But was it merely to give battle to the bigots that a prophet of Swamiji's supreme eminence underwent such suffering as his Midwest lecture tour entailed? No doubt a question has been growing in the reader's mind as to the real meaning of his strange winter as well as the period which followed when, released from the clutches of the lecture bureau, he continued to tour the country. Swamiji rarely mentioned the hardships he had to endure, and thus one is apt to forget them or, at least, minimize them. I have already mentioned something of the difficulties of the midwestern tour; but that was not all: throughout his eastern tour his work continued to make rigorous and exhausting demands upon him. A hint of these trials comes from a letter he wrote to India in February of 1895. "In order to give lectures," he confided, "I had often to make my way through snow covered mountains in the terribly severe winters and had to travel even up to one or two o'clock at night."
From Swami Abhedananda we also learn something of Swamiji s incessant labor. In his lecture "Vivekananda and His Work," the Swami says: "Sometimes he would be invited by people living in different cities hundreds of miles apart to give public addresses on the same day and he would accept in every case, travelling for hours by train or by any available conveyance." Such traveling, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, was grueling even to a seasoned lecturer and man of the world.
One cannot but ask why Swamiji underwent this ordeal. What did he think and feel during this time? What motives, conscious or unconscious, guided him, and how are we to interpret the significance of this itinerant period in relation to his mission as a whole? As far as I am aware no clear or, satisfactory answers to such questions have ever been set forth.
Swamiji was at the peak of his youth and vigor during these many months. They comprised the best time of his life, when his spiritual power was fully matured and his mental and physical energies were still fresh. And it was during these months that he gave of himself unstintingly until, by the end of 1894, his health was already declining and his best energy going. Thus, this lecture tour period, which extends from the time he first came to America until he settled in New York at the beginning of 1895, deserves, I believe, much more study than it has hitherto been given; for one cannot believe that Swamiji, "who was born on earth," as Sri Ramakrishna said, "to remove the miseries of mankind,"38 gave the best of his youth and power without sufficient reason a reason commensurate with his gigantic spiritual stature. (It should be mentioned here that while Swamiji's lecture tour cannot be said to have come to a definite end until he settled in New York, the last part of 1894. marks a transition in his attitude toward his American work. In Chapters Eleven and Fourteen the reader will find a discussion of this period.)
One can distinguish in his biographies three interpretations of Swamiji's activities during his tour. First, it is said that he was preaching Vedanta to the West; second, that his primary object was to clear the ground of much that was false and detrimental in American thought, so that later on Vedantic philosophy might flourish in congenial soil; and third, that his motive was primarily to obtain material help for India, and also to destroy the missionary-created prejudice against his country, which choked American generosity and stifled reason.
Broadly speaking, all three interpretations have been woven together and considered to be a sufficient explanation of his tour. But a study of this period through material not fully available to his early biographers seems to reveal not only that all three interpretations, whether taken singly or together, miss the mark, but that the first two are not even in accord with the facts.
Judging from what Swamiji himself said and did, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the idea of teaching Vedanta to the West did not fully evolve in his mind until the last part of 1894. It was a complex and profound idea, involving an intimate and mature knowledge of the characteristics and needs of the Western mind.
As Swamiji later conceived it, Vedanta was the one unifying force of all the diverse religious, philosophical, and cultural outlooks of man. He showed it to be the philosophy of all religions, the inevitable and ultimate conclusion of science, the justification of all social, moral, psychic, and philosophical efforts of man to realize his own glory, and the method by which that glory might be fully attained. Vedanta, as he con¬-_x000d_
ceived it, was India's saving gift to the world, and for this reason he pleaded with his countrymen to become strong in order to give, and to give in order to become strong.
In the early part of Swamiji's American visit one does not find this conception of the function of Vedanta in the modern world worked out in his mind and put into practical Form. It was a development that required time.
Although Swamiji's mature conception of his mission was, of course, implicit in all his earlier activities, and although inevitably in all his lectures he taught some Vedanta, whether under that name or not, Vedanta being a part of his very nature, still we cannot read the concepts of 1895 into those of 1893 and 1894 without running headlong into complications.
