LECTURES from Colombo to Almora
VEDANTISM
The
following address of welcome from the Hindus of Jaffna was presented to Swami
Vivekananda:
SRIMAT VIVEKANANDA
SWAMI
REVERED SIR,
We, the inhabitants of Jaffna professing the
Hindu religion, desire to offer you a most hearty welcome to our land, the
chief centre of Hinduism in Ceylon, and to express our thankfulness for your
kind acceptance of our invitation to visit this part of Lanka.
Our ancestors settled here from Southern
India, more than two thousand years ago, and brought with them their religion,
which was patronized by the Tamil kings of Jaffna; but when their government
was displaced by that of the Portuguese and the Dutch, the observance of
religious rights was interfered with, public religious worship was prohibited,
and the Sacred Temples, including two of the most far-famed Shrines, were razed
to the ground by the cruel hand of persecution. In spite of the persistent
attempts of these nations to force upon our forefathers the Christian religion,
they clung to their old faith firmly, and have transmitted it to us as the
noblest of our heritages. Now under the rule of Great Britain, not only has
there been a great and intelligent revival, but the sacred edifices have been,
and are being restored.
We take this opportunity to express our
deep-felt gratitude for your noble and disinterested labours in the cause of
our religion in carrying the light of truth, as revealed in the Vedas, to the
Parliament of Religions, in disseminating the truths of the Divine Philosophy
of India in America and England, and in making the Western world acquainted
with the truths of Hinduism and thereby bringing the West in closer touch with
the East. We also express our thankfulness to you for initiating a movement for
the revival of our ancient religion in this materialistic age when there is a
decadence of faith and a disregard for search after spiritual truth.
We need hardly assure you that we have been
carefully watching the progress of your Mission in the West and always heartily
rejoicing at your devotedness and successful labors in the field of religion.
The appreciative references made by the press in the great centers of
intellectual activity, moral growth, and religious inquiry in the West, to you
and to your valuable contributions to our religious literature, bear eloquent
testimony to your noble and magnificent efforts.
We beg to express our heartfelt
gratification at your visit to our land and to hope that we, who, in common
with you, look to the Vedas as the foundation of all true spiritual knowledge,
may have many more occasions of seeing you in our midst.
May God, who has hitherto crowned your noble
work with conspicuous success, spare you long, giving you vigor and strength to
continue your noble Mission.
We remain, Revered Sir,
Yours faithfully,
…..
For and on behalf of the HINDUS OF JAFFNA.
An eloquent reply was given, and on the
following evening the Swami lectured on Vedantism, a report of which is here
appended:
The subject is very
large and the time is short; a full analysis of the religion of the Hindus is
impossible in one lecture. I will, therefore, present before you the salient
points of our religion in as simple language as I can. The word Hindu, by which
it is the fashion nowadays to style ourselves, has lost all its meaning, for
this word merely meant those who lived on the other side of the river Indus (in
Sanskrit, Sindhu). This name was murdered
into Hindu by the ancient Persians, and all people living on the other side of
the river Sindhu were called by them Hindus. Thus this word has come down
to us; and during the Mohammedan rule we took up the word ourselves. There may
not be any harm in using the word of course; but, as I have said, it has lost its
significance, for you may mark that all the people who live on this side of the
Indus in modern times do not follow the same religion as they did in ancient
times. The word, therefore, covers not only
Hindu proper, but Mohammedans, Christians, Jains, and other people who live in
India. I, therefore, would not use the word Hindu. What word should we use
then? The other words which alone we can use are either the Vaidikas, followers
of the Vedas, or better still, the Vedantist, followers of the Vedanta. Most of
the great religions of the world owe allegiance to certain books which they
believe are the words of God or some other supernatural beings, and which are
the basis of their religion. Now of all these books, according to the modern
savants of the West, the oldest are the Vedas of the Hindus. A little
understanding, therefore, is necessary about the Vedas.
This mass of writing called the Vedas is not
the utterance of persons. Its date has never been fixed, can never be fixed,
and, according to us, the Vedas are eternal.
