Chinmayananda Saraswati

Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati (IAST: Svāmī Cinmayānanda Sarasvatī), also known as Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda Saraswati (born Balakrishna Menon; 8 May 1916 – 3 August 1993), was a Hindu spiritual leader and a teacher. In 1953, he founded Chinmaya Mission, a worldwide nonprofit organisation, in order to spread the knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and other ancient Hindu scriptures. Through the Mission, Swami Chinmayananda spearheaded a global Hindu spiritual and cultural renaissance that popularised these spiritual texts and values, teaching them in English all across India and abroad.

Swami Chinmayananda was originally a journalist and participated in the Indian independence movement. Under the tutelage of Swami Sivananda and later Tapovan Maharaj, he began studying Vedanta and took the vow of sannyasa. He gave his first jñāna yajña, or lecture series about Hindu spirituality, in 1951, starting the work of the Mission. Today, Chinmaya Mission encompasses more than 300 centres in India and internationally and conducts educational, spiritual, and charitable activities.

Swami Chinmayananda's approach was characterised by an appeal to the English-educated Indian middle class and Indian diaspora; he gave lectures and published books in English. Swami Chinmayananda also helped found the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), an Indian right-wing Hindu organisation that is considered a member of the Sangh Parivar. In 1964, he convened delegates to create the VHP at Sandeepany ashram and served as the organisation's first president.

In 1944, almost two years after the British had issued his arrest warrant, believing his case was long forgotten, Balan arrived in Punjab and associated himself with several freedom groups. He advised students on distributing leaflets and organising public strikes but was arrested and imprisoned.

Career in journalism

thumb|Balan's article "The Mochi, Symbol of Craftmanship," published in the National Herald on 20 December 1946.

Balan slowly recovered his health. K. Rama Rao gave Balan his first job, as a journalist at The National Herald, a young newspaper that had been founded a few years back by Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote a series of articles on the imperative of socialism in a society where the vast majority of people were poor. He covered subjects ranging from history and culture to social and political issues. Articles such as "In Praise of the Postman," and "The Mochi—Symbol of Craftsmanship," gained him a reputation as a controversial character. In 1947, he began a new series of articles for The Commonweal.

In the summer of 1947, Balan arrived in Rishikesh, by the banks of the Ganges and made the one-mile hike to the Divine Life Society, the ashram of Swami Sivananda. Swami Sivananda’s radiance, laughter, compassion, and simple directness completely disarmed him. Balakrishnan felt something he had never felt before. A sense of inner stillness a peace that did not depend on outer circumstances, joy that seemed effortless. The sages opened his eyes. Balan extended his stay from a week to a month, then more and more. At the age of 31, he went from being a sceptic to an enthusiast, finally becoming a renunciate monk. He began reading more about Hindu scriptures and reviewing spiritual books. Sivananda recognised Balan's latent talents and entrusted him to organise a Gita Committee. Having returned to the Divine Life Society ashram, on 25 February 1949, the holy day of Mahashivratri, Balan was initiated into sannyasa (Hindu vow of renunciation) by Sivananda, who gave him the name Swami Chinmayananda, or "bliss of pure Consciousness."

Chinmayananda held his first lecture series at a Ganesha temple in the city of Pune in December 1951. His audiences soon swelled from a handful into thousands.

In 1956, the 23rd jñāna yajña in Delhi was inaugurated by the President of India, Rajendra Prasad. He spoke highly of the work Chinmayananda was doing to restore India's cultural glory. In a span of five years, Chinmayananda had instructed over 50,000 of his countrymen through 25 jñāna yajñas across the country.

Chinmayananda's message resonated with heads of other faiths. One of his yajñas in Bombay was inaugurated by Cardinal Valerian Gracias, a prominent Catholic archbishop of the time. Chinmayananda was a supporter of interfaith dialogue and participated in many interfaith events.

In 1992, he undertook a lecture tour of twelve US universities to establish an international library and research center, the Chinmaya International Foundation, in Kerala, India. This attracted the attention of RSS pracharak S. S. Apte, who was airing similar ideas at that time.

In the same year, Chinmaya Mission collected ₹10,000 to fund the construction of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, which the RSS was building at the time in Kanyakumari. Additionally, in August 1964, the Pope announced that the International Eucharistic Conference would be held in November in Bombay, and stated that a specific number of Hindus would be converted to Christianity; Chinmayananda announced in response that he would convert an even greater number of people to Hinduism.

Apte and Chinmayananda jointly organised such a conference at the Sandeepany ashram in August 1964, which resulted in the founding of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Swami Chinmayananda was elected as president and Apte as general secretary of the new organisation.