For instance, even a cursory reading of his letters written during the first nine to ten months of his stay in this country can leave no doubt that his conscious purpose in coming to America was to obtain material help for the masses of India, whose suffering he felt as only he could feel. "With a bleeding heart I have crossed half the world to this strange land, seeking help," he wrote on August 20, 1893. And again in 1894 he said in his first letter to Swami Ramakrishnananda, "I have come to America to earn money myself, and then return to my country and devote the rest of my days to the realization of this one aim of my life [the regeneration of India]: And in June of that year to the Dewan of Junagad, "Primarily my coming [to America] has been to raise funds for an enterprise of my own. . . . [The masses] are to be given back their lost individuality. They are to be educated." And around the same time to the Maharaja of Mysore, "Our duty is to put ideas into (the heads of the poor], they will do the rest. This is what is to be done in India. It is this' idea that has been in my mind for a long time. I could not accomplish it in India, and that was the reason of my coming to this country." Again and again Swamiji made similar statements, which do not seem to indicate that he was essentially concerned at this period with spreading Vedanta in the West. The intensity of his desire to obtain American aid for India can be gathered from the fact that although he despaired of earning the money through lecturing, he never gave up the hope of finding help. As late as April 1897 he wrote to Sarala Devi, a niece of Rabindranath Tagore, "My going to the West [again] is yet uncertain; if I go, know that too will be for India. Where is the strength of men in this country? Where is the strength of money?"43 (It may be noted in passing that in 1951 Swamiji's dream of substantial material help from America to India began to come true. Since that time, America's economic and technical aid to India has on the whole increased greatly, assuming at times magnificent proportions.)
But to say that Swamiji's primary purpose during the first year or so of his visit to America was to obtain help for his motherland either by asking for it directly, as he did prior to the Parliament of Religions, or by earning it little by little through a lecture tour, is not to say that his sole aim in lecturing was a financial one. We find that wherever he went he made it a point not only to describe the manners and customs of the Indian people in their true light, but to explain the ennobling and exalted ideals of the Hindu religion.
His effort to correct America's erroneous concept of India was unceasing and at times this in itself seemed to him to be sufficient reason for his having come to the West. "If my coming has done nothing [else]," he wrote in November of 1893 to his friend Haridas V. Desai, the Dewan of Junagadh, "it has done this that Americans have come to know that India even today produces men at whose feet even the most civilized nations may learn lessons of religion and morality."
Further, we find that Swamiji often spoke to the American people of the divinity of man, of the true meaning of religion, and of the essential characteristics of devotion; he spoke also of Buddha and Buddhism, and, above all, he invariably spoke, in one way or another, of his Master's message of the basic unity of all religious aspirations and teachings.
But though Swamiji's lectures during his first year or so in this country were necessarily an expression of his own thought and inevitably had a profound effect on the American public, it does not appear that he felt they constituted a specific mission to the West or that he was deliberately and methodically teaching a spiritual philosophy and path to be followed by the American people. Indeed, he himself declared that such teaching, serious and deeply transforming, could not be accomplished through public and itinerant lecturing.
Further, we find that during his lecture tour he disclaimed any such teaching mission. The tour was being made, he told an interviewer in Des Moines in November of 1893, "for the purpose of founding a school in India for the poor, to elevate them from their present unfortunate condition."
Some three and a half months later this purpose had not changed: "His mission, he says, is not to proselyte us-to try to make us think as he docs," wrote a Detroit journalist, "but to get means to start a college in India."
After returning to India in 1897, Swamiji made it clear that his purpose in going to America had not been to preach Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions, or elsewhere, but to seek help for India.
In his lecture "My Plan of Campaign," delivered in Madras, he said: "I travelled years all over India, finding no way to work for my countrymen, and that is why I went to America. Most of you know that, who knew me then. Who cared about this Parliament of Religions? Here was my own flesh and blood sinking every day, and who cared for them? This was my first step."