There is one salient point which I want you to remember, that all the other
religions of the world claim their authority as being delivered by a Personal
God or a number of personal beings, angels, or special messengers of God, unto
certain persons; while the claim of the Hindus is that the Vedas do not owe their authority to anybody, they are themselves the
authority, being eternal – the knowledge of God. They were never written,
never created, they have existed throughout time; just as creation is infinite
and eternal, without beginning and without end, so is the knowledge of God
without beginning and without end. And this knowledge is what meant by the
Vedas (Vid to know). The mass of
knowledge called the Vedanta was discovered by personages called Rishis, and
the Rishi is defined as a Mantra-drashta, a
seer of thought; not that the thought was his own. Whenever you hear that a
certain passage of the Vedas came from a certain Rishi, never think that he
wrote it or created it out of his mind; he was the seer of the thought which
already existed; it existed in the universe eternally. This sage was the
discoverer; the Righis were spiritual
discoverers.
This
mass of writing, the Vedas, is divided principally into two parts, the Karma
Kanda and the Jnana Kanda – the work portion and the knowledge portion, the
ceremonial and the spiritual. The work portion consist of various sacrifices;
most of them of late have been given up as not practicable under present
circumstances, but others remain to the present day in some shape or other. The main ideas of the Karma Kanda, which
consists of the duties of man, the duties of the student, of the householder,
of the recluse, and the various duties of the different stations of life,
are followed more or less down to the present day. But the spiritual portion of our religion is in the second part, the
Jnana Kanda, the Vedanta, the end of the Vedas, the gist, the goal of the Vedas.
The essence of the knowledge of the Vedas was called by the name of Vedanta,
which comprises the Upanishads; and all the sects of India – Dualists,
Qualified-Monists, Monists, or the Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Shaktas, Sauras,
Ganapatyas, each one that dares to come within the fold of Hinduism – must acknowledge
the Upanishads of the Vedas. They can have their own interpretations and can
interpret them in their own way, but they must obey the authority. That is why we want to use the word Vedantist
instead of Hindu. All the philosophers of India who are orthodox have to
acknowledge the authority of the Vedanta; and all our present-day religions,
however crude some of them may appear to be, however inexplicable some of their
purposes may seem, one who understands them and studies them can trace them
back to the ideas of the Upanishads. So deeply have these Upanishads sunk into
our race that those of you who study the symbology of the crudest religion of
the Hindus will be astonished to find sometimes figurative expressions of the
Upanishads – the Upanishads become symbolized after a time into figures and so
forth. Great spiritual and philosophical ideas in the Upanishads are today with
us, converted into household worship in the form of symbols. Thus the various
symbols now used by us, all come from the Vedanta, because in the Vedanta they
are used as figures, and these ideas spread among the nation and permeated it
throughout until they became part of their everything life as symbols.
Next to the Vedanta come the Smritis. These
also are books written by sages, but the authority of the Smritis is
subordinate to that of the Vedanta, because they stand in the same relation
with us as the scriptures of the other religions stand with regard to them. We
admit that the Smritis have been written by particular sages; in that sense
they are the same as the scriptures of other religions, but these Smritis are
not final authority. If there is anything in a Smriti which contradicts the
Vedanta, the Smritis is to be rejected – its authority is gone. These Smritis,
we see again, have varied from time to time. We read that such and such Smriti
should have authority in the Satya Yuga, such and such in the Treta Yuga, some
in the Dwapara Yuga, and some in the Kali Yuga, and so on. As essential
conditions changed, as various circumstances came to have their influence on
the race, manners and customs had to be changed, and these
Smritis, as mainly regulating the manners and customs of the nation, had also
to be changed from time to time. This is a point I specially ask you to
remember. The principles of religion that are in the Vedanta are unchangeable.
Why? Because they are all built upon the eternal principles that are in man and
nature; they can never change. Ideas about the soul, going to heaven, and so on
can never change; they were the same thousands of years ago, they are the same
today, they will be the same millions of years hence. But those religious
practices which are based entirely upon our social position and correlation
must change with the changes in society. Such an order, therefore, would be
good and true at a certain period and not at another. We find accordingly that
a certain food is allowed at one time and not another, because the food was
suitable for that time; but climate and other things changed, various other
circumstances required to be met, so that Smriti changed the food and other
things. Thus, it naturally follows that if in
modern times our society requires changes to be made, they must be met, and
sages will come and show us the way how to meet them; but not one jot of the
principles of our religion will be changed; they will remain intact.
