Swami Tyagananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order since 1976, is the head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston, and is the Hindu chaplain at MIT and Harvard. After an extensive training in Vedanta and its practice in the Order’s monasteries in India, Tyagananda was assigned to the Vedanta Society in Boston in 1998, where he shares the insights of his tradition through lectures, classes, personal interviews, and meditation instruction.

    Prior to coming to the United States, Swami Tyagananda was for eleven years the editor of the Ramakrishna Order’s English language journal Vedanta Kesari based in Chennai, India. He has written, translated and edited ten books, including Monasticism: Ideals and Traditions (1991), Values: The Key to a Meaningful Life (1996), The Essence of the Gita (2000), and Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited (2010).

    Swami Tyagananda is a member of the American Academy of Religion and on the Board of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. He has presented papers at academic conferences and he gives lectures and classes at the Vedanta Society as well as at MIT, Harvard, and other colleges in and around Boston.