According to Chinmayananda, the VHP was founded in order to

<blockquote>awake(n) the Hindus and to make them conscious of their proud place in the comity of nations. Once we have made every Hindu conscious of his own identity, the Parishad has done its job and we shall feel fully rewarded... ...<br><br>Let us convert Hindus to Hinduism, then everything will be all right.</blockquote>He also believed that the VHP should be focused on educating members of the Hindu diaspora and their children about knowledge of their "cultural duties and spiritual values" and give them the opportunity to "learn, to appreciate and involve themselves in our tradition".

In 1992, Chinmayananda attended the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's 5th European Hindu Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, where the ongoing Ayodhya dispute was a major topic of discussion. During the conference, he stated that the 14 pillars of the Babri Masjid that were identifiable as Hindu temple pillars should be turned over to the Hindus. The mosque was illegally destroyed by VHP activists later that year in an escalation of the Ayodhya dispute.

In January 1993, he gave an interview to Ram Madhav in which he discussed the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he asserted that "pulling down that structure is nothing wrong" because it was not really used as a mosque. "First let us have this Rama Temple," he said, after which there were "two more monuments which are built upon our Krishna’s birth place and Kashi Viswanath." He stated that enthusiasm for the Ram Temple today was not enough, asking Hindus, "Are we ready to live Rama’s life?" On 8 August, five days after Chinmayananda died, conference delegates observed a moment of silence in tribute to him. Taken to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, he was later transferred to Sharp Memorial Hospital, where he had a quintuple bypass surgery on 29 July. But his condition continued to be critical and he was put on a life-support system. His followers mark the date as the occasion of Mahasamadhi Day.

Legacy

Chinmaya Mission

Chinmayananda established ashrams around the world as places for spiritual retreat, study, and practice. the Chinmaya Yuva Kendra (CHYK, the global youth wing of Chinmaya Mission),

Chinmaya International Foundation

He established the Chinmaya International Foundation at the Tharavad house of Adi Shankara which the foundation bought – in the village Veliyanad in Eranakulam District in Kerala.

Nursery school

From its beginnings in 1965 at a nursery school inaugurated by Chinmayananda in Kollengode, Kerala (India), today there are over 76 Chinmaya Vidyalayas (schools), seven Chinmaya colleges, and the Chinmaya International Residential School in India, and the first Chinmaya Vidyalaya outside India's borders, in Trinidad, West Indies.

Medical facilities

Chinmayananda inaugurated the Chinmaya Mission Hospital in 1970. The facility has grown into a modern, fully equipped 200-bed hospital in Bangalore in Karnataka, India.

In the late 1970s, Chinmayananda established rural health care services in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, India.

Publications

Chinmayananda authored 95 publications in his lifetime, including forty commentaries on classical scriptural texts, eight compilations, 13 co-authored works and 34 original works. Over the years, luxury hotels in India started keeping a copy of his commentary on the Bhagavad-gita in all their guest rooms. His books, written in English, have been translated into numerous regional Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Sindhi, and Urdu

BMI chart

The BMI (Body Mind Intellect) Chart is a teaching tool innovated by Chinmayananda that became one of his hallmarks. It categorises the totality of human experience, according to the science of Vedanta, by drawing on 11 characters of the English and Devanagari alphabets.

Honours and recognition

thumbnail|Prime Minister Modi addresses the audience at the release of a commemorative coin to mark the birth centenary of Swami Chinmayananda, in New Delhi on 8 May 2015.

On 2 December 1992, Chinmayananda addressed the United Nations and the talk was titled "Planet in Crisis."

The US magazine, Hinduism Today, conferred him with its Hindu Renaissance Award and the title of "Hindu of the Year" in 1992.

In 1993, he was selected as "President of Hindu Religion" for the Centennial Conference of the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda had given his address one hundred years previously. He was also to be honoured for his selfless service to humanity in Washington, DC at "World Vision 2000," a conference of religious leaders organised by Vishva Hindu Parishad on 6–8 August 1993. He did not attend either of the latter two functions, as he attained Mahasamadhi, in San Diego, on 3 August 1993.

On 8 May 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a commemorative ₹20 coin to mark his birth centenary.

Biopic

In 2014, On a Quest, an English-language biopic featuring the life and works of Chinmayananda, was released. In June 2022, the movie was released to the public on YouTube in English, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. In August 2022, the movie was released in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam languages.

References

Official page of Swami Chinmayananda – Chinmaya Mission

Chinmaya Mission Worldwide