Then there
are the Puranas. ‘Puranam Panchalakshanam’ – which means, the Puranas are of
five characteristics – that which treats of history, of cosmology, with various
symbological illustration of philosophical principles, and so forth. These
were written to popularize the religion of the Vedas. The language in which the
Vedas are written is very ancient, and even among scholars very few can trace
the date of these books. The Puranas were written in the language of the people
of that time, what we call modern Sanskrit. They were then meant not for
scholars, but for the ordinary people; and ordinary people cannot understand
philosophy. Such things were given unto them in concrete form, by means of the
lives of saints and kings and great men and historical events that happened to
the race etc. The sages made use of these things to illustrate the eternal
principles of religion.
There are still other books, the Tantras.
These are very much like Puranas in some respects, and in some of them there is
an attempt to revive the old sacrificial ideas of the Karma Kanda.
All these books constitute the scriptures of
the Hindus. When there is such a mass of sacred books in a nation and a race
which has devoted the greatest part of its energies to the thought of
philosophy and spirituality (nobody knows for how many thousands of years), it is quite natural that there should be so many
sects; indeed it is a wonder that there are not thousands more. These sects
differ very much from each other in certain points. We shall not have time to
understand the differences between these sects and all the spiritual details
about them; therefore I shall take up the common grounds, the essential
principles of all these sects which every Hindu must believe.
The
first is the question of creation, that this
nature, Prakriti, Maya is infinite, without beginning. It is not that this
world was created the other day, not that a God came and created the world and
since that time has been sleeping; for that cannot be. The creative energy is
still going on. God is eternally creating – is never at rest. Remember the
passage in the Gita where Krishna says, “If I
remain at rest for one moment, this universe will be destroyed.” If that
creative energy which is working all around us, day and night, stops for a
second, the whole thing falls to the ground. There never was a time when that
energy did not work throughout the universe, but there is the law of cycles, Pralaya.
Our Sanskrit word for creation, properly translated, should be projection and not creation. For the word creation in the English language has
unhappily got that fearful, that most crude idea of something coming out of
nothing, creation out of nonentity, non-existence becoming existence, which, of
course, I would not insult you by asking you to believe. Our word, therefore,
is projection. The whole of this nature exists, it becomes finer, subsides; and
then after a period of rest, as it were, the whole thing is again projected
forward, and the same combination, the same evolution, the same manifestations
appear and remain playing, as it were, for a certain time, only again to break
into pieces, to become finer and finer, until the whole thing subsides, and
again comes out. Thus it goes on backwards
and forwards with a wave-like motion throughout eternity. Time, space, and causation are all within
this nature. To say, therefore, that it had a
beginning is utter nonsense. No
question can occur as to its beginning or its end. Therefore, wherever in our
scriptures the words beginning and end are used, you must remember that it
means the beginning and the end of one particular cycle; no more than that.
What makes this creation? God. What do I
mean by the use of the English word God? Certainly not the word as ordinarily
used in English – a good deal of difference. There is no other suitable word in
English. I would rather confine myself to the Sanskarit word Brahman. He is the
general cause of all these manifestations. What is this Brahman? He is eternal,
eternally pure, eternally awake, the almighty, the all-knowing, the
all-merciful, the omnipresent, the formless, the partless. He creates this
universe. If he is always creating and holding up this universe, two
difficulties arise. We see that there is partiality in the universe. One person
is born happy, and another unhappy; one is rich, and another is poor; this
shows partiality. Then there is cruelty also, for here the very condition of
life is death. One animal tears another to pieces, and every man tries to get
the better of his own brother. This competition, cruelty, horror, and sighs
rending hearts day and night is the state of things in this world of ours. If
this be the creation of a God, that God is worse than cruel, worse than any
devil that man ever imagined. Ay! Says the Vedanta, it is not the fault of God
that this partiality exists, that this competition exists. Who makes it? We
ourselves. There is a cloud shedding its rain on all fields alike. But it is
only the field that is well cultivated, which gets the advantage of the shower;
another field, which has not been tilled or taken care of cannot get that
advantage. It is not the fault of the cloud. The mercy of God is eternal and
unchangeable; it is we that make the differentiation. But how can this
difference of some being born happy and some unhappy be explained? They do
nothing to make out that difference! Not in this life, but they did in their
last birth, and the difference is explained by this action in the previous
life.
