We are happy to place before our readers this important book, The Message of the Upanisads, by Swami Ranganathananda. The lectures comprising the book were originally delivered by the Swami at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of culture, Calcutta, of which he was then the Secretary. Excepting the first lecture entitled The Charm and Power of the Upanisads, which forms the introduction to the book, all the rest were given as weekly Saturday evening lectures in the Vivekananda Hall of the Institute between May 2, 1962 and January 19, 1963, after completing the study of the three Upanisads Isa, Kena and katha, which form the theme of the present book, the Swami continued these series of weekly lectures, taking up the Gita for a similar verse by verse exposition. As in Rangoon, Karachi, and Delhi earlier, so in Calcutta, these weekly lectures of Swami Ranganathananda attracted an intelligent overflow audience, including a large number of young people. Starting with about a thousand at the opening lecture on May 2, 1962, attendance steadily rose to over sixteen hundred as the weeks passed. The nature of the theme as much as its treatment by the speaker and his mode of delivery helped to hold the attention, and sustain the interest and enthusiasm, of so vast and varied an audience, which represented a cross-section of the cosmopolitan population of the city of Calcutta and its Environs. The lectures which were delivered extempore, were tape-recorded, and later appeared, after thorough editing by the Swami, in the Institute’s monthly Bulletin between August 1962 and August 1966 under the general title Our Spiritual Heritage. The charm and power of the Upanisads was a lecture which the swami delivered at the Institute’s School of Humanistic and Cultural Studies on September 17, 1966 and which appeared in the Bulletin for October 1966.
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