After 150 Years, the Voice of Vivekananda Still Resounds
The religious beliefs of
Indians and Americans bear the indelible imprint of this compellingly Hindu
monk
THIS YEAR MARKS THE 150TH BIRTHDAY OF SWAMI
VIVEKANANDA, born January 12, 1863, in Calcutta. We celebrate his life and
legacy by exploring his early upbringing, his appearance at the 1893 Chicago
World’s Parliament of Religions, his triumphant return to India, his influence
on Hindu identity and nationalism during the independence struggle and his
founding of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission.
Any
evaluation of his life’s work must consider and appreciate India’s astoundingly
depressed state at the time—its economy depleted by decades of exploitation
under the British Raj, its citizens bereft of pride and purpose, its
British-educated intellectuals believing that the country’s traditions were not
even worth salvaging. The people of India were losing heart, and the
recognition he earned in the West was immensely encouraging to India’s elite
and common man alike.
The
vast wealth of resources on Swami’s thirteen-years public mission includes
eight volumes of his collected works and several anthologies safeguarding
thousands of letters and newspaper reports. From these have arisen hundreds of
books. Our writers have drawn upon this material, often letting Swami speak for
himself, so that his own voice and vision may be heard, without need for
interpretation.
Happy birthday, Swamiji!
Happy birthday, Swamiji!
FORMATIVE YEARS
We
begin with a summary short biography by Prof. Jeffrey D. Long, an expert on
Swami’s life and teachings.
BORN TO A SOLID MIDDLE-CLASS hindu family in Kolkata on
January 12, 1863–while the American Civil War raged on the other side of the
globe, and six years after a famous but sadly unsuccessful attempt by his
countrymen to rise in force against British imperial domination–Narendranath
Datta, later known as Swami Vivekananda, would be deeply affected by the currents
of thought flowing among the English-educated elites of Bengal in the
nineteenth century.
An
air of skepticism prevailed among many young Bengalis during Vivekananda’s
early years. Should one worship God with form, as the Hindu traditionalists
continued to do, or without form, as taught by new movements, such as the
Brahmo Samaj? Should one believe in a God at all, or was Western science able
to explain everything, without any recourse to supernatural beings? These
questions, and many others, filled the intellectual atmosphere in which the
young Naren lived and breathed—an atmosphere not unlike that which prevails in
much of our world today.
Having
an even more skeptical and inquiring mind than most, the highly educated Naren
was encouraged by a friend to meet Sri Ramakrishna, a priest at the
Dakshineshwar temple of the Goddess Kali who was known for his ecstatic visions
and wise teachings, as well as for his intensely personal longing for the
Divine.
The
1881 meeting of Narendranath Datta with Ramakrishna reads like an episode from
one of the great Hindu epics. The doubting Naren asks Sri Ramakrishna, “Have
you seen God?” “Yes,” Ramakrishna replies without hesitation, “Though more
intensely than I am seeing you right now.” The rest of their conversation leads
young Naren to suspect that Ramakrishna is truly mad. According to Naren’s own
account, Ramakrishna “folded his palms together and began addressing me as if I
was some divine being, ‘I know who you are, My Lord. You are Nara, the ancient
sage, the incarnation of Narayana. You have come to earth to take away the
sufferings and sorrows of mankind.’”
Despite
his doubts, though, Naren found Ramakrishna to be compelling. “‘Here is a true
man of renunciation,’ I said to myself; ‘he practices what he preaches; he has
given up everything for God.’” Drawn irresistibly to Ramakrishna’s uniquely
charismatic personality, Naren and a number of other young men became regular
visitors to Ramakrishna’s home at Dakshineshwar. Over the course of the next
five years, until Ramakrishna’s death from throat cancer in 1886, Naren and his
fellow seekers received teaching from Ramakrishna.
The Goal: Realization
In
his lecture “My Master,” given in 1896, Vivekananda spoke about his guru: “For
the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw God, that religion
was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than
we can sense the world. I actually saw that religion could be given. One touch,
one glance, can change a whole life. I have read about Buddha and Christ and
Mohammed, about all those different luminaries of ancient times, how they would
stand up and say, ‘Be thou whole,’ and the man became whole. I now found it to
be true, and when I myself saw this man, all skepticism was brushed aside. It
could be done. Religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories; nor is it
sectarianism. It is the relation between the soul and God. Religion does not
consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship.