We now come to the
second principle on which we all agree, not only all Hindus, but all Buddhists
and all Jains. We all agree that life is eternal. It is not that it has sprung
out of nothing, for that cannot be. Such a life would not be worth having.
Everything that has a beginning in time must bend in time. If life began but
yesterday, it must end tomorrow, and annihilation is the result. Life must have
been existing. It does not now require much acumen to see that, for all the
sciences of modern times have been coming round to our help, illustrating from
the material world the principles embodied in our scriptures. You know it
already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is
ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as
poets delight so much to depict, but he has
the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own
past deeds. That makes the differentiation. This is the law of Karma. Each
one of us is the maker of his own fate. This law knocks on the head at once all
doctrines of predestination and fate and gives us the only means of
reconciliation between God and man. We, we,
and none else, are responsible for what we suffer. We are the effects, and we
are the causes. We are free therefore. If
I am unhappy, it has been of my own making, and that very thing shows that I
can be happy if I will. If I am impure, that is also of my own making, and that
very thing shows that I can be pure if I will. The human will stands beyond all
circumstance. Before it – the strong, gigantic, infinite will and freedom in
man – all the powers, even of nature, must
bow down, succumb, and become its servants. This is the result of the law of
Karma.
The next question, of course, naturally
would be: What is the soul? We cannot
understand God in our scriptures without knowing the soul. There have been
attempts in India, and outside of India too, to catch a glimpse of the beyond
by studying external nature; and we all know what an awful failure has been the
result. Instead of giving us a glimpse of the beyond, the more we study the
material world, the more we tend to become materialized. The more we handle the material world, even the little spirituality
which we possessed before vanishes. Therefore that is not the way to
spirituality, to knowledge of the Highest; but it must come through the heart,
the human soul. The external workings do not teach us anything about the
beyond, about the Infinite, it is only the internal that can do so. Through
soul, therefore, the analysis of the human soul alone, can we understand God.
There are differences of opinion as to the nature of the human soul among the
various sects in India, but there are certain points of agreement. We all agree
that souls are without beginning and without end, and immortal by their very
nature; also that all powers, blessing, purity, omnipresence, omniscience are
buried in each soul. That is a grand idea we
ought to remember. In every man and in every animal, however weak or
wicked, great or small, resides the same omnipresent, omniscient soul. The
difference is not in the soul, but in the manifestation. Between me and the
smallest animal, the difference is only in manifestation, but as a principle he
is the same as I am, he is my brother, he has the same soul as I have. This is
the greatest principle that India has preached. The talk of the brotherhood of
man becomes in India the brotherhood of universal life, of animals, and of all
life down to the little ants – all these are our bodies. Even as our scripture
says, “Thus the sage, knowing that the same Lord inhabits all bodies, will
worship everybody as such.” That is why in India there have been such merciful
ideas about the poor, about animals, about everybody, and everything else. This
is one of the common grounds about our ideas of the soul.
Naturally, we come to
the idea of God. One thing more about the soul. Those who study the English
language are often deluded by the words, soul and mind. Our Atman and soul are
entirely different things. What we call Manas, the mind, the Western people
call soul. The West never had the idea of soul until they got it through
Sanskrit philosophy, some twenty years ago. The body is here, beyond that is
the mind, yet the mind is not the Atman; it
is the fine body, the Sukshma Sharira, made of fine particles, which goes
from birth to death, and so on; but behind the mind is the Atman, the soul, the
Self of man. It cannot be translated by the word soul or mind, so we have to
use the word Atman, or, as Western philosophers have designated it, by the word
Self. Whatever word you use, you must keep it clear in your mind that the Atman is separate from the mind, as well as from
the body, and that this Atman goes through birth and death, accompanied by the
mind, the Sukshma Sharira. And when the time comes that it has attained to all
knowledge and manifested itself to perfection, then this going from birth to
death ceases for it. Then it is at liberty either to keep that mind, the
Sukshman Sharira, or let it go for ever, and remain independent and free
throughout all eternity. The goal of the soul is freedom. That is one
peculiarity of our religion. We also
have heavens and hells too; but these are not infinite, for in the very nature
of things they cannot be. If there were any
heavens, they would be only repetitions of this world of ours on a bigger
scale, with a little more happiness and a little more enjoyment, but that is
all the worse of the soul. There are many of these heavens. Persons who do
good works here with the thought of reward, when they die, are born again as
gods in one of these heavens, as Indra and others. These gods are the names of
certain states. They also had been men, and by good work they have become gods;
and those different names that you read of, such as Indra and so on are not the
names of the same person. There will be thousands of Indras. Nahusha was a
great king, and when he died, he became Indra. It is a position; one soul
becomes high and takes the Indra position; one soul becomes high and takes the
Indra position and remains in it only a certain time; he then dies and is born
again as man. But the human body is the
highest of all. Some of the gods may try to go higher and give up all ideas
of enjoyment in heavens; but, as in this world, wealth and position and
enjoyment delude the vast majority, so do most of the gods become deluded also,
and after working out their good Karma, they fall down and become human beings
again. This earth, therefore, is the Karma
Bhumi; it is this earth from which we attain to liberation. So even these
heavens are not worth attaining to.
