Swami Vivekananda at Colombo

An excerpt from a Colombo local paper, the Ceylon Independent, describes how Swamiji was received when he arrived there: “As the day was closing and the night approached, when the auspicious and sacred hour of ‘sandhya’ noted by the Hindu shastras as the best suited for devotion came round as the harbinger of the coming great events of the day, the sage of noble figure, of sedate countenance with large, luminous eyes, arrived, dressed in the orange garb of a sannyasin, accompanied by the Swami Niranjanananda and others. . . . No words can describe the feelings of the vast masses and their expressions of love, when they saw the steam launch bearing the sage, steaming towards the jetty.” 1 ❊ ❊ ❊ At the beginning of this century [twentieth century], Schopenhauer, the great German philosopher, studying from a not very clear translation of the Vedas made from an old translation into Persian and thence by a young Frenchman into Latin, says, “In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.” This great German sage foretold that, “The world is about to see a revolution in thought more extensive and more powerful than that which was witnessed by the Renaissance of Greek Literature,” and today his predictions are coming to pass. (CW [1973] 3:109)