Swami Vivekananda - his influence on the West - AL Bardach

WSJ. MAGAZINE Updated March 30, 2012, 2:01 p.m. ET
MY SWEET LORD The swami Vivekananda, the Bengali monk who brought yoga to the United States, meditating in London, in 1896.

What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common?
The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement

By A. L. BARDACH

By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse,
having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came
to Manhattan, staying at his parents' sprawling apartment on Park Avenue
and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at "The New
Yorker," he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami
Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna- Vivekananda Center, located,
then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY/HULTON ARCHIVE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; ILYA EFIMOVICH REPIN/GETT Y IMAGES; POPPERFOTO/GETT Y IMAGES; SSPL/GETTY IMAGES

Though the iconic author of "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Franny and Zooey"
published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early
1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta
monks and fellow devotees.

After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger's spiritual quest was the
teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta
and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.

These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as
ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not
somewhat alarmed. "As soon as I think of myself as a little body," he
warned, "I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense
of other bodies. Then you and I become separate." For Vivekananda, who
established the first ever Vedanta Center, in Manhattan in 1896, yoga meant
just one thing: "the realization of God."
After an initial dalliance in the late 1940s with Zen—a spiritual path
without a God—Salinger discovered Vedanta, which he found infinitely more
consoling. "Unlike Zen," Salinger's biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, points
out, "Vedanta offered a path to a personal relationship with God…[and] a
promise that he could obtain a cure for his depression….and find God, and
through God, peace."

Finding peace would, however, be a lifelong battle. In 1975, Salinger wrote
to another monk at the New York City center about his own daily struggle,
citing a text of the eighth-century Indian mystic Shankara as a cautionary
tale: "In the forest-tract of sense pleasures there prowls a huge tiger
called the mind. Let good people who have a longing for Liberation never go
there." Salinger wrote, "I suspect that nothing is truer than that,"
confessing despondently, "and yet I allow myself to be mauled by that old
tiger almost every wakeful minute of my life."

It was his daily mauling by the "huge tiger" and his dreaded depressions
that led Salinger to abandon his literary ambitions in favor of spiritual
ones. Salinger—who appears to have had a nervous breakdown of sorts upon
his return from the gruesome front lines of World War II—subscribed to
Vivekananda' s view of the mind as a drunken monkey who is stung by a
scorpion and then consumed by a demon. At the same time, Vivekananda
promised hope and solace—writing that the "same mind, when subdued and
controlled, becomes a most trusted friend and helper, guaranteeing peace
and happiness." It was precisely the consolation that Salinger so
desperately sought. And by 1965 he was ready to renounce his once gritty
pursuit of literary celebrity.

Although all but forgotten by America's 20 million would-be yoginis, clad
in their finest Lululemon, Vivekananda was the Bengali monk who introduced
the word "yoga" into the national conversation. In 1893, outfitted in a
red, flowing turban and yellow robes belted by a scarlet sash, he had
delivered a show-stopping speech in Chicago. The event was the tony
Parliament of Religions, which had been convened as a spiritual complement
to the World's Fair, showcasing the industrial and technological
achievements of the age.

On its opening day, September 11, Vivekananda, who appeared to be
meditating onstage, was summoned to speak and did so without notes.
"Sisters and Brothers of America," he began, in a sonorous voice tinged
with "a delightful slight Irish brogue," according to one listener,
attributable to his Trinity College–educated professor in India. "It fills
my heart with joy unspeakable. .."

Then something unprecedented happened, presaging the phenomenon decades
later that greeted the Beatles (one of whom, George Harrison, would become
a lifelong Vivekananda devotee). The previously sedate crowd of 4,000-plus
attendees rose to their feet and wildly cheered the visiting monk, who,
having never before addressed a large gathering, was as shocked as his
audience. "I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in
the world," he responded, flushed with emotion. "I thank you in the name of
the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and
millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects."

