The swami who teaches in stories
Swami Sarvapriyananda runs the Vedanta Society of New York and teaches Advaita by argument and by anecdote. Eighteen of the anecdotes, one at a time, in order.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 01 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami
Swami Sarvapriyananda runs the Vedanta Society of New York, the house Vivekananda founded in the 1890s, and has become the most widely followed teacher of Advaita Vedanta alive, mostly through talks given in plain rooms with bad lighting. He teaches by argument, which Advaita has always done, and by stories, which is the part that stays.
Vivekananda had a line about how these ideas travel. Whenever the world has been knitted together, he said, Indian ideas have moved along the stitching. The Roman empire, the Islamic empire, the British empire. The swami adds the obvious next one, the empire of the internet, and notes without much fuss that ideas worked out on the subcontinent a few thousand years ago now have a second life as video files. That is how they reach most people now, me included. Not a guru, not a book. A phone, late, after the accounts for the dairy are done. A slightly undignified way to meet a tradition, and exactly what he says will happen.
The metaphysics I had read before and have written about here already. What stays are the stories. A boy in a cinema asking where the screen is. A dying man laughing at the disciple who caught him out. A physicist told that his whole field is illusion, and a swami saying that this was not a helpful thing to tell him. A teenage girl with an argument about suffering that her father could not answer. A monk's three words of Hindi that hold the whole method.
So this run takes them one at a time, short, the way I have been doing with the other traditions in this section. Some are Vedanta. Some are Buddhist, or Christian, or just a man remembering what a senior monk told him when he was nineteen. They are in order because the later ones lean on the early ones, and the third, a boy and a cinema screen, is the picture all the rest use.
I am not a Vedantin and I have no teacher. I run businesses in Phnom Penh and read this at night. If I get a term wrong, that is the reason.