What is
then worth living? Mukti, freedom. Even in the highest of heavens, says our
scripture, you are a slave; what matters it if you are a king for twenty
thousand years? So long as you have a body, so long as you are a slave to
happiness, so long as time works on you, space works on you, you are a slave. The idea, therefore, is to be free of external
and internal nature. Nature must fall at your feet, and you must trample on it
and be free and glorious by going beyond. No more is there life; therefore
no more is there death. No more enjoyment; therefore no more misery. It is bliss unspeakable, indestructible, beyond
everything. What we call happiness and good here are but particles of that
eternal Bliss. And this eternal Bliss is our goal.
The soul is also sexless; we cannot say of the Atman that it is a
man or a woman. Sex belongs to the body alone. All such ideas, therefore, as
man or woman, are a delusion when spoken with regard to the Self, and are only
proper when spoken of the body. So are the
ideas of age. It never ages; the ancient One is always the same. How did It
come down to earth? There is but one answer to that in our scriptures. Ignorance is the cause of all this bondage.
It is through ignorance that we have become bound; knowledge will cure it by taking us to the other side. How will that
knowledge come? Through love, Bhakti; by the worship of God, by loving all
beings as the temples of God. He resides within them. Thus, with that
intense love will come knowledge, and ignorance will disappear, the bonds will
break, and the soul will be free.
There are
two ideas of God in our scriptures – the one, the personal; and the other, the impersonal.
The idea of the Personal God is that He is the omnipresent creator, preserver,
and destroyer of everything, the eternal Father and Mother of the universe, but
One who is eternally separate from us and from all souls; and liberation consists
in coming near to Him and living in Him. Then there is the other idea of the
Impersonal, where all those adjectives are taken away as superfluous, as
illogical, and there remains an impersonal, omnipresent Being who cannot be
called a knowing being, because knowledge only belongs to the human mind. He
cannot be called a thinking being, because that is a process of the weak only.
He cannot be called a reasoning being, because reasoning is a sign of weakness.
He cannot be called a creating being, because none creates except in bondage.
What bondage has He? None works except for the fulfillment of desires; what
desires has He? None works except it be to supply some wants; what wants has
He? In the Vedas it is not the word “He”
that is used, but “It”, for “He” would make an invidious distinction, as
if God were a man. “It”, the impersonal,
is used, and this impersonal “It” is
preached. This system is called the Advaita.
And what are our relations with this
Impersonal Being? – that we are He. We and He are one. Every one is but a
manifestation of that Impersonal, the basis of all being, and misery consists
in thinking of ourselves as different from this Infinite, Impersonal Being; and
liberation consists in knowing our unity with this wonderful Impersonality. These,
in short, are the two ideas of God that we find in our scriptures.
