In the four
volumes (Now
in nine volumes — Ed.)
of the works of the Swami Vivekananda which are to compose the
present edition, we have what is not only a gospel to the world at
large, but also to its own children, the Charter of the Hindu Faith.
What Hinduism needed, amidst the general disintegration of the
modern era, was a rock where she could lie at anchor, an
authoritative utterance in which she might recognise her self. And
this was given to her, in these words and writings of the Swami
Vivekananda.
For the first time in
history, as has been said elsewhere, Hinduism itself forms here the
subject of generalisation of a Hindu mind of the highest order. For
ages to come the Hindu man who would verify, the Hindu mother who
would teach her children, what was the faith of their ancestors will
turn to the pages of these books for assurance and light. Long after
the English language has disappeared from India, the gift that has
here been made, through that language, to the world, will remain and
bear its fruit in East and West alike. What Hinduism had needed, was
the organising and consolidating of its own idea. What the world had
needed was a faith that had no fear of truth. Both these are found
here. Nor could any greater proof have been given of the eternal
vigour of the Sanâtana Dharma, of the fact that India is as great in
the present as ever in the past, than this rise of the individual
who, at the critical moment, gathers up and voices the communal
consciousness.
That India should have
found her own need satisfied only in carrying to the humanity
outside her borders the
bread of life is what
might have been foreseen. Nor did it happen on this occasion for the
first time. It was once before in sending out to the sister lands
the message of a nation-making faith that India learnt as a whole to
understand the greatness of her own thought — a self-unification
that gave birth to modern Hinduism itself. Never may we allow it to
be forgotten that on Indian soil first was heard the command from a
Teacher to His disciples: "Go ye out into all the world, and preach
the Gospel to every creature!" It is the same thought, the same
impulse of love, taking to itself a new shape, that is uttered by
the lips of the Swami Vivekananda, when to a great gathering in the
West he says: "If one religion true, then all the others also
must be true. Thus the Hindu faith is yours as much as mine."
And again, in amplification of the same idea: "We Hindus do not
merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in
the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the
Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know
that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest
absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and
realise the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and, binding
them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful
bouquet of worship." To the heart of this speaker, none was foreign
or alien. For him, there existed only Humanity and Truth.
Of the Swami's address
before the Parliament of Religions, it may be said that when he
began to speak it was of "the religious ideas of the Hindus", but
when he ended, Hinduism had been created. The moment was ripe with
this potentiality. The vast audience that faced him represented
exclusively the occidental mind, but included some development of
all that in this was most distinctive. Every nation in Europe has
poured in its human contribution upon America, and notably upon
Chicago, where the Parliament was held. Much of the best, as well as
some of the worst, of
modern effort and struggle, is at all times to be met with, within
the frontiers of that Western Civic Queen, whose feet are upon the
shores of Lake Michigan, as she sits and broods, with the light of
the North in her eyes. There is very little in the modern
consciousness, very little inherited from the past of Europe, that
does not hold some outpost in the city of Chicago. And while the
teeming life and eager interests of that centre may seem to some of
us for the present largely a chaos, yet they are undoubtedly making
for the revealing of some noble and slow-wrought ideal of human
unity, when the days of their ripening shall be fully accomplished.
Such was the
psychological area, such the sea of mind, young, tumultuous,
overflowing with its own energy and self-assurance, yet inquisitive
and alert withal, which confronted Vivekananda when he rose to
speak. Behind him, on the contrary, lay an ocean, calm with long
ages of spiritual development. Behind him lay a world that dated
itself from the Vedas, and remembered itself in the Upanishads, a
world to which Buddhism was almost modern; a world that was filled
with religious systems of faiths and creeds; a quiet land, steeped
in the sunlight of the tropics, the dust of whose roads had been
trodden by the feet of the saints for ages upon ages. Behind him, in
short, lay India, with her thousands of years of national
development, in which she had sounded many things, proved many
things, and realised almost all, save only her own perfect
unanimity, from end to end of her great expanse of time and space,
as to certain fundamental and essential truths, held by all her
people in common.
These, then, were the
two mind-floods, two immense rivers of thought, as it were, Eastern
and modern, of which the yellow-clad wanderer on the platform of the
Parliament of Religions formed for a moment the point of confluence.