It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in
organizations. Religion consists in realization. As a fact, we all know that
nothing will satisfy us until we know the truth for ourselves. However we may
argue, however much we may hear, but one thing will satisfy us, and that is our
own realization; and such an experience is possible for every one of us if we
will only try.”
Sannyas Life
Shortly
before his death, Ramakrishna gave a select group of his disciples orange robes
and initiated them into sannyasa, or renunciation, thus laying the foundation
for the Ramakrishna Order. After their master’s passing, the young monks began
living together as a community, forming the nucleus of what would eventually
become Belur Math, the central headquarters of the order, in Kolkata, just
across the Hooghly River and slightly to the south of Dakshineshwar.
In
1900, at—of all places—the Shakespeare Club of Padasena in California,
Vivekananda explained the nature of Hindu monasticism: “The sannyasins do not
possess property, and they do not marry. Beyond that there is no organization.
The only bond that is there is the bond between the teacher and the taught—and
that is peculiar to India. The teacher is not a man who comes just to teach me,
and I pay him so much, and there it ends. In India it is really like an
adoption. The teacher is more than my own father, and I am truly his child, his
son in every respect. I owe him obedience and reverence first, before my own
father even; because, they say, the father gave me this body, but he showed me
the way to salvation, he is greater than father. And we carry this love, this
respect for our teacher all our lives.”
The Wandering Years
Naren—henceforth
known by his monastic name of Swami Vivekananda—felt a calling to live for a
time as a wandering sannyasin. Leaving Kolkata, he traveled the length and
breadth of India, visiting such cities as Banaras and Baroda, spending time in
solitary meditation in the Himalayas.
He
spoke of this time in a lecture in Southern California: “Wandering tells on the
body in the long run: sometimes one meal at nine in the evening, another time a
meal at eight in the morning, another after two days, another after three
days—and always the poorest and roughest thing. Who is going to give to the
beggar the good things he has? And then, they have not much in India. And most
of the time walking, climbing snow peaks, sometimes ten miles of hard mountain
climbing, just to get a meal. They eat unleavened bread in India, and sometimes
they have it stored away for twenty or thirty days, until it is harder than
bricks; and then they will give a square of that. I would have to go from house
to house to collect sufficient for one meal. And then the bread was so hard, it
made my mouth bleed to eat it. Literally, you can break your teeth on that
bread. Then I would put it in a pot and pour over it water from the river. For
months and months I existed that way—of course it was telling on the health.”
In
late 1892, after three years of wandering, he famously journeyed to the very
southern tip of India and received a vision of the future of India while
meditating on a rock off the coast that today bears his name. Encouraged by a
local Hindu ruler, the Raja of Ramnad, who had become his disciple, Vivekananda
resolved to undertake the trip that would change the world: to be a Hindu
representative at the World’s Parliament of Religions, to be held in Chicago in
September of 1893.
At the Parliament
“Sisters
and Brothers of America,” began Swami Vivekananda’s renowned first address to
the World’s Parliament of Religions, held at what is now the Art Institute of
Chicago. “Sisters and Brothers of America” were bold words with which to begin
a speech by an Indian monk in America in 1893. Racism was still rampant;
slavery had been abolished by presidential decree just thirty-one years
earlier. India remained under the heel of British imperial rule, and most
Americans of European descent still did not regard people of other ethnic
groups as equals. Placing the word “sisters” before “brothers” was also
significant. This was twenty-seven years before women in America were granted
the right to vote.
Many
in India today view Swami Vivekananda primarily as an Indian cultural hero and
as a revitalizer and reformer of ancient Hindu traditions. In the context of
America, he was in the vanguard of progressive social thought, treating people
of all races, and both men and women, as equals. This was based on the Vedantic
teaching he learned from his master, that God dwells in all beings. The significance
of his opening words was not lost upon his audience, who roared their approval,
forcing him to pause to let the applause die down before proceeding with the
main body of his speech.
