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This chapter begins with a short reappraisal of the life of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa and his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda and describes the social and spiritual world of Ramakrishna. It argues that by putting action at least on the same footing as ascetic contemplation, Vivekananda seems to have not only departed from the negative work ethic of his Master but also implicitly suggested a fresh look at traditional (Hindu) value systems. It also investigates the place of Vivekananda within Hindu revivalist thought. This chapter examines afresh certain questions that remain crucial to our understanding of the interplay between strategies within Hindu revivalism and nationalist thought and discourse.

Swami Vivekananda sought to establish a new Hindu identity under a programme of national solidarity and uplift. He championed tolerant Hinduism, while emphasizing that other religions were subordinate. For Vivekananda, Hinduism was the essence of religion, and encompassed all sects. Buddhism and Jainism were religions in the meaning creeds or sects, unable to meet the requirements for a universal religion.

The impact of colonialism on the Indian mind may be confined to mere ‘surface deterioration’ and it may be ‘potentially what it was’. The relation between Mahatma Gandhi and the pre-modern societies and the critique of modernity, in the process making the necessary route assumed by Partha Chatterjee between nationalism and Gandhi contingent, is described. The Gandhian defence of the pre-modern as well as his critique of modernity, and Swami Vivekananda's limited fascination for modernity can become an important starting point to analyse this tension that would help in better understanding the dynamics of contemporary Indian society. In addition, the differences between Vivekananda and Gandhi are noted. It particularly covers Swami paradigm and Mahatma paradigm. The celebration of India's past and the evils in Indian society are discussed. In general, the two contrasting paradigms would throw better light on the understanding of the tension that underlies the nationalist programme.

Fears and anxieties as well as specific psycho-social strengths are rooted in the earliest ‘pre-verbal’ experiences and connections of life. It is this residual dark soil of infantile experience that erupts in psychopathology, that people mine in myth-making, and that underlies the strivings and disappointments of everyday life. This chapter explores the traces of infantile substratum in three different cultural/historical contexts: in two centuries-old religious cults that command the loyalty and devotion of millions of Indians; and in the life and work of one of the early prophets of a modern Indian identity. It discusses the cult and myths of Krishna, Shiva and Narcissus, and the childhood of Swami Vivekananda.

This chapter examines Swami Vivekananda's reading and interpretation of the Bhagavadgita. It suggests that Vivekananda considered karma yoga as the central teaching of the Bhagavadgita. It highlights that Vivekananda accused priests of misreading the text, defending privileged interests, and denying the people access to the Bhagavadgita which had led to the cultural degeneration of India. Vivekananda believed that nishkama karma or non-attachment is the core teaching of the Gita. It was inclusive in nature and could take the masses into its fold. From this philosophy he evolved two concepts, naranarayana and daridranarayana, which occupy a central place in his mission to revive the youth of India.

This chapter examines the various attempts, on the part of both Western and Indian authors, to deodorize, sanitize, or reform Tantra. The most famous of these is the eccentric Supreme Court judge and secret tàntrika (practitioner of Tantra), Sir John Woodroffe, who is regarded as the founding father of Tantric studies. His legacy of reform and sanitization of Tantra would be mirrored and echoed in various ways by a great many Indian authors, such as Swami Vivekenanda and the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. For both Woodroffe and Vivekananda, Tantra was something that was very much in need of censorship and reform—either (for the former) a moralizing sanitization, or else (for the latter) a form of suppression and denial. This chapter looks at sex, scandal, secrecy, and censorship in the works of Woodroffe and Vivekananda.

Bengali Hindu Swami Vivekananda sought to establish a new Hindu identity, which emphasized the individual’s right to unmediated access to the religious culture of India. His goal was to create a new basis for national unity and religious ethic that would encourage charitable work among the poor. Vivekananda endorsed a philosophical system called Advaita Vedanta, founded by the great teacher Sankara around 800 CE. This branch of Hinduism stresses the non-duality of reality and claims that the only thing that exists is Brahman, the Absolute. Everything, including self is identical with this Absolute, and it is only illusion caused by ignorance which makes us perceive them as individual entities separate from the Absolute.