Annie Besant, a British Theosophist and a conference delegate, described
Vivekananda' s impact, writing that he was "a striking figure, clad in
yellow and orange, shining like the sun of India in the midst of the heavy
atmosphere of Chicago…a lion head, piercing eyes, mobile lips, movements
swift and abrupt." The Parliament, she said, was "enraptured; the huge
multitude hung upon his words." When he was done, the convocation rose
again and cheered him even more thunderously. Another delegate described
"scores of women walking over the benches to get near to him," prompting
one wag to crack wise that if the 30-year-old Vivekananda "can resist that
onslaught, [he is] indeed a god."

"No doubt the vast majority of those present hardly knew why they had been
so powerfully moved," Christopher Isherwood wrote a half century later,
surmising that a "strange kind of subconscious telepathy" had infected the
hall, beginning with Vivekananda' s first words, which have resonated, for
some, long after. Asked about the origins of "My Sweet Lord," George
Harrison replied that "the song really came from Swami Vivekananda, who
said, 'If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must
perceive it.' "

The teachings of Vedanta are rooted in the Vedas, ancient scriptures going
back several thousand years that also inform Buddhism, Hinduism and
Jainism. The Vedic texts of the Upanishads enshrine a core belief that God
is within and without—that the divine is everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita
(Song of God) is another sacred text or gospel, whereas Hinduism is
actually a coinage popularized by Vivekananda to describe a faith of
diverse and myriad beliefs.

Vivekananda' s genius was to simplify Vedantic thought to a few accessible
teachings that Westerners found irresistible. God was not the capricious
tyrant in the heavens avowed by Bible-thumpers, but rather a power that
resided in the human heart. "Each soul is potentially divine," he promised.
"The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature,
external and internal." And to close the deal for the fence-sitters, he
punched up Vedanta's embrace of other faiths and their prophets. Christ and
Buddha were incarnations of the divine, he said, no less than Krishna and
his own teacher, Ramakrishna.

Although Vivekananda was a Western-educated intellectual of encyclopedic
erudition, "the descendant of 50 generations of lawyers," as he would say,
Ramakrishna was for all intents and purposes illiterate. Born Gadadhar
Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna had not an iota of interest in schooling beyond
the study of scripture and prayer. Fortunately, that amply met the job
requirements of his post as a priest at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple.
According to numerous firsthand, contemporaneous accounts, Ramakrishna—who
is revered as a saint in much of India and as an avatar by many—spent a
good deal of his short life in samadhi, or an ecstatic state. On a daily
basis, sitting or standing, he was often observed slipping into a
transported state that he described as "God consciousness, " existing with
neither food nor sleep. He died in 1886 at age 50.

Though Ramakrishna spoke in a village idiom, invoking homespun local
parables, word about the "Bengali saint" spread through the chattering
classes of India in the 1870s like a monsoon. Many who flocked to him—and
declared him a divine incarnation—were educated as lawyers, doctors and
engineers and were often the graduates of British-run Christian schools.
His closest and most influential disciple, however, was Vivekananda (born
Narendranath Datta in 1863 to an affluent family), whom he charged with
carrying the message of Vedanta to the world.

Certainly, a smattering of Eastern thought had already traveled to the West
before Vivekananda' s arrival in the U.S. In the 1820s, Ralph Waldo Emerson
had snared a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and found himself enchanted. "I owed
a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita," Emerson wrote in his journal in
1831. The Gita would inform his Transcendentalist essays, in which he wrote
of the "Over-Soul," that part of the individual that is one with the
universe—invoking the Vedantic precepts of the Atman and Brahman. (In a
tidy historical twist, one of Emerson's relatives, Ellen Waldo, became a
devotee of Vivekananda, and faithfully transcribed the dictated text of his
first book, "Raja Yoga," in 1895.)

Emerson's student and fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, would
study Indian thought even more avidly and crafted his own practice—living
as a secular monk, as it were, by Walden Pond. In 1875, Walt Whitman was
given a copy of the Gita as a Christmas gift, and it is heard unmistakably
in "Leaves of Grass" in lines such as "I pass death with the dying and
birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contained between my hat and my
boots." Though the two never met, Vivekananda hailed Whitman as "the
Sannyasin of America."

