Swami Vivekananda
Photo: 1893 · public domain
Narendranath Datta studied at a British college, read Spencer and Mill, and asked everyone he met whether they had seen God; only Ramakrishna answered — “yes, as I see you”. After his teacher’s death he walked India for years as a mendicant monk and then sailed for America. His address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, opening with “Sisters and brothers of America”, made him famous in a single morning: the West heard Vedanta for the first time from an Indian rather than from missionaries. Then came lectures in the States and England, the Vedanta societies, and the Ramakrishna Mission founded in 1897 with its schools and hospitals. He died at thirty-nine, leaving four books on the yogas — karma, bhakti, raja, jnana — by which he is still read.
He was born in Calcutta on 12 January 1863 at 06:33 local mean time: India had no single time zone until 1906. The hour is the one in the horoscope cast by the family at his birth.