Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 110)

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Parts 1 to 109 were posted earlier. This is part 110. 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 110

 

b) Faith and Love

1. The Indian Ideal of Love Can Be Traced to the Upanishads

Faith in one's own Self... is the basis of Vedanta. (9)

The Upanishads deal elaborately with shraddha (faith) in many places but hardly mention bhakti. (10)

Sometimes it has been urged without any ground whatsoever that there is no ideal of bhakti in the Upanishads. Those that have been students of the Upanishads know that that is not true at all. There is enough bhakti in every Upanisad if only you will seek for it; but many of these ideas which are found so fully developed in later times in the Puranas and other Smritis are only in the germ in the Upanishads. The sketch, the skeleton, as it were, is there. It was filled in in some of the Puranas. But there is not one full-grown Indian ideal that cannot be traced back to the same source - the Upanishads. Certain ludicrous attempts have been made by persons without much Upanishadic scholarship to trace bhakti to some foreign source; but, as you know, these have all been proved to be failures, and all that you want of bhakti is there, even in the Samhitas, not to speak of the Upanishads. It is there, worship and love and all the rest of it; only the ideals of bhakti are becoming higher and higher. In the Samhita portions, now and then you find traces of a religion of fear and tribulation; in the Samhitas now and then you find a worshipper quaking before a Varuna or some other god. Now and then you will find that they are very much tortured by the idea of sin, but the Upanishads have no place for the delineation of these things. There is no religion of fear in the Upanishads; it is one of Love and Knowledge. (11)

As we listen to the heart-stirring poetry of the marvelous lines [of the Upanishads] we are taken, as it were, off from the world of the senses, off even from the world of intellect, and brought to that world which can never be comprehended, and yet which is always with us. There is behind even the sublimity [of the Upanishads] another ideal, following as its shadow, one more acceptable to mankind, one more of daily use, one that has to enter into every part of human life, which assumes proportion and volume later on and is stated in full and in determined language in the Puranas, and that is the ideal of bhakti. (12)

 

Cross reference to:

Ka. Up., 2.2.15