The Academy, however, was a bit slower to embrace Eastern thought and
literature. It wasn't until after an electrifying lecture by Vivekananda at
Harvard's Graduate Philosophical Club on March 25, 1896, that Eastern
Philosophy departments became a staple at Ivy League colleges.

Fascinated by the erudite and polyglot monk—who could pass an entire day
sitting motionless in silent meditation—the esteemed philosopher William
James roped in many of his colleagues, students and friends to attend
Vivekananda' s Harvard lecture. They were not disappointed. "The theory of
evolution, and prana [energy] and akasa [space] is exactly what your modern
science has," their exotic visitor blithely informed them. Nor were they
unamused. When asked, "Swami, what do you think about food and breathing?"
he replied, "I am for both." The evening ended with the turbaned monk,
"dressed in rich dark red robes," receiving an offer to chair Harvard's new
department. Columbia University promptly made its own bid for
Vivekananda—who declined both, noting his vows of renunciation.

At a dinner party in his honor the following night, William James and
Vivekananda scurried off to a corner by themselves, where they were
observed nattering away until midnight. The next morning, James sent word
inviting him to dinner at his own home that evening. And over the next
week, James would dash into Boston to hear his other lectures.

"He has evidently swept Professor James off his feet," wrote a Harvard
colleague. Indeed, the eminent scholar was deferential to a fault with his
newfound Bengali friend, referring to him as Master. More important, in his
seminal book "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James relied upon
Vivekananda' s "Raja Yoga," a treatise on the discipline of meditation
practice from which he quoted extensively: "All the different steps in yoga
are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state, or
samadhi."

Unbeknownst to him, Vivekananda had hit the piñata of influence: James was
arguably the country's premier intellectual. And it hardly hurt that his
brother was the master novelist Henry James.

Along with the James brothers, a half dozen socially prominent and wealthy
women immeasurably facilitated the visiting monk—who not infrequently
encountered some racism on his U.S. lecture tours. Sara Bull in Cambridge,
Josephine MacLeod in New York City, and Margaret Noble in London would set
up salons and avidly spread the word—and even followed him to India. With
the vast contacts and shrewd networking of these women, his talks in
Cambridge and Manhattan became standing-room- only affairs attended by the
cognoscenti of the day, assorted seekers, and all manner of movers and
shakers—from Gertrude Stein, one of James's students, to John D.
Rockefeller. Blessed with "the power of personality, " as Henry James would
say, Vivekananda was the ideal missionary to pitch the message of Vedanta.

During his lifetime, Vivekananda had another enthusiast in Leo Tolstoy, the
titan of Russian letters. "He is the most brilliant wise man," Tolstoy
gushed after devouring "Raja Yoga" in 1896 in a single sitting and
reporting it to be "most remarkable… [and] I have received much
instruction. The precept of what the true 'I' of a man is, is
excellent…Yesterday, I read Vivekananda the whole day."

Not long before his death, Tolstoy was still waxing about Vivekananda. "It
is doubtful in this age that another man has ever risen above this
selfless, spiritual meditation."

Tolstoy and Vivekananda never met, but the opera diva Emma Calvé and the
great tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt sought him out and became his lifelong
friends.

Bernhardt, in fact, introduced him to the electromagnetic scientist Nikola
Tesla, who was struck by Vivekananda' s knowledge of physics. Both
recognized they had been pondering the same thesis on energy—in different
languages. Vivekananda was keenly interested in the science supporting
meditation, and Tesla would cite the monk's contributions in his pioneering
research of electricity. "Mr. Tesla was charmed to hear about the Vedantic
prana and akasha and the kalpas [time]," Vivekananda wrote to a friend. "He
thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are
reducible to potential energy. I am to go to see him next week to get this
mathematical demonstration. In that case Vedantic cosmology will be placed
on the surest of foundations. " For the monk from Calcutta, there were no
inconsistencies between science, evolution and religious belief. Faith, he
wrote, must be based upon direct experience, not religious platitudes.