Again during a lecture in India he explained, "My mission in America was not to the Parliament of Religions. That was only something by the way, it was only an opening, an opportunity." We know, moreover, that had it not been for the urging, the insistence, of Professor Wright, Swamiji might well not have attended the Parliament at all.
The fact is that nowhere, either before leaving India or during his first year in this country, does Swamiji speak or write of teaching Vedanta in America or, for that matter, of having a specific religious mission to the people of the West.
It is true that in February of 1893 he delivered a lecture in Hyderabad entitled "My Mission to the West." But to judge from the little we know of this lecture,* the word "mission" must, I believe, be understood as "purpose in going" rather than "message" or "spiritual teaching." In the first edition of the Life Swamiji's biographers have written in regard to this lecture: "Finally he spoke of his Mission, `which is nothing less than the regeneration of the Motherland,' and he declared that he felt it an imperative duty to go out as a missionary from India to the farthest West, to reveal to the world the incomparable glory of the Vedas and the Vedanta._x000d_
* In recent times several efforts have been made to find reports of this lecture of February 13, 1893, in the old newspapers and periodicals of Hyderabad. (See, for instance, “Swami Vivekanada in Madras : 1892-93,” by Sri Sankari Prasad Basu, Prabuddha Bharata, August 1974, _x000d_
p.295.) The failure of these efforts to date leads one to suppose that the lecture was not reported by the newspapers of the day.
During this same period Swamiji had an interview with the Nawab of Hyderabad, in the course of which, it is reported in the Life, "he . . . Gave out his intention of going to the West to preach the gospel of the Universal, Eternal Religion." Whether or not Swamiji actually spoke these exact words, the broad purpose they define is not at all contrary to our present thesis: to reveal to the world the incomparable glory of the Vedas and the Vedanta and to preach the gospel of the Universal, Eternal Religion is in effect what Swamiji did during his first year or so in America, and this was, to his mind, an essential part of his program for the regeneration of his Motherland.
"It is for the people of India that I am going to the West," he told his Madras dis¬ciples, "for the people and the poor!"
He explained his venture more specifically to Haridas V. Desai, writing after the Parliament of Religions, "Some representative men must come out of India and go to all the nations of the earth to show at least that you are not savages. You may not feel the necessity of it from your Indian home, but believe me, much depends upon that for your nation." But to reveal the glories of the Vedas and the Vedanta and to preach in a general way the Universal, Eternal Religion was quite a different thing from teaching Vedanta to the American people for their own spiritual benefit. Although Swamiji did undoubtedly benefit America with every word he uttered, the benefit of India was for many months clearly uppermost in his mind.
In presenting the view that Swamiji did not come to America and did not undertake his lecture tour in order to teach Vedanta to the American people, I am not forgetting that there are some passages in his letters written before the fall of 1894 that might seem contradictory to this thesis.
For example, he wrote on December 28, 1893, to Mr. Haripada Mitra, "As regards spirituality, the Americans are far inferior to us, but their society is far superior to ours. We will teach them our spirituality, and assimilate what is best in their society."_x000d_
And in January of 1894 he wrote to Swami Ramakrishnananda, "As our country is lacking in social . virtues, so this country is lacking in spirituality. I give them spirituality and they give me money."_x000d_
Now, there is no question that Swamiji was giving spirituality to the American people, both individually and collectively.
But do the above passages indicate that he was intent at the time of writing these letters on teaching Vedanta to Americans? It does not seem that this was what Swamiji was saying, for in both these letters he mentioned his main reason for being in America.
"I came to this country . . . to see if I could find any means for the support of the poor in India. If God helps me, you will know by-and-by what those means are," he wrote to Mr. Mitra. And to Swami Ramakrishnananda, "I do not know how long I shall take to realise my end. . . . I shall try to earn the where withal myself to the best of my might and carry out my plans, or die in the attempt." It would seem that when Swamiji said in these particular letters, and elsewhere during this period, that he was giving spirituality he was simply stating a fact, not explaining his primary purpose.
