Vivekananda to Disciples

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Monday, December 1, 2008

Vivekananda To Chennai Disciples

 

http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_1/vol_1_frame.htm

 

FRIENDS, FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN AND CO-RELIGIONISTS OF MADRAS,

 

 

 

It is most gratifying to me to find that my insignificant service to the cause

of our religion has been accept able to you, not because it is as a personal

appreciation of me and my work in a foreign and distant land, but as a sure sign

that, though whirlwind after whirlwind of foreign invasion has passed over the

devoted head of India, though centuries of neglect on our part and contempt on

the part of our conquerors have visibly dimmed the glories of ancient Âryâvarta,

though many a stately column on which it rested, many a beautiful arch, and many

a marvellous corner have been washed away by the inundations that deluged the

land for centuries — the centre is all sound, the keystone is unimpaired. The

spiritual foundation upon which the marvellous monument of glory to God and

charity to all beings has been reared stands unshaken, strong as ever. Your

generous appreciation of Him whose message to India and to the whole world, I,

the most unworthy of His servants, had the privilege to bear shows your innate

spiritual instinct which saw in Him and His message the first murmurs of that

tidal wave of spirituality which is destined at no distant future to break upon

India in all its irresistible powers, carrying away in its omnipotent flood all

that is weak and defective, and raising the Hindu race to the platform it is

destined to occupy in the providence of God, crowned with more glory than it

ever had even in the past, the reward of centuries of silent suffering, and

fulfilling its mission amongst the races of the world — the evolution of

spiritual humanity.

 

The people of Northern India are especially grateful to you of the South, as the

great source to which most of the impulses that are working in India today can

be traced. The great Bhâshyakâras, epoch-making Âchâryas, Shankara, Râmânuja,

and Madhva were born in Southern India. Great Shankara to whom every

Advâitavâdin in the world owes allegiance; great Ramanuja whose heavenly touch

converted the downtrodden pariahs into Âlwârs; great Madhva whose leadership was

recognised even by the followers of the only Northern Prophet whose power has

been felt all over the length and breadth of India — Shri Krishna Chaitanya.

Even at the present day it is the South that carries the palm in the glories of

Varanasi — your renunciation controls the sacred shrines on the farthest peaks

of the Himalayas, and what wonder that with the blood of Prophets running in

your veins, with your lives blessed by such Acharyas, you are the first and

foremost to appreciate and hold on to the message of Bhagavân Shri Ramakrishna.

 

The South had been the repository of Vedic learning, and you will understand me

when I state that, in spite of the reiterated assertions of aggressive

ignorance, it is the Shruti still that is the backbone of all the different

divisions of the Hindu religion.

 

However great may be the merits of the Samhitâ and the Brâhmana portions of the

Vedas to the ethnologists or the philologists, however desirable may be the

results that the * or * or * in conjunction with the different Vedis (altars)

and sacrifices and libations produce — it was all in the way of Bhoga; and no

one ever contended that it could produce Moksha. As such, the Jnâna-Kânda, the

Âranyakas, the Shrutis par excellence which teach the way to spirituality, the

Moksha-Mârga, have always ruled and will always rule in India.

 

Lost in the mazes and divisions of the " Religion Eternal " , by prepossession and

prejudice unable to grasp the meaning of the only religion whose universal

adaptation is the exact shadow of the (Smaller than the smallest, greater than

the greatest (Katha, II. 20)) God it preaches, groping in the dark with a

standard of spiritual truth borrowed second-hand from nations who never knew

anything but rank materialism, the modern young Hindu struggles in vain to

understand the religion of his forefathers, and gives up the quest altogether,

and becomes a hopeless wreck of an agnostic, or else, unable to vegetate on

account of the promptings of his innate religious nature, drinks carelessly of

some of those different decoctions of Western materialism with an Eastern

flavour, and thus fulfils the prophecy of the Shruti:

 

 

 

— " Fools go staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind. " They alone

escape whose spiritual nature has been touched and vivified by the life-giving

touch of the " Sad-Guru " . (The good teacher.)

 

 

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