Vivekananda on the Vedas part (8)

[Guest guest]

We are presenting the following work by Sister Gayatriprana.

Your comments are welcome. Parts 1 to 7 were posted earlier this is part 8.

jay..Vivekananda Centre London

Earlier postings can be seen at http://www.vivekananda.btinternet.co.uk/veda.htm

 

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 8

 

PART I:

THE ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VEDAS AND VEDANTA

 

continued.....

 

Such was the training of Naren. Little by little, he was lifted out of doubt

into beatitude, out of darkness into effulgence, out of anguish of mind and

heart into blessedness and bliss, out of the seething vortex of the world into

the grand expanse of the world of realization. He was taken, little by little,

and by the power of Sri Ramakrishna, out of bondage into infinite freedom. He

was taken out from the pale of a little learning into that omniscience which is

the consciousness of Brahman. He was lifted out of all objective conceptions of

the Godhead into the glorious awareness of the subjective nature of true Being,

above form, above thought, above sense, above all relative good and evil, into

the sameness and reality and the absolute - beyondness of Brahman. (1)

 

Sri Ramakrishna was the man of realization. Naren aspired to be even like him.

And his desire was fulfilled. It was because he had lived in the garden of

Dakshineshwar and in that of Cossipore with the Master that he was later on able

to stand before large audiences and utter the words of a gospel which stirred

the human heart to its very depths. In the presence of his guru Naren dwelt in

the spiritual world, the inhabitants of which were the simple-minded and the

simple-hearted devotees of Sri Ramakrishna, the light of which was the

beautifully human and humanly divine personality of the Master. Naren came to

stand on firm ground because he was touching the human foundation of all

religious systems. The voice of his master, the tears and smiles during his

spiritual experiences, the manner in which he walked and ate and performed the

thousand and one things of human life, became gospels and apocalyptic

revelations unto him. And how shall divinity ever be revealed if not in all the

sweetness and in spite of all the limitations of human personality? Naren sat at

the feet of his Master and in his eyes he read the whole meaning of the Vedas

and Upanishads. Spirituality was therefore no longer garbed for him in fine but

impractical metaphysics; it presented itself in all the simplicity and in all

the divinity of human life. (2)

 

 

b) Swami Vivekananda’s Visions of Vedic Rishis

 

Swami Vivekananda always thought of himself as a child of India, a descendant of

the rishis. While he was a modern of the moderns, few Hindus have been able to

bring back the Vedic days and the life of the sages in the forests of ancient

India as he did. Indeed, sometimes he seemed to be one of the rishis of that far

off time come to life again, so living was his teaching of that ancient

wisdom...

 

In a dream or vision... he saw sages gathered in a holy grove asking questions

concerning the ultimate Reality. A youth among them answered in a clarion voice:

"Hear, ye children of immortal bliss, even ye who dwell in higher spheres, I

have found the ancient One, knowing whom alone ye shall be saved from death over

again!" [swet.Up.2.5 and 3.8]

 

Asked where he had learnt to chant with that marvelous intonation which never

failed to thrill the listener, he shyly told of a dream or vision in which he

saw himself in the forest of ancient India hearing a voice - his voice -

chanting the sacred Sanskrit verses. (3)

 

"It was evening in that age when the Aryans had only reached the Indus. I saw an

old man seated on the bank of the great river. Wave upon wave of darkness was

rolling in upon him, and he was chanting from the Rig Veda. Then I awoke, and

went on chanting. They were the tones that we used long ago... Shankaracharya

has caught the rhythm of the Vedas, the national cadence. Indeed, I always

imagine that he had some vision such as mine when he was young, and recovered

the ancient music that way." (4)

 

Swami Vivekananda had this vision in his parivrajaka days, some two years after

the mahasamadhi of Sri Ramakrishna, probably in January of 1888. On that

occasion he had the vision of an old man standing on the banks of the Indus and

chanting riks or Vedic mantrams, in such a distinctly different form from the

accustomed methods of intonation that it could be compared rather to Gregorian

chanting. The passage which he heard was that salutation to Gayatri which

begins: "O come, Thou effulgent One, Thou bestower of blessings, signifier of

Brahman in three letters. Salutation be to Thee, O Gayatri, Mother of Vedic

mantrams, Thou who hast sprung from Brahman." The Swami believed that through

this perception he had recovered the musical cadences of the earliest Aryan

ancestors and thought that his own Master must have had a somewhat similar

experience in which he had caught "the rhythm of the Vedas." He also found

something remarkably sympathetic to this mode of chanting in the poetry of

Shankaracharya. (5)

 

 

(to be continued......)