There are, to be sure, other passages that may seem to indicate that he had undertaken a worldwide mission of religious teaching. During the summer of 1894, for example, he wrote to his brother monks of his desire to spread the message of Sri Ramakrishna "all over the world," and he urges them to do the same. Again, "We want thousands of men and thousands of women who will spread like wild fire from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, From the North Pole to the South Pole-all over the world." Yes, it is true that just as Swamiji was giving spirituality to America, he was, as has been pointed out above, spreading his Master's message of the basic unity underlying all religious expression and spiritual striving. Further, he knew that this message must eventually be spread far and wide and with full vigor; and this ideal he naturally set before his brothers, urging them to start to work. But when one reads these and similar passages written during the period in question in their proper context and when one realizes that when they were written the work in India had not even begun, one can, I believe, only see them as indications of the general program Swamiji was developing in his mind for the future and not as statements regarding the work he was presently engaged in.
After considering all that Swamiji said explicitly in regard to his American work in his letters, interviews, and lectures and after taking into consideration the passages that might seem by implication to contradict his own very clear and unequivocal statements, I, for one, cannot but believe that throughout the last part of 1893 and a large part of 1894 he had not embarked upon the broad and world-encompassing mission that he later knew to be his. It appears to have been only toward the end of 1894 and the beginning of 1895 that the fullness of his message to the West began to take shape in his mind and that he settled down to formulate it.
The second interpretation of Swamiji's activities following the Parliament comes from the pen of Swami Kripananda, more generally known as Leon Landsberg, one of the three people in America whom Swamiji initiated into sannyasa. In a dispatch to the Brahmavadin, Swami Kripananda wrote in regard to Swamiji's work: "Before even starting this great mission [of the teaching of Vedanta in the West], it was necessary to first perform the Herculean labour of cleansing this Augean stable of imposture, superstition and bigotry, a task sufficient to discourage the bravest heart, to dispirit the most powerful will. But the Swami was not the man to be deterred by difficulties. Poor and friendless, with no other support than God and his love for mankind, he set patiently to work, determined not to give up until the message he had to deliver would reach the hearts of truth-seeking men and women.
Now, there is no gainsaying the fact that one result of Swamiji's lecture tour through America was, as has been seen, to correct much that was erroneous in contemporary religious thought; but to interpret his activities prior to 1895 as a conscious and deliberate attempt to prepare the American mind for the message of Vedanta would imply that he intended all along to remain in the West to deliver that message in its fully developed form. We have seen from some of his letters written in the early part of 1894 that this was not the case.
Although later on he at times considered remaining in America through another winter, he did not come to a definite decision in this regard until the last part of 1894. As late as September of that year he wrote to Alasinga, "I hope soon to return to India. I have had enough of this country."
It would seem, then, that the only warranted interpretation of Swamiji's outer activities during 1893 and most of 1894 is the third and most obvious one. It appears very clear from all the evidence we have at hand that the uppermost motives that guided him were ( 1) to raise funds for the development of his work in India, and incidentally to provide for his self support during his stay in this country, and (2) to give the American people correct ideas of Hinduism, to combat the current misconceptions regarding India, and to inculcate the spirit of tolerance. With these correlated aims in mind, Swamiji joined a lecture bureau as the best means of carrying them out-not as the best means of teaching Vedanta philosophy to the Western world.
In other words, when we analyze the biographies in the light of history and untangle the motives which have been erroneously attributed to Swamiji from these that are in accord with his own statements and activities, we are faced with the strange conclusion that an illumined soul of the greatest magnitude gave his best energies to thc task of earning money for India, of explaining Hindu customs and religion to the American people, and of answering questions asked, for the most part, by the ignorant, the bigoted, and the dull! Can we accept this as a complete interpretation of the itinerant period of Swamiji's life in America? Has not the essential significance of his lecture tour somehow been overlooked?
