Lemont Journal
 

LEMONT, Ill.,
July 3 — Swami Vivekananda may not be a name to trip easily off the tongues of many Americans these days, but its owner made headlines a century ago, as the man who on a single, extraordinary day was acclaimed as an ambassador of Hinduism to the United States.
     That was Sept. 11, 1893, when Vivekananda, a 30-year-old monk from Calcutta, took the podium at the World's Parliament of Religions, an unusual interfaith gathering in Chicago, and declared that the faith he followed emphasized toleration and accepted all religions as true. His handsome face, saffron turban and flowing coat may also have affected members of the audience, because they greeted his first words — "Sisters and brothers of America" — with a standing ovation.
      "The next day," Vivekananda wrote in a letter, "all the papers announced that my speech was the hit of the day, and I became known to the whole of America."
     Now, after 105 years, Vivekananda, whose writings would be praised by Gandhi and Tolstoy, will be honored with a 10-foot-high bronze statue, to be unveiled on July 12 at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in this suburban city.
     Although he was unknown in this country before the parliament, Vivekananda arrived in the United States at a propitious time. His ideas — that a universal truth lies behind all faiths and that everyone possesses a divine spark that can be cultivated through meditation and study — appealed to many religious liberals, like those who had organized the parliament, and are perpetuated today in the movement that he founded, the Vedanta Societies.
     "That was a touching message for the people to understand, that we are all one," said Swami Chidananda, who heads a Chicago monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, an international organization that Vivekananda founded 101 years ago.
     "Swami Vivekananda, his message to the people in the West was each soul is potentially divine," Swami Chidananda said, as workmen at the temple prepared a mound, to be called Vivekananda Hill, where the statue will stand.
     Vivekananda was born Narendranath Datta in 1863, the son of a lawyer in Calcutta, then the capital of British India. Biographers describe the young man as possessing immense philosophical curiosity, always asking questions about faith and meaning. A spiritual search led him to Sri Ramakrishna, a mystic and a priest of the goddess Kali, who taught that all religions lead to God and who once had a vision of the Madonna and Christ child.
     As Ramakrishna's disciple, Datta took the monastic name Vivekananda and assumed leadership of his teacher's followers after the older man's death in 1886. He later wandered India as a monk, carrying a staff, a water pot, a begging bowl and two books: the Bhagavad Gita, an essential Hindu scripture, and the medieval devotional classic "The Imitation of Christ."
     He learned about the Parliament of Religions while in India, but once in the United States, he was told he could-not participate without credentials from a religious organization.
Through somewhat roundabout circumstances, he secured a place on the program through the help of a professor of Greek at Harvard.
     Frank Parlato, a member of the Ramakrishna monastery in Chicago, said the two-ton statue of Vivekananda was cast by the same Indian company that created one of Ramakrishna

Todd Buchanan for The New York Times

A statue of Swami Vivekananda, founder of the Vedanta Societies, was moved into place on Monday at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago at Lemont, III. The 10-foot-high statue is to be dedicated on Sunday.

 

which stands at the religious order's headquarters at Belur, near Calcutta.
     After the parliament, Vivekananda lectured widely in the United States. Mr. Parlato said the swami, who died in 1902, taught the first yoga classes in the United States, without charge, in a Manhattan apartment on West 33d Street in 1895.
     He returned to India in 1897 but came back to the United States in December 1899, for a six-month stay.
In Los Angeles, he caught a touring Broadway play inspired by his earlier visit. Mr. Parlato said the production was titled "My Friend from India" and concerned social climbers who dressed their barber as a Hindu sage so they might break into high society.
     What did Vivekananda think of the play? "I think he said he never saw anything so funny," Mr. Parlato said.