SWAMI VIDYATMANANDA

Born John Yale in 1913, Swami Vidyatmananda underwent initiation and training under Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society of Southern California.  Following brahmacharya, the active period of education and discipline in Vedanta, he took sannyas, final vows.  This was in 1964.  He was then ordained as a monk in the Ramakrishna order.

On a trip to India, Vidyatmananda visited the Belur Math in Howrah, the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Calcutta, and other pilgrimage sites throughout the subcontinent.  He wrote about these experiences in travelogue articles for the journal Vedanta and the West.

Vidyatmananda went on to become an editor of Vedanta and the West, and edited Atman Alone Abides: Conversations with Swami Atulananda (1978).  He also edited What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda (1982), with an introduction by Christopher Isherwood.  His impressions of India he included in a book entitled A Yankee and the Swamis: A Westerner's View of the Ramakrishna Order (2001).

His career continued as manager of the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France, where he served until his death in 2000.  He was 86 years old.  His autobiography is entitled The Making of a Devotee, and can be found online.

The University of Texas at Austin, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, holds the Swami Vidyatmananda Collection, which comprises correspondence to Vidyatmananda between the years 1923 to 1986, as well as correspondence he gathered through his association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California and the Centre Védantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France. 

Three distinct groups of correspondence are present: letters between Christopher Isherwood and Swami Vidyatmananda 1950-1986; correspondence to Lady Sandwich (formerly Amiya Corbin) from Aldous Huxley, John Van Druten, Christopher Isherwood, Walter De la Mare, E. M. Forster, and Gerald Heard, 1944-1977; and letters to the French diplomat Martha Vanek from Jan Masaryk, René Fülöp-Miller, and Igor Stravinsky, 1923-1930.