Some remarks ought to be made here. It is
only through the idea of the Impersonal God that you can have any system of
ethics. In every nation the truth has been preached from the most ancient times
– love your fellow beings as yourselves
- I mean, love human beings as yourselves. In India it has been
preached, “love all beings as yourselves”; we make no distinction between men
and animals. But no reason was forthcoming,
no one knew why it would be good to love other beings as ourselves. And the
reason, why, is there in the idea of the Impersonal God; you understand it when
you learn that the whole world is one – the
oneness of the universe – the solidarity
of all life – that in hurting any one I am hurting myself, in loving any one I
am loving myself. Hence we understand why it is that we ought not to hurt
others. The reason for ethics, therefore, can only be had from this ideal of
the Impersonal God. Then there is the question of the position of the Personal
God in it. I understand the wonderful flow of love that comes from the idea of
a Personal God, I thoroughly appreciate the power and potency of Bhakti on men
to suit the needs of different times. What we
now want in our country, however, is not so much of weeping, but a little
strength. What a mine of strength is in this Impersonal God, when all superstitions have
been thrown overboard, and man stands on his feet with the knowledge – I am the
Impersonal Being of the world! What can make me afraid? I care not even for nature’s laws. Death is a joke to me. Man
stands on the glory of his own soul, the infinite, the eternal, the deathless –
that soul which no instruments can pierce, which no air can dry, nor fire burn,
no water melt, the infinite, the birthless, the deathless, without beginning
and without end, before whose magnitude the suns and moons and all their
systems appear like drops in the ocean, before whose glory space melts away
into nothingness and time vanishes into non-existence. This glorious soul we
must believe in. Out of that will come power.
Whatever you think, that you will be. If you think yourselves weak, weak you
will be; if you think yourselves strong, strong you will be; if you think yourselves impure, impure you will
be; if you think yourselves pure, pure you will be. This teaches us not to
think ourselves as weak, but as strong, omnipotent, omniscient. No matter that
I have not expressed it yet, it is in me. All knowledge is in me, all power,
all purity, and all freedom. Why cannot I express this knowledge? Because I do
not believe in it. Let me believe in it, and it must and will come out.
This is what the idea of the Impersonal teaches. Make
your children strong from their very childhood; teach them not weakness, nor
forms, but make them strong; let them stand on their feet-bold, all-conquering,
all-suffering; and first of all, let them learn of the glory of the soul. That
you get alone in the Vedanta – and there alone. It has ideas of love and
worship and other things which we have in other religions, and more besides;
but this idea of the soul is the life-giving thought, the most wonderful. There and there alone is the great thought that
is going to revolutionise the world and reconcile the knowledge of the material
world with religion.
Thus I have tried to bring before you the
silent points of our religion – the principles. I have only to say a few words
about the practice and the application. As we have seen, under the
circumstances existing in India, naturally many sects must appear. As a fact,
we find that there are so many sects in India, and at the same time we know
this mysterious fact that these sects do not quarrel with each other. The
Shaivite does not say that every Vaishnavite is going to be demned. The
Shaivite says, this is my path, and you have yours; at the end we must come
together. They all know that in India. This is the theory of Ishta. It has been
recognized in the most ancient times that there are various forms of
worshipping God. It is also recognized that different natures require different
methods. Your method of coming to God may not be my method, possibly it might
hurt me. Such an idea as that there is but one way for everybody is injurious,
meaningless, and entirely to be avoided. Woe unto the world when everyone is of
the same religious opinion and takes to the same path. Then all religions and
all thought will be destroyed. Variety is the
very soul of life. When it dies out entirely, creation will die. When this
variation in thought is kept up, we must exist; and we need not quarrel because
of that variety. Your way is very good for
you, but not for me. My way is good for me, but not for you. My way is
called in Sanskrit, my “Ishta”. Mind you, we
have no quarrel with any religion in the world. We have each our Ishta. But
when we see men coming and saying, “This is
the only way”, and trying to force it on us in India, we have a word to say;
we laugh at them. For such people who want to destroy their brothers because
they seem to follow a different path towards God – for them to talk of love is
absurd. Their love does not count for much. How can they preach of love who
cannot bear another man to follow a different path from their own? If that is
love, what is hatred? We have no quarrel with any religion in the world,
whether it teaches men to worship Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed, or any other
prophet. “Welcome, my brother,” the Hindu says, “I am going to help you; but
you must allow me to follow my way too. That is my Ishta. Your way is very good,
no doubt; but it may be dangerous for me. My own experience tells me what food
is good for me, and no army of doctors can tell me that. So I know from my own
experience what path is the best for me.” That is the goal, the Ishta, and
therefore, we say that if a temple, or a symbol, or an image helps you to
realize the Divinity within, you are welcome to it. Have two hundred images if
you like. If certain forms and formularies help you to realize the Divine, God
speed you; have, by all means, whatever forms, and whatever temples, and
whatever ceremonies you want to bring you nearer to God. But do not quarrel
about them; the moment you quarrel, you are not going Godward, you are going
backward, towards the brutes.
