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Hinduism
 Swami
Vivekananda - Revival of the Vedanta
Lecture
at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago 1893
.......Swami
Vivekananda
Three religions
now stand in the world, which have come down to us from
time prehistoric- Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.
They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them
prove by their survival their internal strength. But while
Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out
of its place of birth by its all conquering daughter, and
a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale
of their grand religion (Zoroastrianism), sect after sect
arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas
to its very foundations, but like the waters of the sea
shore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while,
only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times
more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over,
these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated
into the immense body of the mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy,
of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes,
to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology,
the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the
Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre
to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where
is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless
contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt
to answer.
There never was a time when there was no creation.
The Hindus have received their religion through revelation,
the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning
and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience,
how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas
no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of
spiritual laws discovered by different persons into different
times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its
discovery, and exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it
with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral,
ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and
between individual spirits and the father of all spirits,
were there before their discovery, and would remain even
if we forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we
honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this
audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.
Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without
end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach
us that creation is without beginning and end. Science is
said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy
is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing
existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say
it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes
potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable.
Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound
must undergo that change which is called destruction. So
God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was
a time when there was no creation.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator
are two lines, without beginning and without end, running
parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence,
by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out
of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This
is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: "The sun and
the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous
cycles." And this agrees with modern science.
I am a spirit living in a body.
I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die.
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive
my existence, "I", "I", "I", what is the idea before me?
The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination
of material substance? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit
living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die,
but I shall not die. Here am I in this body; it will fall,
but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was
not created, for creation means a combination, which means
a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created,
it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health,
with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied.
Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet,
others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence.
Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful
God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial?
Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those
who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future
one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign
of a just and merciful God?
In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not
explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat
of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then,
before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those
were his past actions.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted
for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of
existence- one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter
and its transformations answer for all that we have, there
is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But
it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of
matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual
monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a
materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary
here.
The natural habits of a new-born
soul; since they were not obtained in this present life,
they must have come down from past lives.
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from
heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration,
through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar
way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused
by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency
would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body, which
is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency.
This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain
everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions.
So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits
of a new-born soul. And since they were not obtained in
this present life, they must have come down from past lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted,
how is it that I do not remember anything of my past life?
This can be easily explained. I am now speaking English.
It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother
tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try
to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness
is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its
depths are stored up all the experiences. Try and struggle,
they would come up and you would be conscious even of your
past life.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification
is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge
thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the
secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can
be stirred up- try it and you would get a complete reminiscence
of your past life.
So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the
sword cannot pierce, him the fire cannot burn, him the water
cannot melt (or make wet)- him the air cannot dry. The Hindu
believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference
is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body and
that death means the change of this centre from body to
body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter.
In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and
perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down
to matter, and thinks of itself as matter.
Why should the free, perfect and pure being be thus under
the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the
perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect?
We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and
say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want
to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings,
and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming
is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can
the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure,
the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its
nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take
shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the
question in a manly fashion; and his answer is: "I do not
know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself
as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter." But
the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody’s
consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The
Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is
the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation.
This is nothing more than what the Hindu says: "I do not
know."
Well then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect
and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from
one body to another. The present is determined by our past
actions and the future by the present. The soul will go
on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and
death to death. But there is another question; Is man a
tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on a foamy crest
of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next,
rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions-
a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing,
uncompromising current of cause which rolls on crushing
everything in its way and waits not for the widow’s tears
or the orphan’s cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this
is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?
–was the cry that went up from the bottom of that heart
of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of
hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage,
and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed
the glad tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss!
Even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the
Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion. Knowing
Him alone you shall be saved from death over again."
"Children of immortal bliss"- what a sweet, what a hopeful
name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name-
heirs of immortal bliss- yea, the Hindu refuses to call
you sinners. Ye are the children of God, the sharers of
immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on
earth- sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing
libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the
delusion, that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits
free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies;
matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.
Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination
of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and
effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through
every particle of matter and force, stands One "by whose
command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain,
and death stalks upon the earth."
And what is His nature?
He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty
and the all-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our
mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source
of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth
the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden
of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how
to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as
the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the
next life."
This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and
let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna,
who the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth.
He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a
lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened
by water; so a man ought to live in the world- his heart
to God and his hands to work.
It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the
next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake,
and the prayer goes:
"Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning.
If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant
me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward-
love unselfishly for love’s sake."
One of the disciple of Krishna, the then emperor of India,
was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take
shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and
there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the
most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. King
Yudhishthira answered:
"Behold my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful
they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but
my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore
I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source
of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to
be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love.
I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let
Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s
sake. I cannot trade in love.
" Purity is the condition of His mercy.