More presciently, he warned that India would remain a vanquished,
impoverished land until it "elevated" the status of women. And while he
admonished Westerners for their preoccupation with the material and the
physical, he famously advised a sickly young devotee to toughen himself
with athletics: "You will be nearer to heaven playing football than
studying the Bhagavad Gita."

Vivekananda' s influence bloomed well into the mid-20th century, infusing
the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, George Santayana, Jane Addams,
Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller, among assorted luminaries. And then he
seemed to go into eclipse in the West. American baby boomers—more disposed
to "doing" than "being"—have opted for "hot yoga" classes over meditation.
At some point, perhaps in the 1980s, an ancient, profoundly antimaterialist
teaching had morphed into a fitness cult with expensive accessories.

Moreover, a few American academics have recently taken to scrutinizing
Vivekananda and Ramakrishna through a Freudian prism, offering up
speculative theories of sexual repression. In turn their critics respond
that the two titans from Calcutta are incomprehensible via simplistic
Freudian prisms. To understand the unconditional celibacy of Ramakrishna
and Vivekananda, they argue, requires fluency in 19th-century Bengali and a
decidedly non-Western paradigm.

Supporting this view were Christopher Isherwood and his friend Aldous
Huxley, who wrote the introduction to the 1942 English-language edition of
"The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, " a firsthand account (originally published
in India in 1898) described by Huxley as "the most profound and subtle
utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality." Nikhilananda, Salinger's
guru, did the translation, with assistance from Huxley, Joseph Campbell and
Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the late president.

Huxley and Isherwood were introduced to Vedanta in the Hollywood Hills in
the late 1930s by their countryman, the writer Gerald Heard. In a fitting
counterpart to the New York Center, the Hollywood Vedanta society was
likewise run by a scholarly and charismatic monk, Prabhavananda, who
initiated the English trio of writers.

Like Nikhilananda, Prabhavananda was a magnet for the intelligentsia, and
his lectures often attracted the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Laurence
Olivier, Vivien Leigh and W. Somerset Maugham (and led to his writing "The
Razor's Edge"). Inspired by Isherwood—who briefly lived at the center as a
monk—Greta Garbo asked if she too might move in. Told that a monastery
accepts only men, Garbo became testy. "That doesn't matter!" she thumped.
"I'll put on trousers."

Henry Miller, who made headlines with his torrid and banned "Tropic of
Cancer," visited with Prabhavananda at the Hollywood center, devoured a
small library of Vedanta books and settled down in Big Sur in 1944.
Throughout his memoir, "The Air Conditioned Nightmare," Miller invokes
Vivekananda as the great sage of the modern age and the consummate
messenger to rescue the West from spiritual bankruptcy.

Isherwood's commitment to Vedanta, like Salinger's, was unswerving and
lifelong. Over the next 20 years, he co-translated with Prabhavananda the
Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms" and Shankara's "Crest Jewel of
Discrimination, " and was the author of several books and tracts on
Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.

Huxley, however, in his final years turned over his spiritual quest to his
second wife, Laura, and pharmaceuticals— an unequivocal no-no among
Vedantins. Believing he had found a shortcut to samadhi, the great man had
his wife inject him with LSD on his deathbed. "Aldous was the most
brilliant man I ever met," sighed one monk, "but he lacked discrimination. "

Of all the literary lions captivated by Vivekananda and Vedanta, J.D.
Salinger perhaps made the fullest commitment and sacrifices. In 1952,
Salinger exhorted his British publisher to pick up the English rights of
the Gospel, calling it "the religious book of the century."

At the peak of his fame in 1961, Salinger delivered a warmly inscribed copy
of "Franny and Zooey," which is saturated in Vedantic thought and
references, to his guru Nikhilananda, who by then had formally initiated
him as a devotee. Salinger confided to Nikhilananda that he intentionally
left a trail of Vedantic clues throughout his work from "Franny and Zooey"
onward, hoping to entice readers into deeper study.

