11 Facts About Swami Paramananda

Swami Paramananda was a mystic, a poet and an innovator in spiritual community living.

Swami Paramananda was initiated a month before his eighteenth birthday, becoming a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and the youngest disciple of Vivekananda.

Swami Paramananda trained under the mentorship of Ramakrishnananda, a direct disciple of Ramakrishna, and founder of the Madras Math, a thousand miles south of Calcutta.

Swami Paramananda was sent to New York in 1906 at the age of twenty-two to assist at the previously established New York Vedanta Society.

Swami Paramananda lived and taught there until 1909, when Paramananda established the Vedanta Centre of Boston.

Swami Paramananda lectured throughout the United States, Europe and Asia for thirty-four years, until his death in 1940.

Swami Paramananda founded four nonsectarian ashramas where residents are primarily women, two in the United States and two in Calcutta, India.

Swami Paramananda established disciplined communities of nuns under the supervision of Sister Devamata, his American first disciple, whom he ordained to teach Vedanta from the platform in 1910.

Swami Paramananda was the first American woman to teach Vedanta.

Swami Paramananda became the spiritual leader of the ashramas upon Paramananda's death in 1940 and was the first Indian woman to be ordained a teacher in America.

Swami Paramananda founded the "Message of the East" in 1909, the first Vedanta periodical published in the United States which continued for 55 years, offering articles, poetry and commentary on all religions in its monthly, and later quarterly, magazine.