The Defining Moment In Swami Vivekananda's Monastic Life

The article presents Swami Vivekananda’s meditation at Kanyakumari as his ‘moment of enlightenment’ when his thoughts on the reasons for the downfall of India and the course of its revival took a definite shape.

- Asim Chaudhuri

Introduction

It is true that the World’s Parliament of Religions was a big event in Swamiji’s life that acted as the structural catapult launching him into prominence as Swami Vivekananda—the World Teacher. But that was his ‘external’ nature, an outward manifestation of his inner spiritual power—what people saw and heard. His ‘Buddha moment of enlightenment,’ or just his ‘Buddha moment,’ occurred in two places at Kanyakumari—first in Mother Kumari’s temple and then on what is now known as the Vivekananda Rock. Treating these events as a two-part continuum, this will go down as the most defining moment in his monastic life that elevated him from the level of self-actualization to self-transcendence. It was a totally ‘internal’ phenomenon, an innermost experience. This article attempts to describe what led to that moment, how Swamiji experienced it, and what happened in the aftermath. We know something about what led to it and what happened in the aftermath, but very little about its nature, because Swamiji was rather reticent about what he had experienced over those three days at Kanyakumari; for that, we have to rely on his biographers and our capacity for inductive or deductive imagination.

From the Himalayas to Kanyakumari

It all started in July of 1890 when Swamiji left the Baranagore Math with Swami Akhandananda and started for the Himalayas. His final words before he left was: ‘I shall not return until I acquire such realization that my very touch will transform a man.’1 He returned in January 1897, six and a half years later, to the Alambazar Math (to which the brother disciples had shifted in 1892) after fulfilling his promise; no matter how one looks at it, he transformed generations to come.