of
altogether non-Christian faiths, including Keshab Chandra Sen
and Pratap Mazumdar of the Brahmo Samaj, both of whom had
had their first London hearings at South Place. (Of the latter,
Conway had astutely observed that he was "in spirit not really a
Hindu at all, but a preacher of average English Unitarianism.") 72
One of Conway's best-known accomplishments, and one that
attested clearly to his universality,
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was his Sacred Anthology, published in England in 1873 and in

America the following year. It was a bold venture for the times, a
sort of world-bible of nearly five hundred pages, containing
passages from the sacred texts of East and West alike, setting
them on an equal level of spiritual grandeur and value.* Just as
Conway was universal in his intellectual knowledge and
understanding, so was he universal in his friendships. He knew
everyone and sympathized with all but the bigot and the humbug;
it has been said that "there was probably no one who was on more
friendly terms with so many eminent persons on both sides of the
Atlantic" than was Moncure Conway.73

In view of his wide interests, his lifelong study of Eastern

philosophy, and what must have been his gleeful knowledge of
the orthodox Christian discomfiture at the Parliament of
Religions, he almost certainly had heard of Swami Vivekananda
and very probably had attended his lecture at Prince s Hall. In any
event, we can assume that Conway himself invited Swamiji to
speak at the South Place Chapel on Sunday morning, November 1
o. And a better London pulpit (or "desk" as Conway liked to call
it) Swamiji could not have been offered. In point of intelligence,
the congregation was, to be sure, "the largest in London," and
freedom of thought was bred in its bones. For the subject of his
lecture before the South Place Ethical Society, which name the
Chapel had retained, he chose "The Basis of Vedanta Morality."

It is a misfortune that the only report we have at present comes

from the Christian Commonwealth, a Nonconformist journal,
whose editor viewed the entire proceedings with a somewhat
squinty eye. The article appeared as follows on November 14
under the general heading "Pulpit and Pew, Platform and Press" :

The Christian Commonwealth

South Place Chapel Lecture

“THE SWAMI VIVEKANANDA" enlightened the congregation

at South-place Chapel last Sunday morning on "The
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Basis of Vedanta Morality." Attired in a terra-cotta coloured

cassock-like garment-which, a lady observer was quick to point
out, admirably suited his swarthy complexion-his face clean-
shaven, his rotund head covered with an amplitude of black hair,
his eyes large and lustrous-the clever exponent of Hinduism has a
picturesque and prepossessing appearance. Observing his calm
and easy bearing, his perfect command of English, his unbounded
confidence in the finality of his statements, one can understand
the stir he made at the Parliament of Religions. His manner and
tone seem to imply: "You have heard many doctrines and theories
propounded: now listen to me; I have probed to the root of things,
I can speak the final word: here it is."

THE SWAMI explained that in the system of morality which he

was expounding actions were not inspired by any hope of reward,
here or hereafter, nor by any fear of punishment in this world or
in the beyond: "We must work simply from the impetus within,
work for work's sake, duty for duty's sake." This idea of morality
is claimed to be superior to the religion of Jesus, and so has
beguiled some so-called Christians into Buddhism or other
Eastern philosophies. But the essence of true Christianity is that,
if your actions are inspired by the heavenly kingdom within you,
Paradise will be the result, whereas, if you act in harmony with
the devil's kingdom without you will land in Perdition. The
genuine Christian does not, as the Swami seemed to suggest, act
for the purpose of evading punishments, but at the same time he
sees the ultimate consequences of all actions.

AT South-place Chapel the semblance of Christian worship is

preserved, except that public prayer is omitted: why, it is not easy
to understand. It is curious to hear selections from Wordsworth,
Browning, Tennyson, Lowell, George Eliot, and others sung to
tunes usually associated
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with Evangelical hymns. The hymn-singing, however, is left

almost entirely to the professional quartette, who also render two
anthems at each service. The first and second lessons were read
by Vivekananda. They were selections from the Vedas and formed
the text of his address.

According to the letter Swamiji had written to Mr. Sturdy on

October 31, the selections he read were from the Bhagavad Gita
and the Jatakas. "The Ethical Society," he had written, "has sent
me another letter thanking me for the acceptance of this offer.
Also a copy of their forms. They want me to bring with me a
book from which to read for ten minutes. Will you bring the Gita
(translation) and the Buddhist Jataka (translation) with you?"74
Since the Society evidently had not thought to ask Swamiji to
prepare an abstract of his coming talk, and since he of course did
not, the following is all we learn from "The South Place
Magazine" in regard to his lecture:

On Sunday, November 10, the Swami Vivekananda, an Indian

yogi, lectured at South Place on "The Basis of Vedanta Morality",
an abstract of which we regret we are unable to give.

That information did not leave the congregation at South Place as

unsatisfied as it leaves us. They had heard Swamiji himself,
absorbed his ideas, been inspired by his power of lifting an
audience to a sense of spiritual awareness. How many friends he
made that morning, how many of them later attended his classes,
how many became his disciples, we cannot know. But at least
some-perhaps the half dozen earnest people he wanted-must have
followed him; for while the congregation was comprised largely
of confirmed agnostics and secularists, it contained also seekers
of the spiritual truth he had so abundantly to give. This was
indeed the kind of beginning he had hoped for.

There was more to come On the afternoon of that same

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Sunday he had an engagement to speak to a small group in a

house at 63 St. George's Road. In at least one respect this proved
to be one of the most rewarding engagements of his early London
work. But of this, more later. Let us go first to a house in Chelsea,
only two blocks from his own lodgings: the residence of the
Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis, the eminent, though
unorthodox, Anglican clergyman, music critic, and author.

As we have seen above, it was as early as October 24, two days

following the Prince's Hall lecture, that Swamiji mentioned in his
letter to Alasinga that he was going to lecture in Mrs. Haweis's
parlor. It seems clear from this letter, in which Swamiji mentions
some previous correspondence with Mrs. Haweis, that she had not
waited to hear his lecture before inviting him to speak at her first
"At Home" of this 1895-96 season. She did not have to: she had
heard him two years earlier at the Parliament of Religions, which
she had attended with her famous husband. In his book Travel
and Talk, published in 1896, the Reverend Mr. Haweis gives an
account of the Parliarnent and makes particular mention of "the
popular Hindu monk," even quoting a few passages from one of
his more forthright unscheduled talks. The full text of Mr.
Haweis's account has been reproduced by Swami Yogeshananda
(then Brahmachari Buddha Chaitanya) in Vedanta for East and
West, but I shall quote here a sentence or two from it:

Vivekananda, the popular Hindu monk, whose physiognomy bore

the most striking resemblance to the classic face of the Buddha,
denounced our commercial prosperity, our bloody wars, and our
religious inconsistency, declaring that at such a price the "mild
Hindu" would have none of our vaunted civilization.. .. I consider
that Vivekananda's personality was one of the most impressive,
and
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his speech one of the most eloquent speeches which dignified the
great congress.75

The Reverend H. R. Haweis had not been an official Anglican

delegate to the Parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury having
indignantly refused to recognize that conclave-"The Christian
religion," he had written in his letter to the organizers of the
gathering, "is the one religion. I do not understand how that
religion can be regarded as a member of a Parliament of
Religions, without assuming the equality of the other intended
members and the parity of their position and claims." 76 This
official stand did not, however, prevent a number of Anglican
clergymen from independently applauding the idea behind the
Parliament and of lending their names to the Advisory Council.
Among these was the Reverend Mr. Haweis, who also accepted
an invitation to be a speaker on his own and, accordingly, spoke at
one of the plenary sessions in Columbus Hall on "Music, Emotion
and Morals."
On whatever subject this eloquent, charismatic, and often
outrageously unorthodox clergyman spoke, he enthralled his
listeners, who crowded to hear him. Born in 1838, he studied at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a Master of Arts
degree. After filling several pulpit appointments, he was offered
in 1866 the curacy at the Crown Chapel of St. James's in
Marylebone, London. St. James's (first known as Titchfield
Chapel, and not to be confused with St. James's Church in
Piccadilly) was a proprietary chapel, built in 1774 and owned by
the Duke of Portland, who supplied its living and had the right to
appoint its clergy and rent out its pews. In 1817, the duke sold his
chapel rights to the king, at which time the building became the
Crown Chapel of St. James's. The services held in proprietary
chapels were bona fide offices of the Church, but the chapels had
no parishes; nor could christenings, weddings, or funerals take
place in them without special permission. This somewhat second-
rate curacy did not
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in the least cramp the Reverend Mr. Haweis's style. On the

contrary, he made St. James's, which was rebuilt and enlarged in
1867, one of the most fashionable and well-attended churches in
London. Towards the end of 1871, his proud and adoring wife
was to write in her journal: "The Church evening congregation is
growing nearly as large as the morning. We have now, in the dead
season, ~6-odd every Sunday from strangers. Boff is valued and
sought after by all clever and intelligent men-Roman Catholics,
Dissenters, almost all creeds meet and settle down in our Church
and consult and trust Rennie,"77 ("Boff" and "Rennie" were, of
course, both fond references to the Reverend Mr. Haweis.)

Indeed so popular was he that in 18'72, despite his unorthodox

views, he was invited to be a regular Evening Preacher at j
Westminster Abbey, where he held the congregation spell bound.
Nor was it only the upper classes who came to hear him. In the
1870s Haweis inaugurated "Sunday Evenings for the People," on
which occasions the poor and the lonely of Marylebone flocked to
St. James's, and were enthralled not only by talks from the
smiling Reverend but by many a ] cheering tune from his violin,
which he played uncommonly well.

And all these people-High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, Broad

Churchmen, . Nonconformists, Catholics, Dissenters, Atheists,
Secularists-all came to hear the diminutive curate (he was barely
five feet tall) not only because his oratory was brushed with
magic, but because of what he said. He marched quite fearlessly
to the beat of the times, even catching now and then the rhythms
of the future. Nor, although he tended toward poetic flights, did
he obscure matters with long-winded bombast. For the most part,
he spoke in simple everyday language, to which people actually
listened. Further, aside from giving sermons, he wrote an endless
number of articles, more than a dozen books, and frequently went
on far-flung lecture tours-all of which outpouring lent its vitality
to the ideas seething at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Mr. Haweis was often identified with the "Broad" faction of the
Church of England-the liberal, rationalist faction, as
distinguished, on the one hand, from the "High" Anglican, which
followed the way of the Roman Catholic Church in everything
except a recognition of Papal authority, and, on the other hand,
from the older "Low" Anglican, which stemmed from the
Evangelical movement of the eighteenth century and laid much
less stress upon theological scholarship than did the "Anglo-
Catholics." Haweis himself, like many other clergymen of the
Anglican Church, disclaimed all labels. The fact is, however, that
he recognized still another party, to which he gave the name
"Mystic Broad," as opposed to "Rational Broad." Such a party did
indeed exist, though in a shadowy, tenuous way. Now and then
bubbles of romantic mysticism surfaced in the religious thought
of the late nineteenth century, only to be pricked more often than
not by the clergy-High, Low, and Broad alike. But while it lasted,
this shimmering and uncertain mysticism was in part responsible
for the crowds that poured into such chapels as those of Moncure
Conway and Hugh Reginald Haweis. It drew them as the glint of
water draws the parched traveler to an oasis. Was it only a
mirage? Even, or perhaps primarily, the liberal clergy thought so.
But not Haweis. Although he tended to mix romanticism, psychic
phenomena, spiritualism, and mysticism into a frothy brew, he
tried nonetheless to give respectability to the "wellsprings" of
religious experience.

In view of Mr. Haweis's recognition of the need to retain the

"mystical" element in religion, it is not surprising that he was
deeply impressed by Swamiji from the moment he first heard him
at the Parliament of Religions. As we have seen, however, it was
his wife, Mary Eliza Haweis, who invited the "Indian Yogi" to be
the speaker-of honor at Queen's House on the afternoon of
November 16; in late October, when the invitation was issued,
the Reverend was still on a world-tour, from which he returned
only just in time to be host. at the party. Born in London in 1838,
Mary Eliza Haweis was the
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elder daughter of the fashionable portrait painter Thomas

Musgrove Joy and had inherited his gift for painting. After her
marriage in 1867 to the young curate of St. James's, she set about
seriously developing her talents, not only to eke out a parson's
income, but simply because her gifts and intellect cried for
expression. She began to publish articles, poems, and drawings, to
illustrate books, to design book covers and bindings, to sketch
women's dress, and to infuse into both women's fashions and the
decor of Victorian houses her own impeccable good taste. With
the start of women's education in the 1870s and the consequent
creation of a new reading public-the very public for which Mrs.
Haweis wrote and drew-she soon found herself to be one of the
few English women in the latter part of the nineteenth century
who had careers of their own. She had attained this distinction,
moreover, without being severely criticized for the very attempt;
her pursuits did not in the least encroach upon the preserves of the
Victorian male. By the 1880s her illustrated books entitled The
Art of Beauty, The Art of Dress, The Art of Decoration had
established her reputation as an authority on women's dress and
interior decorating, and her Chaucer for Children, which was
published in 1877 and which, though highly popular, was not an
unscholarly work, went through many editions. Nor was Mrs.
Haweis ignorant of certain metaphysical concepts. In The
Women's Signal, a women's journal started by Miss Muller and
taken over by Lady Henry Somerset, of whom we have heard
earlier, one reads that at one of her Queen's House tea parties
"Mrs. Haweis caused a good deal of merriment by alluding to sex
as a `mere dress.' " Such. merriment, the Signal loftily pointed
out, indicated "ignorance on the part of her hearers of Buddhist
and Theosophical theories of reincarnation."

Queen's House, which the Haweises bought in 1883, was an ideal

setting for Mrs. Haweis's At Homes, or, as they were also called,
her "Saturday Lecturettes," at which some renowned person was
invited to deliver a short discourse. The
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house, which stood on Cheyne Walk, facing the Chelsea

Embankment and the Thames, was historic and elegant, built in
1717 on a portion of the grounds where once Henry VIII's vast
manor of Chelsea stood. Tradition had it (wrongly) that the house
once belonged to Catherine of Braganza, the unhappy wife of
Charles II, for which reason Mrs. Haweis changed its name from
Tudor House to Qneen's House. But whatever its early history
may have been, it is certain that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the
famous Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter, owned the house from
1862 until his death twenty years later and that his friend
Algernon Charles Swinburne and his brother W. M. Rossetti
lived with him there for a time after the untimely and tragic death
of his wife. It was because of its association with Rossetti, whose
work she much admired, as well as for its own charm and beauty,
that Mrs. Haweis loved Qneen's House. She furnished and
decorated all the rooms in the best of late Victorian taste, and on
the peak of the roof she added a crowning touch-a statue of
Hermes, messenger of the gods.

At Queen's House, Mrs. Haweis gave some of her most brilliant

At Homes, filling the large drawing room, which ran the entire
width of the house and whose seven tall windows faced the
Thames, with notables, brainy, gifted, fashionable, and to a large
extent liberal-minded. A drawing said to be from the Illustrated
London News depicts one such occasion a meeting of the
Browning Society in February of l891. The drawing is here
reproduced, for the scene must have appeared very much the
same four and a half years later. Even the clerical gentleman
standing to the left of the host and hostess (who are at right
center) bears a striking likeness to Canon Basil Wilberforce, who
was present on that afternoon of November 16, 1895, when
Swamiji entered the room. Later, relating his London experiences
to his old friend Professor John Henry Wright, Swamiji was to
say, "Wasn't it funny? When I came into Mr. Haweis's crowded
parlour he came up to me and in a loud voice said, `Here comes
the master!' “78

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One can well imagine the sudden hush that fell over the
gathering, as everyone turned to look at the handsome and
smiling monk, with his "swarthy complexion," abundant black
hair, and rich "terra-cotta" robe. Unfortunately, there is no
satisfactory report of Swamiji's talk that afternoon. All we have is
the following item that appeared in The Queen, the Lady's
Newspaper of November 23, from which it is clear that he spoke
on the possibility of a universal religion, often discussed in the
West. The brief article read as follows:

AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION

Mrs. Haweis's first autumn At home took place last Saturday at

Queen's House, when the Indian Yogi, or ascetic, Swami Vive
Kananda (Buddhist delegate at the Parliament of Religions at
Chicago in 1893) discussed in a liberal spirit, and not without
humour, the chances and the charms of an universal religion. He
showed that the underlying principles of all the great religions of
the world resembled one another, and amongst the great prophets
he placed the Christian Redeemer very high, implying, however,
that His teaching was little borne out sometimes by His professed
followers. There was no radical impossibility of reconciliation
between sects, now biting and devouring each other from the best
motives, if charity and sympathy were carried into the kiosque,
the temple, and the church. Canon Basil Wilberforce and the Rev.
H. R. Haweis both made interesting speeches in reply to the
Swami. Amongst the guests were Lady Westbury, Lady Kennett-
Barrington (who wore black), Canon and Mrs. Basil Wilberforce,
Lady Jephson (who looked charming in green velvet and sable),
Lady Hutt, Mrs. and Miss Linwood-Strong, Mr. and the Hon.
Mrs. Arthur Nash, the Hon. Mrs. Raymond Parr; Mrs. Wm.
Mitford and Mrs. Bonhote, Col. and Mrs. Benson, and Mrs.
Albert Vickers (in a pretty dress of black broche with blouse of
rose crepon and vast sleeves). The hostess
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wore blue cloth, trimmed with silver balls, and a bodice of

Chinese silk. The rooms were decorated with palms, autumn
leaves, and enormous chrysanthemums from Mrs Josselyn's well-
known conservatories at Stratford St. Mary, The guests numbered
150.
Swamiji must have made good friends of many of the hundred
and fifty elegantly dressed men and women in Mrs. Haweis's
drawing room. It is possible, for instance, that on this occasion he
first met Miss Emmeline Souter, who was later to contribute
financially to his Indian work. Miss Souter, whom we shall meet
again in a later chapter, was a member of the Reverend Mr.
Haweis's congregation and one of his most ardent admirers. Very
likely it was also at Queen's House that Swamiji first met Canon
Basil Wilberforce, who, as seen above, was one of the guests.
Their meeting seems to have resulted in an immediate friendship
and also, seen from this distance, gave impetus to the wave that
was carrying Swamiji into the heart of London. Although Mr.
Haweis was at the time a better known and more popular figure in
the pulpit than Canon Wilberforce, the former's unconventional
preaching did not tend to make him a pillar of the Establishment.
Canon Wilberforce, on the other hand, was the best of the
Anglican Church personified, and his liking for Swamiji was
tantamount to an official seal of British approval. He showed his
liking at once. According to Professor Wright's secondhand
account to his wife, "Canon Wilberforce . . . took him into his
house and gave him a dinner." 79 There is, however, a somewhat
different version of the Canon's hospitality in the Indian Mirror of
January 18, 1896, where it was said : "At [Canon Wilberforce's]
residence there was a levee in honor of the Swami, to which some
of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of London were
invited." Swamiji could, of course, have been entertained and
honored, more than once at the Canon's house which stood (and
still stands) at 20, Dean's Yard, Westminster.
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Canon Albert Basil Orme Wilberforce was the grandson of the

famous English philanthropist and slavery abolitionist, William
Wilberforce, the "Great Emancipator," and the youngest son of
the High Churchman Samuel Wilberforce who had been bishop
successively of Oxford and Winchester and who was an
extremely eloquent and ingratiating (some said unctuous) orator.
Although Bishop Wilberforce, widely known as "Soapy Sam,"
was a powerful ecclesiastic in his time he is perhaps best known
today for his pontifical and informed ridicule of Darwin's theory
of evolution during a public debate and the stern squelching he
received from the young and grave Thomas Huxley. His son
Albert Basil Orme Wilberforce, born in 1841, was also an
eloquent and popular speaker, though in 1895 he was neither a
well-known nor a weighty potentate of the Church. Nor was he
"soapy" : he was an earnest, a well-read, and a good man, a kindly
friend, a liberal thinker, and, it so happened, a serious student of
the Vedanta philosophy. For all these reasons, he much admired
Swamiji and told him (as Swamiji related it to Professor Wright)
that "they were trying to teach in substance the Vedanta
philosophy in the Church at the present time, and that he
[Swamiji) was really a missionary to the Church of England." 80

As time went on and Swamiji met more and more Englishmen on

their home ground, his estimate of the English people continued
to change. "I have been in the midst of the genuine article in
England," he was to write to Mary Hale after his return to
America. "The English people received me with open arms, and I
have very much toned down my ideas about the English race. . . .
I also found at once the difference in culture and breeding
between [the English and the Americans] and came to understand
why American girls go in shoals to be married to' Europeans."
Swamiji could not, of course, avoid coming across arrogant and
crude Anglo-Indians even in England; but he found also lovers of
India, caught forever by her spell. "There are two sorts of
Englishmen who have lived
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in India," he wrote in the same letter. "One consisting of those

who hate everything Indian, but they are uneducated. The other,
to whom India is the holy land, its very air is holy. And they try to
out-Herod Herod in their Hinduism."81

The English, moreover, were on the whole well informed (the

men particularly) and intensely interested in the thought of the
times-religious as well as secular. A thoughtful response to his
lectures must surely have been a relief to Swamiji after the
emotional and often mindless reaction his very presence had
created among some circles in America. In a letter written to
Alberta Sturges on his departure from London at the end of
November he was to sum up the matter:

. . . In your country [America], Alberta, the Vedantic thought was

introduced in the beginning by ignorant "cranks", and one has to
work his way through the difficulties created by such
introductions. You may have noticed that only a few men or
women of the upper classes ever joined my classes in America.
Again in America the upper classes being the rich, their whole
time is spent in enjoying their wealth and imitating (aping?) the
Europeans. On the other hand in England the Vedantic ideas have
been introduced by the most learned men in the country, and there
are a large number among the upper classes in England who are
very thoughtful. So you will be astonished to hear that I found my
grounds all prepared.82

To Mary Hale he would write in the same vein: "The English

people laughed and laughed when I told them about my
experience with the Presbyterians and other fanatics [in America]
and my receptions in hotels etc. [because of a racial confusion]. . .
. In [America] my teachings are thought to be queer by the
`Methodist' and `Presbyterian' aristocracy. In England it is the
highest philosophy to the English Church aristocracy.”83

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As mentioned earlier, there were three parties in the Anglican

Church: the Anglo-Catholics, who stressed sacraments, ritualism,
and theological scholarship; the Evangelicals, who emphasized
the need for individual conversion, holy living "in the great
Taskmaster's eye," Biblical study, and moral and social reform;
and the Broad Church party, which was liberal `; and rationally
oriented. These movements, and varying shades and mixtures of
them, were all integral parts of the powerful established Church
of England. Outside, though a part of orthodox Christianity, was
the large body of Nonconformist Protestant evangelical
denominations, such as Methodist, Baptist, and Congregationalist.
Unlike their counterparts in nineteenth-century America, these
Churches were by and large on the side of Radical social reform
and were liberal in outlook. If they had their narrow, intolerant
side, it had no weight with the public. "I found," Swamiji was to
write to Mary Hale in the letter quoted above, "that those fellows
[such] as Lund [a Christian missionary] etc., who came over from
England to attack me were nowhere. Their existence is simply
ignored by the English people. None but a person belonging to
the English Church is thought to be genteel. Again, some of the
best men of England belonging to the English Church and some
of the highest in position and fame became my truest friends." 84
Not all English clergymen, of course, agreed with Swamiji's
views, but none attempted to silence him by slander or any other
means. "The English Church people are all gentlemen born," he
was later to say on his return to India, "which many of the
missionaries are not. They greatly sympathised with me. I think
that about thirty English Church clergymen agree entirely with
me on all points of religious discussion." 85 But it was not really to
be wondered at. In all parties of the Anglican Church, as well as
among those who, like Haweis, claimed to belong to no party at
all, there were many highly educated and cultured clergymen,
some of whom had studied not only Christian theology and
history but the philosophies and scriptures of non-Christian
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religions as well-and this not to condemn, but to learn. Many

churchmen were keenly aware that the widening rift between
traditional Christian doctrine and the relentless currents of
modern scientific thought was disastrous; they sought somehow
to bring about a reconciliation. Many were also awake to the
terrible social evils of nineteenth-century England and deplored
the Church's failure to meet the new and proliferating problems.
Some of the more thoughtful of the clergy recognized that a
deepening of religious awareness, rather than secularization,
could bring the Church more into line with the times. An infusion
of Eastern thought into Christianity was, therefore, not an
unthinkable (though not, of course, officially welcomed) prospect
to those who knew what Eastern thought in its loftiest reaches
was. And those who knew, recognized in Swamiji its
representative and "missionary." As he was to write to Mary Hale,
"Many people of education and rank, and amongst them not a few
clergymen, told me that the conquest of Rome by Greece was
being re-enacted in England."85 That cultural conquest would be
sidetracked by coming years of war and economic turmoil-but the
seeds for it were to be well planted and could bide their time.

It is clear from Swamiji's letters that he met many celebrated and

influential people, laymen and clergymen alike, during his first
stay in England, but he gives no detailed account of them and
almost no names. We do know, however-and this again through
Professor John Henry Wright, who relayed the information to his
wife-that he met at least one person high up in the British
Government. Professor Wright wrote that Swamiji had
"succeeded in winning" "the chief Secretary for India, Sir F.
Arbuthnot," and that "they became fast friends." This information,
significant though it was, was confused. Sir F. Arbuthnot was not
the Secretary for India and never had been. Here are some facts,
on the basis of which the reader can make his own guess as to
whom Swamiji had won over and become fast friends with.
Among reasonable possibilities, there was the Marquess of Ripon,
whose wife, as we shall see presently,
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Swamiji had almost certainly met. Lord George Ripon had been
Secretary of State for India in 1866, Viceroy of India in 1880—
84, and in 1895 was Secretary of State for the Colonies, with
particular concern for India, toward which he had a sympathetic
and extraordinarily liberal attitude. Swamiji could well have met
and become fast friends with Lord Ripon. As for Sir F. Arbuthnot,
this must have been Sir Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, a well-
known Orientalist, who had been born in India and had spent
many years there in the Civil Service. Later, he became a trustee
of the Royal Asiatic Society in London and in 1891 inaugurated a
new series of the Oriental Translation Fund. Clearly, Sir F.
Arbuthnot was interested in things Indian, and Swamiji certainly
could have met him, perhaps through the like-minded Professor
Robert Watson Frazer (see page 222). My own guess is that
Swamiji met both men and that in the hearing and retelling of it
Professor Wright got them mixed up.*

In no time at all and with very little effort on his part, London
opened to Swamiji. The Anglican Church, the Freethinkers, the
Radicals, as represented by Miss Muller's family, the scientists of
the Balloon Society, Her Majesty's Government, as represented
by at least one high-ranking official, Orientalists, and scholars-all
were his. There was no one in London who would hesitate to
attend his classes, lest to do so be somehow not quite proper; no
door in the city was closed to him. In short, as generally happened
in the course of his Western mission, the way opened at every
turning, and he simply strode along.

Another momentous gathering took place on the afternoon of

Sunday, November 10,* * at 69 St. George's Road (now St.
George's Drive) in Pimlico, or South Belgravia, then a
fashionable district not far from Chelsea. The occasion was
momentous not for its size and social elegance, but, on the
contrary, for its smallness, its intimacy, and for the presence
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of a young woman who listened with concentrated, if skeptical,

attention. The house was one in long rows of narrow houses
abutting one on the other without a crack of air between, each
with its identical columned stoop, each four stories tall, each with
its basement, its garret, its chimneys, its stone facade and its well-
turned balusters and cornices. Number Sixty-three belonged to
Mr. Mortimer Reginald Margesson and his wife, Lady Isabel
Margesson, sister of the seventh earl of Bucking hamshire. Lady
Isabel, in her early thirties at the time, was a Liberal, an ardent
feminist (later, a militant suffragette), an advocate of Froebel's
then modern principles of education, and an intellectual,
conversant with the social and political issues of the day. Having
seen the announcement for Swamiji's lecture at Prince's Hall in
the newspapers, she had attended it and, subsequently, had invited
him to speak at her home. For his audience she had chosen a
challenging group of people, most of whom had "been singled out
. . . on the very score of their unwillingness to believe." Among
this select number was Miss Margaret Noble of Wimbledon, just
turned twenty-eight, a brilliant young journalist and
educationalist, who, while by no means irreligious,* was as
difficult to convince as anyone could wish.

As those who are familiar with Swami Vivekananda's life will

know, Margaret Noble was to become Sister Nivedita, one of his
foremost Western disciples, and was to give her life to the service
of his India. It is from her book The Master as I Saw Him that we
learn about that Sunday gathering in Lady Isabel Margesson's
West End drawing room, where Swamiji "was seated, facing a
half circle of listeners, with the fire on the hearth behind him."
"We were but fifteen or sixteen guests," she wrote, "intimate
friends, many of us, and he sat amongst us, in his crimson robe
and girdle, as one bringing us news from a far land, with a curious
habit of saying now and again ‘Shiva! Siva!' and wearing that
look of mingled gentleness and loftiness, that one sees on the
faces of those who live much in meditation, that look, perhaps,
that Raphael has painted for
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us, on the brow of the Sistine Child." He chanted Sanskrit verses

for them, thrilling them with "those wonderful Eastern tones,"
which they found "at once so reminiscent of, and yet so different
from, the Gregorian music of our own churches." And he
answered their many questions, staying on until darkness came
and the lamps were lighted.87
In her narrative of that afternoon, Sister Nivedita refrained from
giving names; thus we cannot know with absolute certainty who
was present among the guests, besides herself. She does tell us,
however, that "[the] hostess and one or two others were interested
in those modern movements which have made of an extended
psychology the centre of a faith." 88 After puzzling over this
sentence, the present writer has guessed that the reference is to
the young New Thought and faith-healing movements of the time,
such as Christian Science and Unity. And, to be sure, Mrs. Asliton
Jonson, who was a friend of Lady Margesson and who was almost
certainly present, was a believer in mental and spiritual healing.

On the same page Nivedita poses another riddle: "The white-

haired lady, with the historic name, who sat on the Swami's left,
and took the lead in questioning him, with such exquisiteness of
courtesy, was perhaps the least unconventional of the group in
matters of belief, and she had been a friend and disciple of
Frederick Denison Maurice." There are several hints here, and I
do not think one would be wrong in coming to the conclusion that
this courteous, liberal, and elderly lady was the Marchioness of
Ripon, wife of Lord George Ripon, and widely known for her
sweetness and charm. Together with her husband, Lady Ripon
had, to be sure, been a friend and follower of Maurice, the
idealistic and heterodox theologian, out of whose teachings grew
the movement known as Christian Socialism. Further, Lady Ripon
was a friend and cousin of Lady Isabel Margesson and, with her,
had been co-founder of the Sesame Club, to which Sister Nivedita
and Mrs. Ashton Jonson belonged. To clinch the matter, Lady
Ripon had white hair in this period of her life, and the name
Ripon surely
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qualifies as historic. Since she fills all these conditions, let us

place Lady Henrietta Ripon on Swamiji's left.

As for the rest of his audience, they were, as has been seen above,
skeptical of "religious propaganda in general," and had been
invited for that very reason. Why? Had Lady Margesson, a
Christian Scientist or the like, meant to crack their shells of
disbelief? Had she meant, on the other hand, to face Swamiji with
challengers? Or had she wanted simply to set the scene for the
kind of stimulating discussion she enjoyed -the kind in which
intellects glowed in the heat of argument and shot off sparks and
perhaps now and then a rocket? Whatever her motive, she had
surely not dreamed that the life of one of her young skeptics
would be completely reforged that afternoon in the furnace of the
Indian Yogi's thought. This consequence was not immediately
obvious. On taking leave of their hostess, Miss Noble and her
friends remarked that the Swami had said nothing new; it had all
been said before. There was, in short, nothing to become excited
about. And yet, as even Margaret Noble was to admit, he had put
forward ideas new to them. He had told them "that both the mind
and the body were regarded by Hindus as moved and dominated
by a third, called the Self." He had also insisted on the word
"realization" as the crux of religious experience, rather than
"faith." Further, he had dwelt for a while on the "infinite power of
man" and had declared "the one message of all religions to lie in
the call to Renunciation." Again, it must have surprised that group
to be informed that the desire to reach Heaven was regarded in
India "by the most religious people, ‘as a little vulgar.' "89

It will perhaps be of interest to take a moment here to wonder

why Swamiji's thought, most of which was actually revolutionary
in the nineteenth century, seemed familiar on first hearing to his
well-read, though perhaps not scholarly, listeners. One reason
may have been his way of making the most subtle and difficult of
ideas seem available and natural; but another may have been the
apparent and deceptive
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similarity between the philosophy of Vedanta and the element of

idealism and romanticism in the background of nineteenth -
century thought. Just at random, one can think of a number of
disconnected ideas floating about in the English consciousness
that could have been brought to mind by Swamiji's talk. The
romantic poets, for instance, had found God flamingly immanent
in nature and had felt within themselves intimations of
immortality that could not, to themselves, be gainsaid. Some were
pantheistic in outlook, and Shelley, as everyone knew, had sung,
"The One remains, the many change and pass " and had likened
life to a dome of many-colored glass staining the white radiance
of Eternity. In philosophy, Immanuel Kant had declared that the
very structure of the human mind, with its built-in lens of time
and space, was itself that many-colored glass, unavoidably
distorting the real world-the thing-in-itself of which nothing at all
could logically be known or said. Later German idealistic
philosophers, such as Fichte and Schiller, who were inspired but
not restrained by Kant, speculated at length upon the nature of the
"truly Real." Hegel, the most influential of all, believed the
Absolute to be involved in the finite, unfolding itself through a
dialectical process in time and history. He said such things as
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the
consciousness of Freedom,"90 which sounded somewhat like
Swamiji's "The whole life of society is the assertion of that one
principle of freedom."91 (But to Hegel, the finite world was in
process of becoming the Infinite; whereas to Swamiji, as the
illusory veil of finitude grows finer and yet finer, "the light behind
shines forth, for it is its nature to shine.") 92 Schopenhauer, who
considered Hegel's philosophy to be "a monument of German
stupidity"93 and found solace in the Upanishads, advised
renunciation. "If we turn our glances from our own needy and
embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world,"
he wrote, ". . . we shall see that peace which passeth
understanding, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that
inviolable confidence and ser-
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enity . . . ; only knowledge remains, the Will [by which he meant

a blind and driving cosmic Force] has vanished."94
The vehement Carlyle in England and the benign Emerson in
America lent their voices to German idealistic views,
popularizing them. Of immortality, Carlyle wrote in Sartor
Resartus (the theme of which was itself Vedanta-like), "Know of
a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are
perishable; the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and
whatever will be, is even now and for ever." 95 And of our earthly
lives he wrote, "They are dust and shadow; a shadow system
gathered round our ME; wherein, through some moments or
years, the Divine Essence, is to be revealed in the Flesh." 96 And
Emerson, who had studied the Bhagavad Gita, declared in his
"Over-Soul," "We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the
moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the
shining parts, is the soul."97

Such ideas reached down the years through later-day romantics

and idealists as, for instance, Moncure Conway and Haweis.
South Place Chapel, where Hindu and Buddhist scriptures were
regularly read at the Sunday services, was a veritable mart of
idealistic thought. In the published collection of lectures on World
Religions delivered at the Chapel in 1888 and 1889, one finds
opposite the title page a quotation from the Universal Review of
December 1888 which reads in part: "A new Catholicity has
dawned upon the world. All religions are now recognized as
essentially Divine. They represent the different angles at which
man looks at God." (It was, of course, not true that all religions
were then recognized as essentially divine, least of all by the
official Church of England; but the thought was in the air and in
print, even before the Parliament of Religions had been dreamed
of.) Man, too, was recognized as essentially divine, in a way. At
least he was recognized by some as essentially and innately good.
Froebel (whose theories of education were followed by Lady
Margesson and Miss Noble) had defined education as "the
unfolding of the Divine within us”98--a sentiment which, again,
sounded Vedantic,
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but which, again, was not. It stemmed back to Rousseau's natural

man and was mixed with pre-Darwinian theories of evolution.

Thus, ideas noble, lofty, idealistic, poetic, metaphysical were

familiar to most educated Englishmen (and a few educated
Englishwomen), particularly those who sought relief from the
harsh light of science and escape from the windowless walls of
dead-end skepticism. They did not flow from an irrefutable core
of hard-won realization and knowledge (jnana); they were
speculative, vague, and, when pushed, stumbling and confused;
yet there was greatness in them. In their intensity of search, the
thinkers and poets of the first half of the nineteenth century had
reached into deeps of human consciousness and had come up with
gems of transcendent wisdom. Their thought, moreover, had a
tinge of Eastern influence, for Indian scriptures and philosophy
had not been unknown in the Europe of that age. Nor, of course,
were they unknown in England in the ` latter part of the
nineteenth century to a more general public; the Freethought
magazines had given respectful attention to the scriptures of
India, and Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia was widely read. On a
more scholarly level, the works of the Orientalists Max Muller
and Paul Deussen were studied and discussed. And then, for
better or worse, there was Theosophy. In the early 1890s Mrs.
Annie Besant, newly converted, gave many knowledgeable
lectures in and around London, in which she expounded much of
Indian philosophy, including (or perhaps particularly) the theories
of karma and reincarnation. If her old friends, such as George
Bernard Shaw and Charles Bradlaugh, thought she had probably
lost her mind, hundreds of others, mainly from the upper classes,
flocked to hear her and hung upon her every word.

Thus it was that Swamiji's thought seemed familiar to the little

gathering of intellectuals at 63 St. George's Road, who listened to
him as though to yet another speculative philosopher or
metaphysician, whose views, however lofty, were not, after all,
original. Yet, returning to Wimbledon, Miss Margaret
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Noble could not so easily dismiss Swamiji. Had not the deep need
in her for some certainty of belief detected the crystal sound of
certainty itself? The authoritative ring of Swamiji's words, the
experience of that Sunday afternoon, did not leave her.

As I went about the tasks of that week [she wrote in The Master
as I Saw Him], it dawned on me slowly that it was not only
ungenerous, it was also unjust, to dismiss in such fashion the
message of a new mind and a strange culture. It occurred to me
that though each separate dictum might find its echo or its fellow
amongst things already heard or already thought, yet it had never
before fallen to my lot to meet with a thinker who in one short
hour had been able to express all that I had hitherto regarded as
highest and best. I therefore took the only two opportunities that
remained to me, of hearing the Swami lecture, while he was still
in London.99

On week days, Margaret Noble attended to her school in

Wimbledon ("The Ruskin School" for boys and girls up to the age
of ten). Thus her only opportunity to hear Swamiji lecture in
London was on weekends. From her notes appended to The
Master as I Saw Him we know that she attended his crowded
Saturday classes of November 16 and 23. At the time she did not,
as she would acknowledge years later, fully understand the
immense depth and import of his teaching nor hear it with a
receptive mind; yet she seems to have accurately recorded it,
struck, perhaps, by the very force of its expression. The first class
she attended was on bhakti yoga, and her notes have been entitled
in the Complete Works "The Religion of Love." The class of the
second Saturday was, one might say, on the divinity of man; and
has been entitled "Jnana and Karma." In both classes Swamiji
spoke of a religion without dogmas, without liturgies, without
penances. He spoke of renunciation and of realization and of faith
in oneself. These
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were, indeed, keynotes of his teaching in the West, and Margaret

Noble's ear seems to have been tuned to them even there in the
very beginning of what was to be a stormy, lifelong discipleship.
Since her notes give us the only idea we have of Swamiji's
London classes of November 1895, a few passages from them are
quoted here, taken more or less at random from The Master as I
Saw Him :

In the highest love [Swamiji said in "The Religion of Love"],

union is only of the spirit. All love of another kind is quickly
evanescent. Only the spiritual lasts, and this grows. . . . Deepen
your own power of thought and love. Bring your own lotus to
blossom: the bees will come of themselves. Believe first in your
self, then in God. A handful of strong men will move the world.
We need a heart to feel; a brain to conceive; and a strong arm to
do the work. . . . Yesterday, competition was the law. To-day, co-
operation is the law. To-morrow, there is no law. Let sages praise
thee, or let the world blame. Let fortune itself come, or let poverty
and rags stare thee in the face. Eat the herbs of the forest one day,
for food; and the next, share a banquet of fifty courses. Looking
neither to the right hand nor to the left, follow thou on!100
And in "Jnana and Karma" :

. . . Become possessed with the feeling of renunciation. . . . But

does renunciation demand that we all become ascetics? Who then
is to help the others? Renunciation is not asceticism. Are all
beggars Christ’s? Poverty is not a synonym for holiness; often the
reverse. Renunciation is of the mind. . . .

Even forgiveness, if weak and passive, is not true; fight is better.

Forgive when you could bring legions of angels to the victory. . . .
As a lotus-leaf, living in the water yet untouched by it, so should
the soul be, in the world.
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This is a battlefield, fight your way out. This world is a poor

attempt to see God. Make your life a manifestation of will
strengthened by renunciation.

We must learn to control all our brain-centres consciously. The

first step is happiness. Asceticism is fiendish. . . . The second step
is purity. The third is full training of the mind. Reason out what is
true from what is untrue. See that God alone is true. If for a
moment you think you are not God, great terror will seize you. As
soon as you think I am He, great peace and joy will come to you. .
. . The history of the world is the history of a few men who had
faith in themselves. . . . What is civilisation? It is the feeling of
the divine within. When you find time, repeat these ideas to
yourself, and desire freedom. That is all. Deny everything that is
not God. Assert everything that is God. Mentally assert this, day
and night. So the veil grows thinner.

I am neither man nor angel. I have no sex nor limit. I am

knowledge itself. I am He. I have neither anger nor hatred. I have
neither pain nor pleasure. Death or birth I never had. For I am
Knowledge Absolute, and Bliss Absolute. I am He, my soul, I am
He! . . .

But this you must guard [against]. Do not disturb the faith of any.
For you must know that religion is not in doctrines. Religion lies
in being and becoming, in realisation.101

At the close of this class, Swamiji gave a reply to a question that

would surely have appealed to Margaret Noble, an ardent admirer
of John Ruskin, who held that the good and the beautiful were
ultimately one. She jotted it down:

The artist is the witness who testifies to the beautiful. Art is the
most unselfish form of happiness in the world. 102
The above passages are but random samplings from Miss
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Noble's stirring notes, which were themselves but fragments of

Swamiji's classes; and these, in turn, were but two out of a
probable twenty-five held in November of 1895. Crowds came.
"In England my work is really splendid," he wrote to Alasinga on
November 18; "I am astonished myself at it. The English people
do not talk much in the newspapers, but they work silently. I am
sure of more work in England than in America. Bands and bands
come, and I have no room for so many. . . . I shall have to go
away next week, and they are so sorry. Some think my work here
will be hurt a little if I go away so soon. I do not think so. I do not
depend on men or things. The Lord alone I depend upon-and He
works through me."103

One pictures Margaret Noble sitting on the 8oor among those

bands of rapt Englishwomen, her notebook in her lap, her intense
face turned upward to the gerua-robed sannyasin, into whose
hands she would before long place her life. Sitting there,
appreciating the unusual quality in the man and his words, she
had not the least idea of becoming his disciple. According to what
one can make of her own somewhat less than-clear account, she
was not to call Swamiji "Master" until the following year, when,
before he left England for India, she desired to make herself "the
servant of his love for his own people." By that time she had
"recognized that heroic fibre of the man" and made obeisance, as
she wrote, to "his character." Yet even then, she did not "cast in
[her] lot with the final justification of the things he came to
say."104 Margaret Noble, a prototype in this respect of the modern
Western seeker, would give her full allegiance only to that which
her experience could prove true.

Swamiji not only admired this quality of mind but gave to it great
importance. It was indeed precisely because a wholly justifiable
skepticism had entered the current of Western thought, to become
its powerful mainstream, that spiritual reality had to be made
available to the direct experience of the individual. Nothing short
of that would stand up to the intellect of Western man; nothing
else would satisfy his basic
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need to know truth or fill his deepest hungers. He had come to the
dead-end of all external attempts to discover the ultimate reality
of himself, his God, his universe. There was no other way but to
seek within; no other path to take but the inward path the ancient
Vedic Aryans had found millennia before and had cleared and
charted. It was a way completely foreign to Western thought as a
whole. One of Swamiji's primary tasks as a World Teacher was to
present the ancient Vedantic truths and ancient Vedantic paths in
the cultural idiom of the modern West and in such a way that
everyone from a philosopher to a child would find them natural,
comprehensible, and applicable. The time was ripe; but the task
nonetheless was one that only a Prophet could achieve-and a
Prophet, moreover, of gigantic intellect. As Swarxiiji was himself
to write in a much quoted letter to Alasinga, he must "put the
Hindu ideas into English and then make out of dry philosophy
and intricate mythology and queer startling psychology, a
religion which shall be easy, simple, pogular and at the same time
meet the requirements of the highest minds." It was a task, he
said, that only "those can understand who have attempted it." But
no one before him had ever attempted it. "That is my life's work,"
he wrote.105

One of the essential prerequisites of Swamiji's task-or so it would

seem to the present writer-was an intimate, firsthand, empathetic
knowledge of the Western mind in all its varieties and moods-the
aversions and desires peculiar to it, its richnesses and its
poverties, its cultural griefs, joys, assumptions, insanities, and
dreams, its fears, its tabus, and its idols. He had to know, in short,
the subliminal racial language of the West, for how else could he
be guru to the Western people? True, human nature is basically
the same the world over, and Swamiji was teaching basic truths;
but he was well aware that peoples and cultures were widely
varied and that (as he taught) the vessels in which basic truths
come to them must be varied also. He did not ignore the profound
cultural differences, between East and West but, as a true Teacher,
gave them his full respect.
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Swamiji's first visit to England paved his way for his future work
there; but was not this visit also a sort of exploratory voyage into
the vortex of the modern world, where all the currents and cross-
currents of change were particularly tumultuous and audible?
Western thought was, of course, nothing new to Swamiji. Not
only had he had a large dose of it in America, but he had always
been a profound student of the Western world. He knew its
history, its philosophies, much of its science. He knew the
philosophical and psychological reactions to the scientific
overthrow of traditional religion; he well understood that Western
man had been forced to deny the validity of his deepest quests.
But even for a Swami Vivekananda, it was perhaps one thing to
study a culture from a distance, and quite another to walk in the
streets of one of its most ancient citadels and talk with its heirs on
their home ground. Indeed, as we have seen, his estimate of the
English people themselves had changed in many respects during
his first visit among them--" and I am glad to confess it," he was
to write to Alberta Sturges.106 To be sure, Swamiji's understanding
of people and cultures and of the questions that arose out of those
cultures was intuitive and immediate; it was not a matter of
labored research; yet, however quick and spontaneous it may
have been, the further understanding of the Western people that he
gained in London was surely important to the full formulation of
his message.

In the nineteenth century England was the center of the new

world in almost all respects. English culture was Western culture.
Almost all Western thought had found its way to London, had
churned awhile in its cauldrons, and had spread out again along
the seaways of the Empire-"the greatest machine that ever
existed," as Swamiji said, "for the dissemination of ideas."107'
England was, indeed, a sort of clearing house for nineteenth-
century thought. Much of it had also
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originated there. It had been in England, for instance, that

Newton had quietly, without really meaning to, demolished
traditional Christian belief; it was there that David Hume had
pulled the rug from under all other kinds of belief, including that
based upon sense experience; it was there that Wesley had started
a great Evangelical revival in revolt against rationalism, and
there, also, that the Romantic writers and poets had passionately
reacted against the tick-tock universe of the eighteenth century as
well as against the total skepticism to which reason suicidally led.
The individual, the Romantics declared, was free to believe
whatever his heart and intuition prompted him to believe: emotion
was the key to truth. On the Continent, the German idealistic
philosophers who followed upon the heels of Kant reinforced the
emphasis upon individualism and feeling-an emphasis that
persisted, though decreasingly, throughout most of the nineteenth
century. At the opposite pole were the English Utilitarians Jeremy
Bentham, James Mill, and, less radically, John, Stuart Mill, who
thought everything, from morals to human welfare, could be
governed by reason. It was in England, again, that science gave
the coup de grace to orthodox religion with the publication in
1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and in 1871 of his
Descent of Man. It was in England that the brilliant Thomas H.
Huxley, a formidable logician, scientist, and agnostic (a term he
invented for himself), championed Evolution with his double-
edged sword of reason and sarcasm, decapitating whatever
romantic or sentimental nonsense dared raise its head. He
demanded hard evidence for all belief. "The universe is one and
the same throughout," he wrote in a letter explaining his personal
commitment; "and if the condition of my unravelling some little
difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously
refuse to put faith in what does not rest on sufficient evidence, I
cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid
open to me on other terms."108 This avowal was not peculiar to
Huxley; it was the commitment of the new age.
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Ultimate truth was to be found either in the hard facts of science

or not at all. Many Victorians, children of the Enlightenment,
were confident that science could answer all questions and solve
all problems-social, moral, economic, political, personal, and
even philosophical. Moreover, they were certain that social and
moral good would increase and evil steadily decrease until
Heaven was established on earth for all time. But to others less
sanguine, science could not answer the ultimate philosophical
questions; such questions, therefore, were unanswerable and
absurd. The only "far-off divine event" was extinction. What had
once been thought to be the eternal verities of religion were, after
all, mere fairy tales, and man, mumbling them to himself, was but
a dreaming animal standing alone on a mote of dust in a vast and
silent darkness. The reactions to this more pessimistic and grim
outlook were various. Many Victorians were torn with confusion
and despair; some tried to cover over the emptiness with
sentimentality, pious faith, ritualism, or an exciting occultism;
others faced it with a stoic and fatalistic courage; still others
shrugged it off with an eat-drink-and-be-merry bravado, which
could, and did, slide easily into an unabashed worship of money,
of things, and of short-term happiness. Or, again, the same basic
hedonism could be sublimated into a cult of aestheticism, which,
in turn, could verge on decadence.

Another result of the scientific and industrial revolutions

eminently apparent in nineteenth-century England was the near
catastrophic social upheaval that was taking place everywhere.
The deplorable social conditions created by the rapid switch over
from an agricultural economy to an industrial one had forced the
working classes to demand a more humane and democratic
treatment. To some extent, the awakened conscience of the new
and prosperous middle class itself compelled reform. In London
many varieties of socialistic and humanitarian movements had
their vocal leaders and followers. Freedom was becoming the
battle cry of the age--freedom, equality, dignity of the individual,
compassion for the poor
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and oppressed. Concurrently, ideas and words such as submission,

surrender, humility, obedience, and so on-words associated with a
tyrannical Church and State, were becoming anathema to the
common man. If he was to have a religion, then it would have to
be in accord not only with science and reason, but with his new
spirit-his fight for individuality, for dignity, his struggle for an
equal chance for happiness. It was indeed this spirit which the
liberal factions in the churches were trying to keep abreast of-but
they were becoming thereby only more and more secular in their
approach.

London, an old city, richly layered with tradition, was an

articulate and roiling center of all these attitudes, moods, demands
and efforts-newfangled and basic alike. There was scarcely any
person in London without a voice to raise-each propounding some
different solution to all ills-and that with passionate intensity and
volubility. Swamiji could not have failed to hear all those voices,
which throbbed in the city like a commingled cry for help; and,
being Swamiji, he could not have failed to respond.

A few hints in his letters written during his first visit to England
make it clear enough that this period of his Western mission was
still, in some respects, a formative one. He was indeed, as he said,
"probing," still exploring the nature of the West as a great Teacher
explores the nature of a great disciple. Quite apart from his
revised understanding of the English people he appears to have
felt with greater clarity and certainty than before the need to
present the Vedanta philosophy in a way that would reconcile it
with a modern scientific outlook or, at least, to present the
Vedanta cosmology, eschatology, psychology, and so on, in the
light of modern scientific theories and findings. This effort, which
was to hold his attention through much of the following year,
seems to have begun, or at least, to have gathered behind it the
force of his will, in England. "These are countries of gigantic
scholars," he wrote to Swami Brahmananda from Caversham
probably in late October. "Is it a joke to make disciples of
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such people?"109 And to Swami Ramakrishnananda, "The

common people here . . . will give you a wide berth if you preach
God and such things to them. They think this must be another
clergyman!"110 In this same letter, he not only sent out a call for
Sanskrit books but made a request that would, one thinks, set
minds any less hardy than those of his brother monks reeling.
"You just patiently do one thing," he wrote, "-set about collecting
everything that books, beginning with the Rig-Veda down to the
most insignificant of Puranas and Tantras, have got to say about
creation and annihilation of the universe, about race, heaven, and
hell, the soul, consciousness, and intellect, etc., the sense-organs,
Mukti, transmigration, and suchlike things." "No child's play
would do," he added. "I want real scholarly work." 111 It seems
clear that while he was in England, Swamiji set his mind more
intently than ever upon giving the Western people a teaching of
Vedanta such as would fully satisfy the most rational, the most
scientific, the most intellectually inquiring of minds, as well as
the most spiritually searching.

His early plan "to get hold of a few at least very strong and
intellectual men in England to form a society" had now changed.
Not only had his classes attracted men and women both, but, as
we have seen, it did not appear wise at the time to form a society
of any kind. But society or no society, Swamiji was anxious that
his English work take some sort of shape and cohesiveness so that
it would hold together during his absence in America and be
carried forward later when he would leave the West altogether. To
this end he sent out an urgent call to his brother disciples, asking
them (in several letters) to send one of their number to London.
As early as September 24, he wrote to Mrs. Bull, "He [Sturdy]
wants me to bring over a monk from India from amongst my
brethren to help him when I am away in America. I have written
to India for one."112 The need was for a swami versed in both
Sanskrit and English, not, of course, merely to help Sturdy with
his personal study, but to help with the propagation of the Vedanta
philosophy through the study
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and teaching, as well as the translation and publication, of

Sanskrit texts. "The work," Swamiji wrote in October to Swami
Abhedananda, "is to teach the devotees I shall be leaving here, to
make them study the Vedanta, to do a little translation work into
English, and to deliver occasional lectures." 113 Among his
brothers, Swamiji felt that Swami Ramakrishnananda, Swami
Abhedananda, Swami Trigunatita, or Swami Saradananda would
fill the role, and of these four, the last was just then in the best
health. Swamiji sent for him. Like an affectionate and paternally
anxious older brother, he sent money and instructions regarding
the details of the voyage-ticket, pocket expenses, clothes, diet,
and so on. "Above all," he had written to Swami Abhedananda,
"[whoever will come] must have a wool overcoat, for it is very
cold. If you do not put on an overcoat on the ship, you will suffer
much."114 Having requested Swami Saradananda to take the next
boat from Bombay for London, Swamiji impatiently waited for
him. "If Sharat [Swami Saradananda] has started immediately on
your receipt of my letter," he wrote to Swami Ramakrishnananda,
"then only I may meet him, otherwise not. Business is business,
no child's play."115

But when Swamiji left England at the end of November, there

was still no sign of the Swami. And when, in New York, ~ he
received a letter from Swami Saradananda himself, who was still
in India, he knew that his young brother disciple did not intend to
come at all, fearful, perhaps, of the West with its gigantic
scholars. And indeed Swamiji had been giving his brothers some
hair-raising, though not inaccurate, pictures of the Western work.
He had, for instance, written from America that year, "The thing
is, one has to snatch one's bread from the jaws of the missionary
scholars. That is, one must prevail over these people by dint of
learning, or one will be blown off at a puff. They understand
neither Sadhus nor your Sannyasins, nor the spirit of renunciation.
What they do understand is the vastness of learning, the display
of eloquence and tremendous activity. Over and above that, the
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whole country will be searching for flaws, the clergy will day
and night try to snub you, through force or guile. You must get rid
of these obstructions to preach your doctrines." 116 It is small
wonder that even Swamiji's brother disciples hesitated. Swamiji
himself, however, saw no reason for their delay. Seeing that
Swami Saradananda did not intend to come, he replied on
December 23 with one of his more devastating communications :

Your letter only made me sad [he wrote). I see you have lost all
enthusiasm. I know all of you, your powers and your limitations. I
would not have called you to any task which you are incompetent
to do. . . . I would have moulded you to it. Anyone could have
done as well-only a little smattering of Sanskrit was absolutely
necessary. Well, everything is for the best. If it is the Lord's work
the right man for the right place will be forthcoming in the right
time. None of you need feel disturbed.
...The upshot of the whole thing is--I want bold, daring,
adventurous spirits to help me. Else I will work alone. I have a
mission to fulfil. I will work it out alone. I do not care who comes
or who goes. . . .

Good-bye! I would not bother you any more, and all blessings go
with you all. I am very glad I have been of some service to you
sometimes if you think so. At least I am pleased with myself for
having tried my best to discharge the duties laid on me by my
Guru, and well done or ill, I am glad that I tried. So good-bye....
Good-bye . . . to you all. One chapter of my life is closed. Let
others come in their due order. They will find me ready. You need
not disturb yourselves at all about me. I want no help from any
human being in any country. So good-bye! May the Lord bless
you all for ever and ever!117

Needless to say, it was not long after receiving this letter that
Swami Saradananda set sail for England.
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But to return to Swamiji's desire to give shape to his work and to

keep it in motion during his absence from London, he thought not
only of bringing one or more of his young brother disciples to the
West but also of bringing a disciple of his own. In a hitherto
unpublished portion of a letter to Alasinga from Oakley Street,
dated November 18, 1895, he wrote:

. . . I have sent for a Sannyasin from Calcutta, to leave him in

London. I want one more for America. I want my own man. Can't
you send a strong fellow from Madras? Of course I will pay
everything. He must know both English and Sanskrit pretty well-
English more. At the same time [he] must be a strong man not to
be spoiled by the women, etc. Again he must be a thoroughly
trustworthy and obedient man. Do you know Sanskrit enough?
G.G. [Narasimhachariar] knows some. Guru Bhakti is the
foundation of all spiritual development. You cannot come I am
afraid, leaving your paper [the Brahmavadin]. Can G.G. come? I
want to have two fellows in these 2 centres, then I can go to India
and send fresh men to relieve them. I am tired really from
incessant work. Any other Hindu would have vomitted blood and
died if he had to work as hard as I have.118

Swamiji was working not only for the sake of his Western
mission; he was at the same time pouring his energies into India.
As will be seen in more detail in chapter fifteen of the following
volume, he continued during this entire period in England to
write vigorously to his brother disciples at Alam bazar Math and
elsewhere and to his disciples in Madras, keeping in close touch
with all they were doing and giving guidance, advice, and
encouragement. He urged them to open centers and to form
societies. "Work! Work!" he wrote. "Go on opening centres!” 119
He wanted Swami Abhedananda to start a center at
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Meerut; Swami Shivananda to start one at Almora; Swami

Akhandananda to start them at Jaipur and Ajmer, with branches in
Alwar and Khetri; Swami Ramakrishnananda to try to open
centers "in places all over Bengal"; and, a little later, he wrote to
Swami Brahmananda to open a center in Kashmir. 120 He scolded
and exhorted. "We are all of us self important," he wrote to
Swami Akhandananda, "which never produces any work. Great
enterprise, boundless courage, tremendous energy, and, above all,
perfect obedience -these are the only traits that lead to individual
and national regeneration. These traits are altogether lacking in
us."121 But whatever traits may have been lacking Swamiji
himself supplied through the very inspiration of his leadership.
And in their love for him, his great brother disciples took his most
casual word (for no word of his, they knew, was really casual) as
his command.

