On Hinduism By Swami Vivekananda

[Guest guest]

Chicago, Illinois

19 September 1893

 

On Hinduism By Swami Vivekananda

 

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 sea-shore in a tremendous

earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-

absorbing Hood, 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 center 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 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 honor 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, zoning 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 the 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 I am in this body; it will fall, but l 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 vigor, 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 ôôare 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 Rat 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 his 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 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 center is located in the

body, and that death means the change of the center from holy to

body. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter.

 

In its very essence, it is flee, 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 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 center 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 from 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.

We are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and

perfect beings. e divinities on earth - sinners! It is a sin to call

a ma. so; it is 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

Veda. And how to worship Him? Through love. 'He is to be worshiped 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 how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so

much misery. udhishthira answered, 'Be hold, my queen, the Himalayas,

how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me

any- thing 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 beloved; 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 center, 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 Rota 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 realizing - 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 realize 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 Rim, 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 one 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 others could be made.

Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in

discovering one energy of which all the others are hut

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 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 l have seen amongst them that

are called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and

spirituality and love, I have never seen anywhere, l 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. Finer 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 ideas 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

centered in realization. Man is to become divine by realizing 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 realized., 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 anyone's idol

or call its worship sin. He recognizes 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 realize 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 realize 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 recognized

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 realized, or thought

of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and

crescents are simply so many symbols - so many pegs to hang spiritual

ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, 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 neighbors. 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 colors - 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 centers 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

bath 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 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

recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope,

whose whole force, will be centered in aiding humanity to realize 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 parlor 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(1), a thousand

fold 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 neighbor's blood, who never found out

that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's

neighbors, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of

civilization with the flag of harmony.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

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(1) A Tibetan name for the Bramaputra River