Prabuddha Bharata

"This important book fills a gap in our knowledge.... Highly recommended."Â -- Library Journal "... highly recommended... " -- Choice "With admirable clarity and remarkable brevity, Jackson surveys the history of the movement and raises... important issues... " -- The Journal of American History An important history of the Ramakrishna movement, the very first and in many ways the most important Asian religious group to appear in the United States.

Prabuddha Bharata, an English monthly journal of the Ramakrishna Order, has trodden a long and arduous path for the last hundred years. Throughout this past century it has gathered many treasures within its covers. On those pages some of the brightest minds of the century struggled with the problems of the world and placed before humanity their insights and solutions. For the readers who do not have ready access to all the volumes of Prabuddha Bharata, few of the priceless gems contained in those pages have been anthologised here, in this publication by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India. A study of this anthology is a study of life—of science, art, psychology, philosophy, etc., as the titles show. As you will see in the following pages, many of the articles draw the reader into another milieu—a milieu that was the precursor of today’s. There we discern the hopes, fears, and anxieties that moved powerful minds. And there we find the solutions they proposed and the hopes they cherished regarding humanity’s future. We see a recent past through some of the clearest eyes of that period, and we also get a glimpse of the world they thought would soon emerge. Thus we are able to compare all that with the present, understand better what is happening now, and ponder over the future.

The second volume of 'From Darkness to Light' is a compilation of articles penned by the editors of Prabuddha Bharata, the English journal of the Ramakrishna Order started by Swami Vivekananda in 1896. The articles of the first editor B R Rajam Iyer(1896) to the thirty-sixth editor Swami Narasimhananda (2014) make up this volume. In these writings the readers get a glimpse into the various issues that have been the point of focus right from the early days of the journal in 1896 up to the recent times, how there has been a central idea consistently running through all of them, the idea of the spiritual awakening of humanity and India, and yet how the style of presentation has undergone change over a period of time with the change of editors. This makes for a fascinating reading & study. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India.