Simultaneously, he gave detailed instructions to Alasinga in

Madras regarding the new English language magazine, the
Brahmavadin, the first two issues of which he received (after
impatiently waiting) by the end of October. Again, he praised and
scolded and encouraged and gave sound editorial advice. He was
eager that the magazine be successful. "Pay all attention to the
paper," he wrote to his disciple on October 24. "Make it a great
success. Mr. Sturdy will write [for it] from time to time, so will I.
I cannot send any money now. In England lectures never pay-so I
had everything to spend and nothing to gain. By and by I will
have friends here who will spend money on magazines etc. So
long as you are true and pure you will never fail. Mother will
never leave you. All blessings will be on you." l22 And with his
keen ear for the English idiom-knowing so well, as few foreigners
can, what was quaint, what was jocose, what was pompous-he
was an excellent editor: "Don't write such things as—‘a pious
Vairagi shuffled off his mortal coil' ! ! !" he cautioned Alasinga in
a letter of November 18. "That is a phrase rather humorous to be
mixed up with a pious Vairagi's death"123

To judge from the letters he wrote to India during this

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period, he seems to have been thinking of his mission more and

more in worldwide terms, both in respect to organization and
content. From America he had written earlier in the year to
Swami Brahmananda, "At present we shall have to work three
centres, one in New York, another in Calcutta, and a third in
Madras."124 Now he added London and wanted co-ordination
between the four centers. "In effect," he wrote in October of 1895
to Swami Abhedananda, "Mr. Sturdy is my secretary in England,
Mahendra Babu [Mahendra Nath Gupta, later known as "M"] in
Calcutta, and Alasinga in Madras." (Miss Phillips was at that time
secretary of the Society in America.) "We must set the whole
world afire," he wrote in this same letter. " . . . In time we shall
send preachers in large numbers to all the quarters of the
globe."125 And again, to Swami Akhandananda he wrote from
Caversham, "By degrees we must spread the world over."126

That Swamiji''s message should "spread the world over" was, of

course, as important as that it should be rationally oriented and in
keeping with the new scientific outlook. His was a new teaching
for a new world-a dynamically interacting and volatile world
where widespread spiritual knowledge combined with boundless
compassion was to be the only alternative to wholesale
destruction. One is inclined to think that he consciously knew
exactly what was in store for mankind in the coming centuries-the
good as well as the evil; certainly as time went on, he shaped his
message with more and more thoroughness, detail, and urgency,
as though aware that mankind was rapidly creating for itself a
drastically new environment to which it would as rapidly have to
adapt.
On Wednesday, November 27, Swamiji set sail from Liverpool
for New York on the Britannic of the White Star Line. He had
been in England for eleven weeks and was well satisfied with his
work there as a beginning. "I had a splendid success in England,"
he wrote to Sister Christine on December 10, after his return to
America, "and have left a Nucleus there to
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work till my arrival next summer." 127 And on January 6, 1896, to

Mary Hale, "In England I find strong-minded men and women to
take up the work and carry it forward with the peculiar English
grip and energy. . . . The English woman is slow; but when she
works up to an idea, she will have a hold on it sure; and they are
regularly carrying on my work there and sending every week a
report-think of that!"128 Indeed Swamiji had great hopes for his
work in England. As his ship lay at anchor in the fog off the
English coast, he wrote to Alberta Sturges, "I was very successful
in London, and though I did not care for the noisy city, I was very
much pleased with the people. . . . I am convinced that my work
will have more hold on England than America." 129 But it was in
America that the most productive year of his Western mission was
soon to begin.
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NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

P. 209 * In October of 1894 Swamiji had had an invitation from

Miss Henrietta Muller to visit her in England. It had come
through Akshay Kumar Ghosh, her adopted son, who was
attending Cambridge and whom Swamiji had known in India. “I
hope I am going in January or February next,” Swamiji had
written in connection with this invitation (Complete Works, 5:
51). But as we know, his plans completely changed and the matter
seems to have been dropped. On May 6, 1895, he wrote from
New York to Alasinga (who knew Akshay), “What about Babu
Akshay Kumar Ghosh? I do not hear anything from him more”
(Complete Works, 5:82). Evidently, however, the correspondence
was later resumed. On August 9, 1895, Swamiji wrote to Mr.
Sturdy from New York in a passage omitted from his letter as
published in the Complete Works (8:347—50): “Miss Muller is
resigning the Theosophical Society, I have been informed by Mr.
Ghosh, the young man from India whom she has adopted.” There
is no mention in this letter of a renewed invitation from Miss
Muller, and it would seem that it was not until late August or
early September of 1895 that she again asked Swamii to visit her.

p. 218 * This was a reference to Swamiji’s article

“Reincarnation,” published in the Metaphysical Magazine for
March 1895. (See Complete Works, 4:257.)
246 The full text of this article from the Standard was first
reprinted in the Appendix of the first (1896) edition of Mr.
Sturdy’s Narada Sutra and more recently in Vedanta for East
and West, July—August 1970. Three
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248

p. 246 sentences from the same article, taken from its beginning,
its middle, and its end, have appeared in all editions of the Life.

p. 256 * In a 1956 issue of Vedanta and the West it was said that
in "one of his unpublished letters at present in the possession of
the Trustees at Belur Math [,] Swami Vivekananda writes: ‘I will
flood your Yankee land with ritualistic swamis' " (Vedanta and
the West, No. 120 [July-August 1956] : 40). Subsequently,
those words of Swamiji's have often been cited as constituting his
sanction, if not recommendation, of ritualistic worship in
American Vedanta societies (see, for instance, K. P. Hati,
"Remote Contact," Prabuddha Bharata, December 1979, page
499). Unfortunately, the date and addressee of the letter that is
said to include the sentence are nowhere given, and I have so far
been unable to find at Belur Math an unpublished letter
containing the words in question.

I would, however, hazard the guess that when Swamiji wrote

those words about "ritualistic swamis" he did so in the same
teasing spirit in which he wrote to Mary Hale on March 16, 1899:
mentioning the recent establishment of Belur Math, he said, "Tell
Mother [Mrs. George Hale] to look sharp. I am going to deluge
your Yankee land with idolatrous missionaries" (Complete Works,
8: 462). This was of course a sort of family joke. After the
Parliament of Religions many of the ministers and missionaries of
the Presbyterian denomination, to which Mrs. Hale belonged, had
loudly denounced the heathen monk and the sinful idolatry of
Hinduism (see, for instance, Complete Works, 8 : 314—5 ) . The
situation was absurd. The contrast between Swamiji and the
idolatrous heather against whom the leaders of Mrs. Hale's church
fulminated could give rise only to laughter within
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p. 256 the Hale family. Under these circumstances, indeed (cont.)

under any circumstances, the jocular tone of Swamiji’s message
to Mrs. Hale is unmistakable. As far as I am aware, it has never
been interpreted as his recommendation or sanction of the
practice of idolatry in America. And yet the almost identically
phrased sentence about “ritualistic swais” is quoted as evidence
of Swamiji’s serious intention to introduce the practice of
ritualistic Hindu worship in American Vedanta societies. Since the
context in which Swamiji’s words appear is not known to us
today, the fragment is always, perforce, quoted in isolation, but as
far as I can understand, this particular quotation, presented alone
and out of available context, tells us nothing at all about what
Swamiji may or may not have wanted in respect to Hindu
ritualism in the West.
p. 258 * This supposition is based in part on Mr. Desai’s
invitation from Miss Muller to attend “the two public lectures
delivered by Swami Vivekananda.” (See page 244.) Mr. Desai’s
reminiscences make it clear that these two lectures were those of
Prince’s Hall and the Balloon Society.
p. 259 * The societies of the American Ethical Cultural
Movement differed somewhat in outlook from the Brooklyn
differed somewhat in outlook from the Brooklyn Ethical
Association, of which Swamiji’s friend Dr. Lewis G. Janes was
still president in 1895.

p. 267 * In telling of his work on the Scared Anthology, Moncure

Conway wrote in his autobiography: “In 1853 at Concord I had
begun making extracts from Oriental books in Emerson’s library.
I continued to add to the collection . . . [and] after my settlement
at South Place (1864) . . . my accumulation of extracts was
sufficient to enable me to respond me to respond to the desire of
my people for a volume of them. .
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p. 267 ". .. I employed several Hindus and Persians to (cont.)

search books not translated. . . . The ‘Sacred Anthology' was not
compiled for Orientalists nor for critical scholars, but to provide
thoughtful readers with some idea of the ethical and religious
geography, so to say, of the world; and also to provide myself
with a book of ethnical scriptures from which to read lessons
from my pulpit. Type-writing was unknown in 1872—1874. . . .

"The popular success of the `Sacred Anthology,' and the applause

of the journals, led to a much more important kind of success. . . .
Max Muller told me that the interest in Oriental literature stirred
up by the anthology inclined him to undertake the publication of
the `Sacred Books of the East.' " (Moncure Conway,
Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 328--31, passim.)

p. 282 * For the record, the Secretary of State for India in 1895
was the Right Hon. Henry Hartly Fowler. As for the name
Arbuthnot, one of the members of the Council of the India Office
was Sir Alex John Arbuthnot, an extremely conservative, anti-
India Britisher, who was generally in vehement opposition to
Lord Ripon's liberal policy. It is not likely that he is the Arbuthnot
that Swamiji won over or cared to win over.

** According to Sister Nivedita's The Master as I Saw Him, this

talk at Lady Margesson's took place "on a cold Sunday afternoon
in November." Afterward Nivedita took "the only two
opportunities" that remained to her of hearing the Swami lecture
while he was still in London. We know from Appendices A and B
of this same book that those opportunities came on the Saturdays
of November 16 and 23. From this we can conclude that the "cold
Sunday afternoon" was November 10. It could not have been
November 3,
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p. 282 for as late as November 2 (Complete Works, 8: 358) (cont.)

Swamiji was planning to go to Caversham on that Sunday.

p. 283 * The following extract from Richmond Noble's

recollections of his sister Margaret give some idea of the various
influences that went into the making of her mind at the time
of her meeting with Swamiji. A Bengali translation of Richmond
Noble's "Margaret Noble: A Brother's Recollections" is given in
Nivedita Lokamata by Sankari Prasad Basu (Calcutta: Ananda
Publishers, 1962), I : 426-31. It is through Professor Basu's
kindness that the English has been made available to me.

"While literature and education were strong interests of

Margaret's they were not her abiding interests. Without a doubt
the great motive of her life was religion. She inherited religion.
Her father had been an eloquent preacher, so also had her
grandfather. . . .

"Like the rest of us, Margaret's earliest religious experience was

that of an Evangelical Protestant. There must be no
misunderstanding as to this. Most people think that all
Evangelical Protestants are Calvinists, but that is not a correct
view. We believed in Freewill and were not called upon to
subscribe to any doctrine of Predestination or that there were any
specially chosen to be saved or were doomed to be damned. We
were Evangelical Protestants after the model of John Wesley and
Simeon. Otherwise our burdens were no less heavy than
Calvinists. We observed Sabbaths rigorously, each Sunday we
attended worship from two to four times, we were taught to
regard the Bible as the inspired word of God to man and that it
provided for us a complete guide to our conduct, for which we
were solely and directly
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p. 283 responsible to God. It is true we did not have to submit

(cont.) to any dreary Catechism as had Calvinists, but we were
convinced that our consciences would some day rise up to accuse
us before God. There is no doubt that teaching of the sort tends
to a high standard of integrity, however unlovely it may be. It
allowed of no equivocation or evasion and we were left alone to
wrestle with our own problems-the responsibility was ours and no
one else's. It had a profound effect on all of us and
throughout her days Margaret's conduct was based on its code.
"The fervent religious emotion engendered in Evangelical breasts
is particularly susceptible to new influences. Before she left
school she came in contact with what is called the High Church or
Tractarian movement in the Church of England. It would be
unfair to describe that movement as one to promote an imitation
of Roman Catholicism in the Church of England, although
perhaps numbers of its adherents are little more than Roman
mimics. Evangelicals had bestowed little attention to forms of
worship, they placed small value on sacraments except as a means
whereby a faithful heart might remind himself of his Master,
and they cared not at all whether or not those who ministered in
the services of the Church had historically inherited authority
from the Apostles. The Tractarians on the other hand were careful
as to liturgical form, they emphasised the benefit of sacraments
and they treasured historical tradition. They elaborated the ritual
of worship and introduced many accessories popularly associated
with the Church of Rome. In all this they achieved a certain
artistic success and in many respects surpassed their Roman
models. In this they were assisted by the magnificent prose of
their liturgy and by the marvellous artistic design of their
principal services.
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p. 283 "I have dilated on this in order to explain what it (cont.)

was with which the romantic temperament of my sister came in
contact. It gave her a new impetus. It not only gave her colour and
dream in worship (her mind was always full of artistic longing)
but it linked her up with the ages of saints who had gone before.
Margaret became a devotee and at one time she even
contemplated joining the Church of Rome. Had such a secession
taken place, there might have been no Sister Nivedita. While
Margaret was devout, it is to be noted that she was no unswerving
fanatic. On a certain Good Friday, a day which good High
Church people were supposed to devote exclusively to worship
and meditation, she relaxed sufficiently to amuse her small
brother by playing cards with him. When the brother had
forgotten this concession, she never forgot it and in her last years
when the brother elected to stand upon form, she reminded him
for his good of this deviation of hers.

“She was destined to meet other influences. She could not help
resenting the narrowness of Anglo-Catholics, to give them the
name they generally prefer, and Anglo-Catholicism did not seem
to her to offer scope for mental development, it fed the emotions
but starved the intellect. How she came in contact with the more
liberal thinkers in the Church of England, I do not know exactly
for we were not continuously in contact. I think she came to know
Canon Scott Holland and through him learnt of the work of
Frederick Denison Maurice and of others of the kind. Anyway,
she came to appreciate what they used to term `Liberal Religious
Thought'.

"She had reached this liberalism of thought when she met the
Swami Vivekananda and for the first time she was to realize the
liberalism of the old religions, the religions that were entirely free
from the
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p. 283 idea of exclusive salvation so sedulously fostered by

(cont.) all Semitic religions, whether Jewish, Christian or
Moslem. Perhaps it may be that this contact with Indian thought
gave her a new angle of approach to the Gospels of the Christians.
But whatever may have been her reaction, from the first she
perceived that she had a call to India"-well, almost from the first,
if one is to go by her own account.
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CHAPTER FIVE
NEW YORK : DECEMBER 1895

The S.S. Brittanic, the ship on which Swami Vivekananda set sail
from Liverpool on November 27, 1895, was by no means the
most modern "luxury liner" afloat. Built over twenty years earlier,
it had long since been outmoded in design, power, and speed by
steamers three times its tonnage, and its comforts were nothing
compared to theirs. But the voyage started well. On the second
day out, the ship, as was customary, anchored for a few hours off
Qneenstown, Ireland, to pick up the mail, and it was very likely
from there that Swamiji wrote to Edward T. Sturdy, "So far the
journey has been very beautiful.” He had been given a cabin to
himself by a friendly purser ("Every Hindu is a Raja, they think,
and are very polite,"2 he wrote to Alberta Sturges) ; he had been
promised that the fare, which, as he wrote, had been "meat, meat,
meat," would be varied by the vegetables he preferred and had
been eating exclusively for many months; and he found that the
weather, though so foggy that the ship was delayed, was calm and
cheerful. But after leaving Queenstown the Brittanic set forth
onto the open seas and headed straightway into rough and stormy
waters. From then on, the voyage was as Swamiji put it, the most
"disastrous" he had ever had3. The little ship, endlessly tossing
and pitching, made slow, laborious headway through the turbulent
Atlantic; and for the first time in his life Swamiji was "very badly
seasick"4 - and this for days on end.

On Friday, December 6, at 4:24 a.m., the Brittanic at last crossed

Sandy Hook Bar outside the harbor of New York. The
temperature was six degrees below freezing and a sharp wind
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was blowing, but the sky was clear and the sun rising when, after
the usual long stop at the quarantine station at Ellis Island, the
ship was piloted toward the docks of Manhattan. Although the
skyline that greeted Swamiji who surely stood on deck, had little
resemblance to the spectacular skyline of today, its massive
buildings--one of which, the first true skyscraper, rose to an
awesome twenty-one stories-and the colossal stone towers of its
great Brooklyn Bridge were impressive sights and among the
wonders of the world.

There is no record of who met him at that early hour, but most
probably his disciple Swami Kripananda was waiting at the North
River dock to greet him, to look after his luggage, and to escort
him to the lodging house at 228 West Thirtyninth Street, where a
few days earlier two large parlor rooms had been rented for his
and Kripananda's use. "My friends had already engaged some
rooms . . . where I am living now,"5 he was to write to Mr. Sturdy
two days later, and we can be almost certain that these friends
were officers of the Society that he had founded in 1894. The
lodging house was one in which Kripananda (then Leon
Landsberg) had lived from April 19 to July 10 of this same year
and to which he had returned in October; in November he had
held classes there under the auspices of the Vedanta Society, and
thus the house, familiar now to Swamiji's students, had no doubt
seemed the logical place for him to make his headquarters.

The neighborhood, though dreary, was somewhat more

respectable than that in which he had lived the previous season, it
being six blocks farther north. Yet one cannot agree that the house
was, as Kripananda wrote in a letter of December 7 to the
Brahmavadin, "in the best part of the city." 6 Though farther north,
it was also farther west; and west in New York, particularly
around Thirty-ninth Street, could scarcely be called "best." The
house was a three-story, twenty-foot-wide brick building with a
brownstone front and a slate roof. According to Sister Devamata,
whose memories of this period were first published in Prabuddha
Bharata of 1923, it was "one
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in a long monotonous row of dingy boarding houses" 7 a row, as

an early photograph of this particular block shows, of those
narrow, high-stooped, brownstone fronts, each almost identical
with the one jammed next to it, which had sprung up everywhere
in New York during the, latter half of the nineteenth century, and
many of which, in their old or middle age, had been converted
into lodging houses. Two redeeming features of this house were
the low rent of its rooms and the handy fact that it could be easily
reached, as Kripananda correctly pointed out, from all parts of the
city. The house, which stood in the middle of the block between
Seventh and Eighth avenues, was not far from the Broadway
cable cars, or for that matter, from the Sixth Avenue Elevated,
whose wooden coaches, drawn by steam locomotive, thundered
into a station at Forty-second Street; and on Forty-second Street
itself ran a cross-town horesecar.

The two parlor rooms that Swamiji's friends had engaged were on
the first floor, running front to back alongside a narrow hall and
opening onto one another, as parlors in those days generally did.
The front windows, tall and narrow, faced north onto the street,
and it was they, presumably, that provided most of the light, for
the back parlor could have had, at best, only a side window that
looked onto an airwell. There was neither private bath nor
kitchen connected with the rooms; they were simply rooms. The
lodging house kitchen, shared in common by the roomers, was, as
we learn from Sister Devamata's memoirs, on the floor below (the
basement or ground floor), and, to judge from the usual
arrangement of houses such as this, the bathroom, also shared by
all, was on the floor above. It was to this unremarkable lodging
house that Swamiji, "clad in a red and flowing Hindoo cloak,"
came on the morning of December 6.

As far as can be determined, the New York newspapers had not

concerned themselves with Swamiji's stay earlier in the year.
Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and churning with people and ideas
of all sorts, the city accepted him without fanfare or
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blazing headlines. Nor was he the controversial figure here that

he had been elsewhere in America, giving rise to wordy debates,
which the press delighted in. Yet even in this metropolis that took
in its stride so much that was foreign and strange, Swamiji's
arrival on the Brittanic did not go unremarked. It was, in fact,
viewed with amazement by at least one reporter, who hastened to
interview this extraordinay visitor. The result, which was
reprinted in part in the Brahmavadin, 8 appeared originally in the
New York World on Sunday, December 8, 1895, and read in full:

ABOU BEN ADHEM'S IDEAL*

Swami Vivekananda the Yogi, Comes from Bombay, Preaching

Love for His Fellow-Man.

To find an ascetic of the Highest Eastern type clad in a red and

flowing Hindoo cloak over unmistakable American trousers is
necessarily a surprise. But in other thin besides dress is Swami
Vivekananda astonishing. In the first place he declares that your
religion or any one else's religion is just as good as his own, and if
you should happen to be a Christian or Mussulman, Baptist or
Brahmin, atheist, agnostic or Catholic, it will make no difference
to him. All that he asks is that you act righteously according to
your lights.

The Yogi, with his peculiar notions of dress and worship arrived
Friday on the Brittanic. He went to No. 228 West Thirty-ninth
street. While in New York he will lecture upon metaphysics and
psychology, and will also disseminate in a general way his ideas
on the universal religion which asks no man to take another by
the throat because his creed happens to be different. "Let me help
my fellowman; that is all I seek," he says.

There are four general types of men" he- says, "the rational, the
emotional, the mystical and the worker. For
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Them we must have their proper worship. There comes the

rational man, who says, I care not for this form of worship. Give
me the philosophical, the rational--that I can appreciate.’ So for
the rational man is the rational, philosophic worship.

“There comes the worker. He says: I care not for the worship of
the philosopher. Give me work to do for my fellow-men.' So for
him is made a worship, as for the mystical the emotional. In the
religion for all these men are the elements of their faith.

"No, "said the Swami, very softly, in answer to a question, "I do

not believe in the occult. If a thing be unreal it is not. What is
unreal does not exist. Strange things are natural phenomena. I
know them to be matters of science. Then they are not occult to
me. I do not believe in occult societies. They do no good, and can
never do good."

In fact, the Swami belongs to no society, cult or creed. His is a

religion which compasses all worship, all classes, all beliefs.

Swami, who is a very dark-featured and good-looking young

fellow, explained his creed yesterday in remarkably pure English.
One forgot when he spoke that an orthodox choker peered over
the Bombay robe which in turn scantily concealed the American
trousers. One saw instead a winning smile and a pair of deep,
lustrous black eyes. One saw instead a winning smile and a pair
of deep, lustrous black eyes.

Swami believes in reincarnation. He believes that with the

purification of the body the soul rises to a higher condition, and as
the purification through matter continues the spirit rises, until
released from further migration and is joined with the universal
spirit

Such a man as the Jew-baiter Ahlwardt, who has just arrived in

this country, the Swami cannot understand. "You say," he said,
"that he comes here to preach hate against his fellow-men. Is he
not of wrong mind? Is he
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allowed to spread this hate? The doctors should examine his brain
to find out the wrong."

The peculiar name of the Yogi signifies, literally, "the bliss of

discrimination." He is the first Indian Yogi who ever came to this
country. He comes from Bombay.

Contrary to the belief generally held by his biographers-a belief

traceable to a fairly exaggerated report given by Swami
Kripananda in his newsletter of December 7, 1895, to the
Brahmavadin-the work of spreading Vedanta had not been
particularly successful during Swamiji's absence in England. The
actual story, as far as it is known, is contained in letters written to
Mrs. Bull by the two workers themselves-Swami Kripananda and
Swami Abhayananda. (Aside from these two, Swamiji had
authorized no one else to teach, and there is no indication that
Miss Waldo was holding classes or l.ecturing during this period.)

After leaving Thousand Island Park on the morning of August I,

Kripananda had gone to Buffalo, New York, to visit a German
couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Tralles, the latter of whom had earlier
become his disciple through correspondence. He stayed two
weeks with the Tralleses, most pleased to see their natures
undergo "a wonderful change." Before leaving, he gave them the
vows of brahmacharya.

And these happy results [he wrote to Mrs. Bull on August g]

together with your kind suggestions indicate to me the line of
work in which I may hope to be successful. It is not on the public
platform but in the family circle where I must try to disseminate
the truths brought to us from the east. And it occurs to me that it
might prove a blessing for many if I were to walk afoot through
the country, for a short time at least; touching towns and villages,
and thus reaching people who, otherwise, might
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perhaps never have heard of the master's message. I might thus

meet some soul thirsting after truth, but groping in the dark, to
whom my gospel may prove a blessing. What do you think of this
idea? It came to me like an inspiration9

It would appear from Kripananda's sub sequent letters that he

visited New York around August 15 in order to see Swamiji off on
his voyage to Europe. Then, perhaps at Swamiji's advice, he went
on to Detroit, where he remained for about a month. During that
period he wrote four times to Mrs. Bull telling her of his work
and thoughts, and since his own words convey the intense
sincerity of his efforts better than any other words could, his story
can best be told through a few excerpts from his letters, which
were almost always very long. His first letter from Detroit,
written about a week after his arrival, was dated August 27:

Well, I have begun under very favorable auspices. So far I held

two classes at Mrs. Phelps's residence and we have agreed to meet
regularly twice a week. (Mrs. Phelps was a friend of Swamiji's) I
have found some brave souls thirsting after truth, the very
material Sanyasins are made of, and with the help of the Lord, I
trust to be able to lead them to liberation.

As Miss Greenstidle (sic), a teacher of the public schools, at

whose house I stopped on my arrival to Detroit, is very poor,
having to support a mother and six sisters, I could not well accept
her kind offer to stay in her house, and therefore rented a room for
$2 1/2 a week. But I am not sure how long I am going to keep the
room, as I intend in the days when free of the classes, to make
foot excursions to the neighboring towns and so carry out my
plans spoken of to you in New York. I find more and more that
my chief force consists in individual teaching . . .

I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mrs.

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[John J.] Bagley who regularly attends my classes. She is a very

lovely woman. She practices meditation under my directions and
though I cannot expect to make of her a Sanyasyna [sic], I am
sure that she will turn out a good Karma Yogi if not a sincere
Bhakti Yogi.10

September 6:

Next Monday [September 9) I start a new class which will be

composed of poor young men and women. Besides I have got
now three individual disciples who earnestly desire to live the life
of purity and renunciation. It is these for whom I care most. As
regards the others who take up the study of Yoga in the hope of
acquiring wonderful powers by means of breathing exercises, I
tell them plainly that their hope is for nothing, and . . . their
Breathing exercises . . . may result in physical and mental injury
for them. . . . As I do not charge any fee, I am free to teach them
what I please; and I am pleased to teach above all Karma Yoga &
Bhakti. . . .

As soon as I finish my work here I intend to perfectly isolate

myself from the world at least for forty days. I do not know how
this thought came to me, but I feel I ought to carry it out. 11

September 16:

Your kind note with enclosure was received. [Mrs. Bull sent
money to Kripananda almost regularly, as did Swamiji.)… The
check came this time quite a propos. As I do not charge for my
teachings I have to depend on the free contributions of my
disciples.. The poor disciples cannot afford to make any
contributions . . . while the wealthy ones seem to labor under the
mistake that a Sanyasin can live on pure ether. The Lord bless
them. What they principally want is to attain the power to make
More money…

What I crave for is to find some brave souls who for

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God's and Truth's sake are willing to give up everything - even

their lives. Thanks the Lord, I have found here two such souls.
(To one of these two young men, he gave the vows of
brahmacharya.)…

I have a class of poor girls, from 18 to 24. Years of age, who are
very eager to lead a holy life. Of course, I cannot expect to make
of them Sanyasins; but I shall be very happy, if my teachings will
turn them from worldly frivolities to God.

I am studying now very hard the Tattvas.* a subject which the

Swami hardly touched in his lectures, but which seems to me one
of the most important and interesting studies in the Science of
Yoga. It gives the rationale of the breathing exercises, and opens a
vast field of investigation that leads to a true knowledge of our
nature…

The more I meditate on the Advaita philosophy, the more I come

to disagree with Sankaracharya and to accept Ramanuji's (sic)
commentary. If this world be a mere illusion-as Sankara would
have it-then we have no right to infer a reality behind it. From
nothing we cannot infer something (There follows a long
discussion of this point.)

Next week I shall carry out my strong longing for a solitary life. I
shall take-in a little town in the neighborhood a room, and
become entirely invisible to the world. Letters will reach me
through the old address.12

September 18:

I have closed my classes being with the results achieved very

much pleased. Friedeberg writes me from New York that
Abhayananda (formerly Mme Marie Louise) had made two
Bramacharyas (sic). Now, I am much slower with making
Bramacharyas. Many are called but few are chosen…

I shall leave to-morrow for Buffalo where I intend to stay about a

week. My presence there is necessitated by
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my two Bramacharyas who gave proof of their earnestness and

sincerity. I feel as though I have to give them strength and
courage in one of the most critical periods of their spiritual
development…

So, in answer to your question: Would you like to come to see me

for a while? I answer: Yes. . . . I regard your kind invitation as a
call from the Lord, and am sure that by following it, some good
will result.13

The three or four weeks that Swami Kripananda spent in

Cambridge with Mrs. Bull and her two other guests, Miss
Elizabeth Hamlen and a Mrs. Walling, were extremely happy ones
for him, and perhaps for the others as well. In his good moods he
could be an interesting and entertaining companion. "He had all
the great qualities of his race-emotion, imagination, a passion for
learning and a worship of genius," Sister Christine was later to
write of him. ". . . His intimate knowledge of Europe, its
philosophies, its languages, its culture, gave him a profundity and
depth of mind which are rare." 14 All this would have appealed to
Mrs. Bull, and there must have been a flow of good talk between
them. It was perhaps one of the few truly happy times of
Landsberg's life; indeed, he seems to have had a sense of the oasis
like quality of those weeks and a foreboding of difficult days
ahead. Returning to New York, he wrote to Mrs. Bull on October
2 r from Miss Thursby's home in Gramercy Park, where he was
staying for a few days:

When I look back upon the few weeks of my sojourn in your

house, it appears to me as though my soul had spent there the
blissful dream of Devachan [sic], and the reminiscence of the
continuous calm and peace I enjoy in your presence will brighten
and carry me over many a dark and troublesome day that may
await me in the future….

I saw Abhayananda last night, who held a class on the Sankya

[sic] philosophy in her house. There were present
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about 8 or 9 persons. I am surprised to find how much knowledge

in so short a time Abhayananda has acquired on these subjects.
She looks very well…

As soon as I settle somewhere, I shall begin writing out for you

lessons as well as experimental texts of Yoga and the Tattvas. l5

Kripananda's next letter to Mrs. Bull was a very long one, dated
October 27, and read in small part:

Your kind note as usual, helped to strengthen me in my struggles

to become perfect. Your letters always bring to me messages of
peace, hope and faith, and inspire me with courage, whenever in
view of the many obstacles in the way to liberation, my will
becomes weak and my soul despondent…

....I have taken quarters at 228 W 39th street…. I am working

very hard. In order to get rapidity in shorthand I started a course
of 20 lessons in Paine's Business College for $ I 2, taking a lesson
every day and then practicing for four or five hours. [Kripananda
had started studying shorthand a week or so before going to
Thousand Island Park. His purpose was to be able to take down
Swamiji's lectures.] Then I study and practice Yoga. By the way, I
hope to get ready for you before the end of the week a lesson on
the Kundalini, which will help you to more thoroughly
understand the rationale of Raja Yoga, and besides give you a
certain object for your meditations.

…. Abhayananda has made great progress; she must have studied

hard the Hindu philosophy since my absence. I am glad to say
that she also practices meditation, a thing which must be very
difficult for her lively, mobile French mind.

I shall go this afternoon to Friedebergs in order to look up in my

Kabalistic book some appropriate monogram for you and Miss
(Mrs.] Walling.l6

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A Day or so later, after consulting his Kabalistic book,

Kripananda sent "a seal" to Mrs. Bull along with a very long
exposition of the meaning of various Hebrew mantras. He
enclosed also a seal for Mrs. Walling. Through November things
went on in more or less the same way for him. He continued to
practice his shorthand; he prepared long lessons on raja yoga for
Mrs. Bull; he took over the Wednesday class of the Vedanta
Society from Swami Abhayananda and spoke to the members on
the Tattvas. He made two more disciples who were "ready to
sacrifice everything for His sake"17 he had another seal engraved
with Hebrew letter's for Mrs. Bull, wrote many pages of spiritual
counsel for her, and found her letters "permeated with that spirit
of love which I endeavor to nourish in your heart." The Vedanta
Society began to hold its classes in his lodging house, and he
made "every effort to make the lessons both interesting and
instructive."18 He lived an exceedingly austere life, eating very
little and accepting no money, except, it would seem, from
Swamiji and Mrs. Bull.

Meanwhile, Swami Abayananda had also worked earnestly during

Swamiji's absence in an effort to spread his teachings and to make
disciples. From Thousand Island Park she had gone to her small
Greenwich Village house at 179 Waverly Place and had there
started to hold classes. "I have worked very hard," she was to
declare to Mrs. Bull, "making propaganda, preaching, teaching,
talking, writing on Hinduism."19 But for all that, the classes were
small, a fact for which Abhayananda, proud and quick to take
offense, felt the officers of the Vedanta Society were to blame. On
November 22 she wrote an outraged letter to Mrs. Bull, which
read in part:
Dear Madam,

I have just gone through the strangest experience of my life

regarding those classes which I started in accordance to the
specific instructions of Swami Vivek-
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ananda. The offers of the Society took in their heads that I wanted
to teach them! and sent me Kripananda on his return here to tell
me that "I try to force myself as a teacher on the society, that I
create antagonism and offend every body." He; at that visit,
promised me to come to my classes and be present on the
following Saturday. But he never came, neither did he ever call on
me since although I went to his own class (when he returned here,
I vacated the chair at Wednesdays' meeting in his favor) and
listened to what he had to say.

Some ladies from Brooklyn and New York attended the meetings
in my own house for a few times, but they have been persuaded to
discontinue and leave me alone.

Had the officers of the society had any common knowledge of

what it is to propagate new ideas they had helped by their
presence and other duties required by the starting of such a
movement. But they shun my house as if the pest were in it, and
have completely isolated me from everyone. It is not to me, they
did the harm, but to the cause I endeavor to advocate, the truths I
seek to preach. My residence as you know, is not well situated to
attract people, the street is too crooked for New Yorkers to find
their way easily. I spoke of moving (on my return from the
[Thousand] Islands) but was told not to do it.

Indeed, I have moved in organized Societies of all kinds in my

life, but I have never met anything so indescribable as the attitude
assumed by those who believe themselves entrusted with the
piloting of the Society of which I am a Sanyasin. Wonders will
never cease.20

To judge from a letter that Swamiji had written from England to

Abhayananda in October of 1895, she had complained to him of
her difficulties in somewhat the same vein and had, in addition,
evidently expressed an intention, or threat, to defect.* The portion
of Swamiji's letter that has been published in the Complete
Works,** though magnificent in
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Itself seems harmless. But when it is read as a reply to Abhay-

ananda's grievances, its underlying reproofs suddenly glow like
live coals. The following more complete version of this stunning
rebuke has recently been found among Mrs. Bull's papers:

I received your letter duly (Swamiji wrote) and many thanks to

you for it. Perhaps you forget that we have no organization nor
want to build any. Each one is quite independent to teach quite
free to preach whatever he or she likes, you need not take the
least notice who helps you or not, who comes or goes, you do
your work whenever you like and in whatever manner you
choose, if you have the spirit with in you will never fail to attract
others.

The Theosophists' method cannot be ours, for the very simple

reason that they are an organized sect-we are not. Nobody is
bound to take any teaching from anybody unless he or she likes,
nor have I any objections to my pupils going to other persons or
societies to learn the truth. Lord bless them all, and so far as I
know I teach if they find something beyond and better in any
society or organization or person I am only too glad that they
should go. Individuality is my motto, I have no ambition beyond
training individuals up. I think you can learn much from the
Chickering Hall lectures of Mr. Wright, and moreover they being
well-to-do people can help you in your material needs a good
deal. I am sure they will appreciate you and your efforts very
much and as they are nearly in the same line of thought and most
probably much more competent than me to express it, I am sure
you will find immense help from them. As for me, I again repeat-I
form no sect, nor organization-I know very little and that little I
teach without reserve. Where I am ignorant I confess it as such
and never never am I so glad as when I find people being helped
by Theosophists or Christians or Mohammedans or anybody in
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the world. I am a Sanyasi, as such I hold myself as a servant not

as a master in this world. Yet if people love me, they are
welcome, if they hate they are also very welcome.

Each one will have to save himself. each one to do his own work.
I seek no help, I reject none (seek and none were underscored
three times]; nor have I any right in the world to be helped.
Whosoever has helped me or will help, it will be their mercy to
me, not my right, and as such I am eternally grateful.

I am very sorry your circumstances are so bad-but you know, ma

chere fille, I am in a worse plight. In this country (England] I
have everything to spend and nothing to gain, the rooms in
London alone cost me L3 a week, then many other necessities. To
whom shall I complain? It is my own Karma that will have to be
worked out, and when I became a Sanyasi I consciously took the
step, knowing that perhaps this body will have to die of starva-
tion. What of that? A Sanyasi must never complain. In this world
he is a traveller. Come what may, a blessing on all. I am so sorry I
can not send you any help from here. I do not know what to
advise you. Perhaps the best thing for you will be to identify
yourself with some rich organized body as the Theosophists etc. I
am a beggar, my friends are poor. I love the poor. I welcome
poverty. I am glad that I sometimes have to starve. I ask help of
none. What is the use? Truth will preach itself it will not die for
the want of the helping hand of me! ! "Making happiness and
misery the same, making success or failure the same, fight thou
on"-Gita. It is that eternal love, unruffled equanimity under all
circumstances and above all perfect freedom from jealousy or
animosity that will tell that alone will tell- nothing else. That you
do not succeed, is your fault, because you can not attract, because
you can not throw out that infinite power of love-who else to
blame? I taught you the little that I know, I helped you with half
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a loaf so long I had one, but I am very sorry I have none now.
There is only one friend in all England who gives me food and
shelter when I am in need. I am sorry I have no more power to
help you. I will be only too glad if any society takes you by the
hands, you have talents, you can speak well. The Theosophists
especially will be too glad21 [The remainder is missing.]

(As Swamiji reminded Abhayananda, he had done for her what he

could, when he could. "Do you know," Kripananda would write to
Mrs. Bull on December 22, 1895, "that for several months
[Abhayananda] was supported from the few savings [Swamiji]
left here for that purpose?" 22 It is also a fact [learned from her
own letters)* that the Vedanta Society paid Abhayananda's rent
and some expenses. Swamiji unobtrusively looked after his own
as well as he could. Indeed, at one time he took French lessons
from Abhayananda-then, perhaps, still Mme Marie Louise-in
order to keep her from starving.23 But this is by the way.)

Receiving Abhayananda's letter of November 22, Mrs. Bull,

soothing friend to Swamiji's high-strung disciples, invited her to
Cambridge for a few days to talk things over. Swami
Abhayananda took the train from New York on November 26 in a
happy mood; two days earlier she had delivered a successful
lecture before the Philosophical Society of Brooklyn. "I was
warmly received," she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Bull's invitation,
"warmly applauded and I answered my critics in a manner that
secured the verdict of the audience in my favor." 24

After Swamiji's return to New York in December, Abhayananda

made a short and formal call upon him "to pay her respects"
("What nonsense!" Kripananda remarked)25 and then stayed
strictly away from his classes. After a time, Swamiji, together
with Miss Waldo, went to see her in her little house on the
crooked street in Greenwich Village in order to smooth out
whatever may then have been have difficulty.** How far
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he succeeded is not clear from the available evidence.

But be that as it may, it is clear enough that Swami Kripananda

and Swami Abhayananda had done everything in their power to
propagate Swamiji's message while he was away, and, having
come straight from weeks of close association with him at
Thousand Island Park, their power could not have been
negligible. If in the course of their work they each ignited even
one person, turning his or her life toward a spiritual ideal, then
their work that autumn was successful. It does not appear to have
been the case, however, that they "succeeded in forming new
centres . . . at Buffalo, N.Y.; Detroit, Mich. ; and other cities of
the Union."26 Indeed, as far as can be judged, there was no
outward growth of the Vedanta movement during Swamiji's
absence. The New York Society had held weekly class meetings
and had survived, but that seems to have been all.

Before starting his work, Swamiji had the weekend to recover

from his days of illness at sea and to find his land legs once again.
We do not know in any detail how he spent Friday, Saturday,
Sunday, and most of Monday, but we do know that aside from
being interviewed by a reporter from the New York World, one of
the first things he did upon his arrival in the city, which he found
"very dirty and miserable" after "the clean and beautiful cities of
Europe,"27 was to visit several of his friends. He called, for
instance, on the newly wed Mr. and Mrs. Francis Leggett,
delivering to these "birds of paradise" packages that Josephine
MacLeod had sent in his care from England. "They are as usual
very kind," he wrote to Miss MacLeod on Sunday, December 8,
and in this same letter he mentioned others on whom he had paid
calls. "Saw Mrs. and, Mr. Salomon and other friends. By chance
met Mrs. Peak [Peake] at Mrs. Gurnsey's but yet have no news of
Mrs. Rothlinburger [Dora Roethlesberger]."28

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On his way to the Guernseys' he probably walked up Fifth Avenue

in the bracing December air. From Thirty-ninth to Forty-fourth
Street the Avenue would have been serenely quiet on the
weekend, its stone mansions and its churches facing a street
empty of all but an occasional brougham or hansom cab drawn by
smartly trotting horses. He would have passed the massive, ivy-
covered granite wall of the Croton Reservoir and, across the
street, the Temple Emanu-El with its twin Moorish towers, and
further along a rural meat market and a placid country saloon.
This was still the most composed of neighborhoods, but even here
one could sense the vitality and exhilaration of a growing world
metropolis in which new ideas were continually bubbling over.

As soon as possible Swamiji began his classes, eager, it would

seem, to plunge into this second season of his New York work.
From Kripananda's letter of December 10 to Mrs. Bull, we learn
that his opening class was held on the evening of Monday, the
ninth.

The Swami began his work last evening with a lecture

[Kripananda wrote], in which he gave a general idea of the
various methods of Yoga. He was all Bhakti. The two rooms were
crowded, and the movement promises to assume this year
immense proportions. Enclosed I send you the dates of the
various Yoga classes. Provided the means will be forthcoming,
the Swami intends to give free Sunday lectures in a larger Hall. 29

Unfortunately, the list of classes and their dates is lost, but from a
letter Kripananda had written to Mrs. Bull on November 19 we
learn something of Swamiji's plans for his coming work:

I expect to see the Swami on or about the first of December. In a

letter written to Miss Waldo, he gives the subjects of the
discourses he proposes to have in his classes. Among the topics
are:--Prana and its modifications;
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Mind its functions and control; the chief Yoga methods, the
Upanishads etc.30

It is clear that this season Swamiji wanted to give all aspects of

his message a detailed and complete form. Nor did his plan of
work pertain to New York alone; from the start he intended to
hold classes in Chicago and Detroit. "My plans are not settled yet
about the work here," he wrote on Sunday, December 8, to Mrs.
Bull, who was at that time visiting Chicago. "Only I have an idea
to run to Detroit and Chicago meanwhile, and then come back to
New York... . If you think after consulting Mrs. Adams and Miss
Locke that it would be practicable for me to come to Chicago for
a course of lectures, write to me." 31 In two letters to Christina
Greenstidel, Swamiji also spoke of the possibility of his making a
quick tour of Detroit and Chicago. They read in full:
228 W. 39 8th Dec '95
Dear Christina

I am once more on American Soil and have taken lodgings at 228

W. 39 where I begin work from Monday next. Sometime after
Christmas I intend to make a tour through Detroit and Chicago.

I do not care for Public lecturings at all-and do not think I shall

have any more public lectures charging admission. If you will see
Mrs. Phelps & other of our friends and arrange some classes
(strictly on nonpayment basis) it will facilitate things a good deal.

Write at your earliest opportunity & give Mrs. Phunkey and all
our friends my deepest love & gratitude

Yours ever in the Lord Vivekananda

P.S. Kripananda is over full of praise of you and Mrs Funkey. And
sends his loving regards for you.32

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228 W. 39. Dec 10 1895 Dear Christina

Perhaps by this time you have received my first letter. I received

yours just now.

I had a splendid success in England and have left a Nucleus there

to work till my arrival next summer. You will be astonished to
learn that some of my strongest friends are big "guns" of the
Church of England.

This Christmas I am going away a week ~ from 2q.th Decem to

the country with Mr & Mrs Leggett after that I resume my work.
In the meanwhile the classes have begun.

I have written to you my intentions of taking a quick turn through

Detroit and Chicago in the meanwhile and return back.

Give Mrs Phelps my love and kindly arrange the classes [in
Detroit] with her. The best thing is to arrange for a public lecture
where I give out my general plan of work-the Unitarian church is
available and if the lecture is free there will be a big crowd. The
collection most possibly will cover the expenses. Then out of this
we will get the materials of a big class and then hurry them
through leaving Mrs. Phelps & you & Mrs. Funkey to work on
with them.

This plan is entirely feasible & if Mrs Phelps & Mrs Bagley
desire it they can work it out very quick.

Ever yours with love & blessings Vivekananda

But as it happened, Swamiji's New York work was to prove to be

too concentrated to admit of his taking "a quick turn through
Detroit and Chicago" until the beginning of March, 1896. His full
schedule began at once: from December ninth through the twenty-
second he held classes twice daily on four days of the week and a
question-and-answer class on Sundays.
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According to Swami Kripananda (writing to Mrs. Bull on

December 27), “the morning lectures are for the advanced class,
and the evening lectures for the beginners.” 34 Although
Kripananda’s list of the classes is lost, Miss Waldo, writing in
1905, recalls that there were at first nine classes a week. 35 This
statement, together with other scraps of information, gives us the
following schedule for December:

Monday evening December 9—

Introductory
Wednesday morning and
evening December11, 18—Jnana Yoga
Friday morning and
evening December 13, 20—Karma Yoga

Saturday morning and

evening December 14, 21—Raja Yoga

Sunday (afternoon?) December 15, 22—Question

class

Monday morning and

evening December 16, 23—Bhakti Yoga

Even as Swamiji’s schedule settled into a pattern, so also did the

“household,” everyone finding his or her own place in the scheme
of things. From the day of his arrival in New York until a few
days after his classes began, Swamiji shared the two parlor rooms
at 228 West Thirty-ninth Street with Kripananda. On December
10 the latter wrote to Mrs. Bull, “Since the Swami arrived, we had
common house holding, and I gave my share to defraying the
expenses of the victuals.”36 These victuals were cooked, no doubt,
in the community kitchen on the floor below. But shortly the
situation changed. AT the crowded preliminary class meeting of
December 9, it had become apparent that both parlor rooms
would be needed for the morning and evening classes;
Kripananda would require a room of his own. Thus, within a few
days, he moved to a small room on the top floor of the house,
which he called his garret and for which he paid two dollars a
week. Concurrently, the task of cooking fell on Sarah Ellen
Waldo. As Sister Devamata (Laura Glenn in the 1890s) tells the
story in her
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"Memories of India and Indians," the day following Swamiji's

arrival (actually, it was probably not until after the classes had
started) he said to Miss Waldo, "The food here seems so unclean,
would it be possible for you to cook for me?" She was, of course,
delighted.

She went at once to the landlady [Devamata writes] and obtained

permission to use the kitchen. Then, from her own store, she
gathered cooking utensils and groceries. These she carried with
her on the following morning. She lived at the far end of
Brooklyn. The only means of transportation was a jogging horse-
car, and it required two hours to reach the Swami's lodging at
38th [3gth] Street in New York. [Actually, cable cars ran across
the Brooklyn Bridge at intervals of one minute (fare, three cents).
But a jogging horse-car could also have been involved in the trip
from the New York terminal of the Bridge to West Thirty-ninth
Street, and in any event, the daily journey would have been an
arduous one.] Undaunted, every morning found her on her way at
eight o'clock or earlier; and at nine or ten at night, she was on her
way home again.37

Miss Waldo evidently did things with a vigor that swept all before
it, and the name "Haridasi" (Servant of the Lord), which Swamiji
had given (or was to give) her, seems to have become her well.
"[She] moved about doing everything," Devamata writes. "Her
service was continuous and untiring. She cooked, edited, cleaned,
and took dictation, taught and managed, read proof and saw
visitors."

As mentioned earlier, there is no known evidence that Miss

Waldo had held Vedanta classes during Swamiji's absence from
New York in 1895. The weekly classes of the Vedanta Society had
been held by either Swami Abhayananda or Swami Kripananda;
nor did Swamiji authorize Miss Waldo to lecture and hold classes
until October of 1896, as is clear
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from a letter he wrote to her at that time. But however that may
be, Ellen Waldo was close to him and was among those who best
understood his teaching. It was, indeed, because of her ability to
grasp his thought so well that he was to entrust her with the final
editing of his lectures and class talks. It was she also whom he
felt free to scold. "One morning the Swami found Miss Waldo in
tears," Sister Devamata relates. " `What is the matter, Ellen?' he
asked anxiously. `Has anything happened? ‘I seem unable to
please you,' she replied. ‘Even when others annoy you, you scold
me for it.' The Swami said quickly: `I do not know those people
well enough to scold them. I cannot rebuke them, so I come to
you. Whom can I scold if I cannot scold my own?’ “38 Needless
to say, Miss Waldo no longer felt his scoldings to be a cause of
sorrow; on the contrary, they were thenceforth "a proof of
nearness."

Almost at once after the start of Swamiji's classes another change

took place in the "household": there appeared on the scene, out of
the blue, Josiah John Goodwin--the young man whose work for
Swamiji was to be of incalculable importance to the Vedanta
movement. On December 12 the officers of the Society had
inserted the following want ad in both the Herald and the World:

Wanted-A rapid shorthand writer to take down lectures for several

hours
a week. Apply at 228 West 39th Street.

Mr. Goodwin must have applied immediately and have been

immediately engaged, for those three momentous lines appeared
in the papers only once.

It is said in the Life that prior to Goodwin's coming, two

stenographers had been tried out and, for one reason or another,
been found unequal to the task of recording Swamiji's classes. 39
One of them may have been Swami Kripananda, who, as we have
seen earlier, had been working very hard for the past six weeks or
so to learn shorthand and typing for this very purpose. But though
he had worked for hours every
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day and had become fairly proficient, he was evidently not expert
enough for the task. The second applicant, on the other hand, may
have been technically skillful but wanting in comprehension.
What was required was an expert shorthand writer and typist who
was, at the same time, a man of intelligence and spiritual
understanding. It would not seem likely that such a person, if
available at all, would be available for a job that must have
offered a salary lower than the prevailing one of fifteen to
eighteen dollars a week. Yet J. J. Goodwin was just such a man. "I
have intense faith in Truth," Swamiji had written earlier in the
year. "The Lord will send help and hands to work with me." 40 One
cannot very well doubt that Goodwin, a handsome young
Englishman recently come to America, was, literally, a godsend.
Not only was he fully qualified for the task of taking down and
transcribing Swamiji's class talks and lectures, but he was
capable, as he soon proved, of handling many other matters as
well.

Certainly from Mr. Goodwin's point of view, it was by the grace

of God that he had found his way to 228 West Thirty ninth Street.
Although he was a very competent young man by the age of
twenty-five he had behind him eleven years of journalistic
training, experience in editing three newspapers, and a job as
court reporter-he was also, one reads in Noble Lives by
Nagendranath Gupta, "on the highroad to become a wastrel.” 41
This impending profligacy of Goodwin's was, one thinks, due
more to frustration than to an inherent tendency to dissipate his
gifts, for, as far as is known, he came from steady minded stock.
Although his lineage has not been traced further back than two
generations, one finds that his paternal grandfather, the Reverend
Josiah Goodwin, was a Wesleyan minister of Scarborough,
Yorkshire, and not given, one can guess, to wastry. The reverend's
son, Josiah the younger, born in 1817, also followed a stable
course, though not in the ministry. Early in life he discovered that
he had an aptitude for journalism and, in line with this, became an
expert shorthand writer (probably following the new and
innovative Pitman system,
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first published in 1837). This special and then uncommon skill

led him to become for a time the official reporter in connection
with the disputes and arbitrations attendant upon the first laying
of railway lines in England. Subsequently, Yorkshire left behind,
he became a successful editor of, in turn, the Birmingham
Advertiser, the Wilts County Mirror, and the Exeter Gazette.
Exactly when he married and settled down permanently in
Batheaston, a suburb of Bath, is not at present known, but it was
there that his children, Margaretta and Josiah John, were born, the
latter in September of 1870 and there that he became prominent in
Bath's literary life. Though quiet and unassuming, he was soon
appointed Honorary Secretary of a number of prestigious and
learned institutions, including the Literary and Philosophical
Association, the Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, and the
Bath Centre of the Oxford Examinations. He was esteemed, as
well, as an archaeologist (or, one might better say, an antiquarian)
in both Bath and Exeter. From 1859 until his death in 1890, his
primary responsibility was that of editor of the Journal of the
Bath and West of England Agricultural Society, of which he also
served as Secretary for some sixteen years, until poor health
forced him to resign. From all accounts, Josiah Goodwin, aside
from being a well-honored journalist, was a courtly, gentle, in-
dustrious, discreet, modest, and kindly man with a well stocked
mind, retentive memory, and sound judgment.* He seems to have
passed on most of these qualities to his son, our Josiah John, and
to have given him in addition a training in journalism and in
speedy shorthand. As for the "wastrel" part in the son's makeup,
one could suppose that this was a restlessness of soul combined
with high spirits, a restlessness that took him (after an
unsuccessful newspaper venture in Bath in 1893) to Australia and
then to America. He made a living of sorts as he went, editing
things here and there, but in the process of this anchorless life his
native buoyancy and trust began to bog down in agnosticism and
perhaps in despair. And then one cold December day he came to
228 West Thirty-ninth Street.
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Swamiji's impact upon the young Goodwin was profound and

evidently immediate. "The Swami told him many incidents of his
past life, and this created such a moral revolution in him," the
Life relates, "that henceforth his whole life was changed." 42 Thus
Swamiji sometimes startled a half asleep soul into wakefulness.
But it was also, perhaps, his infinite compassion and
understanding that attracted Goodwin. "He r' was as simple as a
child," we learn from Mr. Gupta, "and ' wonderfully responsive to
the slightest show of kindness." Would he not, then, be ready to
fall at the feet of one who had ' no word of condemnation, but
who offered unconditioned love? Fall at Swamiji's feet is,
figuratively, what Josiah Goodwin did. ' Later he spoke of his
meeting with Swamiji to Swami Saradananda. "Being poor from
childhood, I have gone many places trying to make a living. I
have hobnobbed with all kinds of people; they gave me work and
a salary, but no one gave me his heart's love. Then in America I
met Swami Vivekananda then alone could I understand what love
was. So, income or no income, I am caught! Never have I found
such a noble being as Swami Vivekananda. One is drawn to him
as if to one's very own."43

Goodwin forthwith plunged heart and soul into the Vedanta

movement. It is not true, however, as has often been said (in
Josephine MacLeod's reminiscences, for instance), 44 that he
refused' to accept a salary. Surely if it had been possible for him
to work without pay, he would have done so. But it was not
possible. When, in connection with a difficulty that will be
touched upon in a later chapter, Miss Mary Phillips was to remind
him that the members had subscribed his salary among
themselves, he replied: "I am a poor man. For the sake of my part
in the Vedanta movement, I wish I were not, but I am, and I am
not ashamed of it. I simply had to take salary for my work in New
York."45 The salary, however, was no doubt a small one, possibly
barely enough to cover his expenses. Several months earlier--in
August of 1896-he had written to Mrs. Bull: "If I am to work for
the Vedanta—and
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my wishes are all that way: I think I may say my heart is

thoroughly in the work-I am afraid I shall have to accept bare
living, but beyond that I would not consent to any
arrangement."46

From the beginning, "he would work day and night over the
lectures" the Life tells us, "taking them down stenographically and
then typewriting them, all in the same day." 47 Even if he took
down only the advanced morning class, this was in itself a feat,
for, as Kripananda wrote in reference to Swamiji's karma yoga
class, "These lectures are very long if taken down verbatim." 48 To
keep pace with Swamiji was to have little time to spare, and if
there had been an unoccupied room in the same lodging house,
Goodwin most probably would have taken it. As it was, he took a
room almost directly across the street at 247 West Thirty-ninth,
and it was undoubtedly there that he did his typing, going from
the morning class to his typewriter and back again to the evening
class, or first perhaps to dinner at Swamiji's table.

To sit at Swamiji's table was something Kripananda nowadays

refused to do. "I thought it most practicable to live on my own
resources and not to be supported by the Swami," he was to write
to Mrs. Bull on December 20. "I occupy a small garrett [sic] in
the same house for which I pay two dollars a week, and as to my
meals, I take once or twice a day a lunch outside, though the
Swami has his meals cooked at home. Of course, the Swami
insisted upon my sharing his meals with him, but I found it best to
live for myself."49

To tell you the truth-entre nous [he continued]-I am much tired of

that committee of petticoats, which estranges me more and more
from the Swami. They dispose of everything, even the money
which comes in as contributions in the classes. They even grudge
me, the Swami's Sanyasin, a copy of the Swami's lectures, of
which there are furnished several transcripts by the shorthand
man [Goodwin], and for which they have no special use. It
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is for this reason that I am anxious to get a, type-writer of my

own, so as not to have to ask their favor.50

Of this "committee of petticoats'' we shall say more later. Suffice

it at present to note that with classes twice a day, a committee
running everything, Miss Waldo everywhere, people , coming and
going, temperaments following their own course, and Swamiji an
immense and dynamic presence around whom everything
revolved-with all this going on, things were abustle and aglow
with astonishing life behind the drab front of 228 West Thirty-
ninth Street.

One source of information regarding Swamiji's classes of this

season is to be found in an article in the New York Herald of
January 19, 1896, written by a reporter who had attended a class
on karma yoga. From his very brief and none too astute
description of this class ("Its theme was: ‘That which ye sow ye
reap, whether of good or evil' "), one suspects that he attended it
during December when Swamiji had explained the workings of
karma. But however that may be, there was included in this article
a summary of Swamiji's teachings on the four yogas, taken, it
would appear, from a written statement. The paragraph in
question was subheaded "The Doctrine of the Swami" and read:

The following is a brief sketch of the Swami's fundamental

teachings:

"Every man must develop according to his own nature. As every

science has its methods so has every religion. Methods of
attaining the end of our religion are called Yoga, and the different
forms of Yoga that we teach are adapted to the different natures
and temperaments of men. We classify them in the following way,
under four heads:
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"( I ) Karma Yoga-The manner in which a man realizes his own

divinity through works and duty.

"(2) Bhakti Yoga-The realization of a divinity through devotion to

and love of a personal God.

"(3) Rajah Yoga-The realization of divinity through control of

mind.

"(4) Gnana Yoga-The realization of man's own divinity through

knowledge.

"These are all different roads leading to the same center-God.

Indeed, the varieties of religious belief are an advantage, since all
faiths are good, so far as they encourage man to religious life. The
more sects there are the more opportunities there are for making
successful appeals to the divine instinct in all men."

In Swamiji's class talks on each of the four yogas he adapted the

most important paths of spiritual life, as they had been known to
the sages of India and as he himself knew them, to the
requirements of the modern mind, emphasizing again and again
the necessity for the tests of reason and experience, for initiative,
strength, and courage, for practice and realization at every step of
the way. He did not value any one method above another; each, if
followed earnestly and practiced assiduously, would result in "the
attenuating of the lower self, so that the real higher Self may
shine forth."51 While the best path of all was, to his mind, a
combination of all four equally perfected, he taught each singly
and as complete in itself. He did not in his general teachings
recommend any special way; nor did he ask any man or woman to
retreat from the world as a necessary means of attaining the
highest goal. He did not condemn the world as such, nor did he
ignore it as unreal; rather, he deified it, transfigured it: Indeed,
when one considers Swamiji's teachings as a whole during this
second season in New York; one finds him marking out a way for
the active modern man and woman such as had never been
defined before. His teachings were more than the orthodox
philosophies of.
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Vedanta and Yoga put into simple and modern language and
infused with new power. True, he did indeed infuse them with a
tremendous power, but he also gave them a new turn, such as
made them fully relevant to and redemptive of an age whose ways
and needs were not at all the ways and needs of any previous age
on earth and which called for a new mode of spiritual struggle.
Keenly aware of this need, he was marking out a new path and
opening it to all mankind.

In the following chapter we shall try very briefly and in small

measure to discuss Swamiji,s new path. It is enough to say here
that his great mind, so vast in scope, so transcendent in quality-a
mind that can be called more divine than human -must have been
facing problems and producing solutions which involved the
destiny of all men and women for centuries ahead. He was to give
full utterance to those solutions during the coming year, such as
he had not given before. Although there are no incontestable
records of the classes he held 'in New York during the spring of
1895, we can assume that while these may not have been different
in essence from those he was to hold in the winter of 1895-96,
they were, in a sense, preliminary to them and did not constitute
so complete and detailed a presentation of his teachings. The very
fact that he had felt the need to return to New York would indicate
that he had more to say and to do than he had already said and
done. The foundation, however, had been laid in the spring of
1895, and it had by no means disappeared.

