Vivekananda on the Vedas part ((9))

September 4, 2000

We are presenting the following work by Sister Gayatriprana.

Your comments are welcome. Parts 1 to 8 were posted earlier this is part 9. ... 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 9

PART I:

THE ORIGINS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE VEDAS AND VEDANTA

c) The Education of His Brother-Disciples

May of 1887: [After the passing away of Sri Ramakrishna] Narendra and other members of the math often spent their evenings on the roof [of the monastery at Baranagore]. There they devoted a great deal of time to discussion of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Shankaracharya, Ramanuja, Jesus Christ and of the Hindu philosophy, European philosophy, the Vedas, Puranas, and Tantras. (6)

A few days after the Master had passed away, the mother of Swami Premananda invited Sri Ramakrishna's monastic disciples to her village home at Antpur. Swami Vivekananda took them all to Antpur. Their hearts were then afire with renunciation; they felt great agony of sorrow at the loss of their Master; and all were engaged in intense spiritual practices. The only thought they had during those days, and the only effort they made, was for the realization of God and the attainment of peace. When they were at Antpur, they applied themselves much more intensely to spiritual practices. They would light a fire with logs under the open sky and spend the nights there in japa and meditation. Swami Vivekananda would talk with us fervently about renunciation and self-sacrifice. Sometimes he would make his brother-disciples read the Gita, the Bhagavata, the Upanishads, etc., and hold discussions on them. (7)

[At the Baranagore monastery], Narendra... would illustrate the historical import of Sri Ramakrishna’s life and teachings upon the present generation of Hindus who were educated in Western lines of thought, and would show how his life was destined to alter their minds and the entire character of their theological outlook, thus bringing them back from drafting in an ever-widening radical divergence from Hinduism into the understanding of and concurrence with the Hindu ideals of worship and with the contents of the Upanishads. He would say to them, "The time will come when you will see what part Ramakrishna has played in the re-Hinduization of Hinduism and the consolidation, into a compact form, of its essential elements."…

Through loving discipline he infused into his brother-disciples the fire and a wider knowledge of the mission that was before them, the mission which was entrusted by the Master into his charge for fruition and dissemination. Most of the sublime ideas which he gave to the world in the time of his fame were not new to his brother-disciples, except in modes of expression, for they had heard them in these Baranagore days, or even earlier at the garden-house at Cossipore.

Most of all, the leader initiated his fellow-monks into the living realities of Hinduism, making them conscious of the values of its thought and spirit…. He made them master the Upanishads, the Yoga Vashishtha, the Puranas, and the other Shastras, until they knew why the rishis were so exclusive to those who were outside the pale of Hinduism, but their wisdom was to brahmanize them and brahmanize the shudras. (8)

[After his return to Baranagore from his first pilgrimage to the north of India in early 1888, Swami Vivekananda] instilled into his brothers all the ideas he had gathered as a parivrajaka. He broadened their perspective, instructing them for days and days and making them interested in the spiritual regeneration of the nation. He tried to eradicate their provincial consciousness and make them think of all the separate parts of Hindustan as composing an indivisible unit. And the spirit of that unit, he said, was that of the Vedas and Upanishads, and its strength the supersensuous vision and the most wonderful outlook upon life that the human mind and heart had ever conceived. In Ramakrishna India would be one, he said. And this particular training of mind made them capable of bridging the barriers that separate one province or one caste from another. For in turn, they were to cross the boundary line which modern Hinduism, in its more rigid orthodoxy, had determined as the immovable barrier between one caste and another, between one nation and another. (9)

[in 1890], Swami Vivekananda took Swami Akhandananda with him on his journey [of pilgrimage] to Western India.... At Almora, they met Swami Saradananda and Vaikuntha Sannyal (Swami Kripananda).... They stayed at Srinagar, Garhwal, and stayed there for a month and a half. On the way there, they took lessons on the Upanishads from Swami Vivekananda, and spent their time in intense prayer and meditation at Srinagar. (10)

At Srinagar, the monks took up their abode in a lonely hut by the banks of the Alakananda river in which, they came to know, Swami Turiyananda had lived before. In this hut Swami Vivekananda and his brothers passed many days, living on madhukari bhiksha, which means literally, begging a few morsels of food from each house in the village, "even as the bee supports itself with particles of honey from each flower." During these travels and specially here, the Swami instructed his brother-disciples in the teachings of the Upanishads. For days and days in Srinagar, he spent most of the time reading to them these scriptures until their minds became saturated with their meaning and their message. While at Srinagar, he met a school-master, by caste a vaishya, who was a recent convert to Christianity. The Swami spoke to him on the glories of the Vedic religion, and he became repentant of having renounced the glories of the sanatana dharma and longed to return to the Hindu fold. He became greatly attached to the monks and often entertained them in his house. (11)

[in December, 1890, Swami Vivekananda and six of his brother disciples met by chance at Meerut and lived together in an impromptu math for two months. Swami Turiyananda wrote of this episode]: It is well-nigh impossible to express the happiness our stay in Meerut brought to us. During those days Swami Vivekananda taught us everything, right from mending a pair of shoes to chanting the holy Chandi. On the one hand, he would read out and explain to us the Vedanta, the Upanishads, Sanskrit dramas, etc., and on the other, he would teach us how to cook pilau, kalia etc. (12)

(to be continued.....)