Swami Vivekananda 1863 – 1902

Narendranath Datta, known as Swami Vivekananda, was an Indian Hindu monk and the principal disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. His address at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893 introduced Vedanta and yoga to a wide Western audience and made him an instant celebrity. His subsequent lectures and writings presented a confident reformulation of Advaita Vedanta as a universal religion of practice rather than dogma. He founded the Ramakrishna Mission, a major movement of social and educational service, and is credited with shaping the modern self-understanding of Indian spirituality.

Swami Vivekananda — born Narendranath Datta in 1863 in Calcutta — came from a Kayastha family with a strong legal tradition and a religiously inquisitive household. He read philosophy and Western thought at the Scottish Church College and the Presidency College, Calcutta, and was drawn through the Brahmo Samaj into the orbit of Sri Ramakrishna, whose principal disciple he became between 1881 and Ramakrishna's death in 1886.

After several years as a wandering monk through the Indian subcontinent he sailed for the United States in 1893 to represent Hinduism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where his speeches made him a celebrated public figure. From the lecture tours of the next eight years came the volumes Karma-Yoga, Raja-Yoga, Bhakti-Yoga, and Jnana-Yoga, the Lectures from Colombo to Almora delivered on his return, and the foundation of the Vedanta Society in New York in 1894 and the Ramakrishna Mission at Belur in 1897.

Vivekananda recast Advaita Vedanta as a 'practical Vedanta' in which service to the human being is service to the divine, and gave modern Hindu reform a confident global voice. He died at Belur Math in July 1902 at the age of thirty-nine; his birthday is observed in India as National Youth Day.