The Vedanta Society, which he had founded in November of

1894., was still intact, and those who had drawn close to him
were still eager to serve him. Aside from the two to whom he had
given sannyasa, there were Miss Ellen Waldo, Miss Mary
Phillips, Dr. Edward G. Day, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Goodyear, Mr.
and Mrs. Francis Leggett, Miss Josephine MacLeod (who,
although at the time abroad, was ready to give what support she
could), Miss Emma Thursby, and, on her visits to New York, Mrs.
Ole Bull. This is to say nothing of the many now mostly
anonymous people who had come to
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his classes in the spring of 1895 and who had been waiting for
his return. Then, too, he had close friends and loyal supporters in
New York who belonged in a category somewhere between those
who worked actively for the Vedanta movement and those who
simply listened to him speak. Such may have been the New York
attorney Myron H. Phelps, whose name one now and then reads
in connection with Swamiji but of whom little more is known. A
good majority of all these people must have flocked to his classes
as soon as he reopened them in December of 1895.

According to Kripananda, the two parlor rooms could together

hold 150 people,52 but this may have been an overestimate.
Writing of this period, Miss Waldo was to recall that all the
classes "were attended by large numbers to the full capacity of the
rooms,"53 and the highest figure we have for the class attendance
is 120. At first the attendance was generally under 100; yet both
rooms, though not full, were always needed-even during the days
just before Christmas. "In spite of the holiday engagements,"
Kripananda wrote to Mrs. Bull on December 22, "people come in
great numbers to the classes and always delight in hearing the
Swami."54 (After the first week in January, when Swamiji began
giving public lectures, the class attendance would grow. "The
classes are constantly increasing," Kripananda was to write on
January 14. "We have now in the average from 70 to 80 people." 55
And in February Swamiji would write to Sturdy, "The general
attendance varies between 70 and 120.")56

But if the attendance at Swamiji's classes was relatively small, it

was, in a sense, selective. "I could have thousands at my lectures
if I wanted them," he remarked in New York to a disciple who had
expressed regret that his sublime teachings had no larger
following. "It is the sincere student who will help to make this
work a success and not merely the large audiences. If I succeed in
my whole life to help one man to reach freedom, I shall feel that
my labours have not been in vain, but quite successful." 57 Again,
he was to say during the
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course of a bhakti yoga class, “Perhaps only half a dozen men and
women will follow me in all my life, but they will be real men
and women, pure and sincere, and I do not want a crowd. What
can crowds do? The history of the world was made by a few
dozens, whom you can count on your fingers, and the rest were a
rabble."58

Sincerity was the only requirement for regular attendance at

Swamiji's Classes, and aside from the automatic selection that
took place (either one was sincere to start with, shortly became
sincere, or dropped away) there were no prerequisites. All kinds
came, many to both morning and evening classes, avidly drinking
in every word-the women in long sweeping skirts, balloon
sleeves, furs, and hats topheavy with flowers, fruit, feathers, and
ribbons, the men in dark suits, ulsters, derbies and spats; but
some, perhaps most, were plain and variously unfashionable.
From Sister Devamata we learn something of these people.
Unfortunately, by the time she wrote about the first and second
seasons of Swamiji's New York work the two years had become
somewhat confused in her memory, but while this robs her
reminiscences of their value as a historical account, their several
parts, when unscrambled, present us with clear, easily placed
pictures of his life in New York, such as one cannot find
elsewhere. The following paragraphs, for instance, apply
essentially to the second season. She wrote:

It was a heterogeneous gathering at the classes in those shabby

lodgings-old and young, rich and poor, wise and foolish; stingy
ones who dropped a button in the collection basket, and more
generous ones, who gave a dollar bill or even two. We all met day
after day and became friends without words or association. Some
of us never missed a meeting. We followed the course on Bhakti-
Yoga and the course on Jnana-Yoga. We walked simultaneously
along the paths of Raja-Yoga and Karma Yoga. We were almost
sorry that there were only four
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Yogas. We would have liked six or eight, that the number of

classes might be multiplied. . . .

The faithful group that followed the Swami wherever he spoke

were as relentless as they were earnest. If he suggested tentatively
omitting a class because of a holiday or for some other reason,
there was a loud protest always. This one had come to New York
specially for the teaching and wished to get all she could; another
was leaving town soon and was unwilling to lose a single
opportunity of hearing the Swami. They gave him no respite. He
taught early and late. Among the most eager were a number of
teachers, each with a blank book in hand; and the Swami's words
were punctuated by the tap of their pencils taking rapid notes. Not
a sentence went unrecorded; and I am sure that if, later, anyone
had made the circuit of the New York Centres of New Thought,
Metaphysics, or Divine Science, they would have heard
everywhere Vedanta and Yoga in more or less diluted form. 59

Sister Devamata was, perhaps, too close to Swamiji's classes to be

able to judge how the gathering might appear to a disinterested
stranger, but we have also the impression of one who visited the
class solely to observe it. In the Herald article quoted above, the
reporter wrote of the "well-dressed audience of intellectual
appearance." He picked out among the group of "between fifty
and a hundred persons," not religious teachers avidly taking
notes, but "doctors and lawyers, professional men and society
ladies." And one could surely find scattered here and there people
known to the world at large. In addition to Emma Thursby, who
had sung before kings and been feted on both continents, there
would be Antoinette Sterling, recently come from London, where
she had been the most famous ballad singer of the 188os. One
might find the writers Mary Mapes Dodge and Kate Douglas
Wiggin, both of whom took an active interest in Swamiji's work,
and the popular poetess Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who, with her
husband, always
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found in his classes "the same uplifted sense of soul and enlarged
g vision. Again, among the teachers and students of metaphysics
there might be the aristocratic Mrs. May Banks-Stacey, one of the
founders of the Rosicrucian Order in the United States and Matre
of the Grand Lodge of America, who is said to have "studied the
mysteries of Hindoo philosophy under Swami Vivekananda."61
And now and then one would perhaps see the great scientist,
Nikola Tesla, who was to take time off from his continuous work
to attend Swamiji's public lectures.

From the same newspaper report we learn that Swamiji, in his

ochre robe, sat between the two parlor rooms; the students, rich
and poor, famous and unknown, grouped on either side of him.
Some may have sat on sofas or divans upholstered in plush or
horsehair, others on straight-backed chairs . rented or borrowed
for the purpose. (Earlier in the year many of Swamiji's students-in
both New York and London-had sat, perforce, on the floor, and
this may also have been so at Thirty-ninth Street.) But wherever
and however Swamiji's listeners sat, they were absorbed not only
in his words, but in Swamiji himself. "He is possessed of a large
amount of personal magnetism," the Herald reporter wrote in the
same article. "One has but to glance at the grave, attentive faces
of the men and women who attend his classes to be convinced
that it is not the man's subject alone that attracts and holds his dis-
ciples. . . . Following the lecture or instruction, the Swami held an
informal reception, and the magnetism of the man was shown by
the eager manner in which those who had been listening to him
hastened to shake hands or begged the favor of an introduction." 62

It was, indeed, difficult to distinguish Swamiji from his message.

Like all great prophets, he was his message, the embodiment of it,
and almost all who were drawn to the one seem to have been
drawn to the other also. At first, some had come to him simply as
to one more religious teacher, including him in their rounds of
incessant lecture-going. "We were
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insatiable knowledge-seekers," Devamata writes of herself and

her friends, referring now to the spring of 1895. "We did not limit
ourselves to any one doctrine or scripture. We went to one lecture
in the morning, a second one in the afternoon, and sometimes to a
third in the evening. Philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, each had
its turn. Yet, although we seemed to scatter our interest, our real
loyalty belonged to the Swami. We recognized in him a power
that no other teacher possessed. It was he alone who was shaping
our thought and conviction."63

Soon Devamata (then Laura Glenn) and her friends no longer

even seemed to scatter their interest. "Through the late winter and
spring of 1895," she writes (meaning, as the context makes clear,
the winter of 1895-1896), "the work-carried on without the
intermittence of the earlier teaching-gained tremendous
momentum and fervor. We divided our interest no longer. It was
wholly focussed on the message the Swami had to give. That had
become the foundation of our daily living, the stimulus that urged
us onward."64 It is little wonder that it was so. Speaking of
Swamiji's power to revolutionize the world, Swami Turiyananda
once said, "[He] used to tell us, `Do you think I only lecture? I
know I give tangible, living spirituality to them, and they know
they receive it.' In New York Swamiji was lecturing to a class.
Oh, the tremendous effect of it! K. [Swami Abhedananda] said
that while listening to the lecture he felt as if some force was
drawing the Kundalini up, as at the time of meditation." 65 (The
reference here was to a class held in New York in 1900, but in
1895 and 1896 Swamiji's power was no less.)

To be stirred to one's depths was not always a comfortable

experience. Even Laura Glenn, who attended all his New York
classes through two seasons, felt so shy in his presence that she
never came "in close personal touch with him." "There seemed,"
she wrote, "to be an intangible barrier." 66 Some people reacted
with more than shyness. In the Life an unidentified disciple is
quoted as having said, "It would be
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impossible for me to describe the overwhelming force of

Swamiji's presence. He could rivet attention upon himself: and
when he spoke in all seriousness and intensity-though it seems
wellnigh incredible-there were some among his hearers who were
literally exhausted. The subtlety of his thought and arguments
swept them off their feet. In one case, I know of a man who was
forced to rest in bed for three days as the result of a nervous
shock received by a discussion with the Swami. His personality
was at once awe-inspiring and sublime. He had the faculty of
literally annihilating one if he so chose."67

But while Swamiji's personality alarmed some and caused others

to take to their beds, it attracted far more, for his extraordinary
power was penetrated through and through with a consummate
benevolence and simplicity. "Those who feared to be caught in
the current of this great power were but few " Sister Christine
wrote;' "the others by thousands were drawn with the irresistible
force, even as iron filings to a magnet. He had the power of
attraction so great, that those who came near him, men and
women alike, even children, fell under the magic spell he cast" 68--
and, one might add, even animals. "Even my dog-an Irish setter-
felt this," Sister Devamata wrote. "He would stand perfectly still
and a quiver would run through his body whenever Swamiji
would lay his hand on his head and tell him he was a true Yogi." 69

5
As we have seen earlier, Swamiji's bhakti yoga classes were held
in December on Mondays-two classes on the sixteenth and two on
the twenty-third. These were all beginners classes; nor do the
original transcripts of them constitute, as one might suppose, the
first chapters of Swamiji's book Bhakti-yoga. Rather, they are
published in volume four of the Complete Works as the first four
sections of "Addresses on Bhakti-Yoga."* Indeed, the "Addresses
on Bhakti-Yoga" comprise six of the seven (or perhaps nine)
bhakti yoga classes for beginners (both
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morning and evening) that Swamiji held in December and

January of this second season, It is owing to a blessed blunder on
the part of Mr. Sturdy that these six have been published.
As the bhakti yoga classes (and other classes as well) were taken
down and transcribed, they were sent to Mr. Sturdy in England for
the classes he was there conducting. "I will send you a copy of
each (class lecture] as it is finished," Swamiji informed Sturdy in
a heretofore unpublished passage of a letter written on December
23, 1895. "Perhaps you may find in them some suggestions for
your classes there."70 Thinking to promote Swamiji's work in
London, Sturdy published the transcripts of the karma yoga
classes and those of bhakti yoga in two very well got up little
books; he also brought out some of the raja yoga classes in
pamphlet form-all without a word to Swamiji. This was to cause
no little indignation among the officers of the New York Society,
to whom Swamiji had given the rights of publication. The point to
be made here, however, is that Mr. Sturdy's rush into print was
not wholly unfortunate, for it has preserved for us the classes
almost as they came from Swamiji's lips. "These addresses,"
Sturdy wrote in a note for his publications, ". . . are reprinted with
very slight modifications as reported by the shorthand writer." 71
The first part of Bhakti-yoga, on the other hand, while similar in
substance (and often in wording) to Swamiji's beginners classes,
actually consists of articles written by him in December and
January, typed by Swami Kripananda, and sent to Madras for
publication in the Brahmavadin and, later, in book form.

It is in the "Addresses," therefore, that we find Swamiji's words as

he spoke them directly to the students in his beginners class,
scolding them at times for their intellectual scorn of an
"anthropomorphic" Personal God and at other times for running
after psychic phenomena-ghosts and hobgoblins and "all these
creepy things."72 "Whenever we attempt to make an image of God
we make a caricature of Him," he said to the intellectuals,
"because we cannot understand Him as anything higher than man,
so long as we are men. The time
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will come when we transcend our human nature, and know Him
as He is; but so long as we are men we must worship Him in man.
Talk as we may, try as we may, we cannot see God except as a
man. . . . Religion is realisation, and you must make the sharpest
distinction between talk and realisation....If anyone [other than a
Paramahamsa, a knower of God] tells you he is not going to
worship God as man, take care of him. He is an irresponsible
talker, he is mistaken; his religion is for frothy thinkers, it is
intellectual nonsense."73 This passage, which is also (with
variations) in Bhakti'—Yoga, continues in "Addresses" alone:

It is absolutely necessary to worship God as man, and blessed are

those races which have such a "God-man" to worship. Christians
have such a God-man in Christ; therefore, cling close to Christ;
never give up Christ. That is the natural way to see God; see God
in man. All our ideas of God are concentrated there. The great
limitation Christians have is that they do not heed other
manifestations of God besides Christ. He was a manifestation of
God; so was Buddha; so were some others, and there will be
hundreds of others. Do not limit God anywhere. Pay all the
reverence that you think due to God, to Christ; that is the only
worship we can have. God cannot be worshipped; He is the
immanent Being of the universe. It is only to His manifestation as
man that we can pray.74

And to the mysterymongers he went on to say:

But you must not mix up Christ or Buddha with hobgoblins flying
through the air, and all that sort of nonsense. Sacrilege! Christ
coming into a spiritualistic seance to dance! I have seen that
pretence in this country. It is not in that way that these
manifestations of God come. The very touch of one of them will
be manifest upon a man;
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when Christ touches, the whole soul of man will change. . . . The
great strength of Christ is not in His miracles or His healing. Any
fool could do those things, fools can heal others, devils can heal
others. I have seen horrible demoniacal men do wonderful
miracles.... I have seen fools heal at a glance, by the will, the most
horrible disease. These are powers, truly, but often demoniacal
powers. . . . So in worshipping Christ, in praying to Him, we must
always remember what we are seeking. Not those foolish things
of miraculous display, but the wonderful powers of the Spirit
which makes man free, gives him control over the whole of
nature, takes from him the badge of slavery, and shows God unto
him.75

Or again Swamiji scolded his class for a "shopkeeping" religion-

the asking of God for small material things, among which he
included heaven.

The first task in becoming a Bhakta [he said, and I quote from an
unedited transcript] is to give up all such desires for material
things and even for heaven. Such a heaven would not be much
different from this earth. We have here some miseries and some
happiness; we will just have a little less, or a little more. There
will be no more light than we have here; it will be the result of
our good deeds; perhaps plenty to eat, or perhaps very little. Per-
haps we will have the power to fly like bats through the air, and
jump through walls, and play all sorts of tricks, to dance in some
seance room. To my mind, it is better to go to the nether regions
than to run a spiritualistic camera. The Christian's idea of heaven
is of a place of intensified sensual enjoyment. How can that be
God?

You have had such heavens hundreds of times, and had to tumble
down again. The question is how to get rid of these laws of
nature. . . . We have become so unhinged and unnatural, that
nothing natural will satisfy
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us. Every nerve is full of poison and morbidity, and we are always
grasping after morbid things and must have unnatural excitement
and unnatural food and drink and surroundings of life. The air
must be poisoned first and then we can breathe. As to fear, what
are our lives but bundles of fear? We are afraid of catching cold
every day, we are afraid of what we eat, we are afraid of man. . . .

How are we to break ourselves of this, that is the question: It is all

very well to say we are men and human beings. I find Utilitarians
stand up and say, "Don't talk of God and all these things; we can't
know anything about them; let us live happily in this world." 1
would be the first to do so if we could, but the world will not
allow us. As long as you are a slave of nature, how can you ? . . .
This external unquenchable thirst! Always wanting for something.
When a man is a beggar he wants money, money, money. When
he has money he wants other things -society, and after that
something else. Never at rest. How are we to quench this eternal
desire? If we get to heaven our desires will only be increased. . . .
After all, this desire to go to heaven is a desire after enjoyment.
This is to be given up. It is too little, too vulgar a thing to go to
heaven for you to think of. It is just the same as thinking I will
become a millionaire and a very powerful man. There are many of
these heavens, but through them you cannot gain the right to enter
the gates of religion and love.76

With these words, spoken on the evening of December 23,

Swamiji closed his Bhakti yoga classes for the Christmas
holidays.

Both Mr. Sturdy's edition of Swamiji's karma yoga classes and the
New York edition, which we know today, follow more or less the
same sequence of classes, and neither of them gives
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a hint of which are beginners classes and which advanced. This

distinction may not greatly matter, but in trying to follow the
morning and evening courses as Swamiji gave them, it would, I
think, be helpful to know which is which. I have, therefore, tried
to sort them out with the help of Swami Kripananda's dated
transcripts, five of which have recently been found among Mrs.
Bull's papers. From these one learns that "Karma in Its Effect on
Character" arid "We Help Ourselves, Not the World" are
beginners classes and that "Each Is Great in His Own Place,"
"Non-Attachment Is Complete Self Abnegation," and "Freedom"
are advanced classes. Around these posts the rest seem to fall into
place like this: Beginners Course: "Karma in Its Effect on
Character," "What is Duty?" "We Help Ourselves, Not the
World," and "The Ideal of Karma Yoga." Advanced Course:
"Each Is Great in His Own Place," "The Secret of Work," "Non-
Attachment Is Complete Self Abnegation," and "Freedom."

One finds, I believe, that each of these two sets of four lectures
leads the mind from one step to the next without a sense of
contradiction, repetition, or confusion. The early practice of
karma yoga, in which the aspirant cheerfully and as selflessly as
possible performs the duty contingent upon the circumstances of
his life, leads to the advanced practice in which the motive of
duty is left behind and work is done for its own sake, without
compulsion and with the increasing insight and love that come
with detachment.

One drawback to this suggested reading of the American edition

of Karma--Yoga is that it requires some adjustments or, rather, the
undoing of adjustments. It would appear from a comparison with
Mr. Sturdy's London edition (now long out of print) that in order
to give smoothness and a certain logic to the present sequence of
chapters, someone in New York-perhaps Miss Waldo, presumably
with Swamiji's consent-made several transpositions,
interpolations, and omissions. It would be tedious to describe here
all these editorial alterations; let us just say that without them the
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classes within each series, as listed above, follow easily and

obviously one after the other.

As for the main text of the classes, Sturdy's unauthorized but, as

he avowed, virtually unedited publication again serves us well.
Through its pages, excerpts from which have been published
(though not identified) in volume five of the Complete Works, one
can hear Swamiji speak freely and energetically to his students of
the pitfalls along this spiritual path. Even as he stressed again and
again the necessity for practice in every path, for becoming
inwardly pure and capable of selfless action, for realizing the
truths of religion, so also he pointed out the multiple traps into
which one could so easily step, the subtly self serving and self
deceiving acts which passed for idealism and virtue but which, in
fact, subverted them.

The reformer's single-minded zeal was one of the distortions of

"selfless activity" that he inveighed against, at times, as in the
following passage, amicably and with humor, but tellingly
nonetheless:

You see these wine fanatics and cigar fanatics. Some [people]
think that if men give up smoking cigars the world will be a
millennium, and the women are generally these fanatics. . . .
There was a young lady here one day, in this class. She was one
of a number of ladies in Chicago who have built a little house
where they take the working people, and give them some music,
and gymnastics. One day this young lady was talking about these
evils and said she knew the remedy. I said, "How do you know ?"
and she said, "Don't you know the Hull House?"* In her opinion
this Hull House is the great panacea for all the evils that the flesh
is heir to. This will grow upon her; I am very sorry for her. There
are some fanatics in India who think if a woman can get two or
three husbands it will cure all evil. This is fanaticism, and when
you know that this world is a dog's curly tail and will never
straighten, you will never be fanatics. Fanatics can never
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do real work. When I was a boy I thought that fanaticism was a

great element in work, but now, as I grow older, I find out that it
is not. If there was no fanaticism in the world the world would
make much more progress than it does now. . . . There may be a
man who goes about cheating people, there is no trusting him, no
woman is safe near him. But perhaps that blackguard does not
drink wine. He sees nothing good in anyone who drinks wine; all
these wicked things that he does are of no consideration. It is the
natural human selfishness and onesidedness. Whatever you do or
possess you think the best in the world, and those things you do
not possess are of no value. . . . Do you not remember in your
own history how these "Mayflower" people came and began to
call themselves Puritans; they were very pure and good as far as
they went, until they began to persecute other people, and
throughout the history of humanity it is the same. I have read of
two wonderful ships. The first was Noah's Ark and the second the
"Mayflower." The Jews say that out of Noah's Ark all creation has
come, and the Americans say that out of the "Mayflower" nearly
half the people have come. I scarcely meet one who does not say,
"My grandfather or great-grandfather came out of the
`Mayflower'."

...Fanatics only make hatred in the world. Do you mean to say

these fanatics love these poor fellows who become drunkards?
They are simply fanatics because they want to get something out
of it. . . . They have no sympathy, and as soon as you come out of
the company of fanatics you will begin to love and to
sympathise, and the more you get of this love and sympathy, the
less will be the power of cursing these poor fellows, but you will
sympathise rather with their faults.77

Again in Sturdy's Karma—Yoga one hears Swamiji on the subject

of "helping the world." The following passage differs in some
respects from the parallel passage in volumes one and
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five of the Complete Works, notably in its greater length, and it is

perhaps as close as we can come to what was actually said:

"Those whose whole soul is gone into the Self, whose desires are
confined in the Self, who have ever become associated with the
Self, for them there is no work." A ship once passed over a
mountain of magnet and all the bolts and bars were drawn out,
and it went to pieces. It is in ignorance that all struggles remain,
because we are alt really Atheists. Real Theists can never work.
We are all Atheists more or less; we do not see God, believe in
Him. He is G-O-D to us, and nothing more. There are moments
when we think He is near, but then we fall down again. When you
see Him, who struggles for whom? Help the Lord! There is a
proverb in our language, "Shall we teach the Architect of the
Universe how to build?" So those are the highest of mankind who
do not work. The next time you use these silly phrases of the
world, and how we must all help God, do this, and do that for
Him, remember this. Do not think it; it is too selfish. All the work
you do is subjective, for your own benefit. God has not fallen into
a ditch for you and me to help Him out by building a hospital or
something of that sort. He allows you to work. He allows you to
exercise in this great gymnasium, not to help Him, but to help
yourself. Do you think even an ant will die for want of your help?
Most arrant blasphemy! Do you think you can help the least thing
in this universe? You cannot. You only help yourself in this
gymnasium of the Lord. He allows you to work, and it is in order
to help yourself. This is the attitude of work. If you work in this
way you will never be attached. If you always remember that it is
a privilege which has been given to you. The world does not need
you at all. This world goes on. Millions of men and women in this
world think . . . they are great ones, and when they die they are
like a drop in the ocean; nobody thinks of
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them. God is living infinitely. . . . Blessed are we that we are

given the privilege, allowed the great privilege of working for
Him, not helping Him.78

As for the dates of the eight karma yoga classes, Swamiji almost
certainly held them on the Friday mornings and evenings of
December 13 and 20, and January 3 and 10. Of the two outside
dates we can be positive: we know that the class "Each Is Great in
His Own Place" was held on Friday, December 13, it having been
published in the Brahmanadin of February 1 1896, together with
information regarding its date; further, as mentioned earlier, a
dated transcript of the class "Freedom" has recently come to light,
leaving no doubt that it was held on the morning of Friday,
January.10

We can be certain that Swamiji held his December jnana yoga

classes on the Wednesdays of the eleventh and the eighteenth, and
almost certain of what they were. As will be seen in the following
chapter, we have recently been able to identify all of the jnana
yoga classes of January and February of 1896, and in the light of
this knowledge, as well as in the light of their own nature and
tone, it is reasonable to infer that the notes of at least two of the
jnana yoga classes of December 1895, are published in the
Complete Works as "Introduction to Jnana Yoga" (volume six) and
"Steps to Realisation" (volume one). Further, two dated
transcripts of Swami Kripananda's that have recently surfaced
give us two more classes: the advanced class "Cosmology"
(volume two) and a heretofore unknown introduction to the
beginners (evening) jnana yoga class, which for convenience let
us temporarily entitle "The First Step towards Jnana." In
December, then, Swamiji's beginners jnana yoga classes, held on
the evenings of December 11 and 18, were, respectively, "The
First Step towards Jnana" and "Steps to Realisation." His
advanced (morning) classes were probably "Introduction to Jnana
Yoga" and certainly "Cosmology" (also known as "Sankhya
Cosmology"). Of the
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advanced classes we shall speak in a later chapter; let me here

quote at some length from the heretofore unknown introductory
and most wonderful beginners class, "The First Step," that Swami
Kripananda ably took down (Mr. Goodwin had not yet appeared
on the scene) typed out, and sent to Mrs. Bull, among whose
papers it has been preserved for all these years. Here are some
excerpts:

The word Jnana means knowledge. It is derived from the root

"jna"-to know-the same word from which your English word to
know is derived. Jnana Yoga is yoga by means of knowledge.
What is the object of the Jnana Yoga? Freedom. Freedom from
what? Freedom from our imperfections, freedom from the misery
of life. Why are we miserable? We are miserable because we are
bound. What is the bondage ? The bondage is of nature. Who is it
that binds us? We, ourselves.

The whole universe is bound by the laws of causation. There

cannot be any thing, any fact, either in the internal or in the
external world that is uncaused, and every cause must produce an
effect. Now this bondage in which we are is a fact. It need not be
proved that we are in bondage. For instance: I would be very glad
to get out of this room through this wall, but I cannot; I would be
very glad if I never became sick, but I cannot prevent it; I would
be very glad not to die, but I have to; I would be very glad to do
millions of things that I cannot do. The will is there, but we do not
succeed in accomplishing the desire. When we have any desire
and not the means of fulfilling it, we get that peculiar reaction
called misery. Who is the cause of desire? I, myself. Therefore I
myself am the cause of all the miseries I am in.

Misery begins with the birth of the child. Weak and helpless he
enters the world. The first sign of life is weeping. Now, how
could we be the cause of misery, when we find it at the very
beginning? We have caused it in the past.
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(Here Swamiji entered into a fairly long discussion of "the very

interesting theory called Reincarnation." He then continued:]

We learn that in the first place we have been existing eternally; in

the second place that we are the makers of our own lives. There is
no such a thing as fate. Our fives are the result of our previous
actions, our Karma, and it naturally follows that, having been
ourselves the makers of our Karma, we must also be able to
unmake it.

The whole gist of Jnana Yoga is to show humanity the method

how to undo this Karma. A caterpillar spins a little cocoon around
itself out of the substance of its own body, and at last finds itself
imprisoned. It may cry and weep and howl there; nobody will
come to its rescue, until it becomes wise and then comes out a
beautiful butterfly. So with these our bondages. We are going
around and around ourselves through countless ages, and now we
feel miserable, and cry and lament over our bondage. But crying
and weeping will be of no avail. We must set ourselves to cutting
these bondages.

The main cause of all of bondage is ignorance. Man is not wicked

of his own nature, not at all. His nature is pure, perfectly holy.
Each man is divine. Each man that you see is a God by his very
nature. This nature is covered by ignorance, and it is ignorance
that binds us down. Ignorance is the cause of all misery.
Ignorance is the cause of all wickedness, and knowledge will
make the world good. Knowledge will remove all misery. Knowl-
edge will make us free. This is the idea of Jnana Yoga: knowledge
will make us free! What knowledge? Chemistry? Physics?
Astronomy? Geology? They help us a little, just a little. But the
chief knowledge is that of your own nature. "Know thyself." You
must know what you are, what your real nature is. You must
become conscious of that infinite nature within. Then your
bondages will burst. . .
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. . . There are various ways to know this Self, but in Jnana Yoga it
takes the help of nothing else but sheer intellectual reasoning.
Reason alone, intellect alone, rising to spiritual perception, show
what we are. There is no question of believing. Disbelieve
everything-that is the idea with the jnani. Believe nothing and
disbelieve everything; that is the first step. Dare to be a
rationalist. Dare to follow reason wherever it leads you.

We hear every day people say all around us: "I dare to reason." It
is, however, a very difficult thing to do. I would go two hundred
miles to look at the face of the man who dares to reason and
follow reason. Nothing is easier to say, and nothing is more
difficult to do. We are bound to follow superstitions all the time,
old, hoary superstitions, either national or belonging to humanity
in general, superstitions belonging to family, to friends, to
country, to fashion, to books, to sex, and to what not. Talk of
reason! Very few people reason, indeed. You hear a man say, "Oh,
I don't like to believe in anything, don't like to grope through
darkness. I must reason." And so he reasons. But when reason
smashes to pieces things that he hugs unto his breast he says, "No
more! This reasoning is all right until it breaks my ideals. Stop
there!" That man would never be a jnani. That man will carry his
bondage all his life and his life to come. Again and again he will
come in the power of death. Such men are not made for Jnana.
There are other methods for them, as Bhakti, Karma, or Raja
Yoga, but not Jnana.

I want to prepare you by telling that this method can only be

followed by the boldest. Do not think that the man who believes
in no church, belongs to no sect, or the man who boasts of his
unbelief is a rationalist. Not at all. In modern times it is rather
bravado to do anything like that.

To be a rationalist requires more than unbelief. You must be able

not only to reason, but also to follow the
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dictates of your reason. If reason tells you that this body is an

illusion, are you ready to give it up? Reason tells you that heat
and cold are mere illusions of your senses; are you ready to brave
these things? If reason tells you that nothing that the senses
convey to your mind is true, are you ready to deny your sense
perception? If you dare, you are a rationalist.

It is very hard to believe in reason and follow truth. This whole

world is full either of the superstitious or half hearted hypocrites.
I would rather side with superstition and ignorance than stand
with these half hearted hypocrites. They are no good. They stand
on both sides of the river.

Take anything up, fix your ideal and follow it out boldly unto
death. That is the way to salvation. Half heartedness never led to
anything. Be superstitious, be a fanatic if you please, but be
something. Be something, show that you have something; but be
not like these shilly-shallyers with truth, these jacks-of all-trades,
who just want to get a sort of nervous titillation, a dose of opium,
until this desire after the sensational becomes a habit. The world
is getting too full with such people. Contrary to the apostles who,
according to Christ, were the salt of the earth, these fellows are
the ashes, the dirt of the earth. So let us first clear the ground and
understand what is meant by following reason, and then we will
try to understand what the obstructions are in our following
reason.

The first obstruction in our following reason is our unwillingness

to go to truth; we want truth to come to us. In all my travels, most
people told me: "Oh, that is not a comfortable religion you talk;
give us a comfortable religion!" I do not understand what they
mean by this "comfortable religion." I was never taught any
comfortable religion in my life. I want truth for my religion;
whether it be comfortable or not...
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These people have got into a rut, and they do not dare to get out
of it. Truth must apologize to them. . . .

As children we all think that the world is made so very nice, and
that masses of pleasures are simply waiting our going out into it.
That is every schoolboy's dream. And when he goes out into the
world, the everyday world, very soon his dreams vanish. So with
nations. When they see how every city is built upon ruins, every
forest stands upon a city, then they become convinced of the
vanity of this world. All the power of knowledge and wealth once
made has passed away; all the sciences of the ancients, lost, lost
forever; nobody knows how. That teaches us a grand lesson.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. If we
have seen all this, then we become disgusted with this world and
all it offers to us. This is called vairagyam, non--attachment, and
is the first step towards knowledge.

The natural desire of man is to go towards the senses. His turning

back, away from the senses, takes him back to God. So the first
lesson we have to learn is to turn away from the vanities of the
world. How long will you go on sinking and diving down, and
going up for five minutes to again sink down, again come up and
sink, and so on, tossed up and down? How long will you be
whirled on this wheel of Karma, up and down, up and down?
How many thousands of times have you been kings and rulers,
how many times have you been surrounded by wealth and
plunged into poverty? How many thousands of times have you
been possessed of the greatest powers? But again you had to
become men, rolling down on this mad rush of Karma's waters.
This tremendous wheel of Karma stops neither for the widow's
tears or the orphan's cry. How long will you go on? How long?
Will you be like that old man who had spent all his life in prison
and when let out begged to be brought back into his dark and
filthy dungeon cell? This is the case with us all! We cling with all
[our] might
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to this low, dark, filthy cell called this world, to this hideous,
chimerical existence where we are kicked about like a football by
every wind that blows. We are slaves in the hands of nature,
slaves to a bit of bread, slaves to praise, slaves to blame, slaves to
wife, to husband, to child, slaves to everything. . . . Do you call
that love? Not I. This is mere desire, animal desire, nothing more.
Turn back from these things. Is there no end to these hideous
dreams ? Put a stop to them.

...True civilization does not mean to congregate in cities and live

a foolish life, but going Godward, controlling the senses, and thus
becoming ruler in this house of the Self. Think of the slavery in
which we are. Every beautiful form I see, every sound of praise I
hear immediately attracts me; every word of blame I hear
immediately repels me. Every fool has an influence over my
mind. Every little movement in the world makes an impression
upon me. Is this a life worth living? So when you have realised
the misery of this physical existence, when you become
convinced that such a life is not worth living, you have made the
first step towards Jnana.79

In Swamiji's next beginners jnana yoga class (entitled in the

Complete Works "Steps to Realisation" and in Prabuddha
Bharata [1897], where it was first published, "Sadhanas or
Preparations") he continued with the further prerequisites of
jnana yoga: the six steps of sensory and mental control; intense
desire for freedom; and discrimination between the Real and the
unreal. Their purpose was not, as might be thought in connection
with this path and in connection with Swamiji's emphasis on
reason, to clarify the intellect as such but rather to deepen and
purify the heart, for, as he said, "the pure heart is the best mirror
for the reflection of truth." By "heart" in this context Swamiji did
not, of course, mean the devotional love of the bhakta but the
unclouded knowledge of the jnani the insight into the underlying
meaning of things and the
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selfless, reverential, and uncompromising response that such

insight evokes. "These preparations will make us pure and light,"
he said. "Bondages will fall off by themselves, and we shall be
buoyed up beyond this plane of sense-perception to which we are
tied down." And there was a grand ending to this class: "Every
being that is in the universe has the potentiality of transcending
the senses; even the little worm will one day transcend the senses
and reach God. No life will be a failure; there is no such thing as
failure in the universe. A hundred times man will hurt himself, a
thousand times he will tumble, but in the end he will realise that
he is God. . . . No one will be lost."80

There is little doubt that four of Swamiji's raja yoga classes were
also held in December, on the Saturdays of the fourteenth and the
twenty-first, and that the evening classes consisted roughly of
what now constitutes chapters one and two of the book Raja--
Yoga and the morning, or advanced, classes, of his introduction to
Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms" and his commentary on about half
of its first chapter. On Monday, December 23, Swamiji wrote to
Mr. Sturdy, "I have now taken up the Yoga Sutras, and take them
up one by one and go through all the commentaries along with
them. These talks are all taken down, and when completed will
form the fullest annotated translation of Patanjali in English. Of
course it will be a rather big work."81 At first Swamiji seems to
have followed this plan. "The words dropped in my last letter
were Yoga Sutra which I am translating, with notes from various
authorities," he wrote again to Sturdy on January 16 1896. "I want
to incorporate the chapter in Kurma-Purana in my notes." 82 But as
it turned out, the big, scholarly, and annotated work he had
contemplated was not written. Instead, as he would write in his
preface to Raja-Yoga, his "Yoga Aphorisms" consist of "a rather
free translation of the aphorisms (sutras) of Patanjali, with a
running commentary." "Effort," he continued, "has been made to
avoid technicalities as far as possible,
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and to keep to the free and easy style of conversation." 83

Swamiji's "Yoga Aphorisms" are indeed without technicalities or

complexities, so much so that from time to time since the
publication of Raja-Yoga the question has arisen in the minds of
its students if the commentaries are not, in part at least,
transcribed class talks, as his letter of December 23 to Mr. Sturdy
would seem to indicate, rather than dictations to Miss Waldo, as
has been generally supposed. Certainly Miss Waldo played a large
part in Swamiji's work of translating the Sutras, sitting with him
in the back parlor on quiet afternoons. "Those cherished hours of
work on it were specially happy ones for her," Sister Devamata
writes. "She often spoke of them. Each day when the Swami's
meal had been prepared and her tasks in the kitchen were done,
she would come up to the back parlour where Swamiji lodged;
take her seat at the table, on which stood an open ink-well; and
dip her pen in the ink."84 Miss Waldo's own account of those
sessions has been quoted in the Life; but it will bear repeating
here. "It was inspiring to see the Swami as he dictated to me the
contents of the work ", she wrote. "In delivering his commentaries
on the Sutras, he would leave me waiting while he entered deep
states of meditation or self contemplation, to emerge therefrom
with some luminous interpretation. I had always to keep the pen
dipped in the ink. He might be absorbed for long periods of time
and then suddenly his silence would be broken by some eager
expression or some long deliberate teaching."85

But did Swamiji dictate the whole of what is now known as his
commentary on the Yoga Sutras to Miss Waldo? It has recently
become certain that he did not. Even with the conclusive evidence
now available (of which more in a moment) the tone of the
commentaries leads one to guess, as mentioned above, that they
are class talks. Indeed one finds a few expressions that would
seem definitely to indicate that Swamiji was speaking to a group.
For instance: "Most of you ladies play the piano"; 86 "Some of this
I have told you before";87 "The system of Yoga is built entirely on
the philosophy of the
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Sankhya, as I told you in some of the previous lectures" 88 Now

perhaps you have remarked that when I talk on subjects in which
I take a few ideas that are familiar to everyone, and combine, and
recombine them, it is easy to follow, because these channels are
present in everyone's brain."89 But while these scattered clues
have long led to many a suspicion, only recently have we come
upon conclusive evidence that such suspicions have been correct:
Swamiji's advanced raja yoga classes in December, January, and
February did indeed consist of his introduction to and running
commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms. For this certainty we
can thank, initially, Swami Kripananda, whose laboriously typed
transcripts of these classes have recently come to light.*

But there is no reason to suppose thereby that Swamiji did not

also dictate to Miss Waldo translations of the Aphorisms, some of
the deeply thought-out ideas contained in his commentaries, and
his short appendix to Raja--Yoga, which last consists of
references to yoga from various Sanskrit texts other than
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. As it appears in Raja-Yoga, then, "Yoga
Aphorisms" very probably consists of a combination of Swamiji's
dictation to Miss Waldo and Goodwin's (not, I believe,
Kripananda's) transcripts of his advanced raja yoga classes-all
much edited 1by Miss Waldo, Swamiji himself, and, later on, Mr.
Sturdy.

Swamiji's work' in New York this second season did not consist
alone in delivering his message, but in providing the means by
which it would be perpetuated after he had left America. His
primary move in this direction was to train a permanent body of
workers-a process he had begun, as we have seen earlier, by
taking several of his disciples to a summer retreat at Thousand
Island Park to finish their training in yoga and bhakti and jnana.
"Then they will be able to help carry the work on," 90 he had
written to Alasinga on May 6 of 1895.
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But aside from this, it was, he knew, essential for him to establish
an organization of some sort through which those he had trained
could function, and without which, as he had written to Mrs. Bull
in March of 1895, "nothing could be done." To this end, he had
wanted for some time to give the secular side of his work a
definite form. In the summer of 1895, he had written to Alasinga
from Thousand Island Park, "Here [in America] I have already got
a respectable following. Next year I will organise it on a working
basis, and then the work will be carried on." 91 The time was now
ripe for this organization to take shape.

For one thing, it was no longer essential, as it had been the

previous season, for him to keep the secular aspect of his work in
his own hands and out of the hands of those who wanted him to
cultivate "the right sort of New Yorkers" and whose well-meaning
help, as he had said, "frightened" him. He had by now convinced
his friends and supporters that his own method of work,
unconventional, uncompromising, and fearless, would not spell
disaster either to himself or to his mission. Even Mrs. Bull no
longer counseled him from Cambridge to "keep society in good
humor." She now simply watched, with bated breath perhaps, but
for the time being in silence, wisely concluding, no doubt, that
there was no other course possible. "I always wish to be of help to
his work, however and wherever he determines to direct it
himself," she wrote to Kripananda toward the end of December
1895 and added with motherly resignation, "He is gaining in
experience."92

For another thing, Swamiji's New York following was by now so

well established that he felt at last free to disentangle himself
from the "horrid money affairs" that were always so irksome to
him. Although most of his followers were poor, there were some
who were able to contribute to his work and to handle the
financial side of it. Whereas the previous season he had supported
his classes by giving paid public lectures, now, a day or two after
his return from London, he wrote to Mrs. Bull, "The public
lecture plan I intend to give up entirely,
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as I find the best thing for me to do is to step entirely out of the

money question-either in public lectures or private classes. In the
long run it does harm and sets a bad example. . . . My idea is for
autonomic, independent groups in different places. Let them work
on their own account and do the best they can. As for myself, I do
not want to entangle myself in any organisation." 93 Thus, in
December of 1895, Swamiji established an Executive Committee
within the New York Society which would attend to the business
end of things.

As has been seen in chapter one, the Society as it existed prior to

this time had been nebulous and largely ineffectual. Its officers,
still untrained and uncomprehending of Swamiji's method of
work, had had very little voice in the management of his affairs
and left little trace behind them. It was, in fact, long thought by
Swamiji's biographers that the Vedanta Society of New York did
not come into existence until the end of February of 1896--a date
based on a misleading sentence in one of Kripananda's news-
letters to the Brahmavadin. But unobtrusive as the Society was in
1895, we can say definitely, on the basis of information that has
come to light, that it did exist.

Well aware at an early date of the need for at least a skeletal

organization, Swamiji had founded the Society in November of
1894., writing at the end of that month to Alasinga, "I have started
[an organisation] already in New York and the Vice President will
soon write to you. Keep correspondence with them. Soon I hope
to get up a few in other places."94

In connection with this new--born Society (or parallel to it, or

perhaps for a time identical with it) was something called a
"Temple Universal." What this was is not clear from any available
records. We know that when Swamiji was in Baltimore in October
of 1894. he was much interested in a project to found an
"international university." According to the Reverend Hiram
Vrooman, his host in Baltimore, this university was "one of Mr.
Vivecananda's pet ideas." "[It] has the full sympathy of myself
and my brothers," Mr. Vrooman went
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on, "and also a number of gentlemen of wealth and position,

including several religions. Among its promoters are members of
the Roman Catholic and Hebrew religions. The idea of the
university is education in general religion.. . . One of Mr.
Vivecananda's ideas in the establishing of the university is that it
may serve to educate a superior kind of missionary for work in
India.... I can say relative to the university that it is to be located
near Boston, and that a meeting to give it definite shape will be
held soon. Mr. Vivecananda will not leave this country until it is
established."95

Nothing seems to have come of this idea of an international

university, but out of it may have evolved Swamiji's idea for a
"Temple Universal." The Indian Mirror of January 31, 1895
writes of this latter project as though it were well on its way.
Under the heading "News and Notes" one reads the following:

We learn that an organisation named `Temple Universal' has been

started by Swami Vivekananda in America. Mr. Edward G. Day,
M.D., the Vice-President of the Association, writing to a friend
here says: "The expressed object of the organisation is to help the
spiritual growth of man by the aid of all forms of religion which
are recognised as so many paths, leading to the same goal." So the
Swami's stay in America will be of permanent good to both India
and America. He means starting a few more societies, like the
above, in other cities. Mr. Day further says: "The Swami is highly
esteemed in our midst, and earnest seekers after truth cluster
round him. He will shed a great light on the West, and will lead
many to a more perfect knowledge of God, and a closer com-
munion with him."96

The news rapidly spread. On February 7, 1895, Mr. Sarat Chandra

(Chakravarty?) and Swami Subodhananda wrote a joint letter to
Mr. Lala Badri Shah, a friend of Swamiji's in Almora: "Swami
Vivekananda has founded a society for a
place of worship there at America. The place is called the Temple
Universal & men of all creeds can use it to preach their own
faith."97 Again on August 22, 1895, the Indian Mirror reported;

....The Swami has established in every principal town in the

United States a branch of his new association, called `Temple
Universal'.98

Swamiji himself was not aware that he had done so. Indeed, the
Temple Universal, the establishment of which would have
required a great deal of money, organization, and concerted effort
(such as had been envisioned for the "international university")
does not seem to have materialized at all. "I do not hear much
now about the Temple Universal that was to be built in America,"
Swamiji had written to Alasinga on May 6, 1895; "yet I have a

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firm footing in New York, the very centre of American life, and so
my work will go on."99

Swamiji did not altogether give up the idea of building a temple

in the West. In a heretofore unpublished portion of a letter dated
in the Complete Works March 1896 he was to write to Alasinga,
"That Temple Universal I have given up. I have a new name, the
"Mumukshu" ["Desire for Liberation"]. . . . Patience, patience.
Next year I expect to build a temple in New York and then the
Lord knows."100 But Swamiji was not to return the following year
to America; nor, as far as it is known at present, did he again
mention building a temple in New York. Thus, unless more
information comes to light, we cannot really know what he had in
mind. (Perhaps, as in the temple he envisioned for Madras, 101 OM
was to be the all inclusive symbol of veneration, and perhaps
mumukshu was to be recognized as the unifying theme of and
power behind all religious paths. But whatever Swamiji's idea
may have been, the time was not ripe for its realization.)

Although the Temple Universal proposed at the end of 1894 or

beginning of 1895 did not take tangible form, the Society
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that Swamiji founded at that period did not disband. Once or

twice after he had left America for England in August of 1895, we
hear, if not the voice of the society itself, the reverberation of its
activities, or lack of them. As we have seen, for instance, its
officers had managed to incense Swami Abhayananda by not
attending her lectures. On the more positive side, it had paid her
rent during the summer of 1895 and "what [she] had to spend in
postage stamps and carfare for the propaganda." 102 The Society
again gave evidence of its existence in November: at the classes
Swami Kripananda was then holding at 228 West Thirty-ninth
Street, it was the Society's treasurer who took up the collection. "I
have not made one cent," Kripananda wrote on December 10 to
Mrs. Bull in reply to her inquiry. "The small collection that was
taken up in the classes were taken by the Treasurer Mr. Goodyear.
He offered me several times assistance, and so did Miss Waldo.
But I did not accept anything as I had still some means; I paid all
the time my own rent, until last week when the two rooms were
engaged for the Swami and myself." 103 We need no further
evidence to show that the Society existed throughout 1895. An
inadequate organization it undoubtedly had been; nevertheless, it
was a society and thought of itself as such.*

It should be mentioned here that while the Society had officers

from the start and, to judge from Kripananda's description (see
chapter one), trustees and at least one committee, it had no formal
membership outside this small group of officiaries, nor was it to
have one for several years. It had what one might call
sympathizers, but no members in the usual sense. This was as
Swamiji wanted, for while he knew that the work of spreading his
teachings and, at the same time, of keeping them pure and intact
required an organization, the last thing he wanted was to create a
membership that would savor in any way of exclusiveness. It has
been more or less taken for granted by Swamiji's biographers that
the New York Vedanta Society, at the time of its inception,
"invited members of all religious creeds and organizations to
become its members
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without change of faith . . . [who] became known as `Vedantins.'

"104 This is not in accordance with the facts as they are now
known nor with what Swamiji seems to have had in mind at that
time. A large group of people known as "Vedantins" (whatever
their religious creed) he wanted to avoid for as long as possible.
He wanted to keep his message fluid and unconfined, so that it
would reach all levels of society, touch all philosophies, and flow
through all religions, breaking down the barriers between them.
He wanted Vedanta to be a religion that one could, to be sure,
follow directly if one wished, but he wanted it also to be a
teaching that could find its place in the lives of those who
followed any other religion in the world, or of those who
followed no religion at all. The initial carrying out of this purpose
did not require-indeed, it precluded-the enlistment of an
organized following, which, in those early days, could so easily
have formed itself into an exclusive sect and thereby have nipped
the fulfillment of Swamiji's purpose in the bud. It was a danger he
was aware of and one which he was careful to guard against.
Again and again, he told reporters in America and others who
questioned him that he was not founding a new religion or a
religious society, but was simply teaching a philosophy. "Preach
the philosophy, the spiritual part, and let people suit it to their
own forms,"105 he wrote in May of 1895 in connection with the
editorial policy of the Brahmavadin, which was meant for both
Indian and Western readers.

Nor did Swamiji feel at this time that a religious organization

with a membership was essential for the spread and preservation
of his message. "Neither numbers, nor powers, nor wealth, nor
learning, nor eloquence, nor anything else will prevail, but purity,
living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realization. Let there be but
a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken
their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole
soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth, nor power,
nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world," he had
written to Sturdy on August
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9, 1895. "As to societies and organisations," he had added, "these

will come of themselves."106 Thus in America, as in England,
Swamiji "let things grow," laying down no rules, giving no
preaching directions to his ordained disciples, enlisting no
followers, introducing no rituals, and establishing no society
except that which was essential to handle the secular, or external,
side of his work. "As to the teaching part," he would write to Mr.
Sturdy on January 16, 1896, "my friends will go over this country
from place to place, each one independent, and let them form
independent circles. That is the easiest way to spread. Then, when
there will be sufficient strength, we shall have yearly gatherings
to concentrate our energies."107

The establishment of an efficient Executive Committee within the

Vedanta Society was a vast relief to Swamiji. "I have made over
all the secular part of the work to a committee and am free from
all that botheration," he wrote to Mr. Sturdy on December 23,
1895. "I have no aptitude for organising. It nearly breaks me to
pieces."108 There are no available records of who constituted this
committee, but we can be fairly certain that Miss Mary Phillips,
Miss Ellen Waldo, and Mr. Walter Goodyear were among its first
members. There were others as well, for we find Swami
Kripananda writing to Mrs. Bull on December 20 of those who
were then managing Swamiji's secular affairs as "mostly to me
unknown people who constitute a self made committee of the
Swami's movement."109 (In this same letter, he also referred to
"that committee of petticoats.") Who these unknown-to-
Kripananda people (mostly women) may have been it is hard to
say, for he was acquainted with all those whose names are
familiar to us. Many New Yorkers, however, could have become
interested in Swamiji's work during the spring of 1895, when
Kripananda (then Leon Landsberg) had decided to live apart from
his Guru, and there must, indeed, have been workers whose
names have not come down to us. One thing that is certain is that
Kripananda was mistaken when he called the Committee
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"self made." It had been appointed by Swamiji to serve a definite

purpose, namely, to raise funds, to take up collections, to rent
halls, to advertise, to engage a "typewriter"-in short, to handle the
business aspect of the classes and lectures-and also to attend to
whatever other business matters might come along, For instance,
on January 16, 1896, Swamiji wrote to Mr. Sturdy, "I have a
chance of getting a piece of land in the country to serve as a
summer meditation resort. That, of course, requires a committee
to look after it in my absence, also, the handling of money and
printing and other matters."110 And then there was to be the project
of publishing Swamiji's pamphlets and books, which would
require a committee of its own, but of this more later.

According to Kripananda's letter of December 20 to Mrs. Bull the

Executive Committee was by that date functioning in full force-
disposing of everything, "even the money which comes in as
contributions in the classes." This was, of course, as Swamiji
wished. Out of the collection money and donations, the
committee met the expenses of the work. While these dis-
bursements may not have always been wise or practical (Mrs.
Bull would take a dim view of them in general),* it was owing to
them that Swamiji was able to give his lectures and class talks
entirely free of charge. Nor did the committee handle financial
matters alone, it also made resolutions. "I do not think the Swami
will come to Boston," Kripananda wrote to Mrs. Bull on
December 26. "The Committee resolved that he should not start
his intended tour to Detroit or Chicago before the close of his
work in New York which will be in April." 111 Needless to say, to
make resolutions in connection with Swamiji's work was like
deciding in which direction the wind should blow or where
lightning should or should not strike, and, to be sure, things
would not work out at all as the committee resolved.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that at this time the
committee members were solemnly making well-intentioned,
albeit superfluous, resolutions and plans.
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Those December days were full ones. "The Swami works very
hard," Kripananda wrote on December 20, "lecturing twice a day,
and then spending the rest of the time in hard study over the
Sanskrit books [for which he had sent to India and London], not
allowing himself half an hour a day for going outdoors. He eats
very little-vegetable food. I am afraid [sic] he will make himself
sick."112 Certainly anyone else would have made himself sick.
"You must always remember how much work I have to do,"
Swamiji wrote on this same day to his Madras disciples.
"Sometimes I have to deliver two or three lectures a day*--and
thus I make my way against all odds-hard work; any weaker man
would die."113 Nor, as he was to write to Mrs. Bull on February 6,
1896, had he "slept even one night soundly in New York."

Even before Swamiji's second season hit its full stride, as it would
do in January, there was work for everyone around him: Mr.
Goodwin and Miss Waldo were fully occupied; other members of
the Committee bustled about; Kripananda, aloof in his garret,
worked far into the night, pounding out all manner of things on a
Smith Premier typewriter, which with the help of Mrs. Bull he
had rented for five dollars a month and which, he assured her, "I
understand to handle."

"I am now preparing on the typewriter some newspaper articles

from [the Swami's] lectures," he wrote to her in his letter of
December 26,

though I am afraid that the daily papers care little for religious
matter. The last few days I worked very hard till late at night. My
head is dizzy.

[And on December 29:] I have not been well at all in the last few
days, and so I could not finish a few more very long lessons [for
Mrs. Bull] on Raja Yoga. I was crowded with work. So far I have
arranged three lessons for the papers, which I shall try to place.
Besides, I am translating
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deussen for the Swami and writing for the Brahmavadin, and
typewriting the Swami's articles [on bhakti yoga] for the same
paper.114

In addition, Kripananda wrote long letters to Mrs. Bull at least

once a week; thus, as he said, his time was "filled out from the
early morning to late in the night." He contributed what he could
to the young Vedanta movement. On December 22 there appeared
in the Herald an article he had "succeeded in placing in that
paper." This was a compilation, with his introductory remarks, of
the "Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna," taken from four issues of the
Brahmavadin. The following week (Sunday, December 29) the
Herald published one of the articles he had prepared from
Swamiji's karma yoga class entitled "Each Is Great in His Own
Place." Again, on January 19 the Herald brought forth an article in
which he had quoted at length from Swamiji's bhakti yoga class
of the morning of December 23. These three articles, which
appeared under large and provocative headings, were no doubt
read by many people, some of whom may have thereby
discovered Swamiji; Kripananda's articles themselves, however,
would not add anything to the present narrative and we need not
reproduce them here.

Into a period of two weeks or so-from the ninth of December

through the twenty-third-Swamiji had crammed a full season's
activity. He had held at least twenty classes, and perhaps several
more, most of which, together with his classes of the next two
months, were to form a large part of the books he was to speak of
as the "text-books which will be the basis of work when I am
gone." These were, of course, the now famous books Karma-
Yoga, Bhakti--Yoga, and Raja--Yoga. (Of Jnana--Yoga we shall
say more later on.) He had dictated part of his translation of the
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, had written two or three chapters of
Bhakti--Yoga, had directed, as always, the Indian work through
his fiery letters to his brother monks and to his
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disciples in Madras, and had formed an executive committee to

handle the secular aspect of his work in New York. In addition, he
had no doubt given many private interviews, refusing none who
came to him for help, guidance, and instruction.

Despite the fact that his students, as Sister Devamata writes,

wanted to give him no holiday, these two weeks of unremitting
work and sleepless nights made a Christmas vacation imperative.
Indeed, Swamiji was longing around this time to "bury" himself
in a remote Himalayan cave, there to plunge into the furthest
depths of meditation. "Narendra belongs . . . to the realm of the
Absolute,"115 Sri Ramakrishna had said of him. And throughout
his life, his longing for the Absolute was intense and constant.
From time to time, he expressed it in a cry of anguish or in a
resolve to withdraw entirely from the world, a plan that he must
have known could not be carried out until the towering structure
of his mission was built and his work on earth done. One such
plan he communicated to Swami Kripananda, who, taking it
seriously (for who could not take Swamiji's moods seriously?),
wrote in his letter of December 26 to Mrs. Bull, "In May he will
sail to England, to go from there to India where he intends
burying himself in a cave for several years. Thus it is the last
season we shall have the blessing of having him in our midst."

Swamiji was never to know, outwardly, the peace of a Himalayan

cave. But at least he had a respite from work during the Christmas
holidays of 1895. As early as December 8, his good friends Mr.
and Mrs. Francis Leggett had invited him to spend the holidays
with them at their country home in Ulster County, New York.
"Going with the birds of paradise to Ridgely this Christmas," 116 he
had written to Josephine MacLeod, and accordingly he closed his
New York classes on the evening of December 23 with a bhakti
yoga class and the next day took off. Before going, he wrote at
least two notes (both dated December 24.), one of which,
heretofore unpublished, was to Christina Greenstidel. It read in
full:
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Dear Christina--Merry Christmas and happy Newyear to you. I

am going today to the country. I return in 10 days.

As about the tour through Detroit, I will fix it later on. I am afraid
if I go just now everything here will fall to pieces.

I will come anyway and I am afraid it will be later than I

expected.

My love to Mrs. Phelps Mrs. Phunkey & all our friends &
Christmas greetings

ever yours in the Lord117

Vivekananda

P.S. Kripananda sends his greetings too

Swamiji's other note was a short greeting to Mrs. Bull:

Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you Dear Mrs. Bull.
And may peace and health rest on you and yours for ever. I am
going out of town today and will be back in ten days.

My love to all

Yours affiy,118
Vivekananda
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NOTES FOR THE CHAPTER FIVE

p. 316 * Abou Ben Adhem, the hero of Leigh Hunt's famous

poem, who asked a recording angel to list him as loving his
fellowmen, was as familiar to Swamiji s contemporaries as was,
say, Omar Khayyam.

p, 321 * By the "Tattvas" Kripananda was very probably

referring to a Theosophical work by Rama Prasad entitled
Nature's Finer Forces, which included the author's translation
from the Sanskrit of the Tantric work "The Science of Breath and
the Philosophy of the Tattvas." The "Tattvas," as here defined,
were the evolutes of cosmic force. The book dealt to a large
extent with psychic phenomena. Its second edition had been
published in London in 1894.. (It is also possible, but not likely,
that Kripananda had in mind the pancatattva--the five "forbidden"
things of Tantric practice, in which case the Detroit ladies could
well have been aghast.)

p. 325 * In what he supposed was a defense of Swamiji,

Kripananda wrote to Mrs. Bull on December 22, 1895, "Do you
know that [Abhayananda] threatened him in spite of all he had
done for her--to go over to the Theosophists if he would
not satisfy her constant demand for money, more money.
Imagine! apart from breaking a sanyasin's pledge not to belong to
any society, she joined or threatened to join those who spread the
filthiest calumnies against her Guru and benefactor!" Allowing
for Kripananda's generally heated views of most matters, we can
still assume that Abhayananda had written to Swamiji of the
advantages of belonging to an organized and wealthy
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P· 325 society, such as the Theosophical Society, which was

(cont.) indeed inimical to him at that period.

** As published in the Complete Works (7: 487-88) this letter (the

original of which is no longer extant) is addressed to Alasinga. In
the Life (first edition, volume 2, pages 396-97), however, it is
rightly addressed to Swami Abhayananda. Miss Hamlen made
two copies-at Mrs. Bull's behest-a complete copy, of which the
last part is missing, and a partial copy, from which the version
published in the Complete Works has been taken. Neither copy as
found today bears a salutation, but its contents make it certain that
the letter was addressed to Abhayananda, not Alasinga.

p. 328 * Swami Abhayananda's available letters are to be found

among the papers of Mrs. Ole Bull.

