Swami Satprakashananda

Swami Satprakashananda (April 1888 – 15 November 1979) was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher.

Biography Swami Satprakashananda was born in Dhaka (now in Bangladesh) in April 1888 in what has been described as a "pious Hindu family". He had been initiated by Swami Brahmananda in 1908, later receiving monastic orders (Sannyasa) from Swami Shivananda in 1927. Satprakashananda served for a time as an associate editor of Prabuddha Bharata, an English-language monthly journal of the Ramakrishna Order published since 1896, and for six years directed the Ramakrishna Mission Center in New Delhi.

In 1937, Satprakashananda was sent to the United States of America. He gave lectures for a summer in Washington, D.C., but decided not to start a center in that city "for two reasons: the central focus of the city is political, not spiritual, and its population is transient."

Satprakashananda subsequently went to Saint Louis, Missouri where in 1938 he established a permanent Vedanta Society which he directed for the next forty years.

In American Veda, Philip Goldberg reported that after moving into the area, Huston Smith sought out the Saint Louis Vedanta Society, "took up a meditation practice and probed deeply into Vedanta, meeting with Satprakashananda for tutorials virtually every week for ten straight years." When the St. Louis Vedanta Society grew and was ready to purchase its own building, Smith placed the deed in his own name, having served "as front man for the transaction,"

Thought Historian Carl Jackson noted the similarity of Satprakashananda's presentation of seven principles of Vedanta with a presentation almost fifty years earlier by the Vedanta Society of San Francisco, remarking that "there is a uniformity... that suggests that in nearly a century there has been almost no deviation from Swami Vivekananda's original formulations"

Reviewed in Philosophy East and West, The Middle Way