In his travels Dharmapala encountered many universalizing projects-from Theosophy to Kakuzo Okakura’s pan-Asianism, from the World’s Parliament of Religions to the branding and projection of world religions, from Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, and Annie Besant to Lord Curzon’s affection for an Imperial British Buddhism. In Kolkata the Bengali elite (bhadralok) was drawn to Buddhism for its humanism as well as by their own civilizational pride in Buddhism as an Indian religion. As Dharmapala cultivated those connections, he fought to take Bodh Gaya away from the Hindu renouncer who controlled it, trying to install a Japanese Buddha image in the Bodh Gaya temple. That struggle brought both local and international actors into conflict and made the place a global Buddhist resource on the one side and an emergent instrument for forging the Indian nation on the other.

The establishment of British rule brought India in direct contact with Christianity and English education which led to fresh awakening. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergence of great rational minds and an enormous urge for freedom characterized the Indian scene. The era, which, in historical terms, commenced with Raja Rammohan Roy of Bengal, heralded a major attitudinal change among the people of India. The unequal society that had been built in India over the ages needed to be changed in favour of equality and giving people a greater say in religious, political, and economic systems. The contribution of three leaders is indeed of great historical value: Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941); Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902); and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). Each one grew to become a formidable figure in his sphere of human activity: Gurudev Tagore in literature, Swami Vivekananda in religion, and Mahatma Gandhi in politics.

Chapter 10 reconstructs Vivekananda’s philosophical justification of panentheistic cosmopsychism and his account of how the single Divine Consciousness individuates into the varied conscious perspectives of humans and non-human animals. He provides two complementary arguments in favor of panentheistic cosmopsychism: (1) an “involution argument” for panpsychism, which is based on the Sāṃkhyan satkāryavāda, the doctrine that an effect pre-exists in its material cause, and (2) an argument for panentheistic cosmopsychism, which is based on two sub-arguments: namely, the argument from design and the argument for the epistemic value of supersensuous perception (i.e., AEV, discussed in chapter 5). The chapter then explains what it calls Vivekananda’s account of “grounding by self-limitation,” according to which Divine Consciousness manifests as everything in the universe by playfully limiting, or veiling, Herself through the individuating principle of māyā. The chapter concludes by bringing Vivekananda into dialogue with the contemporary philosopher of mind Miri Albahari.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed reconstruction of the main tenets of Vivekananda’s philosophy of Integral Advaita, as expounded in lectures and writings in the 1890s. Militating against the dominant view that his philosophy follows Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta in all or most of its essentials, the chapter contends that Vivekananda, under the influence of Ramakrishna, reconceived Advaita Vedānta as a nonsectarian, world-affirming, and ethically oriented philosophy. Vivekananda, in contrast to Śaṅkara, held that (1) the impersonal Brahman and the personal Śakti are equally real aspects of one and the same Infinite Divine Reality; (2) the universe is a real manifestation of Śakti; (3) since we are all living manifestations of God, we should make Vedānta practical by loving and serving human beings in a spirit of worship; and (4) each of the four Yogas (i.e., basic forms of spiritual practice)—Bhakti-Yoga, Jñāna-Yoga, Karma-Yoga, and Rāja-Yoga—is a direct and independent path to salvation.

This chapter examines how reading contemporary Indian philosophers' writings as modern texts or considering them as modern authors fails to capture some important ideas contained in them. There are two different sets of interpretations on contemporary Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda. The first consists of those like Tapan Raychaudhuri, who sees no traces of Hindu revivalism in Vivekananda. Raychaudhuri, together with Nemai Sadhan Bose, tries to project universalism, ultimate truth, rather than Hindu religion, as central to Vivekananda. The second set comprises those like Javeed Alam, who sees certain thoughts and categorizations of communalism in Vivekananda. This chapter argues that democracy in India can be sustained not only through a liberal epistemology based on empirical claims about reality, but also through Buddhist epistemology. To develop this argument, the chapter considers a crucial structural feature of democracy: criticism. It elaborates the three modes of criticism: criticism as rejection, self-criticism, and internal criticism.

