Swami Vivekananda : Leader of Sacred Nationhood

Swami Vivekananda

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

LEADER OF SACRED NATIONHOOD

Swami Vivekananda’s

150th Birth Anniversary Publication

SHITANGSHU KUMAR CHAKRABORTY

Mentor Emeritus

Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Values

(PUBLICATION DEPARTMENT)

5 DEHI ENTALLY ROAD • KOLKATA 700 014

Published by

The Adhyaksha

Advaita Ashrama

P.O. Mayavati, Dt. Champawat

Uttarakhand - 262524, India

from its Publication Department, Kolkata

Email: mail@advaitaashrama.org

Website: www.advaitaashrama.org

© All Rights Reserved

First Print Edition, June 2012

First Ebook Edition, September 2016

ISBN 978-81-7505-363-2 (Hardbound)

ISBN 978-81-7505-841-5 (epub)

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyrights

Publisher’s note

Author’s note

Dedication

Swami Vivekananda:

The Master Architect of a Glorious Institution

The Supra-Secular

Metaphysical Keynote: The First Principle

Swami Vivekananda’s Insights into Leadership Qualities

Vivekananda’s Style of Institution-Making

Vivekananda’s own Leadership Modelling

Towards Classical Love and Discipline

Swami Vivekananda:

The Galvanizing Colossus

Saving a Culture Nailed to the Cross

Back to Rajarshi

The Thousand-Petalled Lotus

The Evangel of Rootedness

Crusader against Imitation

Slayer of Narcissism

Charismatic Servant Leader

Prophet of Sustainability and Ethicality

The Machine Builder

Education of the Heart

Three Mandates

Swami Vivekananda:

Leadership Philosophy for Nationhood

Facing the Problem

Swami Vivekananda Begins to Galvanize

A Riddle of Vastness

Gross National Character

Progress and Renunciation

Back to the National Scene

The Moot Point

Atonement

Swami Vivekananda:

From Bones to Corals

Gongs of the Bell

Karma—The Baseline

Poetry—The Peakline

Death—The Skyline

Farewell to Quotients

Swami Vivekananda:

A Pilot, a Compass, and the Stormy Sea

Overview of the Stormy Sea of Unethicality

Towards Vedantic Ethics

Intellectual or Cognitive Ethics versus Consciousness Ethics

The Duty of the Time

Swami Vivekananda:

Flashes of Omniscience

Bharatvarsha and the World

Caste (Varna)

Civilization, Culture

Competition, Progress

Consciousness

Death

Education, Character, Purity

Ego, Humility

Emotions/Feelings Versus Intellect/Reason

Ethics, Morals

Greed, Money, Commerce

History, Society

Karma, Rebirth, Ethicality

Leading, Following, Discipline

Marriage, Mother, Woman

Politics

Rishis

Science, Technology

Self-SELF, Grabbing-GIVING

Slavery, Freedom, Rituals

Spirituality, Yoga

Within, Without

Swami Vivekananda:

Inspirer of Some Poems

Ode to Mayavati

Smash thy Cage—and Fly

Silence—My Virgin Mother

Ode To Gratitude

Appendix

East, West and Swami Vivekananda

Suggested Additional Reading

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The year 2013 is about to witness the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, and the celebration is going to be all over India. Vivekananda had a message to deliver to humankind. That message was of the Divinity of the Soul and the concomitant principles of the Unity of existence and Solidarity of the human race. His voice was the voice reiterating the age-old spiritual principles of Advaita Vedanta at a time when the human race had sunk down to the appalling depths of materialism and sensuality. And the emancipation of the human race from this situation is possible, according to him, only by the indispensable virtue of renunciation.

Next year it will be 120 years since Vivekananda came upon the world stage. It will be high time for the world, and especially India, to take stock of the situation. In our humble attempt to fulfil this need, we present to our readers, with immense joy, the present book Swami Vivekananda—Leader of Sacred Nationhood authored by Prof. S. K. Chakraborty.

The author goes into some of the core issues faced by India today. It is a sincere attempt at examining the present situation in the country on some of the major fronts. The passionate presentation of these issues makes us see and feel the gross departure of our country’s populace from the ideals Swami Vivekananda placed before us for the making of an ideal society. In the wake of Swami Vivekananda, the country had seen the emergence of great spiritual personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi and others. All these great figures together were the country’s bulwark against the dangerous ideology of materialism and sensuality. It is needless to state that in spite of this, the damaging ideology of materialism has gripped the nation’s soul and infused her with thorough profaneness in every sphere of life. Swami Vivekananda, as a leader of sacred nationhood, is the torch to be lighted in these dismal and dark days that see the erosion of spiritual values in our society, especially among the younger generation.

