Vivekananda on the Vedas (Part 29)

January 14, 2001

Parts 1 to 28 were posted earlier. This is part 29. Your comments are welcome... Vivekananda Centre London

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

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS

By Sister Gayatriprana

part 29

4. The True Aryan Is He Who Is Born through Prayer, the Descendant of the Whole Universe

What is an Aryan? He is a man whose birth is through religion. This is a peculiar subject, perhaps, in the USA, but the idea is that a man must be born through religion, through prayers. (15)

The child whose very conception and whose death is according to the rules of the Vedas, such is an Aryan. (16)

He is of the "Aryan race" who is born through prayer, and he is a non-Aryan who is born through sensuality. (17)

Re [the theory of] the Accado-Sumerian racial identity of the ancient Tamilians: this makes us proud of the blood of the great civilization which flowered before all others - compared to whose antiquity the Aryans and the Semites are babies....

As for us Vedantins and sannyasins [monks], we are proud of our Sanskrit-speaking ancestors of the Vedas; proud of our Tamil-speaking ancestors whose civilization is the oldest yet known; we are proud of our Kolaran ancestors, older than either of the above - who lived and hunted in forests; we are proud of our ancestors with flint implements - the first of the human race; and, if evolution be true, we are proud of our animal ancestors, for they antedated man himself. We are proud that we are the descendants of the whole universe, sentient or insentient. Proud that we are born, and work, and suffer - proudest still that we die when the task is finished and enter for ever the realm where there is no more delusion. (18)

b) The Indian Aryans Sought, above All, to Master the Mind and Go Beyond Physical Pleasures

1. Through Culture of the Mind and Intellect the Indian Aryans Evolved the Upanishads

We find three ideas wherever the Aryans go: the village community, the rights of women, and a joyful religion. The first is the system of village communities...; each man was his own and owned the land. All these political institutions of the world that we now see are the development of these village systems; as the Aryans went to different countries and settled, certain circumstances developed this institution, others that. (19)

When the Aryans reached India, they found the climate so hot that they could not work incessantly, so they began to think; thus they became introspective and developed religion. They discovered that there is no limit to the power of the mind. They therefore sought to master that, and through it they learned that there is something infinite coiled up in the frame we call man, and that it is seeking to become kinetic. To evolve this became their chief aim. (20)

The Aryans were lovers of peace, cultivators of the soil, and were quite happy and contented if only they could rear their families undisturbed. In such a life they had ample leisure, and therefore greater opportunity of being thoughtful and civilized. Our King Janaka tilled the soil with his own hands, and he was also the greatest of knowers of Truth of his time. With us, rishis, munis, and yogis have been born from the very beginning; they have known from the first that the world is a chimera. Plunder and fight as you may, the enjoyment that you are seeking is only in peace; and peace, in the renunciation of physical pleasures. Enjoyment lies, not in physical development, but in the culture of the mind and intellect. (21)

The Upanishads were preached and oblations offered in hermitages near which deer grazed. (22)

2. The Bold Intellectual Analysis of the Indian Aryans Produced Great Contributions to Science

In ancient India the centers of national life were always the intellectual and spiritual, not political. Of old, as now, political and social power have always been subordinated to spiritual and intellectual. The outburst of national life was round colleges of sages and spiritual teachers. We thus find the samitis of the Panchalas, of the Kasyas (of Varanasi), the Maithilas standing out as great centers of spiritual culture and philosophy, even in the Upanishads. Again, these centers in turn became the focus of political ambitions of the various divisions of the Aryans. (23)

There was an inquisitiveness in the race to start with, which very soon developed into bold analysis; and though, in the first attempt, the work turned out might be like the attempts with shaky hands of the future master-sculptor, it very soon gave way to science, bold attempts, and startling results.

Its boldness made these men search every brick of their sacrificial altars - scan, cement, and pulverize every word of their scriptures, arrange, rearrange, doubt, deny, or explain the ceremonies. (24)

Vedic anatomy was no less perfect than the Ayurvedic. There were many names for many parts of the Organs, because they had to cut up animals for sacrifice. (25)

Their boldness turned their gods inside out and assigned only a secondary place to the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Creator of the universe, their ancestral Father-in-Heaven; or threw Him altogether overboard as useless and started a world religion without Him [buddhism], with even now the largest following of any religion. (26)

The sea is described as full of ships. Sea voyage was prohibited later on, partly because there came the fear that people might thereby become Buddhists. (27)

The Vedic sacrificial altar was the origin of geometry. (28)

The Aryans were by nature an analytical race. In the science of mathematics and grammar, wonderful fruits were gained, and by the analysis of the mind the full tree was developed. (29)

[The boldness of the Aryans] evolved the science of geometry from the arrangement of the bricks to build various altars and startled the world with astronomical knowledge that arose from the attempts to time accurately their worship and oblations. It made their contribution to the science of mathematics the largest of any race, ancient or modern; and to their knowledge of chemistry, or metallic compounds in medicine, their scale of musical notes, their invention of the bow-instruments - all of great service in the building of the modern European civilization. It led them to invent the science of building up the child-mind through shining fables, of which every child in every civilized country learns in a nursery or school and carries an impress through life. (30)

3. Poetic Insight Was the Other Great Peculiarity of the Indian Aryans

Behind and before this analytical keenness, covering it as in a velvet sheath, was the other great mental peculiarity of the race - poetic insight. Its religion, its philosophy, its history, its ethics, its politics, were all inlaid in a flowerbed of poetic imagery - the miracle of language which was called Sanskrit, or perfected, lending itself to expressing and manipulating them better than any other tongue. The aid of melodious numbers was involved even to express the hard facts of mathematics.

This analytical power and the boldness of poetical visions which urged it onwards are the two great internal causes in the makeup of the Hindu race. They together formed, as it were, the keynote of the national character. This combination is what is always making the race press onwards beyond the senses - the secret of those speculations which are like the steel blades the artisans used to manufacture - cutting through bars of iron, yet pliable enough to be bent into a circle.

They wrought poetry in silver and gold; the symphony of jewels, the maze of marble wonders, the music of colors, the fine fabrics which belong more to the fairyland of dreams than to the real - have back of them thousands of years of working of this national trait.

Arts and sciences, even the realities of domestic life, are covered with a mass of poetical conceptions, which are pressing forward till the sensuous touched the supersensuous, and the real gets the rose-hue of the unreal.

The earliest glimpses we have of this race show it already in possession of this characteristic, as an instrument of some use in its hands. Many forms of religion and society must have been left behind in the onward march before we find the race as depicted in the scriptures, the Vedas.

An organized pantheon, elaborate ceremonials, divisions of society into hereditary classes necessitated by a variety of occupations, a great many necessaries and a good many luxuries of life are already there. (31)

to be continued.....