When one reads the lives of saints and sages, it seems clear that the activity of an illumined soul must necessarily be undestood on two levels. There is, first, the activity which embraces the visible purposes of his life and which can be seen and comprehended by all in greater or lesser degree. But strenuous and inspired as such activity may be, it occupies only a part of his mind, by far the larger and more potent part operating on a level hidden from our view. Indeed, it would seem that the very speciality of such a person consists in the fact that far beneath his surface mind are depths that are fully awake and fully absorbed in God. It is said that in its deepest levels the mind of a saint is so close to God that His effulgence forms, as it were, its very substance and texture. Surely that vast and silent part of Swamiji's mind, which was at one with God even while he was in the midst of the most "cyclonic" outer life, not only served to inform and illumine his surface mind but had a function of its own which constituted the true and special significance of his mission.
But somehow this most important aspect of Swamiji's life has been given little importance in his biographies, and his life in America has been so presented as to give the reader the impression that he was primarily a "man of action," a lecturer and a writer-spiritually inspired, it is true, but first and fore most an intellectual genius. We do not see him as he must have been: continually in a transcendental state of consciousness, possessed of innumerable spiritual experiences of the highest order and, while undertaking the most rigorous of active lives, performing on a deeper level a service of incalculable value to the world.
I do not mean here to minimize the importance of Swamiji's external accomplishments. His biographers have understandably placed a great deal of emphasis upon his magnificent vindication of India, his glowing and convincing oratory, and his brilliant exposition of Hinduism in its various phases. All this was certainly the work of great genius and helped to establish India in the eyes of the world as a nation worthy of honor and respect. But I must confess that to Americans Swamiji's patriotism is not so important as it is to his own country men. And I believe that as time goes on and India forgets her past degradation and urgent need For national vindication in the eyes of the world, even she will see it as of secondary importance. It would seem, therefore, unfortunate that in the interpretation of Swamiji's mission in this country the patriotic and intellectual aspects have been emphasized, while the most important part-that which sprang from the depths of his being and which had unique and infinitely more lasting value has been relatively neglected.
It is interesting to note in this connection that the biographies of the other monastic disciples of Sri Ramakrishna are rich with accounts of their exalted spirituality and spiritual experiences, but not so that of Swamiji, although, as is well known, he was acknowledged by his Master and his brother monks to have been spiritually the greatest among them. The biographers themselves tell us this, but then, as though forgetting their own words, they seem to become bedazzled by the radiance of his external accomplishments, almost losing sight of all else. Perhaps so one-sided a portrayal has left the way open to a great deal of misunderstanding.
For instance, some modern interpreters have explained that Swamiji fulfilled the external aspect of Sri Ramakrishna's mission, while the vast legacy of spiritual power was embodied elsewhere. Again, one reads in an essay on Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda that if the latter had not visited Dakshineswar, he might well have become one of India's Fore most statesmen. But according to Sri Ramakrishna himself, Swamiji was nityasiddha, eternally perfect, and born to save the world. While it is true that Swamiji had world shaking gifts and powers of all sorts, surely it was no accident that he came to Dakshineswar and that his genius took the form it did.
Other interpreters, taking Swamiji's activities during the lecture-tour period at their face value, have been led to remark that he could not have been receiving divine guidance at this time, for his mission was apparently of a temporal nature and was directed, moreover, by his own instincts and his own will. It has been suggested that, as far as his world mission is concerned, this early period was one of groping and of indecision and that, all in all, it was more human than divine.
Now, it would seem to me that to criticize Swamiji as not having been divinely guided simply because at times he seemed to decide matters for himself is to fail in appraisal of his spiritual stature. Not only was he divinely guided in the sense of receiving commands from God, but, if we are to believe the opinion of one of his great brother disciples, Swami Shivananda, he was Ishwara-kalpa, literally Godlike. Living as he did on the very borderland of the Absolute, his will was God's will, his every action the action of God. More than this, he was born with the tremendous spiritual power of a world-teacher. Unless this aspect, indeed essence, of his life on earth is brought into prominence how can we even begin to understand and appreciate what he was accomplishing during his long lecture tour?