The
major theme of Vivekananda’s address would be a central one of his teaching:
the idea of “toleration and universal acceptance.” Speaking of Hindus
generally, he says, “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept
all religions as true.”
On
September 19 he gave his “Paper on Hinduism” to the Parliament, which contained
his oft-repeated exhortation that man is not a sinner: “A Vedic sage 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.”
Vivekananda
denounced the opposites of toleration and acceptance—bigotry and fanaticism—in
the second half of his speech. In his closing lines, he says, “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.”
His
success at the Parliament was widely reported both in the US and India, with
the The New York Herald memorably stating, “He is undoubtedly the greatest
figure in the Parliament of Religions. After hearing him, we feel how foolish
it is to send missionaries to this learned nation.”
His National Impact in the US
Vivekananda
was not the first Hindu teacher to visit North America. A Brahmo Samaj
representative, Pratap Majumdar, had been in America prior to Vivekananda, and
also attended and spoke at the 1893 Parliament. The groundwork for the
reception of Swami Vivekananda’s ideas had also been laid by the intense
interest in Hindu thought of such major intellectual figures of nineteenth
century America as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The
Theosophists, and before them, the Transcendentalists, had produced a discourse
that was ready for a direct infusion of Hindu thought and practice from the
Subcontinent. Vivekananda was not the first, but he was the best received,
becoming a celebrity figure whose travels and teachings were followed by all of
the major newspapers of the day.
The
Vivekananda phenomenon was not without some resistance. Racism, as mentioned,
remained rampant, and the United States was a deeply Christian nation. There
were those who sought to counter his influence. But there was also a deep vein
of religious progressivism into which he successfully tapped. In 1894 he
started the first Vedanta Society in New York. This organization then grew,
becoming nationwide in its scope soon after Vivekananda returned to India and
began dispatching his brother monks to lead the centers that sprouted up from
Boston on the East Coast to San Francisco in the West.
THE SEDITIOUS MONK
We turn now to the impact of
Vivekananda on India’s independence movement, excerpting (with some editing)
from a comprehensive article by Prof. Sankari Prasad Basu (1928–) which
appeared in the August, 1992, edition of Vivekananda Kendra Patrika.
AT THE OUTSET LET US REMIND OURSELVES of a known fact:
Vivekananda was not directly involved in the Indian freedom movement.
Nevertheless, he had tremendous influence on all phases of the movement. It has
been said that Vivekananda’s influence on the Indian movement was no less than
the influence of Rousseau on the French revolution, or of Marx on the Russian
and Chinese revolutions.
Without
the background of wide national consciousness, no freedom movement is possible.
From all contemporary sources it becomes evident that Vivekananda’s was the
most forceful influence to rouse the national spirit in India. To quote Sister
Nivedita, “He was a worker at foundations. Just as Ramakrishna, in fact,
without knowing any books, had been a living epitome of the Vedanta, so was
Vivekananda of the national life.”
We
shall go briefly into what happened in the national field before Vivekananda’s
advent. English education, vernacular literature, the Indian press, various
reform movements and political associations, including the Congress, had come
and spread their influence before him. In spite of all these, a pervading
national consciousness was absent. Otherwise, how could The Hindu of Madras
write in early 1893 about the religion of the major community, the Hindus, that
“it is dead” and “its course is run”? But the same paper, along with others,
including Anglo-Indian and missionary papers, wrote in less than one year’s
time (and also afterwards) that “the present time may be described as the
renaissance period in the history of Hindus” (Madras Christian College
Magazine, March 1897). It was called a “national uprising” (Madras Times, 2
March 1895). How did this miracle happen? The only answer that we derive from
contemporary accounts is that Vivekananda appeared at the Parliament of
Religions, proclaimed there the glory of Indian religion and civilization, won
recognition for his country’s ancient heritage, and thereby gave back to his
countrymen their long-lost self-esteem and self-confidence.
In Swami’s Own Words: The Future of
India
“The
Future of India” was a lecture to an audience of 3,000 given in Madras on
February 14, 1897, at the Harmston Circus Pavilion. In it, Swami Vivekananda
eloquently exhorts India’s youth to work for India’s freedom and makes the
extraordinary prediction that it will take 50 years to obtain. In fact, 51
years and one week later, on February 20, 1947, British Prime Minister Clement
Attlee announced India would be given full self government.
