Swami Vivekananda

Narendranath Datta was born in Calcutta in 1863 into an educated Bengali family. His father was an attorney; his mother was a woman of deep religious devotion and formidable intelligence whose influence on him was profound. He was an exceptional student — intellectually precocious, physically vigorous, spiritually restless — who encountered the saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa around 1881, at eighteen.

The encounter transformed him. Ramakrishna was an ecstatic mystic who had achieved states of spiritual realization through devotion to the goddess Kali, but who recognized in this young intellectual skeptic something he had been waiting for. Their relationship — the unlettered saint and the university-educated rationalist — lasted five years, until Ramakrishna's death from throat cancer in 1886. In those five years Vivekananda underwent an experience of religious transformation that he spent the rest of his short life translating into philosophical language and social action.

He traveled across India for years as a wandering monk, experiencing the poverty and suffering of his country directly. In 1893 he traveled to the United States, arriving with almost no money, to address the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. His opening words — Sisters and Brothers of America — were greeted with a standing ovation before he had said anything else. His subsequent addresses established him as the most compelling voice at the Parliament and launched him on a two-year lecture tour that introduced Vedanta and Yoga to Western audiences. He returned to India in 1897, founded the Ramakrishna Mission to combine spiritual practice with social service, and died in 1902 at thirty-nine.