** Greenwich Village, an area in the southwest part of New York

City, had been actually a village before the city was laid out in a
gridiron street plan, in which it then formed a sort of tangle. It
was a maze of narrow, twisting streets, which, according to an
1897 account, "lead everywhere and nowhere and wander about
in the most irregular ways." In the 1890s Greenwich Village was
no longer inhabited by the respectable and sturdy gentry of its
earlier days, but neither was it yet the bailiwick of rebel artists
and writers. It was a fairly poor district of Irish and Italian
immigrants. The houses were on the whole dilapidated, and the
rents low. Waverly Place was a crooked, self--crossing street,
twisting between Christopher and West Tenth streets. Without
Miss Waldo's company, Swamiji would surely have become com-
pletely lost trying to find Abhayananda's house.

P· 337 * Information regarding Josiah Goodwin, father of

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Josiah John Goodwin, has been gathered from the (conc.) Journal
of the Bath and West of England and Southern Counties Society,
June 1890, which journal was unearthed through the research of
Swami Yogeshananda.

p· 348 * "Addresses on Bhakti-Yoga" (Complete Works, 4: 360),

together with Swamiji's New York lecture "Bhakti Yoga" or, as in
the Complete Works (2 : 38-53), "Bhakti or Devotion," constitute
the book Religion of Love by Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta:
Udbodhan Office, 1907).

p· 354 * Hull House was the famous Settlement House in

Chicago founded in 1889 by Jane Addams. Swamiji did not of
course discredit its charitable service of the poor-except as a
solution in itself to all the ills of the world.

p. 366 * At the date of this writing, six of Kripananda

transcripts of Swamiji's advanced raja yoga classes have come to
light. Four of these have been made available through the
kindness of Mrs. Sylvea Bull Curtis and two through the kindness
of the Vedanta Centre at Cohasset, Massachusetts. The last of
these six transcripts is dated February 1, 1896, and is Swamiji's
commentary on chapter two, numbers 19 through 24 of the Yoga
Aphorisms. It can be assumed that he continued and completed
his commentary on all the aphorisms on the mornings of February
8, 15, and 22.

(A number of Kripananda's typed transcripts of Swamiji's bhakti,

karma, and jnana yoga classes have also been recently discovered.
To judge from Kripananda's letters to Mrs. Bull, none of his
transcripts are typed from his own shorthand, but, rather, copied
from Goodwin's transcripts.)

p. 371 * It was not until October of 1898, when Swamiji was

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in India, that the New York Vedanta Society was (cont.)

incorporated and registered under the laws of the State of New
York, with Mr. Francis Leggett as its president, and not until the
spring of 1900, when Swamiji was in California, that the trustees
of the Society opened a membership roll. The Society's first
Constitution, drawn up by Swami Abhedananda in 1898, when
many of the first officers were still active, read: "The Vedanta
Society of the City of New York was founded by Swami
Vivekananda in 1894, and incorporated according to the Laws of
the State of New York by Swami Abhedananda on October
28, 1898." (See Swami Abhedananda, Complete Works, 10: 67;
Sister Shivani, Swami Abhedananda in America [Calcutta:
Ramakrishna Vedanta Math], pages 289, 291.)

It may also be noted here that in 1899 the stationery of the New
York Vedanta Society bore the letterhead:

Vedanta Society
Office and Library 146 E 55th Street
Established-1894. Incorporated--1898

Any official records relevant to the first years of the Society were
very probably destroyed by fire-if they existed at all. (See Sister
Shivani, op. cit., page x.)

p. 374. * For Mrs. Bull's opinion of the New York Vedanta

Society's handling of money see World Teacher-2 chapter 14.
section two.

p. 375 * It is not surprising that Swamiji sometimes held three

classes a day during this period. Often in America he
would hold classes in the homes of his friends, in addition to
those at his own lodgings. At the present writing, however, we
have no records of his extra classes in December of 1895.
According to
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Kripananda's letter of December 23 to the Brahmavadin, "during

this short time he lectured seventeen times, morning and
evening." (Brahmavadin, February 1894, pages 134--35·)
Swamiji's regular classlectures more than account for this number.
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CHAPTER SIX
NEW YORK: JANUARY, FEBRUARY 1896-I

The last time that Swamiji had visited Mr. Leggett's estate in the
Hudson River Valley, some eighty miles north of New York City,
the countryside had been green and flowering, the Catskills blue
in the distance, and the air fragrant with spring. Now everything
was white, trees were bare, and smoke rising from neighboring
houses and from the chimneys of Ridgely Manor spoke of blazing
fireplaces or crackling wood stoves, of people gathered indoors,
of roasted chestnuts, plum pudding, and Christmas trees. The
main house at Ridgely, large and comfortable, was presided over
by those who well knew how to take care of their extraordinary
guest. They knew his need of frequent solitude, his habit of
entering into deep meditation for hours at a stretch, his tendency
to slip into samadhi. They knew, as well, his gay moods, his
childlike sense of fun and play that made any holiday a festival.
Indeed, Frank and Betty Leggett were no doubt among those of
Swamiji's Western hosts who are mentioned in the Life as having
allowed him absolute personal freedom. "Did he desire to talk,
they would listen with rapt attention. Did he desire to sing the
songs of his own land, he could do so freely. If he sat in silent
abstraction they left him to his mood. Times were when he would
break the silence of days in a rhapsody of divine eloquence; and
then again he would talk on matters that required no mental
concentration."1

At present we have no detailed account of the Christmas vacation

at Ridgely; nor do we know who, if any, the other guests were.
Yet we can form some pictures of our own. We can, for instance,
imagine brisk walks in the snowy countryside,
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excursions by horse and sleigh into the Catskills, where Swamiji

learned that land in large plots could be had "for very little
money,"2 and where he found a plot of 101 acres, with "some
buildings on it; plenty of trees and a river" 3 for sale at two
hundred dollars, which, with Mrs. Bull's help, he wanted to buy
for a summer meditation resort. We can also guess at the long
evening talks before a roaring fire in the great hall of the
"Manor," when he spoke of God and man with the authority and
grandeur of the prophet that he was, carrying the minds of his
listeners far beyond their accustomed worlds. We can, in fact,
more than guess at this last, for we find Mr. Leggett writing from
New York on January 10, 1896, to Miss MacLeod (then in
Europe) of this holiday with Swamiji that she had missed. "One
night at Ridgely," he told her, "we were all spellbound by his
eloquence. Such thoughts I have never heard expressed by mortal
man-such as he uttered for two and a half hours. We were all
deeply affected. And I would give a hundred dollars for a
typewritten report of it. Swami was inspired to a degree that I
have never seen before or since. He leaves us soon and perhaps
we shall never see him again, but he will leave an ineffaceable
impress on our hearts that will comfort us to the end of our
earthly careers."4

"Ridgely seems a particularly favored place; ' Miss MacLeod was

to write to Mary Hale a year and a half later. "Swamiji having
given us his most eloquent words there" 5--a remark that could
have pertained to this Christmas holiday, which she knew of from
hearsay, as well as to the Easter vacation of 1895. (She could not
yet have dreamed of the "Great Summer" of 1895, when he was
to spend ten weeks at this indeed favored place.) 6 The Christmas
holidays of 1895 lasted only a brief ten days; yet at this season of
his life Swamiji was still in good health, still strong and
physically resilient, and those days in brisk country air had been
enough to refresh him. Returning to New York, he wrote to Mrs.
Bull on January 3.* His letter, which has not heretofore been
published, read in full :
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228 39th street

New York the 3rd Jan 96

Dear Mrs Bull-I have had a letter from Mr Trine asking me to

have some classes at the Procopeia in February. I do not see my
way to go to Boston in Feb. however I may like it. I have given
up for the present my plan of going to Detroit & Chicago in
February. Later on I will try. Miss Locke will see to my having
classes in Chicago & I have some friends in Detroit. I may go to
Baltimore for a few days in the meanwhile. I enjoyed my visit
with the Leggetts exceedingly. It has braced me for further work.
I am very well both physically and mentally.
Wishing you a happy New Year
I remain yours ffiy7
Vivekananda

And now ahead of him lay three and a half months of incessant,
strenuous activity.
2
"Never fear! The Divine Mother is helping me!" Swamiji wrote to
Swami Brahmananda, probably just after his return from Ridgely.
"This year such work is going to be turned out, that you will be
struck dumb to hear of it!"8 And the year of 1896 was indeed to be
the most fruitful year of his work in the West. It was, one might
say, the climax of his mission-the year in which he gave his fully
developed world message, both theoretical and practical, in all its
detail and profundity.

Before the Christmas holidays Swamiji had decided to deliver a

series of public Sunday lectures in January, which were to be free
of charge. To charge admission to his lectures had always been
distasteful to him; he had done so only during his midwestern
lecture tour in 1893 and 1894, when he had been trying for raise
money for India, and again in the early part of 1895, when there
had been no other way to support his
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classes. It was .not only his personal dislike of handling money

that now prompted him to give public lectures free of charge; the
time had come for him to establish a definite policy of work for
the young Vedanta movement. As we have seen earlier (page
367), he had decided after his return from England "to step
entirely out of the money question" in both public lectures and
private classes.9 A sannyasin asks nothing in return for his
religious teachings: this was the age-old tradition in India and one
that he knew must be followed by the Vedanta movement in the
West, if that movement was to remain pure. He must also have
felt that the Western Vedanta societies could not, and certainly
should not, expect to lean indefinitely on their spiritual leaders for
financial support. Thus Swamiji's decision to set a precedent of
free public lectures had a twofold purpose: it would release his
successors from the burden of earning money and it would
compel the Western societies to stand financially on their own
feet. And then, aside from all that, there was Swamiji's cheerful
observation-"If the lecture is free, there will be a big crowd." 10 So,
all in all, whatever the financial condition of the New York
Vedanta Society may have been in 1896, the giving of free
lectures was the logical move.

The Society's financial condition was, as it happened, not good.

"The Swami is utterly poor," Kripananda had written to Mrs. Bull
on December 22, 1895: "no one to support his movement, all
expenses for rent of class rooms, lecture hall, printing and
advertising are defraid [sic] from his own means and he does not
charge anything neither for class attendance or public lectures. In
order to provide for all these things, he -I tell it privately to you-
starves himself! And he works like a giant. He hardly permits
himself ten minutes walk after the evening lecture." 11 It was true
that Swamiji worked like a giant; but the rest, written in one of
Kripananda's turbulent moods, was surely an exaggeration. Miss
Waldo, who cooked for him, would have seen to it that he had
enough to eat; moreover, she, Miss Phillips, the Goodyears, Miss
Ellis, and others whose
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names we do not know, contributed toward paying not only Mr.

Goodwin's salary but the rent of Swamiji's rooms: Very likely
they helped to defray many other expenses. Still, these people
were not wealthy, and there is no doubt that Swamiji lived with
the utmost frugality, working constantly, giving the best of his life
to his mission in the West.

His New York work had now taken on a definite rhythm which
could not be broken before its course had run; his earlier plan to
visit Chicago and Detroit after Christmas was, therefore,
postponed. "Here if I go away for a week, everything falls to
pieces,"12 he wrote to Mary Hale on January 6, implying, perhaps,
that even a Christmas vacation had caused a lapse in the class
attendance. And to Mrs. Bull he explained on January 10 that he
could not yet come to Boston. "These are the difficulties in the
way," he wrote. "First the work here will fall to pieces-secondly I
have begun to write in right earnest. I want to finish some text
books to be the basis of work when I am gone. I want to hurry
through four little text books before I go. Of course it is
impossible to come this month as the notices are out for the four
Sunday lectures."13 In an unpublished portion of this letter, all of
which varies considerably from the published version, Swamiji
went on to say:

My idea now is to make a tour in Boston, Detroit, and Chicago in

March and then come back to New York a week or so and then
start for England. In March I will be able to stay a few weeks at
each of these places. Of course it is true that [as] yet I have no
competent persons here to carry on the work like Sturdy in
England nor any sincere friend to stand by me except you. I will
do anything you want me to do and if you think it is good for me
to come to Boston in February I am ready.l4

Swamiji wrote also to Detroit, letting his friends there know that
they should not soon expect him. A letter of this period to Mary
Funke, whose name he always had one difficulty or
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another in spelling, has not heretofore been published. It read in

full:

228 W. 39
New York, the 6th Jan 1896.

Dear Mrs. Funkey--

Many many thanks for the sweet flowers. It recalls to me the
beautiful times we had at the Thousand islands and presages
many such summer gatherings.

The work here had begun in right earnest and we will advance it
farther this year than in the last.

I am therefore uncertain as to the exact date of my coming to

Detroit. I will come however very soon.

Yours ever in the Lord 15

Vivekananda

To Sister Christine on this same date Swamiji sent his now well-
known poem, "To an Early Violet." He addressed it "To my dear
disciple Miss Christina Greenstidle," but somehow, she did not
reply, at least not before January 24, when he wrote to her again.
This second letter has not before been published; it read:

24.th Jan '95 [‘96]

Dear Christina
I have not heard from you long. Hope everything is going on well
with you and Mrs Phunkey.
Did you receive my poem? I had a letter from Mrs. Phelps today.
I am coming to Detroit next March early as I will have to finish
my February course in New York. The public lectures will be
printed as they are delivered right along. The class lectures will
very soon be collected & edited in little volumes. May the Lord
bless you ever & ever
Yours ever with love & blessings 16
Vivekananda
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Swamiji's first series of Sunday lectures began on the after noon

of January 5 in the auditorium of Hardman Hall, which had been
rented for the first four Sundays of the year. The day before, the
following announcement appeared in the ,New York World, and a
similar one in the Herald:

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
Will lecture on Sundays at 3: 30 P.M. during
January, in Hardman Hall, 19th st and 5th ave.;
subject to-morrow, "The Claims of Religion; Its
Truth and Utility." Admission free; collection.

It was a freezing day. "The sky was clear and blue as in summer,"
the papers read, "but the air cut like a knife." And at three-thirty
in the afternoon when Swamiji's lecture presumably began, the
temperature was fifteen degrees, a degree of cold which the wind
would have much worsened. But cold weather could not daunt
New Yorkers, and although we have no record of the lecture
attendance for this particular Sunday, the auditorium, which was a
small one, was probably full to overflowing. Later in the month
Swamiji wrote of the January lecture attendance, "900 will come
as a rule, 300 standing, and about 300 going off, not finding
room."17

The following report of the first lecture appeared in the New York
World Telegram of January 6:

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA LECTURES The Hindoo Monk tells

New Yorkers About
the Truth and Utility of Religion.

Swami Vivekananda, the Hindoo monk and delegate to the

World's Parliament of Religions, delivered the first of a series of
lectures yesterday afternoon at Hardman Hall. His subject was
"The Claims of Religion; Its Truth and Utility."

This wise man of the East has made this country his home since
the World's Fair. He has lectured and taught
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in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn and New York;

in which cities he has many followers. Swami Vivekananda is one
of a large order of monks in 'India called "Sanyasi" (one who has
renounced the world). These monks go about teaching "Yoga," or
"Union ", which is how to realize God and our divinity.

Swami Vivekananda was educated at a university in Calcutta. He

is a tall man of handsome face and figure, and looked picturesque
and Oriental as he made his address in the garb of his religious
order.

Swami Vivekananda spoke in a slow, impressive and musical

monotone. His diction was simple and his thought seemed to have
weight with the attentive audience.

"Religion is a vision and an inspiration," he said. "It is

unknowable. And where is the utility of studying the
unknowable? To do good to others is one utility of religion. But
you cannot do much good in this world. It is good to do good, but
we have been doing good for hundreds of thousands of years and
have not added anything to the sum total of human happiness.
Religion is neither pessimistic nor optimistic; it wants to know
the truth."

Swami Vivekananda pronounced the benediction in his native

language. Classes in Yoga are taught free every day at No. 228
West Thirty-ninth street.

The above report was accompanied by a line drawing of "Swami

Vivekanand," standing solidly on the platform of the hall, his
hands behind his back. The drawing is hardly that of a "tall man,
of handsome face and figure," but it is reproduced in this book for
the readers' amusement or indignation, as the case may be.
Swamiji himself may have thought it a good likeness. Rarely
aware of his body, he apparently did not know what it looked like.
A story in illustration of this was told to Sister Devamata by Miss
Waldo and took place in the front drawing room of 228 West
Thirty-ninth Street – a
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long, narrow room with two tall windows facing the street,
between which hung a mirror "reaching from floor to ceiling."

This mirror [Devamata wrote] seemed to fascinate the Swami. He

stood before it again and again, gazing at himself intently. In
between he walked up and down the room, lost in thought. Miss
Waldo's eyes followed him anxiously. "Now the bubble is going
to burst," she thought. "He is full of personal vanity." Suddenly he
turned to her and said: "Ellen, it is the strangest thing, I cannot
remember how I look. I look and look at myself in the glass, but
the moment I turn away I forget completely what I look like."18

Mr. Goodwin's typed transcript of Swamiji's first public lecture of

the season was not printed in pamphlet form. Several months later
Walter Goodyear wrote to Mrs Bull in regard to the transcript,
"We [the New York Vedanta Society] find we have typewritten
copies of the following which have never been printed-`The
Claims of Religion,' Sun. Jany 5, `Immortality' deliv. in Brooklyn
Jany 17 and notes Question Class [Sunday] Dec 15, '95." 19 (The
two lectures eventually found their way into the Complete Works,
the former in volume four and the latter in volume two. What
became of the class notes is not known.)

It was not until the following week that arrangements were under
way to print and publish Swamiji's Sunday lecture in pamphlet
form, a procedure that must have involved much activity at 228
West Thirty-ninth Street-typing by Goodwin, editing by Miss
Waldo, checking by Swamiji, retyping, proof reading, rushing
copy to and from the printer, all in the space of a few days.
Publication started with "The Ideal of a Universal Religion,"
which Swamiji had delivered on the afternoon of Sunday, January
12. The following Sunday when he gave his third lecture, a stack
of pamphlets appeared on a table in the lobby of Hardman's Hall,
for sale at ten cents a copy. This
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pamphlet, the title page of which is here reproduced, constituted

the first publication in America of Swamiji's lectures ,marking, in
a sense, the beginning of the book on the Vedanta philosophy he
wanted to leave behind. (The lecture itself, which, as Swami
Kripananda wrote to Mrs. Bull, was "a grand success," had been
delivered, it so happened, on Swamiji's birthday. He had turned
thirty-three.)

Swamiji's third and fourth Sunday afternoon lectures at Hardman

Hall, delivered on January 19 and 26, were entitled, respectively,
"The Cosmos: The Macrocosm" and "The Cosmos: The
Microcosm." The two lectures were published in one pamphlet,
entitled simply "The Cosmos" and were put on sale at Brentano's,
"the literary emporium" of New York.

3 With "The Microcosm" Swamiji's January lectures, given in a

hall that proved far too small for the hundreds who tried to gain
admittance, came to a close. His next New York lecture series
would be held in an auditorium with a seating capacity at least
four times as great, but before we speak of those February
lectures, let us consider the four January ones. It is, I believe, of
interest to note that the sequence of lecture subjects in the January
series would be repeated six months later in London, when
Swamiji would again introduce the vast and lofty philosophy of
Vedanta. One is led to believe, without much surprise, that he was
following a deliberate, step-by-step method of presenting these
unfamiliar, and therefore difficult, ideas to Western audiences,*
and it may be profitable to attempt to understand, to some extent
at least, what his method was, for it is not obvious in the
unchronological arrangement of his Complete Works, or for that
matter, in the book Jnana—Yoga.. As we have seen above, his
first New York lecture was "The Claims of Religion; Its Truth and
Utility" (in London his first lecture would be "The Necessity of
Religion").
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In an age in which religion of any kind had come to be looked

upon-by almost every educated person with disdain and distrust,
it was of course important that Swamiji convince his audiences at
the very outset that the principles of religion were based on reality
and that they had value in human life. Indeed, one of his major
efforts in the West was to bring religion, as such, back into good
repute. Although almost everyone still went dutifully to church,
religion meant little more to most than a set of theistic and
authoritarian doctrines and beliefs which the findings of science
and the dictates of reason had once for all demolished and which
had, moreover, little relevance to the social and economic realities
of an industrial age. The word religion had developed a hollow
and mocking ring.

What claim had religion upon the attention of the enlightened

people of the modern West? What is religion? In answering these
questions, Swamiji went straight to the mark:

. . . Essentially, . . . religion belongs to the supersensuous and not

to the sense plane. It is beyond all reasoning, and not on the plane
of intellect. It is a vision, an inspiration, a plunge into the
unknown and unknowable, making the unknowable more than
known, for it can never be "known." This search has been in the
human mind, as I believe, from the very beginning of humanity.
There cannot have been human reasoning and intellect in any
period of the world's history without this struggle, this search
beyond.

. . . It is my belief that religious thought is in man's very

constitution, so much so that it is impossible for him to give up
religion until he can give up his mind and body, until he can stop
thought and life. As long as man thinks, this struggle must go on,
and so long man must have some form of religion. . . .

The great question of all questions at the present time is this: . . .

Why shall we not be content with the known?
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Why shall we not rest satisfied with eating, drinking, and doing a
little good to society?20

The remainder of this lecture was, primarily, a reply to this

question. "Fortunately," Swamiji said, "we must inquire into the
beyond."

This present, this expressed, is only one part of that unexpressed.

The sense universe is, as it were, only one portion, one bit of that
infinite spiritual universe projected into the plane of sense
consciousness. How can this little bit of projection be explained,
be understood, without knowing that which is beyond? . . . This
God, this eternally Unknowable, or Absolute, or Infinite, or
without name-you may call Him by what name you like-is the
rationale, the only explanation, the raison d’etre of that which is
known and knowable, this present life.21

There lay the validity of religion. The facts it discovered and

spoke of constituted the basis of the phenomenal world. That such
facts could not be verified by sense experience or by reason could
not render them meaningless; they were the very essence of
meaning. Yet, on the other hand, Swamiji strongly
objected to the acceptance of religious statements through blind
faith. "In true religion," he said, "there is no faith or belief in the
sense of blind faith. . . . To believe blindly is to degenerate the
human soul."22 Religious facts were to be discovered for oneself
through supersensuous inspiration. Here sounded one of the main
themes of his message-the availability of "supersensuous
inspiration": "If one man was ever inspired, it is possible for each
and every one of us to be inspired, and that is religion. . . . Come
face to face with religious facts, and come into direct contact with
the science of religion. Religion does not consist in believing any
number of doctrines or dogmas, in going to churches or temples,
in reading certain books. Have
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you seen God? Have you seen the soul P If not, are you
struggling for it? . . . Religion is here and now, in this present
life."23

Swamiji's own conviction, his own immediate perception, of his

listeners' capacity to come "face to face with religious facts" was,
perhaps, more persuasive than thousands of words. Even here in
his first public lecture of this season in New York he made no
compromise with what was to him a visible truth; although he
took pains to make matters simple, he did not talk down
spiritually to his audience; he did not assume they were incapable
of the highest realization nor that they could not grasp the highest
ideas, for, as he was to say three Sundays later, "The same divine
essence from which the ideas emanated is ever present in man,
and, therefore, he can always understand them." In his profound
respect for human beings, he did not teach them a comforting
religion; he did not hesitate to goad them on to self effort.
"Religion is a question of being and becoming, not believing," he
said. "This is religion, and when you have attained to that you
have religion. Before that you are no better than the animals." 24

In speaking of religion as the very substance of all human

knowledge-including science, religion itself, and "what you call
ethics"-Swamiji tore large holes in the doctrine of Utilitarianism,
which, in the minds of many people, served admirably as a
rational foundation for ethical and humanitarian behavior. He was
to do the same in his parallel lecture in London, "The Necessity of
Religion," and in this latter connection we shall say more
regarding his many-phased rebuttal of this materialistic, indeed
hedonistic, doctrine, which at the close of the nineteenth century
was held by many who were "passing for the [most] learned, the
most rational, the most logical, the most intelligent crowd ever
seen on this earth."25

As for the utility of religion, Swamiji pointed out that it "has

made man what he is, and will make of this human animal a god."
"Take off religion from human society, what
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will remain ? Nothing but a forest of brutes." 26 Further, spiritual

knowledge brings to man the greatest possible happiness. If utility
is what conduces to happiness, then true religion must be of the
highest utility.

We find that man enjoys his intellect much more than an animal
enjoys his senses, and we see that man enjoys his spiritual nature
even more than his rational nature. So the highest wisdom
[utility?] must be this spiritual knowledge. With this knowledge
will come bliss. All these things of this world are but the
shadows, the manifestations in the third or fourth degree of the
real Knowledge and Bliss.27

Swamiji's second Sunday lecture at Hardman Hall, "The Ideal of

a Universal Religion" (his second lecture in London would have
the same title) dealt with a subject that he felt to be of vital
importance to the present age and was one on which he often
spoke. But aside from being an extended commentary on the
doctrine of religious harmony that Sri Ramakrishna had taught
and so fully embodied, it was as well a preliminary and integral
step in Swamiji's explanation of the universal principles of
Vedanta. Having in his previous lecture defined religion in
general, he anticipated the question: What of all the various
warring religions of the world? "Is it possible that there should
ever reign unbroken harmony in this plane of mighty religious
struggle?"28 The answer involved a further definition of religion
in general and of various religions or creeds in particular.

Even as Swamiji had pointed out in "The Claims of Religion" that

religion in general dealt with supersensuous reality which is
available to superconscious experience, he now declared that this
universal religion "runs through all the various religions of the
world in the form of God." " `I am the thread that runs through all
these pearls,' and each pearl is a religion or even a sect thereof." 29
It was not that the pearls
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must be identical one with the other, or even similar. The

harmony of religions did not lie in an impossible uniformity, or
even a synthesis, of beliefs and practices; it could exist only in the
underlying reality from which they all arose and toward which
they all aspired.

We find [he said] . . . that if by the idea of a universal religion it is

meant that one set of doctrines should be believed in by all
mankind, it is wholly impossible. . . Again, if we expect that there
will be one universal mythology, that is also impossible; it cannot
be. Neither can there be one universal ritual. Such a state of
things can never come into existence; if it ever did, the world
would be destroyed, because variety is the first principle of life. . .
. This world must go on working, wheel within wheel, this
intricate mass of machinery, most complex, most wonderful.

What can we do then? We can make it run smoothly, we can

lessen the friction, we can grease the wheels, as it were. How? By
recognizing the natural necessity of variation. . . . We must learn
that truth may be expressed in a hundred thousand ways, and that
each of these ways is true as far as it goes. We must learn that the
same thing can be viewed from a hundred different standpoints,
and yet be the same thing. . . . Through high philosophy or low,
through the most exalted mythology or the grossest, through the
most refined ritualism or arrant fetishism, every sect, every soul,
every nation, every religion, consciously or unconsciously; is
struggIing upward, towards God; every vision of truth that man
has is a vision of Him and of none else. . . . This is the only
recognition of universality that we can get.30

Here Swamiji in the vastness of his vision seems to have been

speaking not only of religion as such but of all aspects of human
life. Life itself was a struggle toward God, and each
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individual life was a religion, each moving surely toward God, as

a radius of a circle toward the center. No one path or faith or way
of life was any better in relation to the ultimate goal' than any
other. In another analogy he pointed out that there were indeed
stages along the way from which the view of the goal
approximated to a greater or lesser extent the goal itself and to
which one might assign a value; but whatever the view, the goal
remained the same, as the sun remains the same, though an
observer traveling toward it sees it differently from different
stages of his journey. In still another analogy he spoke of the
variety of religious views created by different capacities and
characters, each mind shaping its own idea of God, as vessels
shaping the water they contain into their own size and form. But
the substance of that which is thus limited and structured is in
each case the same. "In each vessel the vision of God comes in
the form of the vessel. Yet He is One, He is God in every case." 31

But how, from a practical standpoint, could harmony be brought

to this kaleidoscopic variety of views? Swamiji's proposal was
twofold. First, he spoke somewhat as he had in his appeal for
harmony at the Parliament of Religions:

In the first place, I would ask mankind to recognize this maxim:

"Do not destroy." Iconoclastic reformers do no good to the world.
Break not, pull not anything down, but build. Help if you can; if
you cannot, fold your hands and stand by and see things go on.
Do not injure if you cannot render help. Say not a word against
any man's convictions so far as they are sincere. 32

But in addition to this, a positive basis of unity was needed, a

deeply felt understanding of the principles embracing all varieties
of spiritual struggle and a practical means of accommodating
every aspirant, whatever his temperament and needs. For the first
time (as far as we know) Swamiji spoke in public of introducing a
"new" religion to the West:
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What I want to propagate [he said] is a religion that will be

equally acceptable to all minds; it must be equally philosophic,
equally emotional, equally mystic, and equally conducive to
action. . . . To become harmoniously balanced in all these four
directions is my ideal of religion. And this religion is attained by
what we in India call Yoga-union.33

He went on to define in some detail each of the four yogas raja,

karma, bhakti, and jnana. To each he gave equal attention, but it
was the philosophy inherent in the last, and not alien to the others,
that provided the basis for religious unity the philosophy of
monism. He did not elucidate the principles of this philosophy in
this first series of New York lectures, except to say now:

[Jnana-Yoga] tells man that he is essentially divine. It shows to

mankind the real unity of being, and that each one of us is the
Lord God Himself, manifested on earth. All of us, from the lowest
worm that crawls under our feet to the highest beings to whom we
look up with wonder and awe--all are manifestations of the same
Lord.34

This was a theme that he would later on develop in full. For now,
he closed this important lecture, which, as he was to write to Mr.
Sturdy, "was the outline of our work,"35 with a paragraph that will
perhaps always resound in the mind of every student of his
thought:

It is imperative that all these various Yogas should be carried .out

in practice; mere theories about them will not do any good. First
we have to hear about them, then we have to think . about them.
We have to reason the thoughts out, impress them on our minds,
and we have to meditate on them, realise them until at last they
become our whole life. No longer will religion remain a
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bundle of ideas or theories, not an intellectual assent; it will enter

into our very self. By means of intellectual assent we may today
subscribe to many foolish things, and change our minds
altogether tomorrow. But true religion never changes. Religion is
realisation; not talk, nor doctrine, nor theories, however beautiful
they may be. It is being and becoming, not hearing or
acknowledging; it is the whole soul becoming changed into what
it believes. That is religion.36

In Swamiji's third and fourth lectures, "The CosmosThe

Macrocosm" and "The Cosmos-The Microcosm," he answered
some age-old questions that were, in modern form, agitating the
nineteenth-century mind. (In London these two subjects would be
dealt with in one lecture under the title "The Real and Apparent
Man," published in the Complete Works as "The Real Nature of
Man.") First: Whence came this vast external universe? Did God
create it out of nothing and for purposes known to Himself? Or
did the blind forces of matter and energy bring it into existence
and shape it through natural processes, such as those of geology
and evolution? Whence did it come? Where is it going? Why?
These were the first, elementary questions that Swamiji answered
in "The Macrocosm." "I will try to present before you," he said,
"the outline of the answer that I have gathered from the ancient
philosophers of India in harmony with modern knowledge."37 He
then proceeded to explain the Vedantic concept of the cyclic
involution and evolution of the universe, its rhythmic projection
and dissolution, the causal form evolving into the subtle, the
subtle into the gross, the gross involving back into the subtle,
going back to the cause; then evolving once again. "This coming
out of the fine and becoming gross, simply changing the
arrangements of its parts, as it were, is what in modern times [is]
called evolution. . . . But we have to learn one thing more," he
said. "We have to go one step further, . . . every evolution is
preceded by an involution."38

411
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This concept, familiar to every present-day student of Vedanta,

can be briefly stated with running excerpts from this lecture:
We see then, that nothing can be created out of nothing.
Everything exists through eternity, and will exist through eternity.
Only the movement is in succeeding waves and hollows, going
back to fine forms, and coming out into gross manifestations. This
involution and evolution is going on throughout the whole of
nature. The whole series of evolution beginning with the lowest
manifestation of life and reaching up to the highest, the most
perfect man, must have been the involution of something else.
The question is: The involution of what? What was involved?
God. The evolutionist will tell you that your idea that it was God
is wrong. Why? Because you say God is intelligent, but we find
that intelligence develops much later on in the course of
evolution. . . . This objection of the evolutionists does not hold
water, as we shall see by applying our theory. The tree comes out
of the seed, goes back to the seed; the beginning and the end are
the same. The earth comes out of its cause and returns to it. We
know that if we can find the beginning we can find the end. E
converso, if we find the end we can find the beginning. . . . In the
end we find the perfect man, so in the beginning it must have
been the same. Therefore, the protoplasm was the involution of
the highest intelligence.... That perfect man who is at one end of
the chain of evolution was involved in the cell of the protoplasm,
which is at the other end of the same chain.

Applying the same reason to the whole of the universe, we see

that intelligence must be the Lord of creation, the cause. What is
the most evolved notion that man has of this universe? It is
intelligence. . . . The beginning was, therefore, intelligence. . . .
The sum total of the intelligence displayed in the universe must,
therefore, be the
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involved universal intelligence unfolding itself. This universal

intelligence is what we call God. . . .

We now see that all the various forms of cosmic energy, such as
matter, thought, force, intelligence, and so forth, are simply the
manifestation of that cosmic intelligence, or, as we shall call it
henceforth, the Supreme Lord. Everything that you see, feel, or
hear, the whole universe, is His creation, or to be a little more
accurate, is the Lord Himself. . . . He it is that comes down and
becomes the lowest atom, and slowly unfolding His nature rejoins
Himself. This is the mystery of the universe. . . . This is the only
solution of the Cosmos that satisfies the human intellect. In one
word, we are born of Him, we live in Him, and unto Him we
return.39

It was an answer satisfying not only to the modern intellect,

which seeks for the cause of things in their own nature rather than
in some external, supernatural force or intelligence, but to the
emotions as well; it was a theistic answer, but it reached the
highest peaks of dualism. The Supreme Lord, from whom the
universe emanated, was immanent everywhere, in everything;
nothing was not He. "It is He who is shining as the sun and the
stars, He is the mother earth. . . . He is the man who is talking. He
is the audience that is here. He is the platform on which I stand,
He is the light that enables me to see your faces. It is all He." 40
This explanation of the universe was at once more reasonable and
more exalted than the explanation given by Christian theology in
its orthodox forms. It was, moreover, inclusive of the glimpse of
things gained through the peephole of science, and was thus
acceptable to many of Swamiji's listeners. Nor, of course, was he
speaking academically. Did he not vividly perceive then and there
that all was God Himself-the platform, the audience, the light, his
own form? More, had he not known in the vastness of his own
being the rhythmic rise and fall of universes without beginning
and without end ? His teaching, as always, was out
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of his own experience and thereby carried with it the power to

convince.

But grand though this lecture was, it was not the final word he
wanted to give. Questions remained, one of the most important of
which was: Who is this "I" that witnesses the external world? Put
more simply: Who and what is man? "From analysing the
external nature," Swamiji was to say at the beginning of his next
lecture, "The Microcosm," "man is led to analyse the internal; this
question of the internal man comes with a higher state of
civilisation, with a deeper insight into nature, with a higher state
of growth."41 And this questioning had become particularly active
in the latter part of the nineteenth century when the concept of
man as a special creation of God had received a damaging, indeed
mortal, blow through the theory (or fact) of Evolution. Man's
prestige had grievously suffered, and for all his vaunted progress,
his self respect was at a dangerously low ebb. The concept of man
as a higher animal, long held by rationalists and now confirmed
by science, opened wide the door to the jungle. If man is an
animal, should he not rightly act like one rather than suppress his
natural bent? The question in all its implications had not yet
pushed through the walls of Victorian prudery into the open, but it
was on its way, and it could well alter the face of human society,
for the concept man has of his essential nature perhaps determines
more profoundly than anything else his outlook on life, forming
and informing every aspect of his culture. Indeed, the answer to
this all-important question "What is man?" was basic to Swamiji's
message.

As far as his New York lectures are concerned, he began his

answer with "The Microcosm," leading his audience through an
epistemological argument. Again, let us quote his own words:

I am looking at you. How many things are necessary for this

vision? First, the eyes. . . . Secondly, . . . the nerve centre in the
brain. [Third,] the mind must be there. . . .
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The mind, too, is only the carrier; it has to carry the sensation still
forward, and present it to the intellect.. . . Still this is not
sufficient. The intellect must carry it forward and present the
whole thing before the ruler in the body, the human soul, the king
on the throne. . . .

The instruments are in the external body, the gross body of man;
but the mind and the intellect are not. They are in what is called in
Hindu philosophy the finer body and what in Christian theology
you read of as the spiritual body of man; finer, very much finer
than the body, and yet not the soul. This soul is beyond them all. 42
. . . Just as the body has its progress and decadence, so also has
the mind, and, therefore, the mind is not the soul, because the soul
can neither decay nor degenerate. How can we know that? . . .
Because knowledge which is self illuminating and the basis of
intelligence cannot belong to dull, dead matter. . . . It is
intelligence that illumines all matter. . . . This body is not self
luminous; . . . neither can the mind nor the spiritual body be self--
luminous They are not of the essence of intelligence. That which
is self luminous cannot decay. . . . Decadence is possible only of
that light which is borrowed and is not of its own essence. 43 . . .
The light which shines through the mind is not its own. Whose is
it then? It must belong to that which has it as its own essence, and
as such can never decay or die, never become stronger or weaker;
it is self luminous, it is luminosity itself. It cannot be that the soul
knows, but it is knowledge. It cannot be that the soul has
existence, but it u existence. It cannot be that the soul is happy, it
is happiness itself: . . .

We see, then, that this human being is composed first of this

external covering, the body, secondly, the finer body, consisting
of mind, intellect, and egoism. Behind them is the real Self of
man. . . .

... If the existence of the soul is drawn from the

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argument that it is self luminous, that knowledge, existence

blessedness are its essence, it naturally follows that this soul
cannot have been created. A self--luminous existence,
independent of any other existence, could never have been the
outcome of anything. It always existed; there was never a time
when it did not exist. . . . How can the soul . . . be said to be
existing in time, when time itself exists in the soul? It has neither
birth nor death, but it is passing through all these various
stages. . . . It takes up a body and uses it; and when that body has
failed and is used up, it takes another body; and so on it goes 44

At this point Swamiji veered off from his definition of the real
nature of man; it was necessary first to explain to his audience a
concept as new and strange to Western thinking as was that of an
uncreated, beginningless soul-the theory of reincarnation. He
devoted the remaining third of this lecture to a discussion of that
subject. And so came to a close his first series of Sunday lectures
in New York. Anyone attending all four lectures would have
gained a broad and rich outline of the first steps of Vedantic
thought.
4

The New York newspapers had not ignored Swamiji this season,
but it was not until his public lectures showed clear signs of
proving successful that the Herald considered him newsworthy
enough for special attention. On Sunday, January 19, that paper
released not one, but two long articles telling of his presence in
the city and of his classes. The first article, which concerned a
bhakti yoga class held on December 23, had been submitted by
Swami Kripananda (see chapter five, section five) . The second
article, which appeared in another section of the Herald, has been
quoted in part earlier, but the remainder of it can be given here:
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SWAMI PREACHES TO GOTHAMITES.

High Priest of Hindooism Promulgates Oriental Lore

from West Thirty-Ninth Street.

WINS FAME AND PUPILS

Many Well Known Persons Are Seeking to Follow the

Teachings of His Philosophy.

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE FAITH.

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA is a name to conjure by in certain

circles of New York society to-day-and those not the least wealthy
or intellectual. It is borne by a dusky gentleman from India, who
for the last twelve months has been making name and fame for
himself in this metropolis by the propagation of certain forms of
Oriental religion, philosophy and practice. Last winter his cam-
paign centred in the reception room of a prominent hotel on Fifth
avenue. Having gained for his teachings and himself a certain
vogue in society, he now aims to reach the common people, and
for that reason is giving a series of free lectures on Sunday
afternoons at Hardman Hall.*

Sufficient success has attended the efforts of Swami Vivekananda

to justify a description of the man and his work in the United
States.

THE MAN HIMSELF

The Swami Vivekananda is a pure blooded Hindu, born some

thirty-three years ago in the Province of Bengal, and educated at
Calcutta University, where he learned to speak the English
language with ease and fluency. Of his early life he never speaks,
save to talk in a general way about the great master who taught
him the doctrines and practices he is now trying to introduce into
this country.
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The outlines of his later life are better known to Americans, for he
came to the United States three (two and a half] years ago as the
representative of Hindooism at the Congress of Religions held in
Chicago during the World's Fair. Afterward he went on a lecturing
tour through the United States.

The personality of the Swami may be gathered in great measure

from his picture. He is of dark complexion, of rather more than
average height and heavily built. His manner is undoubtedly
attractive, and he is possessed of a large amount of personal
magnetism. . . .

The work of the Hindoo in this country consists at present in

giving free lectures and holding free classes, initiating disciples
and conducting a large correspondence,

At present, while the lectures and classes are popular, and the
number of pupils daily increases, the Swami has only two
proclaimed disciples. Both of these have changed their names and
are now known by Sanscrit pseudonyms, prefixing the word
Swami, which means "Lord" or "Master." Both of these disciples
are Americans of foreign extraction, and one at least is well
known in New York.

[There followed two paragraphs descriptive of Swami

Abhayananda and Swami Kripananda. In chapter two, section
seven,* we have quoted excerpts from these paragraphs, and to
reproduce them here will add nothing new. Following them was a
"brief sketch of the Swami's fundamental teachings," which has
been quoted in full in chapter five, section four. Following that
was a brief description of one of Swamiji's karma yoga classes,
the audience, and the informal reception during which "those who
had been listening to him hastened to shake hands or begged for
the favor of an introduction." This passage has also been quoted
in chapter five, section four. The article then continued:]

Concerning himself the Swami will not say more than is

absolutely necessary. Contrary to the claim made by
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some of his pupils, he declares that he has come to this country

alone and not as officially representing any order of
Hindoo monks. He belongs to the Sanyasi, he will say, and is
hence free to travel without losing his caste. When it is pointed
out to him that Hindooism is not a proselytizing religion, he says
he has a message to the West as Buddha had a message to the
East. When questioned concerning the Hindoo religion, and asked
whether he intends to introduce its practices and ritual into this
country, he declares that he is preaching simply philosophy.* In
talking, if standing up, he has a very odd trick of shortening or
heightening himself imperceptibly, so that at one moment he is
apparently at the height of his interlocutor's shoulder and again on
a level with his eyes.

THOSE WHO LISTEN

There can be no question that the Swami is securing an influential

following. Many clergymen have attended his lectures. Indeed, he
was invited to lecture before the Dixon Society in this city by Dr.
Wright. Some of those who are his pupils are well known in the
city. Among the names of these recorded at the Swami's house
were Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Mr. and Mrs. Francis Leggett, Mme
Antoinette Stirling, Dr. Alan Day, Miss Emma Thursby and
Professor Wyman. Mrs. Ole Bull also is one of his disciples. The
Swami has just received an invitation from Mr. John P. Fox to
lecture before the Harvard Graduate Philosophical Club. Here he
lectures twice daily on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and
Saturdays, in addition to his public lectures on Sunday afternoon.

Since Swamiji's karma yoga classes had extended to the first and
second Fridays of January (see chapter five, section five), it was
indeed the case that he had been holding classes
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twice daily on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at

228 West Thirty-ninth Street. But with the completion of karma
yoga, the number of weekly classes was reduced to seven. The
new schedule was printed on the back of the first pamphlet, "The
Ideal of a Universal Religion," which was distributed on January
19:

CLASS LECTURES.

228 West 39th Street, New York City.

MONDAYS : "BHAKTI YOGA," - - - - - 11 A. M. 8 P. M..

WEDNESDAYS: "GNANA YOGA," - - - 11 A.M. 8 P. M.
FRIDAYS : QUESTIO,N CLASS, - - - - - - 8 P.M.
SATURDAYS : "RAJA Y'OGA," - - - - - - 11 A.M. 8 P. M.

On the back cover of the subsequent pamphlet, "The cosmos," the

additional information was given that the morning classes were
for advanced students and the evening classes for beginners. To
judge from available dated transcripts, however, Swamiji's bhakti
yoga classes did not follow this pattern; rather, the beginners
classes appear to have been held both mornings and evenings in
December and January, and after them came classes on para-
bhakti, or supreme devotion. Except for the bhakti yoga classes
that may have been held on Monday, January13, and one held on
the morning of January 20, all the beginners classes are given in
"Addresses on Bhakti-Yoga" in volume four of the Complete
Works. The transcripts of the January 13 classes (if indeed any
classes were held on that day) remain undiscovered, but by good
fortune Mr. Goodwin's transcript of the bhakti yoga class of
January 20 has recently come to light and will bear quoting from
here at some length, for it is new to us. This was Swamiji's last
beginners class and is given in full in appendix A. He began:

We finished in our last about Pratikas. One idea more of the preparatory
Bhakti, and then we will go on to the
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Para, the Supreme. This idea is called Nishta, devotion to one idea. . . .
[Nishta is] knowing that all different forms of [worshipping God] are
right, yet sticking to one and rejecting the others. We must not worship
the others at all. We must not hate or criticise them, but respect them.
The elephant has two teeth coming out from his mouth. These are only
for show; he cannot eat with them; but the teeth that are inside are those
with which he chews his food. So mix with all states, say yea, yea, to all,
but join none. Stick to your own ideal of worship. When you worship,
worship that ideal of God which is your own Ishtam, your own chosen.
If you do not, you will have nothing. Nothing will grow. When a plant is
growing it is necessary that it should be hedged round lest any animal
eat it up. When it has become strong and a huge gigantic tree, do not
care for any hedges, it is perfect in itself. So when just the seed of
spirituality is growing, to fritter away the energies in all sorts of
religious ideas, a little of this and a little of that, a little of Christianity, a
little of Buddhism, and reality of nothing destroys the soul. This has its
good side, and in the end we will come to it. Only do not put the cart
before the horse. . . . After a long course of training in this Ishtam, when
this plant of spirituality has grown and the soul has become strong and
you begin to realise that your Ishtam is everywhere, [then] naturally all
these bondages will fall down. . . . Devotion to one idea; those who have
this will become spiritual, will see the light. . . .

Of course, at the same time, we must always remember that we

must recognise the Ishtams of others and respect them, . . . or else
worship will degenerate into fanaticism. There is an old story of a
man who was a worshipper of Shiva. There are sects in our
country who worship God as Shiva, and others who worship Him
as Vishnu. This man was a great worshipper of Shiva, and to that
he added a tremendous hatred for all worshippers of Vishnu,
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and would not hear the name of Vishnu pronounced. There are a
great number of worshippers of Vishnu in India, and he could not
avoid hearing the name. So he bored two holes in his ears and tied
two little bells on to them, and whenever a man mentioned the
name of Vishnu, he moved his head and rang the bells, and that
prevented his hearing the noise.

But Shiva told him in a dream, "What a fool you are; I am Vishnu
and I am Shiva; they are different only in name; there are not two
Gods." But the man said, "I don't care. I will have nothing to do
with this Vishnu business !"

He had a little statue of Shiva and . . . built an altar for it. One day
he bought some beautiful incense and went home to light some of
the incense for his God. While the fumes of his incense were
rising in the air he found that the image was divided into two: one
half remained Shiva, and the other half was Vishnu. Then the man
jumped up and put his finger under the nostril of Vishnu so that
not a particle of the smell could get there.

Then Shiva became disgusted, and the man became a demon. He

is the father of all fanatics, the "bell-eared" demon. . . .

This is the only danger in this Nishta Bhakti, becoming this

fanatical demon. The world gets full of them. It is very easy to
hate. . . . The ordinary, undeveloped weak brain of mankind
cannot love one without hating another. This very [characteristic]
becomes fanaticism in religion. . . . This should be avoided, and at
the same time the other danger should be avoided: we must not
fritter away our energies. Religion becomes a nothing with us;
just hearing lectures. These are the two dangers. The danger with
the liberals is that they are too expansive and have no intensity.
You see that in these days religion has become very expansive,
very broad, but the ideas are so broad that there is no depth in
them. . . . This is the danger
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with the liberal thought, and on the other hand the sectarians have
the depth, the intensity, but that intensity is so narrow. They are
very deep, but with no breadth to it, and not only that, it draws out
hatred to everyone else. Now, if we can avoid both these dangers
and become as broad as the uttermost liberals and as deep as the
bluest fanatic, then we will solve the problem. . . .

Here ends the first part of Bhakti, the formal, the ceremonial, the
preparatory 45

Swamiji then went on to review the preparatory steps of bhakti

yoga, which led up to para-bhakti. First there were the
qualifications of the disciple: longing for spirituality, purity, and
perseverance. The teacher, too, must be properly qualified, able to
transmit the spiritual current that has passed down to him through
generations. Then came the preparatory steps of worshiping God
through symbols, of repeating His name, of holding to one's Ishta,
and of reverencing those of others. In speaking of the worship of
God through symbols, or pratikas, Swamiji told another story:

We can worship anything we like [he said] if we think it is God. If

we do not think it is God that worship is not Bhakti. If you think
it is God it is all right.

There was a certain Yogi who used to practise meditation in a

lonely part of the forest, on the banks of a river. There was a poor
cowherd, a very ignorant man, who used to tend his herd in that
forest. Every day he used to see this same Yogi meditating by the
hours, practising austerities, living alone, studying. Somehow he
got curious what he did, so he came to him and said, "Sir, can you
teach me the way to God ?" This Yogi was a very learned, great
man; and he replied, "How will you understand God, you
common cowherd; blockhead, go home and tend your cows, and
don't bother your head with such things "
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The poor fellow went away, but somehow a real want had come
to him. So he could not rest, and he came again to the Yogi, and
said "Sir, won't you teach me something about God?" Again he
was repulsed, "Oh you blockhead, what can you understand of
God? Go home." But he could not sleep, he could not eat; he must
know something about God.

So he came again, and the Yogi, in order to quiet the man, as he

was so insisting, said, "I'll teach you about God."

The man asked, "Sir, what sort of being is God ? What is his
form? How does he look?"

The Yogi said, "God is just like the big bull in your herd; that is
just God; God has become that big bull."

The man believed him, and went back to his herd, and day and
night he took that bull. for God, and began to worship it. He
brought the greenest grass for that bull, rested close to it, and
gave it light, sat near it, and followed it. Thus days and months
and years pass. His whole soul was there. One day he heard a
voice, as it were, coming out of the bull. The bull speaks. "My
son, my son." "Why, the bull is speaking! No, the bull cannot
speak." Again he went away, and sat near meditating in great
misery of his heart; he did not know . anything. Again he heard
the voice coming out of the bull, "My child, my child." He goes
near-"No, the bull cannot speak." Then he went back again and
sat despondent. Again the voice came and that time he found it
out. It was from his own heart. He found that God was in him.
Then he learned the wonderful truth of the Teacher of all
Teachers, "I am with thee always." And the poor cowherd learned
the whole mystery.

Then he goes back to the Yogi, and when he is at some distance

the Yogi sees him. The Yogi has been the most learned man in the
country; practising austerity for years, meditating, studying, and
this cowherd, an ignorant
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blockhead, never studied a book, never learnt his letters, but he

comes, his whole body, as it were, transfigured, his face changed,
the light of heaven shining round his face. The Yogi got up.
"What is this change? Where did you get this ?"

"Sir, you gave me that." "How? I told you that in joke."

"But I took it seriously, and I got everything I wanted out of that

bull, for is He not everywhere?"

So that bull was the pratika, and that man worshipped the bull as
his pratika, as God, and he got everything out of it. So that intense
love, that desire, brings out everything. Everything is in
ourselves, and the external world and the external worship are the
forms, the suggestions that call it out.

But forms lead one to the highest only if one desires the highest.
"All these external forms of Bhakti," Swamiji went on in this
same class,

this repetition of the name, worship of Pratika, this Nishta, this

Ishtam, are but the preparations until that eternal power wakes up.
Then alone comes spirituality, when one goes beyond these laws
and bounds. Then all laws fall down, all forms vanish, temples
and churches crumble into dust and die away. . . .

So this is the goal towards which we are going, the Supreme

Bhakti, and all that leads up to this is but preparation. But it is
necessary. It prepares the infinite soul to come out of this bondage
of books and sects and forms; these fly away and leave but the
Soul of man: . . .

We see that the vast mass. of mankind is born in some church or

temple or [some religious] form and never comes out of it. Why?
Have these forms helped the growth of spirituality? If through
these forms we step onto the highest platform of love, where
forms vanish and all these
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sectarian ideas go away, how is it that the vast majority of men

are always groveling in some form or other? They are all atheists;
they do not want any religion. . . . What you want, you get. The
Lord fulfills all desires. If you want to keep a certain position in
Society you will do so; if you want church you will get that and
not Him. If you want to play the fool all your life with all these
churches and foolish organisations, you will have them and have
to live in them all your lives. . . . Those that love Him alone will
come to Him, and those that love others will go wherever they
love 46

In the second part of Bhakti--Yoga, "Para-Bhakti or Supreme ·

Devotion," the soul had soared far beyond the need of these
preparatory practices and had set forth on the open sea of intense
spiritual love. Here the superficial conflict between the often
pious and sentimental beginning bhakta and the often dry and
disdainful beginning jnani disappeared. As both passed beyond
the kindergartens of religion, as both neared the outposts of
Reality, then for each aspirant true religion began, and therein lay
the essential unity of these separate paths. "Each seems to lay a
great stress upon his own peculiar method of worship," Swamiji
wrote, "forgetting that with perfect love true knowledge is bound
to come even unsought, and that from perfect knowledge true
love is inseparable."47 "There is no sweetness but He," he would
say in a jnana yoga class. When through knowledge, you "look
upon all things with the same eye, . . . then you have got the truth,
and then alone you will know what happiness means, what peace
means, what love means."48 It was through love, on the other
hand, that the ripe bhakta "sees no distinctions; the mighty ocean
of love has entered into him, and he sees not man in man but
beholds his Beloved everywhere. Through every face shines to
him his Hari. Wherever there is beauty or sublimity, to him it is
all His. . . . Such, though bitten by a serpent, only say that a
messenger came to them from their Beloved."49 Per-
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ceiving that all is He, the jnani loves all; loving Him, the bhakta
perceives that all is He.
Nor did the bhakta in Swamiji's teaching stop with the "blessed
madness of divine love." From that "dizzy height on the pinnacle
of the religion of love,"50 where all sense of self is lost, the bhakta
becomes identified with the object of his worship.

We all have to begin as dualists in the religion of love [Swamiji

said at the close of his classes on para-bhakti. God is to us a
separate Being, and we feel ourselves to be separate beings
also. . . . We all begin with love for ourselves, and the unfair
claims of the little self make even love selfish. At last, however,
comes the full blaze of light, in which this little self is seen to
have become one with the Infinite. Man himself is transfigured in
the presence of this Light of Love, and he realises at last the
beautiful and inspiring truth that Love, the Lover, and the
Beloved are One.51

This culmination was the bhakti of Advaita, monism, which

transcends the organic unity of Ishvara, the souls, and the world.
Even as Swamiji had defined the meaning of Ishvara at Thousand
Island Park, so did he define Him in New York at the very outset
of his bhakti yoga class.

It has always to be understood [he wrote] that the Personal God

worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the
Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the
Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be
loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect
of Brahman, that is; Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. . . . Ishvara is the
highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words,
the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind.
Creation is eternal, and so is Ishvara.52

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But behind the eternity of time was the Timeless Brahman, into
whom (or which?) both worshiper and worshiped might
disappear-for both, all along, were He. Indeed, the culmination of
all yoga was neither to love nor to know but to be. Naked in itself,
the soul "has not knowledge, existence, and blessedness as its
qualities, they are the essence of the soul" 53 so Swamiji had said
in "The Microcosm" the day before opening his class on para-
bhakti. And so he was to say with greater emphasis and fuller
explanation in many lectures to come.

Karma yoga was no different in its ultimate goal than bhakti or

jnana yoga. By this path of selfless, nonattached work "men may
get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by
prayer,"54 Swamiji said in one of his advanced karma yoga
classes, and in another, "We find that Jnana, Bhakti, and Karma
all come to one point. The highest ideal is eternal and entire self
abnegation, where there is no `I' but all is `Thou' and whether he
is conscious or unconscious of it, Karma-Yoga leads man to that
end."55

This path of action started exactly where one stood, wherever that
might be, and climbed to the goal of freedom-"the goal of all
human nature." Meant for those who are active in one way or
another-in ruling a kingdom or sweeping a street, in fighting a
battle or reading the scriptures-it was the path (with variations)
for the vast majority of people, including most monastics, as well
as householders and those unmarried men and women living in
the world, but dedicated to a life of spiritual unfoldment and
service. In his first advanced class Swamiji made it clear that
there was no difference in spiritual value between one way of life
and another, or, for that matter; between one yoga and another.
"The important thing," he said, "is to know that there are
gradations of duty and of morality-that the duty of one state of
life in one set of circumstances will not and cannot be that of
another."56

He gave an illustration, which was, in fact, the key to the

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whole matter of who should and who should not follow the path
of work :

....One man does not resist [evil] because he is weak, lazy, and
cannot, not because he will not; the other man knows that he can
strike an irresistible blow if he likes; yet he not only does not
strike, but blesses his enemies. The one who from weakness
resists not commits a sin, and as such cannot receive any benefit
from the non-resistance; while the other would commit a sin by
offering resistance. . . .

Such is the central idea of Karma-Yoga. The Karma Yogi is the

man who understands that the highest ideal is non-resistance, and
who also knows that this non-resistance is the highest
manifestation of power in actual possession, and also what is
called the resisting of evil is but a step on the way towards the
manifestation of this highest power, namely, non-resistance.
Before reaching this highest ideal, man's duty is to resist evil; let
him work, let him fight, let him strike straight from the shoulder.
Then only, when he has gained the power to resist, will non-
resistance be a virtue.

[Until then] inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity

always means resistance. Resist all evils, mental and physical;
and when you have succeeded in resisting, then will calmness
come. . . . We see very few in the world who have really reached
that stage. I do not know if I have seen twenty persons in my life
who are really calm and non-resisting, and I have travelled over
half the world.57

In the beginning, the practice of this yoga lay in doing one's duty.
How does one determine what one's duty is? Swamiji devoted a
large part of his beginners classes (see chapter five, section five)
to answering this question. But to act out of a sense of duty was
by no means the essence of karma yoga;
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indeed, in his last advanced class, entitled "Freedom," he pulled

aside, as it were, duty's pious mask to reveal the gross face of
compulsion and attachment. "What is duty after all?" he asked,
and replied: "It is really the impulsion of the flesh, of our
attachment; and when an attachment has become established . . .
we baptise it with the high-sounding name of duty. We strew
flowers upon it, trumpets sound, and sacred texts are said over it,
and then the whole world fights, and men earnestly rob each other
for this duty's sake."58 Still one's conventional duty in life was a
guideline to action and the only place from which to start.

As Swamiji defined it, one's duty was, briefly, "to do that work
which will exalt and ennoble us in accordance with the ideals and
activities of the society in which we are born" 59-- and of course, in
accordance with one's position in that society at any particular
time. To do one's duty as so defined and to do it with forbearance,
without complaint, with courage, without any sense that one's
own position is inferior or superior to that of others, and above all
to do it with progressive unselfishness prepared the moral
foundation for the real practice of karma yoga. And lest the
worms of self righteousness and fanaticism undermine the whole
structure, Swamiji made it clear that while one's duty was to do
good to the world " the world does not require our help at all." 60
Moreover, "no permanent or everlasting good can be done to the
world. . . . The sum total of the good things in the world has been
the same throughout in its relation to man's need and greed. It
cannot be increased or decreased." 61 "Let us give up all this
foolish talk of doing good to the world," he said. "It is not waiting
for your or my help; yet we must work and constantly do good,
because it is a blessing to ourselves."62

By working in this way, readily doing whatever happens to be our

duty, "we shall find that even this idea of duty undergoes change,
and that the greatest work is done only when there is no selfish
motive to prompt it."63 It was when "the tentacle of selfishness"
began to lose its grip that the
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karma yogi threw all idea of duty overboard-and with it all idea of
reward or praise or recognition on earth or in heaven.