With the sincere hope that this book will enkindle a serious enquiry in all sensitive minds, we place it before our readers. We are grateful to the author for penning this thought-provoking work.

The footnotes in general have been provided by the author. A few have been added by the Editor; in such instances it has been stated that the note has been supplied by the Editor.

—PUBLISHER

14 April 2012

AUTHOR’S NOTE

India today as a nation is devoid of any sense of purpose. It is pathetic for all those, across the world, who understand what Bharatvarsha symbolizes. The founder Rishis of Bharatiya culture had sung to the world, all-inclusively, shrinvantu vishve amritasya putrah, [1] yatra vishvam bhavati ek nidam, [2] and the like. Our boys like Nachiketas had emphatically asserted, na vittena tarpaniyo manushya, [3] and our women like Maitreyi had eloquently argued, yena aham na amrita syam kim aham tena kuryam? [4] Yet we are a terribly misinformed, un-informed and misguided mass of humanity today. Nothing can be deadlier for our nation than the erroneous rejection, by time-serving policy makers and intellectuals, of the timeless gifts from the likes of Vivekananda in the previous century. They had recovered and reconstructed the lost compass for the national ship that is Bharatvarsha. It seems present-day India is bent upon casting this compass into oblivion again. She today is weak—both within and without. Her leaders in all walks of public life don’t seem, even for a moment, to realize what a magnificent responsibility this nation has to the whole world. Like animals we are being made to only look down to the ground. We have forgotten to look upwards, as human beings, to the sky. But because our founding fathers did so much of the latter for several millennia that we still live as a culture. Hence a passionate tryst with Swami Vivekananda is the leitmotif of this small book.

Sri Ramakrishna used to repeat these two lessons quite often:

• Once an ant went to a hill of sugar. One grain filled its stomach. Taking another grain in its mouth it started homeward. On its way it thought, Next time I shall carry home the whole hill. [5]

• Can a one-seer pot hold ten seers of milk? [6]

Wading through the nandan kanan (celestial garden) of Vivekananda literature the author was constantly realizing the compelling truth in the two similes uttered by the guru of Swami Vivekananda. Blossoms most delicate and fragrant we saw. Tall, erect, strong trees too we discovered. The endless expanse of Swamiji’s world of noble yet brave thoughts was so enthralling as to leave us groping for what to choose and what to leave out. So this small book is a humble offering of the finite to the Infinite, at the momentous time of his 150th birth anniversary.

The pages below are characterized by an attempt to bring Swamiji to the centre of the stage where the national and international dramas are being acted out. This is not to claim comprehensiveness by any measure. However, being a teacher for five decades, we have been having a ring-side, close-up view of the mishaps crashing upon the socio-cultural body of Bharatvarsha. Swamiji was, in his own words, a fighter with girded loins. The events and trends he had seen to be on the verge of devastating his dear Motherland at its core, have in many ways been magnified today by several degrees. We have deeply felt for long that Swamiji’s body-less soul is desperately looking forward to at least a few from our generation who would speak out with the same spirit and fire that had sparked off from his agonized heart. A brahmajnani (knower of Brahman) shedding tears of blood for his culture, his nation—what a marvel!

Swamiji had one small advantage though—if advantage it can be called. He was speaking with the British colonial rule as the backdrop. However, in this era of independence, whom to fight against? It turns out to be an unfortunate case of a house divided against itself. The task for an author like us becomes difficult and delicate. Yet a long spell of immersion in the ocean of Vivekanandian honesty and forthrightness seems to have stamped upon us an impress of these qualities—to a small degree at least. Hence, several thorny issues afflicting India today have been analyzed below with frank courage. For, our society is moving farther and farther away from Truth. The corpus of Vivekanandian ideas has been employed as a sort of microscope, telescope and X-ray, all put together, to expose many of the cancerous sores in our nation and society. Moreover, everything in this book is based on personal observation, nothing on hearsay. Swamiji never spoke to please anybody. This author might also have ended up much like that, the seepage effect of Swamiji’s word-power being irresistible.