WHY IS IT, TO TAKE A CASE IN POINT, that forty millions
of Englishmen rule three hundred millions of people here? What is the
psychological explanation? These forty millions put their wills together and
that means infinite power, and you three hundred millions have a will each
separate from the other. Therefore to make a great future India, the whole
secret lies in organization, accumulation of power, coordination of wills.
Already before my mind rises one of the marvellous verses of the Rig-Veda
Samhita which says, “Be thou all of one mind, be thou all of one thought, for
in the days of yore, the Gods being of one mind were enabled to receive
oblations.” That the Gods can be worshipped by men is because they are of one
mind. Being of one mind is the secret of society. And the more you go on fighting
and quarreling about all trivialities such as “Dravidian” and “Aryan,” and the
question of Brahmins and non-Brahmins and all that, the further you are off
from that accumulation of energy and power which is going to make the future
India. For mark you, the future India depends entirely upon that. That is the
secret—accumulation of will power, coordination, bringing them all, as it were,
into one focus. So give up being a slave. For the next fifty years this alone
shall be our keynote—this, our great Mother India.
Young
men of Madras, my hope is in you. Will you respond to the call of your nation?
Each one of you has a glorious future if you dare believe me. Have a tremendous
faith in yourselves, like the faith I had when I was a child, and which I am
working out now. Have that faith, each one of you, in yourself—that eternal
power is lodged in every soul—and you will revive the whole of India. Ay, we
will then go to every country under the sun, and our ideas will before long be
a component of the many forces that are working to make up every nation in the
world. We must enter into the life of every race in India and abroad; we shall
have to work to bring this about. Now for that, I want young men. “It is the
young, the strong, and healthy, of sharp intellect that will reach the Lord,”
say the Vedas. This is the time to decide your future—while you possess the
energy of youth, not when you are worn out and jaded, but in the freshness and
vigor of youth. Work—this is the time; for the freshest, the untouched, and
unsmelled flowers alone are to be laid at the feet of the Lord, and such He
receives. Rouse yourselves, therefore, for life is short. There are greater
works to be done than aspiring to become lawyers and picking quarrels and such
things. A far greater work is this sacrifice of yourselves for the benefit of
your race, for the welfare of humanity. What is in this life? You are Hindus,
and there is the instinctive belief in you that life is eternal.
Life
is short, but the soul is immortal and eternal, and one thing being certain,
death, let us therefore take up a great ideal and give up our whole life to it.
Let this be our determination, and may He, the Lord, who “comes again and again
for the salvation of His own people,” to quote from our scriptures—may the
great Krishna bless us and lead us all to the fulfilment of our aims!
His Call to Arms
After
returning to India, Vivekananda called upon the people to believe in their
potential strength. He exhorted his countrymen to accept new ideas and scientific
knowledge that the modern machine age could offer. He showed the way for
nation-building on a sound foundation.
In
his 1897 Madras speech, “My Plan of Campaign,” he exhorted the leaders to
cultivate the indispensable virtue of feeling for the people: “Feel, therefore,
my would-be reformers, my would-be patriots! Do you feel? Do you feel that
millions and millions of the descendants of Gods and of sages have become
next-door neighbors to brutes [e.g. the British]? Do you feel that millions are
starving today and millions have been starving for ages? Do you feel that
ignorance has come over the land as a dark cloud? Does it make you restless?
Does it make you sleepless? Has it made you almost mad? Are you seized with
that one idea of the misery of ruin, and have you forgotten all about your
name, your fame, your wives, your children, your property, even your own
bodies? If so, that is the first step to becoming a patriot.”
In
“The Mission of Vedanta,” given the same week, he told the audience: “Ay, let
every man and woman and child, without respect of caste or birth, weakness or
strength, hear and learn that behind the strong and the weak, behind the high
and the low, behind everyone, there is that Infinite Soul, assuring all the
infinite possibility and the infinite capacity to become great and good. Let us
proclaim to every soul: Arise, arise, awake! Awake from this hypnotism of
weakness. None is really weak; the soul is infinite, omnipotent and omniscient.
