Swami Vivekananda gave this lecture at Kumbakonam, in Tamilnadu when he returned after Chicago Parliament of Religions.
PART-I
A very small
amount of religious work performed brings a large amount of result. If this
statement of the Gita wanted an illustration, I am finding every day the truth
of that great saying in my humble life. My work has been very insignificant
indeed, but the kindness and the cordiality of welcome that have met me at
every step of my journey from Colombo to this city are simply beyond all
expectation. Yet, at the same time, it is worthy of our traditions as Hindus,
it is worthy of our race; for here we are, the Hindu race, whose vitality, whose
life-principle, whose very soul, as it were, is in religion. I have seen a
little of the world, travelling among the races of the East and the West; and
everywhere I find among nations one great ideal which forms the backbone, so to
speak, of that race. With some it is politics, with others it is social
culture; others again may have intellectual culture and so on for their
national background. But this, our motherland, has religion and religion alone
for its basis, for its backbone, for the bed-rock upon which the whole building
of its life has been based. Some of you may remember that in my reply to the
kind address which the people of Madras sent over to me in America, I pointed
out the fact that a peasant in India has, in many respects, a better religious
education than many a gentleman in the West, and today, beyond all doubt, I
myself am verifying my own words. There was a time when I did feel rather
discontented at the want of information among the masses of India and the lack
of thirst among them for information, but now I understand it. Where their
interest lies, there they are more eager for information than the masses of any
other race that I have seen or have travelled among. Ask our peasants about the
momentous political changes in Europe, the upheavals that are going on in
European society — they do not know anything of them, nor do they care to know;
but the peasants, even in Ceylon, detached from India in many ways, cut off
from a living interest in India — I found the very peasants working in the
fields there were already acquainted with the fact that there had been a
Parliament of Religions in America, that an Indian Sannyasin had gone over
there, and that he had had some success.
Where,
therefore, their interest is, there they are as eager for information as any
other race; and religion is the one and sole interest of the people of India. I
am not just now discussing whether it is good to have the vitality of the race
in religious ideals or in political ideals, but so far it is clear to us that,
for good or for evil, our vitality is concentrated in our religion. You cannot
change it. You cannot destroy it and put in its place another. You cannot
transplant a large growing tree from one soil to another and make it
immediately take root there. For good or for evil, the religious ideal has been
flowing into India for thousands of years; for good or for evil, the Indian
atmosphere has been filled with ideals of religion for shining scores of
centuries; for good or for evil, we have been born and brought up in the very
midst of these ideas of religion, till it has entered into our very blood and
tingled with every drop in our veins, and has become one with our constitution,
become the very vitality of our lives. Can you give such religion up without the
rousing of the same energy in reaction, without filling the channel which that
mighty river has cut out for itself in the course of thousands of years? Do you
want that the Gangâ should go back to its icy bed and begin a new course? Even
if that were possible, it would be impossible for this country to give up her
characteristic course of religious life and take up for herself a new career of
politics or something else. You can work only under the law of least
resistance, and this religious line is the line of least resistance in India.
This is the line of life, this is the line of growth, and this is the line of
well-being in India — to follow the track of religion.
Ay, 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. It cannot send
cohorts, under whose feet the earth trembles, for the purpose of destruction
and pillage and the ruination of races. Therefore they say — what is there in
this religion? It does not bring any grist to the grinding mill, any strength
to the muscles; what is there in such a religion?
They little
dream that that is the very argument with which we prove out religion, because
it does not make for this world. Ours is the only true religion because,
according to it, this little sense-world of three days' duration is not to be
made the end and aim of all, is not to be our great goal. This little earthly
horizon of a few feet is not that which bounds the view of our religion. Ours
is away beyond, and still beyond; beyond the senses, beyond space, and beyond
time, away, away beyond, till nothing of this world is left and the universe
itself becomes like a drop in the transcendent ocean of the glory of the soul.
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.
Ay, it is a
curious fact that while nations after nations have come upon the stage of the
world, played their parts vigorously for a few moments, and died almost without
leaving a mark or a ripple on the ocean of time, here we are living, as it
were, an eternal life. They talk a great deal of the new theories about the
survival of the fittest, and they think that it is the strength of the muscles
which is the fittest to survive. If that were true, any one of the aggressively
known old world nations would have lived in glory today, and we, the weak
Hindus, who never conquered even one other race or nation, ought to have died
out; yet we live here three hundred million strong! (A young English lady once
told me: What have the Hindus done? They never even conquered a single race!)