It is said that by its very nature the deep center of an illumined mind shines out over the relative world, redeeming it and awakening it. Was it not this activity, this shining forth of his being in its full perfection and power, that constituted Swamiji's greatest service to America? 'The fact is that American devotees view him, not as an intellectual expounder of the Vedanta philosophy, but as the first great prophet sent to this country by God. Swamiji himself said that he did not lecture, he gave. Being what he was a completely illumined soul whose heart cried over the suffering of all men-he inevitably poured out his blessings as the sun pours out its light. In and through everything he said and did, his profound calm and peace, his boundless compassion for all humanity, and his ready ability to awaken spirituality in others loomed large. And it was these things not his patriotism or his intellectual genius that captured the heart of this country.
Wherever Swamiji went, whatever his external activities, his mission was, first and always, to impart spirituality to whoever was able to receive it. Such was his very nature. Whether he was answering questions regarding India's customs, lecturing on Hinduism, or castigating the bigoted and hypocritical, whether he was attending social gatherings or making chance acquaintances on trains or in hotels, he was, under all circumstances, shedding divine light. Quite literally he planted the seeds of spirituality deep in the hearts of innumerable human beings, changing the course of their lives forever. So spontaneously and naturally did he do this that at times it seems that he himself was not aware of it. And indeed, such "unawareness" has always characterized prophets and saviors just as it characterizes the sun, which does not deliberate upon whether or not it will shine. Yet, there was awareness, too; did he not write, probably in March of 1894, "Through this instrument He is awaking the spiritual consciousness in thousands of hearts in this far-off country" ? Sometimes, at least, he well knew his stature and his power.
It was during the period of the lecture tour that Swamiji came in contact with more people than at any other time; and if we accept the Hindu belief that every word of an illumined soul bears everlasting beneficial fruit in the life of the hearer, then we cannot even begin to estimate the spiritual effect of that tour upon the life of America. How many hundreds and thousands received his blessings as he went about from city to city in the Midwest, South, and East we can never know. Possibly even many of those who received them were themselves not conscious of the fact, for blessings often work in secret through inexorable ways. Thus, although the apparent purpose of Swamiji's tour was to collect funds for India, to spread a true knowledge of her culture and religion, to combat the slander disseminated against her, and to teach religious tolerance, his deeper purpose was to fulfill the divine function of a prophet among the people of the Western world, mingling with as many as possible and blessing all. We in America believe that it was this last which formed the true substance and inner power of his mission to the West, and we believe that America has been divinely favored.
Perhaps of all his interpreters Swami Abhedananda, who knew Swamiji as he was in this country, came closest to the American evaluation of him when, in his lecture before the Vedanta Society of New York on March 8, 1903, he said: "The preachers of truth are very few, but their powers are felt by those who happen to come within the atmosphere of their divine personality. Such a preacher of truth occasionally appears like a gigantic comet above the horizon, dazzling the eyes and filling the hearts of ordinary mortals with wonder and admiration, and silently passes away into the invisible and unknown realms of the universe. The late Swami Vivekananda was one of those great comets who appeared in the spiritual firmament once perhaps after several centuries."
Yes, truly Swamiji was in the fullest sense a prophet sent by God to America. He was a prophet who prepared us to meet the modern age, which not only needs the philosophy of Vedanta to solve its many and complex problems but requires thousands of spiritually awakened people to put that philosophy into practice and make it a living force in the future history of the world. And since such a prophet can fulfill his function only by mingling with the people, blessing them through his very presence, it would seem strange had Swamiji not traveled here and there, enduring untold hardships and giving of himself without stint. Only thus could he quicken and transform the inner life of this nation; and this in truth is what he did.
It was only after having fulfilled this essential part of his prophetic mission that Swamiji settled down in New York to establish a center, to give Vedanta a definite intellectual form, to write books, and to train disciples.
One might well say that during the first sixteen months of his American visit he lit the fire of spirituality in innumerable hearts, and then, during the next sixteen months, built up a legacy of spiritual and philosophical knowledge by which that fire might be fed for centuries to come.
If the reader agrees with this interpretation of Swamiji's activities during 1893 and 1894, then he will also agree that they constitute an essential part of his function as a divine prophet and that this period during which he moved among the people of America, talking with them and blessing them, formed one of the most important parts of his entire mission to the West.