SOURCE: "The Founders: Ramakrishna and Vivekananda," in Vedanta For the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 16-37.

In the following essay, Jackson examines the lives of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, with particular emphasis on Vivekananda's 1893 visit to the United States.

The spiritual founder of the Ramakrishna movement was an obscure Hindu born in a small Indian village in rural Bengal in the early part of the nineteenth century. He never traveled more than a few hundred miles from his birth-place, he often behaved like a child, and he embraced a great many conceptions that modern Westerners would immediately dismiss as rank superstition. His admirers insist that he was a religious genius in the great tradition of Hindu holy men. Scholars agree that he played a leading role in the modern revival of Hinduism in India and that the movement he inspired has deeply...