swami vivekananda

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JANUARY 14 WAS MAKAR SNKRANTI AND ALSO SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S

JANAMATITHI(BIRTHDAY) THIS YEAR. HERE IS A THREE PAGE SUMMARY OF HIS

EIGHT PAGE ‘PAPER ON HINDUISM’ READ AT PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS HELD IN

CHICAGO IN 1893. IT IS ILLUMINATING AS IT ANSWERS MANY FAQ ON

HINDUISM. FULL TEXT IS GIVEN IN THE ENCLOSURE AND CAN ALSO BE READ AT

SITE:

http://www.sriramakrishnamath.org/guiding/epochmaking.asp?val=topic3

THIS SITE GIVES TEXT OF ALL THE SIX LECTURES HE GAVE AT THE PARLIAMENT.

CHETAN

 

 

SUMMARY

OF

PAPER ON HINDUISM

Read at the Parliament on 19 September, 1893

 

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from

time prehistoric—Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all

received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival

their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb

Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its

all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains

to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in

India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very

foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous

earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an

all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the

tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed,

and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.

>From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the

latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of

idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the

Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in

the Hindu's religion.

Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which

all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis

upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this

is the question I shall attempt to answer.

 

The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas.

They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. …..by

the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of

spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. The

discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as

perfected beings. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning

or end. …..creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and

without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active

providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out

of chaos, made to run for a time, and again destroyed.

Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce—him the

fire cannot burn—him the water cannot melt—him the air cannot dry. The

Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is

nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means

the change of this centre from body to body.

Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom

of matter, is the next question. ………(Hindu’s) answer is: "I do not

know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of

itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter." Well,

then, the human soul is eternal and immortal, perfect and infinite, and

death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The

present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the

present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth

to birth and death to death. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?— (A

Vedic sage said,) "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that

reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond

all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from

death over again."

…..the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God,

the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities

on earth—sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel

on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you

are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye

are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the

servant of matter.

And what is His nature?

He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the

All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our

beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength.

Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the

little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Veda. And how

to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one

beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life."

This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how

it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to

have been God incarnate on earth.

He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf,

which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to

live in the world—his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world,

but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes:

"Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy

will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may

love Thee without the hope of reward—love unselfishly for love's sake."

 

The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of

matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the

word they use for it is therefore, Mukti—freedom, freedom from the

bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.

And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this

mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy.

The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories.

If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an

all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him,

and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage

gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen

God." And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion

does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain

doctrine or dogma, but in realising—not in believing, but in being and

becoming.

when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with

Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the

reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute,

knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read

this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a

stone.

I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the

consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy

the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing

with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the

ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal

consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this

miserable little prison-individuality must go.

Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of

the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no

polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one

will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including

omnipresence, to the images.

The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are

called idolaters, men, the like of whom, in morality and spirituality

and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, "Can sin

beget holiness?"

The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth,

omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But

with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to

their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them

religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing

good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in

realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or

temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his

spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress.

If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would

it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage,

should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from

error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To

him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest

absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and

realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth

and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every

soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and

more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun.

To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling,

a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and

circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God

out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of

them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only

apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth

adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures.

The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna, "I am

in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever

thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and

purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.

This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious ideas of the Hindus.

The Hindu may have failed to carry out all his plans, but if there is

ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no

location in place or time; which will be infinite like the God it will

preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of

Christ, on saints and sinners alike;

It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or

intolerance in its polity, which will recognise divinity in every man

and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created in

aiding humanity to realise its own true, divine nature.

Source:<http://www.sriramakrishnamath.org/guiding/epochmaking.asp?val=topic3>

 

 

=====

Chetan Merani

 

 

 

 

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