The formulation of the common bases of Hinduism was the inevitable
result of the shock of their
contact, in a
personality, so impersonal. For it was no experience of his own that
rose to the lips of the Swami Vivekananda there. He did not even
take advantage of the occasion to tell the story of his Master.
Instead of either of these, it was the religious consciousness of
India that spoke through him, the message of his whole people, as
determined by their whole past. And as he spoke, in the youth and
noonday of the West, a nation, sleeping in the shadows of the
darkened half of earth, on the far side of the Pacific, waited in
spirit for the words that would be borne on the dawn that was
travelling towards them, to reveal to them the secret of their own
greatness and strength.
Others stood beside the
Swami Vivekananda, on the same platform as he, as apostles of
particular creeds and churches. But it was his glory that he came to
preach a religion to which each of these was, in his own words,
"only a travelling, a coming up, of different men, and women,
through various conditions and circumstances to the same goal". He
stood there, as he declared, to tell of One who had said of them
all, not that one or another was true, in this or that respect, or
for this or that reason, but that "All these are threaded upon Me,
as pearls upon a string. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness
and extraordinary power, raising and purifying humanity, know thou
that I am there." To the Hindu, says Vivekananda, "Man is not
travelling from error to truth, but climbing up from truth to truth,
from truth that is lower to truth that is higher." This, and the
teaching of Mukti — the doctrine that "man is to become divine by
realising the divine," that religion is perfected in us only when it
has led us to "Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him
who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world, that One who is
the only soul, of which all souls are but delusive manifestations" —
may be taken as the two great outstanding truths which,
authenticated by the
longest and most
complex experience in human history, India proclaimed through him to
the modern world of the West.
For India herself, the
short address forms, as has been said, a brief Charter of
Enfranchisement. Hinduism in its wholeness the speaker bases on the
Vedas, but he spiritualises our conception of the word, even while
he utters it. To him, all that is true is Veda. "By the Vedas," he
says, "no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of
spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times."
Incidentally, he discloses his conception of the Sanatana Dharma.
"From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which
the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the lowest
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." To his mind, there could be no sect,
no school, no sincere religious experience of the Indian people —
however like an aberration it might seem to the individual — that
might rightly be excluded from the embrace of Hinduism. And of this
Indian Mother-Church, according to him, the distinctive doctrine is
that of the Ishta Devatâ, the right of each soul to choose its own
path, and to seek God in its own way. No army, then, carries the
banner of so wide an Empire as that of Hinduism, thus defined. For
as her spiritual goal is the finding of God, even so is her
spiritual rule the perfect freedom of every soul to be itself.
Yet would not this
inclusion of all, this freedom of each, be the glory of Hinduism
that it is, were it not for her supreme call, of sweetest promise:
"Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that dwell in higher
spheres! For I have found that Ancient One who is beyond all
darkness, all delusion. And knowing Him, ye also shall be saved from
death." Here is the word for the sake of
which all the rest
exists and has existed. Here is the crowning realisation, into which
all others are resolvable. When, in his lecture on "The Work Before
Us," the Swami adjures all to aid him in the building of a temple
wherein every worshipper in the land can worship, a temple whose
shrine shall contain only the word Om, there are some of us who
catch in the utterance the glimpse of a still greater temple — India
herself, the Motherland, as she already exists — and see the paths,
not of the Indian churches alone, but of all Humanity, converging
there, at the foot of that sacred place wherein is set the symbol
that is no symbol, the name that is beyond all sound. It is to this,
and not away from it, that all the paths of all the worships and all
the religious systems lead. India is at one with the most puritan
faiths of the world in her declaration that progress is from seen to
unseen, from the many to the One, from the low to the high, from the
form to the formless, and never in the reverse direction. She
differs only in having a word of sympathy and promise for every
sincere conviction, wherever and whatever it may be, as constituting
a step in the great ascent.
The Swami Vivekananda
would have been less than he was, had anything in this Evangel of
Hinduism been his own. Like the Krishna of the Gitâ, like Buddha,
like Shankarâchârya, like every great teacher that Indian thought
has known, his sentences are laden with quotations from the Vedas
and Upanishads. He stands merely as the Revealer, the Interpreter to
India of the treasures that she herself possesses in herself. The
truths he preaches would have been as true, had he never been born.