Stand up, assert yourself, proclaim the God within you, do not deny Him!”
Renewing Hinduism
Past
history shows that, in India, religious movement has always preceded national
regeneration. Here in India, no national uprising was possible without
revitalizing Hinduism, the religion of the majority. Vivekananda did that, and
at the same time made it clear that Hinduism and other religions could remain
in harmony and feel themselves as belonging to one nation. His primary role as
a religious leader made him the undisputed spiritual father of the Indian
freedom movement. His contributions towards Indian nationalism, militant
nationalism in particular, included renewed self-esteem and self-confidence,
dynamic spirit, dedication, a call for strength and struggle, love for the
country and its people, equal rights, harmony of religions and an emphasis on
social uplift and character building through mobilization of the young.
Vivekananda
urged the Indians to do away with narrow nationalism and to place and judge all
problems with an international perspective. He exhorted them to bring reform on
national lines and fight for national integration.
All
these ideas spread widely throughout India, either directly through him, or
through his books. Those writings took at times the shape of secret
revolutionary literature, copied in hand and circulated amongst the students.
How He Understood the British
Vivekananda’s
knowledge of world history, coupled with his deep and penetrating intellect and
direct experience, made him realize the real nature of British imperialism
which, unfortunately, the Indian leaders of his time could not comprehend.
Those leaders, though conscious of the occasional lapses of the British rule,
thought that on the whole it was beneficial to the people. To many of them the
rule was “divine dispensation” and they readily took an oath of allegiance. But
Vivekananda considered the British rule as nothing but Satanic, with merciless
exploitation as its sole objective. In the following words of Vivekananda we
find rare socio-political insight, couched in poetic diction:
“Therefore,
the conquest of India by England is not a conquest by Jesus or the Bible as we
are often asked to believe, neither is it like the conquest of India by Moguls
and the Pathans. But behind the name of the Lord Jesus, the Bible, the
magnificent palaces, the heavy tramp of the feet of the armies .... shaking the
earth, the sounds of war trumpets, bugles, the drums, and the splendid display
of the royal throne; behind all these, there is always the virtual presence of
England—that England whose war flag is the factory chimney, whose troops are
the merchant men, whose battle fields are the market places of the world and
whose Empress is the gold-studded Goddess of Fortune.”
The
Congress which spearheaded the national struggle afterwards was not the
Congress of Vivekananda’s time. Vivekananda objected to the “mendicant policy”
of that Congress, comprised as it was of toothless petitions and appeals to the
British Raj; he urged the nationalists to come down from their high pedestal of
intellectual and worldly superiority to the grass-root level and mix with the
lowliest of the lowly and share their sufferings; he inspired them for
self-organization through man-making education, and to sacrifice their all for
the country. The latter-day Congress accepted practically all his programs.
n
Swami’s Own Words: His plan for the education of India
n
the same lecture, “The Future of India,” Swami Vivekananda makes his case for
taking on the education of the masses of India.
WE MUST HAVE A HOLD ON THE SPIRITUAL AND SECULAR
EDUCATION OF THE NATION. Do you understand that? You must dream it, you must
talk it, you must think it and you must work it out. Till then there is no
salvation for the race. The education that you are getting now has some good
points, but it has a tremendous disadvantage which is so great that the good
things are all weighed down. In the first place it is not a man-making
education, it is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education
or any training that is based on negation, is worse than death. The child is
taken to [an English-run] school, and the first thing he learns is that his
father is a fool, the second thing that his grandfather is a lunatic, the third
thing that all his teachers are hypocrites, the fourth that all the sacred
books are lies! By the time he is sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless
and boneless. And the result is that fifty years of such education has not
produced one original man in the three Presidencies [states of South India]. Every
man of originality that has been produced has been educated elsewhere, and not
in this country, or they have gone to the old universities once more to cleanse
themselves of superstitions. Education is not the amount of information that is
put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must
have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you
have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have
more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library—“The ass
carrying its load of sandalwood knows only the weight and not the value of the
sandalwood.” If education is identical with information, the libraries are the
greatest sages in the world, and encyclopedias are the Rishis. The ideal,
therefore, is that we must have the whole education of our country, spiritual
and secular, in our own hands, and it must be on national lines, through
national methods as far as practical.
