Modern Teachers

If you have read a book on Hinduism in English, sung a bhajan in a Kuala Lumpur centre or attended a yoga class anywhere in the world, you have almost certainly met the teachers on this page, directly or at one remove. In the 19th and 20th centuries, under colonial rule, missionary criticism and then independence, a remarkable succession of Hindu teachers rethought the tradition — some by reform, some by renewal, some simply by sitting still. Modern reading Much of what they taught is a modern reading of older texts: often profound, widely held, and different in places from the classical commentaries. This page tries to show both their achievement and the questions they raise.

Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi

Ramakrishna (1836–1886), born Gadādhar Chaṭṭopādhyāy in the Bengal village of Kamarpukur, had little schooling. As a young priest at the new Kālī temple of Dakshineswar near Calcutta, he longed for the Goddess so fiercely that he could not perform the rites, until, by his own account, she showed herself to him. He then followed one discipline after another: Tantric practice under a woman teacher, the Bhairavī Brāhmaṇī; Vaishnava devotion; Advaita under the wandering monk Totāpurī — and, his biographers say, periods of practice as a Muslim and of meditation on Christ. He concluded that all of them led to the same God. His conversations were recorded by a schoolteacher, Mahendranāth Gupta, known as “M,” in the Bengali Kathāmṛta — The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in English. Its most quoted saying is three words:

His wife Sarada Devi (1853–1920) was married to him as a child, by village custom, and joined him at Dakshineswar as a young woman. The marriage was never consummated; Ramakrishna worshipped her as the Goddess herself. After his death she became the “Holy Mother” of his disciples, guiding monks and householders alike with plain, homely wisdom. Her best-remembered counsel is to stop looking for faults in others and to make the whole world one’s own: no one, she said, is a stranger. The same Ramakrishna, worshipping Kālī as Mother, appears on Maya & Lila.

Scholars have read Ramakrishna in sharply different ways. Jeffrey Kripal’s Kālī’s Child (1995) gave a psychoanalytic and Tantric reading that devotees and several scholars rejected as a misreading of the Bengali sources; the debate is a reminder that a saint’s inner life is not easy to know from outside.

Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), born Narendranāth Datta, was a Calcutta student of Western philosophy and a member of the reformist Brahmo Samaj when he met Ramakrishna in 1881. After his teacher’s death he wandered India as a monk for several years, shocked by its poverty. In September 1893 he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago — his ship to America had called at Penang and Singapore on the way — and became famous overnight. He founded the Vedanta Society in New York and, back in India in 1897, the Ramakrishna Mission, with a motto he framed himself:

His teaching joined Advaita to service: since the one Self lives in all, serving the poor is worship — see Karma Yoga. His four short books on the yogas gave the world the familiar scheme of four paths. He died at thirty-nine. Malaysia In 1904 Jaffna Tamil settlers in Kuala Lumpur founded the Vivekananda Ashram in Brickfields in his honour; it is now a heritage building.

Was Vivekananda’s Vedānta the old one? Three views:

Reformers: Dayananda and Narayana Guru

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883), born Mūlśaṅkar in Gujarat, tells in his own account how, as a boy keeping the Shivaratri vigil, he saw a mouse running over the liṅga and lost faith in image worship. After years as a wandering ascetic and study with the blind grammarian Virajānanda at Mathura, he founded the Ārya Samāj in Bombay in 1875. Its programme was “back to the Vedas”: the Vedic Saṃhitās alone are revelation; the Purāṇas, image worship, avatāras and caste by birth are later corruptions. He championed education for girls, opposed child marriage and allowed the Veda to be taught to all. Its motto is a Vedic phrase:

His book Satyārth Prakāś (1875) includes harsh critiques of Purāṇic Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity and Islam, which have caused offence ever since; later, in the 1920s, the Samāj’s śuddhi campaign to bring converts back into Hinduism sharpened tensions with Muslims. Its schools and colleges, the DAV institutions, remain one of India’s largest education networks.

Narayana Guru (1856–1928) of Kerala was born into the Ezhava community, ranked low and barred from many temples. In 1888 at Aruvippuram he consecrated a Shiva image himself — an act reserved for Brahmins — and went on to found temples, schools and the SNDP Yogam (1903) for his community’s uplift. His Malayalam Ātmopadeśa Śatakam teaches Advaita; his short prayer Daiva Daśakam is sung daily in many Kerala homes. At one temple he consecrated a mirror. His message reached far beyond his own people:

For more on both reformers and caste, see Varna & Jati.

Sages of the south: Aurobindo and Ramana

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) was educated in England from the age of seven and at Cambridge, then returned to India to work for the state of Baroda and became a leader of radical nationalism in Bengal. Arrested in the Alipore bomb case of 1908, he spent a year in jail awaiting trial — where, he later wrote, he saw Krishna in everything around him — and was acquitted. In 1910 he withdrew to French Pondicherry and devoted himself to yoga. His Integral Yoga aims not to escape the world but to transform it: consciousness has descended into matter and is evolving back towards the divine, and the yogi works for the descent of a “supramental” consciousness into life itself. His major works are The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and the epic poem Savitri. Mirra Alfassa, “the Mother,” led his ashram and founded the international township of Auroville (1968). His symbolic reading of the Veda appears on Ṛta.