We may end by expressing our personal gratitude to Swami Vivekananda on two counts. First, it was primarily through his writings that the author was suddenly awakened (in the early 1970’s) to the unexplored horizons of Bharatvarsha’s sadhana for the sake of management in general. No blueprint, nor any structure of idioms and concepts for bridging the two worlds was available. Yet Swamiji seems to have secretly empowered us to undertake a blind-folded journey on a pathless terrain. His writings planted the roots of our conviction that such an enduring civilization must necessarily have been well-managed, backed by excellent leadership. Somehow it began to take shape, the path became identifiable. The first Indian Ethos course for MBA students was offered at IIM Calcutta in 1983. Swamiji was the invisible teacher, the voice without form, speaking through the author.

The second count, incidental to the first one, was the establishment of an exclusive Management Centre for Human Values in the IIMC campus. It is the first and only one of its kind in India. It was inaugurated in 1995, with Board approval. Corporate houses from India and delegates from abroad began to regularly attend the residential programmes conducted there. The entire Centre was created from munificent donations begged by the author from forty five large and small corporate entities and a few great-souled individuals, spread all over India. This summary of facts is for the record for posterity. Swamiji was surely the prime mover behind all this. Thank you very much, Swamiji. And pranams. And Glory unto the Lord too for granting us a life-span long enough to witness Swamiji’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations.

Thanks are due to Mahua Das and Rani Mahato of the Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Values for their patient labours in computerizing our messy handwritten manuscript. My unstinted gratitude to Advaita Ashrama, its President and Editor, for accepting this rather straight-speaking work with openness and conviction.

—S. K. Chakraborty

Kolkata

12 January 2012

Notes and References

[←1] Hear, ye children of immortality, even they who occupy celestial regions.

[←2] The whole world is a single nest.

[←3] Material wealth does not give real satisfaction.

[←4] What shall I do with that which does not bestow on me Immortality?

[←5] Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Chennai, Vol. 1, p. 102.

[←6] Ibid., p. 257.

This book is dedicated to

Revered Srimat Swami Gambhiranandaji Maharaj

as a humble offering to his sacred memory

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA:

THE MASTER ARCHITECT OF A GLORIOUS INSTITUTION

The Supra-Secular

All the four luminaries of the golden quartet of pre-independence India—Rabindranath Tagore (1861), Swami Vivekananda (1863), Mohandas Gandhi (1869) and Sri Aurobindo (1872)—had created sacred institutions with their respective, distinctive stamps. These were all original creations, not life-less clones of Oxfords or Harvards. In all probability none of them had forgotten our own Takshashilas and Nalandas. Love for Bharatvarsha was of course the common foundation in the midst of creative variety in their attempts. Yet they too were international right from inception.

A major question that has often confronted us is this: Why does the institution founded by Swami Vivekananda continue to thrive and expand with dignity and trust, even today, while those built or initiated by the other three equally venerable personalities are either practically nonexistent, or happen to be poor reflections of their original selves? What is the key to the blossoming and endurance of the two-pronged institution launched by Swami Vivekananda? Our answer is: Inspired, mandated and empowered by Sri Ramakrishna at the Cossipore garden-house in 1886, (1) the 23-year old Narendranath Datta (later Swami Vivekananda) had vowed to ensure the nurturance of successive generations of brahmacharis and sannyasins. They were to be inducted with due care, and then put through a long, rigorous process of spiritual and secular learning. This class of sacred soldiers, groomed to be in touch with the realm of the supra-rational, the transcendent, has been working in the heart of society, unlike the Buddhist sanghas. All this was absent in the other three loftily pitched institutions. They were not as emphatic and determined about the ultimate goal of the members of their organizations, namely, atmano mokshartha (for one’s own liberation), as Swami Vivekananda was. This was the supra-secular keystone of Swami Vivekananda’s enduring institution.

About two decades ago we were speaking to a group of senior IAS officials on Indian culture at the Mussoorie IAS Academy. At one stage a sudden insolent voice questioned us, Who are your authorities? Say, Radhakrishnan and Vivekananda, we responded. Rudely again the questioner shot back, Vivekananda is not an authority. We were stunned! Nearly five years later more or less the same topic was being presented to another group of IAS officers at the Management Centre for Human Values, IIM Calcutta. During the morning tea-interval one of the group members brusquely asked us, What has Vivekananda done in and for India? Would you talk about him in North East India? As before, we stood aghast again, fumbling for words to respond. These two snapshots give us a part of the unholy picture of secular, educated India today. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend! But the sacred has to cleave its way through the adamantine walls of phoney secularism.