The British Reaction
In
relevant historical accounts, secret Government papers, published reports and
reminiscences of revolutionary leaders, we find the tremendous influence
exerted by Vivekananda on the revolutionary movement. His writings were widely
read by the militants. Those were practically their textbooks; recruitments to
revolutionary parties were made from the members of the Ramakrishna Mission,
and the magic name of Vivekananda was used for this purpose. The government,
noticing that many portions of Vivekananda’s writings could be used for radical
politics, thought of prohibiting the publication of Swamiji’s letters and
banning the Ramakrishna Mission. This was not surprising, as Vivekananda
himself was in his lifetime regarded a suspicious character and was closely
watched and harassed. The British Criminal Investigation Department complained
at the time that whenever they went to search a revolutionary’s house, they
found the books of Vivekananda. Here are two extracts from the secret police
reports:
“...
The teachings of the Vedanta Society tend towards Nationalism in politics.
Swami Vivekananda himself generally avoided the political side of the case, but
by many Hindu Nationalists he is regarded as the Guru of the movement. ... It
is obvious that with very little distortion this teaching [of Vivekananda] was
a powerful weapon in the hands of an idealist revolutionary like Aurobindo
Ghosh.… Several passages of the teachings of Swami Vivekananda are pregnant
with sedition, that their potentialities for evil have been fully realized and
taken advantage of by the revolutionary party, that the various recognized
maths are resorted to by political refugees, and that bogus ashramas, which are
nothing but centres for the dissemination of revolutionary doctrines, have
sprung up with alarming rapidity in eastern Bengal.”
Subhas
Chandra Bose, whom the British considered the most dangerous man in India, and
who embodied the entire militant revolutionary spirit of India, wrote time and
again that his life was molded under Vivekanandas influence and urged the youth
to follow Swamiji’s ideal. He said of Vivekananda: “Reckless in his sacrifice,
unceasing in his activity, boundless in his love, profound and versatile in his
wisdom, exuberant in his emotions, merciless in his attacks, but yet simple as
a child.”
Testimony of the Freedom Fighters
Sri
Aurobindo wrote in 1916, “Vivekananda was a soul of puissance if ever there was
one, a very lion among men, but the definitive work he has left behind is quite
incommensurate with our impression of his creative might and energy. We
perceive his influence still working gigantically, we know not well how, we
know not well where, in something that is not yet formed, something leonine,
grand, intuitive, upheaving that has entered the soul of India and we say,
‘Behold, Vivekananda still lives in the soul of his Mother and in the souls of
her children.’”
In
1949, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, noted, “I do not know how
many of the younger generation read the speeches and the writings of Swami
Vivekananda. But I can tell you that many of my generation were very powerfully
influenced by him and I think that it would do a great deal of good to the
present generation if they also went through Swami Vivekananda’s writings and
speeches, and they would learn much from them.” Nehru concluded, “Men like Sri
Ramakrishna Paramahansa, men like Swami Vivekananda and men like Mahatma Gandhi
are great unifying forces, great constructive geniuses of the world, not only
in regard to the particular teachings that they taught, but their approach to
the world; and their conscious and unconscious influence on it is of the most
vital importance to us.”
THE DIGNITY OF SELFLESS SERVICE
Prof. Long next discusses the legacy
of service derived from Vivekananda’s teachings, especially as shown in the
activities of the Ramakrishna Mission.
FOR VIVEKANANDA, SELFLESS SERVICE (seva) is the essence
of karma yoga. He was among the first Hindu spiritual teachers in the modern
era to give seva a central place in the spiritual path. Vivekananda and his fellow
monks of the Ramakrishna Order were derisively referred to as “scavenger monks”
for their work with the poor and the ill in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in India. Before this time, the role of a sannyasin was
understood by most Hindus to involve a complete withdrawal from the concerns of
the world, their main focus being meditation, contemplation and teaching,
rather than seva. Vivekananda, however, taught his fellow renouncers that they
needed to do both. “You must be prepared to explain the difficult intricacies
of the shastras now, and the next moment to go and sell the produce of the
fields in the market. You must be prepared for all menial services.”
