Swami Vivekananda

Born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in 1863, Vivekananda was a gifted singer before he was a monk — trained in Indian classical music, he compiled a songbook of devotional music in his youth, and it was his singing that first endeared him to the mystic Ramakrishna, whose chief disciple he became. After Ramakrishna''s passing he wandered the length of India as a penniless monk, then sailed for America to speak at the 1893 World''s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. His opening words — "Sisters and brothers of America" — drew a standing ovation, and in the years that followed he taught across the United States and England, founding the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894, the first Hindu organization in the West.

Returning to India a national hero, he founded the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897, joining contemplative life to service of the poor. He died in 1902, just thirty-nine years old. His books on the four yogas — including Bhakti Yoga, his study of the path of divine love — gave the West its first systematic account of devotion as a spiritual discipline, and the door he opened was the one through which Paramahansa Yogananda, Srila Prabhupada, and every later wave of Indian teachers and chant leaders walked.