And it is not at all true that all its energies are spent, that atrophy has
overtaken its body: that is not true. There is vitality enough, and it comes
out in torrents and deluges the world when the time is ripe and requires it.
We have, as it
were, thrown a challenge to the whole world from the most ancient times. In the
West, they are trying to solve the problem how much a man can possess, and we
are trying here to solve the problem on how little a man can live. This
struggle and this difference will still go on for some centuries. But if
history has any truth in it and if prognostications ever prove true, it must be
that those who train themselves to live on the least and control themselves
well will in the end gain the battle, and that those who run after enjoyment and
luxury, however vigorous they may seem for the moment, will have to die and
become annihilated. There are times in the history of a man's life, nay, in the
history of the lives of nations, when a sort of world-weariness becomes
painfully predominant. It seems that such a tide of world-weariness has come
upon the Western world. There, too, they have their thinkers, great men; and
they are already finding out that this race after gold and power is all vanity
of vanities; many, nay, most of the cultured men and women there, are already
weary of this competition, this struggle, this brutality of their commercial
civilisation, and they are looking forward towards something better. There is a
class which still clings on to political and social changes as the only panacea
for the evils in Europe, but among the great thinkers there, other ideals are
growing. They have found out that no amount of political or social manipulation
of human conditions can cure the evils of life. It is a change of the soul
itself for the better that alone will cure the evils of life. No amount of
force, or government, or legislative cruelty will change the conditions of a
race, but it is spiritual culture and ethical culture alone that can change
wrong racial tendencies for the better. Thus these races of the West are eager
for some new thought, for some new philosophy; the religion they have had,
Christianity, although good and glorious in many respects, has been imperfectly
understood, and is, as understood hitherto, found to be insufficient. The
thoughtful men of the West find in our ancient philosophy, especially in the
Vedanta, the new impulse of thought they are seeking, the very spiritual food
and drink for which they are hungering and thirsting. And it is no wonder that
this is so.
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.
All their theories, their teachings, their doctrines, and their ethics are
built round the life of a personal founder, from whom they get their sanction,
their authority, and their power; and strangely enough, upon the historicity of
the founder's life is built, as it were, all the fabric of such religions. If
there is one blow dealt to the historicity of that life, as has been the case in
modern times with the lives of almost all the so-called founders of religion —
we know that half of the details of such lives is not now seriously believed
in, and that the other half is seriously doubted — if this becomes the case, if
that rock of historicity, as they pretend to call it, is shaken and shattered,
the whole building tumbles down, broken absolutely, never to regain its lost
status.
Every one of the
great religions in the world excepting our own, is built upon such historical
characters; but ours rests upon principles. There is no man or woman who can
claim to have created the Vedas. They are the embodiment of eternal principles;
sages discovered them; and now and then the names of these sages are mentioned
— just their names; we do not even know who or what they were. In many cases we
do not know who their fathers were, and almost in every case we do not know
when and where they were born. But what cared they, these sages, for their
names? They were the preachers of principles, and they themselves, so far as
they went, tried to become illustrations of the principles they preached. At
the same time, just as our God is an Impersonal and yet a Personal God, so is
our religion a most intensely impersonal one — a religion based upon principles
— and yet with an infinite scope for the play of persons; for what religion
gives you more Incarnations, more prophets and seers, and still waits for
infinitely more? The Bhâgavata says that Incarnations are infinite, leaving
ample scope for as many as you like to come. Therefore if any one or more of
these persons in India's religious history, any one or more of these
Incarnations, and any one or more of our prophets proved not to have been
historical, it does not injure our religion at all; even then it remains firm
as ever, because it is based upon principles, and not upon persons. It is in
vain we try to gather all the peoples of the world around a single personality.
It is difficult to make them gather together even round eternal and universal
principles. If it ever becomes possible to bring the largest portion of
humanity to one way of thinking in regard to religion, mark you, it must be
always through principles and not through persons. Yet as I have said, our
religion has ample scope for the authority and influence of persons. There is
that most wonderful theory of Ishta which gives you the fullest and the freest
choice possible among these great religious personalities. You may take up any
one of the prophets or teachers as your guide and the object of your special
adoration; you are even allowed to think that he whom you have chosen is the
greatest of the prophets, greatest of all the Avatâras; there is no harm in
that, but you must keep to a firm background of eternally true principles. The
strange fact here is that the power of our Incarnations has been holding good
with us only so far as they are illustrations of the principles in the Vedas.