Because
of the all-pervasive presence of Brahman, the Divine Ultimate Reality, dwelling
within all beings, a practitioner of Vedanta does not distinguish, according to
Vivekananda, between “the service of the Lord” and “the service of others.” The
service of the Lord is the service of others, and the service of others is the
service of the Lord. In Vivekananda’s words, “‘They worship Me best who worship
My worshipers. These are all My children, and your privilege is to serve
them’—is the teaching of Hindu scriptures.”
Empowering the Powerless
Vivekananda’s
vision of seva was not one of mere charity, but was a more radical vision of
enabling the self-empowerment of the poor, primarily through education. As
Vivekananda writes, “The only service to be done for our lower classes is to
give them education, to develop their lost individuality. That is the great
task between our people and princes. Up to now nothing has been done in that
direction. Priest-power and foreign conquest have trodden them down for
centuries, and at last the poor of India have forgotten that they are human beings.
They are to be given ideas; their eyes are to be opened to what is going on in
the world around them; and then they will work out their own salvation. Every
nation, every man and every woman must work out their own salvation. Give them
ideas—that is the only help they require, and then the rest must follow as the
effect.” This emphasis on self-empowerment was deeply influential upon Mohandas
K. Gandhi, who translated it into his concept of swaraj, or self-rule. Through
Gandhi, Vivekananda’s philosophy of service and human empowerment would
influence human rights struggles across the globe, including the American Civil
Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Ramakrishna Mission
That
seva was not something that Vivekananda only preached, but put into action
himself, is evidenced from the work of the Ramakrishna Mission, which he
established in 1897. The relief work of the Ramakrishna Mission is famous, not
only in India but beyond India’s borders as well, and continues unabated today.
Its first relief project began just two weeks after its establishment on May 1,
1897, in the famine-stricken region of Mahula, Murshidabad. Plague relief
efforts in Calcutta in 1898 through 1900, famine relief in Madhya Pradesh in
1900, and earthquake relief in Punjab in 1905 followed this effort. And these
are only the some of the more high-profile efforts launched early on in the
history of the Mission. Building upon these, the Mission is now one of the most
widespread and effective relief organizations operating in India, with schools,
orphanages and hospitals scattered throughout the region, all organized and
maintained by the monks of the Ramakrishna Order.
Its
1,200 swamis run a vast array of public services. These include 15 hospitals,
130 dispensaries, hundreds of medical camps and various medical schools and
colleges, altogether treating over eight million patients just in the period
April 2010 to March 2011.
Their
1,200 schools handled 330,000 students in the same period, at an expenditure of
us$21 million. They have projects in rural and tribal areas to improve
sanitation, teach better agricultural methods, educate both children and adults
and provide medical services. Shortly after Cyclone Aila struck in West Bengal
in 2009, killing hundreds and rendering more than a million homeless, they were
on the scene. They ran smaller relief programs in nearly every state in India,
plus ongoing tsunami rebuilding efforts in Sri Lanka.
Frequent
religious teaching takes place, often in conjunction with annual festivals and
celebrations of the Math and Mission, along with the operation of 211
libraries, various institutes for Sanskrit studies and a major publication
program.
SWAMI AND THE INTERFAITH MOVEMENT
Prof. Long explains how
Vivekananda’s influence has profoundly shaped the interfaith movement of our
times.
AS IT HAS
BEEN SAID BY PROF. BASU that Swami Vivekanananda was crucial to
but not directly involved with India’s freedom movement, so it may also be said
that while he did not invent interfaith dialogue, he was instrumental in its
ideological influence today. The first World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893
was the product of a religious progressivism already in place during his time.
Vivekananda infused this existing trend with an energy and an intensity that it
did not previously have.
As
a disciple of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda envisioned and embodied interfaith
dialogue in a way that was far more radical than most conceived it in his time.