"Be not compelled," Swamiji charged his advanced students.

"Why should you be compelled? Everything that you do under
compulsion goes to build up attachment."94 And in his last
beginners class: "The Karma-Yogi asks why you require any
motive to work other than the inborn love of freedom. Be beyond
the common worldly motives. . . . Let us do good because it is
good to do good; he who does good work even in order to get to
heaven binds himself down, says the Karma-Yogi. Any work that
is done with the least selfish motive, instead of making us free,
forges one more chain for our feet. So the only way is to give up
all the fruits of work, to be unattached to them."65

In his four advanced karma yoga classes (see chapter five, page
351 ) Swamiji explained in detail the rationale behind
nonattached action and the method of achieving it. He did not
present this yoga as an easy path to freedom-"To attain this
unattachment is almost a life-work,"66 he said-but he charted the
way, speaking as Sri Krishna had done more than three millennia
before him, not for those rare souls "who are perfectly satisfied
with the Self, whose desires do not go beyond the Self, whose
mind never strays out of the Self, to whom the Self is all in all" 67-
but for those who "stand inside (the world-machine) and learn the
secret of work."68

As has been seen earlier we can say with certainty that the first
eight chapters of Raja-yoga consist of Swamiji's beginners classes
and that his "Yoga Aphorisms" are his advanced (morning)
classes. As he wrote to Mr. Sturdy, the original transcripts were
"much altered and rearranged" 69 for publication, but however that
may have been, Raja-Yoga as it stands today forms a systematic,
step-by-step course in "controlling nature, external and internal"
to the end of perceiving and manifesting "Him who is beyond all
darkness."

"The teachers of the science of Yoga," Swamiji told his

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Class, “. . . declare that religion is not only based upon the

experience of ancient times, but that no man can be religious until
he has the same perceptions himself. Yoga is the science which
teaches us how to get these perceptions.” 70 Like karma yoga in its
unmixed form, this science of raja yoga “ never asks the question
what our religion is, whether we are Deists or Atheists, whether
Christians, Jews, or Buddhists. We are human beings; that is
sufficient.”71 During his Saturday evening raja yoga classes,
Swamiji explained the meaning and rationale of each step of the
way, from the essential moral disciplines, through breathing
exercises, to mental control, to concentration and deep
meditation, and finally to the superconsious state of samadhi. This
was a science in which the mind deals with the mind itself, probes
deeper and deeper into its own secrets, lifts itself, probes deeper
and deeper into its own secrets, lifts itself to higher and yet higher
levels of awareness, generates more and more power, discovers
subtler and yet subtler states of reality, until, at length, utterly
concentrated and still, it dissolves in the transcendent light of the
Purusha, the Self. The long journey of the soul was to be
undertaken methodically, deliberately, and without recourse to
any outside, supernatural power whatsoever. As psychic and
spiritual states and phenomena passed by, as it were, in review,
Swamiji showed them all to be natural—not supernatural, but
contained within man from the start and made now to unfold
quickly, as though evolution had been speeded up a thousandfold.

One of Swamiji’s purposes in explaining the rationale of raja

yoga—“one of the grandest of sciences”—was to divest it of the
clouds of mystery that had enshrouded it and that had, as he said,
well-nigh destroyed it. He not only explained its steps, as far as
possible, in the light of the most advanced psychological and
physiological knowledge of that age, but pointed out that the
science of religion was as clear cut, as empirical, as rational, and
as capable of verification as any science of the external world.
Like each of the physical sciences, it had the instruments and
methods appropriate to it; it had
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its own verifiable discoveries and was open to the experimenta-

tion of anyone willing to learn the relevant techniques and
disciplines. How much training in actual practice Swamiji gave in
his classes we cannot know. Perhaps he gave more than the brief
and simple instructions in pranayama that one finds in the book
Raja--''Yoga, which he himself edited. Surely he gave instruction
in meditation and encouraged its practice in his presence. His
emphasis was ever on practice in all the yogas, hard, steady
practice. And in connection specifically with raja yoga he insisted
that "practice is absolutely necessary." "You may sit down and
listen to me by the hour every day, but if you do not practise, you
will not get one step further. It all depends on practice." 72 It is
probable, then, that he gave detailed instruction in his actual
classes, later eliminating some of it from his book and warning in
his Preface, "Yoga can only be safely learnt by direct contact with
a teacher."73 But the book he left behind is today an invaluable
guide not only for those in the Western world who, in search of
new frontiers of reality, are turning the mind's searchlight of
inquiry into the mind itself and there beginning to discover
undreamt of powers, but also, and more particularly, for those
who are discovering the immense spiritual value of meditation.
Swamiji's sane, rational delineation of the inner territory of the
mind, which had long since been thoroughly explored and charted
by India's ancient sages, but which was known to the West only
through the mystifying jargon of occultism, could save the
Western experimenter many years of stumbling trial and error.
Swamiji's primary intent in Raja--Yoga, however, seems to have
been to untangle the then prevailing confusion between psychic
and spiritual phenomena and to put both on a basis acceptable to
the rational mind of the West, or, rather, to expand that mind a bit
to include more in its scope than the outermost skin of reality.
Thus, though he may have judiciously edited out of Raja-Yoga a
good deal of practical instruction, his book stands as a monument
of religious science.
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Swamiji’s advanced jnana yoga classes were, in a sense ,closely

related to those on raja yoga, for the philosophy of Patanjali’s
Yoga is almost identical with the Sankhya philosophy of kapila,
which is, in turn, a sort of springboard for Vedanta-one that
Swamiji made use of to reach the great heights of Advaita.

But let us speak first of his beginners jnana yoga classes, which
were faithfully transcribed by Mr. Goodwin, but not published
until years later and not identified until now. Through Miss Waldo
and Sister Devamata three of Goodwin's transcriptions of the
January classes found their way, without exact identification, into
the pages of The Message of the East, a monthly magazine
published by the Vedanta Centre of Boston (founded by Swami
Paramananda in 1909) and thence into volume two of the
Complete Works. Fortunately, the transcripts themselves still
exist, and through the kindness of the Vedanta Centre (whose
headquarters are now in Cohasset, Massachusetts) they have been
made available to this book. Since these transcripts are clearly
dated, even as to time of day, it is now possible to identify
Swamiji's beginners jnana yoga classes in the Complete Works
and to determine their chronological order. As we have seen in the
previous chapter (page 357), the first two beginners classes, held
on the evenings of December 11 and 18, were, respectively, the
unpublished "First Step towards Jnana" and the published "Steps
to Realisation"; the classes that followed on the Wednesday
evenings of January were "The Atman: Its Bondage and
Freedom," January 8; "Soul, Nature, and God," January 15; "The
Way to Blessedness," January 22; and on January 29 a heretofore
unpublished class on the Mundaka Upanishad, of which we shall
say more later.
Swamiji opened the first of these January jnana yoga classes with
the words (as given in Goodwin's transcript) : "We have talked of
nityanitya-viveka, discriminating that which is real from
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the unreal."74 This was no doubt a reference to his class of

December 18, "Steps to Realisation," in which, as mentioned
earlier, he had discussed the requisite disciplines of jnana yoga-
the six steps of sensory and mental control; intense desire for
freedom; and discrimination between the Real and the unreal. (He
had insisted upon the necessity for renunciation in the preceding
class of December 11.) Now in "The Atman: Its Bondage and
Freedom" he began a philosophical discussion of Vedanta,
starting with the dualistic idea that "each man consists of three
parts-the body, the internal organ or the mind, and behind that,
what is called the Atman, the Self." "The Atman," he said, "is the
only existence in the human body which is immaterial. . . . [It] is
omnipresent. . . . But the Self acts through the mind and the body,
and where they are, its action is visible." 75 What one's body and
mind are, and why they are what they are, was, by and large, the
theme of this class. Their condition at any given time, Swamiji
said, was entirely due to the tremendous force of samskaras-the
impressions made upon the mind through one's own thoughts and
actions, good and bad. Samskaras, the sum total of which
determines a person's character, compel the soul (or the mind) to
transmigrate through life after life, taking on and manifesting
through one body after another. "A man dies," he said; "the body
falls away and goes back to the elements; but the Samskaras
remain, adhering to the mind which, being made of fine material,
does not dissolve, because the finer the material, the more
persistent it is. But the mind also dissolves in the long run, and
that is what we are struggling for." 76 He used here the vivid
analogy of the whirlwind-a force that gathers bits of matter
(body) around itself as it rotates on and on. Until the force of
samskara is finally spent, "the Atman is covered by the whirl of
the mind and imagines it is being taken from place to place," 77
from one life to another, each of which is determined by the
power of our acts and thoughts in previous lives.
But (in another metaphor) the long chain of life and death
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is really a circle that inevitably returns to its starting point in

Brahman.

All this universe was in Brahman, and it was, as it were, projected

out of Him, and being turned out, it has moved forward and
forward. But what is meant by that forward movement? At last we
find it was moving in a circle, and comes back to the point from
which it was projected. So with this force which we call soul,
which for the time being we will assume is a force projected out
from God; later on we will find what it really is. This being
projected, it came out through all sorts of vegetable and animal
forms, and at last it is in man, and is about the furthest curve of
the circle, the nearest link to God. To come back to the point from
which we have been projected is the great struggle of life.
Whether people know it or not does not matter. . . . All social
struggles, wars and fights, human struggles, and competitions, in
plant life, animal life, and; everywhere, are but the expressions of
that eternal struggle ' to get back to this equilibrium. 78

But if the circle is bound to come round of its own accord, why
should we struggle ? "If everyone is going to be free " Swamiji
said, "we will sit down and wait. That is true. Every being will
become free sooner or later; no one can be lost." 79 But there were
two reasons that we struggle. "In the first ace," he said, "these
struggles are the very factor that will bring us to the centre, and in
the second place, we do not know why we struggle. We have
to."80 Here Swamiji likened the cycle of evolution to the giant
Ferris wheel that he had watched revolving at the Chicago Fair,
and he went on to say first what seems to have been a detour) :

. . . When you enter into one of the carriages of the Ferris wheel
you are bound by the conditions of the wheel, but when you come
out you are free. So whosoever has
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come into this wheel of nature for him to talk of freedom is

nonsense; it cannot be. The law of causation rules us, and when
we see that it is the law of causation what can we do? Why preach
religion, and why struggle to do something higher and all that?
That may be a natural question, but it is a wrong one, because it
takes for granted that one [person] is bound by law and another is
not. If you say, "Why do you preach to us?" I answer, "Because I
too am bound by laws, and have to work under laws, as I am
doing." The relation does not change, as we are all in the same
position. We are all in this room; my distance from you is about
four feet. If this room moves, the distance between us would not
change. That is to say, we are both changed, but the relation will
not change, so there will still be four feet between us. If all are
bound, the relation will not change. A thief is brought before a
magistrate, and the thief says, "Why should you punish me? It
was by the laws of nature that I was forced to steal; it was not I."
The magistrate replies, "The same laws of nature compel me to
punish you, my friend." What is the motive power of all our
actions ? The desire, the thirst. We desire, want something, and
we are struggling to fulfill that want. So long as there is a want, it
is a sure sign that there is imperfection. all

During the course of this discussion, Swamiji brought in the

related subject of recurring cosmic cycles. This passage, which
was mentioned earlier as being a detour of sorts, seems in some
places to be clearer in Goodwin's transcript than in the Complete
Works, and because of its great interest, I have quoted pertinent
portions of it in Appendix B as they appear in the transcript.

Swamiji began his next beginners jnana yoga class, "Soul, Nature,
and God," with the same statement that each man consists of three
substances, so to say-the gross body, the subtle body,* and the
Self. He analyzed the process of perception
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(as he would do in his public lecture "The Microcosm"), tracing it

back to the Self, "the ruler of all these instruments [the senses and
the mind], the master in the house, the enthroned king in this
body."82 He then went on to compare the structure of the whole
universe with that of the individual, the macrocosm being built on
the same plan as the microcosm. Thus he posited the existence of
God. "We have three entities ", he said. "Here is nature which is
infinite, but changeable. . . . Then there is God, unchangeable, the
ruler; and there is the soul, unchangeable as God, eternal, but
under the ruler. One is the master, the other the servant, and the
third one is nature."83 Swamiji then described the relationship
between these three entities according to the dualistic and
qualified monistic views. At the end of this class he touched upon
the monistic view, for it was that to which he was leading, but he
did not here enter into it.

It was in his last two beginners classes that his exposition of

Advaita Vedanta reached its culmination. The first, published in
volume two of the Complete Works as "The Way to Blessedness,"
was his free translation of and running commentary on many
verses of the katha Upanishad-almost all of the first, second, and
third cantos of part one and those verses from parts two and three
that highlighted the line of thought in which the philosophy of the
Self was developed. Summing up, Swamiji carried forward the
view of qualified monism to its logical conclusion in monism,
where the Self, the One Being, stands free; where there is no
coming and going for the soul, no transmigration at all, no
dependence, and no law.

This is the one fundamental idea in the Vedas [he said], that our
search in the stars, the nebulas, the Milky Way, in the whole of
this external universe leads to nothing, never solves the problem
of life and death. The wonderful mechanism inside had to be
analysed, and it revealed to [the Vedic Aryans] the secret of the
universe; nor star
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or sun could do it. Man had to be anatomised; not the body, but
the soul of man. In that soul they found the answer. What was the
answer they found ? That behind the body, behind even the mind,
there is the self existent real man. He dies not, nor is He born. The
self existent One is omnipresent, because He has no form. That
which has no form or shape, that which is not limited by space or
time, cannot live in a certain place. How can it? It is everywhere,
omnipresent, equally present through all of us....

. . . Now, we know that the universal Soul is infinite. How can

infinity have parts? How can it be broken up, divided? It may be
very poetic to say that I am a spark of the Infinite, but it is absurd
to the thinking mind. What is meant by dividing Infinity? Is it
something material that you can slash it or hack it into pieces?
Infinite can never be divided. If that were possible, it would be no
more Infinite. What is the conclusion then? The answer is, that
Soul which is the universal is you; you are not a part but the
whole of It. You are the whole and the all of God. . . . As Self,
there is only one in the universe. It is in me and you, and is only
one; and that one Self has been reflected in all these various
bodies as various different selves. But we do not know this; we
think we are separate from each other and separate from Him.
And so long as we think this, misery will be in the world. This is
hallucination.84

As was said earlier, Goodwin's transcript of Swamiji's next and

last beginners class in jnana yoga has not been heretofore
published. It comprises Swamiji's commentary on the Mundaka
Upanishad, in which the knowledge of the Self is extolled above
all other knowledge and the path of renunciation above all other
paths. Mr. Goodwin's transcript is given in full in Appendix C, but
let us quote here a portion of Swamiji's commentary on canto two
of part three:
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. . . Two things exist in the world, dream and reality. What we call
life is a succession of dreams, dream within dream. One dream is
called heaven, another earth, another hell, and so on. One dream
is called the human body, another animal body, and so on; all are
dreams. The reality is what is called Brahman, that Being who is
Existence, Knowledge, Bliss. . . . When we desire we are
hypnotising ourselves. Just as I desire I will go to heaven, that
hypnotises me, and I begin to find I am in heaven directly I die,
and will see angels and all sorts of things. I have seen about fifty
people who have come from death's door, and they a have told me
stories about being in heaven. These are the mythologies of our
country, and it shows that it is all hypnotism. Where Western
people make a great mistake is here. So far as you have these
ideas [that] heaven and hell [are not real] we agree with you, but
you say this earth is real. That cannot be. If this is real, heavens
and hells are real, because the proof of each of these is the same,
and if one is a hypnotic condition, the whole of it must be. So
Vedantists say that not only are heavens hypnotic, but so is this
life and everything here. Some people want to go from one
hypnotic condition to another, and these are what we call the fools
of the world, the samsaris, the travellers who go from dream to
dream, from one hypnotic trance to another. . . . The Vedanta
philosophy says that this whole universe, mental, physical, moral
is hypnotic. Who is the cause of this hypnotism? You yourself are
to blame. This weeping and wailing, and knocking your heads
into corners will not do you the least good. This knocking
everything on the head is what is called non-attachment, and
clinging on to more and more hypnotism is attachment. That is
why, in all religions, you will find they wanted to give up the
world, although many of them do not understand it. . . . You have
heard those wonderful stories of India, of how those magicians
can make a man
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see a rope rise from the ground to the skies. I have not seen one of
them. One of the Mogul Emperors, Jahangir, mentions it. . . . He
said, "Allah, what do these devils do? They take a rope or a chain,
and the chain is thrown up and up, until it becomes firm, as if it
were stuck to something. Then he lets a cat go up the chain, then a
dog, then a wolf, then a tiger, then a lion. All walk up the chain
and vanish. Sometimes they will send men up the chain. Two men
will go up and begin to fight, and then both of them vanish and
after a while you hear a noise of fighting, and a head, a hand, and
a foot fall, and, mind you, there are two or three thousand people
present. The fellow showing it has only a loincloth on." They say
this is hypnotism, throwing a net over the audience. That is what
they call their science. It exists in a certain limit, but if you go
beyond this limit, or come within it, you do not see it. The man
who is playing does not see anything. So if you stand near him
you do not see anything. Such is the hypnotism here. So we have
first to get beyond the circle, jnana, or stand within the circle of
the hypnotism, bhakti, with God, the great player who is playing
ail these things: the whole universe he projects. Chapter after
chapter comes and goes. This is called Maya, the power which
creates all these tremendous things, and he who is the ruler of this
Maya is God. . . . Just as in the case of that chain-the man who
was standing in the centre had the power and was not deluded, but
all that audience was governed by Maya. So that portion of
Atman which rules Maya is called God, and the little bits of the
Atman deluded by it are called souls-you and I. The bhakta says
crawl nearer and nearer to the hypnotist, and when you get to the
centre you do not see anything. You get clear of it. The jnani does
not care to undergo all this trouble-it is a dangerous way. Unless a
man becomes a lunatic, when he finds himself covered with mud
will he take more mud to wash himself? So why increase the
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hypnotism? Get out of the circle: cut it off and be free. When you
are free you will be able to play, even without being caught
yourself. Now you are caught: then you will catch; that will be all
the difference.85

As far as we know, this passage constituted Swamiji's first long

discussion of Maya in his New York classes and lectures. And
here, of course, lay the true rationale behind the path of
renunciation, the philosophy to which he had been leading all
along in his lectures and classes alike: "You are under this
hypnotism, and so long as you are in it you will have to see God,
and nature, and the soul, and when you are beyond this hypnotism
God will vanish, and so will nature, and so will the soul. . . . The
thing manifested, the universal being, is not anything of these;
these are all nonsense, Maya, but that upon which all these things
are being played, the background upon which all this picture is
written-we are one with Him."86

Even as Swamiji's beginners jnana yoga class was a step-by-step

exposition of Vedanta, his advanced class, which he had begun in
December and had been holding every Wednesday morning in
January and which he would continue to hold on two Wednesdays
in February, was also a ladder to Advaita, though of a different
sort. Indeed, seven of these advanced classes constitute a
masterpiece of Sankhya-Vedanta exposition, and it was very
likely to them that Miss Waldo referred when she wrote in 1905
"The New York lectures on jnana-yoga have never been
published, although they are among the finest Swami ever
gave."87 Two years later, probably at her urging, the classes were
brought out in book form by the New York Vedanta Society under
the title Jnana Yoga-Part II, and a year later in Calcutta as The
Science and Philosophy of Religion, with a preface by Swami
Saradananda. In both editions the classes are introduced by a
chapter consisting of excerpts from Swamiji's lecture "The Claims
of Religion; Its Truth and Utility," which, as seen earlier, he had
delivered on Sunday, January 5, and which was not a class at all.
(Their actual
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introduction may well have been "Introduction to Jnana Yoga,"

which was very probably a pre-Goodwin class held on the
morning of December 11, 1895)* But however that may be, it is, I
believe, safe to say that The Science and Philosophy of Religion is
the long-delayed fourth of the "four little text books" that Swamiji
had had in mind as fruit of this season's work. It was the Jnana-
Yoga that would have formed a set with Raja-Bhakti-, and karma-
Yoga. According to the "Editor's Preface" to the New York edition
of 1907 (the editor at that time was Sister Devamata),** "the
purely philosophical character [of these lectures] made it doubtful
as to whether they would appeal to the general public, and for that
reason they were not brought out in book form at once."

Throughout his advanced jnana yoga class, Swamiji's purpose

was to present in clear language the classical philosophical
explanation of the highest truth discovered long ago by Indian
seers through superconscious perception. To Swamiji, as to all
Indian sages and teachers, philosophy was not an attempt to find
truth through rational inquiry; rather, it was the attempt to explain
in rational terms the suprarational truths discovered through
experience and thereby to guide others through a rational process
to an attainment of the same experience. Reason was essential to
the practice of jnana yoga, the followers of which must first be
intellectually convinced of the transcendental reality that they
seek to know-or more accurately, that they are. But one thinks
that Swamiji was also laying before everyone, jnani or not, the
highest of all truth the Oneness of Existence-in terms acceptable
to the modern West, the terms of reason. This experience of unity,
of oneself as the One, was not the goal of the jnani alone; it was
the ultimate goal of every human being, whatever his path.

And yet this class was of course primarily a class in the path of
jnana-of knowledge. He began with an exposition of the Sankhya
cosmology and psychology of Kapila, "the father of Hindu
evolutionists," who is said to have lived before the Sixth century
B.C. This was the classic approach to jnana yoga,
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for it discriminated at the very outset between the Self and the
non-Self, or, in the terminology of Sankhya, between Prakriti
(nature) and Purusha (the conscious principle). But . in presenting
the Sankhya cosmology (which Vedanta, up to a point; adopted)
Swamiji also had another purpose in mind. He wished to show the
parallelism between the findings and theories of modern physics
(as then known) and the facts about the universe perceived in
supersensory vision by the ancient seers, demonstrating thereby
that "the real, essential parts of psychology (by which he meant
here "the truths gathered from internal experience"] are in perfect
accord with the essential parts of modern physical knowledge." 88
"Real truth in any field of knowledge," he said, "will not
contradict itself."89 To reconcile religion (or truths perceived
through superconscious experience) with science (truths gathered
through experience of the physical world) was one of Swamiji's
primary interests during this period of his teaching; for just as in
'India every philosophical proposition or spiritual claim stood or
fell by the Vedas, so in the modern West it stood or fell according
to its agreement or disagreement with scientific knowledge. "In
the first place," Swamiji said in one of his first classes (that of
December 18), "let us go over the psychological and scientific
ideas of the Orientals as to Cosmology and all that pertains to it,
and we shall find how wonderfully it is in accordance with all the
latest discoveries of modern science; and when there is anything
lacking, we shall find that it is on the side of modern science." 90
But in 1896 a very great deal was lacking on the side of science.
The subtle analysis of matter and mind, with which the Sankhya
philosophy had so thoroughly dealt had not yet even begun in the
West. The electron, for instance, was not to be identified until the
following year: the interchangeability between matter and energy
was unsuspected; time and space were still considered to be
absolutes; psychology was still a branch of philosophy, and
although William James's monumental Principles of Psychology
(published in 1890) bore out Kapila's psychology up to a point,
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it stopped far short of tracing the miracles of perception and

action, of thought and will back to their finer and yet finer forms.
In short, all branches of nineteenth-century science were still
bulldozing over the surface of the universe, into the unfathomable
depths of which the ancient sages of India had peered with the
exquisitely tuned instrument of the illumined mind. "How fine
their perception was," Swamiji exclaimed, "how perfect their
analysis and how wonderful!"91 The knowledge that Western
science had so far turned up was indeed, as Newton had
understood, only a pebble on the shore of the great ocean of truth.
But however that might have been, both science and religion were
attempts to seek the explanation of things through an exploration
of the nature of the things themselves. The former deals, by
definition, with the nature of the material universe, so called; the
latter deals with the subtle realm of the mind in which the
universe is perceived and known and explores far deeper into the
"nature of things" than does science. In this sense, religion, as
Swamiji saw it, was an extension of science. Just as matter and
mind could be said to form a continuum, so the disciplines of
science and religion could be said to form a continuum of man's
exploration of the same reality. One of Swamiji's main efforts at
this period was, then, not so much to point out a detailed parallel
between the findings of modern science and those of Indian
cosmology and psychology, as to show that the external world
and the internal world were not separate, that "the gross melts into
the fine, physics into metaphysics, in every department of
knowledge." Nor, as he pointed out in his class on raja yoga, was
metaphysics a vague discipline. Religious inquiry, following the
internal path, using the methods and instruments appropriate to its
own field, testing its findings by reason, verifying its reasoning
by experience, was a science in its own right. Moreover, like the
external or physical sciences, it moved toward broader and
broader generalizations, until at length an (or the) all-embracing
principle was reached.

But while Swamiji made a special effort to show that science

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and religion are not in contradiction to one another but "each

rests on truth, and . . . the truths internal are in harmony with the
truths external," his primary effort in his jnana yoga class was to
put forward the philosophical, rational explanation of the truths
discovered through the superconscious experiences of ancient
Indian sages. He wanted to drive home those truths, to make them
dynamic parts of the minds and hearts of his students. To do this,
he had to make them intellectually acceptable to the best of
Western thought as well as compatible with and relevant to the
Western time-spirit, the inexorable ground swells of modern
Western culture. Although he did not deviate from the orthodox
Indian methods of exposition, and certainly never from the
Upanishads, he yet made these ancient teachings, long dormant
and unavailable, glow with new life.

Even as he had introduced the Vedanta philosophy in his public

lectures with a general explanation of Vedantic (or, generally
speaking, Sankhya) cosmology, so he began his advanced jnana
yoga classes with a detailed exposition of Sankhya cosmology
and psychology. This was a particularly difficult subject for those
brought up in Western thought. Indeed, the principles most
important to Indian thought were the very ones most foreign to
the West. These were the related principles, or concepts, that ( 1 )
matter is an evolute of mind (Mahat) and (2) that mind is a finer
form of matter and quite different from Spirit. "It is very hard to
grasp it [that matter evolves in stages out of mind]," Swamiji told
his class, "because in Western countries the ideas are so queer
about mind and matter. It is hard to take these impressions out of
our brains. I myself had tremendous difficulty," he added, "being
educated in Western philosophy in my childhood." 92 Although, as
he pointed out, the equivalence of mind and matter was in accord
with the ideas of the modern materialists, the Indian concept that
"mind is but matter in a finer form"93 was in radical opposition to
the ingrained Judeo-Christian tendency to equate mind with soul.
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Swamiji took great pains to make this and other startling concepts
clear to his class before demolishing the dualism of the Sankhya
system in its higher reaches. Again and again he went over the
steps of cosmic evolution; he traced it backward and forward-
backward through the psychological mechanism of perception,
forward through the steps of "creation"; again and again he
explained the important point that an effect was always the cause
in a more gross form, or, conversely, the "cause is the more subtle
state of the manifested state"; 94 all gross things are the results of
fine ones. He discussed the agreements and disagreements
between Sankhya and Western philosophy; he pressed home
Sankhya's epistemological implications; he clarified the place of
will in the cosmic scheme-a place not at all fundamental-and he
pointed out how very small a portion of reality comes within the
range of our consciousness.

7
In one line of reasoning, the Sankhya scheme of cosmology is the
logical starting point of the Vedanta philosophy. It begins with the
gross world as it is grossly perceived-that is to say, it starts,
realistically, with the given, with what is real to an ordinary
human being-and traces it back and back to its origins, which it
conceives of as an ultimate duality. Vedanta takes over from
there: In his advanced jnana yoga classes Swamiji traced the
complete progress of this train of thought, and although the small
book comprising those classes is readily available, it may not be
amiss here to remind the reader of his presentation of Sankhya
cosmology and of the resolution of its dualism in the highest
Vedantic knowledge. We need not trace in much detail the
cosmological scheme of the Sankhya-the evolution of the
universe from an undifferentiated and static primordial state
(avyaktam) to the gross matter we perceive, on the one hand, and
on the other, to the mind and senses by which we perceive it. It
will suffice here to quote some of Swamiji's summarizing
paragraphs.
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According to the Sankhya philosophy [he said in his third class,

"Sankhya and Advaita"*], Prakriti is the cause of all these
manifestations which we call thought, intellect and reason, love,
hatred, touch and taste; . . . everything is from Prakriti. This
Prakriti consists of three sorts of elements [gunas], one called
sattva, another rajas, and the third tamas. These are not qualities,
but the materials out of which the whole universe is being
evolved, and at the beginning of a cycle they remain in
equilibrium. When creation comes this equilibrium is disturbed
and these elements begin to combine and recombine and manifest
as the universe.l

The first manifestation of this Prakriti in the cosmos [Swamiji had

said in his previous class] is what the Sankhyas call Mahat. We
may call it universal intelligence-the great principle; . . . It covers
all the grounds of consciousness, subconsciousness, and
superconsciousness. . . . Out of this Mahat comes the universal
egoism, and these [Mahat and egoism, or ahamkara] are both
material.There is no difference between matter and mind save in
degree. . . . And that egoism changes into two varieties:'' In one
variety it changes into the organs. Organs are of two kinds,
organs of sensation and organs of reaction. . . . Out of the same
substance, the egoism, is manufactured another fine form, the
tanmatras, fine particles of matter. . . . And out of the tanmatras,
or subtle matter, is manufactured the gross matter-air, water,
earth, and all the things that we see and feel.

....That is the cosmic plan, according to the Sankhyas, and what is

in the cosmos or macrocosm must be in the individual or
microcosm.

Take an individual man. He has first .a part of undifferentiated

nature in him, and that material nature in him becomes changed
into Mahat--a small particle of the universal intelligence, and that
small particle of the universal intelligence in him becomes
changed into egoism--a particle of the universal egoism. This
egoism in turn becomes changed into
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Egoism – a particle of the universal egosim. This egoism in turn

becomes changed into the sense-organs and the tanmatras, and out
of the latter combining he manufactures his world, his body. I
want this to be clear, because it is the first stepping-stone to
Vedanta, and ii is absolutely necessary for you to know. 2

Swamiji had touched on the profound significance of this point in

his first class :

...It is impossible, according to the Sankhyas, for any material

thing to exist which has not as its material some portion of
consciousness ["consciousness" here means mind]. Consciousness
is the material out of which manifestations are made. . . . I do not
know this table as it is, but it makes an impression; it comes to the
eye, then to the indriyas, and then to the mind; the mind then
reacts, and that reaction is what I call the table. It is just the same
as throwing a stone into a lake; the lake throws a wave against the
stone; this wave is what we know. The waves coming out are all
we know. . . .

The question is, how do we all see the same things? Because we
all have a part of this cosmic mind.3

As Swamiji had pointed out a little earlier in this same class,

Sankhya psychology was; in effect, akin to the philosophy of the
European idealists.

. . . Some European philosophers have asserted that this world

exists because "I" exist, and if "I" do not exist, the world will not
exist. . . . But these European philosophers do not know the
psychology of it, although they know the principle; they have
only a glimpse of it.4

The psychology of it was that the perceiving organs and the

perceived objects were two sides of the same coin-the "I"
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or ego-consciousness, the ahamkara. In other words, the

perceived world, the universe as it is known to us, is an outward
correlate of the inner sense organs; both are evolutes of egoism,
which in turn stems from Mahat. And all this is in Prakriti.

The detailed evolutionary steps of Prakriti, with its Sanskrit terms

and non-Western concepts, must have caused many unaccustomed
brains to spin, and it is very likely that Swamiji had a blackboard
in his classroom on which he drew charts; Indeed, in one class he
cites "a blackboard" as an object d perception--an object not
likely to come to mind as an example unless it looms before the
eye. But the Sankhya cosmology and psychology led to
conclusions to which even chalk and blackboard could not have
done justice. Let us here interrupt Swamiji's class to present a
heretofore unpublished and undated one-page manuscript that has
bearing on this subject and that has recently come to light.* Some
of the ideas that Swamiji ' here noted down give a stunning-
indeed staggering-picture of the creative interaction of individual
minds. This was not subjective idealism, or solipsism, or realism;
it was a description ' of the play of Prakriti, "the eternal
phenomenal net," of which "inside" and "outside"-mind and
matter-were simply inter-reacting states. Swamiji wrote:

My nerves act on my brain-the brain sends back reaction which

on the mental side is this world.

Something x acts on the brain through the nerves, t reaction is this

world.

Why not they be also in the body-why outside? Because we find

the already created outside world (as t result of a previous
reaction of the brain) act [s] on us calling on a farther reaction.

Thus inside becomes outside & creates another action which

interior action created another reaction, which again becomes
outside and again acts inside.

The only way of reconciling between idealism and realism is to

hold that one brain can be affected by the
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world created as reaction by another brain from inside, i.e., the

mixture x + mind which one brain throws out can affect another[,]
to which it's external[,] similarly.

Therefore as soon as we come within the influence of this

hypnotic circle or influence created by hundreds of preceding
brains we begin to feel this world as they see.

Mind is only a phase of matter, i.e., of the ever-changing

phenomena of which matter & mind are different states or views.
There must be something in whose presence this eternal
phenomenal net is spread-that is the Substance, the Brahman. 5

To return to Swamiji's class, in which matters were comparatively

simple: He explained again and again that Prakriti is jada
(insentient). It is working under law; it is all compound and
insentient. Mind, intelligence, and will, all are insentient." 6 The
whole universe, gross and subtle, and the whole process of
knowing the universe, have all evolved from that mass of primal
stuff called avyaktam. It evolves and involves eternally vast
machine, a continuously changing and marvelously fashioned
kaleidoscope of gunas, endlessly shifting, endlessly mysterious,
for in its subtle reaches it is far, far beyond the scope of ordinary
human consciousness and reason. Many layered and wondrously
wrought, it is everything that man can ever know-happiness,
misery, life, death; indeed, it is the creating and knowing mind
itself in all its modes, all its depths and heights, its powers, and its
infinite extent-subconscious, conscious, and superconscious.
Prakriti is everything -and yet, it is nothing; it is a compound
through and through, no part of it is free; nor, for all its dazzle and
grand display, is its light its own. In itself, Prakriti is dead.

This was one side of the picture presented by the Sankhya

philosophy. But there had to be another side, for while Prakriti by
itself has no light, "we find reason and intelligence in it."
"Therefore," Swamiji pointed out, "there must be some Existence
behind it . . . whose light is percolating through it
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and appearing as Mahat and consciousness and all these various

things, and this Existence is what Kapila calls the Purusha, . . and
the Vedantist-Self."7

According to Sankhya, there are an infinite number of Purushas,

as many as there are conscious beings, and each, being immaterial
and simple, is infinite and omnipresent. In his second and third
classes Swamiji spoke at some length about the Purusha,
describing it more in terms of what it was not than of what it was,
for it is necessarily beyond description. It is entirely different
from Prakriti, out of which all concepts and words are formed; it
is unchanging and uncaused; it is the "unwitting cause" of all the
changes going on in Prakriti. But it is not any part of, or involved
in, Prakriti; "it is neither intelligence nor Buddhi (will), but yet it
is the cause of both these; it is His [Purusha's] presence that sets
them all vibrating and combining."8 Indeed, Purusha, aloof and
serene, might be likened to the light of a magic lantern, whose
mere shining produces an infinitely varied play, and without
which there is nothing. ``This Purusha is not consciousness,"
Swamiji went on to explain, "because consciousness is a
compound, but whatever'' is radiant and good in this
consciousness belongs to it. . . . All the joy and happiness and
light in the universe belongs to the Purusha, but [that joy etc.] is a
compound because it is that Purusha plus Prakriti."9

The difficulty-the primordial human difficulty-is that Purusha,

infinite, unchanging, entirely luminous and pure, has somehow
identified itself with Prakriti:

It thinks "I am the Linga Sharira [the subtle body],* it thinks "I
am the gross matter, the gross body," and as such is enjoying
pleasure and pain; but these do not really belong to the soul, they
belong to this Linga Sharira and to the gross body. . . . The soul
has neither pleasure nor pain; it is the Witness of everything, the
eternal Witness of things that are going on, but it takes no fruits
from any work.10

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#
Why Prakriti? Why all this evolving and involving, which
according to Sankhya is real and everlasting? It is said that
Prakriti goes through this dance time without end so that the
individual soul, experiencing all the arabesques and pirouettes of
fortune, from the most gross to the most refined, will at last
discover "that it never was in Prakriti but was entirely sepasate."11
Swamiji does not linger on this explanation of why Prakriti exists,
and neither need we, for at this point enters the lion of Advaita
Vedanta, quietly at first, later roaring.

"So far so good," Swamiji had said. "[Kapila's] psychology is

clear and most precise, and just think of the age of it, the oldest
rational thought in the world ! . . . But we shall have to differ with
him on some points as we go on."12

First, that [according to the Sankhya] intelligence or anything of

that sort does not belong to the soul, but that it belongs entirely to
Prakriti, the soul being simply qualitiless, colourless. The second
point is that there is no God, and Vedanta will show that without a
God there cannot be any explanation whatever. Thirdly, we shall
have to contend that there cannot be-many souls, that there cannot
be an infinite number of them, that there is only one soul in the
universe and that one is appearing as many.l3

"We will take the first proposition," Swamiji went on, "that
intelligence and reason belong entirely to Prakriti, and not to the
soul."14 He referred back to the Sankhya-Yoga concept of
perception, in which the chitta (mind-stuff) reacting to stimulus
throws out waves, which produce the world we see. But what the
original stimulus actually is we can never know. "It is what the
German philosophers call the `thing-in-itself.' " 15 Swamiji calls
the stimulus from outside "x". The combination of this "x'' plus
mind is our external universe.

Similarly in internal perception, when we want to know

ourselves. The real Self, which is within us, is also
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unknown and unknowable. Let us call it "y". When I want to

know myself as Mrs. so-and-so, the "y" has to appear as "y" plus
the mind. . . . [So] all internal knowledge is a combination of "y"
plus the mind. . . . So the intelligence that we know is a
compound of the power of the light of the soul plus nature.
Similarly, the existence which we know must be a compound of
"x" plus the mind [nature].

We find . . . that in [the] three factors-I exist, I know, and I am

blessed (the idea that I have no want, which comes from time to
time)-is the central idea, the grand basic idea of our life. . . .
These factors manifest as existence phenomenal, knowledge
phenomenal, and love phenomenal. . . . This existence which we
know is a compound of "x" and the mind, and knowledge is a
compound of that "y" inside plus mind, and that love also is a
compound of the "y" and mind. . . . These three factors I exist, I
know, and I am blessed), which come from inside and are
combining themselves with the external things to manufacture
phenomenal existence, knowledge, and love, are called by the
Vedantists "Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, and Bliss
Absolute." . . . [These] are not qualities of the soul, but its
essence; there is no difference 'between them and the soul. And
the three are one; we see the one thing in three different lights:
They are beyond all knowledge and by their reflection Prakriti
appears to be intelligent.16*

"The first thing; therefore, that we find against Kapila," Swamiji

went on to say, concluding this part of his argument, "is that he
conceives the soul to be a mere qualitiless, colourless, inactive
something. Vedanta teaches that it is the essence of all Existence,
Knowledge, and Bliss, infinitely higher than all knowledge that
we know, infinitely more blessed than any human love that we
can think of, infinitely existing."17

The second point (not the first, as in the Complete Works

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version) which Swamiji took up with Kapila was the latter's idea
of God or, rather, his idea that there was no God in the sense of a
Cosmic Ruler. Swamiji dealt with this in short order. He pointed
out (as he had done elsewhere) that since the individual series of
Prakriti (the microcosm) requires the Purusha (or Self) behind it
as the ruler and governor, and since the microcosm and
macrocosm are built on the same plan, it follows that "this
universe, too, will require such a soul, [and] the universal soul
which is behind the modifications of Prakriti is called by Vedanta;
Ishvara-the Supreme Ruler, God."l8

Swamiji was now in a position to show that God and the soul
were one. The strongest argument to support this view lay in the
answer to another question: What is the mind that is always being
added to "x" and "y" and obscuring them? The reply was of
supreme importance to the philosophical structure of Vedanta.

The mind is "time, space, and causation." These form the very
essence of the mind. . . . These three are the forms in which both
"x" and "y" are caught and become limited by the mind. Beyond
them there is nothing else in the constitution of the mind. Take off
these forms, which of themselves do not exist-what remains? It is
all one; "x" and "y" are one. It is only this mind, this form, that
has limited them apparently, and made them differ as internal and
external world: . . . When there are no qualities there can be only
one. "X" and "y" are both without qualities because they take
qualities only in the mind, therefore these "x" and "y" are one.

. . . This whole universe is all one, and is called in the Advaitist

philosophy Brahman. Brahman appearing behind the universe is
called God; appearing behind the little universe-the microcosm, is
the soul. This very "Self" or Atman therefore is God in man.
There is only one Purusha, and He is called God, and when God
and man are
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analysed, they are one. The universe is you yourself, the

undivided you; you are throughout this universe. . . . The whole
universe is you; . . . You are God, you are the angels, you are
man, you are the animals, you are the plants, you are minerals,
you are everything : all manifestation is you. Whatever exists is
you-the real "You" the one undivided Self-not the little, limited
personality - that you have been regarding as yourself. 19

Another conclusion was implied in this reasoning and followed

rigorously from it:

The question now arises-how have you, the Infinite Being,

become broken into parts, as Mr. so-and-so, the animals and so on
a The answer is that all this division is s only apparent. We know
that the infinite cannot be divided, therefore this idea that you are
a part only-has no reality, and never will have; and this idea that
you are Mr. so-and-so was never true at any time; it is but a '
dream. Know this and be free. That is the Advaitist conclusion. "I
am neither the mind, nor the body, nor am I the organs; I am
Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute; I `a am He, I am He." This
is knowledge, everything besides this is ignorance. 20

So far, Swamiji's argument had proceeded from the psychological

or epistemological standpoint. In his fourth class, "The Free
Soul," he reached the same conclusion through an ontological
discussion:

All these souls are but reflections and not real. . . . There , is but
one Infinite Being in the universe, and that Being ; appears as
"You" and as "I", but this appearance of division is after all
delusion. He has not been divided, but only appears to be divided.
This apparent division is caused by looking at Him through the
network of time,
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space, and causation. . . . He is the one Infinite Being of the

universe, and that Being we are. I am That, and you are That. Not
parts of it, but the whole of it.21

Unlike Sankhya (and unlike Vishishtadvaita) Advaita Vedanta

stated that it is not only the identification of the soul with matter
and mind, or with Prakriti, that is illusory; rather, the whole of
Prakriti is an illusion, hanging on the thread of that illusory
identification. In his next class, "One Existence Appearing as
Many," Swamiji clarified and emphasized this point:

You must bear this in mind; it is not that there is a soul in man,
although I had to take that for granted in order to explain it at
first, but that there is only one Existence, and that one the Atman,
the Self, and when this is perceived through the senses, through
sense imageries, it is called the body. When it is perceived
through thought, it is called the mind. When it is perceived in its
own nature, it appears as the Atman, the one only Existence. So, it
is not that there are three things in one, the body and the mind and
the Self-although that was a convenient way of putting it in the
course of explanation but all is that Atman. . . . "I am that one
Existence"-- this is the last conclusion.22

It was a tremendous statement, so bold, so immense that the mind

feels overwhelmed and turns away as from something too vast for
its contemplation, too threatening to its very existence, and tends
to reduce it to harmless philosophical talk. But Swamiji meant
these things to be taken literally not as philosophical speculations,
but as fact. He was by no means merely expounding Indian
philosophy. He spoke not only to the intellect, but to the deeper
layers of man's being, where an immediate awareness of Reality
was possible. "This illusion of the universe will break one day [as
does a mirage],"
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he had told his students. "The whole of this will vanish, melt
away. This is realisation. Philosophy is no joke or talk. It will be
realised."23

How? Here he came to a discussion of the actual practice of jnana

yoga. But first in "The Free Soul" he had taken up an inevitable
question. The beginning of jnana yoga, as was said before,
demands an intellectual conviction of the truth to be realized; thus
in these classes Swamiji gave many arguments, answering many
questions, dispelling as many doubts as was possible. The next-
to-last question was a stumbling block built into the mind itself-
the mind of which time, space, and causation were the very
essence. That mind was compelled to ask what had caused itself,
though the concept of cause was entirely its own fabric. This was
the question: "How is it that what is infinite, ever perfect, ever
blessed, Existence Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, has come under
these delusions? . . How did this illusion come?" Swamiji gave
the simple Vedantic answer-an evasion almost, but no more so
than illusion itself, endlessly reflecting its own image down
mirrored corridors:

The answer is that we cannot expect any answer to an impossible

question. The very question is impossible in terms. You have no
right to ask that question. Why? What is perfection? That which is
beyond time, space; and causation. That is perfect. Then you ask
how the perfect became imperfect. In logical language the
question may be put in the form--"How did that which is beyond
causation become caused?" You contradict yourself. You first
admit it is beyond causation and then ask what causes it.
Questions can only be asked within the limits causation. . . .
Within time, space, and causation [the question can never be
answered, and what answer map lie beyond these limits can only
be known when we have transcended them; therefore the wise
will let this question rest. When a man is ill, he devotes himself to
curing his
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disease, without insisting that he must first learn how he came to

have it.24

Delusion is not caused by real existence. Delusion causes

delusion, the causal chain retreating forever into the past. And this
gave rise to the final question : "Does not this admission [of self
caused delusion] break your monism, because you get two
existences in the universe, one your self, and the other the
delusion?" "The answer," Swamiji replied, "is [that] delusion
cannot be called an existence. Thousands of dreams come into
your life, but do not form any part of your life. Dreams come and
go; they have no existence; to call delusion existence will be
sophistry."25

In the fall of this year, when he would be in London, Swamiji was

to enter more fully into the theory of Maya, which "forms one of
the pillars upon which Vedanta rests." 26 The concept required
much elucidation, for it seemed more like a pit than a pillar to the
Western mind; a negation of reality rather than an affirmation of
it. But now, in his New York class ("One Existence Appearing as
Many") he turned on the morning of Wednesday, January 29, to a
discussion of the practice of jnana yoga.

The jnana yogi (the Advaita jnani) is he who takes the teaching of
Advaita Vedanta seriously; he first hears it, then reflects upon it,
becomes convinced of it, and then constantly asserts it.

Think always-"I am Brahman" (Swamiji instructed his class] ;

every other thought must be cast aside as weakening. Cast aside
every thought that says that you are men or women. Let body go,
and mind go, and gods go, and ghosts go, let everything go but
that one Existence. . . . Get rid of all other thoughts, everything
else must be thrown aside, and this is to be repeated continually,
poured through the ears until it reaches the heart, until every
nerve and muscle, every drop of blood tingles with the
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idea that "I am He, I am He." . . . Even at the gate c death, in the
greatest danger, in the thick of the battle field, at the bottom of the
ocean, on the tops of the highest mountains, in the thickest of the
forest tell yourself," am He, I am He." Day and night say, "I am
He." . . These are words that will burn up the dross that is in the
mind-words that will bring out the tremendous energy which is
within you already, the infinite power which is sleeping in your
heart. This is to be brought out by constantly hearing the truth and
nothing else. Wherever there is thought of weakness, approach
not the place Avoid all weakness if you want to be a jnani."27

In his classes entitled "The Free Soul" and "One Existence

Appearing as Many" Swamiji spoke of the qualifications required
of those who wanted to be jnana yogis. As we have mentioned
earlier, he dwelt on most of these disciplines in some detail in his
beginners classes of December, "The First Step toward Jnana"
and "Steps to Realisation"; now he spoke only briefly of the need
for "renunciation of all fruits of work and of all enjoyments in this
life or another life"; of the necessity for controlling the mind, not
by taking physical or mental helps, as does the raja yogi, but by
the sheer power of will; of the practice of forbearance-"bearing all
miseries without murmuring, without complaining" ; and, as we
have seen in the quotation given above, of viveka, rigorous
discrimination between the Real and the unreal. Convinced that
phenomenal world is unreal, the jnana yogi jumps as it w off the
edge of the universe without hesitation and without' backward
look. He plunges head-on. "The jnani feels that cannot wait,"
Swamiji said, "he must reach the goal this very moment. . . . [He]
seeks to tear himself away from this bondage of matter by the
force of intellectual conviction. This is negative way-the `Neti,
Neti' (`Not this, Not this')."28

But Swamiji pointed out that there was a positive way also in
which the world was not denied but was totally transformed
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or, rather, in which its ordinary appearance was brushed aside

and its reality affirmed and responded to as divine. In his next
class; entitled in The Science and Philosophy of Religion "Unity
of the Self," he told of how the sage Yajnavalkya taught his wife
Maitreyi that one loves everything not for its own sake but
because of the Self, thus illustrating and applying the grand
philosophy of Advaita to everyday life and everyday rela-
tionships:

In and through every part of this little individuality is shining that

Infinite, the Real Individuality. Everything is a manifestation of
the Atman. . . . That perfect One, when seen through certain kinds
of covering, we call different degrees of good, and when seen
through other kinds, we call evil. . . . How can there be anything
but that One? Whatever is the lowest physical enjoyment is He,
and the highest spiritual enjoyment is also He. There is no
sweetness but He. . . . When you come to that state and look upon
all things with the same eyes; when you see in the drunkard's
pleasure in drink or in the saint's meditation that sweetness only,
then you have got the truth, and then alone you will know what
happiness means, what peace means, what love means. 29

Swamiji's last advanced jnana yoga class was, as he said at its

outset, "a brief resume of all that I have been trying to tell you."*
Here he traced the steps that Vedantic thought had taken to solve
the "great question of all questions-out of what did God create
[the universe]?"30 Again, as in his beginners class, he explained
the dualistic, the qualified-monistic, and, finally; the monistic
solutions, one leading into the other, until the grand conclusion of
Oneness was reached. "If a man reasons," he had said in an earlier
class, "there is no place for him to stand until he comes to this,
that there is but One Existence, that everything else is nothing.
There is no way left for rational mankind but to take this view." 31
But while this
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was the fact, Swamiji was of course aware-though perhaps

regretfully so-that "all people cannot take up this Advaita
philosophy; it is too hard." "First of all," he said, "it is very
difficult to understand it intellectually. It requires the sharpest of
intellects, a bold understanding. Secondly, it does not suit the vast
majority of people."32 But he did not for this reason or any other
espouse a dualistic teaching. Each one of us must pass through
the steps of dualism and qualified monism, 1 said-but do so
quickly. "While the human race took millions of years to reach
from one step to another, individuals may live the whole life of
the human race in a few year or they may be able to do so more
quickly, perhaps in s months."33

He had little patience with the talkers of monism-those who

denied the existence of God but not of themselves as individuals
or of their worlds. "If you have one piece, you must take the
whole."

The man who says here is this world but there is no God is a fool,
because if there be a world, there will have be a cause of the
world, and that is what is called God. . , As long as this dream
exists . . . we are bound to look upon ourselves as being born and
dying, but as soon as the dream that we are bodies vanishes, will
vanish the dream that we are being born and dying, and will
vanish the other dream that there is a universe. That very thing
which we now see as this universe will appear to us as God and
that very God who was so long external, will appear as the very
Self of our own selves. The last word of Advaita is "Tat-tvam-
asi"-"That thou art."34

That was the last word of Swamiji's class on jnana yoga. It was,
indeed, the last word of all that he taught; it was the highest fact,
eternally true. One could wake up from the dream at once, or one
could dream better and better dreams, surfacing at last into
Reality. But whether one awoke soon or
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late, the Fact was always there, unchanged, eternal-"That thou

art."

As Swamiji pointed out many times, the whole of religion was the
total, unmediated realization of this one Reality; the different
yogas were the means. "The grandest idea in the religion of the
Vedanta," he said in one of his beginners karma yoga classes, "is
that we may reach the same goal by different paths; and these
paths I have generalised into four-viz. those of work, love,
psychology, and knowledge. . . . Each blends into the other. But
according to the type which prevails we name the divisions. . . .
We have found that, in the end, all these four paths converge and
become one. All religions and all methods of work and worship
lead to one and the same goal." 35 Nor was one method
intrinsically better than another. "The yogas of work, of wisdom,
and of devotion," he often declared, "are all capable of serving as
direct and independent means for the attainment of Moksha." 36
And it was as such that he taught them. But he taught them also in
a way that each could be combined with one or more of the
others. As we have pointed out earlier, he had come to earth for
men and women in every walk of life and of every kind of
temperament and ability-for the student, the householder, the
unmarried self supporting man or woman, and the monastic; for
the intellectual, the emotional, the active, and the contemplative;
he had come for those who believed in God and for those who did
not believe in God, for those who sought ultimate Reality and for
those who cared nothing for ultimate Reality but wanted only to
alleviate the immediate and very real suffering of their
fellowmen. He came, as well, for those who combined within
themselves every kind of temperament and ability. This last type
of person, perfected, was, indeed, his ideal man. "Would to God,"
he had cried in his lecture "The Ideal of a Universal Religion,"
"that all men were so constituted that in their minds all these
elements of philosophy, mysticism,
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emotion, and of work were equally present in full! That is the

ideal, my ideal of a perfect man."37

It followed that a path in which all four yogas were combined was
the ideal path, and it is not in the least surprising that as Swamiji
taught the yogas they were all intimately inter connected. Each
could be practiced independently of the others, but they could
also be combined without conflict or contradiction; indeed they
reinforced and clarified one another His advanced karma yoga
classes, for instance, would has been easy to understand by those
who were also attending b classes on jnana yoga and raja yoga,
for both karma yoga at raja yoga were based on the psychology of
Sankhya, as well ; on the philosophy of Vedanta. In explaining the
rationale karma yoga in "The Secret of Work" he: referred to "the
great saying of the Sankhya, `The whole of nature is for d soul,
not the soul for nature.' The very reason of nature’s existence is
for the education of the soul; it has no other meaning; it is there
because the soul must have knowledge and through knowledge
free itself." 38And in his karma yoga class entitled "Freedom" he
pointed out in one of his vivid passages that the meaning behind
both jnana and karma yoga was the same:

. . . When we speak of man as not other than the infinite being

which is manifesting itself, we mean the only one very small part
thereof is man; this body a1 this mind which we see are only one
spot of the infinite being. This whole universe is only one speck
of the infinite being; and all our laws, our bondages, our joys and
our sorrows, our happinesses and our expectations, are only with
this small universe; all our progression and digression are within
its small compass. . . . [Man] has forgotten his infinite nature, and
his whole idea is confined to the little joys, and sorrows, and heart
jealousies of the moment He thinks that this finite thing is the
infinite; and m only so, he will not let this foolishness go. He
clings on
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desperately unto Trishna, the thirst after life. . . . To acquire

freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it
cannot be found here. . . . nor in heaven, nor in any place where
our mind and thought can go, where the senses can feel, or which
the imagination can conceive.

. . . Man's experience in the world is to enable him to get out of its

whirlpool. . . . Karma-Yoga makes a science of work; you learn
by it how best to utilise all the workings of this world. . . . Karma-
Yoga makes us admit that this world is a world of five minutes,
that it is a something we have to pass through; and that freedom is
not here, but is only to be found beyond.39

In his classes on raja yoga there is the same teaching:

. . . You were never bound by laws, nature never had a bond for
you. That is what the Yogi tells you. Have patience to learn it.
And the Yogi shows how, by junction with nature and identifying
itself with the mind and the world, the Purusha thinks itself
miserable. Then the Yogi goes on to show you that the way out is
through experience. You have to get all this experience, but finish
it quickly. We have placed ourselves in this net and will have to
get out. We have got ourselves caught in the trap, and we will
have to work out our freedom. So get this experience of husbands,
and wives; and friends, and little loves; you will get through them
safely if you never forget what you really are. Never forget this is
only a momentary state, and that we have to pass through it.
Experience is the one great teacher-experience of pleasure and
pain; but know it is only experience 40

Again, the actual practice of raja yoga, particularly the practice of

meditation, was an almost indispensable help in refining and
honing the instruments of the body and the mind,
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preparing them for their enormous and sustained effort of turning

around to face not matter but Spirit, of giving up "the clinging to
this universe." Raja yoga lent speed and power to the other yogas,
energizing them.

As for bhakti yoga, its practice by no means ended with

prostrations at a shrine, with japa, or hymns, or ritualist worship.
It reached out to worship the universe, not symbolically, but
actually. "God is the Samashti [the generalized an the abstract
universal whole]," Swamiji said in a class o bhakti yoga, "and this
visible universe is God differentiate and made manifest." 41

If we love this sum total, we love everything. Loving the world

and doing it good will all come easily then; . . With the love of
God will come, as a sure effect, the love of everyone in the
universe. The nearer we approach God the more do we begin to
see that all things are in Him When the soul succeeded in
appropriating the bliss of this supreme love, it also begins to see
Him in everything. Our heart will thus become an eternal fountain
of love And when we reach even higher states of this love, a1 the
little differences between the things of the world are entirely lost;
man is seen no more as man, but only as God; the animal is seen
no more as animal, but as God even the tiger is no more a tiger,
but a manifestation a God. Thus in this intense state of Bhakti,
worship is offered to everyone, to every life, and to every being. 48

This ideal could be as much a part of karma yoga as a bhakti.

Several times during his classes on karma yoga Swamiji pointed
out that the "idea of mercy and selfless charity can be put into
practice . . . by looking upon work as `worship in case we believe
in a Personal God."43 Indeed, for those who believe in God, this
way is much less difficult than is the way of those who "are left to
their own devices." The latter "hats simply to work with their own
will, with the powers of their
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mind and discrimination, saying, `I must be non-attached.'

[Whereas the former] give up the fruits of work unto the Lord,
they work and are never attached to the results. Whatever they
see, feel, hear, or do, is for Him. . . . Let us be at peace, perfect
peace, with ourselves, and give up our whole body and mind and
everything as an eternal sacrifice unto the Lord. Instead of the
sacrifice of pouring oblations into the fire, perform this one great
sacrifice day and night-the sacrifice of your little self." 44 And
again, "When you are doing any work, do not think of anything
beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your
whole life to it for the time being." 45 And that highest worship
was that in which one sees God in all beings and all beings in
Him. "Why should we expect anything in return for what we do?"
Swamiji asked in a beginners karma yoga class. "Be grateful to
the man you help, think of him as God. Is it not a great privilege
to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow-men?" 46 And
in a passage preserved by Mr. Sturdy in his edition of Karma-
Yoga, "Blessed are we that we are given the privilege of working
for Him, not of helping Him. Cut out this word `help' from your
mind. You cannot help; it is blaspheming. You are here yourself at
His pleasure. Do you mean to say you help Him? You worship.
When you give a morsel of food to the dog, you worship the dog
as God. God is in that dog. He is the dog. He is all and in all. We
are allowed to worship Him. Stand in that reverent attitude to the
whole universe, and then will come perfect non-attachment. This
should be your duty. This is the proper attitude of work. This is
the secret taught by Karma-Yoga."47

Philosophy, devotion, meditation, and action all went hand in

hand; practice, as well as theory, was intertwined. Though
standing "inside the world-machine," one could assert "I am that
One Existence" and work through freedom and through love,
without the least desire or fear, letting "the ripples come and go,
[letting] huge actions proceed from the muscles and
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the brain, but [letting] them not make any deep impression on the
soul";48 and without contradiction one could perceive only
divinity in one's fellowmen and worship that living divinity
through service of all kinds; here karma, jnana, and bhakti yoga
mere one, and the practice of meditation that tapped the source of
knowledge, power, and love charged the whole. A combination of
yogas was, of course, nothing new in itself. Sri Krishna had
taught it millennia ago. But the combination that easily
harmonized nonattached activity, renunciation, the inviolate
freedom of the Self, the equal divinity of all beings, and the
dedicated and reverent service of man as God Himself was as
unique in the history of religion as the modern age is unique in
the history of the world. It was fully in keeping with the time-
spirit of the age-rational, compassionate, active, meditative. It
was, moreover (and necessarily), a path that would produce a type
of human being such as the new age demands and such as the
world has never seen before, except in rare individual instances.
Whether formal monastics, householders, or the special class
emerging today of free-lance, uncloistered brahmacharins-
whatever their way of life, they would be men and women of high
spiritual ideals, of selfless love for all, of strong will, with the
ability for effective and beneficial action, and the capacity to give
their lives freely in the service of their fellowmen. Such was the
new man of Swamiji's vision.

