WORLD PARLIAMENT
OF RELIGION, CHICAGO
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 honour 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 remnant 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 streams having their sources in different
places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, 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 the Gita: "Whosoever comes to
Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men 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 civilisation 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 honour 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.
Why We Disagree
15 Sep 1893
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 which 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 Christian sits in his
little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his
little well and thinks 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.
Paper on
Hinduism
Read at the Parliament on 19th
September, 1893
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 Brahmin 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 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, now 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; mut 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 by 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 belives 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 belives 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. Not is the soul bound
by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free. unbounded. holy,
pure, and perfect. But somehow of 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; an 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; anmmortal, 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 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 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 fulfil its services in discovering one
energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of
religion becomes 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.
Religion
not the crying need of India 20th September, 1893
Christians must always be ready for good criticism,
and I hardly think that you will mind if I make a little criticism. You
Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to save the soul of the
heathen--why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In India,
during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did
nothing. 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. They ask us for
bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a starving people to offer
them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics. In
India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the
people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I fully
realised how difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a
Christian land.
I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I
am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master,
India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am
going to criticise Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this.
Far be it from me to criticise him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But
our views about Buddha are 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 was a
Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have
accepted Shakya Muni as God 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 Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shakya Muni came to
preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy.
Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand
him, while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise
the import of this teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of
the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the
truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not to destroy,
but he was the fulfilment, 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 that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste
and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and 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 from the hidden Vedas and throw them
broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought
missionarising into practice--nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of
proselytising.
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
heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a 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 is not
one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.
But at the same time, Brahminism 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 realise what the separation has shown to us, that the
Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor
the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the
Buddhists and the Brahmins 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 Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the
wonderful humanising power of the Great Master.
Address at the
Final Session
27th September, 1893
The World's Parliament of Religions has become an
accomplished fact, and the merciful Father has helped those who laboured to
bring it into existence, and crowned with success their most unselfish labour.
My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of truth first
dreamed this wonderful dream and then realised 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 any one here
hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and
the destruction of the other, to him I say, "Brother, 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
his individuality and grow according to his 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
anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the
destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point
out to him 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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