Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta, 1863–1902).
The first Hindu missionary to the West and a well-known
follower of Bengali mystic Ramakrishna.
Narendranath had a solid education and had planned to become
a lawyer; when he first met Ramakrishna, he was cautious and distrustful, but
over the course of a year, he was changed.
After Ramakrishna's death, he spent many years wandering
around India, eventually realizing that religious life needed to serve both
India's material and spiritual problems.
Vivekananda is most known for his speech to the First World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, in which he introduced Hinduism—in
its logical, Vedantic form—to his Western audience for the first time.
He spoke throughout America and England for the following
four years before returning to India to great acclaim.
He spent the remainder of his brief life promoting the
Ramakrishna Mission, a religious organization dedicated to both social and
religious improvement.
For more information, see Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 1965; Swami Vivekananda's Swami Vivekananda's Complete Works, 1970; and George M. Williams' "Swami Vivekananda" and "The Ramakrishna Movement: A Study in Religious Change," both in Robert D. Baird's Religion in Modern India, 1998.
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