Chapter 9 concerns what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers has called the “hard problem of consciousness”—the problem of explaining how conscious experience arises. The chapter provides an in-depth reconstruction of Vivekananda’s Sāṃkhya-Vedāntic solution to the hard problem of consciousness and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. The chapter first outlines Ramakrishna’s mystically grounded views on consciousness and the views of five of Vivekananda’s prominent Western contemporaries: John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, William James, W. K. Clifford, and Alfred Russel Wallace. It then examines Vivekananda’s own approach to the hard problem of consciousness and his critique of modern materialist theories of consciousness. Combining elements from Sāṃkhya, Advaita Vedānta, and the teachings of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda defends a metaphysics of panentheistic cosmopsychism, according to which the sole reality is Divine Consciousness, which manifests as everything in the universe.

Chapter 8 reconstructs Vivekananda’s nuanced cosmopolitan account of the dynamics of religious faith. Vivekananda made a unique intervention in late nineteenth-century debates about faith and reason by steering a middle course between the stringent evidentialism of W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley and the anti-evidentialist fideism of William James. Vivekananda justifies religious faith on the basis of an “expanded evidentialism,” arguing that supersensuous perception and mystical testimony are valid sources of evidence that support the rationality of religious belief. Vivekananda’s various remarks about faith hint at a dynamic conception of religious faith, according to which one’s faith evolves in the following three stages: (1) faith as sub-doxastic intellectual assent, (2) faith as belief, and (3) faith as self-authenticating realization. The chapter concludes by bringing Vivekananda into critical dialogue with William Alston, who was one of the first Western philosophers to distinguish doxastic and non-doxastic forms of religious faith.

The introduction discusses some of the textual difficulties relating to The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda and then outlines the cosmopolitan hermeneutic approach to Vivekananda’s philosophy that will be adopted throughout the book. At the methodological level, one of the primary aims of the book is to reconstruct Vivekananda’s philosophical views on a wide range of issues, including the nature of God, the ontological status of the world, the ontological basis of ethics, religious pluralism, the epistemology of mystical experience, the powers and limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness. However, the book also makes a sustained case that Vivekananda’s philosophical positions and arguments are not merely of historical interest. Drawing upon the recent work of Jonardon Ganeri, the book argues that Vivekananda was an “immersive cosmopolitan” philosopher who developed innovative philosophical ideas by rethinking aspects of his own inherited Indian tradition and critically engaging a variety of Western thinkers.

Chapter 3 argues that Vivekananda’s views on the harmony of religions evolved from 1893 to 1901 in three phases. In the first phase from September 1893 to March 1894, Vivekananda defended the equal salvific efficacy of the major world religions but claimed that a “universal religion” that would harmonize all the world religions was an “ideal” that did not yet exist. In the second phase from September 1894 to May 1895, he claimed that the universal religion already exists in the form of Vedānta, which he expounded in terms of the “three stages” of Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Advaita. However, by late 1895, he abandoned his earlier attempt to ground the harmony of religions in the three stages of Vedānta. Instead, he held that every religion corresponds to at least one of the four Yogas, each of which is a direct and independent path to salvation.

Central to Vivekananda’s doctrine of the science of religion is the controversial assumption that supersensuous experience is a genuine source of knowledge. He defended this assumption by presenting a sophisticated argument for the epistemic value of supersensuous perception, which this chapter reconstructs and further develops. One of the key premises of Vivekananda’s argument for the epistemic value of supersensuous perception is an epistemic principle of perceptual justification that he adapted from traditional Indian pramāṇa epistemology—namely, svataḥ-prāmāṇyatā, the doctrine of the “intrinsic validity” of cognitions defended by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsakas and Vedāntins. On this basis, he argues that we are justified in believing the testimony of mystics who claim to have directly perceived supersensuous realities. The chapter refines and develops Vivekananda’s argument for the epistemic value of supersensuous perception into a seven-premise argument by drawing upon Vivekananda’s own ideas as well as contemporary analytic philosophy.