Vivekananda's Letters: Serve the Lowest, Not Just Ritual

On a weeknight at the Vedanta Society of Southern California, Swami Mahayogananda opens with the same prayer that begins every session of this study: "May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we gain in strength together." Then he turns to page 391 of the new edition of the Letters of Swami Vivekananda, and the room settles into the slow, close attention of people who have come a long way through four volumes of correspondence. The letter he reads was written from Chicago, from the Hale residence, to Vivekananda's brother disciples at the main monastery in India. It is long, it is pointed, and by the speaker's account it "came down very hard" on monks who were giving too much of their energy to worship, puja, and ritual while the suffering in India went on. Serve the hungry, serve the suffering. That, in short, is the command underneath the whole letter.

Why does this new edition of Vivekananda's letters matter?

Mahayogananda is clear about what makes this edition different from the older collection most readers know. The letters now run in strict chronological order, and as far as the material to date allows, they have been restored to their original form. "There's a lot of material edited out of the letters that appear in the complete works," he tells the group, sometimes because it concerned someone still alive, and sometimes because an editor judged it uninteresting. For a student of Vivekananda's philosophy, a cut like that might be harmless. But for students who want to know where Swamiji was and what he was doing, he says, "every detail is important." The result, in his words, is "a tremendous trove of new information."

That practical note carries its own small lesson. The speaker mentions that the paper volumes are expensive in America because they ship from India, and that the ebook, at roughly $10, was "money well spent." He also points out the feature that matters most to a study group: you can search an ebook for a passage. For anyone trying to follow a letter line by line, that is no small convenience. It is also a reminder that the way you hold a text changes how you read it.

What does "As Thakur loved you" really ask of us?

The emotional center of the letter is a sentence the speaker returns to more than once. Reading it aloud, he gives it the weight of a command: "As Thakur loved you, as I love you, you love the world like that." He pauses on its power, and he draws a parallel to the Christian scriptures, where Jesus tells his disciples to love one another as he has loved them. Vivekananda, in this reading, "always comes back to love."

The word "Thakur" needs a moment of explanation, and Mahayogananda gives it one. It is the affectionate yet respectful name the disciples used for Sri Ramakrishna. The word can also mean a deity in a temple, or a master, and it carries several shades of meaning at once. In the Gospel, the speaker notes, the disciples most often called him Mahashaya, a term of respect that is often rendered as "sir" but, in his view, loses something in that translation, because "sir" carries a formality that the original does not. Ramakrishna, he says, could not bear being addressed as father, Baba, Karta, master, or Guru, but he accepted Thakur. The detail is small, yet it shows how carefully the disciples and their teacher negotiated affection and reverence.

Vivekananda's instruction to the brothers in India is concrete. He asks them to gather the people around them, to find Gunandhi (the monk Achyutananda Saraswati, of another order, with whom Vivekananda had traveled during his wandering years), and to bring him into the work of uplifting India. He asks them to find Gupta, Swami Sadananda, Vivekananda's first monk disciple, and to call him "in my name." The love in the letter is not abstract. It is a request for people to be physically called, invited, and kept close.

What do the monks' vows say about renunciation?

The letter gives monks a set of rules, and Mahayogananda reads them slowly. The first concerns renunciation. He quotes the Sanskrit trio that the letter names: bhakti, bhukti, mukti, meaning devotion, enjoyment, and liberation. "We are sannyasins. Bhakti, bhukti, mukti, everything has been renounced." Of the three, he explains, a sannyasin naturally gives up the pursuit of enjoyment. But Vivekananda goes further. He suggests that even seeking devotion, or seeking liberation, must be set aside. "It's a very high call," the speaker says. "Swamiji sets the bar very high for his ideal of monasticism."

"To do good to the world, to do good to everyone down to the lowest chandala is our vow. Let whatever comes, liberation or hell." (Vivekananda, in a letter from Chicago, as read by Swami Mahayogananda)

This is the passage that gives the talk its sharpest turn. The speaker stops and asks the room who the chandalas are in America today. Someone answers, "Minorities," and he takes the idea further. A chandala is someone you would not want to touch. And then he names the people every visitor to an American city sees: "The unhoused, the people living on the streets right outside." He asks, plainly, "Who is it that we don't want to touch? ... I don't want to touch them." Vivekananda's vow, read through that lens, is not a sentiment about distant poverty. It is an instruction about the person sleeping on the sidewalk on your own route to work. Do good to them. Let whatever comes.

There is a reason that reading lands. Vivekananda's letter, as the speaker reads it, sets service against the comfortable habits of religious life, including the habit of concentrating on the bell and the altar while a crisis unfolds beyond the temple walls. The vow is demanding because it refuses to let spiritual practice serve as an alibi for avoiding the people nearest to us.

How should we understand Ramakrishna as an incarnation?

Mahayogananda is careful about a point that is easy to get wrong. Vivekananda, he says, considered his guru to be an avatara, a manifestation of God in human form, like Buddha, Rama, Krishna, or Jesus. This is clear, he argues, from the letters and from the hymns Vivekananda wrote to Sri Ramakrishna. Yet Vivekananda was equally clear that this belief was not to be preached or pressed on others. "Let people accept him as they see him." The speaker contrasts this with a form of Christianity of that era, and to some extent of today, in which one must believe that Jesus is God or face hell forever. The room laughs at that line, and the speaker's point is serious: Vivekananda leaves each listener room to see Ramakrishna "in your own light, according to your own understanding."

This is a useful discipline for any contemplative reader. It asks us to hold a strong conviction about a teacher without making that conviction a test of other people's worth. Vivekananda, in this letter, practices what the speaker describes as an openness that does not require agreement before it offers love.

What does the teaching "God is your own true nature" mean in practice?

Later in the session, the reading reaches a line that the speaker frames as a direct instruction: "God is your own true nature. Realize it." The phrase compresses the logic of the whole talk. If the divine is not somewhere else but is one's own deepest nature, then the work is not to acquire holiness from outside, through ritual alone, but to recognize it, and to let that recognition show up in how one treats the unhoused neighbor, the minority, or the stranger one would rather not touch. The letters, read this way, are not an archive of old debates. They are a set of working instructions for a living practice.

The speaker's commitment to the material is itself a kind of teaching. He has no interest in reducing the letters to a fact sheet. He reads the details of Vivekananda's movements, his friends, and his disagreements as parts of a single human life, and he treats each detail as worth knowing because it is part of how a teacher actually lived.

Where to go from here

If this session has you wanting to read the letter itself, start with the passage Mahayogananda reads from page 391 of volume one of the new edition, where Vivekananda writes from Chicago to the brothers at the monastery. Read it slowly, and read the vow aloud. Then ask the question the speaker asks: who, in your own city, are the people you would rather not touch? Vivekananda did not write these lines as literature. He wrote them as instructions. The new four-volume edition, arranged chronologically and restored as far as possible, makes it easier than ever to follow him from one letter to the next and to see how his teaching on love, renunciation, and service developed in the real circumstances of his life.