Romain Rolland had conferred the honour of hero upon Vivekananda while concluding the chapter on The Ramakrishna Mission in his profound biography on Swami Vivekananda. (2) V.K.R.V. Rao, an eminent Indian economist and educator, had concluded after referring to a fiery letter written by Vivekananda from America to a disciple in India:

These forceful words only indicate the importance he attached to values and how they should dominate every walk of life, …and values also included a deliberate attempt to practise them in one’s personal life . (3)

This chapter therefore tries to inform our contemporary organization builders, employees and administrators that a careful study of the leadership-cum institution building facet of Vivekananda’s multi-dimensional personality should be enormously rewarding. It would be a signal folly to brush aside this contribution of his under the false stereotype that after all he has been only a world-shunning monk who had created a spiritual outfit for otherworldly pursuits! Nothing can be farther from truth. Let us see how he married the metaphysical with the empirical, the spiritual with the social, the sacred with the secular (hence sacro-secular).

Metaphysical Keynote: The First Principle

The double-winged Ramakrishna Math and Mission, as it evolved during the period 1886-97, is an institutional embodiment of Sri Ramakrishna’s mandate to Narendranath (later Swami Vivekananda), "Serve Shiva in jiva." (4) The inherent Shiva is sacred, the apparent jiva secular (i.e. material, mundane). Out of this seed grew the trunk: atmano mokshartham, jagat hitaya cha, For one’s own liberation, and for the good of the world. This was Vivekananda’s re-articulation of the mission for the missionaries of the sacro-secular adventure. An attempt is being made below to glean a range of ideas and principles, planted by Swami Vivekananda in this sacro-secular institution, for consideration by all modern secularistic leaders. It may be worthwhile to remember that at the time when the Ramakrishna Math and Mission was constituted and its foundations laid, no formal literature on leadership, organization development, institution-building and the like existed. Yet today the Ramakrishna Math and Mission is an international institution, with 172 centres (as in 2010-2011), reaping a rich harvest of trust, gratitude and credibility for its sacro-secular contributions to humanity.

Pursuit of sacro-secular fusion is the very first lesson modern institution-builders—at least in India—may want to learn from Vivekananda’s conceptual framework. The sacred, the pure, the enduring is always rooted in the trans-empirical, the trans-mundane, the trans-rational, the metaphysical. This hill-top positioning at higher altitude helps the mind to gather a truer perspective, a more mature sense of proportion, and a wider vision. If thereafter it descends on the empirical terrain, it is more likely that our mind can tackle and negotiate ground-level problems with greater sagacity and sense of priority, followed by genuine effectiveness. The secular is then better manageable in the clear inner light of the sacred.

Social scientists on the whole appear to commit the mistake of trying to understand Indian culture and ethos by either denying it altogether, or denigrating its over-arching metaphysical backdrop. Indian society and tradition constitute a unique and thorough translation of the ultimate metaphysical goal-means system into a ceaseless song of daily life. Without recognizing this deep-structure, hasty examination of India’s surface traditions usually leads to ineffectual and erroneous conclusions about the sense of time, authority, hierarchy, change, discipline, women’s role and a host of other things. An example of this is a recent volume published from Holland in 1989. It tries to interpret Indian culture and Indian management as a couple. (5) It is a laborious study based on fieldwork in India. But it skims only the surface patterns of Indian culture—the references throughout the book produce this impression. Yet in our view no work which wishes to assess Indian culture and relate it to secular affairs can afford to bypass the Rabindranaths, Vivekanandas and Aurobindos. Even Gandhiji’s deeper foundations have not drawn the researchers’ attention. Yet all these archetypal Indians, to suggest a phrase, have been metaphysically empirical—the Indian keynote.

Thus, one of the chief errors of the contemporary leadership outlook is to consider the secular and the sacred as contradictory forces. It is caught in an either-or trap. By contrast, in authentic tune with the Indian genius, Swami Vivekananda had asked us to be seized by and be conscious of the gentle dew-drop-like charm of the practical spirituality of India. (6) To prevent the secular from turning vulgar, the use of the purifying reagent of the sacred or the spiritual is essential. The drama of Chandashoka being metamorphosed into Dharmashoka is amongst the most cherished Indian sagas of this sacro-secular priority (much like H2O in chemistry). The Indian Empire of the Mind had then attained its apogee as a consequence of this transmutation. Similarly, earlier in the Ramayana we have the significant symbolic transformation