The Bhagavad Gita Comes to Chicago: The Legacy of Swami Vivekananda in the United States

Leaders from ten different religious traditions gathered for the first World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Illinois in September 1893. The seventeen-day conference featured over two hundred speakers and served as the first international effort to promote religious tolerance and interreligious dialogue. Plans for the convention started in 1890 with a group of Chicago Unitarians and Presbyterians led by Jenkin L. Jones and John H. Barrows. Jones, Barrows, and the General Commission of the Parliament of Religions decided to schedule the event in conjunction with the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. They invited religious figures from around the world and established “universal peace” and “religious tolerance” as the Parliament’s themes.

Most of the Parliament’s seven thousand attendees came to Chicago with a genuine interest in promoting peace and tolerance. Some Protestant denominations used the event to demonstrate the righteousness of their theology over other faiths. Others opposed the Parliament altogether. The General Assembly of the US Presbyterian Church discouraged Barrows from organizing the event. Archbishop of Canterbury Edward Benson and Pope Leo XIII criticized the conference and denounced Anglican and Catholic participants, including Baltimore Archbishop Cardinal James Gibbons. Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Abdul Hamid II’s condemnation of the meeting resulted in low Muslim attendance. Despite its detractors, however, the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions started a worldwide trend toward religious tolerance and interreligious dialogue that continues in the twenty-first century. Subsequent parliaments occurred in 1933, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2015. The 2015 conference drew representatives from fifty religions and eighty countries.

Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda was born Narenda Nath Datta in Calcutta, India in 1863. He was the son of a lawyer and studied Western philosophy and history at Presidency College and Presbyterian College in Calcutta. His introduction to famous Hindu monk Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa at Dakshineshwar Kali Temple in 1881 was a turning point in his life. Vivekananda became a disciple and established his own monastic order after Ramakrishna’s death in 1886. The loss of his sister to suicide in 1890 inspired him to abandon monastic life and set out to learn more about his country and its people. Travelling across India and witnessing its extreme poverty transformed Vivekananda and moved him to dedicate his life to serving the poor through charity and spiritual guidance.

Vivekananda saw the World’s Parliament of Religions as an opportunity to bring the teachings of Ramakrishna to a wider audience. He also hoped to secure international aid for India’s impoverished. Maharajah Ajit Singh of Khetri funded the Swami’s voyage to the US. Vivekananda did not have a formal invitation to the Parliament, but Harvard University Professor of Sanskrit John H. Wright recommended him to the General Commission. The Swami’s speech on the opening day of the conference captivated listeners and met with thunderous applause. John Barrows noted the audience’s appreciation for Vivekananda’s informal manner of speaking and recognized him as the most influential orator of the entire conference. The Swami presented as a simple monk, but his orange robe and red turban made him a novelty among Chicagoans. Newspapers across the country spread the story of the Indian monk and his rousing speech. Vivekananda remained in the US giving lectures, teaching classes, and establishing the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston, Massachusetts. His orations promoted peace and interreligious dialogue and addressed the moral detriments of materialism and imperialist missionaries in India. The Swami saw great potential for religious tolerance in the US as a young nation unencumbered by centuries-old religious traditions. He earned money for his lectures and lived in luxury with his American hosts. This divergence from his life as a humble monk caused him spiritual anguish and drew criticism from his peers in India.

Vivekananda returned to India in 1897 and founded the Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta. The mission brought monks and laypeople together to spread the teachings of Ramakrishna and serve the needy. He made a second visit to the US in 1899 but died suddenly of an aneurism in 1902 at age thirty-nine. The Swami’s words on the first day of the World’s Parliament of Religions embody the aspirations for religious tolerance and interreligious dialogue that endure in the twenty-first century: “The sun will shine upon every human being, and there is no place for persecution or intolerance.” The Ramakrishna Mission continues to provide medical aid, education, housing, disaster relief, and spiritual guidance to the poor in India.

The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita takes place at a critical juncture in the Mahabharata epic. The kshatriya (warrior) Arjuna Pandava and his four brothers assemble on the battlefield across from their adversaries and cousins the Kauravas. The Pandavas and Kauravas develop a bitter rivalry over inheritance, kingdom, and pride, but Arjuna has reservations about going to war against his kin. Krishna, the earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, is Arjuna’s charioteer and spiritual guide. He addresses Arjuna’s doubts and eases his mind about the danger and tragedy of the battle ahead. Krishna’s sermon represents the most influential parable in Hindu theology outlining the foundational tenets of dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha.

The Gita begins with Arjuna’s apprehension. He questions the justification of a war requiring him to kill his own relatives when family bonds are one of the frameworks for universal order. Arjuna sees no victory in a battle where the winner is left to grieve the loss of loved ones. He implores Krishna to help him understand his predicament and find the proper course of action. Krishna responds by explaining dharma (duty). He tells Arjuna that a kshatriya’s dharma is to fight without hope for reward or fear of loss. Not fighting would be a betrayal of dharma, or adharma. Adharma would result in negative spiritual ramifications for Arjuna, his family, and the universe. Krishna warns that it is “better to perform one’s own work poorly than to do well the work of someone else.” He goes on to explain karma (the positive or negative remnants of one’s actions) and its effect on samsara (reincarnation/rebirth). Krishna assures Arjuna that the physical body is temporary, the atman (soul) is eternal, his sense of “self” is only an illusion. Arjuna’s true “self” is his atman which is part of the universal divinity. Each atman passes through many physical lives in a long cycle of rebirths before attaining moksha (freedom from reincarnation and oneness with the divine). The accumulated karma of one’s current physical life determines the state of their next life. Krishna explains how all deeds generate either positive or negative karma that “will stick through this life and determine the nature of rebirth.” He convinces Arjuna to do what is best for his karma by following his dharma as a kshatriya. Arjuna takes comfort in knowing that those who will die in the coming battle will be born again.

