So did Narendranath, now Swami Vividishananda. He set off on his wanderjahre to quench his spiritual thirst and discover the soul of India. Between 1888 and 1893 he wandered over the landmass of India, a penniless mendicant monk, a saffron-clad beggar, nameless and without formal identity save that of his inner understanding of his belonging to theDashanami Sampradaya of Sannyas.
Only one thought kept fermenting in his brain --- how to activate the life-giving spiritual principles of his Master in real India to alleviate the misery of the masses steeped in ignorance, superstition and grinding poverty, and how to reformulate the Religion of the Vedas in modern scientific terms so as to save world civilisation from impending cataclysmic annihilation.
Here was a young man with a starving mother and siblings, following the untimely death of his father, torn between the triple tendencies of a conflicting mind that impelled him on to plunging into the battle for the economic survival of his immediate family from which he had but formally cut off bonds but could not psychologically do so when he contemplated their earthly misery, to plunging into the national consciousness to discover a way out of India's political, economic and spiritual servitude, and to plunging into the deepest reserves of his being to discover a way out of the spiritual plight that beset humanity and set up nations along the collision course to annihilation and the extinction of civilisation. And that, too, he was struggling to find a solution that would last for ages to come and settle civilisation along the royal avenue of godhead whence the human species would enter into the evolving new age that awaited them.
What a stupendous task lay ahead as the Swami wandered from place to place, now as guest in a cobbler's hut and now taking up residence at a royal palace as the spiritual preceptor (Guru) of the sovereign! He came to know India at first-hand, its hoary culture, its myriad diversity, its strengths and its weaknesses, its terrible surface degradation owing to historical conditions and its sublime subterranean spirituality that still flowed under the mass of material misery. The monk absorbed and assimilated at close range the very pulsations of his motherland so intensely that he became identified with its very spirit. The king and the commoner paid homage to him, the sovereign and his subjects sought his spiritual guidance and scholars who taught him abstruse scriptures stood agape at his superhuman intellectual abilities. All recognised the heroic fibre of the man, his burning patriotism, vast erudition and sublime spirituality. In his bid to discover the soul of India he had become its very soul. Vivekananda was now 'condensed India'.
Written by Sugata Bose
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