Vivekananda on the Vedas (part 230)

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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 230

 

[india] must conquer the world, and nothing less than that is my ideal. It may be very big, it may astonish many of you, but it is so. We [indians] must conquer the world, or die. There is no other alternative. The sign of life is expansion; we must go out, expand, show life - or degrade, fester, and die. There is no other alternative. Take either of these - either live, or die. Now , we all know about the petty jealousies and quarrels that we have in India. Take my word, it is the same everywhere. The other nations,. with their political lives, have foreign policies. When they find too much quarrelling at home, they look for somebody abroad to quarrel with, and the quarrel at home stops. We have these quarrels in Indian without any foreign policy to stop them. This must be our eternal foreign policy - preaching the truths of the Shastras to the nations of the world. I ask you who are politically minded: do you require any other proof that this will unite us Indians as a race? (83)

In the past we read in history that whenever there arose a great conquering nation uniting the different nations of the world, binding India with the other races, taking her out, as it were, from her loneliness and from her aloofness from the rest of the world into which she again and again cast herself, that whenever such a state has been brought about, the result has been the flooding of the world with Indian spiritual ideas. (84)

It was India’s karma - her fate - to be conquered and, in her turn, to conquer her conqueror. She has already done so with her Muslim victors. Educated Muslims are Sufis, scarcely to be distinguished from Hindus. Hindu thought has permeated their civilisation; they have assumed the position of learners. The great Akbar, the Mogul emperor, was practically a Hindu. And England will be conquered in her turn. Today she has the sword, but it is worse than useless in the world of ideas. You know what Schopenhauer said of Indian thought: he foretold that its influence would be as momentous in Europe, when it became well known, as the revival of Greek and Latin culture after the Dark Ages...

[Though there are not many signs of a renaissance at present], I dare say a good many people saw no signs of the old Renaissance and did not know it was there, even after it had come. But there is a great movement, which can be discerned by those who know the signs of the times. Oriental research has of recent years made great progress. At present it is in the hands of scholars, and it seems dry and heavy in the work they have achieved. But gradually the light of comprehension will break….

India was once a great missionary power. Hundreds of years before England was converted to Christianity, Buddha sent out missionaries to convert the world of Asia to his doctrine. The world of thought is being converted. We are only at the beginning as yet. The number of those who decline to accept any special form of religion is greatly increasing, and this movement is among the educated classes. In a recent American census, a large number of persons declined to class themselves as belonging to any form of religion. All religions are different expressions of the same truth; all march on, or die out. They are the radii of the same truth, the expression that variety of minds requires. (85)