Authors Like Swami Vivekananda

Patanjali

Ancient Indian · Yoga Sutras

Patanjali is the name attached to the Yoga Sutras, 196 short aphorisms on meditation and the stilling of the mind. Almost nothing is known of him; several ancient authors bore the name, and scholars date the text anywhere from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE. Vivekananda was among those who revived interest in it in the late nineteenth century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American · Nature (1836), Essays (1841), Representative Men (1850)

Emerson (1803–1882) was the central figure of New England Transcendentalism. He read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in translation, and his idea of the Over-Soul, a single spirit present in every person, owes a debt to them. His poem “Brahma” (1857) puzzled readers by speaking in the voice of the Hindu godhead.

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Rabindranath Tagore

Indian (Bengali) · Gitanjali (1910; English 1912), Sadhana (1913)

Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta two years before Vivekananda. He was a poet, novelist, composer and educator who in 1901 founded a school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati University. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1919 he gave up his knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

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Sister Nivedita

Irish · Kali the Mother (1900), The Web of Indian Life (1904), The Master as I Saw Him (1910)

Margaret Elizabeth Noble (1867–1911) was born in Dungannon, County Tyrone, and was running her own school in London when she met Vivekananda in November 1895. He gave her the name Nivedita, and she followed him to India, where in 1898 she opened a school for girls in Bagbazar, Calcutta, and later supported the movement for Indian independence. She died in Darjeeling at 43.

Sri Aurobindo

Indian · The Life Divine (serialised 1914–1921), The Synthesis of Yoga, Savitri

Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) was born in Calcutta and educated in England, at St Paul’s School and King’s College, Cambridge, before returning to become a leader of the nationalist movement. Arrested in 1908 in the Alipore bomb case, he spent a year in jail before being acquitted, then left politics, settled in Pondicherry in 1910 and developed what he called Integral Yoga.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Indian · Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Yogananda (1893–1952) was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, into a Bengali family. He sailed to the United States in 1920 as India’s delegate to an International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, founded the Self-Realization Fellowship the same year and spent most of the rest of his life in America. Autobiography of a Yogi was published in 1946.

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Christopher Isherwood

English-American · Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965), My Guru and His Disciple (1980)

Isherwood (1904–1986) emigrated to the United States in 1939, settled in southern California and became a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. With Prabhavananda he translated the Bhagavad Gita (1944). Ramakrishna and His Disciples includes Vivekananda’s story.

Aldous Huxley

English · Brave New World (1932), The Perennial Philosophy (1945), The Doors of Perception (1954)

Huxley (1894–1963) moved to southern California in 1937 and from 1939 until his death was closely involved with the Vedanta Society of Southern California and Swami Prabhavananda, who initiated him. The Perennial Philosophy is an anthology of passages from Eastern and Western mystics with commentary, arguing that the same truths appear across the world’s religions.

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Jiddu Krishnamurti

Indian · The First and Last Freedom (1954), Freedom from the Known (1969)

Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was taken up as a boy by the Theosophical Society, which raised him to be a coming World Teacher. In 1929 he dissolved the Order of the Star built around him, declaring that “truth is a pathless land”, and spent the rest of his life giving talks. A 1991 memoir by Radha Rajagopal Sloss claimed he had a secret affair of about 25 years with her mother, Rosalind; he never confirmed it.

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Alan Watts

English-American · The Way of Zen (1957), The Book (1966)

Watts (1915–1973) was born in Chislehurst, Kent, moved to the United States in 1938 and became the best-known popular interpreter of Asian philosophy for Western audiences. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are is his short account of the Vedanta idea that the self and the universe are one.

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