Paper on Hinduism
Paper on Hinduism
By Swami Vivekananda
Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893
E-Text Source:
www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info
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. It may sound ludicrous to
this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no
books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered
by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed
before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with
the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual
relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of
all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we
forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected
beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them
were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but
they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without
beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic
energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where
was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In
that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him
mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo
that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd.
Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, 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. This is what the Brâhmin boy
repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and
moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science.
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I", "I",
"I", what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a
combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit
living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die.
Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a
past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a
certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are
born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all
wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet,
others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are
all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another
unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold
that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why
should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?
In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but
simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been
causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were
his past actions.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited
aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence - one of the mind, the other
of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there
is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved
that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is
inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a
materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those
tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind
alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul
caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws
of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display
of that tendency. This is in accord with science, for science wants to explain
everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are
necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And since they were
not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it that I do
not remember anything of my past life ? This can be easily explained. I am now
speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother
tongue are now present in my consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and
they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental
ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and
struggle, they would come up and you would be conscious even of your past life.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of
a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have
discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be
stirred up - try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life.
So then the 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. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In
its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or
other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as matter.
Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom of
matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the
belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the
question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to
answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific
names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the
same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the
absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is
sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to
face the question in a manly fashion; and his 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." But the fact is a fact for all that. It
is a fact in everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body.
The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer
that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the
Hindu says, "I do not know."
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. But
here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on
the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next,
rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions - a powerless, helpless
wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and
effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on
crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the
orphan's cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is
there no hope? Is there no escape? - was the cry that went up from the bottom of
the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and
consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the
world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: "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." "Children of immortal bliss" - what a sweet, what
a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name - heirs of
immortal bliss - yea, 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.
Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving
laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all
these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One "by
whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks
upon the earth."
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 Vedas. 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." One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor
of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter
with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked
him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery.
Yudhishthira answered, "Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful
they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love
the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He
is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be
loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for
anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must
love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love."
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. How does that mercy
act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God,
yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is
made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law
of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism.
The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences
beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them.
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.
Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect,
to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God,
becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the
religion of the Hindus.
And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss
infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing
in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.
So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects
of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or
three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so 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.
"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
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. Then alone can death cease when I am alone with
life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then
alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the
necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical
individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously
changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the
necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.
Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach
perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the
goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one
element out of which all other could be made. Physics would stop when it would
be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which all others
are but manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would
discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant
basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are
but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that
the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of
all science.
All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation,
and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that
what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more
forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of
science.
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. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the
situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet." Names are
not explanations.
I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India.
Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their
idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, "If
I abuse your God, what can He do?" "You would be punished," said the preacher,
"when you die." "So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu.
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?"
Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian
go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in
prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so
many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no
more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without
breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental
idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he
worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom
he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not
omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole
world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not,
when we repeat that word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky or of
space, that is all.
As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we
have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of
the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a
church, a mosque, or a cross. 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 realisation. Man is to
become divine by realising 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.
He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say the
scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the
next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised." Mark, the
same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you, "Him the Sun cannot
express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what
we speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not abuse any one's
idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life.
"The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that
childhood is a sin or youth a sin?
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.
Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised it. Every
other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to
adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John
and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a
coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be
realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images,
crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols - so many pegs to hang the
spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but
those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it
compulsory in Hinduism.
One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It
is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of
undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults,
they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for
punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their
neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the
fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion
any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity.
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.
It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these
little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of
everything the same truth reigns. 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." And what has been
the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of
Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved
and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our
caste and creed." One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric
of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or in Jainism
which is atheistic?
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their
religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a
God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And
he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
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; which
will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total
of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its
catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human
being, from the lowest grovelling savage not far removed from the brute, to the
highest man towering by the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity,
making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human nature. 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.
Offer such a religion, and all the nations will follow you. Asoka's council was
a council of the Buddhist faith. Akbar's, though more to the purpose, was only a
parlour-meeting. It was reserved for America to proclaim to all quarters of the
globe that the Lord is in every religion.
May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians,
the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of
the Christians, give strength to you to carry out your noble idea! The star
arose in the East; it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes dimmed and
sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit of the world; and now it is again
rising on the very horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo, a thousandfold
more effulgent than it ever was before.
Hail, Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never
dipped her hand in her neighbour's blood, who never found out that the shortest
way of becoming rich was by robbing one's neighbours, it has been given to thee
to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of harmony.