Hinduism-a Universal Religion - Part 1

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Swami Vivekananda

Hinduism-a Universal Religion - Part 1

 

(The following is an excerpt taken from Swami Vivekananda's lecture given at the Parliament of Religions held at Chicago in 1893)

 

Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric-Hinduism, Zorostrianism and Judaism. All of them have 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 by its own daughter, and while a handful of Parsis is all that now remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India, seeming to shake the religion of Vedas to its very depths, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake, it receded 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 ideas of idolatry, with its multifarious mythology, the agnostics of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion.

 

Where then, the question arises, where is the common center upon 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 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 Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons at different time. Just as the laws of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would continue to exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain, even if we forgot them.

 

The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis and we honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.

 

Here it may be urged that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that sum total of the cosmic energy is always same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was the 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 compound and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there was never 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 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 Brahmana boy repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created, like the sun and the moons of previous cycles". And this agrees with the modern science.

 

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes and try to conceive of my own existence "III"-- what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, the nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. here I am in this body; it will fail but I will go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination, which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigor and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots, and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy? Nor would it mend matters least to be 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 flat 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 mind and body accounted for by inherited aptitude? here are two parallel lines of existence--one of the mind, the other of the 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 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 bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration through which a peculiar mind 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, for science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetition. 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 this 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 the direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the whole world by Hindu Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which they 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 can not pierce--Him the fire cannot burn--Him the water cannot melt--Him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose center is located in the body, and that means the change of the center from body to body. Nor is soul bound by conditions of matter. In its very essence, its free, unbounded, holy, pure and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matte, and thinks 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 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 the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become 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 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 of oneself as 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 a change of center from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a pillow and dashed down into the yawing 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 in crushing everything on 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 an 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, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are 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. You are not matter. You are not bodies. Matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.