Swami Vivekananda says Vedanta alone can become the universal religion of man

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THE MISSION OF THE VEDANTA Volume 3, Lectures from Colombo to Almora

 

In other countries religion is only one of the many necessities in life. To

use a common illustration which I am in the habit of using, my lady has many

things in her parlour, and it is the fashion nowadays to have a Japanese

vase, and she must procure it; it does not look well to be without it. So my

lady, or my gentleman, has many other occupations in life, and also a little

bit of religion must come in to complete it. Consequently he or she has a

little religion.Politics, social improvement, in one word, this world, is

the goal of mankind in the West, and God and religion come in quietly as

helpers to attain that goal.

 

Their God is, so to speak, the Being who helps to cleanse and to furnish

this world for them; that is apparently all the value of God for them. Do

you not know how for the last hundred or two hundred years you have been

hearing again and again out of the lips of men who ought to have known

better, from the mouths of those who pretend at least to know better, that

all the arguments they produce against the Indian religion is this — that

our religion does not conduce to well-being in this world, that it does not

bring gold to us, that it does not make us robbers of nations, that it does

not make the strong stand upon the bodies of the weak and feed themselves

with the life-blood of the weak. Certainly our religion does not do that.

 

Ours is the true religion because it teaches that God alone is true, that

this world is false and fleeting, that all your gold is but as dust, that

all your power is finite, and that life itself is oftentimes an evil;

therefore it is, that ours is the true religion. Ours is the true religion

because, above all, it teaches renunciation and stands up with the wisdom of

ages to tell and to declare to the nations who are mere children of

yesterday in comparison with us Hindus — who own the hoary antiquity of the

wisdom, discovered by our ancestors here in India — to tell them in plain

words: " Children, you are slaves of the senses; there is only finiteness in

the senses, there is only ruination in the senses; the three short days of

luxury here bring only ruin at last. Give it all up, renounce the love of

the senses and of the world; that is the way of religion. " Through

renunciation is the way to the goal and not through enjoyment. Therefore

ours is the only true religion.

 

I have become used to hear all sorts of wonderful claims put forward in

favour of every religion under the sun. You have also heard, quite within

recent times, the claims put forward by Dr. Barrows, a great friend of mine,

that Christianity is the only universal religion. Let me consider this

question awhile and lay before you my reasons why I think that it is

Vedanta, and Vedanta alone that can become the universal religion of man,

and that no other is fitted for the role. Excepting our own almost all the

other great religions in the world are inevitably connected with the life or

lives of one or more of their founders.

 

Have faith in yourselves, and stand up on that faith and be strong; that is

what we need. Why is it that we three hundred and thirty millions of people

have been ruled for the last one thousand years by any and every handful of

foreigners who chose to walk over our prostrate bodies? Because they had

faith in themselves and we had not. What did I learn in the West, and what

did I see behind those frothy sayings of the Christian sects repeating that

man was a fallen and hopelessly fallen sinner? There I saw that inside the

national hearts of both Europe and America reside the tremendous power of

the men's faith in themselves.

 

Ay, my friends, I must tell you a few harsh truths. I read in the newspaper

how, when one of our fellows is murdered or ill-treated by an Englishman,

howls go up all over the country; I read and I weep, and the next moment

comes to my mind the question: Who is responsible for it all? As a Vedantist

I cannot but put that question to myself. The Hindu is a man of

introspection; he wants to see things in and through himself, through the

subjective vision. I, therefore, ask myself: Who is responsible? And the

answer comes every time: Not the English; no, they are not responsible; it

is we who are responsible for all our misery and all our degradation, and we

alone are responsible.

 

Teach yourselves, teach every one his real nature, call upon the sleeping

soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will

come, purity will come, and everything that is excellent will come when this

sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity. Ay, if there is anything

in the Gita that I like, it is these two verses, coming out strong as the

very gist, the very essence, of Krishna's teaching — " He who sees the

Supreme Lord dwelling alike in all beings, the Imperishable in things that

perish, he sees indeed. For seeing the Lord as the same, everywhere present,

he does not destroy the Self by the Self, and thus he goes to the highest

goal. "

 

If the Brahmin is he who has killed all selfishness and who lives and works

to acquire and propagate wisdom and the power of love — if a country is

altogether inhabited by such Brahmins, by men and women who are spiritual

and moral and good, is it strange to think of that country as being above

and beyond all law? What police, what military are necessary to govern them?

Why should any one govern them at all? Why should they live under a

government? They are good and noble, and they are the men of God; these are

our ideal Brahmins, and we read that in the Satya Yuga there was only one

caste, and that was the Brahmin. We read in the Mahâbhârata that the whole

world was in the beginning peopled with Brahmins, and that as they began to

degenerate, they became divided into different castes, and that when the

cycle turns round, they will all go back to that Brahminical origin. This

cycle is turning round now, and I draw your attention to this fact.

 

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Om namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya

Prashant Jalasutram