Swami Vivekananda
Disciple of the Lord
Ramdrishsna Paramhansa DEB
At the Parliament of Religions,
Chicago
Published Under the Patronage
of
Babu Guru Prasanna Ghose
of Jorabagan, Calcutta.
On either side of Cardinal Gibbons were grouped the oriental delegates, whose many colored raiment vied with his own in brilliancy. Conspicuous among the followers of Brahma and Buddha and Mahammad was the eloquent monk Vivekananda of India, clad in gorgeous red apparel* his bronzed face surmounted with a huge turban of yellow.
Swami Vivekananda of India was next introduced. When Vivekananda addressed the audience as “sisters and brothers of America”, there arose a peal of applause that lasted for several minutes. He spoke as follows:—
(GREETING)
It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which .you have given us. I thank you in the name of the
most ancient order of monks in the world : I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who have told you that these men from far off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to the different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I belong to a religion into whose sacred language, the Sanskrit, the word exclusion is untranslatable. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. We have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, a remnant which came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Boman tyranny. I belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings : “As the different steams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, O Lord, so the different paths which men take through different tendencies,
various though they appear, crooked or straight, all .lead to thee.”
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in Gita: “Whosoever comes to me, through whatsoever form I reach him, they are all struggling through paths that in the end always lead to me.” Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have possessed long this beautiful earth. It has filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for this horrible demon, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But its time has come: and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death knell to all fanaticism, to all persecutions with the sword or the pen, and to all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
HINDUISM
Three religions stand now in the world which have come down to us from time pre-historic – Hinduism, Zorostrianism, and Judaism. They all have received tremendous shocks and all of them proved 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, are all that remains to tell the tale of his grand religion, sect after sect have arisen in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundation, but like the waters of the sea shore 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, they have been all sucked in, absorbed and assimilated in the immense body of another faith.
From the high spiritual flights of Vedantic philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like the echoes, the agnosticism of the Buddhas, the atheism of the Jains, and the low ideas of idolatry with the multifarious mythology, 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 Hindas 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 law 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 with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical and spiritual relations between soul and souls 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, and I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very best of them were women.
Here it may be said that the law as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning of end; Science has proved to us that the sum total of the cosmic energy is the same throughout all. Then if there was a time where nothing existed, where was- all this manifested energy ? Some say it was in a potential form in God. But then God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make him mutable, and everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that .change which is called destruction. Therefore God would die. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation. If I may be allowed to apply a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each
other, and God is power, and ever active providence, under whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos,-—made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Hindu boy repeats every day with his Guru : “The sun and the moon, the Lord created after other suns and moons.” And this agrees with 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 matters and 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 will not die. Here am I in this body, and when it will fail, still I will go on living; and also I had a past. The soul was not created from nothing, for creation means a combination, and that means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Therefore it was not created.. Some are born happy, enjoying perfect health, beautiful body, mental vigor and with all wants supplied. Others are born miserable ; some are without hands or feet, some idiots, and and only drag on a miserable existence. Why, if they are all created, does a just and merciful God create one happy and other unhappy—why is he so partial ? Nor would it mend matters in the least by holding that those that are miserable in this life will be perfect in a future. Why should a man be miserable here in the reign of a just and merciful
God ? In the second place, it docs not give us any cause, but simply a cruel act of an all-powerful being, and therefore unscientific, There must have been causes, then, to make a man miserable or happy before his birth, and those were his past actions. Are not all the tendencies of the mind and those of the body answered for by inherited aptitude from parents ? Here are the two parallel lines of-existence—one that of the mind, the other that of matter. If matter and its transformation answer for all that we have, there is no necessity of 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, but neither of these is necessary here.
We cannot deny that bodies inherit certain tendencies from heridity, but these tendencies only mean the secular configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. The cause of those peculiar tendencies in that soul have been caused by his past actions, and a soul with a certain tendency would go and take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument of the display of that tendency by the laws of affinity. And this is in perfect accord with science, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So these repetitions are also necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-
born soul—and they were not got in this present life; therefore they must have come down from past lives.
But there is another suggestion; taking all these for granted, how is it that I do hot remember any* thing of my past life ? This cah be easily explained. I am now speaking English, It is not my mother tognue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are present in my consciousness, but let me try to bring them up, they rush into my consciousness. That shows that consciousness is the name only of the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths is stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle and they will come up and you will be conscious.
This is the 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 precepts 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 can not pierce—him the fire cannot burn—him the water can not melt—him the air can not dry. And that every soul is a circle Whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in a body, and doath 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 and pure
and perfect. But somehow or other it has got itself hound down by matter, and thinks itself as matter. Why should the free, perfect and pure being be under the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect be deluded into the belief that he is imperfect, is the question. We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there, and some thinkers want to answer it by the posing of one er more quasi perfect beings, and big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How the perfect becomes 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 itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter. But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in every body’s consciousness that he thinks himself as the body. We do not attempt to explain why I am in this body. The answer, that it is the will of God, is no explanation. It is nothing more than what they say themselves. “We 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 will be by the present; that it 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 ciy ? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of nature. Is there no hope ? Is there no escape ? was th? cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of merpy, 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 to the world. “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 delusions, and 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, brethern, 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 being, ye are divinities on earth. Sinners ? It is a sin to
call a man so ; it is a standing libel on human, nature. Come up, Oh, live and shake off the delusion that you are sheep ; you are souls immortal, spirits free and 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 apd effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of. matter and force, stands one through whose command the wind blows, the fire bums, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth. And what is His nature ?
He is every where 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 ajl strength ; give us strength- Thou art He that bearest the burden, 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 loye, ‘He is to be worshipped as the one beloved,” “dearer than everything in this and the next life.”
This is the doctrine of love preached in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and preached 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 this 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 will go to a hundred hells, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward— unselfishly love for love’s sake.” One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his throne by his enemies and had to take shelter in a forest in the Himalayas with his queen, and there one day the queen was asking him how it. was that he, the most virtuous of men; should sufl’er so much misery; and Yudhisteer answered: “Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how 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 under bondage of matter, and perfection will be reached when the bond shall burst, and the word they use is therefore mukti—freedom, freedom from
In progress…