The two men often met at the 94th Street center, where they would discuss
the spiritual challenges of renunciation. Salinger would also embark on
"personal retreats" at the Vedanta center in Thousand Island Park in the
St. Lawrence River. There he would stay in the cottage where Vivekananda
had lived and held retreats in the late 1890s.

In January 1963, at the New York celebration of Vivekananda' s 100th
birthday—presided over by the secretary-general of the United Nations, U
Thant—Salinger sat front and center at the banquet table. A few weeks
later, he published "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An
Introduction, " two exquisitely wrought novellas in which the suicide of
Seymour, arguably Salinger's alter ego, is the catalyzing event. "I have
been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day," begins one entry in
Seymour's diary in "Raise High." In Seymour, the narrator declares, "I tend
to regard myself as a fourth-class Karma Yogini, with perhaps a little
Jnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot."

In Salinger's last published work, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in 1965 in "The New
Yorker," Seymour bursts into a manic tribute to Vivekananda. "Raja-Yoga and
Bhakti-Yoga, two heartrending, handy, quite tiny volumes, are perfect for
the pockets of any average, mobile boys our age, by Vivekananda of India."

And then America's beloved novelist stopped publishing. "Name and fame,"
eschewed by Ramakrishna, no longer was the ticket for the increasingly
hermetic Salinger. His ferocious literary ambition was now supplanted by
what appears to have been a diligent, albeit eccentric, spiritual quest for
the next four decades—until his death in 2010.

While Salinger is depicted by many chroniclers and contemporaries as an
ornery crank, four letters, approved by Salinger's estate for use by the
New York Ramakrishna- Vivekananda Center, suggest a man of singular devotion
and renunciation: "I read a bit from the Gita every morning before I get
out of bed," he wrote to Nikhilananda' s successor swami at the New York
center in 1975.

Salinger also conducted a long correspondence with Marie Louise Burke, who
compiled a six-volume history of Vivekananda' s visits to the West. Burke
was as serious a seeker as Salinger and as devoted as a nun: Indeed, she
took the monastic name Sister Gargi. Nevertheless, the nervous, sometimes
paranoid Salinger fretted that she might profit from their letters.
Unfortunately, Burke proved her fidelity to her friend by burning them.

In between his two treks to the West, Vivekananda returned to India and
founded the Ramakrishna Order as both a monastery and a service mission.
Today it is among the largest philanthropic organizations in
India—providing food, medical assistance and disaster relief to millions.
His prescription for his countrymen, however, who had been demoralized by
colonialism, was to borrow a page from the West, he said, and instill
itself with the "can do" spirit of Americans. "Strength! Strength is my
religion!" he exhorted. "Religion is not for the weak!"

India has scheduled a yearlong party to commemorate the 150th anniversary
of Vivekananda' s birth, beginning on January 12, 2013. There will be plenty
of readings of his four texts on yoga as a spiritual discipline. Nine
volumes chronicle his talks, writings and ruminations, from screeds against
child marriage to Milton's "Paradise Lost" to his pet goats and ducks. But
if there were a single takeaway line that boils down his teachings to one
spiritual bullet point, it would be "You are not your body." This might be
bad news for the yoga-mat crowd. The good news for beleaguered souls like
Salinger was Vivekananda' s corollary: "You are not your mind."

In a 1972 letter to the ailing Nikhilananda in the last year of his life,
Salinger seemed to be saying as much.

"I sometimes wish that the East had deigned to concentrate some small part
of its immeasurable genius to the petty art of science of keeping the body
well and fit. Between extreme indifference to the body and the most extreme
and zealous attention to it (Hatha Yoga), there seems to be no useful
middle ground whatever."

Salinger went on to express his gratitude to the man who had guided him out
of his "long dark night." "It may be that reading to a devoted group from
the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is all you do now, as you say, but I imagine
the students who are lucky enough to hear you read from the Gospel would
put the matter rather differently. Meaning that I've forgotten many worthy
and important things in my life, but I have never forgotten the way you
used to read from, and interpret, the Upanishads, up at Thousand Island
Park."

By then, Salinger had not published in some time. Nor would he again. Nor
did he seem to miss it.