Vivekananda and the Gita

Vivekananda never published a commentary on the Gita but referred to it often in sermons. His speeches at the World’s Parliament of Religions cited the Gita to promote religious tolerance. The Swami, like Ramakrishna before him, rejected religious dogma and fundamentalism. He approached all scripture as fluid and open to interpretation: “By the Vedas (ancient Hindu texts) no books are meant. They are the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.” Vivekananda recognized all religions as paths to a single divinity. He quoted Krishna: “The present convention is a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita, ‘Whosoever come to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach them. All are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.’” The Swami used Gita-inspired language to explain the inclusive monistic nature of Hinduism: “Sect after sect arose in India and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith. Worshippers apply all the attributes of the universal God to different images.” He also described his vision for worldwide religious tolerance: “God is the inspirer of temples, churches, idols, images, crosses, crescents, and books, but they are only the supports along the path to the universal divine which is everywhere.”

Vivekananda invoked the Gita to educate his non-Hindu audience at the Parliament about the basic tenets of dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha. He told of the Kauravas humiliating their Pandava cousins, stealing their land, and banishing them from their kingdom and the Pandavas accepting this plight as their dharma. The Swami paraphrased Krishna when explaining atman, karma, and samsara to the Parliament: “I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The present is determined by our past actions. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth. The atman will reach moksha when it burst from the bondage of matter, becomes free from death and misery, and merges with the universal consciousness.”

Legacy

Vivekananda and his teachings appeared in periodicals and books for years after his visit to the US. These publications sometimes presented the Swami in a supernatural or Orientalist context. “Mental healers” Leander E. Whipple and John E. McLean’s Metaphysical Magazine, “devoted to occult, philosophic, and scientific research,” included Vivekananda’s “Metaphysics in India: Reincarnation” in March 1895 alongside articles about telekinesis and levitation. The August 11, 1897, edition of the Arizona Weekly Journal featured a story about the Swami at an “international beauty show” in Chicago. According to the article, the Swami spoke Bengali to a woman from Georgia dressed as an “East Indian princess.” The startled and confused fashion model called Vivekananda “a stuck-up northern niggah!” The Columbia Sun Herald contained a “New Books” review of Henry J. van Haagen’s Vedanta Philosophy: Lectures by the Swami Vivekananda on Raja Yoga and Other Subjects in November 1897. The reviewer claimed the book “deserves the attention it is receiving” and praised it for clarifying “all the difficulties that Hinduism presents to the Western mind.” The Philadelphia Inquirer featured an article entitled “Two Women Become Hindoo Monks” in August 1898. The report erroneously credited L.V. Comer of Chicago as “the first of her race” to become a Hindu monk and asserted that the ceremony “constitutes her as a god.” Swami Abhayananda, originally Marie Louise of France, ordained Comer. Abhayananda studied under Vivekananda during his time in New York City. The newspaper quoted her: “Our faith is the synthesis of all religions, moralities, and philosophies. Notice our alter pictures Christ, saints of the Episcopal and Catholic churches, dark hued prophets of the Orient, and the Buddha.” She explained samsara: “You may be a man in one incarnation and a woman in the next. The strong, stalwart, earnest women of today, like Susan B. Anthony and Julia W. Howe, will be men and leaders of men in their next stage of development.” The Patriot of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania paid homage to Vivekananda when he died in 1902. The article commemorated him as a person “who achieved a more than ordinary reputation in India, whom the multitudinous neo-mystics and devotees of strange faiths were delighted to honor, who spoke of the universal soul and interpreted India’s ancient creed to the nations of the West.” Oddly, the feature also suggested the Swami misappropriated donation funds.

Indian monks of the Ramakrishna Order built upon Vivekananda’s work in the US. Swami Prabhavananda arrived in California in 1923. He established the Vedanta Society of Southern California and promoted religious tolerance and interreligious dialogue along the west coast until his death in 1976. Prabhavananda connected the Hindu practice of japa (repeating mantras) with personal prayer in Christianity. He believed Christians could experience the Hindu concept of bhakti yoga (divine love) by repeating prayers, Biblical passages, or the name “Jesus Christ.” English philosopher Aldous Huxley was a pupil of Prabhavananda. Huxley had been a critic of religious persecution and corrupt clerics since the 1920s. He blamed human arrogance for anthropomorphizing God and chastised most organized religions as “devices of idolatry and superstition.” Huxley took an interest in Eastern spirituality, monism, and meditation in the 1930s and incorporated Prabhavananda and Vivekananda’s teachings into his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy. He asserted that “Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with one divine Reality.” The Perennial Philosophy refers to positive karma as human action that moves people toward a realization of the connection between themselves and the divine. Negative karma obscures this truth with “the intensification of separateness.” Huxley practiced and endorsed meditation for clearing the mind of distraction and discovering the universal divine. The Perennial Philosophy states that “[f]or the enlightened liberated person, samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, and the phenomenal and real are essentially one.” Like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Prabhavananda, Huxley believed spirituality and practice should suit the perspective and circumstance of the individual: “For each who achieves unity within their own organism and union with the divine there is an end of suffering.”

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