The glory of Shri Krishna is that he has been the best preacher of our eternal
religion of principles and the best commentator on the Vedanta that ever lived
in India.
The second claim
of the Vedanta upon the attention of the world is that, of all the scriptures
in the world, it is the one scripture the teaching of which is in entire
harmony with the results that have been attained by the modern scientific
investigations of external nature. Two minds in the dim past of history,
cognate to each other in form and kinship and sympathy, started, being placed
in different routes. The one was the ancient Hindu mind, and the other the
ancient Greek mind. The former started by analysing the internal world. The
latter started in search of that goal beyond by analysing the external world.
And even through the various vicissitudes of their history, it is easy to make
out these two vibrations of thought as tending to produce similar echoes of the
goal beyond. It seems clear that the conclusions of modern materialistic
science can be acceptable, harmoniously with their religion, only to the
Vedantins or Hindus as they are called. It seems clear that modern materialism
can hold its own and at the same time approach spirituality by taking up the
conclusions of the Vedanta. It seems to us, and to all who care to know, that
the conclusions of modern science are the very conclusions the Vedanta reached
ages ago; only, in modern science they are written in the language of matter.
This then is another claim of the Vedanta upon modern Western minds, its
rationality, the wonderful rationalism of the Vedanta. I have myself been told
by some of the best Western scientific minds of the day, how wonderfully
rational the conclusions of the Vedanta are. I know one of them personally who
scarcely has time to eat his meal or go out of his laboratory, but who yet
would stand by the hour to attend my lectures on the Vedanta; for, as he
expresses it, they are so scientific, they so exactly harmonise with the
aspirations of the age and with the conclusions to which modern science is
coming at the present time.
Two such
scientific conclusions drawn from comparative religion, I would specially like
to draw your attention to: the one bears upon the idea of the universality of
religions, and the other on the idea of the oneness of things. We observe in
the histories of Babylon and among the Jews an interesting religious phenomenon
happening. We find that each of these Babylonian and Jewish peoples was divided
into so many tribes, each tribe having a god of its own, and that these little
tribal gods had often a generic name. The gods among the Babylonians were all
called Baals, and among them Baal Merodach was the chief. In course of time one
of these many tribes would conquer and assimilate the other racially allied
tribes, and the natural result would be that the god of the conquering tribe
would be placed at the head of all the gods of the other tribes. Thus the
so-called boasted monotheism of the Semites was created. Among the Jews the
gods went by the name of Molochs. Of these there was one Moloch who belonged to
the tribe called Israel, and he was called the Moloch-Yahveh or Moloch-Yava. In
time, this tribe of Israel slowly conquered some of the other tribes of the
same race, destroyed their Molochs, and declared its own Moloch to be the
Supreme Moloch of all the Molochs. And I am sure, most of you know the amount
of bloodshed, of tyranny, and of brutal savagery that this religious conquest
entailed. Later on, the Babylonians tried to destroy this supremacy of
Moloch-Yahveh, but could not succeed in doing so.
It seems to me,
that such an attempt at tribal self-assertion in religious matters might have
taken place on the frontiers and India also. Here, too, all the various tribes
of the Aryans might have come into conflict with one another for declaring the
supremacy of their several tribal gods; but India's history was to be
otherwise, was to be different from that of the Jews. India alone was to be, of
all lands, the land of toleration and of spirituality; and therefore the fight
between tribes and their gods did not long take place here. For one of the greatest
sages that was ever born found out here in India even at that distant time,
which history cannot reach, and into whose gloom even tradition itself dares
not peep — in that distant time the sage arose and declared, — "He who exists is one; the sages call
Him variously." This is one of the most memorable sentences that was ever
uttered, one of the grandest truths that was ever discovered. And for us Hindus
this truth has been the very backbone of our national existence. For throughout
the vistas of the centuries of our national life, this one idea — — comes down, gaining in volume and in
fullness till it has permeated the whole of our national existence, till it has
mingled in our blood, and has become one with us. We live that grand truth in
every vein, and our country has become the glorious land of religious
toleration. It is here and here alone that they build temples and churches for
the religions which have come with the object of condemning our own religion.
