Dear al Pranam
This is the great speech of Vivekananda; this is to be read by every
Indian; and those who have movements of antagonism and the resistance and
those who have no/poor knowledge of our wealth or those who do not
understand properly the meaning of the treasure of this nation, and one who
gloats over others vituperatively without sense are rescinded with the
replies (with quotes from B G on dot). A harengue which shall place
everyone on the right tracks.
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*Swami Vivekananda 1893 Chicago speech*
“Swami Vivekananda said that only rituals will not connect an individual
to divinity…he said Jan Seva is Prabhu Seva.”
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 1
Response to Welcome
Sisters and Brothers of America,
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 millions and millions
of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks also to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to
the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off
nations may well claim the honor of bearing to 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 am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the
refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell
you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the
Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very
year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I
am proud to 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, and which is every day repeated by
millions of human beings:
As the different streams having their sources in different places all
mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which people
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 the Gita:
Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach them; all are
struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.
*Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long
possessed this beautiful earth. They have 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 these horrible demons,
human society would be far more advanced than it is now.* But their time is
come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor
of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all
persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable
feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 2
Why We Disagree
I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has
just finished say, “Let us cease from abusing each other,” and he was very
sorry that there should be always so much variance.
But I think I should tell you a story that would illustrate the cause of
this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time.
It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog.
Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog
lost its eyes or not but, for our story’s sake, we must take it for granted
that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the
worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to
our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little
sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and
fell into the well.
“Where are you from?”
“I am from the sea.”
“The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?” and he took a leap
from one side of the well to the other.
“My friend,” said the frog of the sea, “how do you compare the sea with
your little well?”
Then the frog took another leap and asked, “Is your sea so big?”
“What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!”
“Well, then,” said the frog of the well, “nothing can be bigger than my
well. There can be nothing bigger than this. This fellow is a liar, so turn
him out.”
That has been the difficulty all the while.
I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the
whole world is my little well. The Christians sit in their little well and
think the whole world is their well. The Muslims sit in their little well
and think that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the
great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little
world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to
accomplish your purpose.
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 3
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 sea-shore in a tremendous
earthquake <https://www.financialexpress.com/tag/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
<https://www.financialexpress.com/market/stock-market/vedanta-ltd-stock-price/>
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 center 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 honor 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 Brahmin boy repeats every day: ” The sun and the moon, the Lord
created like the suns and the 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 I am in this body; it will fall, but 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 vigor, 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 another 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
<https://www.financialexpress.com/auto/new-cars/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 his 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 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 center is located in the body, and that death means the
change of the center from holy 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 be thus under the thralldom 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 center 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 from 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. We 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 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 Veda. And how to worship
Him? Through love. “He is to be worshiped 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 how it was that he, the most
virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, “Be
hold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love
them. They do not give me any- thing 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 beloved;
my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for any-
thing; 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 center, 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 realizing – 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 realize 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
one 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 others could be made. Physics would stop when
it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which
all the others are hut 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
worshipers 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 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, l 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 Do 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. finer 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 ideas 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 centered in
realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or
temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his
spiritual childhood; but on and on he must progress.
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 realized.”
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 anyone’s idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes 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 realize 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 traveling 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 realize 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 recognized 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 realized, or thought of, or stated through the
relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols
– so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is
necessary for everyone, 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 neighbors. 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 traveling, 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 colors- 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 sees 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 centers 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 bath 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 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 recognize
divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force,
will be centered in aiding humanity to realize 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 parlor 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 traveled 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 Sanpo¹, a thousand fold 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 neighbor’s blood, who never found out that the
shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbors, it has been
given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilization with the flag of
harmony
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 4
Religion Not the Crying Need of India
Christianity must always be ready for good criticism, and I think that you
will hardly mind if I make a little criticism. Christian brethren of
America, you are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the souls of
heathens. I ask you: what have you done and are doing to save their bodies
from starvation? In India, there are 300 million men and women living on an
average of a little more than 50 cents a month. I have seen them living for
years upon wild flowers*. During the terrible famines, thousands died from
hunger but the missionaries did nothing*. They come and offer life but only
on condition that the Hindus become Christians, abandoning the faith of
their fathers and forefathers. Is it right? There are hundreds of asylums,
but if the Muslims or the Hindus go there, they are kicked out. There are
thousands of asylums erected by Hindus where anybody is received. There are
hundreds of churches that have been erected with the assistance of the
Hindus, but no Hindu temples for which a Christian has given a penny.
Brethren of America, you erect churches all through India, but the crying
evil in the East is not religion. They have religion enough, but it is
bread that the suffering millions of burning India cry out for with parched
throats. What they want is bread, but they are given a stone. It is an
insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a
starving man to teach him metaphysics. Therefore, if you wish to illustrate
the meaning of “brotherhood,” treat the Hindus more kindly, even though
they are Hindus and are faithful to their religion. Send missionaries to
them to teach them how better to earn a piece of bread and not to teach
them metaphysical nonsense.