This world is not for cowards [he said in a passage relating to

karma yoga]. Do not try to fly. Look not for success or failure.
Join yourself to the perfectly unselfish will and work on. . . . The
ordinary Sannyasin gives up the world, goes out, and thinks of
God. The real Sannyasin lives in the world, but is not of it. Those
who deny themselves, live in the forest, and chew the cud of
unsatisfied desires are not true renouncers. Live in the midst of
the battle of life. Anyone can keep calm in a cave or when asleep.
Stand in the whirl and madness of action and
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reach the Centre. If you have found the Centre, you cannot be
moved.49

One who could so live and act was the kind of hero this world
had. great need of. "If there are a hundred of such in any country,"
Swamiji had said in one of his karma yoga classes, "that country
need never despair."50 And in thinking of the highest development
of such people, he wrote in August of 1895 to Mr. Sturdy, "Half a
dozen of such lions in each country, lions who have broken their
own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is
gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor
fame, are enough to shake the world." 5l But it was not only such
fully developed lion-souls whom Swamiji had in mind; he
envisioned a whole new type of human being, a type out of which
the lions would emerge. As early as September of 1894 he had
written to his friend Haridas Viharidas Desai, "With proper care
and attempt and struggle of all [India's] disinterested sons, by
combining some of the active and heroic elements of the West
with calm virtues of the Hindus, there will come a type of men far
superior to any that have ever been in this world." 52 A few months
later he felt that such a type could be produced also in the West,
which was, perhaps, one reason he settled down in New York to
teach intensively for a while. "I am to create a new order of
humanity here," he wrote from New York to Alasinga in May of
1895, "who are sincere believers in God and care nothing for the
world."53 By the time his second season in New York began he
seems to have definitely formulated the teaching by which this
could be accomplished. And only thus could the wave of good in
this world rise to great and long enduring heights. As he had said
in "The Secret of Work," "We may convert every house in the
country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals,
but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's
character changes."54

Necessarily, Swamiji did far more than make his teachings

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intellectually clear to those who came to his lectures and classes.

He himself was there. He who gave these teachings m the ocean
of his own experience, he who pointed out these paths and
combinations of paths was standing there, incredibly vivid,
incredibly vast, incredibly compassionate and wise, giving of
himself and his power day after day, as constant as truth itself. "It
was like the sun that you will never get once you have seen." 55

470
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p. 385 * During this Christmas holiday Swamiji did not make a

side trip, as is sometimes said, to Mrs. Bull’s house in
Caqmbridge. His letters to her of December 24, 1895, and
January 3, 1896, which bracket his Ridgely visit, make this
abundantly clear.

P. 393 * The method of leading the mind from an easily grasped

concept to an unfamiliar and subtle one is called in India
Arundhati Nyaya. In Swamiji’s words: “To show a man the fine
star Arundhati, one takes the big and brilliant star nearest to it,
upon which he is asked to fix his eyes first, and then it becomes
quite easy to direct his sight to Arundhati” (Complete Works,
3:398).

P. 407 * This sentence and the one preceding it could not have
been more misleading. The last thing Swamiji had had in mind
was to gain “for his teachings and himself a certain vogue in
society.” As is well known, in the early months of 1895 he had
disregarded every bit of well-meaning advice in this connection.
Far from centering his “campaign” in “the reception room of a
prominent hotel on Fifth Avenue” (the reference is to the
Waldorf), he had, as related in chapter one, taken rooms in an
unfashionable and humble lodging house.

P. 408 * See chapter one, section one, and chapter two, section
seven.

P. 409 * This sentence and the one preceding it appear to have

been taken from a report of the question-and-
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P. 409 answer period following Swamiji’s lecture before the

(cont.) Brooklyn Ethical Association on December 30, 1894. It
was then that he said for the first known time, “I have a message
to the West as Buddha had a message to the East.” (See Complete
Works, 5:314.)

P. 427 * The subtle body or sukshma sharira is composed of the

sense organs, the mind, the intellect (buddhi), the egoism
(ahamkara), the five subtle elements, and the five vital forces
(pranas).

P. 433 * In the Complete Works this “Introduction” and the eight

jnana yga classes (including “Introduction to Jnana Yoga”) are
scattered through the first three volumes, in most cases with
altered titles and many variations in the text. As published in book
form, the classes (not including “Introduction to Jnana Yoga”) are
entitled: “The Sankhya Cosmology,” “Prakriti and Purusha,”
“Sankhya and Advaita,” “The Free Sould,” “One Existence
Appearing as Many,” “Unity of the Self,” and “The Highest Ideal
of Jnana Yoga.” The first three classes appear in volume two of
the Complete Works, entitled respectively “Cosmology,” “A Study
of the Sankhya Philosophy,” and “Sankhya and Vedanta.” The
fourth and fifth classes appear in volume three with unaltered
titles; the sixth in volume two under the title “Yajnavalkya and
Maitreyi,” and the seventh in volume one under the title
“Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi,” and the seventh in volume one under
the title “Steps of Hindu Philosophic Thought.” The
“Introduction” is published in volume three as “Unity, the Goal of
Religion,” which constitutes excerpts from “The Claims of
Religion; Its Truth and Utility” The two paragraphs at the close of
the “Introduction” may have been added by Swami Saradananda,
who prepared the class notes for publication while he was in
America at the beginning of 1897 (see Editor’s Preface to The
Science and Philosophy of Religion).
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In connection with the early editing of Swamiji's lectures, there is

the following passage, dated September 29, 1897 from Swami
Abhedananda's diary: "Miss Waldo was a motherly old lady well-
educated in Western philosophy and a devoted disciple of Swami
Vivekananda who initiated her as a Brahmacharini. She never
married and was about 45 years old. It was she who corrected and
edited all the lectures of Swami Vivekananda which were
afterwards published in book form" (Complete Works of Swami
Abhedananda, vol. 10, pages 13-14).

Sister Devamata also remarks on Miss Waldo's part in the

preparation of Swamiji's American publications for the press. "So
great was Swami Vivekananda's confidence in her ability," she
wrote, "that he would pass the type-written transcriptions of his
lectures over to her with the instruction to do with them what she
thought best" (Preface to the Madras edition of Inspired Talks,
1908).

Later on, Sister Devamata herself took over the task of preparing
Swamiji's still unpublished lectures and classes for the press. In
her "Memories of India and Indians" she wrote: "Although I saw
Miss Waldo frequently while Swami Vivekananda was in New
York, our real friendship dated from 1901, when the charge of the
publishing department of the New York Vedanta Society-then
well established-passed from her hands to mine. Her eyes had
given out and she was unable to undertake further literary work.
The first task she transferred to me was the editing and putting
through the press of the Swami's two volumes on Jnana-Yoga.
When the editing of them was completed I carried them back to
her, feeling she was the one to pass judgement on what J had
done, but she made no corrections and the books were published"
(Prabuddha Bharata, May 1932, page 244.). (Jnana-'Yoga
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p. 433 –Part I, which consisted primarily of Swamiji’s (cont.)

London lectures, was published in 1902. Jnana—Yoga Part II,
which consisted of Swamiji’s New York jnana part II, which
consisted of Swamiji’s New York jnana yoga classes, was not
published until 1907.)

P. 438 * This was actually Swamiji’s fourth advanced jnana yoga

class, if his introductory class has not been included in The
Science and Philosophy of Religion, I am not counting it and thus,
I trust, am avoiding confusion.

But to add a little to the confusion, I can mention here that the
class entitled “Prakriti and Purusha” in The Science and
Philosophy of Religion was entitled “The Sandhya Categories,”
which was actually its subject, when it was first published in the
Brahmavadin (October 15, 1897).

P. 440 * These notes written in Swamiji’s hand have been made

available through the kindness of the Vedanta Centre in Coasset,
Massachusetts.

P. 442 * The Linga Sharira or Sukshma Sharira, the subtle body

(see note for page 427, above), is generally thought of in
Christianity as the soul, or the “spiritual body.” It survives the
death of the gross body, goes to heaven or hell, and (in Eastern
thought) is reincarnated in another gross body. In the Sankhya
system all this coming and going of the subtle body takes place in
Prakriti; it is as mechanical and material as everything else. In
Advaita Vedanta, it is illusory. In either case, there is nothing
“spiritual” about it. Only the unmoving Purusha or, in Vedanta,
the Self, is spiritual.

P. 444 * This passage, as given in The Science and Philosophy of

Religion, seems rather difficult and obscure. It has been heavily
edited and altered, no doubt for the sake
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P. 444 of clarity, in the Complete Works (2: 458—59). I have,

(cont.) however, adhered as closely as possible to the earliest
published text.

P. 451 * Unless Swamiji held an advanced jnana yoga class that

has not been published or unless he skipped one Wednesday
morning in January or February, this series, which opened on the
morning of December I t, closed on the morning of February 12.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
NEW YORK: JANUARY, FEBRUARY 1896-II

Swamiji's beginners class on bhakti yoga closed on Mom January

20, and that on raja yoga on Saturday, January Newcomers,
however (and there were more and more ever day), may have felt
at sea in the advanced classes, which continued through the first
three weeks of February. Therefore Swamiji asked his disciple
Swami Kripananda to start holding beginners classes in both these
yogas. In his newsletter d: January 3 t to the Brahmavadin,
Kripananda duly reported development:

Our new Sanyasins, Abhayananda and Kripananda are now

beginning to assist the Swami in his great Though quiet and
attracting less attention, their work spreading the sublime
teachings of their master is persistent and accompanied with
success. Abhayananda h well attended classes on the Vedanta
Philosophy Brooklyn, and Kripananda, at the head-quarters, tea '
lessons on Raja-Yoga and Bhakti to classes of beginners.1

While it was true that Swami Abhayananda was successfully

holding classes and lecturing once a week in Brooklyn, w she had
moved in the beginning of the year, Kripanan situation was a
more difficult one. Those who came to West Thirty-ninth Street to
hear Swamiji and found that class was being held by someone
else-anyone else--bound to be disappointed. "The moon,"
Kripananda wrote sadly to Mrs. Bull, "plays a very insignificant
figure in presence of the lord of the day. . . . But a beginning must
be
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made, and in venturing to teach here under such humiliating

conditions for me, I simply obey the Swami's desire. . . . The
contribution last time was forty five cents. I do not care about the
financial results, but will be too happy if I only succeed in
bringing one single soul to God."2

It would appear that Swamiji shortly took up once again the

beginners class on raja yoga, fox on February 4 Kripananda wrote
to Mrs. Bull: "The Swami has reduced his classes to four in the
week and has begun a Raja class for beginners." 3 Whether or not
this beginners class constituted a fifth weekly class in Swamiji's
schedule is not clear. It seems certain, however, that during the
first three weeks of February he regularly held an advanced class
on bhakti yoga, one on jnana, and one on raja, a question-and-
answer class and/or a beginners class on raja yoga. In addition he
held a weekly class at the home of his friend Miss Corbin and
gave a public lecture every Sunday afternoon to a large audience.
But before we speak of Swamiji's February talks, let us return to
January, for during that month he delivered a few lectures other
than those at Hardman Hall which we have already discussed.

In the closing paragraph of one of the two articles about Swamiji

that appeared in the New York Herald of January 19, 1896 it was
said that he "was invited to lecture before the Dixon Society [in
New York] by Dr. Wright." (See chapter six, section two.) It has
not been discovered to date who this Dr. Wright was; nor, as far as
has been determined, was there an organization in New York in
1895 or 1896 known as the Dixon Society. The only prominent
New Yorker at that time by the name of Dixon whose field of
interest might conceivably be related to Swamiji's teachings was
Thomas Dixon, Jr., a well-known, rather fierce-looking young
clergyman, who in April of 1895 had founded the People's
Church. From Kripananda's newsletter of January 31 to the
Brahmavadin we learn that in January of 1896 Swamiji did, to be
sure, lecture before the People's Church in New York. 4 In view of
this, it is perhaps reasonable to suppose, until contrary
information comes to
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light, that the "Dixon Society" and the People's Church were one
and the same. In any event, we know that Swamiji spoke' before
the latter-on what date and on what subject, Kripananda neglected
to say.

In March of 1895 Thomas Dixon, Jr., had resigned his ministry of

the Twenty-third Street Baptist Church in order to start his own
nondenominational church "on a broad and popular platform."
Outstandingly fervent and intense, the young Thomas Dixon
considered that the machinery of a strict Baptist Church was a
hindrance to "the reaching of the nonchurch-going masses of New
York." "I believe," he wrote; "that it is more important to lift
many men out of the ditch than to spend my time making a few
men Baptists." He wanted "a perfectly free pulpit" from which he
could "preach to their last logical conclusion those things which
have become to me of supreme importance," such as his belief
that politics should be religion in action Thenceforth, he
preached every Sunday morning at the Academy of Music (New
York's former opera house) and called his pulpit the People's
Church. His Church lasted for four years, drawing a large
congregation from the downtown masses of New York, but not
sufficient funds. Mr. Dixon resigned in March of 1899 and,
disillusioned about the value of nondenominationalism-"what we
gained in breadth we lost in vital force" 6-resumed for a time the
Baptist ministry. Despite Dixon's unquestioned compassion for
the poor of New York City, he was at heart a fiery reactionary,
speaking fervently from his pulpit against populism, feminism,
and being from the South, black rights; indeed he never overrode
an obsessive racial prejudice. Later on, he became a novelist and
in 1905 published his best-known work, The Clansman, a
historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the theme of which was
white supremacy. (His play based on this novel was the model for
the first true epic motion picture in America, "Th Birth of a
Nation:' First shown in 1915, it created wild racial riots many
parts of the United States.)

But Thomas Dixon also had an idealistic side, and it is not

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surprising that during his years of preaching he invited Swamiji

to address his New York congregation. One finds, however, no
actual account of Swamiji's lecture nor any record that the two
young men, so radically different in their basic outlooks, met and
exchanged views. We know at present only that one day in
January of 1896 Swamiji spoke from the pulpit of the People's
Church to a large and motley audience, consisting in part, at least,
of poor, tenement-dwelling workingmen and women, many of
whom would have been immigrants.

A very different group was that which Swami Kripananda termed

"the matadors of materialism." Kripananda's account of Swamiji's
talk before these hard-core skeptics was imbedded in his
newsletter dated January 12, 1896, to the Brahmavadin.
Regrettably, he gave no specifics of time or place or audience,
and while Swamiji's talk may have taken place sometime between
December 9 of 1898 and January 12 of 1896, it could also have
been given in late 1894 or early 1895. In any case, the importance
of the talk, the text of which is lost to us along with all else, lay in
the very fact that Swamiji met these "matadors" on their own
ground and came away fully victorious. Events such as this
remind us that his scholarship and powers of logic were as
incisive as his spirituality was inspiring. He could defeat the
keenest of intellects in argument as well as win the most doubting
of hearts. In his lectures and classes he used simple language, for
his purpose there was to make "the abstract Advaita . . . living-
poetic-in everyday life."' But when it came to upholding the
principles of philosophical Vedanta against a scholarly onslaught-
East or West-he could be devastatingly encyclopedic and a master
of debate. Kripananda evidently stood by enthralled during the
occasion he describes in the following passage, watching the deft
play of his master's unsheathed sword.

. . . The so-called free-thinkers [he wrote], embracing the atheists,

materialists, agnostics, rationalists, and all those who, on
principle, are averse to anything that smells
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of religion, . . . thought this Hindu monk was an easy match for

them, and that all his theology would be crushed under the weight
of Western civilisation, Western philosophy, and Western science.
So sure were they of their triumph, that they invited him, in New
York, to lecture before their Society, anxious to show to their
numerous followers how easily religious claims can be refuted by
the powerful arguments of their logic and pure reasoning. I shall
never forget that memorable evening when the Swami, accepting
the challenge, appeared, single-handed, to face the matadors of
materialism, all arrayed with their; heaviest armour of law, and
reason, and logic, and common-sense, of matter, and force, and
heredity, and all the stock phrases calculated to awe and terrify
the ignorant mass. Imagine their surprise and consternation when
they found that, far from being intimidated by these big words,
he proved himself a master in wielding their own weapons, and as
familiar with the arguments of materialism as with those of the
Advaita philosophy. He showed them that their much vaunted
Western civilisation consisted principally in the development of
the art to destroy their fellowmen, that their Western science
could not answer the most vital questions of life and being, that
their immutable laws; so much talked of, had no outside existence
apart from the human mind, that the very idea of matter was a
metaphysical conception, and that it wag the much despised
metaphysics upon which ultimately; rested the very basis of their
materialism. With an irresistible logic he demonstrated that their
knowledge proved itself incorrect, not by comparison with
knowledge which is true, but by the very laws upon which it
depends for its basis; that pure reasoning could not help admitting
its own limitations and pointed to something beyond reason; and
that rationalism when carried to its last consequences must
ultimately land us at a something which is above matter, above
force, above senses, above thought
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and even consciousness; and of which all these are but the
manifestations. . . .

The powerful effect of this lecture could be seen on the following

day, when numbers of the materialistic camp came to sit at the
feet of the Hindu monk, and listen to his sublime utterances on
God and religion.8

On Friday evening, January 17, Swamiji gave one of his most

stirring lectures of this season to the members of the
Metaphysical League of Brooklyn; which had been founded two
months earlier. The League (as it called itself, for it was loosely
organized) held its meetings in Brooklyn's Robertson Hall on the
first and third Friday evenings of each month, and thus Swamiji
had little choice but to cancel a question-and answer class in order
to speak to these metaphysicians. The subject he chose, or that
may have been chosen for him, was Immortality." As luck would
have it, Mr. Goodwin attended the lecture, taking it down in his
expert shorthand, and thus, although the transcript was not printed
in pamphlet form, it was preserved in the New York Vedanta
Society and first published in India in a 1902 edition of Jnana-
Yoga (then spelled Gnana-Yoga).

"Immortality" was not connected with Swamiji's Sunday

afternoon series at Hardman Hall, which was then in progress and
during the course of which, as we have seen in the preceding
chapter, he would slowly lead his listeners up to the very edge of
Advaita Vedanta but would not, during January, plunge fully into
the heart of the matter. The single lecture before the Metaphysical
League was, on the other hand, an explosion of philosophy, the
steps accelerated into one leap. presumably, his audience was
ready to follow. "There is no half way house," Swamiji told them.
"You are metaphysicians and there is no crying quarter." 9 And he
proceeded to give one of his most powerful affirmations of the
Self, the One Being in the universe.

It is true that he led up to his conclusion, employing the same

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scientifically oriented themes as would form the substance; his

coming Sunday lectures (January 19 and 26) on the cosmos First,
he showed that all life was, as it were, immortal, seemingly
separate life, each form of matter and manifestation of energy
being a link in one continuous chain extending from protoplasm
(the first form in which life manifests itself) to the highest
manifestation, the perfect man, the incarnation of God on earth.
"The whole of this series is but one life, and the whole of this
manifestation must have been involved in that very protoplasm. . .
. This one mass of intelligence, from the protoplasm up to the
most perfected man, slowly and slow uncoils itself. What was it?
It was a part of the cosmic universal intelligence involved in that
little protoplasm itself, and it w all there. Not that it grows.* . . . It
can never grow. It was there; only it manifests itself:" 10 And this
process was etertal As he had done in a jnana yoga class (see
chapter six), Swamiji likened the unending cycles of cosmic
involution and evolution and the chance recurrence of the same
combination of forms again and again to the cars of the giant
Ferris wheel at the Chicago Fair and the individual souls to their
passengers. This cosmic wheel constituted a sort of immortality:
"We see . . . that there is recurrence of the same material
phenomena at certain periods, and that the same combinations
have been taking place throughout eternity. But that is not the
immortality of the soul."11

A second idea was that "you and I [passengers in the wheel of

forms must] be part of the cosmic consciousness, cosmic life
cosmic mind, which got involved and we must complete the circle
and go back to this cosmic intelligence which is ." 12 This is
another kind of immortality. But Swamiji pointed out that this,
too, is insufficient. As a part of the cosmic life or cosmic
intelligence, the individual could not as such be eternal being a
compound-a part of something or a result of some thing, however
subtle-the individual could not remain eternally intact.
"Everything that is a compound must sooner or later go back to its
component parts. .. . It gets dispersed,
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broken up, resolved back into its components." 19 Where, then, is

individual immortality?

And now Swamiji proceeded to seek out the truly immortal soul
through an analysis of the mystery of perception-a line of inquiry
which would have been familiar to those attending his jnana yoga
classes at that time. From the sense organs he carried his listeners
back and back until he came to "the King of kings inside, the
Ruler on His throne, the Self of man." 14 From here on, his lecture
was a thunder of Advaita Vedanta. "Some of you, perhaps, will be
frightened," he warned-but he did not on that account muffle his
voice. Briefly:

. . . The Self of man is not the body, neither is it thought. It cannot

be a compound, . . . and that which was never a compound can
never die. . . . That which does not die cannot live. You were
never born, and you will never die. . . . [Further] that which is
beyond law, where there is nothing to act upon it, how can that be
limited? It must be omnipresent. You are everywhere in the
universe. . . .

If, then, we are beyond all law, we must be omniscient, ever-

blessed; all knowledge must be in us and all power and
blessedness. Certainly. You are the omniscient, omnipresent being
of the universe. But of such beings can there be many? . . .
Certainly not. Then what becomes of us all? You are only one;
there is only one such Self and the One Self is you. . . . Therefore
know that thou art He; thou art the God of this universe, "Tat
Tvam Asi" (That thou art). All these various ideas that I am a man
or a woman, or sick or healthy, or strong or weak, or that I hate or
I love or have a little power, are but hallucinations. Away with
them! What makes you weak? What makes you fear? You are the
One Being in the universe. What frightens you? Stand up then and
be free.15

Swamiji was not talking here to monastics or would-be monastics

or to advanced spiritual aspirants, but to house-
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holders, to ordinary men and women who were, to be sure,

interested in spiritual culture, but who were living in the world,
occupied with the many demanding tasks and obligations of
domestic, uncloistered lives.* They were, by and large, the people
of the "market place," through the mazelike lanes of which the
vast majority of the human race has to find its way to liberation. It
was to these people that Swamiji taught Advaita Vedanta, straight,
uncompromising, unbuffered. He indeed gave no quarter. He
pointed to the solid, uncluttered ground of the Self and said, stand
here. Any path marked out on such firm ground would lead
unerringly to freedom. What can frighten you? If the suns come
down, and the moons crumble into dust, and systems after
systems are hurled into annihilation, what is that to you? Stand as
a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self, the God of the
universe. . . .

Silly fools tell you that you are sinners, and you sit down : in a
corner and weep. It is foolishness, wickedness, down. right
rascality to say that you are sinners! You are all God. . . . Know
then, that thou art He, and model your . whole life accordingly;
and he who knows this and models his life accordingly will no
more grovel in darkness.16

This teaching, which Swamiji gave with such evident power that
evening of January 17, was, as the present writer under stands it,
the dominant theme of his world message. He was, of course,
well aware, as he was to say in a lecture two weeks later, that few
men dared "to follow [Advaitism] in all its practical bearings." 17
But he also knew that "there are a few brave souls in the world
who dare to conceive the truth, who dare to take it up, and who
dare to follow it to the end."l8 And those few, belonging to any
station in life, active in any field,, would leaven the world.

Swamiji's next "outside" lecture engagement took him at the

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end of January to Hartford, Connecticut. This old and quiet New

England town, which had been and was still a center of culture,
must have charmed Swamiji even in the dead of winter, when its
gardens and parks were snow covered and its trees bare. The town
was not unknown to him, for on March 8 of 1895 he had lectured
there on "God and the Soul" (see chapter one). His lecture now
(January 31, 1896) was entitled "The Ideal of a Universal
Religion," a subject similar to his earlier lecture and one that he
had spoken on, as we have seen in the last chapter, during his
Sunday series in New York and which he would speak on again
this . year in Detroit, Boston, London, and yet again in 1900
during his second visit to the West. It was, in fact; a subject he
often chose when speaking only once to any particular audience,
for its message of harmony between creeds, of unity in variety,
was one of the important and immediately relevant parts of his
Master's teaching and of his own, as well. But although Swamiji
sometimes spoke more than once on the same subject, under the
same title, he seems never to have given exactly the same lecture
twice. His themes, never frozen into notes, often fell into new
patterns; new lights would be thrown on them, new illustrations
or analogies would reveal some new aspect or meaning. Always
speaking extemporaneously, he was always new.

If Mr. Goodwin accompanied Swamiji to Hartford, he evidently

did not take notes of the lecture for no transcript of it has been
published. This being the case, a heretofore unreprinted
newspaper report that appeared in the Hartford Daily Times of
February I is worth quoting in full.

"UNIVERSAL RELIGION."

Vivekananda's Lecture on the Creeds of the World.

A fair house greeted the Hindu monk, Vivekananda, last night.

But if Hartford people . had known what they were losing, it
would have been crowded from top to bottom. It was a lecture
that ministers, especially, could
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ill afford to lose. The talk of the Swami (spiritual teacher) would
have sweetened their own charity and broadened their own
pulpits. But apparently but one of them ventured out. As Emerson
once said: "We need some good pagan religion." But
Vivekananda's can hardly be called pagan; it embraces the
universe. He was introduced by Mr. C. B. Patterson, in some
fitting remarks. Vivekananda is a fine looking man in his turban
and yellow rube, the latter the badge of the vow of poverty and
chastity that those of his order have to take. His dark face is
refined ' and spiritualized by the high thought in which he lives. '
His subject last night was "The Ideal, or Universal Religion" [sic].

Throughout the universe there are two forces constantly at work,

the centrifugal and centripetal, positive and negative, action and
reaction, attraction and repulsion. We find love and hatred, good
and evil. What plane is strongest than the spiritual plane, the
plane of religion? The world furnishes no hate stronger than that
engendered by religion, and no love stronger. No teachings have
brought more unhappiness into the world, nor more happiness:''
The beautiful teachings of Buddha have been carried across the
Himalayas, at a height of 20,000 feet, by his disciples. Five
hundred years later came the teachings your beautiful Christ, and
these have been carried on the wings of the wind. On the other
hand, look at your beautiful earth deluged in blood in the interest
of prop agandism and religion. As soon as a man comes into
company of those who do not believe as he does, his v nature
changes. It is his own opinions he fights for, not religion. He
becomes the very embodiment of cruelty fanaticism. His religion
is all right, but when he starts o to fight for his own selfish
opinions he is all wrong. People are up in arms about the
Armenian and the Turkish butcheries, but their consciences don't
say a word when the butcheries are committed in the interest of
their own
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religion. In human beings we find a curious mixture of God, man,

and devil, and religion stirs up the latter more than anything else.
When we all think alike, the God side of our nature comes out;
but let there be a clash of opinions, and presto, change! the devil
has the floor. This has been so from time immemorial, and will be
so always. In India we know what fanaticism means, for that
country for the last thousand years has been the especial field of
missionaries. But above the clash of opinions, and the fight for
religions, there comes the voice of peace. For 3,000 years efforts
have been made to bring the different religions into harmony. But
we know how this effort has failed. And it always will fail, and it
ought to fail. We have a network of words about love, peace, and
universal brotherhood, which were meant all right originally, but
we repeat them like parrots, and to us they mean nothing. Is there
a universal philosophy for the world? Not yet. Each religion has
its own creeds and dogmas and insists upon propagating them.
You can't make one religion for the whole world. That must not
be. The Armenians say it will be all right if you will all become
Armenians. And the Pope of Rome says: "O yea, it is a very easy
thing. If you will all become Roman Catholics, it will be all
right." And so with the Greek church, and the Protestant church,
and all the rest. There can never be one religion only, it would be
death to all other religions. If every one thought alike there would
be no more thought to think. If everybody looked alike, what
monotony! Look alike and think alike--what could we do but sit
down and die in despair? We can't live like a row of chipmunks;
variation belongs to human life. One God, one religion is an old
sing-song, but there's danger in it. But, thank God, it can never be.
Start out with your long purse, and your guns and cannon, to push
your propagandism. And suppose you succeed for a while? In ten
years your so-called unity would be split into fragments. That is
why there are so
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many sects. Take the largest religion, the Buddhist. They try to
help the world to be better. Next come the Christians, with good
many things to teach. They have three a Gods in one, and one in
three, and one of the three took on the sins of the world and was
killed. Whoever doesn't k believe in him, goes to a very hot place.
And Mohammed, whoever doesn't believe in him will have his
skin burnt off, and then a fresh one will be furnished to be burnt,
That he may know that Allah is the all-powerful. All religions
came originally from the Orient. These great teachers or
incarnations come in different forms. The Hindus have ten
incarnations; the first was a fish, and so on, down to the fifth, and
from there, they were all men. The Buddhists say: "We don't care
to have so many incarnations; we want only one." The Christians
say: "We will have only one, and this is Christ." And they say he
is the only one. But the Buddhist says they have the start in time;
their great teacher came five hundred years earlier. And the
Mohammedans say theirs came last, and therefore is the best.
Each one loves his own, just as a mother loves her own child. The
Buddhist never sees any fault in Buddha; the Christian never sees
any fault in Christ, and the Mohammedan never sees any fault in
Mohammed. The Christian says their God took the form e of a
dove and came down, and that they say is not mythology, but
history. The Hindu says his god is manifested in a cow and that he
says is not superstition, but history. The Jew thinks his Holy of
Holies can be contained in a : box or chest, with an angel on
guard on either side. But the Christian's God in the form of a
beautiful man or woman, is a horrible idol. "Break it down!" they
say. One ' man's prophet did such and such wonderful things,
while others call it only superstition. So where's your unity: Then
there are your rituals. The Roman Catholic puts on his robe, as I
have mine. He has his bells and candles and holy water, and says
these are good and necessary, but
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what you do, he says is only superstition. We can never upset all
this and have but one religion for the very life of thought is the
differentiation of thought. We must learn to love those who think
exactly opposite to us. We have humanity for the background, but
each must have his own individuality and his own thought. Push
the sects forward and forward till each man and woman are sects
unto themselves. We must learn to love the man who differs from
us in opinion. We must learn that differentiation is the life of
thought. We have one common goal, and that is the perfection of
the human soul, the god within us. Religion is the great force to
help unfold the god within man. But we have to unfold in our
own way. We can't all assimilate the same kind of food. Let your
aspirations be of the highest, and your inspirations will be in
harmony with reason and all known laws, and the Lord will
always be with you.

According to one of Kripananda's letters to the Brahmaradin the

above lecture was delivered before the Metaphysical Society at
Hartford. Nothing in the Hartford papers, however, indicates that
this was the case. The lecture was open to the public and had been
announced in the Religious Notices of the Hartford newspapers
several days before the event. It was not, however, until the day
after the lecture that the following item appeared in the "Social
Notes" of the Hartford Daily Times. Had it been printed in the
paper on time, that is, before the lecture, the hall might have been
as crowded as the talk had warranted:

SOCIAL NOTES

Hartford has been favored with some fine and entertaining

lectures this season. But none will exceed in interest the one to be
given in Unity Hall, next Friday evening, by Swami Vivekananda
on "The Ideal of a Universal Religion." He is a fine speaker and
has many splendid ideas, all based upon the highest spiritual
principles.
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Besides, he is so interesting a personality and picturesque figure

in his Oriental robes and graceful turban, it is worth the price of
admission to look at him.

By the time the good people of Hartford were reading this item on
Saturday morning, Swamiji was back in New York, holding a
class on raja yoga.

On that same Saturday morning, February 1, 1896, the following

item appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle :

COMPARATIVE RELIGION

The first of a course of four lectures on comparative religion

under the auspices of the Brooklyn Ethical Association will be
given at the Pouch Mansion, 345 Clinton Ave., tomorrow night.
Swami Vivekananda, the well known Hindu monk will speak on
"The Hindu Conception of God: the Atman." Other lecturers in
the course will be Prof. J. Leonard Corning and the Reverend F.
Hubert James.

On the same date, the following announcement appeared in both

the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Daily Standard Union, under
"Religious Notices":

Brooklyn Ethical Association. Sunday Eve. February 2 at 8:00

PM. First lecture in the course on the "God Idea in Some of the
Principal Religions of the World." The Swami Vivekananda of
India. Subject: "The Hindoo conception of God-the Atman."
Course tickets $I.50 Single admission 50c.

Although Swamiji had decided by now to give a sec series of

Sunday lectures in New York, he could not change the
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date of this lecture in Brooklyn. Thus on this first Sunday of

February, accompanied by Mr. Goodwin, and perhaps also by
others, including Swami Kripananda (Miss Waldo was already
there), Swamiji crossed the East River to Brooklyn (then still
separate city) by way of the great Bridge or by ferry. The
Brooklyn Ethical Association knew Swamiji well, Dr. Lewis
Janes, its president, having introduced him there at the of 1898.,
Swamiji's subsequent lectures delivered under the auspices of the
Association in the early part of 1895 had drawn audiences that
had filled to overflowing the large gallery and parlors of the
Pouch Mansion, a spacious Victorian house, used for various
functions, including club meetings and dancing parties.

The people of Brooklyn, unlike those of Hartford, were aware

that Swamiji was coming, and on the evening of February a spoke
to a full house-or, as a reporter more elegantly put "The audience
which gathered was sufficient to occupy all accommodations
provided."

At least two Brooklyn reporters were present, one from the Daily
Standard Union, the other from the Times. Their articles, which
appeared the following morning, are given in Appendix or this is
the only lecture Swamiji delivered in America of which we have
both newspaper reports and Mr. Goodwin's transcription, which
was printed in pamphlet form and later published in Jnana-Yoga
under the title "The Atman." By paring the reports with the
published lecture it becomes once clear that the reports give only
a faint idea of Swamiji's stirring eloquence and of the heights of
thought to which he ed. Both reporters, it is true, caught the
general trend of lecture in which he had discussed the three
phases of vedanta philosophy; but both emphasized its least
important aspect, dwelling at length on his analysis of dualistic
Vedanta devoting but a passing remark or two to his ringing
exposition of monism, which, as the title of the lecture indicates,
constituted his main theme.

It is not surprising that this was so, for as he himself acknowl-

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edged during his talk, nondualistic Vedanta was a difficult

concept for the mind to grasp.

Even in India, its birthplace [he said], where it has been ruling
supreme for the last three thousand years, it has not been able to
permeate the masses. . . . It is difficult for even the most
thoughtful man and woman in any country to understand
Advaitism. We have made ourselves so low. We may make great
claims, but naturally we want to lean on somebody else. We are
like little, weak plants, always wanting a support. How many
times have I been asked for a “comfortable religion”! 19

It would seem clear enough that Swamiji did not advocate a

dualistic religion, or anything near it. On the other hand he did
not insist on the monistic way for everyone; that would have been
contrary to monism itself, contrary to the upward spiraling path of
the human mind, and contrary, certainly, to his own vastness of
outlook, in which world history, indeed time itself, was a mere
illusory speck on the face of truth. He took man where he was, or
where man thought he was.

As society exists at the present time [he said at the close of this
lecture], all these three stages are necessary; the one does not
deny the other, one is simply the fulfilment of the other. The
Advaitist or the qualified Advaitist does not say that dualism is
wrong; it is a right view, but a lower one. It is on the way to truth;
therefore let everybody work out his own vision of this universe
according to his own ideas. . . . All will come to truth in the long
run.20

Yet as time went on, Swamiji was to become impatient for the
human race. More and more, particularly during his second visit
to the West, he was to stress the need for all men to assert their
own divinity—now. The long run was too long. Even in 1896 one
hears in his lectures the ring of urgency
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almost of insistence; for how could he, who saw so clearly,

endure to see even a speck of darkness clouding the face of God!
"Why give thirsty people ditch-water to drink whilst the river of
life and truth flows by?"21 he was to protest later in the year.
Never did he speak of Advaita Vedanta without speaking in
clarion tones. His words were always an impassioned call to the
soul. Even in this more or less expository lecture before the
humanists of the Ethical Association he cried:

What does the Advaitist preach? He dethrones all the gods that
ever existed, or ever will exist in the universe and places on that
throne the Self of man, the Atman, higher than the sun and the
moon, higher than the heavens, greater than this great universe
itself. No books, no scriptures, no science can ever imagine the
glory of the Self that appears as man, the most glorious God that
ever was, the only God that ever existed, exists, or ever will exist.
I am to worship, therefore, none but my Self: . . . I am He, and He
is I. None but I was God, and this little I never existed. . . . You
are the veritable Gods of the universe; nay, there are not two-there
is but One.

. . . This is the last word of the Vedas. It begins with dualism, goes
through a qualified monism and ends in perfect monism. We
know how very few in this world can come to the last, or even
dare believe in it, and fewer still dare act according to it. Yet we
know that therein lies the explanation of all ethics, of all morality,
and all spirituality in the universe.22

Inadequate though the newspaper reports of this lecture are, we

learn from the Daily Standard Union that Swamiji spoke at the
Pouch Mansion for "an hour and a quarter." From this it is
apparent that he said even more than was published in pamphlet
form, for to read "The Atman" as it there appears (aloud and
slowly) takes no more than forty-five minutes. A clue to at least
one passage that was edited away is contained
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in a sentence of the Times report: "He told of the beliefs of the

Buddhists who take their stand on an ethical foundation. `B, good
and do good' is their doctrine:" A discussion of Buddhist doctrines
does not appear in "The Atman" as we know it today. But
Swamiji spoke often of Buddha in the West, for a he was to say
later in London, "We want today that bright sun of intellectuality
[that is found in Shankaracharya] joins with the heart of Buddha,
the wonderful infinite heart of love and mercy. This union will
give us the highest philosophy."23

Almost certainly, Swamiji himself gave the final. stamp o

approval to the editing of this Brooklyn lecture and of the four
others that appeared in pamphlet form in New York in 1896 We
can be reasonably sure, therefore, that these lectures a first
published contained only what he wanted them to contain and
equally sure that they did not contain everything he had said from
the platform to rapt audiences. Many digressions stories,
repetitions, and scoldings must have been omitted Indeed, from
Swamiji's letters to Mr. Sturdy in connection with his New York
lectures and classes, we learn that he "expunged everything that is
objectionable."24 (Such "objectionable” passages may have
consisted not only of Swamiji's forthright criticism of his listeners
but of those quick flashes of wit with which he could turn aside
an untimely or irrelevant question. The story is told, for instance,
that in the course of a lecture at the Brooklyn Ethical Association
[perhaps the one we have been discussing] he had touched on the
subject of yoga, but had not entered into the details of its practice.
During the question-and-answer period that followed a woman
asked, "Swami, what do you think about breathing and eating:
Whereupon Swamiji rep lied, "I assure you, Madame, that am in
favor of both!")*

Throughout his lecture tours in 1893 and 1894. Swamiji had not
hesitated to speak as he wished, often pointing out with
devastating accuracy the foibles, inconsistencies, complacencies,
and prejudices of the times. Such blasts, fearless and
uncompromising promising, were, to say the least, considered
indiscreet by some
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who, like Mrs. Bull, were trying to promote his work, but there is
no reason to believe that on this account Swamiji had stopped
delivering them. "I know full well how good it is for one's
worldly prospects to be sweet," he had written in a fury of
rebellion to Mary Hale on February 1 of 1895, "I do everything to
be sweet, but when it comes to a horrible compromise with the
truth within, then I stop."25 His great heart would not allow him to
be "sweet"; it was, indeed, that heart, the heart of a Buddha,
pierced by every cry of humanity, that compelled him to walk
among men and to undertake a bone-breaking schedule of work in
the midst of Western civilization. The question sometimes arises
how Swamiji, who saw divinity everywhere and continuously,
could at the same time see the evil and anguish of the world and
give himself fully to its removal. The present writer has no way of
answering this question except to quote from the words of a
senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order. In speaking of the great
monistic knowledge and the equally great compassion of
Swamiji, he said:

There is a logical contradiction here. Yes, I cannot but admit to

myself that there is always a contradiction between these two
motives-the motive of truth and the motive of compassion. But
what a blessed contradiction!
I can only say this: in the relative state there are these two strong
motives always there. At least, these two motives should be active
in the lives of people. But aside from this, there is, I think, a
deeper explanation for the contradiction we find in souls such as
Buddha and Swamiji. You see, when man transcends his relative
being and yet still lives in his body on this plane, there comes an
extraordinary state. That is the state in which one can cast one's
mind into any mode or any mood one likes. And it will be a total
mood or total mode. Suppose his mind, for some reason, is seized
with the motive of truth. His whole mind will join in it, and there
will not be anything lacking
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in his longing for truth. At that time it would be quite possible

that the cry of suffering would not reach his ears. But by the same
token there could come another moment in which his whole being
would be molded into a profound mood of compassion, of love
and service. At that time, the idea of Truth would not reach him.
Not a ripple of thought would arise to ask: "Are these people real?
Doesn't philosophy say that this man is really God pretending to
be a suffering man?" No, that is the voice of the intellect, and
when the heart alone speaks, the intellect is silenced.

You find such contradictions in all great lives. Reconciliation

does not lie in the simultaneous existence of these two motives, or
moods, one adjusting to the other; it ` lies, rather, in the
transcendence of all limited moods. He who lives
transcendentally is thereby able to wield his whole mind
according to an oncoming mood, and when the mood of
compassion comes, then his whole being is gives ` to the service
of man. .. . . So Swamiji could say that he was ready to go to hell
if thereby he could serve one person. . . .

Yet, great as he was, vast as he was, and multiform and many-

phased as he was, underlying and overlaying his moods and
modes of thought was still a basic hung " for the abyss of the
Absolute. He was tormented by the longing to be lost in it. Not
always was he conscious this, but unconsciously it was there,
making him restless by night and by day.26
3

This mood, this longing for the Absolute, came on Swamiji at

times with an almost irresistible force. We have seen t in
December of 1895 Kripananda was convinced that his Guru
would retire shortly to a Himalayan cave, never to return. January
Swamiji himself wrote to Mrs. Bull, "After a 1 months' work in
England I will go to India and hide myself
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absolutely for some years or for ever. . . . I get more and more
convinced that there is no other object in work except the
purification of the soul-to make it fit for knowledge. This world
with its good and evil will go on in various forms. Only the evil
and good will take new names and new seats. My soul p
hankering after peace and rest eternal and undisturbed. . . . I long,
oh! I long for my rags, my shaven head, my sleep under the trees,
and my food from begging! India is the only place where, with all
its faults, the soul finds its freedom, its God."27

Two weeks later Swamiji wrote again to Mrs. Bull in the same
vein. This letter, which has. not previously been published, is
perhaps as indicative as any he ever wrote of the intensity of that
basic mood in which his whole being was pulled, as it were, to the
Formless. It read in full:

228 W. 39
New York the 6th of Feb. '96

Dear Mrs. Bull

I received your last duly but owing to many things I have given
up the idea of taking rest next month. I go to Detroit the first
week of March and then towards the middle or last week come to
Boston. I have not much faith in working such things as the
Procopaea &c-because these mixed up conglomerations of all
isms and ities mostly fads, disturb the steadiness of the mind and
life becomes a mass of frivolities. I am very glad however to get
an opportunity to talk to the graduates of Harvard. This does not
mean that I am not coming to Procopaea [a club in Boston]. I will
come but it will be only for your sake. There is one if however-
and that is if I am physically able. My health has nearly broken
down. I have' not slept even one night soundly in New York since
I came and this year there is incessant work both with the pen &
the mouth. The accumulated work and worry of years is on me
now I am afraid. Then a big struggle awaits me in England. I wish
to go to the bottom of the Sea & have a good long sleep.
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To Detroit I must go dead or alive as I have disappointed them

several times last year. There were big money offers from near
Chicago. I have rejected them as I do not any longer believe in
paid lectures and their ' utility in any country. If after Detroit I
feel the body able '' to drag itself on to Boston I will come, else I
will remain in Detroit or some other quiet place and rest to
recuperate for the coming work in England. So far I have tried to
work conscientiously-let the fruits belong to the Lord. If they
were good they will sprout up sooner or later; if bad, the sooner
they die the better. I am quite satisfied with my task in life. I have
been much more active than a Sanyasin ought to be. Now I will
disappear from society; altogether. The touch of the world is
degenerating me I ' am sure--so it is time to be off. Work has no
more value beyond purifying the heart. My heart is pure enough,
why shall I bother my head about doing good to others. "If you
have known the Atman as the one only existence & nothing else
exists; desiring what? for whose desire you : trouble yourself?"
This universe is a dream pure & simple: Why bother myself about
a dream? The very atmosphere: of the world is poison to the yogi-
but I am waking up-my old iron heart is coming back-all
attachments of relatives, friends, disciples are vanishing fast.
"Neither through wealth nor through progeny-but by giving up,:
everything as chaff is that immortality attained"-the Vedas. I am
so tired of talking too; I want to close my' lips and sit in silence
for years. All talk is nonsense
Yours flfly28
Vivekananda
(There was no chance that Swamiji could soon close lips and sit
in silence. And one might note here that around this time he was
writing to his brother disciples in India: work! as far as in you lies
! Then I shall go to India move the whole country. What fear! . . .
Gangadhar [Swami
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Akhandananda] has done right heroic work! Well done! Kali

[Swami Abhedananda] has joined him in work-thrice well done!!
Let one go to Madras, and another to Bombay, let the world shake
in its hinges! Oh, the grief! If I could get two or three like me, I
could have left the world convulsed.")29

While the amount of work Swamiji was doing was in itself

certainly enough to account for the extreme physical fatigue of
which he wrote to Mrs. Bull, the effort required to force his mind
to remain on the level where work was not only possible but
charged with tremendous energy and will was an effort known
perhaps only to avatars and prophets. Was it not this constant
strain on the subtle levels of his being that broke Swamiji's
health? Yet, surely in the nights when carriages and wagons no
longer rattled by on cobbled streets, when Miss Waldo had gone
home, when the lodging house was still and no suffering heart
made its demands upon his own, perhaps then his mind, released,
plunged into the abyss of God. It could not really have been
otherwise, for he lived on the very edge of samadhi, wading in the
tidelands of that Ocean. It has been said that Swamiji's
continuance of "the meditative habit throughout his Western life
was remarkable; for the disturbances were innumerable." 30 But
perhaps it was more remarkable that he maintained the habit of
activity, for his effort was not to keep his mind lifted, but to hold
it down. His great heart compelled him to work; his prescient
belief that he had but a few years left compelled him to work
incessantly. "Sister," he had written in his letter of February I,
1895, to Mary Hale, "the way is long, the time is short-evening is
approaching-I have to go home soon, I have no time to give my
manners a finish. I cannot find time to deliver my message." 31

And yet one could say that his grueling schedule might of itself
have hastened the day of his departure from this earth. It was
during the months of January and February of 1896 that his
health, once robust, began to break down. Tired even when he had
arrived from England in December after a hard
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six weeks of steady teaching ("I am really tired from incessant

work," he had written to Alasinga from London on November 18,
1895. "Any other Hindu would have vomitted blood and died if
he had to work as hard as I have to"), 32 he had had no rest before
undertaking his heavy program of New York classes in December.
By February, he was badly feeling the strain, writing to Sturdy in
the second week of that month, "I am afraid my health is breaking
down under constant work. I want some rest. We are so unused to
these Western methods, especially the time-keeping." 33 And to
Mary Hale on February 10, "My health is very much broken
down this year by constant work. I am very nervous. I have not
slept a single night soundly this winter. I am sure I am working
too much, yet a big work awaits me in England. . . . I was not
made for these struggles , and fights of the world."34

Perhaps it was around this time and in this mood that , Swamiji
wrote the following heretofore unpublished and undated lines of
an unfinished poem :

From life to life I am waiting here at the gates-they open not.

My tongue is parched with ceaseless prayers and dim my eyes

have grown

With constant straining through the gloom to catch one ray long
sought;

My heart is seized with dark despair, all hope well nigh has
flown.

And standing on life's narrow ridge, beneath the chasm I see

Strife and sorrow, darkness deep of whirling life & death,

Of mad commotion, struggles vain, of folly roaming free.

On one side this dark abyss-I shudder to see it even On the other
this wall35

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Now and then, despite the intensity and fullness of his routine,
Swamiji had some recreation, though it was not the kind of rest he
craved. He walked a little every day, sometimes in Central Park
with one or another of his friends, sometimes simply along the
streets of the city. "It required no little courage," Miss Waldo later
told Sister Devamata, "to walk up Broadway beside that flaming
coat. As the Swami strode along in lordly indifference, with me
just behind, half out of breath trying to keep up with him, every
eye was turned upon us and on every lip was the question: `What
are they?' " And to be sure they must have been a sight-the lordly
flaming monk and the portly, heavily breathing woman just
behind. "Later," Miss Waldo confided to her friend, "I persuaded
him to adopt more subdued clothing for the street." 36 And one
indeed hopes that in the bitterly cold winter of New York Swamiji
at least wore an overcoat over his robe.

Sometimes, on a day when there was no class, he would go to

Miss Waldo's house in Brooklyn. "It was [then] Swamiji who took
the jogging horse-car [at least a part of the way], travelled the two
hours and cooked the meals," Devamata wrote. "He found
genuine rest and relaxation in the freedom and quiet of Miss
Waldo's simple home. The kitchen was on the top floor of the
house, in front of it the dining-room full of sunshine and potted
plants. As the Swami invented new dishes or tried experiments
with Western provisions, he ran back and forth from one room to
the other like a child at play:»s~
Miss Waldo was deeply devoted to Swamiji. Years later, she
expressed the depth of her feeling in a letter to Miss MacLeod,
who had shared with her some of his letters.

I brought the dear letters upstairs and read them over again and
then put my head down on them and had a good cry over them.
My blessed, blessed guru! How was I ever so favored as to be
permitted to know him! And not only to know him, but to love
him and be accepted by
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him as his disciple ! I always bless the day he came into my life.
May I always be faithful to him and to his teachings! 38

Sometime during this New York season Swamiji attended a

dinner quite different from those informal and free occasions at
Miss Waldo's. This was "a little dinner given by Mrs. Leggett at
the Metropolitan Club,"39 a very grand and exclusive
establishment, known to New Yorkers as "the millionaires' club."
The building itself, which stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and
Sixtieth Street "a gleaming white Italian Renaissance palace,
entered from a spacious colonnaded courtyard" 40 was a match in
grandeur for any of the super magnificent mansions that were
being built along the Avenue from Fiftieth Street northward by
the millionaires themselves. While Swamiji may have loved to
cook his own dinner at Miss Waldo's humble house in Brooklyn,
he would have been equally at home in the fashionable
surroundings of the Metropolitan Club dining room and have
enjoyed the company of his friends the Leggetts: The young artist
Maude Stumm, who had first met Swamiji in Paris, met him for
the second time at this dinner and later, at Miss MacLeod's
request, jotted down her memory of the occasion :
Besides this wonderful guest [Swamiji] were three others, one of
them the young Boston woman who had taken the prize for the
"Hymn of the Republic" sung at the World's Fair. She was little
and sat very erect, with an alert expression. Swami was rolling
out Sanskrit and translating the ancient glories of India-nobody
daring to speak. He dwelt finally upon the spiritual superiority of
the Hindu, even today. Thereupon the Boston lady interrupted:
"But, Swami, you must admit that the common people of India
are way below the cultivation of the same class in, say
Massachusetts; why look at one item-the newspapers!" Swami,
recalled from his poetic flight, raised his great eyes
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and regarded her silently. "Yes, Boston is a very cultivated

place," he said, "I landed there once-a stranger in a strange land.
My coat was like this red one and I wore my turban. I was
proceeding up a street in the busy part of the town when I became
aware that I was followed by a great number of men and boys. I
hastened my pace and they did too. Then something struck my
shoulder and I began to run, dashing around a corner, and up a
dark passage, just before the mob in full pursuit, swept past and I
was safe! Yes," he concluded, "Massachusetts is a very civilized
place!" Even this did not silence the little woman, and with
astonishing temerity she raised her voice again to say, "But,
Swami, no doubt a Bostonian in Calcutta, would have created just
such a scene!" "That would be impossible," he replied, "for with
us it is unpardonable to show even polite curiosity to the stranger
within our gates, and never open hostility."41

Far more remarkable was another dinner, or rather supper party,

attended by Swamiji on Wednesday evening, February 5. The
event was written up in New York Herald of Sunday, the ninth, in
a social column, headed with unwitting appropriateness "A
GALA OCCASION." The occasion referred to was not, it so
happened, the party at which Swamiji was a guest, but Mrs.
William Astor's annual ball. This "most sacred ceremony of the
year" had taken place throughout the night of Monday, February
3. But the event that occurred two evenings later was, as far as we
are concerned, the true GALA OCCASION. And, in fact, this
particular social column devoted a good deal more space to it than
to Mrs. Astor's ball. The heading (in part) and the relevant
paragraphs read as follows :

A Wonderful Curio Supper Proves the

Most Novel Entertainment of
the Winter Season.
The supper given on Wednesday night by Mrs. Austin
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Corbin and Miss Annie Corbin at their home, No. 425 Fifth
avenue, styled by some a curio party, was, perhaps, the most
unique entertainment in the social calendar of the winter season.
It was an entertainment arranged by the hostess for the purpose,
in order that Mme Sarah Bernhardt might meet the Swami Vive
Kananda, the Hindoo priest. The French tragedienne, since she
has added "Izeyl" to her repertoire, has taken a profound interest
in Hindoo mythology and the occult sciences of the East, and she
was extremely anxious to converse with the well known
expounder of the religion of the Far East. So on Wednesday night
the opportunity was offered, and Mme. Bernhardt was not slow to
grasp it. She arrived at the Corbin house soon after her labors at
the theatre were over, and there found the Brahmin priest arrayed
in his rather showy robes 'of office and, surrounding him was a
brilliant company of young people, including Mrs. Adolf
Ladenburg, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Lieutenant and
Mrs. Gianni Bettini, M. Victor Maurel, Miss Caroline Duer, Mr.
Charles Mathews, Mr. Creighton Webb, Mr. J. Norman de R.
Whitehouse, Mr. Frederic H. Baldwin and Professor Nikola Tesla,
the electrician.
An elaborate supper was served, and as it progressed Mme.
Bernhardt, through the aid of Mrs. Ladenburg, Mr. Whitehouse
and Mr. Mathews, as interpreters, discussed Hindoo mythology
with the Swami and had little fits of delight over the discourse of
Professor Tesla, who is one of the inventors of photographing
through opaque substances. The French actress, the Swami, the
Professor and several others in the company engaged in a lengthy
disputation on the great questions of life and death and the great
hereafter, while exquisite theories on life and morals were
advanced, and suggestions worthy of Plato on the banks of the
Ilissus were made. It was an intellectual treat seldom encountered
in social life in the metropolis.
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To say the least! High Society in the metropolis studiously

avoided anything that approached the dangerous realm of ideas;
whereas the Corbin party entered that realm head on. In the New
York World of February 6 and g one finds, respectively, the
following items:

Mr and Mrs Austin Corbin gave a supper and vaudeville last night
at their home, No. 425 Fifth avenue. Sarah Bernhardt gave some
monologues, the Hindoo High Priest gave a typical performance
and other artists assisted.

. . . Mrs. John J. Wysong gave one of the swagger Vaudeville-

Kettledrums of the week on Wednesday afternoon, when she had
a great many callers. . . . The same evening Mrs. Austin Corbin
capped the climax in this line by having Sarah Bernhardt, the
Indian high priest and others of their ilk at the very fine supper
party they gave. The craze for vaudeville is rampant.

Vaudeville, it should be noted, was not in those days the slapstick,

rowdy variety show it had been at an earlier age and that it was to
become again. In the 1890 it was relatively elevated. "Name acts"
had been introduced as a drawing card, famous stage or concert
artists did not feel it beneath their dignity to be prominently
featured on a vaudeville bill, and lucky was the hostess of a
private entertainment who could persuade the great and renowned
to perform. The Corbins' party was clearly on a high cultural
level, for only the most famous of artists could be asked to sing,
play, or speak under the same roof with the divine Sarah; those of
her "ilk" were top rank. Victor Maurel, for instance, was a famous
baritone, currently singing at the Metropolitan Opera House. As
for Swamiji, one suspects that the social editor of the World had
little idea of what a Hindoo High Priest was apt to do; "typical
performance" was the safe way out. Very likely he just sat quietly
during the "vaudeville," enjoying the monologues and
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songs. It was later in the evening that he entered into con-

versation.

The news of the party spread as far as Detroit. In the Detroit Free
Press of March I, in a section entitled "Fair Woman's World," one
finds the following item from New York:

The Swami, who has been a social fad this winter in certain
circles, has been given a number of receptions. Last week Mrs.
Austin Corbin gave a brilliant gathering of social and professional
stars in honor of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt and the Swami
Vivekananda, . . . who discussed the philosophy, morals and
religion of Hindoo life through an interpreter for several hours.
The priest was in the Brahmin robes; the actress wore an exquisite
evening gown. It is also stated that a warm friendship has sprung
up between the two.

The Corbin's evening was the initial to quite a series at which

these distinguished foreigners were entertained. Mrs. Ole Bull
had an afternoon for the great actress, who it is said is very
enthusiastic over everything American, and is very demonstrative
in showing it. If a lady pleases the divine Sarah, she goes into
wild delight over her, holding her hands and patting her face in a
truly French style.

It must have been sometime during the next to last week in

January that Swamiji had gone to see Sarah Bernhardt in the
drama Izeyl, which was having a brief run at Abbey's Theatre
(three short blocks from his lodgings). He was no doubt taken to
the play by insistent friends, for no one should miss seeing the
Bernhardt, as the divine Sarah was called in America. Moreover,
the play was based on the legend of Buddha and the courtesan
Ambapali; it was, in short, Indian, and therefore Swamiji must see
it.

Mme Bernhardt had brought Izeyl to America in January of 1896,

along with a number of other plays, from her theater
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in Paris, where, according to the Boston Transcript, it had been

"one of the most sensational novelties of a decade." She had
transported across the Atlantic not only the original cast of Izeyl,
but "all the original scenes, properties and costumes" an operation
that was characteristic of the Bernhardt's method f procedure. As
Swamiji was later to remark, "Sarah Bernhardt is given to
spending lavishly."42 Izeyl was elaborately staged and, to judge
from the sketches in the newspapers, the sets presented a wide
variety of effects-Egyptian, Arabian, Classical Greek, Coptic, and
amid all this Eastern or near Eastern glory, at least one scene that
Swamiji found to be authentically Indian. A few years later he
was to mention this last in his travel-letters written for the
Udbodhan magazine. `One year," he wrote, "[Mme Bernhardt]
performed a drama touching on India, in which she set up a whole
Indian street scene on the stage-men, women and children,
Sadhus and Vagas and everything-an exact picture of India! After
the performance she told me that for about a month she had
visited ;very museum and made herself acquainted with the men
and Nomen, and their dress, the streets and bathing ghats and
everything relating to India."43 Clearly, Swamiji was impressed by
the care Mme Bernhardt had taken in her researches and by the
faithfulness with which she had reproduced this particular scene.

The play itself was something else again. Its four acts, which
swamiji patiently sat through, concerned the courtesan Izeyl's
attempt to win the heart of Buddha. "It is a sort of Frenchified life
of Buddha," Swamiji wrote to Mr. Sturdy. It was indeed. and it
was Frenchified in more than plot. Written especially or Sarah
Bernhardt by two now obscure French poets, Armand sylvestre
and Eugene Morand, the drama took place entirely n French
verse, and perhaps for this reason, as well as for its high-flown
sentiments, was considered one of the cultural highlights of the
New York season. During its short run in dew York it was such a
success that although it had been scheduled to play for only five
days, three extra performances
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were given, the last of which was a matinee held on Wednesday

February 5.

