Paper on Hinduism
"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 in different times. Just as the law of gravitation
existed before its discovery, and would 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.”
Paper on Hinduism
By Swami Vivekananda
Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893
E-Text Source: www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info
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, 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 seashore 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.
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 in different times. Just as the law of gravitation
existed before its discovery, and would 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 or 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.
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 substances?
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.
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 our 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 — 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. 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 here is another
question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the
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 and effect; a little moth placed
under the wheel of causation 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 the 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, whom 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 disciples 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. 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.”
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, 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. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. 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 alone 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 other could be made.
Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in
discovering one energy of which all 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 is it, 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.
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 worshipers 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 hearers sharply answered," If I abuse your God, what can He
do?” "You would be punished," said the preacher," when you die.” "So
my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu.
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?”
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 as 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.
As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental
constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the
image 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 any one'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, mean 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 if
there is ever to be a universal religion, it must 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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