This is one very great principle that the world is waiting to learn from us.
Ay, you little know how much of intolerance is yet abroad. It struck me more
than once that I should have to leave my bones on foreign shores owing to the
prevalence of religious intolerance. Killing a man is nothing for religion's
sake; tomorrow they may do it in the very heart of the boasted civilisation of
the West, if today they are not really doing so. Outcasting in its most
horrible forms would often come down upon the head of a man in the West if he
dared to say a word against his country's accepted religion. They talk glibly
and smoothly here in criticism of our caste laws. If you go, to the West and
live there as I have done, you will know that even some of the biggest
professors you hear of are arrant cowards and dare not say, for fear of public
opinion, a hundredth part of what they hold to be really true in religious
matter.
Therefore the
world is waiting for this grand idea of universal toleration. It will be a
great acquisition to civilisation. Nay, no civilisation can long exist unless
this idea enters into it. No civilisation can grow unless fanatics, bloodshed,
and brutality stop. No civilisation can begin to lift up its head until we look
charitably upon one another; and the first step towards that much-needed
charity is to look charitably and kindly upon the religious convictions of
others. Nay more, to understand that not only should we be charitable, but
positively helpful to each other, however different our religious ideas and
convictions may be. And that is exactly what we do in India as I have just
related to you. It is here in India that Hindus have built and are still
building churches for Christians and mosques for Mohammedans. That is the thing
to do. In spite of their hatred, in spite of their brutality, in spite of their
cruelly, in spite of their tyranny, and in spite of the vile language they are
given to uttering, we will and must go on building churches for the Christians
and mosques for the Mohammedans until we conquer through love, until we have
demonstrated to the world that love alone is the fittest thing to survive and
not hatred, that it is gentleness that has the strength to live on and to
fructify, and not mere brutality and physical force.
The other great
idea that the world wants from us today, the thinking part of Europe, nay, the
whole world — more, perhaps, the lower classes than the higher, more the masses
than the cultured, more the ignorant than the educated, more the weak than the
strong — is that eternal grand idea of the spiritual oneness of the whole
universe. I need not tell you today, men from Madras University, how the modern
researches of the West have demonstrated through physical means the oneness and
the solidarity of the whole universe; how, physically speaking, you and I, the
sun, moon, and stars are but little waves or waveless in the midst of an
infinite ocean of matter; how Indian psychology demonstrated ages ago that,
similarly, both body and mind are but mere names or little waveless in the
ocean of matter, the Samashti; and how, going one step further, it is also
shown in the Vedanta that behind that idea of the unity of the whole show, the
real Soul is one. There is but one Soul throughout the universe, all is but One
Existence. This great idea of the real and basic solidarity of the whole
universe has frightened many, even in this country. It even now finds sometimes
more opponents than adherents. I tell you, nevertheless, that it is the one
great life-giving idea which the world wants from us today, and which the mute
masses of India want for their uplifting, for none can regenerate this land of
ours without the practical application and effective operation of this ideal of
the oneness of things.
The rational
West is earnestly bent upon seeking out the rationality, the raison d' être of
all its philosophy and its ethics; and you all know well that ethics cannot be
derived from the mere sanction of any personage, however great and divine he
may have been. Such an explanation of the authority of ethics appeals no more
to the highest of the world's thinkers; they want something more than human
sanction for ethical and moral codes to be binding, they want some eternal
principle of truth as the sanction of ethics. And where is that eternal
sanction to be found except in the only Infinite Reality that exists in you and
in me and in all, in the Self, in the Soul? The infinite oneness of the Soul is
the eternal sanction of all morality, that you and I are not only brothers —
every literature voicing man's struggle towards freedom has preached that for
you — but that you and I are really one. This is the dictate of Indian
philosophy. This oneness is the rationale of all ethics and all spirituality.
Europe wants it today just as much as our downtrodden masses do, and this great
principle is even now unconsciously forming the basis of all the latest
political and social aspirations that are coming up in England, in Germany, in
France, and in America. And mark it, my friends, that in and through all the
literature voicing man's struggle towards freedom, towards universal freedom,
again and again you find the Indian Vedantic ideals coming out prominently. In
some cases the writers do not know the source of their inspiration, in some
cases they try to appear very original, and a few there are, bold and grateful
enough to mention the source and acknowledge their indebtedness to it.
SOURCE: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume-3
(Lectures from Colombo to Almora)
