SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA

Born in India, Prabhavananda joined the Ramakrishna Order after graduating from Calcutta University in 1914.  He was initiated into the Order by Swami Brahmananda, an original disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.

 In 1923, the Order sent him to the United States where he worked as an assistant minister of the Vedanta Society of San Francisco.  After two years in San Francisco, he established the Vedanta Society of Portland, Oregon.  In December 1929, he moved to Los Angeles where, in 1930, he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

Under his administration the Vedanta Society in Los Angeles became the largest Vedanta Society in the West, with monasteries in Hollywood, in Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles, and in convents both in Hollywood and, up the coast, in Santa Barbara.

Swami Prabhavananda was a scholar who authored books on Hindu culture.  He was assisted by Frederick Manchester, and by Christopher Isherwood.  His comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and religion attracted such distinguished figures as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard.

In his book My Guru and His Disciple (1980) Christopher Isherwood describes his thirty years as a student and friend of Prabhavananda. He writes: "I first met the Hindu monk called Swami Prabhavananda in 1939, soon after I settled in Los Angeles.  I last saw him in 1976, only a short while before he died.  

"Throughout that period, as his often backsliding disciple, but always a devoted friend, I observed him lovingly but critically.  Thus I quickly became convinced that he was neither a charlatan nor a lunatic, and then, much more slowly, became aware of a Presence within him.

"This was altogether other than his usually charming, sometimes cantankerous, sometimes absurd Bengali self.  It was a Presence to which Gerald Heard, fastidiously avoiding the word 'God,' would refer to as 'This Thing.'"