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 differentlanguages. 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 anti-materialist teaching had morphed into a fitness cult with expensive accessories.
Moreover, a few American academics have recently taken to scrutinizingVivekananda 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 "TheRazor'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 invoke 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 littleJnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot."
In Salinger's last published work, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in 1965 in "The NewYorker," 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 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.
Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal
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