Typically, scholars have argued that Vivekananda simply gave a modern ethical twist to the eight-century Adi Shankaracharya’s philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Recently, however, Swami Medhananda, an academic philosopher as well as a monk of the Ramakrishna Order, has argued against this interpretation. In his book, Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, Medhananda has demonstrated the extent to which Vivekananda’s philosophy was, in fact, based on the teachings of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna. And so, Medhananda argues that while Vivekananda initially leaned towards the world-rejecting outlook of traditional Advaita Vedanta, he eventually came to embrace an “Integral Advaita”, a non-sectarian, life-affirming Advaita philosophy championed by Ramakrishna. This is the same Integral Advaita which would later form the philosophical beliefs of the Indian mystic and poet, Sri Aurobindo. Later in this video, we will discuss the ways in which Sri Ramakrishna taught many spiritual secrets to Swami Vivekananda in the form of “Vijnana Vedanta”.
Medhananda provides four points to explain the Integral Advaita philosophy, and how that differs from the traditional Advaita Vedanta of Adi Shankaracharya. In contrast to Shankaracharya, Vivekananda and Ramakrishna held that:
(1)
The impersonal Brahman and the personal Shakti (represented by the goddess Kali) are equally real aspects of one and the same Infinite Divine Reality;
(2)
The universe is a real manifestation of Shakti;
(3)
Since we are all living manifestations of God, we should make Vedanta practical by loving and serving human beings in a spirit of worship;
(4)
Each of the four Yogas – Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Gyana Yoga, and Raja Yoga – is a direct and independent path to salvation.
To make his argument, Medhananda traces the intellectual development of Vivekananda over his lifetime. In his teenage years, Vivekananda was, in his own words, “swept up in the surging tide of agnosticism and materialism”, and became sceptical of the very existence of God. “It seemed for a time as if I must give up all hope of religion”, he remarked in hindsight.
But all of this changed in the early 1880s, when he met his guru, Sri Ramakrishna. In an 1896 lecture, Vivekananda remarked about his first impressions of his guru as follows:
“For the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw God, that religion was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than we can sense the world.”
Ramakrishna trained and guided Vivekananda, both spiritually and intellectually, from 1882 to 1886. But what about the period of agnosticism before meeting his guru? How did the young Naren’s spiritual beliefs develop in the absence of his future guru?
#vivekananda #vedanta #advaita
Script: Anmol
Edit: Harsh
VO: Karan Nambiar
Original Score: https://youtu.be/MKgfFUx_V4Q
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