This is a Reproduction of Paper On Hinduism Presented by Swami Vivekanada in Parliament Of Religions in United States Of America. The work is in Public Domain, No Copyright issues involved.
Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893.
Paper on Hinduism
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 Allmerciful.
"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 allmerciful
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.