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) took the opposite road from public life. At sixteen, in Madurai, he lay down and acted out his own death, and woke to the Self; weeks later he left home for the holy hill of Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai and never left it. For years he hardly spoke. His teaching of self-enquiry, “Who am I?”, is explained on Jnana Yoga. He taught as much by silence and presence as by words; visitors from the British writer Paul Brunton to local farmers describe the same stillness around him. He also composed Tamil hymns to Arunachala, and to many he recommended surrender to God as an equal path.

Anandamayi Ma

Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982), born Nirmalā Sundarī in a village of East Bengal, now in Bangladesh, had no human guru. Married young, she passed through years of spontaneous spiritual practice — initiating herself — while her husband, Bholanāth, became her disciple. For more than half a century she travelled across India, in states of joy and absorption that her followers took as the Goddess’s presence. She taught simply: keep God in mind, do your duties, sing the Name; she rarely gave formal discourses, and answered questions playfully. Her ashrams at Varanasi and Kankhal, near Haridwar, welcomed seekers of every kind, though they kept orthodox rules of caste purity in matters of food — a tension her biographer Lisa Lassell Hallstrom discusses. She is among the most revered women teachers in modern Hinduism; see also The Guru.

Teachers who travelled

Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) was born Kuppuswāmī at Pattamadai, in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. Trained in medicine, he sailed to British Malaya in 1913 and worked for about a decade as a doctor on a rubber estate near Seremban, caring for plantation labourers — many of them Tamils. In 1923 he returned to India, took saṃnyāsa at Rishikesh and founded the Divine Life Society (1936). He wrote a vast number of short, practical books on yoga, japa, festivals and ethics — several are cited elsewhere in this guide — and summed up his teaching in six words: serve, love, give, purify, meditate, realise. His disciples carried his “yoga of synthesis” worldwide, among them Swami Chidananda, Swami Vishnudevananda, Swami Satchidananda, Swami Satyananda and Swami Chinmayananda. Malaysia Divine Life Society branches remain active in Malaysia.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1896–1977), born Abhay Charan De in Calcutta, was a pharmaceutical businessman and disciple of the Gauḍīya teacher Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī. At sixty-nine, with little money, he sailed to the United States in 1965 and the next year founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in New York. Through street kīrtan of the mahāmantra, free vegetarian meals and his Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, he carried Caitanya’s devotion (see Bhakti Saints) around the world in twelve years. After his death the movement went through bitter disputes over succession; in 1998 its own journal published a study documenting the abuse of children in its boarding schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and ISKCON set up a child-protection office and later settled a lawsuit by former pupils. Malaysia ISKCON temples, kīrtan and Ratha Yātrā processions are a familiar part of Malaysian Hindu life.

Swami Chinmayananda (1916–1993), born Balakrishna Menon in Kerala, was a journalist jailed during the Quit India movement who, by his own account, went to Rishikesh to expose holy men and stayed to become one. Initiated by Sivananda, he studied Vedānta under Tapovan Mahārāj in the Himalayas, then broke convention by teaching the Upaniṣads and the Gītā in English to large public audiences, from 1951. The Chinmaya Mission he inspired runs study groups, children’s classes and schools around the world. He was also among the founders of the Vishva Hindu Parishad in 1964.

Through the years

1. 1875Ārya SamājDayananda founds it in Bombay and publishes the Satyārth Prakāś.
2. 1881–1886Ramakrishna and NarendraMeetings at Dakshineswar; Ramakrishna dies in 1886.
3. 1888AruvippuramNarayana Guru consecrates a Shiva image.
4. 1893ChicagoVivekananda at the World’s Parliament of Religions; the Ramakrishna Mission follows in 1897.
5. 1896ArunachalaThe young Ramana arrives at Tiruvannamalai.
6. 1904Kuala LumpurThe Vivekananda Ashram is founded in Brickfields.
7. 1910PondicherryAurobindo leaves politics for yoga.
8. 1913–1923MalayaDr Kuppuswami, later Sivananda, works near Seremban.
9. 1936Divine Life SocietyFounded by Sivananda at Rishikesh.
10. 1951–1953Chinmaya MissionChinmayananda’s first public Gītā lectures; the Mission is formed.
11. 1966ISKCONPrabhupāda founds it in New York.
12. 1982KankhalAnandamayi Ma dies; her samādhi shrine is there.

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Sources & further reading

• Swami Nikhilananda (trans.), The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1942).
• Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play, trans. Swami Chetanananda (Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 2003).
• Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kālī’s Child Revisited (Motilal Banarsidass, 2010); Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kālī’s Child (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
• The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati).
• Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (SUNY Press, 1988).
• Anantanand Rambachan, The Limits of Scripture: Vivekananda’s Reinterpretation of the Vedas (University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
• J. T. F. Jordens, Dayānanda Sarasvatī: His Life and Ideas (Oxford University Press, 1978).
• Nataraja Guru, The Word of the Guru: The Life and Teaching of Guru Narayana (1952; D. K. Printworld, 2003).
• Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008).
• Arthur Osborne, Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge (Rider, 1954).
• Lisa Lassell Hallstrom, Mother of Bliss: Ānandamayī Mā (1896–1982) (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Swami Venkatesananda, Sivananda: Biography of a Modern Sage (Divine Life Society).
• Edwin F. Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand (eds), The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004).
• Nancy Patchen, The Journey of a Master: Swami Chinmayananda (Asian Humanities Press, 1989).