These are a few ideas in our religion. It is
one of inclusion of every one, exclusion of none. Though our castes and our
institutions are apparently linked with our religion, they are not so. These
institutions have been necessary to protect us as a nation, and when this
necessity for self-preservation will no more exist, they will die a natural
death. But the older I grow, the better I seem to think of these time-honored
institutions of India. There was a time when I used to think that many of them
were useless and worthless; but the older I grow, the more I seem to feel a
diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment
of the experience of centuries. A child of but yesterday, destined to die the
day after tomorrow, comes to me and asks me to change all my plans; and if I
hear the advice of that baby and change all my plans; and if I hear the advice
of that baby and change all my surroundings according to his ideas, I myself
should be a fool, and no one else. Much of the advice that is coming to us from
different countries is similar to this. Tell these wiseacres: “I will hear you
when you have made a stable society yourselves. You cannot hold on to one idea
for two days, you quarrel and fail; you are born like moths in the spring and
die like them in five minutes. You come up like bubbles and burst like bubbles
too. First form a stable society like ours. First make laws and institutions
that remain undiminished in their power through scores of centuries. Then will
be the time to talk on the subject with you, but till then, my friend, you are
only a giddy child.”
I have finished what
I had to say about our religion. I will end by reminding you of the one
pressing necessity of the day. Praise be to Vyasa, the great author of the
Mahabharata, that in this Kali Yuga there is one great work. The Tapas and the other hard Yogas that were
practiced in other Yugas do not now. What is needed in this Yuga is giving,
helping others. What is meant by Dana? The highest of gifts is the giving of
spiritual knowledge, the next is the giving of secular knowledge, and the next
is the saving of life, the last is giving food and drink. He who gives
spiritual knowledge, saves the soul from many and many a birth. He who gives
secular knowledge opens the eyes of human beings towards spiritual knowledge,
and far below these rank all other gifts, even the saving of life. Therefore it
is necessary that you learn this and note that all other kinds of work are of
much less value than that of imparting spiritual knowledge. The highest and
greatest help is that given in the dissemination of spiritual knowledge. There is an eternal fountain of spirituality in
our scriptures, and nowhere on earth, except in this land of renunciation, do
we find such noble examples of practical spirituality. I have had a little
experience of the world. Believe me, there is much talking in other lands; but
the practical man of religion, who has carried it into his life, is here and
here alone. Talking is not religion; parrots may talk, machines may talk
nowadays. But show me the life of renunciation, of spirituality, of
all-suffering of love infinite. This
kind of life indicates a spiritual man. With such ideas and such noble
practical examples in our country, it would be a great pity if the treasures in
the brains and hearts of all these great Yogis were not brought out to become
the common property of every one, rich and poor, high and low; not only in
India, but they must be thrown broadcast all over the world. This is one of our
greatest duties, and you will find that the more you work to help others, the
more you help yourselves. The one vital duty incumbent on you, if you really
love your religion, if you really love your country, is that you must struggle
hard to be up and doing, with this one great idea of bringing out the treasures
from your closed books and delivering them over to their rightful heirs.
And above
all, one thing is necessary. Ay, for ages we have been saturated with awful
jealousy; we are always getting jealous of each other. Why has this man a
little precedence, and not I? Even in the worship of God we want precedence, to
such a state of slavery have we come. This is to be avoided. If there is any
crying sin in India at this time it is this slavery. Every one wants to
command, and no one wants to obey; and this is owing to the absence of that
wonderful Brahmacharya system of yore. First, learn to obey. The command will
come by itself. Always first learn to be a servant, and then you will be fit to
be a master. Avoid this jealousy, and you will do great works that have yet to
be done. Our ancestors did most wonderful works, and we look back upon their
work with veneration and pride. But we also are going to do great deeds, and
let others look back with blessings and pride upon us as their ancestors. With
the blessing of the Lord everyone here will yet do such deeds that will eclipse
those of our ancestors, great and glorious as them may have been.
...The End...
