Address at the parliament of
religons
|
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. l thank you in the name of
the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of
the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of the millions and
millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who,
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 the 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, which is every day repeated by millions
of human beings:
"As the different streams having there 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
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.
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 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 flog that lived in the sea
came and fell into the well.
"Where are you form?" "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. l 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. 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 Hindus'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
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 exists, 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 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 newborn soul. And since they were not obtained in this
present life, they must have come down from past lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, how is it
that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily
explained . I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue; in
fact, no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness;
but let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that
consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its
depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would
come up, and you would be conscious even of your past life.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect
proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the
Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the
ocean of memory can be stirred up - try it and you would get a complete
reminiscence of your past life.
So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot
pierce - him the fire cannot burn - him the water cannot melt - him the
air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose
circumference is nowhere but whose centre is located in the body, and that
death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul
bound by the conditions of matter . In its very essence, it is free,
unbounded, holy , pure, and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself
tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as matter.
Why should the free, perfect and pure being be thus under the 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 posting one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big
scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The
question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect;
how can the pure, the absolute change even a microscopic particle of its
nature? But the Hindu is sincere He does not want to take shelter under
sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; and
his answer is : " I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the
soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned
by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that. It is a fact in
everybody's consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The
Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The
answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more
than what the Hindu says, " I do not know."
Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal , perfect and
infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to
another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by
the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth
to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny
boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and
bashed 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. 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, no
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 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 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. Yudhisthira
answered , "Behold my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they
are; I love them. They do not give me anything but my nature is to love
the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly , I love the
Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only
object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do
not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me
wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in
love."
The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of
matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word
they use for it is , therefore Mukti - freedom from the bonds of
imperfection, freedom from death and misery. And this bondage can only
fall of 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 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
existence's 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 but manifestations, and the science of
religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in
a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing
world, One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive
manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the
ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of
all sciences.
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 chirishing 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 explantions.
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 us the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the
Hindu uses and 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 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 centred 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 any where. "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 tell
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 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 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 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 to everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to
say that 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
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.
He must not stop any where. "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 tell
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 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 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 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 to everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to
say that 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
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 extra -ordinary 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 carryout 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 catholocity 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 centred 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 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
Zorostrians, 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 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 vangaurd of civilization with the flag of harmony.
Religion Not the Crying Need of India
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 the starving
people to offer them religion; it is an insult to the 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 realized how difficult it was to get help
for heathens from Christians in a Christian land.
Buddhism: The Fulfilment of Hinduism 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 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. But our views about Buddha
are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation be-
tween 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
fulfill 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 realize the importance 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 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
the 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 how the hid- den Vedas and throw
them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who
brought missionarizing 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. Saint 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 the 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 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 everyone, 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 himself 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 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 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 beg- gars, 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 Brahmin with the heart,
the noble soul, the wonderful humanizing power of the Great Master.
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 labour.
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 ham time to time in this
harmony. My special thanks to them, for they have, by their striking
contrast, made the 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 others, 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 extended character. In the
face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his
own religion and the destruction of 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". |