"I went to see this Buddha business," Swamiji told Mr Sturdy.

". . . A courtesan `Iziel' wants to seduce the Buddha under the
banyan-and the Buddha preaches to her the vanity of the world,
whilst she is sitting all the time in Buddha's lap. However, all is
well that ends well--the courtesan fails." 44 Swamiji went on to say
that during the performance Sarah Bernhardt had spied him in the
audience and forthwith had wanted to have an interview with him.
"A swell family of m acquaintance arranged the affair," he wrote.
"There were besides Madame, M. Morrel [Maurel], the celebrated
singer also the great electrician, Tesla," and as we have seen, quite
number of others. But it is not likely that Sarah Bernhard wanted
to discuss personal spiritual problems with Swamiji for she does
not seem to have had a more than passing interest in. such
matters, nor was she at that time in her life troubled at heart.
Fifty-one years old when Swamiji first met her, she had attained
to a dignity of bearing, a certain maturity c judgment, and, if one
can call it so, a serenity of mind; am yet she had lost none of her
extraordinary incandescence and charm. One imagines, then, that
Sarah Bernhardt-famous adored, beautiful, fulfilled, and
untroubled by questions as t life's ultimate meaning-desired to
meet Swamiji simply because he was, as she had seen at a glance,
a great and remark able man, an imposing presence, and, like
Izeyl herself, Hindu.

Mme Bernhardt's slightest wish in those days, and for many years
to come, was tantamount to a royal command. Yet no one, not
even she before whom monarchs had bowed, could command
Swamiji. If he had sensed in her desire to meet him merely the
whim of a spoiled and self willed woman, it is ver likely that he
would have refused the invitation. As it was, he must have seen
beyond the fabulously famous actress to; woman with greatness
of heart, of immense vitality, and indomitable spirit; a woman
whose zest for life and singleness
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of purpose no amount of suffering-and no amount of adulation

-could destroy. Sarah Bernhardt's motto, which she had adopted at
the very beginning of her career, was one Swamiji would have
approved: "Quand meme"-"Just the same," or, translated by her
granddaughter, "Despite all." It was a motto that she lived by,
magnificently overriding all obstacles (and there had been many)
in her path to glory. She was, to be sure, obstinate, given to
violent tempers, incredibly extravagant, demanding, capricious,
and utterly scornful of convention; but Sarah Bernhardt was never
petty, never was she weak, nor was she by any means stupid. She
had genius and Was well aware of it; she had also the
determination and the capacity for endless and painstaking work.
Further, she had the capacity, when necessary, for true self--
sacrifice, as was evident, for instance, in her tireless and selfless
nursing service during the Siege of Paris in 1870. Indeed, Mme
Sarah was not only a great actress, she was, as the passing years
were to reveal more and more, a great and gallant woman.
"Wherever there is the least manifestation of greatness," Swamiji
once said, "know for certain God is there." 45 And thus, even as he
had gone to see Sarah Bernhardt in Izeyl, so would he agree to
this "interview" with her, which was arranged by the Austin
Corbins, whom they both knew and who were indeed a "swell
family."

It may have been at this party that Sarah Bernhardt told Swamiji
in that "wonderful voice" (which he was later to mention) and
with the help of interpreters, her English being exceedingly poor
and Swamiji's French not good, about her researches for the
Indian street-scene in Izey; and he no doubt expressed his
admiration. She assured. him again and again that India was "very
ancient, very civilized," and she certainly told him, as she was to
do again in Paris in 1900, that his country was the dream of her
life. Swamiji listened, amused, perhaps charmed, for whatever
Sarah Bernhardt said, she said it charmingly. When writing of her,
he always seemed to be vastly and benignly entertained, as by an
exceptionally
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talented, highly spirited, and astonishing child. In any event, the

talk at the Corbins' surely had its light and vivacious moments,
Mme Bernhardt chatting animatedly about India, about her
researches, about the theater, and Swamiji listening amiably. But
it would appear that before long the conversation slid into a
discussion of Indian philosophy, Swamiji and Tesla conversing at
some length on the subject of Vedanta cosmology. Sarah
Bernhardt was by no means lost or bored by this turn of events,
going, indeed, into "little fits of delight"; but it was Nikola Tesla
who, according to Swamiji, was the most pleased. "Madame is a
very scholarly lady and has studied up the metaphysics a good
deal," Swamiji wrote to Sturdy. "M. Morrel [Maurel] was very
interested, -but Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic
Prana and Akasha and the Kalpas, which according to him are the
only theories modern science can entertain."46

This was probably not Swamiji's first meeting with Nikola Tesla,
that extraordinary genius whose fame today is by no means
commensurate with his achievements in the field of electricity.
There is good reason to believe that Mr. Tesla attended Swamiji's
lectures in New York in 1896, for about. a year later Swamiji
remarked during the course of a lecture in south India, "I have
myself been told by some of the best scientific minds of the day,
how wonderfully rational the conclusions of the Vedanta are. I
know one of them personally, who scarcely has time to eat his
meal, or go out of his laboratory, but who yet would stand by the
hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he expresses it,
they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonise with the
aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern
science is coming at the present time."47 Swamiji was surely
referring here to Nikola Tesla, who did indeed scarcely leave his
New York laboratory. "I spend so many hours at my laboratory at
times that my friends become alarmed and threaten to lock the
place up and hide the key," Tesla told a newspaper reporter in
1894. Yet evidently the Vedantic cosmology that Swamiji was
expound-
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ing in New York in January and February of 1896 drew him forth
on Sunday afternoons to Hardman Hall or Madison Square
Garden; and at either place, if he had arrived late, he would have
had to stand. Swamiji's first meeting with Tesla may have
occurred even earlier than 1896. At the World's Columbian
Exposition (where the Parliament of Religions had been held) the
electrical scientist had demonstrated his most recent inventions
with spectacular showmanship, and most probably he had been
one of the distinguished guests at the vegetarian dinner that the
Chairman of the Electrical Congress, Professor Elisha Gray, and
his wife gave for Swamiji in September of 1893 at "their
beautiful residence, Highland Park, Chicago."48

Curiously, he who did so much for industrial America is today

scarcely mentioned in American histories. But in 1896 Nikola
Tesla, who in July of that year would reach the age of forty, was a
celebrated figure, regarded by scientists and laymen alike with
something approaching awe. No other electrical scientist of his
day, including Thomas Edison, whom Tesla looked upon as a
somewhat doltish trial-and-error man, understood so well the
properties of electro-magnetic waves, and no one could make
them do his bidding as could he. Before coming to America from
his native Croatia (now a part of Yugoslavia) he had invented the
polyphase alternating-current system (an accomplishment no one
had thought possible) and had made remarkable discoveries in the
fields of high frequencies and high voltage. These achievements
were to release electricity from the bondage of the direct-current
powerhouses, those feeble generators that were so dear to
Edison's heart but that could do no more than send hesitant and
fluctuating charges of electrical current to distances not much
greater than half a mile. It was in 1896 that the gigantic Niagara
Falls powerhouse, which utilized Tesla's patents, went into
operation and that, for the first time, electric power of high
voltages could be transmitted for many miles. The age of electric
power was born then and there; and Nikola Tesla was, without
question, its
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father. He created, as has been said of him, the modern era.

Indeed practically everything Tesla invented was; either literally

or figuratively, of a world-shaking order and, for the most part,
beyond the grasp of his contemporaries. By 1896 there were far
more wonders in his brain-which served him as a filing case,
drawing board, and laboratory-than he had as yet revealed.
Already, for instance, he had discovered the fundamental
principles of radio and the principles, also, of remote control, both
of which he was to demonstrate in New York in 1898. He had in
mind, not as fantasies but as wellworked-out possibilities, radio-
controlled and jet-propelled airplanes. He had invented
fluorescent lighting; had described what are today known as
cosmic rays and the phenomena of radioactivity. In the early part
of 1896 he was publishing his improvements on the production of
X-rays that he had been working on for several years and that
Roentgen had only just discovered.

These are but a few of the things Nikola Tesla worked with and
played with long before anyone else had dreamed of them and
long before anyone could think what earthly good they were.
Ironically, many of his important inventions and discoveries are
today credited to other men. He himself was in part to blame for
his present obscurity, for he often neglected to take out patents,
or, if he had patents, sold them for too little. As a result, he was
dependent on others for capital; and those others lacked his
vision. Thus, despite the fact that over half of his two hundred and
twelve patents are today in essential use, Tesla died at the age of
eighty-seven in poverty and obscurity.

But to return to 1896 - he was then young, famous, and

abounding in self confidence and vitality. He was six feet two
inches tall, slender, handsome, charming, and highly cultured. -'
He dressed meticulously, even while working, and was given to
dining in solitary splendor at the luxurious Waldorf Hotel. Now
and then, he would invite his friends to regal dinners that were the
talk of the town and would entertain them afterward
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with the thunders and lightnings of his laboratory. If Sarah

Bernhardt was the goddess of the age, he was the god. He was the
god Thor, who not only could create lightning and shake the earth'
(with an oscillator), but could cause palpitations in many a female
heart. Yet, Tesla followed a severely rigorous program of self
discipline and austerity. He refused far more invitations than he
accepted, and, for the sake of his work, had banished women
from his life altogether. His effort was to achieve supermanhood;
and as far as the development of almost superhuman powers
were concerned, he had been successful.
The trio that convened at the Corbins' house that evening of
February 5, 1986, was indeed something to contemplate! Swami
Vivekananda, Sarah Bernhardt, Nikola Tesla-each peerless in his
or her own field, each at the height of achievement and fame,
each looked upon by others as somehow superhuman. The genius
and vitality that flowed there, manifesting itself so abundantly on
three different levels, was staggering, and the ground it covered
was immense. Taken together, the spheres those three represented
and commanded stretched over the entire spectrum of human life
and expression - the sphere of the emotions and the senses, the
sphere of the intellect, and, embracing and transcending both, the
sphere of the spirit. One could search far through history and not
find a comparable meeting.

While the dedication of each of these three embodied powers was

total, there were recesses, so to speak, and the Corbin supper .was
a recess they all seem to have enjoyed. Sarah Bernhardt, her still
slender figure crowned by a mop of frizzy red hair, dressed, the
papers said, in an exquisite evening gown; Swamiji in a flame-
colored silk robe and white turban; Nikola Tesla in the elegant
white tie and tails he donned every evening, must have chatted
together like old friends. As we have surmised earlier, the talk
probably started with the sets for Izeyl and found its way to Indian
philosophy-specifically Vedanta (or Sankhya) cosmology, which,
to Mme Bernhardt's
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apparent interest and Tesla's delight, Swamiji explained in some

detail. In his desire at this period of his mission to correlate the
insights of the ancient rishis with the findings and theories of
modern science, he probably asked Tesla many a question and a
day or so later evidently put his queries in a letter. On February 8
Tesla wrote him the following note:

My dear Sir,

As it would be difficult to answer your questions by letter and as I

wish to have the pleasure of meeting you again I would suggest a
visit to my laboratory 45 East Houston Street any day next week
you find convenient.

Faithfully yours49
N Tesla

A meeting was arranged. "Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate

mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential
energy," Swamiji wrote to Mr. Sturdy on February 13. "I am
going to see him next week, to get this new mathematical
demonstration. In that case, the Vedantic cosmology will be
placed on the surest of foundations. I am working a good deal
now upon the cosmology and eschatology of Vedanta. I clearly
see their perfect unison with modern science. "50

But one searches in vain, both through Swamiji's lectures and

writings and Nikola Tesla's published papers, for a further
reference to the mathematical demonstration that Swamiji had so
hopefully looked forward to. It is highly probable that he met
with disappointment. Indeed, a year and a half later, during the
course of a lecture in Lahore, he said, "There is the unity of force,
Prana; there is the unity of matter, called Akasha. Is there any
unity to be found among them again? Can they be melted into one
? Our modern science is mute here; it has not yet found its way
out"51 In fact, to judge from the views that Tesla held for many
years thereafter on the relationship between matter and energy, he
had either not fully grasped Swamiji's ideas on this subject, or,
not being able
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to demonstrate them mathematically, had rejected them as false.

Indeed, although some of Swamiji's ideas have since been
verified, even today (1982) the unified primal energy beyond
Prana and Akasha that he wanted science to discover has not yet
been found.

Let us consider briefly the Vedanta cosmology in relation to

science then and now, for even after Swamiji had given his
classes in Sankhya cosmology, his mind went on working with
those ideas. He intended, as he wrote to Sturdy, to write a book on
this subject in the form of questions and answers. "The first
chapter will be on cosmology, showing the harmony between
Vedantic theories and modern science. . . . The eschatology will
be explained from the Advaitic standpoint only." By which he
meant that this visible world and the various spheres through
which, from the dualistic standpoint, the soul actually passes after
death, are, from the Advaitic standpoint, visions constituted of
name and form only, like waves in an ocean. "This name-and-
form is called Maya, and the water is Brahman."Sz In this letter
he outlined the "layers of the universe"-the varying appearances
of Akasha and Prana:

…The lowest or most condensed is the Solar sphere, consisting of

the visible universe, in which Prana appears as physical force, and
Akasha as sensible matter. The next is called the Lunar sphere,
which surrounds the Solar sphere. This is not the moon at all, but
the habitation of the gods, that is to say, Prana appears in it as
psychic forces, and Akasha as Tanmatras or fine particles. Beyond
this is the Electric sphere, that is to say, a condition in which the
Prana is almost inseparable from Akasha, and you can hardly tell
whether Electricity is force or matter. Next is the Brahmaloka,
where there is neither Prana nor Akasha, but both are merged in
the mind – stuff, the primal energy. And here-there being neither
Prana nor Akasha -the Jiva contemplates the whole universe as
Samashti or the sum total of Mahat or mind. This appears as a
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Purusha, an abstract universal soul, yet not the Absolute, for still
there is multiplicity. From this the Jiva finds at last that Unity
which is the end. Advaitism says that these are the visions which
rise in succession before the Jiva, who himself neither goes nor
comes, and that in the same way this present vision has been
projected. The projection (Srishti) and dissolution must take place
in the same order, only one means going backward, and the other
coming out.53

It is only during the last ten years or so that the Big Bang theory-
the theory of a universe rushing outward from an initial
explosion-has been accepted by almost all scientists; and this is
merely a small part of Vedantic cosmology, a part taking place
after (immediately after, perhaps) the evolution, or formation, of
Prana: and Akasha, energy and matter. That the physical universe
will fall back in on itself, to again expand, and so on cyclically
forever, is today a theory entertained by a number of reputable
physicists, but it is as yet (1982) unproved. Swamiji's "Electrical
sphere," on the other hand, where the "Prana is almost
inseparable from Akasha," was established by Einstein long ago;
his term "mass-energy" embodies this interchangeability of matter
and energy. But what this "mass energy" is no one at this writing
seems to know. Yet it was this-the state beyond matter and energy,
the state out of which matter and energy evolved-that Swamiji
had hoped Nikola Tesla could mathematically demonstrate. He
could not. Indeed; is it not just here that physics meets
metaphysics and begins to slip beyond the grasp of mathematics?
But however that may be, Tesla, in accord with his era, had not
yet grasped the concept of "mass-energy," the sphere or state
where one can "hardly tell whether electricity is force or matter."
Despite his remarkable discoveries and inventions (some of
which, it is said, have unlimited possibilities today, waiting to be
tapped), despite his brilliance and prescience, his concepts were
not of the twentieth century. As late as 1938 he made an emphatic
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statement about a belief he had doggedly held since 1893 or

1894. "There is no energy in matter other than that received from
the environment; . . . [this] applies rigorously to molecules and
atoms as well as to the largest heavenly bodies, and to all matter
in the universe in any phase of its existence from its very
formation to its. ultimate disintegration."54 In short, for many
years Nikola Tesla was of the firm conviction that matter and
energy were two entirely and eternally distinct entities. Like all
nineteenth century physicists, he believed that atoms were, as
Newton had said, "solid, hard, impenetrable and unbreakable." He
believed, further, that electricity was a force that acted upon the
atom from the outside, thereby producing electric currents. He did
not believe and did not want to believe that force and matter were
interchangeable and that both were "reducible to potential
energy." Swamiji was far ahead of him.

Just the same, Nikola Tesla was, as Swamiji said, charmed with
the ideas of Vedantic cosmology and, up to a point, was surely in
accord with them; nor did he ever forget them. In the last years of
his life, when he had finally conceded that mass could be
converted into energy, he wrote a paper on the incalculable power
at the command of man. In this paper, a portion of which was
published for the first time in his biography, Prodigal Genius, by
John J. O'Neill, he said :

Long ago [Man] recognized that all perceptible matter comes

from a primary substance, or a tenuity beyond conception, filling
all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon
by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence,
in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary
substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity,
becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and
matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.
Can Man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all
processes in nature?.. If he could do this, he would
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have powers almost unlimited and supernatural. . . . He could

cause planets to collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat
and light. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite
forms. (Such powers] would place him beside, his Creator, make
him fulfill his ultimate destiny.55

Here one finds that well over forty years after knowing Swamiji,
Tesla remembered the exact terms the Hindu monk had used, and
although he chose from both Vedantic cosmology and modern
physics the parts that gratified his obsession with supermanhood,
it is clear that Swamiji's lectures, conversations, and, perhaps,
classes had stirred him deeply.

Although Swamiji met both Sarah Bernhardt and Nikola Tesla

separately at least once after their meeting at the Corbins', these
tremendously vital archetypes of man's genius in three spheres-
spiritual, intellectual, and esthetic-never again came together as a
trio. Their meeting in February of 1896 had been like some
splendid astronomical conjunction that occurs but once in
hundreds, thousands of years. What meaning it had in the lives of
Sarah Bernhardt and Nikola Tesla or in the larger life of mankind
we can only guess; but that Swamiji delighted in meeting and
talking to these two people, each so great in his and her own field,
we can be sure; for Man was his love, and human greatness,
wherever he found it and however it was expressed, never failed
to give him joy.* How often did he say that the whole universe
was contained in that one word-Man !

The Austin Corbins' house at 425, Fifth Avenue, where this rare
trio had talked together, was not unfamiliar to Swamiji. As we
have seen in an earlier chapter, he had held several classes there
in February and March of the previous season. It had not been
long, however, before he was writing to Mrs. Bull (on March 21,
1895), "I went to Miss Corbin's last Saturday and told her that I
should not be able to come to hold classes any more. Was it ever
in the history of the world that
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any great work was done by the rich?" 56 That had been the end of
the Corbin classes for 1895. During this season of 1896 Swamiji
had again agreed to hold classes at 425 Fifth Avenue, somehow
fitting them into his crowded weeks of January and February. At
present all we know of what may have been a weekly class comes
from a heretofore unpublished letter written by Swamiji to Miss
Thursby:

228 West 39th Street

New York, Feby 26th, 1896

Dear Miss Thursby

Will you oblige me by giving Mr. Goodwin any particulars you

can with reference to the business arrangements made for my 6
lectures with Miss Corbin. He will see her, with the idea of
obtaining payment.

Thanking you in anticipation, & with best regards

Very truly yours57
Vivekananda

Mr. Goodwin was successful in this mission. On March I he wrote

to Mrs. Bull:

I succeeded in getting $100 from Miss Corbin on Friday

[February 28] & the Swami wanted to pay his Detroit expenses
out of it, but I thought you would not like him to do so, so
persuaded him not to. I hope I did correctly. I have seen a letter
from Detroit from which it is certain that his expenses will be met
there.58

We can, I believe, assume that this hundred dollars from Miss

Anna Corbin was in payment for the six classes that Swamiji had
held in her house. It does not seem a handsome sum even for
those days; but on the other hand, Swamiji would have taken no
payment at all if he had not wanted to meet his own expenses and
if the Corbins had not been extraordinarily rich.
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In those days the very rich were very rich indeed, while the
laboring classes could barely keep alive. The gap between the two
was immense: the ratio of the average income of the employed
masses of downtown New York-that is, the tens of thousands who
were trapped in unending poverty, filth, and wretchedness-and
that of the tycoons of residential Fifth Avenue, the few hundred
who lived lavishly in palatial mansions, was something in the
neighborhood of one to fifteen thousand. Generally speaking,
Swamiji's following lay between these two extremes, consisting
of the more or less comfortable middle class that could give some
thought to matters of the spirit. But he spoke also to some of the
very poor, at, for instance, the People's Church, and to some of
the very rich at the Corbins'. Indeed, there seems to have been no
section of the American people upon whom his glance did not fall
and whom his words did not reach.

Through February of 1896, though longing to "sit in silence for

years," Swamiji continued to hold classes and to deliver a public
lecture at least once a week. A hall in Madison Square Garden had
been rented for the last three Sunday afternoons in the month, and
the crowds that came to hear him lecture on those afternoons were
larger than ever. "People are now flocking to me," he would write
on February 17. "Hundreds have become convinced that there are
men who can really control their bodily desires; and reverence
and respect for these principles are growing." 59

Madison Square Garden, which should not be confused with the

immense arenas that have since served its purpose, covered the
block bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues and Twenty-sixth
and Twenty-seventh streets. Though huge, it was a graceful,
arcaded three-story building, topped by a tower 300 feet high,
which was, in turn, topped by a 13-foot-tall twirling statue of
Diana, with bow and arrow poised to shoot
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into the wind. Completed in 1890, the building housed the

auditorium of New York, where all manner of exhibitions,
conventions, sports events, horse shows, and circuses took place.
It was not, however, in the main auditorium that Swamiji gave his
lectures, but in the more modest Concert Hall on the second floor.
Yet even the Concert Hall was large for those days, seating r5oo
people-five times as many as Hardman Hall. Here, to capacity
crowds, Swamiji delivered the second series of his New York
lectures: "Bhakti Yoga," "The Real and the Apparent Man," and
"My Master," on, respectively, February 9, 16, and 23.

In his series at Hardman Hall Swamiji had given his Sunday

audiences a foundation for the heights of Vedantic thought. He
had established on a rational basis the need for religion in human
life; he had as rationally pointed out the essential unity of the
religious principle, of which all the various creeds were vital
manifestations; and in his third and fourth lectures he had posited,
through a cosmological argument, the existence of an immanent
God and, through an epistemological argument, the existence of
the individual, self luminous, immutable soul behind the changing
phenomena of body and mind. There, on this pinnacle of dualistic
thought, he had left the .matter for the time being.

Now, beginning his second New York series, Swamiji did not at
once take up the thread of Vedanta philosophy where he had left
off. Rather, he spoke of the living relationship between the
individual soul and the Personal God-a relationship at first a little
stiff and shy on the part of the devotee, expressed with
ceremonies, rituals, forms, and various symbols of reverence. But
in his very absorption in these prescribed observances; the
devotee becomes more and more enrapt, his yearning more
authentic, less spasmodic and contrived; his relationship with God
becomes more and more real, until the ceremonious gestures, the
chants and the incense, the sanctified place of worship are no
longer needed. The conception of the Beloved has so deepened
and widened that the devotee's every
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thought, act, and word are instinct now with an almost breathless
reverence; there is no being who is not found to be He, no spot
that is not His temple. And at length, in that blaze of love the Fire
at the heart of the universe consumes the spark and "that God who
at first was a Being somewhere, became resolved, as it were, into
Infinite Love. Man himself was also transformed. He was
approaching God, he was throwing off all vain desires, of which
he was full before. With desires vanished selfishness, and, at the
apex, he found that Love, Lover, and Beloved were One."60

This lecture was, in effect, a summary of Swamiji's bhakti yoga

classes. Like them, it reached the monistic consummation through
the path of devotion; it employed not reason, but love, to
transcend the dualistic view of God, the soul, and the world. This
path was, surely, an age-old means by which the soul and the
world itself are dissolved in that blaze of union. Indeed, in this
lecture, as well as in his bhakti classes, one would think that
Swamiji had nothing else in mind or heart to teach but the .path of
devotion, so fully did he give himself to it, so carefully and
glowingly did he explain it. But it was not so. His teachings
necessarily reached beyond the dualistic ways they
accommodated; the Oneness of Advaita Vedanta was the ground
on which bhakti yoga (as he taught it) stood, the Infinitude to
which it aspired.

It was in his second Madison Square Garden lecture that he took

up the thread of the Vedantic argument, left hanging in Hardman
Hall. This long lecture, entitled "The Real and the Apparent
Man," was the grand climax of his two Sunday courses, the full,
culminating statement of his message, for which he had prepared
the way. He first reviewed both the cosmological and
epistemological (or psychological) arguments that he had
employed in his earlier lectures, coming, on the one hand, again
to Mahat (the Universal Mind), out of which Akasha and Prana
have been produced, and, on the other hand, to the soul of man,
against the permanence of which perceptions are unified and
known. We are here still in a dualistic
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realm - the realm of an unchanging Substance against which real

forms continually rise and fall.

Before moving on from the dualistic concept of God, soul, world,

Swamiji pointed to an equally valid view of things hat of
Buddhism, according to which "there is no such thing as
immovability in the universe; it is all change and nothing but
change."61. It was Advaita Vedanta that resolved apparent conflict
between these two views, each of which ~ supported by strong
reason; neither of which was in itself actually tenable. "The
reality is," Swamiji said,

That there is change, and there is non-change in this universe. It is

not that the Soul and the mind and the body are three separate
existences, but this organism is one. It is the same thing which
appears as the body, as the mind, and as beyond the mind and
body, but not at the same time. . . . He who sees only motion
never sees that absolute calm; and he who sees that absolute calm,
for him the motion has vanished. . . .

There is then but One Unit Existence, and that One is appearing
as manifold. This Self, or Soul, or Substance, is all that exists in
the universe. That Self, or Substance, or Soul, is, in the language
of non-dualism, the Brahman, appearing to be manifold by the
interposition of name and form.62

In one grand, rolling sentence after the other, Swamiji went

expounding the concept of Advaita Vedanta:
. . . This whole universe is that One Unit Existence; name and
form have created all these various differences. . . . This idea of
duality, of two, is entirely false, and the whole universe is the
result of this false knowledge. When discrimination comes, and
man finds there are not two but One, he finds that he is this
universe. It is I who am this universe as it now exists, a
continuous mass of change.
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It is I who am beyond all changes, beyond all qualities, the

eternally perfect, the eternally blessed.
There is, therefore, but one Atman, one Self, eternally pure,
eternally perfect, unchangeable, unchanged; it has never changed;
and all these various changes are but appearances in that one Self.
. . . None comes and none goes, says the nondualist. . . .
Omnipresent is the Self of man. Where to go? Where not to go? It
is everywhere. . . . It is nature that is changing, not the soul of
man. This never changes. Birth and death are in nature, not in
you. . . . These spheres, and devils, and gods, and reincarnations
and transmigrations, are all mythology; so is this human life. It is
not that they are mythology, and this [life] is true. . . . The whole
thing is mythology, and the greatest of all lies is that we are
bodies, which we never were. It is the greatest of all lies that we
are mere men; we are the God of the universe. We have been
always worshipping our own hidden Self.63

This lecture (in the view, at least, of the present writer) was one of
Swamiji's most important and most beautiful. It not merely
combined the moving beauty of poetry and the crystal beauty of
clear logic, but, more important, pointed to the terrible beauty that
flamed at the heart of the universe and that the names and forms
of entire universe could never fully express-the beauty which in
its entirely was the very essence of man. The subject of this
lecture was, of course, man himself. What was he really? This
question, which had grown more and more central to the Western
search for truth and value, more and more pivotal to cultural and
political life since the Renaissance, had become by the close of
the nineteenth century all-important. The question "What is
God?" was no longer pertinent to the life of the people as a whole.
As for the question "What is the universe?" the answer was
shortly to become so complex and uncertain that the layman
would abandon all hope of comprehending it. But the most
ordinary man asked
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with increasing wonder, "What am I ?" "Who am I ?" Was the

answer in its inmost depth available to his realization? To this
anguished and most legitimate question Swamiji answered
ringingly Yes ! Even here and now, while living. "It is a mistake
to think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are
separate. The real man is the One Unit Existence. . . . Is it
possible to realise this?....It is. There are men still living in this
world for whom delusion has vanished for ever." 64 Moreover, "if
all mankind today realise only a bit of that great truth, the aspect
of the whole world will be changed."65

Paradoxical though his concern may seem, Swamiji deeply cared

about the welfare of the world in its every aspect. His love was
man-not only what some might call the "spiritual man" but man in
his everyday working, struggling, often miserable existence. In
his every form man was to Swamiji God, man as man was the
spiritual man. That he should suffer even in dreams was an agony
to Swamiji's heart. He did not point out in this lecture, as he had
often done before and would do again to a startled nineteenth-
century audience, that the world as such and on the whole was
never through the operation of its own laws going to become
better or worse than it was; the sum total of relative good and the
sum total of relative evil would ever be the same. He did not here
discuss the eternal wavelike nature of the cosmos, with its
inescapable crests and troughs; rather, he asserted that one could
break these laws of relativity and be free. And then "religious
realization does all the good to the world"66 and this in a practical
sense:

People never stop to think [he said] that those who least thought
of their own individualities were the greatest workers in the
world. Then alone a man loves, when he finds that the object of
his love was not a clod of earth, but the veritable God. That wife
will love the husband more when she thinks that the husband is
God Himself.. . . That man loves his greatest enemy who knows
that that very enemy is God Himself. That man loves a holy man
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who knows that the holy man is God Himself, and that very man
loves the unholiest of men because he knows that the background
of the unholiest of men is even He, the Lord; and that man
becomes a world-mover for whom the little self is dead and God
stands in its place. The whole universe will become transfigured,
as it were. That which is painful and miserable will all vanish,
struggles have all departed and gone. . . . Gods will live upon this
earth. This very earth will be heaven, and what evil can there be
when gods are playing with gods, when gods are working with
gods, gods are loving gods ?67

Did, then, Swamiji envision a time when large numbers of the

human race would have realized their own divinity-their own
spiritual essence? It would seem that he did, but not overnight; he
was practical from start to finish. Again and again throughout his
mission he declared that monistic understanding, let alone
realization, was not immediately available to all, but that an initial
handful would be enough to change the world. He said now:

If one-millionth part of the men and women who live in this

world simply sit down and for five minutes say, "You are all God,
O ye men and O ye animals, and living beings, ye are the
manifestations of the one living Deity!" the whole world will be
changed in half an hour.68

Who knew from where-from what city or village, from what

section of society, from what cultural background, from what
religion-the individuals composing that millionth part of mankind
would arise? Reading this lecture and many others that Swamiji
delivered in the West, one finds it difficult to think that he did not
want the highest of Vedantic philosophy to be taught without
qualification to everyone, high and low. Who could know where
that seed of pure truth would sprout and flourish? As prodigal as
nature itself, he expended vast
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amounts of energy so that even one life might emerge and be

lifted into freedom. He did not calculate: though acknowledging
the value (indeed the necessity) of lesser truth, he himself never
taught as conclusive anything less than what he knew to be the
highest. He threw it all broadcast.

My whole life has been changed by the touch of one of these

Divine men, about whom I am going to speak to you next Sunday
[he said at the close of this climactic lecture], and the time is
coming when these thoughts will be cast abroad over the world.
Instead of living in monasteries, instead of being confined to
books of philosophy to be studied only by the learned, the time
has come when they will be sown broadcast over the whole
world, so that they may become the common property of the saint
and the sinner, of men, women, and children, of the learned and
of the ignorant. It will permeate the atmosphere of the world, and
the very air that we breathe will tell with every pulsation, "Thou
art That." And the whole universe of myriads of suns and moons,
through everything that speaks, with one voice will say, "Thou art
That."69

If this knowledge, this jnana, was mankind's hope-and Swamiji

fully believed that it was-he could not temporize in expounding it
nor hold back his power of giving it. How much spiritual force
did not flow through his body! And though that body was a
perfect conduit, even that superbly tuned instrument was shaken.
This lecture, which marked the peak of his American mission,
seemed also to mark a peak of physical exhaustion. The following
day (February 17) he wrote to Alasinga, "Just as I am now writing
to you, every one of my bones is paining after yesterday
afternoon's long Sunday public lecture. I have succeeded now in
rousing the very heart of the American civilization-New York. But
it has been a terrific struggle. . . . Now things are in such shape
that they will go on."70

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Flooded over by that torrent of power, surely none who attended

Swamiji's New York lectures and classes could have remained
unchanged; a new element entered the lives of those who came in
contact with him, and because he never spoke to the intellect
alone, but, literally, to the very soul of his listeners, his thought
had entered their lives for all time, there to grow and to become
at length the force that would determine their destinies. It was
bound to be so. Swamiji's own words, spoken in a bhakti yoga
class, explain the phenomenon of guru-shakti -and surely, whether
or not he gave formal initiation, he was guru to all who sat at his
feet. "If a heater is hot," he said, "it can convey heat
vibrations. . . . Even so is the case with the mental vibrations of
the religious teacher which he conveys to the mind of the taught.
It is a question of transference, and not of stimulating only our
intellectual faculties. Some power, real and tangible, goes out
from the teacher and begins to grow in the mind of the taught." 71

To some of his New York students Swamiji gave formal diksha

initiation (the first initiation into spiritual life); to those who
wanted it, he gave brahmacharya, and to those who wanted it
badly enough, he gave sannyasa. Of this last group there was just
one in 1896. On Thursday, February 13, Swamiji gave the vows
of sannyasa to a Dr. Street, naming him Swami Yogananda. The
ceremony took place, Kripananda wrote in the Brahmarvadin of
March 28, 1896, "in the presence of the other Sannyasins
[evidently Abhayananda had come from Brooklyn] and a number
of Brahmacharins." Who these brahmacharins were we do not
know. One remembers, however, that Swamiji had given the first
monastic vows to five disciples at Thousand Island Park, and very
probably had made other brahmacharins since his return from
England.

Of Dr. Street, the third sannyasin Swamiji made in America, he

wrote to Sturdy on February 13, "Today another Sannyasin has
been added to the list. This time it is a man who is a
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genuine American and a religious teacher of some standing in the

country. He was Dr. Street. He is now Yogananda, as his leaning
is all towards Yoga."72 Swami Yogananda had, in fact, developed
certain psychic powers before he had met Swamiji, as one learns
from Swami Abhedananda, who met Yogananda in New York in
1898. Swami Abhedananda wrote in his Diary:

On March 3 [1898] Swami Yogananda . . . called on me and spent

the morning talking on psychic experiences he had acquired by
crystal gazing. He could foretell events by looking intently on a
ball of white crystal placing it on a small table in front. This is
called Tratak yoga in India. He had practised this branch of Hatha
Yoga for many years before he met Swami Vivekananda and
attended his classes on Raja Yoga in New York city. Swami
Vivekananda was pleased to know him and admired his psychic
powers. . . . He was a student of Egyptian mysticism and wrote a
book on that subject. He was a clairvoyant, that is, with the help
of his crystal he gained the psychic vision of things or events
happening at a long distance. I was told that on the eve of the
Spanish American War in 1898 Dr. Street was sitting in his room
with a group of young American ladies and gentlemen who were
gazing at the crystal ball with him. He suddenly declared that the
American Battleship called "Maine" was blown up by the
Spaniards in the port of Santiago in the Island of Cuba and that
this disaster would bring on the war between U.S.A. and Spain.
His vision and statement were correct in every way and the war
was declared against Spain by U.S. Government. . . . The Swami
was honest, simple, amiable and a great mystic. The one peculiar
thing I noticed in his talk [was] that he pronounced Vandanta for
Vedanta.'73

But however he may have pronounced it, Yogananda had been

struck by the vastness of Vedanta, in the infinity of which
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a man could find his own meaning. He expressed his views on

the subject in a short article, more rhapsodic than philosophical,
that appeared in the Brahmavadin of September 12, 1896. The
only other bit of information that the present writer knows about
this first Yankee sannyasin is that by June of 1896 he had started a
class in Brooklyn and was in close touch with the New York
Vedanta Society.

From Swami Kripananda's letters to the Brahmavadin we learn

that on the Thursday following the initiation of Yogananda,
Swamiji made several young men and women his disciples;
giving them a mantra. These two ceremonies, held on February 13
and 20, are the only ones of which we have definite knowledge,
and it was perhaps during one of them that Swamiji gave the
vows of brahmacharya to at least three people-Miss Waldo, Mr.
Goodwin, and young Mr. Van Haagen. Of one such ceremony
Mrs. Bull wrote several months later to Kripananda, who had
been mistakenly addressing her as "Yati Mata," dividing the
monastic name Yatimata into two words and wrongly supposing it
to mean "Mother of Monks." Correcting him in at least one
respect, Mrs. Bull related some of the facts: "The designation of
Yati Mata was given to Miss Waldo and none other so far as
know-certainly not myself.* I have taken no vows, but I spoke my
aspirations ; in the presence of those who had, asked their help
and the ` blessing of Vivekananda whom I reverence for the
knowledge he brought me of his Master and for his own brave life
towards purity and perfection."74

(In considering Swamiji's methods of work, it is of interest to note

that he gave monastic vows to both men and women r in spite of
the fact that there was not a semblance in the Western world of
Vedantic monasteries or convents. His American monastic
disciples were, so to speak, fledglings ' without a nest; they did
not have the convenience, protection, support and discipline of a
monastic institution of any kind whatsoever; they had to stand on
their own strength alone. It is not impossible to think that Swamiji
saw an advantage in
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this, a test of true renunciation and a schooling in detachment and

courage. As he had said in his classes: "Live in the midst of the
battle of life. Anyone can keep calm in a cave or when asleep.
Stand in the whirl and madness of action and reach the Centre. If
you have found the Centre, you cannot be moved." 75 And again,
"To be in the world, but not of it, is the true test of the
Sannyasin."76 This is not to say, of course, that Swamiji did not
also recognize the desirability of Vedanta monasteries and
convents in the West, as well as in the East; undoubtedly he did,
but that is a subject beyond the scope of this book.).

Since the middle of December, 1895, Mrs. Bull had been wanting
to come to New York, but time and again she had been compelled
by domestic duties to change her plans: "Why are you not here?"
Kripananda had finally cried out in despair on receiving news in
mid January of yet one more cancellation of a proposed visit.
"How I longed, and am longing to see your face again, to come
under the influence of that angelic personality which emanates
peace and happiness for all alike, the good and the bad, without
asking for any reward or thanks!"77
This cry arose from weeks of increasing misery on Kripananda's
part. Nothing had been going well for him. The trouble,
ostensibly at least, was the hard-working, ebullient Miss Waldo,
who, he wrote, "is ruling supreme." "From the early morning till
late at night every corner is full with her. She belongs to those
beings as the ghost in Arabian Nights, that once let out of the
bottle he fills the whole universe, and nothing else can exist near
him. She wants him Swamiji absolutely for herself alone. . . . I go
her out of the way. . . . She is a very good woman, but what may
be an advantage in her, that profusion of devotion for the Swami,
repulses me from her, more and more."79

And then there was the "shorthand man." The unexpected

presence of the young and capable Goodwin, who was rapidly
growing ever closer and dearer to Swamiji and becoming
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indispensable to the work, must have been a source of even more

bitter heartbreak, too painful for utterance.

Kripananda's morose, and, it would seem, very apparent hostility

toward those who were close to Swamiji and taking hold of the
work could not but have created unpleasantness. His relationship
even with Swamiji himself became for a time, as he told Mrs.
Bull, "a very cold one." Yet Swamiji never wavered in his love for
his disciple, and we see him one January day, when matters had
perhaps reached a crisis, stopping his work to climb the stairs to
the small attic room in which Kripananda had isolated himself.

The Swami came up to my room (Kripananda wrote to Mrs. Bull]

and poured out his inmost heart before me, his old love for me
found again beautiful expression and I could not help yielding to
the tenderness he showed me.79

And for the time being, at. least, Kripananda saw all things in a
different light.

The same day (he continued] peace was made between us and
Abhayananda. I went, on the Swami's instigation, to see her and
the result was that all the trivial quarrels of the past are burried
[sic] and we are, what we always should be, brother Sanyasins.
She will call again on the Swami who, in spite of what had
occurred, is and was always ready to forget and forgive. 80

We do not know at present what had occurred between

Abhayananda and Swamiji that required his forgiveness, but
whatever it had been, his forgiveness was, indeed, a foregone
conclusion; his grace was inexhaustible. Kripananda's particular
misery, however, seems to have been impervious to God Himself;
it had a will and a resilience of its own. The following week he
wrote to Mrs. Bull:
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You are indeed the only one who kindly thinks of me. I live here
as in a desert, perfectly alone. No one to pour out my heart. . . .
She [Miss Waldo] has driven me away from the friend and the
teacher. I withdraw in my little chamber, and only see the Swami
when I come down to the lecture. My mental agonies I cannot
describe. It is only to you that I entrust the secret of my heart.
Everything will pass.81

And then at last Mrs. Bull came. The exact date on which she
arrived in New York is not known, but that it was after the sixth
of February is certain, for on that date Swamiji had written to her,
making no mention of her impending visit. Once in New York, it
is probable that she remained for more than two weeks, or at least
until Swamiji's last lecture at Madison Square Garden on
February 23. Little is known directly of her visit, but it is clear
from subsequent events that during it, and perhaps because of it,
she began to take a more active and leading part in the American
Vedanta movement than she had before.

A vitally important aspect of that work was the publication of

Swamiji's lectures and classes, through which his teachings would
remain living and available to future generations. As has been
seen earlier, he had been at work on preparing Raja Yoga as early
as December and in January was planning to publish three other
books-Bhakti-Yoga, which would first come out in Madras;
karma-Yoga; and, Jnana- Yoga, which last, as he originally
conceived it, was no doubt to consist of his advanced class talks
on the subject. In February, Karma-Yoga was ready for the
printer, and the manuscript of Raja-Yoga was nearing completion.
So far, the Vedanta Society had published only pamphlets, the
officers having raised among themselves the money for Mr.
Goodwin's small salary and the cost of printing. The Executive
Committee had handled all the necessary business contingent
upon bringing out the pamphlets, but this early publishing venture
seems to have been a more or
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less informal affair as far as financial and legal matters were

concerned. No definite organization had as yet been set up to
undertake so large a project as the publication of Swamiji's
books-a project that would require not only more capital than the
publication of pamphlets, but a sustained and responsible
management. As far as can be gathered, there was no one in New
York at that time able to take full charge of the matter. Those who
had the ability did not have the freedom; while those with
freedom lacked ability. "My great want here is a strong man like
you, possessing intellect, and ability, and love," Swamiji had
written to Mr. Sturdy on January 16, longing even then, as he was
so often to long thereafter, for workers equal to his vision. "In this
nation of universal education," he continued, "all seem to melt
down into a mediocrity, and the few able are weighted down by
the eternal moneymaking."82 The formation of the Executive
Committee in New York had been Swamiji's solution to the lack
of a single strong; steady, and financially independent worker. Yet
even a committee needs both an able leader and money if its work
is to prosper and survive. In February, the imminent publication
of Swamiji's books, together with his equally imminent departure
from New York-and, in a month or two, from America called for
both financial and managerial help.

Mrs. Bull's visit to New York could not have been better timed-a
fact that upheld the somewhat fatalistic view she herself held
toward her comings and goings. "There is always one best place
for us," she once wrote to Swamiji, "and I have learned not to ask
or to choose."83. One of the most important results of her visit
was that all the publishing activities of the Executive Committee
were now turned over to a new committee, which became known
as the "Publication Committee of the Vedanta Society." Mrs. Bull
was, in Swamiji's words, "the principal backer" (together with Mr.
Leggett) of this new committee; she was also, so to speak, its
chairwoman. The Committee was a businesslike affair. In return
for advancing (not donating) the money for Mr. Goodwin's steno-
graphical
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services, as well as for the printing and handling of books and

pamphlets, the members were to own, legally and in proportion to
their financial interest, whatever they published. The copyright
certificates, though in Swamiji's name, were placed in Mrs. Bull's
keeping, and, as befitted her position, she was given power of
attorney to conduct the Committee's business. This we learn from
a letter Mr. Walter Goodyear addressed to her shortly after her
return to Cambridge, in which he wrote, "Power of Attorney and
first two copyrights to follow later." 84 (These first two copyrights
must have been for the two pamphlets published in January: "The
Ideal of a Universal Religion" and "The Cosmos.") Some six
weeks later Mr. Goodyear sent to Mrs. Bull by registered mail
"the copyright certificates for [the book] Karma Yoga, [and the
pamphlets] Real & Apparent Man and Atman."85. The copyright
for the pamphlet "Bhakti Yoga"-the public lecture Swamiji had
delivered in New York on February g-was not mentioned in the
available correspondence between Mr. Goodyear and Mrs. Bull;
this pamphlet was, however, included among the first publications
of the Vedanta Society, which comprised, in all, five pamphlets
and one book.

Although Mrs. Bull was not one to be the principal backer of a

venture over which she could have no control, it is certain that
Swamiji did not place her in charge of the publication of his
pamphlets and books for that reason. Her money would have
meant nothing to him, nor, for that matter, would her other more
worldly qualifications, such as her wide and diverse contacts, her
managerial experience and ability, her broad education, and her
general business acumen. Essential as all these attributes may
have been to the success of a publication venture, they would
have been of small value in Swamiji's eyes-even of negative
value-had not Mrs. Bull also possessed an unwavering goodness
of heart. Indeed, her practicality and common sense seem often to
have been overlaid and suffused by a misty idealism that
befogged rather than illumined the matters at hand. Inconvenient
though this
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quality was to prove in times of crisis, Swamiji suffered it; it was

more than made up for by the nobility, generosity, and loyalty of
her character that would lead him to call her Dhira Mata-"Steady
Mother." "You [alone] may do anything you please with my
affairs," he had written to her in April of 1895. "I will not even
murmur."86

From time to time, however, Swamiji did murmur. Although Mrs.

Bull appreciated him, she did not yet (in the early part of 1896)
fully understand his methods of work, nor did she yet grasp the
magnitude of Swamiji himself: Not yet did she call him "the
Prophet"; she was still capable of a slightly patronizing air, such
as an older woman might take toward a young protege whose
genius was unquestioned but still immature. She could write in
June of 1895 to her friend Mohini Chatterji, who had first
introduced her to Vedanta: "The past six months [actually it had
been longer] I have known the Swami Vivekananda and been
much impressed by the life of Ram Krishna, his Master.
Vivekananda has done much towards helping agnostics and
atheists the latter among our working people as well as scholars. I
find him sincere and able and hope that his experience here will
help to give him poise and judgement that shall tend towards his
benefit as a worker when he returns to India."87

Possibly it was not until Mrs. Bull knew Swamiji in India that her
appreciation of this glowing young Hindu who called her
"Mother" would turn to deep reverence. Meanwhile, she seems to
have persisted in offering him unapt advice. "I will die a thousand
deaths," he had thundered in February of 1895 after an argument
with her, "rather than lead a jelly-fish existence of yielding to
every requirement of this foolish world."88 Yet, certain that he
was ruining his chances, she could not remain silent forever. In a
letter written to her by Kripananda on April 16, 1896, long after
her return to Cambridge, we catch faint echoes of what seems to
have been another royal storm. "Both you and the Swami owe it
[to me]," Kripananda wrote, "that, instead of being enemies, you
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separated as good friends: at the time when the Swami felt most
irritated against you, [I received all the blows which in his anger
were directed at you."89

It is not likely that Swami and- Mrs. Bull would have parted
enemies. Though they had their differences of opinion, though
Swamiji may often have overthrown her plans for him, though he
may often have stormed against "keeping society in good
humor,"90 She was always to him (even before he called her so)
"Dhira Mata," and convinced that she was one of those who were
destined to help his work, he entrusted her with a large part of it.

The first evidence that the new Publication Committee was in

operation appeared on Sunday, February 23, when Swamiji's first
book, Karma-yoga, was presented to the public. In telling of his
last lecture, which he delivered on this day, Sister Devamata
wrote in her "Memories" :

It was on this [final] Sunday that the Swami's first volume

appeared. F or some time the lectures of one Sunday had been for
sale on the book table the next Sunday in pamphlet form. Now a
whole collection of lectures on Karma-Yoga was brought out in a
large, thin, closely-printed volume-very different from the edition
published later. It was not very beautiful, but the workers were
extremely proud of it.91

On the title page of this first edition of Karma-.Yoga was printed

in small capitals: PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF
THE VEDANTA SOCIETY. The Vedanta Society had now taken
on, officially and legally, the role of publisher. And things had
changed: the pamphlet "The Real and the Apparent Man," which
came out on the same day, presented a photograph of Swamiji on
its cover; the type faces on the cover and title page were better
chosen than-or, at least, different from-those of the earlier
pamphlets, and their arrangement was more arresting. Even more
significant than
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these changes in format was the addition of a line on the cover

and title page which read: "Under the Auspices of the Vedanta
Society." From this last we can, I think, infer that it was during
the week Karma-Yoga went to press that the Publication
Committee was set up to handle it and to take into its care the
publication of Swamiji's pamphlets and future books composed of
his New York lectures and classes. As far as can be determined,
Miss Waldo was officially placed in charge of the editorial work,*
Mr. Goodwin of the printing, and Mr. and Mrs. Walter Goodyear
of the distribution and accounting.

As though suddenly conscious of itself as an entity of importance,

charged with keeping Swamiji's message alive in his absence, the
Vedanta Society began during this momentous third week of
February to use its name elsewhere as well. We find, for instance,
that the newspaper announcements of Swamiji's final lecture,
which appeared on February 22, read:

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

Final Lecture under the auspices of

THE VEDANTA SOCIETY

Feb. 23, 1896, at 3:30 P.M. at Madison Square

Concert Hall, Madison ave. and 26th st. Subject
"My Master: His Life and Teachings." Admis-
sion free. Collection.

Heretofore, the Vedanta Society had operated more or less in the

background, attending in what seems to have been an informal
way to the printing of pamphlets, the hiring of halls, and the
making of plans and resolutions. But though it had been active
and helpful, it had been almost invisible in the radiance of its
leader. Indeed, to some who had attended lectures and classes but
who had taken no part in the work that had gone on behind the
scenes, it appeared that the Society came into being only as
Swamiji left New York much as stars seem to come into being
only as the sun leaves the sky. Sister Devamata, for instance,
became aware of the
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existence of a Vedanta Society only toward the end of Swamiji's

stay. Even then she thought little of it. Recalling those early days,
she wrote: "In the closing days of Swami Vivekananda's
American sojourn, his most devoted followers had banded
themselves into a so-called Society, but it was a loosely-woven
organization, without headquarters or definite channels of
activity. The members met occasionally and listened to each other
lecture, the lecture being rebuilt notes of Swami Vivekananda's
teachings; but little was accomplished towards giving the group
permanent form."92

It is true that after Swamiji's departure the Vedanta Society

remained for some time "a loosely-woven organization." But
loosely woven or not, its function was now to carry on his work.
The sudden emergence of the Society as a purposeful entity,
together with the simultaneous organization of the Publication
Committee, throws a little light on a sentence in Kripananda's
letter of March 22, 1896, to the Brahmavadin, in which he wrote,
covering the news from February 19, "There has been organized
in New York a `Vedanta Society' for the study and propagation of
the Vedanta literature."93 He may have had in mind the new
Publication Committee as well as the new function the Vedanta
Society had assumed-a function which might well enough be
called "the study and propagation of the Vedanta literature." That
Kripananda enclosed the words Vedanta Society in quotation
marks was perhaps his way of divesting the group of reality, just
as Devamata's "so-called" was perhaps hers. But whatever else
the Society may or may not have been, ii was real and had been
so for a long time.94

Swamiji gave his last Sunday lecture at Madison Square Garden

on February 23. According to the lunar calendar, by which Indian
anniversaries are generally reckoned, this day was more or less
Sri Ramakrishna's birthday,* and, as though in celebration,
Swamiji had chosen to speak on his Master.
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The subject, "My Master-His Life and Teachings," was also

particularly fitting for the close of this New York season. The
previous Sunday he had reached the summit of his exposition of
Vedanta philosophy in "The Real and the Apparent Man." The
truth of what he had uttered could be verified only in the depths
of Self Knowledge, or, short of that, in the life of one who fully
embodied and exemplified it. Perhaps an even more cogent
reason why Swamiji chose this subject to close the season during
which he had fully formulated his mission in all its aspects was to
state categorically the fundamental purpose of Sri Ramakrishna's
advent and, by extension, of his own. During the course of this
lecture, he expanded the theme he had touched upon at the close
of his previous lecture -that of world-transformation through
spirituality, renunciation, self sacrifice, and the total clarity of
same-sightedness. This was, indeed, the primary theme of "My
Master"; it weaves through the original lecture like a fiery thread
and, at the end, bursts into flame. Although this magnificent
closing passage-a clarion call to renunciation, combined with a
scorching indictment of Western hedonism-was the grand
resolution and full statement of the lecture's dominant theme , it is
not to be found in the version of "My Master" as published in the
Complete Works.

As is fairly well known, "My Master" as we read it today (and as

it has always been presented to the public) is woven of Swamiji's
New York lecture and another on Sri Ramakrishna that he
delivered in England in the fall of 1896. It would appear that
because of his forthright denunciation of Western materialism
during the course of the New York lecture, Swamiji had banned
its publication. "I did not allow it to be published," he is quoted as
having said a year or so later, "as I had done injustice to my
Master. My Master never condemned anything or anybody. But
while I was speaking of him I criticized the people of America for
their dollar-worshipping spirit. That day I learnt the lesson that I
am not yet fit to talk of him."95 To judge from the very fact that
"My Master" as Swamiji had
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given it in New York was indeed never published, it would seem

clear that it was this lecture to which he was here referring.

In the Life it is said that Swamiji "once spoke in Boston before a

large audience gathered to hear him on `My Master.' " "Full of the
fire of renunciation that he was," the passage continues, "when he
saw before him the audience composed, for the most part, of
worldly-minded men and women . . . he launched out on a terrible
denunciation of the vulgar, physical and materialistic ideas which
underlay the whole of Western civilization. Hundreds of people
left the hall abruptly, but in no way affected, he went on to the
end."96 Unfortunately, my searches through the contemporary
Boston newspapers of all the possible dates on which Swamiji
could have given this Lecture (its date is not recorded in the Life)
have failed to uncover any trace of it. It would seem possible,
then, that in the early telling and retelling of this particular piece
of history one city became confused with another and that the
story actually pertains to Swamiji's New York lecture of February
23, 1896, rather than to a lecture in Boston. And yet one does not
find in the relevant New York newspapers the outraged editorials
mentioned in the Life; nor to judge from the memory of one who
attended the lecture, does it appear that "hundreds of people left
the hall abruptly." Recalling the occasion, Sister Devamata wrote:

[Madison Square Concert Hall] was full to the uttermost at that

closing lecture-every seat, every foot of standing room was
occupied. . . . As he entered the hall from a door at the side of the
platform, one sensed a different mood in him. He seemed less
confident, as if he approached his task reluctantly. . . . He began
his lecture with a long preamble [a not unimportant historical
background]; but once in his subject, it swept him. The force of it
drove him from one end of the platform to the other. It
overflowed in a swift-running stream of eloquence and feeling.
The
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large audience listened in, awed stillness and at the close many
left the hall without speaking. As for myself, I was transfixed. The
transcendental picture drawn overwhelmed me. The call had
come and I answered.97

Could this have been the same lecture that drove hundreds from
the hall in indignation? We do not know; indeed, the whole matter
seems open to further study.*

But however that may be, Swamiji was unquestionably

remorseful over certain fiery passages in the New York "My
Master." Moreover, this tribute to Sri Ramakrishna, magnificent
though we know it was, may have seemed heartbreakingly
inadequate to him. "I have understood him very little," he was
later to say to an Indian disciple. "He appears to me to have been
so great that whenever I have to speak anything of him, I am
afraid lest I ignore or explain away the truth, lest my little power
does not suffice, lest in trying to extol him I present his picture by
painting him according to my lights and belittle him thereby!" 98
For such reasons Swamiji perhaps despaired over his New York
lecture ! And never would we have known its true glory and
import had not Swami Saradananda brought out an Indian edition
of Miss Waldo's (or perhaps Sister Devamata's) composite
version-an edition which, by some great good fortune, includes
(as the "Waldo" version does not) what must have been one of its
more flaming passages.

But, first, let us speak of this lecture as a whole. Only recently has
the New York lecture been extracted from its entanglement with
the England lecture (the latter of which was published in the
Brahmavadin in 1897).99 In addition, a comparison has been made
between two early editions of the composite version, one first
published by the New York Vedanta Society in 1901, and the
other (Swami Saradananda's edition) published by the Udbodhan
Office, Calcutta, in 1907. Passages not found in the New York
edition are found in the Indian one, and vice versa, and between
the two, a version of "My Master"
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which comes as close as possible to the lecture Swamiji gave n

New York has been constructed.*

The first six and a half pages of "My Master" as published n

volume four of the Complete Works are from the New York
lecture. Thenceforth, passages, both long and short, from the
England lecture are liberally interspersed. Almost all those hat
deal at some length with Indian customs as well as those hat
discuss Sri Ramakrishna's practice of various religions and his
conclusions regarding their underlying unity and identity of goal
are from the England lecture. (In all, the Massages from the
England lecture add up to approximately fifteen pages of the
thirty-four-page "My Master" as published n the Complete
Works.) Valuable in their own context though these passages are,
they tend to obscure the thread of the New York lecture; its theme
no longer stands out clearly and incisively; its edge is blunted.
When the original "My Master" stands free, then its theme, the
call to renunciation, sounds with clarion directness throughout.

The lecture opened with the well-known verse from the

Bhagavad Gita, "Whenever virtue subsides and vice prevails, I
come down to help mankind . . ." And then Swamiji went on.
(The following passages are excerpts from the New York "My
Master" as separated from the England lecture.) 100

Whenever this world of ours, on account of growth, on account of

added circumstances, requires a new adjustment, a wave of power
comes; and as a man is acting on two planes, the spiritual and the
material, waves of adjustment come on both planes. . . . Today,
man requires one more adjustment on the spiritual plane; . . and
the power is coming to drive away the clouds of gathering
materialism. The power has been set in motion which, at no
distant date, will bring unto mankind once more the memory of
its real nature; and again the place from which this power will
start will be Asia.101

I am going to put before you the life of a man who has

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been the mover of such a wave in India. 102 His studies showed
him that the one goal in the religions of India was the realisation
of [the] Mother and this idea took possession of the boy. His
whole life, as it were, became concentrated on that. How should
he find Mother? The prepossession grew, grew until he could
speak nothing, hear nothing, except about that one thing, how to
attain to Mother.l03

At that time he had no teacher, nobody to tell him anything except

that every one thought that he was out of his mind. This is the
ordinary condition of things. If a man is not mad with desire for
gold, the men of this world say that he is out of his mind! If one
seeks not after lust and wealth and vanity, he is called mad. But
such men are the salt of the earth. Out of such madness came the
powers that have moved this world of ours in the past, and out of
such madness alone will come the powers of the future, that are
yet to move it. So days, months, and even years passed in a
continuous struggle of the soul to arrive at Truth. 104

[Later on, he became] free and developed, and the first impulse
that came to him was to struggle to rid himself of the superstition
of social distinctions, to be quit of the last trace of social vanity,
to make himself the equal of the lowest.105

Then came to him the conviction that to be perfect, the sex idea
must go, because soul has no sex, soul is neither male nor female.
Sex exists only in the body and the man who desires to reach the
spirit cannot at the same time identify himself with it. . . . His
mind became changed, and he entirely forgot the idea of sex; and
with it vanished all possibility of desire. His whole horizon was
changed. . . . Think of the blessedness of that life from which all
carnality had vanished. To him, every woman's face had become
transfigured and to one who can look upon all women alike with
the eyes of this love and rev-
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erence, shines out from behind women, the face of, the Divine
Mother, the Blissful One, Protector of the human race. That is
what we want. Do you mean to say that the divinity behind
woman can ever be cheated? It never was and never will be.
Unconsciously it asserts itself. Unfailingly it detects fraud, detects
hypocrisy, unerringly it recognises the warmth of truth, the light
of spirituality, the holiness of purity. Such purity is absolutely
necessary in every country in the world.106

Such was the rigorous and unsullied purity that now came into the
life of that man. All the struggles that we meet through our lives
were past for him. His hard-earned jewels of spirituality, for
which he had given three-quarters of his life, were now ready to
be given to humanity. And now began his mission. . . .