The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the
bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this
bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore,
Mukti- freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from
death and misery.
And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of
God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the
condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals
Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see
God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the
crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt
ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation.
This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism.
The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories.
If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence,
he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul
in him, which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful
universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. So the best proof
a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have
seen the soul; I have seen God." And that is the only condition
of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles
and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but
in realising- not in believing, but in being and becoming.
Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle
to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see
God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect
even as the Father in Heaven, is perfect, constitutes the
religion of the Hindus.
And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He
lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect
bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought
to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with
God.
So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion
of all the sects of India: but then, perfection is absolute,
and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have
any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a
soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with
Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection,
the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence
absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have
often and often read this called the losing of individuality
and becoming a stock or a stone.
"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness
to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be
greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies,
the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness
of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate
of happiness being reached when it would become a universal
consciousness.
Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality,
this miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then
alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone
can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then
alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge
itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion.
Science has proved to me that physical individuality is
a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously
changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita
(unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart,
soul.
Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as
science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further
progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry
could not progress farther when it would discover one element
out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop
when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering
one energy of which all the others are but manifestations,
and the science of religion become perfect when it would
discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death,
Him who is the constant basis of an ever changing world.
One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive
manifestations. Thus it is, through multiplicity and duality
that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther.
This is the goal of all science.
All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long
run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science
today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been
cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in
more forcible language, and with further light from the
latest conclusions of science.
There is no polytheism in India
Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the
religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell
you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple,
if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers
applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence,
to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name
henotheism explain the situation. "The rose called by any
other name would smell as sweet." Names are not explanations.
I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach
to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling
them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick,
what could it do?
One of his listeners sharply answered: "If I abuse your
God, what can He do?"
The preacher said, "You would be punished when you die."
The Hindu retorted "So my idol will punish you when you
die."
The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst
them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in
morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere,
I stop and ask myself, ‘Can sin beget holiness?’
We can no more think about anything
without a mental image than we can live without breathing.
Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse.
Why does a Christian go to Church? Why is the cross holy?
Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are
there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there
so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray?
My brethren, we can no more think about anything without
a mental image than we can live without breathing. By the
law of association, the material image calls up the mental
idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external
symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep
his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as
well you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent.
After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the
whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God
superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word ‘omnipresent’,
we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all.
The whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation.
As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental
constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity
with the images of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally
connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church,
a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the idea
of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other
ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference
that while some people devote their whole lives to their
idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them
religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines
and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the
Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become divine
by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or
books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual
childhood: but on and on he must progress.
He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship,"
say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to
rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest
stage is when the Lord has been realised."
Mark the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol
tells you, "Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor
the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we
speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not
abuse anyone’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognises
in it a necessary stage of life. "The child is father of
the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood
is a sin or youth a sin?
If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of
an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even
when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error.
To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth,
but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To
him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the
highest absolutism, means so many attempts of the human
soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined
by the conditions of its birth and association, and each
of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a
young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and
more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.
Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has
recognised it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed
dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It places
before society only one coat, which must fit Jack and John
and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry,
he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus
have discovered that the absolute can only be realised,
or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the
images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols-
so many pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that
this help is necessary for every one, but those that do
not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is
it compulsory in Hinduism.
One thing I must tell you, Idolatry in India does not mean
anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the
other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp
high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they
sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are
always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting
the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns
himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.
And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion
any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the
door of Christianity.
To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only
a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through
various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal.
Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material
man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why,
then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent,
says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth
adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different
natures.
It is the same light coming through glasses of different
colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes
of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth
reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation
as Krishna, "I am in every religion as the thread through
a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness
and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity,
know thou that I am there." And what has been the result?
I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system
of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the
Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We
find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed."
One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric
of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is
agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the
whole force of their religion is directed to the great central
truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They
have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son.. And
he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas
of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to carry out all
his plans, but there is ever to be a universal religion,
it nust be one which will have no location in place or time;
which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and
whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of
Christ, on saints and sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic
or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total
of all these, and still have infinite space for development;
which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms,
and find a place for, every human being, from the lowest
grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the
highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart
almost above humanity, making society stand in awe of him
and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which
will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its
polity, which will recognise divinity in every man and woman,
and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created
in aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature.
Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you.
Asoka’s council was a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar’s,
though more to the purpose, was only a parlour meeting.
It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters
of the globe that the Lord is in every religion.
May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda
of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah
of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians, give
strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star arose
in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes
dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of
the world; and now it is again rising on the very horizon
of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold more
effulgent than it ever was before.
Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given
to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbour’s blood,
who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich
was by robbing one’s neighbours, it has been given to thee
to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of
harmony. |
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