Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 177)

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Parts 1 to 176 were posted earlier.

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 177

 

 

c) The Life-Saving Education for India

1. We Must Replace Superstition with Human-Making Education Based on the Teachings of the Vedas

We must have a hold on the spiritual and secular education of the nation. Do you understand that? You must dream it, you must talk of it, you must think it, and you must work it out. Till then there is no salvation for the race. The education that you are getting now has some good points, but it has a tremendous disadvantage which is so great that all the good things are weighed down. In the first place, it is not a human-making education; it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education, or any training that is based on negation, is worse than death. Children are taken to school and the first thing they learn is that their fathers are fools, the second thing is that their grandfathers are lunatic, and the third thing is that their teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all the sacred books are lies! By the time they are sixteen they are a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless. And the result is that fifty years of such education has not produced one original person in the three presidencies. Everyone of originality that has been produced has been educated elsewhere, not in this country; or they have gone to the old universities once more to cleanse themselves of superstitions. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, human-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than someone who has got by heart a whole library. "The ass carrying its load of sandalwood knows only the weight and not the value of the sandalwood." If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages in the world and the encyclopedias are rishis. The ideal, therefore, is that we must have the whole education of our country, spiritual and secular, in our own hands, and it must be on national lines, through national methods as far as practicable.(19)

Cross reference to:

Ka. Up., 1.1.5

2. Young People Should Learn from All Renouncing Teachers the Highest Spiritual Truths Coupled with Modern Science

In India they tell me that I should not teach Advaita Vedanta to people at large. But I say that I can make even a child understand it. You cannot begin too early to teach the highest spiritual truths.(20)

Disciple: Talking with you and listening to your realizations, I feel no necessity for the study of the scriptures.

Swami Vivekananda": No! Scriptures have to be studied also. For the attainment of jnana, study of scriptures is essential. I shall soon open classes in the Math for them. The Vedas, Upanishads, the Gita and Bhagavata should be studied in the classes and I shall teach Panini’s Ashtadhyayi. [sanskrit grammar].(21)

[My idea of education for our Indian children] is guru-griha-vasa - living with the guru… in the same way as of old. But with this education has to be combined modern Western science. Both of these are necessary… The present university system is almost wholly one of defects. Why, it is nothing but a perfect machine for turning out clerks. I would thank my stars if that were all. But no! See how people are becoming destitute of shraddha and faith. They assert that the Gita is only an interpolation, and that the Vedas are but rustic songs! They like to master every detail concerning things and nations outside of India, but if you ask them, they do not know even the names of their own forebears up to the seventh generation, what to speak of the fourteenth!… A nation that has no history of its own has nothing in this world. Do you believe that one who has such faith and pride as to feel: "I come of noble descent" can ever turn out to be bad? How could that be? That faith in him or herself would curb his or her actions and feelings; so much so that he or she would rather die than commit wrong. So, a national history keeps a nation well-restrained and does not allow it to sink so low…. Those who have eyes to see find a luminous history in India, and on the strength of that they know the nation is still alive. But that history has to be rewritten. It should be restated and suited to the understanding and ways of thinking which our people have acquired in the present age through Western education….

To bring this about, the old institution of "living with the guru" and similar systems of imparting education are needed. What we want are Western science coupled with Vedanta, brahmacharya as the guiding motto, and also shraddha and faith in one’s own self. Another thing that we want is the abolition of that system which aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as that of the man who battered his ass, being advised that it could thereby be turned into a horse. (22)

One should live from his very childhood with one whose character is like a blazing fire and should have before him or her a living example of the highest teaching. Mere reading that it is a sin to tell a lie will be of no use. Every boy and girl should be trained to practice absolute brahmacharya; and then, and only then, faith - shraddha - will come. Otherwise, why will not one who has no shraddha speak an untruth? In our country, the imparting of knowledge has always been through men and women of renunciation. Later, the pandits, by monopolizing all knowledge and restricting it to the tol [village school], have only brought the country to the brink of ruin. India had all good prospects so long as men and women of renunciation used to impart knowledge.(23)