The one great principle of his life was "Go out not to seek! Let
the lotus of your own heart bloom. All the rest will come of itself.
First acquire spirituality. It will not take long to give it to the
world."107

...He had the same sympathy for all; he had found the secret of
their harmony. A man ought to be intellectual, or devotional, or
mystic, or active; each of the various religions represents one or
the other of all these types. Yet it is possible to combine all the
four in one man, and this is what humanity in the future is going
to do. That was his idea. He condemned none but saw the good in
all.108

In the presence of my Master I found out that even in this body,

man may be perfect. Those lips never cursed any one; never even
criticised any one. Those eyes had pierced, as it were, beyond the
possibility of seeing evil, that mind had lost the power of thinking
evil. He saw nothing but good. Such infinite purity, such immense
renunciation give us the one only secret of spirituality. . . .

So all the great saints and prophets have expressed it, and so have
they done. How can there be spirituality without renunciation?
Renunciation is the background
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of all religious thought, wherever it be, and you will always find
that in proportion as it diminishes, in proportion as the senses
creep into the field of religion, so, in the same ratio, will
spirituality die out. This man was the very embodiment of
renunciation. . . . He was a triumphant example, a living
realisation of the complete renunciation of lust and money. He
was far beyond any idea of either; and such a man was necessary
for this present age. Such renunciation is necessary in these days
when men have begun to think that they cannot live a month
without what they call their "necessities," which they are at the
same time increasing in geometrical ratio. It was necessary that in
a time like this, one man should arise to demonstrate to the
sceptics of the world, that he cared not a straw for all the gold and
all the wealth that was in the universe. There are still such men. 109

And then, at the close, came Swamiji's call. It is given here in full,
for only a small fraction of it is found in the Complete Works:

Such a man, then, was necessary; and such renunciation is what

this age requires. Men and women of to-day! if there be among
you any pure, fresh flower, let it be laid on the altar of God. If
there are among you any who, being young, do not desire to
return into the world, let them give up! let them renounce! This is
the one secret of spirituality, renunciation. Think of every woman
as your mother. Give up this wealth. What does it matter?
Wherever you are, the Lord will protect you. The Lord takes care
of His children. Dare to do this. Be brave enough to do it. Such
great sacrifices are necessary. Can you not see the tide of death
and materialism that is rolling over these Western lands? How
long will you keep the bandage over your eyes? Can you not see
the power of lust and unholiness, that is eating into the very vitals
of society?
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Believe me, you will not arrest these things by talk, or by

movements of agitation for reform; but by renunciation, by
standing up, in the midst of decay and death, as mountains of
righteousness. Talk not, but let the power of renunciation emanate
from every pore of your body. Let it strike those who are
struggling day and night for gold, that even in the midst of such a
state of things, there can be one to whom wealth counts for
nothing. Nor let there be lust! Put away lust and wealth. Sacrifice
yourselves.
But who is it that will do this? Not the worn-out or the old,
bruised and battered by society, but the Earth's freshest and best,
the strong, the young, the beautiful. Such are they who must be
laid upon the altar, and by their sacrifice save the world. Lay
down your lives. Make yourselves servants of humanity. Be living
sermons. This, and not talk, is renunciation. Stand up and strike !
The very sight of you will fill the worldly mind, the wealth
seeking mind, with terror. Words never do anything. Preaching
has been all in vain. Every moment, prompted by the thirst for
wealth, books are brought out. But they do no good, because the
power behind their words is zero.

Stand you up, and realise God ! If you can renounce all wealth
and all sex, it will not be necessary for you to speak. Your lotus
will have blossomed, and the spirit will spread. Whoever
approaches you will be warmed, as it were, by the fire of your
spirituality.

This is the message of Sri Ramakrishna to the modern world.

Care not for doctrines or for dogmas, for sects or for churches. All
these count for but little, compared with that essence of existence,
which is in each one, and called spirituality. The more this is
developed in a man, the more powerful is he for good. He who
has most of it can do most good to his fellow-men. First, then,
acquire that.
... Only those who have seen it will understand this; but such
spirituality can be given to others, even though
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they be unconscious of the gift. Only those who have attained to

this power are amongst the great teachers of mankind. They are
the powers of light.

Then be you this! The more of such men any country produces,
the higher is that country raised. That land where no such men
exist, is doomed. Nothing can save it. Therefore my Master's
message to the world is, "Be ye all spiritual! Get ye first
realisation!" And to the young and strong of every country he
would cry that the time is come for r enunciation. Renounce for
the sake of humanity ! You have talked of the love of man till the
thing is in danger of becoming words alone. The time is come to
act. The call now is, Do ! Leap into the breach and save the world
110.

Here "My Master" ended,* as did also Swamiji's second and last
season in New York **

It is not possible to estimate the amount of energy Swamiji

expended during this season, for one cannot judge his work by
ordinary standards: Yet even by those standards, even in terms of
physical and intellectual energy, his output was prodigious. At a
conservative estimate, he held throughout this season (from
December 9 through February 25) seventy classes (including
those at Miss Corbin's) and delivered ten public lectures. And this
in addition to interviews, initiations, extensive correspondence,
the writing of articles, the translating of scriptures, the editing of
lectures for publication, and the organizing of his work into some
sort of shape that would contain and perpetuate his message. He
had given of himself to the point of exhaustion during those three
months-and there remained far more to do.
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NOTES FOR CHAPTER SEVEN

p.472 *These lines have been quoted from the 1902 Udbodhan
edition of Gnana-Yoga(page 126). In the Complete
Works(2:228) the text reads: “Not that it grows. Take of
the ideas of growth from your mind. With the idea of
growth is associated something coming from outside,
something extraneous, which would give the lie to the
truth that the infinite which lies latent in every life is
independent of all external conditions” In the earlier
1902, edition the italicized words read: “and that will
break the mathematical demonstration that the cosmic
energy s the same throughout.” In this lecture Swamiji
had not yet shown that the Infinite lies latent in every
life –that was a conclusion to which he was leading. The
premise he had established was that “the sum total of
the energy that is displayed in the universe is the same
throughout (Complete Works, 2:227). It was upon this
proposition that he was basing his argument, not upon
the indwelling Infinite, which he had not posited.

P. 474 *The names of some of the members of the Metaphysical

League are known to us; many of them were married
couples. (See Brooklyn Eagle November I, 1896)

P. 484 . * This incident was related by the late Swami

Akhilananda, recorded by Dr. Hilary Holt, and made
available to this book through the kindness of Swami
Chetanananda, head of the Vedanta Society of. St.
Louis.

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p. 5o8 Nikola Tesla was told in an article by the present (cont.)

author in Prabuddha Bharatq, March 1972, pages 110-
20. More information was there given in connection
with Mme Bernhardt and Mr. Tesla.

p. 52o *The name Haridasi, which Swamiji had earlier given to

Miss Waldo, was evidently not her monas- tic name. In
1897 she was known to Swami Abhed- ananda as
Brahmacharini Yatimata (see Swami Abhedananda,
Complete Works, 10: 7, 13). In later years, the members
of the New York Vedanta Society knew her not only as
Miss Waldo but as Sister Yatimata. (See Sister Shivani,
Swami Abbedananda in America, p.231)

p. 528 * For, information about the editing of Swamiji's New

York lectures and classes see notes for chapter six, page
463.

p. 529 *The exact date of Sri Ramakrishna's birth was not

determined until later as having been February -z8,
1836. In Swamiji's day, the consensus was that the day
was February 2o, and the choice of year ranged from
1833 to 1835. In the first published edition of "My
Master," Swamiji is quoted as having given Sri
Ramakrishna's birth date as February 20, 1835.

P. 532 * There was at least some disapproval of Swamiji's

New York lecture "My Master." In this connection.
Betty Leggett wrote to Mrs. Bull on March 16, 1896, "I
always feel the fine things [the Swami] accomplishes in
new fields. The shallow criticisms I have .heard since
the last lecture ["My Master"] make me feel that his
noble & generous work here for two years has been
largely to empty heads & emptier hearts" (SCB).

It is probable that the following passage from a letter

written by Mr. William J. Flagg to Mrs. Bull

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p.532 *on June 19, 1896, refers also to Swamiji's "My Master"
as delivered in New York: "He [Swamiji] promised he
would write [out] beforehand his last Music Hall lecture
on Sri Krishna Paramahansha, but was too busy to do
so. The consequence was that it occupied an hour and a
half in delivery, and gave much offense" (SCB).

Mr. Flagg, an admirer of Swamiji's (see Prophetic,

Mission-2,.chapter nine, section two), lived in New
York and would almost certainly have attended at least
some of his lectures at the Concert Hall in Madison
Square Garden. True, he says Music Hall, and there
was a well-known Music Hall in Boston. However, I
think we can reasonably assume that Mr. Flagg's
"Music Hall" was a slip; for the Boston Music Hall
was just that-a music hall, where the Boston
Symphony Orchestra regularly gave performances and
top-notch artists such as Paderewski and Emma
Thursby gave concerts. It would have been highly
irregular for a lecture to have been delivered in the
Music Hall. Moreover, if Mr. Flagg's comments refer
to a Boston lecture on Sri Ramakrishna (not, surely, on
Sri Krishna), then Swamiji would have had to deliver
it in March of i896, and ,it the present writing 1 have
found no evidence that he did so.

p.533 * For the disentanglement of Swamiji's lecture "My

Master" as given in New York from the composite
lecture in volurke four of the Complete Works., as well
as for its reconstruction, we are indebted to Michael D.
Smith and David T. Kalins, both of whom under- took
this scholarly and painstaking work while living at the
monastery of the Vedanta Society of Northern
California.

p.538 * The anticlimactic ten and a half lines at the close of "My
Master" as published in the Complete Works

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p.538 (beginning: "for realization; and then you will see the
harmony in all the religions of the world") do not occur
in Swami Saradananda's edition or anywhere in the
London lecture as published in the .Ri,ahmavadin. The
lines may have been added by Miss Waldo or others in
New York in an effort to tie the composite lecture
together.

**Sister Devainalta tells us that a day or two after

Swamiji had given his lecture "My Master" "a
supplementary meeting in a private house marked the
close of the Swami's New York work" (.Prabuddha
Pharata, April 1932, page 192). We can, 1 believe,
assume -Lbis meeting to have been the last of the six
class-lectures that Swamiji had held at Miss Corbin's
house (see page 568.., This would indeed have been a
"supplementary" meeting. Since Swamiji's public
lectures and the classes he held at his own quarters
constituted the main body of his New York work as it
has come down to us, it can be said that the season
closed with "My Master."
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APPENDIX A
(Unpublished and Unedited Transcript made by J. J. Goodwin)
BHAKTI YOGA, Monday A.M., Jan. 20th, 1896.

We finished in our last about Pratikas. One idea more of the

preparatory Bhakti, and then we will go on to the Para, the
supreme. This idea is what is called Nishta, devotion to one idea.
We know that all these ideas of worship are right, and all good,
and we have seen that the worship of God, and God alone, is
Bhakti; the worship of any other being will not be Bhakti, but
God can be worshipped in various forms, and through various
ideas, and we have seen that all these ideas are right and good, but
the difficulty is here: If we just stop with his last conclusion, we
find that in the end we have frittered away our energies, and done
nothing. It is a great tendency among liberal people to become
jack-of all-trades, and master of none, to nibble a little here and
there, and in the long run and they have nothing. In this country it
many times grows into a sort of disease, to hear various things
and do nothing. there is the advice of one of our old
Bhaktas-"Take the honey com all flowers, mix with all with
respect, say yea, yea, to all, out give not up your seat". This
giving not up your own seat is what is called Nishta. It is not that
one should hate, or even criticises the ideals of other people; he
knows they are all light; but, at the same time, he must stick to his
own ideal every strictly. There is a story of Hanuman, who was a
great worshipper of Rama; just as the Christians worship Christ as
he incarnation of God, so the Hindus worship many incarnations
of God; according to them, God came nine times in India, and
will come once more. When he came as Rama this Hanuman was
His great worshipper. Hanuman lived very
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long, and was a great Yogi, and during his lifetime Rama came
again as Krishna, and he, being a great Yogi, knew that the same
God had come back again as Krishna. He came and served
Krishna, but he said to Him, "I want to see that Rama form of
yours". Krishna said." Is not this form enough? I am this Krishna;
I am this Rama; all these forms are mine". Hanuman said, "I
know that, but the Rama form is for me. The Lord of Janaki and
the Lord of Sri are the same; they are both the incarnations of the
Supreme Self; yet the Lotus-eyed Rama is my all in all". This is
Nishta; knowing that all these different forms of worship are
right, yet sticking to one, and rejecting the others. We must not
worship the others at all. We must not hate or criticise them, but
respect them. The elephant has two teeth coming out from his
mouth. These are only for show; he cannot eat with them; but the
teeth that are inside are those with which' he chews his food. So
mix with all states, say yea, yea to all, but join none. Stick to your
own ideal of worship. When you worship, worship that ideal of
God which is your own Ishtam, your own chosen. If you do not
you will have nothing. Nothing will grow. When a plant is
growing it is necessary that it should be hedged round lest any
animal eat it up. When it has become strong and a huge gigantic
tree, do not care for any hedges, it is perfect in itself. So when just
the seed of spirituality is growing, to fritter away the energies on
all sorts of religious ideas, a little of this, and a little of that, a
little of Christianity, a little of Buddhism, and reality of nothing,
destroys the soul. This has its good side, and in the end we will
come to it. Only do not put the cart before the horse. In the first
place we are bound to become sectarians, but this should be the
ideal of sectarianism, not to avoid anyone. Each of us must have a
sect, and that sect is our own Ishtam, our own chosen way, but
that should not make us want to kill other people; only to hold to
our own way. It is sacred, and it should not be told to our own
brothers, because my choice is sacred, and his is sacred. So keep
that choice as your own. That should be the worship of everyone.
When you pray to your
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own ideal, your own Ishtam, that is the only God you shall have.
God exists in various phases no doubt, but for the time being,
your own Ishtam is the only phase for you. Then, after a long
course of training in this Ishtam, when this plant of spirituality
has grown, and the soul has become strong and you begin to
realise that your Ishtam is everywhere,[then] naturally all these
bondages will fall down. When the fruit becomes ripe it falls of
its own weight. If you pluck an unripe fruit it is bitter, sour. So we
will have to grow in this thought. Simply hearing lectures, and all
this nonsense, making the battle of Waterloo in the brain, simply
unadjusted (undigested?) ideas, is no good. Devotion to one idea;
those that have this will become spiritual, will see the light. You
see everyone complaining-"I try this", and "I try that", and if you
cross question them as to what they try, they will say they have
heard a few lectures in one place and another, a handful of talk in
one corner and another, and for three hours, or a few days, they
worshipped and thought they had done enough. Chat is the way of
fools, not the way to perfection, not the way o attain spirituality.
Take up one idea, your Ishtam, and let the whole soul be devoted
to it. Practise this from day to day until you see the result, until
the soul grows, and if it is sincere and good, that very idea will
spread till it covers the whole universe. Let it spread by itself; it
will all come from the inside out. Then you will say that your
Ishtam is everywhere, and that He is in everything. Of course, at
the same time, we must always remember that we must recognise
the Ishtams of others and respect them, the other ideas of God; or
else worship will degenerate into fanaticism. There is an old story
of a man who was a worshipper of Shiva. There are sects in our
country who worship God as Shiva, and others who worship Him
as Vishnu. This man was a great worshipper of Shiva, and to that
he added a tremendous hatred for all worshippers of Vishnu, and
would not hear the name of Vishnu pronounced. There are a great
number of worshippers of Vishnu in India, and he could not avoid
hearing the name. So he bored two holes in his ears,
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and tied two little bells on to them, and whenever a man

mentioned the name of Vishnu, he moved his head, and rang the
bells and that prevented his hearing the noise.

But Shiva told him in a dream, "What a fool you are! I am

Vishnu, and I am Shiva; they are not different, only in name; there
are not two Gods". But this man said, "I don't care I will have
nothing to do with this Vishnu business".

He had a little statue of Shiva, and made it very nice, built an altar
for it. One day he bought some beautiful incense and went home
to light some of the incense for his God. While the fumes of his
incense were rising in the air he found that the image was divided
into two : one half remained Shiva, and the other half was Vishnu.
Then the man jumped up and put his finger under the nostril of
Vishnu so that not a particle of the smell could get there.

Then Shiva became disgusted, and the man became a demon. He

is the father of all fanatics, the "bell-eared" demon. He is
respected by the boys of India, and they worship him. It is a very
peculiar kind of worship. They make a clay image, and worship
him with all sorts of horrible smelling flowers. There are some
flowers in the forests in India which have a most pestilential
smell. They worship him with these, and then take big sticks and
beat the image. He is the father of all fanatics, who hate all other
gods except their own.

This is the only danger in this Nishta Bhakti, becoming this

fanatical demon. The world gets full of them. It is very easy to
hate; the generality of mankind get so weak that in order to love
one they must hate another; they must take the energy out of one
point in order to put it into another. A man loves one woman, and
then loves another, and to love the other, he has to hate the first.
So with women. This characteristic is in every part of our nature,
and so in our religion. The ordinary, undeveloped weak brain of
mankind cannot love one without hating another. This very
[characteristic] becomes fanaticism in religion. Loving their own
ideal is synonymous with hating every other idea. This should be
avoided, and at the same time
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the other danger should be avoided. We must not fritter away all
our energies. Religion becomes a nothing with us; just hearing
lectures. These are the two dangers. The danger with the liberals
is that they are too expansive and have no intensity. You see that
in these days religion has become very expansive, very broad, but
the ideas are so broad that there is no depth in them. Religion has
become to many merely a means of doing a little charity work
just to amuse them after a hard day's labor; they get five minutes
religion to amuse them. This is the danger with the liberal
thought, and on the other hand the sectarians have the depth, the
intensity, but that intensity is so narrow. They are very deep, but
with no breadth to it, and not only that, but it draws out hatred to
everyone else. Now, if we can avoid both these dangers and
become as broad as the uttermost liberals, and as deep as the
bluest fanatic, then we will solve the problem. Our idea is how
that can be done. By this theory of Nishta, knowing that all these
ideals that we see are [good] and true, that all these are so many
parts of the same God, and at the same time thinking that we are
not strong enough to worship Him in all these forms, and
therefore must stick to one ideal and make that ideal our life.
When you have succeeded in doing that all the rest will come.

Here ends the first part of Bhakti, the formal, the ceremonial, the
preparatory, and you must remember that the first lesson in this
Bhakti was on the disciple. Who is the disciple? What are the
necessary qualifications for a disciple ? You read in the
Scriptures-"Where the speaker is wonderful, so is the listener,
when the teacher is wonderful, so is the taught; then alone will
this spirituality come". Mankind generally thinks that everything
is to be expected from the teacher; very few people understand
that they are not fit to be taught. In the disciple first this is
necessary, that he must want; he must really want spirituality. We
want everything but spirituality. What is meant by want? Just as
we want food; luxuries are not wants, but necessaries are wants.
Religion is a necessary thing to very few, and to the vast mass of
mankind it is a luxury. There are a
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hundred things in life without which they can live, until they
come to the shop and see a new and artistic something, and they
want to buy it. Ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent of mankind
come to religion in this way; it is one of the many luxuries they
have in life. There is no harm in this; let them have all they want;
[but] they are entirely mistaken if they think they can fool with
God; He cannot be fooled with; they will only fool themselves,
and sink down lower and lower until they become like brutes.
Those therefore will become spiritual who want, who feel the
necessity of religion, just as they feel the necessity of clothes, the
necessity of work, the necessity of air to breathe. A necessary
thing is that without which we cannot live, and a luxury is that
which is simply gratification of a momentary desire. The second
qualification in the disciple is that he must be pure, and the other
was that he must be persevering; he must work. Hearing is only
one part, and the other part is doing.

The second necessity in Bhakti was the teacher. The teacher must
be properly qualified, and the main idea in that lecture was that
the teacher must have the seed of spirituality. The teacher is not a
talker, but the transmitter of spiritual force, which he has received
from his teacher and he from others, and so on, in unbroken
current. He must be able to transmit that spiritual current. So
when the teacher and the taught are both ready, then the first step
in Bhakti Yoga comes. The first part of Bhakti Yoga is what is
called the Preparatory, where you work through forms.

The next lecture was on the name; how in all Scriptures, and in all
religions, name has been exalted, and how that name does us
good, and for the Bhakti Yogi, he must always think that the name
itself is God, nothing different from God. Name and God are one.

Next it was taught how for the Bhakti Yogi humility and
reverence are necessary. The Bhakti Yogi must hold himself as a
dead man. A dead man never takes an insult, never retaliates, he is
dead to everyone. The Bhakti Yogi must rev-
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erence all good people, all saintly people, for the glory of the
Lord shines always through His children.

The next lesson was the Pratikas. In that it was taught that Bhakti
is only when you worship God. Worshipping anyone else is not
Bhakti. But we can worship anything we like if we think it is
God. If we do not think it is God that worship is not Bhakti. If
you think it is God it is all right.

There was a certain Yogi who used to practise meditation in a

lonely part of the forest, on the banks of a river. There was a poor
cowherd, a very ignorant man, who used to tend his herd in that
forest. Every day he used to see this same Yogi meditating by the
hour, practising austerities, living alone, studying. Somehow he
got curious what he did, so he came to him and said "Sir, can you
teach me the way to God?" This Yogi was a very learned, great
man, and he replied, "How will you understand God, you
common cowherd; blockhead, go home and tend your cows and
don't bother your head with such things".

The poor fellow went away, but somehow a real want had come
to him. So he could not rest, and he came again to the Yogi, and
said "Sir, won't you teach me something about God ?" Again he
was repulsed, "Oh, you blockhead, what can you understand of
God ? Go home." But he could not sleep, he could not eat; he
must know something about God.

So he came again, and the Yogi, in order to quiet the man, as he

was so insisting, said, "I'll teach you about God."

The man asked, "Sir, what sort of being is God? What is his form?
How does he look?"
The Yogi said, "God is just like the big bull in your herd ; that is
just God; God has become that big bull".

The man believed him, and went back to his herd, and day and
night he took that bull for God, and began to worship it. He
brought the greenest grass for that bull, rested close to it, and
gave it light, sat near it, and followed it. Thus days and months
and years passed. His whole soul was there. One day he heard a
voice, as it were, coming out of the bull. "The bull
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speaks". "My son, my son". "Why, the bull is speaking! No, the
bull cannot speak". Again he went away, and sat near meditating
in great misery of his heart; he did not know anything. Again he
heard the voice coming out of the bull, "My child, my child". He
went near-"No, the bull cannot speak". Then he went back again
and sat despondent. Again the voice came and that time he found
it out. It was from his own heart. He found that God was in him.
Then he learned the wonderful truth of the Teacher of all
Teachers, "I am with thee always". And the poor cowherd learnt
the whole mystery.

Then he goes back to the Yogi, and when he is at some distance

the Yogi sees him. The Yogi has been the most learned man in the
country, practising austerity for years, meditating, studying, and
this cowherd, an ignorant blockhead, never studied a book, never
learnt his letters, but he comes, his whole body, as it were,
transfigured, his face changed, the light of heaven shining round
his face. The Yogi got up. "What is this change ? Where did you
get this ?"

"Sir, you gave me that." "How? I told you that in joke"

.
"But I took it seriously, and I got everything I wanted out of that
bull, for is He not everywhere?"

So that bull was the pratika, and that man worshipped the bull as
his pratika, as God, and he got everything out of it. So that intense
love, that desire, brings out everything. Everything is in
ourselves, and the external world and the external worship, are
the forms, the suggestions that call it out. When they become
strong, the Lord within awakes. The external teacher is but the
suggestion. When faith in the external teacher is strong, then the
Teacher of all teachers within speaks; eternal wisdom speaks in
the heart of that man. He need not go any more to any books, or
any men, or any higher beings, he need not run after supernatural
or preternatural beings for instruction; the Lord Himself becomes
his instructor. He gets all he wants from himself, no more need to
go to any temple, or church; his own body has become the
greatest temple in the world, and in that
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temple lives the Lord of Creation. In every country great saints

have been born, wonderful lives have been (lived), coming out of
the sheer power of love. So all these external forms of Bhakti, this
repetition of the name, worship of Pratika, this Nishta, this
Ishtam, are but the preparations until that eternal power wakes up.
Then alone comes spirituality, when one goes beyond these laws
and bounds. Then all laws fall down, all forms vanish, temples
and churches crumble into dust and die away. It is good to be born
in a church, but the worst possible fate to die in a church. It is
good to be born in a sect, and the worst possible thing to die in a
sect, with sectarian ideas. What sect can hold a child of the Lord,
what laws bind, what forms shall he follow ? What man shall he
worship ? He worships the Lord Himself. He Himself teaches
him. He lives in the temple of all temples, the Soul of man.

So, this is the goal towards which we are going, the Supreme
Bhakti, and all that leads up to this is but preparation. But it is
necessary. It prepares the infinite soul to come out of this bondage
of books and sects and forms; these fly away and leave but the
Soul of man. These are superstitions of an infinite amount of
time. This "my father's religion", "my country's religion", or "my
book", or my this and that, are but the superstition of ages; they
vanish. Just as when one is pricked with a thorn he takes another
thorn to get the first out and then throws both of them away. So
this superstition is in us; in many countries even into the soft
brains of little babies are put the most horrible and diabolical
nonsense as sect ideas. Parents think they are doing good to the
child, but they are merely murdering it to satisfy Mrs Grundy.
What selfishness! There is nothing that men out of fear of
themselves or out of fear of society will not do. Men will kill their
own children, mothers will starve their own families, brothers will
hate brothers, to satisfy forms, because Mrs So-and-so will be
pleased and satisfied. We see that the vast mass of mankind is
born in some church or temple or (some religious) form and never
comes out of it. Why? Have these forms helped the growth of
spiri-
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tuality? If through these forms we step on to the highest platform

of love, where forms vanish and all these sectarian ideas go away,
how is it that the vast majority of men are always groveling in
some form or other? They are all atheists; they do not want any
religion. If a man comes to this country without any friend, or
without knowing anyone, supposing he is a blackguard in his own
country, the first thing he will do in this country will be to join a
church. Will that fellow ever have religion? Do you mean to say
that these women who go to churches to show their dresses will
ever have religion, or will come out of forms? They will go back
and back, and when they die they will become like animals. Do
you mean to say that those men who go to church to look at the
beautiful faces of women will ever have religion? Those who
have certain social religions, because society requires that they
shall belong to Mr. So-and-so's church or because that was their
father's church-will they ever have religion? They understand
certain broad views, but they must keep a certain social position,
and will keep it through eternity. What you want, you get. The
Lord fulfills all desires. If you want to keep a certain position in
Society you will do so; if you want church you will get that and
not Him. If you want to play the fool all your life with all these
churches and foolish organisations, you will have them and have
to live in them all your lives. "Those that want the departed go to
the departed and get ghosts; but those that love Him, all come to
Him". So those that love Him alone will come to Him, and those
that love others will go wherever they love. That drill business in
the temples and churches : kneel down at a certain time, stand at
ease, and all that drill nonsense, all mechanical, with the mind
thinking of something else-all this has nothing to do with real
religion.

There was a great prophet in India, Guru Nanak, born 400 years
ago. Some of you have heard of the Sikhs, the fighting people. He
was a follower of the Sikh religion. One day he went to the
Mohammedans' Mosque. These Mohammedans are feared in their
own country, just as in a Christian
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country no one dare say anything against their religion. They

think they have liberty to kill and criticise everybody who does
not agree with them. So this man went in, and there was a big
Mosque, and the Mohammedans were standing in prayer. They
stand in lines; they kneel down, stand up, and repeat certain
words at the same times, and one fellow leads. So Guru Nana
went there, and when the mullah was saying "In the name of the
most merciful and kind God, Teacher of all teachers", he began to
smile. He says "Look at that hypocrite". The mullah got into a
passion. "Why do you smile?" "Because you are not praying, my
friend, that is why I am smiling". "Not praying?" "Certainly not;
there is no prayer in you". The mullah was very angry, and he
went and laid a complaint before a magistrate, and said, "This
heathen rascal dares to come to our mosque and smiles at us when
we are praying; the only punishment is instant death, kill him".
The man was brought before. the magistrate, and asked why he
smiled. "Because he was not praying". "What was he doing?" the
magistrate asked. "I will tell you what he was doing, if you will
bring him before me". The magistrate ordered the mullah to be
brought, and when he came he said "Here is the mullah explain
why you laughed when he was praying". He said, "Give the
mullah a piece of the Koran [to swear on]. When he was saying
Allah, Allah, he was thinking of some chicken he had left at
home". The poor mullah was confounded. He was a little more
sincere than the others, and he confessed he was thinking of the
chicken, and so they let the Sikh go. "But", said the Magistrate
"Don't go to the church again. It is better not to go at all than to
commit blasphemy there and hypocrisy. Do not go when you do
not feel like praying, do not be like a hypocrite, and do not think
of the chicken and say the name of the Most Merciful and Blissful
God."

A certain Mohammedan was praying in a garden. They are very

regular in their prayers. When the time comes, wherever they are
they just begin, fall down on the ground and get up and fall down,
and so on. One of them was in a garden when the call
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for prayer came, so he knelt there, prostrate on the ground to pray.

A girl was waiting in the garden for her lover, and saw him on the
other side, and in her hurry to reach him did not see the man
prostrate, and walked over him. He was a fanatical
Mohammedan, just what you call here a Presbyterian, the same
breed. Both believe in barbecuing eternally. So you can just
imagine the anger of this Mohammedan when his body was
walked over. He wanted to kill the girl. The girl was a smart one,
and she said "Stop that nonsense; you are a fool and a hypocrite".
"What! I am a hypocrite?" "Yes, I am going to meet my earthly
lover and I did not see you there, and you are going to meet your
heavenly lover and should not know that a girl was passing over
your body".

This transcript has been made available by the Vedanta Centre,

Cohasset, Massachusdtts.

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APPENDIX B

The Recurrence of Cosmic Cycles

In his jnana yoga class "The Atman: Its Bondage and Freedom,"
held on the evening of January 8, 1896 (see chapter six, section
six), Swamiji introduced the subject of the cyclic recurrence of
forms , time without end, with these words: "The vast mass of
mankind are content with material things, but there are some who
become awakened and want to get back, who have had enough of
the playing down here [Complete Works, 2 : 259]. Along with this
comes a very important question, and because I may forget it, I
will discuss it now." He then went on (and with the kind
permission of the Vedanta Centre, Cohasset, Massachusetts, I
quote from Goodwin's transcript, which differs in spots from the
same passage in the Complete Works):

The question is why should we attempt to get our and get back to
the centre. Suppose we have all come from God, but we find this
world is pleasurable and nice; then we would rather try to get
more and more of this. Why should we try to get out of it? The
alpha and omega of Vedanta philosophy is to "give up the
world" ; that is the idea with which we started, giving up the
unreal and taking the real. [But] why should we not turn towards
enjoyment and not away from it? . . . The answer is this, that all
these forms that we are seeing now are being manifested again
and again, and we know that this world in which we live has been
here many times before. I have been here and talking to you. . . .
And many times more it will be the same. . . . This world has
been here many times. We are all certain that this world will die
and will be broken to pieces. Secondly, we see that these things
periodically occur. Suppose there are three or four dice, and when
we throw them one comes up five, and another four, and another
three, and
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another two, and you keep on throwing and throwing. There must
come times when those very same numbers will recur. Go on
throwing, and no matter how long may be the interval, those
numbers must come again. It can be mathematically asserted in
how many throws they will come again; this is the law of chance.
So with souls. However distant may be the period, these things
are happening again and again, all these combinations and
dissolutions. There is only a short rest, and then-and then this
eating and drinking here comes back, and then death again. . . .

Along with this (idea] of throwing dice, comes (the] very

interesting (view] that it was not the same soul, that this body is
one link in the whole chain, and that the whole chain is composed
of many links, beginning from the little worm, and let us hope
ending in man, and these links form a circle, and this circle is
revolving like the Ferris wheel at Chicago, the carriages of which
are rolling forward all the time, but the occupants are changed. A
soul goes into a carriage, goes through the circle, and comes out
again. The wheel still goes on and on. All these forms are what is
called permanent; cyclically the wheel revolves, showing all these
forms, but you and I must get out. Different souls are riding in
this wheel. This is how it can be explained that a man can read the
past and future life of another man. The most astonishing powers
of reading the past and the future have been known in every
country and every age. . . .

This last sentence occurs in volume two of the Complete Works,

at the beginning of paragraph two of page 261. It should be noted
here that the remainder of the paragraph does not appear in
Goodwin's transcript, according to which Swamiji went on to say
that everything within the Ferris wheel-even the struggle to be
free-acts according to law and is predictable.
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APPENDIX C
J. J. Goodwin's Unedited Transcript of
Swami Vivekananda's Jnana Yoga Class Held on the
Evening of January 29, 1896

In last Gnana lecture we read one of the Upanishads; we will read

another. Brahma was the first of the Devas, the Lord of this cycle
and its protector. He gave this knowledge of the Brahman, which
is the essence of all knowledge, to his son, Atharvan. The latter
handed it over to his son Angiras, he to his son, Bharadvaja, and
so on. There was a man called Saunaka, who was a very rich man;
who went to this Angiras as a learner. He approached the teacher
and asked him a question. "Tell me sir which is that which, being
known, everything else is known." One is supreme and the other
is inferior. The Rigveda is the name of one of the different parts
of the Vedas. Siksa is the name of another part. All different
sciences are inferior. What is the supreme science. That is the
only science, the supreme science, by which we reach the
unchangeable one. But that cannot be seen, cannot be sensed,
cannot be specified, without colour, without eyes, without ears,
without nose, without feet, the Eternal, the Omnipresent, the
Omnipenetrating, the Absolute, He from whom everything comes.
The sages see him, and that is the supermist knowledge. Just as
the urnanabhi, a species of spider, creates a thread out of his own
body, and takes it back, just as the plants grow by their own
nature, and all these things are yet separate and apparently
different; the heart is as it were different from the other parts of a
man's body; the plants are different from the earth; the thread is
different from the spider; yet they were the causes, and in them
these things act. So from this unchangeable one has come this
universe. First out of the Brahman comes the knowledge of desire
and from that comes the manifestation of
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Creator, or the golden womb. From that comes intelligence, from

that matter and all these different words. This is the truth; that
those who want to come to salvation or attain to other enjoyments
in the Vedas, various ways are told, and then it goes on to say how
they will reach to these blessings. When they die they will go
through the sun's rays into places which are very beautiful, where
after death they go to heaven, and live there for some time, but
from there they again fall. Here are two words-ista purtam,
sacrificial and other rituals are called istam and purtam is making
roads, building hospitals and so on. "Fools are they who think that
rituals and doing good work are high, and that there is nothing
higher. They get what they desire, and go to heaven, but every
enjoyment, and every sorrow, must have an end, and so that ends
and, they fall back and back, become men again, or still lower.
Those that give up the world, and learn to control the senses, live
in a forest, through the rays of the sun they reach that immortality
where lives He who is the Absolute. Thus the sage, examining all
desires of good or evil works, throws away all duties, and wants
to know that, getting which there is no more return, no more
change, and to know that he goes to the Guru, the teacher, with
fuel in his hand. There is a myth in our country of going to the
Guru with fuel in their hands, as a sign of helping him in making
sacrifices, as he will not take presents. What is a teacher? He who
knows the secrets of the scriptures, he whose soul has gone unto
Brahman, who does not care for works, or going to heaven, or all
these things. Unto such a disciple, who has controlled his mind,
has become peaceful and calm, given up all this tremendous wave
that rises in the mind by desire-"I will do this & that"-and all
those things which are at best only disturbing, such as name &
fame, which impel mankind to do all sorts of things, in that
disciple in whom all these vexatious desires have been calmed
down, him the teacher taught the way by which he could know
that One who never changes, and who is the truth, which is the
science of Brahman. Then comes what he taught "This is the
truth, oh
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gentle one-as from a mass of burning flame myriads of sparks

come out, of the same nature as the fire, even so from this
unchangeable one, all these forms, all these ideas, all this
creation, comes out, and unto Him it goes back." But the Eternal
One is everlasting, formless, without beginning, inside and
outside of every being-beyond all life, beyond all mind, the Pure
One, beyond even the unchangeable, beyond everything. From
Him is born the vital principle, from Him comes the mind, from
Him come all organs of the senses, from Him are air, light, water,
and this earth which holds all beings. These heavens are, as it
were, his head; his eyes, the sun and moon-the cardinal points are,
as it were his ears-the eternal knowledge of the Vedas is, as it
were, his manifested speech. His life is the air, His heart is this
universe, His feet this world. He is the Eternal Self of every
being. From Him have come the different Vedas, from Him have
come the Gods of the Sadhyas -the latter are superior men, much
higher than ordinary men, and very much like the Gods. From
Him are all men, from Him are all animals, from Him is all life,
from Him all the forces in the mind, from Him all truth, all
chastity. The seven organs are all from Him, the seven objects of
perception from him, the seven actions of perception are from
Him, from Him the seven worlds in which the life currents flow.
From Him are all these seas, oceans, from Him are all rivers that
roll into the sea, from Him are all plants and all liquids. He is the
inside, He is the inner Soul of every being. This great Purusha,
this great One, He is this universe, He is the work, He is the
sacrifice, He is the Brahman, He is the Trinity. He who knows
Him is freeing his own soul from the bond of ignorance, and
becomes free. He is the bright one; he is inside every human soul.
From Him are all name and form, all the animals, and men are
from Him. He is the one Supreme. He who knows Him becomes
free. How to know Him. Take this bow, which is the Upanishad,
the knowledge of the Vedanta; place upon that bow the sharpened
rod of worship, stretch that bow by what? By making the mind of
the same form as He, by knowing that
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you are He. Thus strike at it; strike at that Brahman with this rod.
This One is the bow. This human mind is the rod. Brahman is the
object which we want to hit, and this object is to be hit by
concentrating the mind, and just when the rod has hit, the rod
penetrates into the object, and becomes one with it, a unity. Even
so, this soul, the rod, is to be thrown upon the object so that it will
become one with it. In whom are the heavens, this earth, and the
skies, in whom is the mind and all that lives. In the Upanishads
there are certain passages which are called the great words, which
are always quoted and referred to. In Him, that One, in Him
alone, the Atman, can be all other words. What is the use of all
other talks. Know Him alone. This is the bridge over this life to
reach to universality. He goes on to show a practical way. So far it
is very figurative. Just as all the spokes of a wheel meet at the
axle, even so in this body is that place from which all the arteries
flow, and at which they all meet. There meditate, upon the Om
that is in the heart. May thou succeed. May the gentle one with
success attain unto the goal, may you gQ beyond all darkness, to
Him who is omniscient, the all-knowing. His glory is in heaven,
on earth, everywhere. He who has become the mind, the prana, he
who is the leader in the body, he who is established in the food,
the energy of life. This is another of the sentences very much
quoted. By supreme knowledge the sages see Him whose nature
is bliss, who shines as immortality. By supreme knowledge. There
are two words. One is Gnanam, the other Vignanam. Gnanam
may be translated as science; this means intellectual only and
Vignanam realisation. God cannot be perceived by intellectual
knowledge. He who has realized [the Self] by that supreme
knowledge, what will become of that man ? All the knots of the
heart will be cut asunder. All darkness will vanish for ever when
you have seen the truth. How can you doubt? How foolish and
childish you will think these fights and quarrels of different
sciences and different philosophies and all this. You will smile at
them. All doubts will vanish, and all work will go away. All work
will vanish.
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Beyond, the golden sheath is there, without any impurity, without

compare, He, the Brahman. His is the brightness, the light of all
light, the knower, the Atman. Realise Him as such, and when you
have done that the sun cannot illumine, nor the moon, nor the
stars. A flash of lightning cannot illumine the place; it is mental,
away deep in the mind. He shining, everything else shines; when
He shines inside the whole man shines. This universe shines
through His light. You take such passages later on, when studying
the Upanishads. The difference between the Hindu mind and the
European mind is that whereas in the West, truths are arrived at
by examining the particular, the Hindu takes the opposite course.
There is no metaphysical sublimity as in the Upanishads. It leads
you on beyond senses infinitely more sublime than the suns and
stars. First they try to describe God by sense sublimities, that his
feet are the earth, his head the heavens. But that did not express
what he wanted to say. It was in a sense sublime. He first gave
that idea to the student, and then slowly took him beyond, until he
gave him the highest idea, the negative, too high to describe. He
is immortal, He is before us, He is behind us, He is on the right
side, He is on the left, He is above, He is beneath Upon the same
tree there are two birds with most beautiful wings, and the two
birds always go together, always live together. Of these; one is
eating the fruits of the tree, the other, without eating, is looking
on. So in this body are the two birds always going together. Both
have the same form, and beautiful wings. One is the human soul,
eating the fruits; the other God Himself; of the same nature. He is
also in this body, the Soul of our soul; He eats neither good nor
evil fruits, but stands and looks on, But the lower bird knows that
he is sleek and small, and humble, and tells all sorts of lies. He
says he is a woman, or he is a man, or a boy. He says he will do
good, or do bad, he will go to heaven, and will do a hundred sorts
of things. Just in delirium he talks and works, and the central idea
of his delirium is that he is weak. Thus he gets all his misery,
because he thinks he is nobody. He is a created little being; he
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is a slave to somebody; he is governed by some god or gods, and

so is unhappy. But when he becomes joined with God, when he
becomes a Yogi, he sees that the other bird, the Lord, is his own
glory. "Why, it was my own glory whom I called God, and this
little I, this misery, was all hallucination; it never existed; I was
never a woman, never a man, never any one of these things."
Then he gives up all his sorrow. When this golden one who is to
be seen is seen, the Creator, the Lord, the Purusha, the God of this
universe, then the sage has washed off all stains of good and bad
deeds. Good deeds are as much stains as bad deeds. Then he
attains to extreme sameness with the pure one. The sage knows
that He who is the Soul of all souls, this Atman, shines through
all. He is the man, the woman, the cow, the dog, in all animals, in
the sin, and in the sinner. He is the Sanyassi, He is in the ruler, He
is everywhere. Knowing this the sage speaks not. He gives up
criticising anyone, scolding anyone, thinking evil of anyone. His
desires have gone into the Atman. This is the sign of the greatest
knowers of the Brahman, that they see nothing else but Him. He
is playing through all these things. Various forms, from the
highest gods to the lowest worms, are all He. The ideas want to be
illustrated. First of all the writer showed us the idea that if we
want to get to heaven and all these places, we will get there. That
is to say, in the language of the Vedas, whatever one desires that
he sees. As I have told you in previous lectures the Atman neither
comes nor goes. It has neither birth nor death. You are all
omnipresent, you are the Atman, you are at this moment in
heaven, and in the darkest places too. You are everywhere. Where
are you not? Therefore how can you go anywhere. These comings
and goings are all fictions, but the Atman can never come nor go.
These visions change. When the mind is in a particular condition
it sees a certain vision, dreams a certain dream; so in this
condition we are all seeing this world, and man, and animals, and
all these things, but in this very place this condition will change
and the very thing we are seeing as earth we shall see as heaven,
or we may see it as the opposite
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place, or as any place we like, and all this depends on our desires.
But this dream cannot be permanent, just as we know that any
dream in the night must break. Not one of these dreams will be
permanent. We dream that which we think we will do. So these
people who are always thinking in this life of going to heaven,
and meeting their friends, will have that, as soon as their dream of
this life is ended, and they will be compelled by their desires of
this life to see these other dreams, and those who are superstitious
and are frightened into all such ideas as hell, will dream that they
are in the hot place. Those whose ideas in this life are brutal,
when they die, will become pigs and hogs, and all these things.
With each one, what he desires he finds. This book starts by
telling us that those who know nothing better than a little road
making, or hospital building, and such good works, will have a
good dream when they die, they will dream that they are in a
place where they will have god bodies, and can eat anything they
like, jump about, go through walls and so on, and sometimes
come down and startle someone.

In our mythology there are the Devas, who live in heaven, and the
Devakas, who are very much same, but a little more wicked. The
Devas are like your angels, only some of them from time to time
become wicked, and find that the daughters of men are good. Our
deities are celebrated for this sort of thing. What can you expect
of them? They are here simply hospital makers and have no more
knowledge than other men. They do some good work with the
result that they become Devas. They do their good work for fame,
or name, or some reward, and get this reward, dreaming that they
are in heaven, and doing all these things. Then there are demons
who have done evil in this life. But our books say that these
dreams will not last very long, and then they will either come
back and take the old dream again as human beings, or still
worse. Therefore, according to these books, it behaves every
sensible, right thinking man, once for all, to brush aside all such
foolish ideas as heavens and hells. Two things exist in the world,
dream
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and reality. What we call life is a succession dreams, dream

within dream. One dream is called heaven, another earth, another
hell, and so on. One dream is called the human body, another
animal body, and so on, all are dreams. The reality is what is
called Brahman, that Being who is Existence, knowledge, bliss.
So he is the Guru, the sage, who wants to get rid of all these
dreams, to stand aside and know his own nature, who wants to go
beyond this self hypnotism. When we desire we are hypnotising
ourselves. Just as I desire I will go to heaven, that hypnotises me,
and I begin to find I am in heaven directly I die, and will see
angels and all sorts of things. I have seen about fifty people who
have come from death's door, and they all have told me stories
about being in heaven. These are the mythologies of our country,
and it shows that it is all hypnotism. Where Western people make
a great mistake is here. So far as you have these ideas of heaven
and hell we agree with you, but you say this earth is real. That
cannot be. If this is real, heavens and hells are real, because the
proof of each of these is the same, and if one is a hypnotic
condition, the whole of it must be. So Vedantists say that not only
are heavens hypnotic, but so is this life and everything here. Some
people want to go from one hypnotic condition to another, and
these are what we call the fools of the world, the samsaris, the
travellers who go from dream to dream, from one hypnotic trance
to another. For fifty years they are under the idea they are men
and women. What nonsense is a man or a woman in the soul? It is
terrible hypnotism. How can the soul have any sex? It is self
hypnotism. You have hypnotised yourself and think you are men
and women. If we are fools we will again hypnotise ourselves and
want to go to heaven, and hear all this trash of gods and
goddesses, and all sorts of humbugs, and will kneel down and
pray and have god bodies by the million to worship on thrones. At
the end, they have to hypnotise themselves again. We are all in
the same boat here, and all who are ' same boat see each other.
Stand aside, free, beyond earn and hypnotism. Some fools have
hypnotised
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themselves that they will have bodies, and wives, and all these
things. I also am a fool, and have hypnotised myself that I will
have senses, and all these things. So we are all in the same boat
and see each other. Millions of people may be here whom we do
not see, touch or feel, just as in hypnotism there may be three
books before you-you are hypnotised and are told that one of
them does not exist, and you may live for a year in that condition
and never see it. Suppose thirty men are under the same hypnotic
influence, and are told that this book does not exist. Those who
are in this condition will all fail to see the book. Men, women,
animals are all hypnotised, and all see this dream, because they
are all in the same boat. The Vedanta Philosophy says that this
whole universe, mental, physical, moral, is hypnotic. Who is the
cause of this hypnotism. You yourself are to blame. This weeping
and wailing, and knocking your heads into corners will not do
you the least good. This knocking everything on the head is what
is called non-attachment, and clinging on to more and more
hypnotism is attachment. That is why, in all religions, you will
find they wanted to give up the world, although many of them do
not understand it. These fellows used to starve themselves in a
forest, and see the devil coming to them. You have heard those
wonderful stories of India, of how those magicians can make a
man see a rope rise from the ground to the skies. I have not seen
one of them. One of the Mogul Emperors, Jahangir, mentions it,
and he was a great sage. He says "Allah, what do these devils do?
They take a rope or a chain, and the chain is thrown up and up,
until it becomes firm, as if it were stuck to something. Then he
lets a cat o up the chain, then a dog, then a wolf, then a tiger, then
a lion. All walked up the chain, and vanished. Sometimes they
will send men up the chain. Two men will go up and begin to
fight, and then both of them vanish and after a while you hear a
noise of fighting, and a head, a hand, and a foot fall, and, mind
you, there are two or three thousand people present. The fellow
showing it has only a loincloth on". They say this is hypnotism,
throwing a net over
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the audience. That is what they call their science. It exists in a

certain limit, but if you go beyond this limit, or come within it,
you do not see it. The man who is playing does not see anything.
So if you stand near him you do not see anything. Such is the
hypnotism here. So we have first to get beyond the circle, Gnana,
or stand within the circle of the hypnotism, Bhakti, with God, the
great player who is playing all these things: the whole universe he
projects. Chapter after chapter comes and goes. This is called
Maya, the power which creates all these tremendous things, and
he who is the ruler of this Maya, is God. And he who is ruled by
Maya, just as in the case of that chain-the man who was standing
in the centre had the power and was not deluded, but all that
audience was governed by Maya. So that portion of Atman which
rules Maya is called God, and the little bits of the Atman deluded
by it are called souls-you, and I. The Bhakta says crawl nearer
and nearer to the hypnotist, and when you get to the centre you do
not see anything. You get clear of it. The Gnani does not care to
undergo all this trouble-it is a dangerous way. Unless a man
becomes a lunatic, when he finds himself covered with mud will
he take more mud to wash himself? So, why increase the
hypnotism. Get out of the circle; cut it off and be free. When you
are free you will be able to play, even without being caught
yourself. Now you are caught; then you will catch; that will be all
the difference. Therefore in the first part of this book, we are told
that we must give up all this idea of heaven, and of birth and
death, and so on. It is all nonsense; no man was ever born, or ever
died. They are all in hypnotism-So is eternal life, and all this
nonsense. Heaven is hypnotism, and so is earth. It is not as
materialists say, that heaven is a superstition, and God is a
superstition, but he himself is not a superstition. If one is
superstition, if one link is nonexistent, the whole chain is
nonexistent. The existence of the whole chain depends on the
existence of one link, and that of one link on the whole. If there is
no heaven there is no earth, and if there is no God there is no
man. You are under
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this hypnotism, and so long as you are in it you will have to see
God, and nature, and the soul, and when you are beyond this
hypnotism God will vanish, and so will nature, and so will the
soul. Therefore first of all we will have to give up all these ideas
of God and heaven, and enjoying the fruits of these, and all that
going to heaven will be one more dream. Next, after showing
these things, the book goes on to tell us how to get out of it, and
the one idea that is brought out through all these ideas is to be one
with that universal being. The thing manifested, the universal
being, is not anything of these; these are all nonsense, Maya, but
that upon which all these things are being played, the background
upon which all this picture is written, we are one with Him. You
know you are one with Him, only you must realise it. He gave us
two words, one knowledge intellectual and the other is realisation.
That is to say, intellectual assent is within this realisation, and
realisation is beyond it. Therefore intellectual assent is not
sufficient. Every man can say this theory is right, but that is not
realisation; he must realise it. We can all say we understand that
this is hypnotism, but that is not realisation. That will be when the
hypnotism will break, even for a moment; it will come with a
flash; it must come. If you struggle it will come. When it does
vanish, all idea of body will go along with it, that you have sex I
or body, just as a lamp blows out. Then what will become. If
some part of your Karma remains this world will come back -
again, but not with the same force. You have known that it is what
it is; you will know no more bondage. So long as you have eyes
you will have to see, or ears to hear, but not with the same force. I
had read all sorts of things about this mirage, but had never seen
it before, until about four years ago I was travelling in Western
India. Of course, as a Sanyassi, I was travelling on foot, making
my slow marches. So it took' me about a month to travel through
that country. Every day I saw
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such beautiful lakes and the shadows of trees on the shores of

those lakes, and the whole thing was quivering in the breeze, and
birds flying and animals. Every day I saw this, and thought what
a beautiful country it was, but when I reach some village I find it
is all sand. I say how is it. One day I was very thirsty, and thought
I would drink a little water at the lake, but when I approached it
disappeared, and with a flash came into my mind "This is the
mirage about which I read all my life." But the strange thing is
that I was travelling for a month, and could never recognise that it
was a mirage, and in one moment it vanished. I was very glad to
know this was the mirage about which I had read all my life. Next
morning I saw the lake again, and along with it, came the idea
"That is the mirage." All this month I have been seeing the
mirage, and could not distinguish the fine distinction between
reality and mirage, but in that one moment I caught the idea.
From that time, when I see a mirage, I will say "That is a mirage",
and never feel it. Such will it be [with] this world when the whole
thing will vanish once, and after that, if you have to live out your
past work, you will not be deceived. Take a carriage with two
wheels. Suppose I cut one of the wheels from the axle. The other
wheel will run for some time by its past momentum, and will then
fall. The body is one wheel, and the soul another, and they are
joined by the axle of delusion. Knowledge is the axe, which will
cut the axle and the soul will stop immediately, will give up all
these vain dreams. But upon the body ' that past momentum, and
it will run a little, doing this and that, and then it will fall down,
but only good momentum will be left and that body can only do
good. This is to warn you not to take a rascal for a free man. It
will be impossible for that man to do evil. So you must not be
cheated. But when you become free the whole hypnotism has
vanished, and you know the distinction between the reality and
the mirage. It will no more be a bondage. The most terrible things
will not be able to daunt you. A mountain [could] fall upon you
but you will not care. You will know it for a mirage.

This transcript, the original of which is written in Goodwin's

hand on thirty sheets of paper, has been made available by the
vedanta Centre, Cohasset, Massachusetts.

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APPENDIX D

The following two newspaper articles from, respectively, the

Brooklyn Daily Standard Union of February 3, 1896, and the
Brooklyn Times of the same date are reports of Swamiji's lecture
"The Atman" (see chapter seven, section two) and are reproduced
here for comparison with the transcript of the lecture as published
in volume two of the Complete Works.

`THE HINDU GOD'

Reappearance of the Swami Vivekananda

FIRST OF A SERIES OF LECTURES ON "THE GOD-IDEA" DELIVERED

BEFORE THE ETHICAL ASSOCIATION-FAITH OF THE COMMON PEOPLE
OF INDIA.

Under the auspices of the Brooklyn Ethical Association, the first

of a series of lectures on "Comparative Religion; or, The God-
Idea," was delivered before a large audience in Pouch Mansion
last evening by the Swami Vivekananda of India. This was the
first time this lecturer has appeared in Brooklyn since his return
from England, where he went after his great success in this
country last year. Dr. Lewis G. Janes, the president of the
association, introduced the speaker, who talked for an hour and a
quarter without once referring to notes on "The Hindu Conception
of God." The subject was treated under three heads, "The
Differentiated or Personal God " , "The Partially Differentiated, or
Immanent God," and "The Undifferentiated, or the Philosophical
Absolute."

According to the Swami Vivekananda, ninety per cent of the

people in India believe in the first kind of God. These believe that
God the Creator is eternally separated from nature and from
human souls. He is a Being only to be loved and not to be prayed
to for material things. For material things the
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people pray to the little gods, of which they have many.

The people who believe in the God of the second subject are a
little higher intellectually than the mass of the people, but both
sects believe that the soul is by nature pure, and both believe that
the selfish philosophy of "Me and Mine" is at the very root of the
misery in the world. The mass of the people who believe in a
personal God are great vegetarians, and their aversion to eating
flesh is based on a loftier foundation than that of the Buddhists.
When you ask a Buddhist why he does not eat the flesh of
animals, he will say: "Because it is wrong to kill animals: ' When
you ask the same question of a Hindu Dualist, he will answer:
"Because the animals belong to God."

The belief in the God classed under the third subject, was a
philosophy rather than a religious faith, and of course too abstruse
and too high ever to become the religion of the masses. In the
Sanscrit, the word "creation" is "projection." The Hindus do not
believe that God created the world out of nothing. They believe
he projected it out of something.

During the lecture the Eastern theory of reincarnation was''..

explained, and the highest ethics and human ideas were '
elaborated to portray the prevailing faith of the Hindus.

HINDU CONCEPTION OF GOD

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA BEFORE THE

ETHICAL ASSOCIATION

The first in a Course of Four Lectures On the God-idea in Some

of the Principal Religions of the World Historical and
Explanatory Exposition of the Beliefs of the Various Sects.

Swami Vivekananda, of India, lectured last night in the Pouch

gallery on "The Hindu Conception of God." The lecture was the
first in a course arranged by the Brooklyn Ethical association to
be given on alternate Sunday evenings,
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the general subject of the course being the God-idea in some of

the principal religions of the world as illustrated in literature,
philosophy and art. The lecture of Swami last night was the first
he has delivered before the Ethical association since his return
from England, and in consequence the audience which gathered,
was sufficient to occupy all the accommodations provided.

The lecturer commenced by saying that from much that had been
written of the religions of India, it might be supposed that the
monistic school was at the head. The fact was that there had been
various phases of Indian thought and that of the monistic thinkers
formed a very small part of the whole. From the earliest times
there had been various schools of thought in India. The people
were free to choose their own forms, to make their own
philosophy and to start their own sects. Swami said that at the
present time he did not know how many sects there were in India,
but they were in the thousands. It seemed that the religious
activity of the country was inexhaustible.

The lecturer then spoke of the establishment of the most ancient

religions in India. He told of the beliefs of the Buddhists, who
take their stand on an ethical foundation. "Be good and do good"
is their doctrine. Beside the Buddhists and the other unorthodox
sects were the orthodox sects, who all admit the authority of the
Hindu Scriptures, the Vedas. They form various schools which are
principally divided into three groups, the logicians, the Vedantists
and the numericals. The first and third did not form any sect and
so the second division, the Vedantists, really governed India. They
took the name especially because they wanted to base their all on
the Vedas. They were not unanimous in opinion, however. Still
they all believed that the universe was created in cycles,
appearing and disappearing, that it was projected out and that
after a long period it contracted and went back again. Then, after
a period of perfect rest it again appeared.
The first sect were called the dualists. They believed that
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God was the creator of the universe, yet that he was eternally
separated from nature and from human souls. They believed that
God is personal-that is, he has human attributes-he is merciful,
just, powerful, almighty, he can be loved and he loves us in
return. In a word, they believed in an anthropomorphic God. Out
of his own will he had helped to create the universe, but nature
existed in spite of him. He must have material to create and nature
was his material. Swami said that go per cent of the people all
over the world were dualists in religion. They were necessarily so,
as their minds could not grasp anything higher. The dualists
believed, also, that man and not God was responsible for the evil
in the world. They believed that the soul, in the long run, must go
to salvation. According to the dualists, there was beyond this
universe another, where no death, evil or disease existed, and
sooner or later we would all come to that world, where there was
no misery. We must be born and born again, until finally we got
rid of all desire of enjoyment, of all desire for personal pleasure.
The idea of "me and mine" was the root of all evil. Everything
must be held as God's. Finally, with the heart purified, we should
come at last into this perfect universe, where we should have
almost supreme power and live forever a beautiful existence with
God. This, Swami said, was the religion of the masses in India.
Above them were the mono-dualists, who believed that the effect
in the universe was but the cause reproduced in another form.
They believed the God was the creator and the material out of
which the universe was created. There were also the non dualist
Vedantists, who believed that we did not exist at all we were self
hypnotized, and imagined all we saw. Finally came the sect which
believed that the soul was the God, that it was absolutely
supreme, that .beside it there was nothing. The lecturer closed in a
eulogy and eloquent exposition of this latter religion, which, he
said, could never become the religion of the masses because they
could not comprehend it.

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