The Necessity of Religion

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(from Jnana Yoga by Swami Vivekanand)

 

Some exceptions may be taken in the case of the Buddhists as

represented by the

Southern sect. It may be asked--if the Buddhists do not believe in

any God or

soul, how can their religion be derived from the supersensuous state

of

existence? The answer to this is that even the Buddhists find an

eternal moral

law, and that moral law was not reasoned out in our sense of the

word. But

Buddha found it, discovered it, in a supersensuous state. Those of

you who have

studied the life of Buddha, even as briefly given in that beautiful

poem, The

Light of Asia, may remember that Buddha is represented as sitting

under the

Bo-tree until he reached that supersensuous state of mind. All his

teachings

came through this, and not through intellectual cogitations.

 

Thus, a tremendous statement is made by all religions; that the human

mind, at

certain moments, transcends not only the limitations of the senses,

but also the

power of reasoning. It then comes face to face with facts which it

could never

have sensed, could never have reasoned out. These facts are the basis

of all the

religions of the world. Of course we have the right to challenge

these facts, to

put them to the test of reason. Nevertheless, all the existing

religions of the

world claim for the human mind this peculiar power of transcending

the limits of

the senses and the limits of reason; and this power they put forward

as a

statement of fact.

 

Apart from the consideration of the question how far these facts

claimed by

religions are true, we find one characteristic common to them all.

They are all

abstractions as contrasted with the concrete discoveries of physics,

for

instance; and in all the highly organised religions they take the

purest form of

Unit Abstraction, either in the form of an Abstracted Presence, as an

Omnipresent Being, as an Abstract Personality called God, as a Moral

Law, or in

the form of an Abstract Essence underlying every existence. In modern

times,

too, the attempts made to preach religions without appealing to the

supersensuous state of mind have had to take up the old abstractions

of the

Ancients and give different names to them as " Moral Law " , the " Ideal

Unity " , and

so forth, thus showing that these abstractions are not in the senses.

None of us

have yet seen an " Ideal Human Being " , and yet we are told to believe

in it. None

of us have yet seen an ideally perfect man, and yet without that

ideal we cannot

progress. Thus, this one fact stands out from all these different

religions,

that there is an Ideal Unit Abstraction, which is put before us,

either in the

form of a Person or an Impersonal Being, or a Law, or a Presence, or

an Essence.

We are always struggling to raise ourselves up to that ideal. Every

human being,

whosoever and wheresoever he may be, has an ideal of infinite power.

Every human

being has an ideal of infinite pleasure. Most of the works that we

find around

us, the activities displayed everywhere, are due to the struggle for

this

infinite power or this infinite pleasure. But a few quickly discover

that

although they are struggling for infinite power, it is not through

the senses

that it can be reached. They find out very soon that that infinite

pleasure is

not to be got through the senses, or, in other words, the senses are

too

limited, and the body is too limited, to express the Infinite. To

manifest the

Infinite through the finite is impossible, and sooner or later, man

learns to

give up the attempt to express the Infinite through the finite. This

giving up,

this renunciation of the attempt, is the background of ethics.

Renunciation is

the very basis upon which ethics stands. There never was an ethical

code

preached which had not renunciation for its basis.

 

.... to be continued