Place · meditation rock memorial · India
Vivekānanda Rock Memorial
Also known as Kanyakumari, Vivekananda Rock, Vivekananda Rock, Kanyakumari, Vivekānanda Rock Memorial
The rock 400 metres offshore from Kanyakumari's southernmost cape where Swami Vivekananda meditated for three days — 24-26 December 1892 — at the end of five years of wandering across India and before leaving for the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The three-day meditation produced his vision of the service-oriented Vedanta and the formulation of 'daridra Narayana seva' — service to the poor as service to the god. The Vivekananda Rock Memorial, inaugurated 1970 by Eknath Ranade of the RSS-affiliated Vivekananda Kendra, remains India's most consequential 20th-century religious memorial. The adjoining Thiruvalluvar statue, 133 feet high, was added in 2000.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Ramakrishna Mission accounts
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 8.078, 77.553
Connections (2)
- Life routeBelur Math
Vivekānanda swam to the rock off Kanyākumārī in December 1892 and sat three days deciding what to do; he left for Chicago the following spring and founded Belur Math in 1898. The rock at the land's end and the monastery on the Hooghly are the beginning and the institution of the same six years.
- Site adjacencyKanyākumārī
The rock lies a few hundred metres off the Kanyākumārī shore, so the goddess at the land's end and the meditation rock are within sight of each other. The memorial built on it in 1970 is the reason the rock is now a destination in its own right rather than a stone in the strait.
On these journeys
Sources
Kanyakumari resolve of 1892 — Wikipedia
Open Vivekānanda Rock Memorial in the repository →