Swami Trigunatitananda

Trigunatitananda (30 January 1865 – 10 January 1915), premonastic name Sarada Prasanna Mitra, was a direct disciple of Ramakrishna, the 19th-century Indian Hindu mystic and sant. He established the monthly Bengali magazine Udbodhan of Ramakrishna Math and later, at the behest of Vivekananda, went to America in 1902 and took charge of the San Francisco centre.

Life Trigunatitananda was born as Sarada Prasanna Mitra, on 30 January 1865. He was born to an aristocratic family in the village of Naora in Bhangar I, (now in South 24 Parganas) near Calcutta. Sarada was enrolled in the Metropolitan Institution at Shyampukur, Calcutta. This was a school of Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, a social reformer, educator and scholar of 19th century India. The headmaster there was Mahendranath Gupta, better known as "M", the author of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (or Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita in Bengali). Sarada did not do well in the school-leaving "entrance examination". "M" took young Sarada to Dakshineswar temple to meet Ramakrishna on 27 December 1884. At a very young age Sarada had shown a religious disposition and this was reinforced by contact with Ramakrishna, whom he visited often after joining the Metropolitan college. thumb When his parents decided to arrange a marriage for him according to Indian customs, he left his house for Puri in January 1886, but was brought back by his parents. He appeared for and passed his First Arts examination. In 1904, because of the work involved, Trigunatitananda felt that a new building for Vedanta Society of San Francisco was needed. Funds were raised, and in January 1906 the building in Webster Street, which came to be known as the first Hindu Temple in the western world, was established and opened to the public. The Swami published a pamphlet explaining each tower and detail of the structure. "This temple," the pamphlet began, "may be considered as a combination of a Hindu temple, a Christian church, a Mohammedan mosque, a Hindu math or monastery, and an American residence." Then it goes on to explain the symbolism built into the temple. He died on 10 January 1915.

Character and legacy

Quotes Keep on praying to God with your whole heart; if the need arises for you to have a Guru, God will send somebody for you who will be just the man you want People talk of finding out the proper kind of guru. But that is not a reasonable position in all cases. Whoever the guru may be, everything will progress nicely if the disciple is earnest and sincere. People of all castes can be initiated by a good guru who has attained perfection. What caste can a true devotee or the perfect soul have? When the individual soul merges in God (like rivers in the sea), they can no more have any individuality. So how can there be then, the distinction of caste, as Brahmin, etc., belonging to the body and never to the soul?