[At this point, Swami Vivekananda said that he was not feeling too well
that day and so wished to be excused. But, we read in the newspaper report,
“there were thunders of applause and cries of ‘Go on,’” so Vivekananda
continued:]
The earlier speaker said something about the miserable and ignorant priests
in China. The same may be said of the priests in India. I am one of those
monks who have been described as beggarly. That is the pride of my life. I
am proud in that sense to be Christ-like. I eat what I have today and think
not of tomorrow. “Behold the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do
they spin.” The Hindu carries that out literally. Many gentlemen present in
Chicago sitting on this platform can testify that for the last twelve years
I never knew whence my next meal would come. I am proud to be a beggar for
the sake of the Lord. The idea in the East is that to preach or teach
anything for the sake of money is low and vulgar, but to teach the name of
the Lord for pay is such degradation as would cause the priest to lose
caste and be spat upon.
There is one suggestion in the earlier speaker’s paper that is true: If the
priests of China and India were organized, there is an enormous amount of
potential energy that could be used for regeneration of society and
humanity. I endeavored to organize it in India but failed for lack of
money. It may be I shall get the help I want in America.
I came here to seek help for my impoverished people and I fully realized
how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a
Christian land. I have heard so much of this land of freedom, of liberty
and freedom of thought, that I am not discouraged. I thank you, ladies and
gentlemen.
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 5
Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism
I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China and Japan
and Sri Lanka follow the teachings of the Buddha, India worships him as God
incarnate on earth.
You have just now heard that I am going to criticize Buddhism, but by that
I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticize him whom
I worship as God incarnate on earth. Our view about the Buddha is that he
was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation between Hinduism
(by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism
at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity.
Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni [Buddha] was a Hindu. The Jews
rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, whereas the Hindus accept Shakya
Muni as God incarnate and worship him.
But the real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism
and what we should understand as the teachings of the Buddha lies
principally in this: Shakya Muni came to preach nothing new. Like Jesus,
the Buddha came to fulfill and not to destroy. In the case of Jesus, it was
the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the case of
the Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realize the import of his
teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfillment of the Old
Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfillment of the truths
of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not to destroy,
but he was the fulfillment, the logical conclusion, the logical development
of the religion of the Hindus.
The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and
the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks. In
it, there is no caste. In India a man from the highest caste and a man from
the lowest can become monks, *thus the two castes become equal. In religion
there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution*. Shakya Muni
himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness
to bring out the truths hidden in the Vedas and throw them broadcast all
over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought
missionaries into practice–nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of
proselytizing.
The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody,
especially for the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples were
Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken
language in India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of
Buddha’s Brahmin disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit,
but he distinctly told them, “I am for the poor, for the people; let me
speak in the tongue of the people.” And so to this day the great bulk of
his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.
Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of
metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so
long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as
there is a cry going out of the human heart, there shall be faith in God.
On the philosophic side, the disciples of the Great Master dashed
themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them;
and on the other side, they took away from the nation that eternal God to
which every one, man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that
Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day there are
very few who call themselves Buddhists in India, the land where Buddhism
was born.
But at the same time, Hinduism lost something–that reforming zeal, that
wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful leaven which
Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so
great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to
say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known
to be unchaste.
Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then
realize what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhist cannot stand
without the brain and philosophy of the Hindu, nor the Hindu without the
heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and the Hindus
is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is populated by
three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave
of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful
intellect of the Hindus with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful
humanizing power of the Buddha.
Addresses at the Parliament of Religions – 6
Address at the Final Session
The World’s Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and
the merciful Father has helped those who labored to bring it into
existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labor. My thanks
to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first dreamed
this wonderful dream and then realized it. My thanks to the shower of
liberal sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My thanks to this
enlightened audience for their uniform kindness to me and for their
appreciation of every thought that tends to smooth the friction of
religions. A few jarring notes were heard from time to time in this
harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking
contrast, made general harmony the sweeter.
Much has been said of the common ground of religious unity. I am not going
just now to venture my own theory. But if anyone here hopes that this unity
will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of
the other, to them I say, “Friends, yours is an impossible hope.” Do I wish
that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu
or Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid.
The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed
around it. Does the seed become the earth, or the air, or the water? No. It
becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates
the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and
grows into a plant. Similar is the case with religion. The Christian is not
to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a
Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet
preserve their individuality and grow according to their own law of growth.
If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this:
It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the
exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has
produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this
evidence, if some people still dream of the exclusive survival of their own
religion and the destruction of the others, I pity them from the bottom of
my heart, and point out to them that upon the banner of every religion will
soon be written, in spite of resistance: “Help and not Fight”,
“Assimilation and not Destruction”,; “Harmony and Peace and not Dissension.”
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