Bhagavad Gita

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Books he read ...

   

 

 

The following is a partial list of books mentioned in various sources as those that Vivekananda read.

 

• Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis (carried it with him as a wandering monk)
• Yogavâsishtha Râmâyana
• Short History of the English People by John Richard Green (as a student)
• Works of Herbert Spencer (as a student)
• Immanuel Kant (as a student)
• Schopenhauer (as a student)
• John Stuart Mill (as a student)
• Auguste Comte (as a student)
• Aristotle (as a student)
• Poetry Wordsworth (said in the Life of Swami Vivekananda by his eastern and western disciples to be his favorite poet as a youth) (as a student)
• Three Essays on Religion by John Stuart Mill (said by Brajendra Seal to have “upset his first boyish theism and easy optimism.” ) (as a student)
• David Hume (a friend introduced him to the study of Hume) (as a student)
• Hymn to the Spirit of Intellectual Beauty by Percy Shelley (as a student)
• Other poems (recommended to him by Brajendra Seal) (as a student)
• Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (said that he read it several times)
• The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold. Vivekananda said it "represents more of Vedantism than Buddhism." "That beautiful poem" he called it.
• Encyclopedia Britanica: First 10 volumes of first edition at least, according to reminiscences of Sarat Chandra Charkravarty.
• Ashtadhyayi
  (Source. Reminiscences by G.S. Bhate)
• Amarakosha
  (Source. Reminiscences by G.S. Bhate)
• Lalita Vistara
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Nârada Sutras
• Shândilya Sutras
• Vairagya Shatakam
• Katha Upanishad
• Kalidasa's Shankantalam
• The Earth and Its Inhabitants by Elisee Reclus [French geographer and social philosopher].
  Los Angeles, December 1899.
• Alice in Wonderland
• Alice Through the Looking Glass
  Swamiji said that Lewis Carroll had some kind of intuition-this was not an ordinary mind-to have written such books. He thought Alice in Wonderland "the most wonderful book for children that has been written in this [the nineteenth] century."
  "There is no such thing as law or connection in this world, but we are thinking that there is a great deal of connection," he had said in 1896 during a New York class. "... The world is the same unconnected thing. Alice in Wonderland-with no connection whatever."

 

 

 

 

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- www.vivekananda.net edited by Frank Parlato Jr.

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