Nay more, they would have been equally authentic. The difference
would have lain in their difficulty of access, in their want of
modern clearness and incisiveness of statement, and in their loss of
mutual coherence and unity. Had he not lived, texts that today will
carry the bread of life to thousands might have remained the obscure
disputes of scholars.
He taught with authority, and not as one of the Pandits. For he
himself had plunged to the depths of the realisation which he
preached, and he came back like Ramanuja only to tell its secrets to
the pariah, the outcast, and the foreigner.
And yet this statement
that his teaching holds nothing new is not absolutely true. It must
never be forgotten that it was the Swami Vivekananda who, while
proclaiming the sovereignty of the Advaita Philosophy, as including
that experience in which all is one, without a second, also added to
Hinduism the doctrine that Dvaita, Vishishtâdvaita, and Advaita are
but three phases or stages in a single development, of which the
last-named constitutes the goal. This is part and parcel of the
still greater and more simple doctrine that the many and the One are
the same Reality, perceived by the mind at different times and in
different attitudes; or as Sri Ramakrishna expressed the same thing,
"God is both with form and without form. And He is that which
includes both form and formlessness."
It is this which adds
its crowning significance to our Master's life, for here he becomes
the meeting-point, not only of East and West, but also of past and
future. If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it
is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work,
all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of
realisation. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular.
To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself
religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to
avoid.
This is the realisation
which makes Vivekananda the great preacher of Karma, not as divorced
from, but as expressing Jnâna and Bhakti. To him, the workshop, the
study, the farmyard, and the field are as true and fit scenes for
the meeting of God with man as the cell of the monk or the door of
the temple. To him, there is no
difference between
service of man and worship of God, between manliness and faith,
between true righteousness and spirituality. All his words, from one
point of view, read as a commentary upon this central conviction.
"Art, science, and religion", he said once, "are but three different
ways of expressing a single truth. But in order to understand this
we must have the theory of Advaita."
The formative influence
that went to the determining of his vision may perhaps be regarded
as threefold. There was, first, his literary education, in Sanskrit
and English. The contrast between the two worlds thus opened to him
carried with it a strong impression of that particular experience
which formed the theme of the Indian sacred books. It was evident
that this, if true at all, had not been stumbled upon by Indian
sages, as by some others, in a kind of accident. Rather was it the
subject-matter of a science, the object of a logical analysis that
shrank from no sacrifice which the pursuit of truth demanded.
In his Master,
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, living and teaching in the temple-garden at
Dakshineshwar, the Swami Vivekananda — "Naren" as he then was —
found that verification of the ancient texts which his heart and his
reason had demanded. Here was the reality which the books only
brokenly described. Here was one to whom Samâdhi was a constant mode
of knowledge. Every hour saw the swing of the mind from the many to
the One. Every moment heard the utterance of wisdom gathered
superconsciously. Everyone about him caught the vision of the
divine. Upon the disciple came the desire for supreme knowledge "as
if it had been a fever". Yet he who was thus the living embodiment
of the books was so unconsciously, for he had read none of them! In
his Guru, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda found the key to
life.
Even now, however, the
preparation for his own task was not complete. He had yet to wander
throughout
the length and breadth
of India, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, mixing with saints and
scholars and simple souls alike, learning from all, teaching to all,
and living with all, seeing India as she was and is, and so grasping
in its comprehensiveness that vast whole, of which his Master's life
and personality had been a brief and intense epitome.
These, then — the
Shâstras, the Guru, and the Motherland — are the three notes that
mingle themselves to form the music of the works of Vivekananda.
These are the treasure which it is his to offer. These furnish him
with the ingredients whereof he compounds the world's heal-all of
his spiritual bounty. These are the three lights burning within that
single lamp which India by his hand lighted and set up, for the
guidance of her own children and of the world in the few years of
work between September 19, 1893 and July 4, 1902. And some of us
there are, who, for the sake of that lighting, and of this record
that he has left behind him, bless the land that bore him and the
hands of those who sent him forth, and believe that not even yet has
it been given to us to understand the vastness and significance of
the message that he spoke.
N. of Rk — V.
July 4, 1907