20th September, 1892
Dear Panditji Maharaj,*
Your letter has reached me duly. I do not know
why I should be undeservingly praised. "None
is good, save One, that is, God", as the Lord Jesus hath said. The
rest are only tools in His hands. "Gloria in Excelsis", "Glory
unto God in the highest", and unto men that deserve, but not to such an
undeserving one like me. Here "the servant is not worthy of the hire"; and a Fakir,
especially, has no right to any praise whatsoever, for would you praise your
servant for simply doing his duty?
. . . My unbounded gratitude to Pandit
Sundarlalji, and to my Professor** for
this kind remembrance of me.
Now I will tell you something else. The Hindu mind was ever deductive and never
synthetic or inductive. In all our philosophies, we always find hair -
splitting arguments, taking for granted some general proposition, but the
proposition itself may be as childish as possible. Nobody ever asked or searched the truth of these general propositions.
Therefore independent thought we have almost none to speak of, and hence the
dearth of those sciences which are the results of observation and
generalisation. And why was it thus?--
from two causes: The tremendous heat of the climate forcing us to love rest and
contemplation better than activity, and the Brahmins as priests never
undertaking journeys or voyages to distant lands. There were voyagers and
people who travelled far; but they were
almost always traders, i.e. people from whom priestcraft and their own sole love for gain had taken away all
capacity for intellectual development. So their observations, instead of adding
to the store of human knowledge, rather degenerated it; for their observations
were bad and their accounts exaggerated and tortured into fantastical shapes,
until they passed all recognition.
So you see, we must travel, we
must go to foreign parts. We must see how the engine of society works in other
countries, and keep free and open communication with what is going on in the
minds of other nations, if we really want to be a nation again. And over and
above all, we must cease to tyrannise. To what a ludicrous state are we
brought! If a Bhangi comes to anybody as a Bhangi, he would be shunned as the
plague; but no sooner does he get a cupful of water poured upon his head with
some mutterings of prayers by a Padri, and get a coat on his back, no matter
how threadbare, and come into the room of the most orthodox Hindu -- I don't
see the man who then dare refuse him a chair and a hearty shake of the hands!
Irony can go no further. And come and see what they, the Padris, are doing here
in the Dakshin (south). They are converting the lower classes by lakhs; and in
Travancore, the most priest - ridden country in India -- where every bit of
land is owned by the Brahmins . . . nearly one - fourth has become Christian!
And I cannot blame them; what part have they in David and what in Jesse? When,
when, O Lord, shall man be brother to man?
Yours,
Vivekananda
* Pandit Shankarlal of Khetri.
**
With whom he read the Maha - Bhashya on Panini.
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