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WorkSwami Vivekananda

Jnana-Yoga

Lectures to London and New York audiences presenting maya, the world's appearance, as a plain statement of fact rather than a theory.

by Swami Vivekananda571 passages held

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Original title
Jnana Yoga
First published
(aged 36)
Original language
English

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Overview

Modern people, Swami Vivekananda told a London audience in 1896, laugh at anyone who cites Moses, the Buddha or Christ, and accept without question whatever has been said by Darwin, by the biologist Thomas Huxley or by the physicist John Tyndall. He called this a scientific superstition in place of a religious one. His lectures that year answer such an audience on its own ground. Their centre is maya, a Sanskrit word usually translated as illusion. Maya, Vivekananda insists, is not a theory that the world is unreal but a description of how the world is: we know and do not know, we are alive and dying, every pleasure carries its pain, and no reform removes the contradiction. The agnostics' answer, to take life as it comes and enjoy it, leaves out what makes life human, the search for an ideal. Non-dual Vedanta answers that the real self of each person is the infinite itself, and that freedom means knowing this, not escaping to somewhere else. Along the way he corrects Schopenhauer, who had admired the Upanishads but, in Vivekananda's view, wrongly made the will the root of everything. The four lectures on practical Vedanta draw the consequence for daily life: the living God is every man and woman, yet people pass that God by and build temples to an imagined one. A second part gathers seven lectures given in New York, which set out the cosmology of the Sankhya school of the sage Kapila and then show Vedanta pushing past Sankhya's dualism to a single reality; the Vedanta Society of New York published them in 1907, five years after Vivekananda's death. He spoke with little preparation, and the words survive because Josiah Goodwin, a stenographer who followed him from New York to London and on to India, took them down. Goodwin died of typhoid at Ootacamund in June 1898, aged 27.

Key concepts

Is maya just another word for illusion?

Not in these lectures. Vivekananda says maya is not a theory that the world does not exist but a description of the world as we meet it: full of contradiction, where knowing sits beside ignorance, life beside death and every pleasure beside its pain. In the oldest texts the word meant something like magic. In the developed Vedanta it names the way things actually are, before any explanation of why.

What does non-dualism, or Advaita, claim?

It claims there is only one reality, and that the many things we see, souls included, are that one reality appearing through time, space and causation. Vivekananda compares those three to a glass: the Absolute seen through it looks like a universe. So the soul is not a part of God but God whole, appearing many times over, as one sun is reflected in millions of water drops.

What is the Atman?

The Atman is the real self of a person, behind body, senses and mind. Vivekananda argues that it was never born and cannot die, because it is not made of parts, and that it is free already; what binds is only our ignorance of it. Several lectures work toward this from different sides, through immortality, the cosmos within and the difference between the real and the apparent man.

What does the Sankhya philosophy teach?

Sankhya, founded by the sage Kapila, explains the world through two principles: Nature, which unfolds from a state of rest into intellect, mind, senses and matter, and the soul, which only watches the changes. Vivekananda calls it the foundation of all Indian philosophy and accepts most of its cosmology. Vedanta, on his account, simply pushes further, asking what single reality lies behind both.

What makes Vedanta practical?

In the four lectures on practical Vedanta, it is the claim that the highest truth applies to ordinary life rather than to the hermit's cave. Vivekananda points out that the Upanishads came from kings who sat on thrones and commanded armies. If the self of everyone is divine, then the living human being is the truest image of God, and the way people treat each other becomes worship.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Maya, a Statement of Fact

Maya is usually translated as illusion and heard as a claim that nothing is real. The London lectures turn it into a description of ordinary life, and the question becomes whether anyone can deny the description.

Vivekananda insists that the Vedanta's maya is neither idealism nor realism but a plain account of what we are: we know and do not know, we live and are dying, and every pleasure brings its pain. King Yudhishthira's answer, that people watch others die daily and think they never will, is maya; so is the sage Narada living twelve years in half an hour. Against the agnostics' advice to enjoy life as it comes, he answers that the search for an ideal is part of life itself.

  • maya
  • illusion
  • suffering
  • desire
  • human nature
  • perception
  • epistemology
  • knowledge

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The Self That Was Never Bound

If the real self of each person is the infinite, freedom is not a place to reach but a fact to recognise. What then is the long struggle for, and what is it that dies?

Non-dual Vedanta, as these lectures present it, says the Atman, the real self, is not a spark of God but the whole of it, seen through the body and mind as a sun is seen in many drops of water. The lion raised among sheep, who bleats until shown his reflection, is the human condition. The boy Nachiketas, refusing Death's gold and kingdoms, wants only the knowledge of what survives. Liberation means knowing this self, not escaping to a heaven, which is only another way of seeing this same world.

  • self
  • soul
  • nondualism
  • nonduality
  • liberation
  • freedom
  • consciousness
  • self-knowledge
  • unity
  • afterlife
  • karma
  • vedanta

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From Kapila's Two to Vedanta's One

An ancient Indian cosmology set a watching soul against a changing Nature and explained everything else from there. The New York lectures ask why Vedanta accepts nearly all of it and still refuses to stop at two.

Vivekananda calls Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya school, the father of Indian psychology, and walks his audience through its account of Nature unfolding from rest into mind, senses and matter and folding back again in endless cycles. He accepts the picture and pushes past its dualism: time, space and causation are only the glass through which one Absolute is seen as many. Every evolution presupposes an involution, and Schopenhauer erred, he says, in making the will the root of all things.

  • sankhya
  • cosmology
  • causation
  • metaphysics
  • evolution
  • mind

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The Living God and Every Faith

A philosophy that makes the self divine has to say what follows on a Monday morning. The lectures on practical Vedanta and on a universal religion answer for daily life and for the quarrel of the creeds.

The four lectures on practical Vedanta argue that the Upanishads came from kings and generals, not hermits, and that a better image of God than any carved one already exists in the living human being. Prayers to imaginary beings he calls superstition. The closing lectures turn to the religions: as four photographs show one church from four corners, they show one truth from different standpoints. His watchword is acceptance, not toleration, which can be blasphemy, the pretence of allowing others to live.

  • religion
  • religious pluralism
  • ethics
  • renunciation

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Within this work

passages held
571
distinct concepts
629
by passages held, corpus-wide
#127

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “nondualism” and “self”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
nondualismself15
nondualityself13
liberationself8
causationself7
mayaself6
liberationmaya5
metaphysicsnondualism5
metaphysicsself5
liberationnonduality4
mayametaphysics4
mayanondualism4
causationmetaphysics3
nondualismreligious pluralism3
causationmaya2
causationnonduality2
causationliberation1
liberationnondualism1
mayanonduality1
metaphysicsnonduality1
metaphysicsreligious pluralism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 Bhakti-Yoga (Bhakti Yoga)

    The devotional counterpart to Karma Yoga, worked out in the same New York winter of classes.

     EN
  2. 1896 Karma-Yoga (Karma Yoga)

    Printed within weeks of the New York classes it records, and the earliest of Vivekananda's yoga books to appear; the later ones turned to devotion, to knowledge and to the training of the mind.

     EN
  3. 1896 Raja Yoga

    Among Vivekananda's four yoga books, this is the one built on a classical text: class lectures on the discipline of the mind, followed by his own translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

     EN
  4. 1899 Jnana-Yoga (Jnana Yoga) you are here EN
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