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| http://vedanta.org/about-the-vedanta-society/vedanta-temple-hollywood/ |
Swami Swahananda, the senior most Vedanta monk in the United States,
passed away on October 19 at the age of 91. As the head of the Vedanta
Society of Southern California for 36 years, Swahananda was a frequent
visitor and a popular lecturer at the Santa Barbara center on
Ladera Lane.
Swahananda’s influence owed much to his direct lineage to
Ramakrishna, the 19th century mystic regarded as a saint (and avatar)
by many in India. Swahananda’s own teacher was a brother monk to the
formidable Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s foremost disciple, whose
electrifying appearance at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in
1893 made him an overnight sensation. It was Vivekananda, the first
missionary from the East, who introduced yoga and meditation to
the West.
Vivekananda’s clarion call of “work and worship” became the credo of
Swahananda’s life. While renowned for his compassion, scholarship, and
flawless memory, he eschewed ostentatious displays of piety. Indeed, he
was an encyclopedia of jokes, which peppered all his talks. “A man went
to a fortune teller and asked her what was in his future,” began one of
his perennials, which he recounted in a gravelly Bengali accent.
Informed by the fortune teller that “the next ten years of your life
will be difficult,” the man asked fearfully, “Then what?!” “Don’t
worry,” she replied, “you’ll get used to it.” Another chestnut began
with a missionary telling Eskimos that they had to accept Jesus or go
to Hell. “But what about the folks who lived before Jesus?” asked one
Eskimo. Told by the missionary that they are okay because they didn’t
know, the Eskimo exclaimed, “So why are you telling us?”
Swahananda was born Bipadbhanjan Goswami to a religious family in a
small village in the northeastern corner of British India which is
today Bangladesh. His father, who died two months before his birth, had
been a disciple of Sarada Devi, the wife of Ramakrishna; she was known
as Holy Mother. When Swahananda’s father asked her if he should become
a monk, Sarada Devi reportedly told him, “No my child, but from your
family two shall come.” (In addition to Swahananda, a nephew also
joined the Ramakrishna Order.)
Swahananda was keenly interested in spiritual matters and texts as a
young child. At the age of 14, in 1936, he began corresponding with the
head of the Ramakrishna Order. When he was 15, he embarked on a long
and arduous trip to Belur Math (the monastery and headquarters for the
order, outside of Calcutta) to receive initiation from Swami
Vijnanananda, the last, living disciple of Ramakrishna.
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| As a young monk |
Like Vivekananda, Swahananda was a
sannyasin of
unconditional renunciation, an indefatigable missionary, and a scholar
with bottomless curiosity about the world. He earned two Master
degrees, in English Literature and English Language, at the University
of Calcutta in 1945-46. A year later, he joined the Ramakrishna Order.
Sent to their monastery in Madras (Chennai), he became the editor of
Vedanta Kesari,
an English language journal of the Ramakrishna Order, for six years.
After a pilgrimage to practice austerities in the Himalayas, he was
asked to take charge of the Ramakrishna Mission in New Delhi, becoming
the youngest monk in its history to do so.
In 1968, he was dispatched to the United States to serve as the
assistant minister of the San Francisco Vedanta Society, arriving on
the West Coast during the Summer of Love. He was greatly amused, but
entirely unimpressed, by New Age hippies seeking a pharmaceutical
shortcut to enlightenment. Two years later, he was appointed head of
the Vedanta Society of Berkeley, California. When the People’s Park
demonstrations took hold of the city, devotees asked him to leave the
area for his safety. Swahananda, however, was an avid student of
politics and relished being in the thick of it. He had, after all,
survived the partition and independence of India, both of which were
birthed in his native Bengal.
In 1976, he was sent to the Hollywood Vedanta Center to succeed
Prabhavananda, the charismatic monk and author who had initiated
authors Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and established the
center as a mecca for intellectuals and seekers from Igor Stravinsky to
Greta Garbo.
Swahananda was quite different from his predecessor in style and
temperament. He initiated fewer celebrities but in a blaze of what one
might call spiritual manifest destiny, he exponentially expanded the
reach of
Vedanta in
the United States. In all, he established 17 new Vedanta centers in the
states, including ones in Washington D.C., Houston, Phoenix, and
Dallas, and a retreat center at Ridgley, New York where Vivekananda had
spent a good deal of time in 1895. Swahananda also traveled and
lectured in Europe, Latin America, Canada – and even Russia, knowing
that Leo Tolstoy had been an early admirer of Vivekananda. Like the
titan monk he so admired, Swahananda was an insistent champion of women
and, in an unprecedented move, appointed them to manage and run
Vedanta centers.
Swahananda translated the Chandogya Upanishad and Panchadasi of
Vidyaranya from Sanskrit to English, and several other works from
Bengali. His own books include
Hindu Symbology and Other Essays,
Meditation and Other Spiritual Disciplines,
Mother Worship: A Collection of Essays on Mother Worship in India,
Service and Spirituality,
Vedanta and Ramakrishna,
Vedanta and Holy Mother, and
Vedanta and Vivekananda.
In recent years, Swahananda had been beset with poor health
including diabetes and kidney disease. Yet he seemed impervious to the
degradations and torments of illness and quietly performed multiple
acts of devotion and service daily. A week before his death, he
insisted on flying to Austin, Texas, to speak at the opening of a
new center.
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| As an old monk |
One of his jokes began with a minister asking a parishioner why he
was not coming to church of late. “All my friends are dead,” explained
the parishioner, “and I don’t want to remind God that I’m still
around.” That however, was not the case for him. “Whether I die or stay
does not matter to me,” he calmly told this reporter a year ago.
Five days before his passing, he told his physician, also a devotee,
that he would die of a stroke. His doctor protested that such a
calamity would cause great pain and disability. On the contrary,
Swahananda assured his doctor: “Not the kind I’m going to have,” he
said. “I’m going to have a big one. And that will be it.”
And so it was.
A.L.Bardach wrote about Vivekananda in
The Wall Street Journal and
The New York Times.
Nuns and swamis from throughout the country will gather for a
memorial service celebrating Swami Swahananda's life on December 8, 10
a.m. at the Vedanta Temple, 927 Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, 93103. Call
969-2903 or go to
www.vendanta.org for more information.
From : http://www.independent.com/news/2012/nov/14/swami-swahananda-1921-2012/#comments
Wednesday, November 14, 2012 by A.L. Bardach
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