Even many of the participants in as progressive a body as the World’s Parliament
of Religions saw the function of interfaith dialogue to be “preparing the way
for the reunion of all the world’s religions in their true center, Jesus
Christ”—the view held by the Catholic Church to this day. Vivekananda resisted
such parochialism and proposed, in its place, the idea of the world’s religions
as “different streams having their sources in different places” that “all
mingle their water in the sea” of the shared divinity of all beings.
Replacing Tolerance with Acceptance
Vivekananda
envisioned interreligious relations that would go beyond the secular ideal of
tolerance, in which practitioners of diverse traditions merely coexist, toward
an ideal of acceptance. In a 1900 lecture titled “The Way to the Realization of
a Universal Religion,” Vivekananda draws a stark distinction between the lesser
virtue of tolerance–which is certainly preferable to intolerance–and the
greater virtue of acceptance. “Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not
exclusion. Not only toleration, for so-called toleration is often blasphemy,
and I do not believe in it. I believe in acceptance. Why should I tolerate?
Toleration means that I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to
live. Is it not blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live?
I accept all religions that were in the past, and worship with them all; I
worship God with every one of them, in whatever form they worship Him.”
mpact on Modern Writers
A
preeminent advocate of this approach in the twentieth century was philosopher
and author Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), a close disciple of Swami Prabhavananda
of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, through whom a variety of
Vedantic ideas would become part of the countercultural movement of the 1960s,
eventually entering the mainstream of American popular consciousness.
Huxley’s
classic work, The Perennial Philosophy, defends the ideal of a harmony of
religions by arguing that there is a shared core of experiential wisdom at the
heart of all of the world’s religious traditions, whose texts he quotes quite
liberally to prove the existence of “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine
Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology
that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine
Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent
and transcendent Ground of all being.”
Huxley’s
approach, known as perennialism, exerted a strong influence on several
prominent philosophers, theologians and scholars of religion, including Huston
Smith, Joseph Campbell, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and John Hick, through whom this
basic principle of Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy became disseminated to the
wider public in the West. Smith, author of the best-selling book on the world’s
religions yet published and titled simply, The Illustrated World’s Religions,
probably has done more to shape Western perceptions of the world’s religious
traditions than any other single scholar. Based for a time at St. Louis
University, he had close interactions with Swami Satprakashananda of the
Vedanta Society of St. Louis, and gradually came to endorse Swami Vivekananda’s
attitude of universal acceptance toward all religions.
Joseph
Campbell was similarly influenced by Vedanta and Huxley’s philosophy of
perennialism. Becoming a countercultural hero through his popular book on
comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell’s work, like
Smith’s, became a point of entry for many in the West to Vedanta and the
thought of Swami Vivekananda. And although known mostly only in academic
circles, Islamic scholar and philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and philosopher of
religion John Hick have dedicated much of their professional careers to
articulating, in Nasr’s case, an explicit perennialism, and in the case of
Hick, a point of view discernibly influenced by perennialism and by the
Vedantic concept of a common ultimate reality at the basis of all religious
experience.
The
basic presumption of perennialism is that all religions share a common core–a
perennial philosophy–that unites them all as the pearls on a thread, despite
their external differences. It is not a great leap from this considered
academic perspective, informed by the Vedanta of Swami Vivekananda, to the
results of polls taken in the last few years that indicate 65 percent of
Americans believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including a
surprising 37 percent of white evangelical Christians. The same survey
indicates that 24 percent of Americans believe in the central Hindu doctrine of
reincarnation.
AN EVALUATION
At a June, 2003, conference at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Indic Studies, Prof. Carl T.
Jackson of the University of Texas at El Paso offered these insightful
summaries of how Swami Vivekananda is seen by scholars today.
SCHOLARS HAVE INCREASINGLY ARGUED THAT SWAMI
VIVEKANANDA’S presentation of Hinduism was not representative of the
traditional Hinduism followed by most Hindus in his time or now. He emphasized
a universal Hinduism that offered what Aldous Huxley once referred to as the
“Highest Common Denominator” for other religions. The Swami formulated a
traditional Hindu idea from the view of Advaita Vedanta, ignoring the worship
of many Gods, elaborate rituals and observances of popular Hinduism as
practiced by most Hindus.
Critical
of the Swami’s interpretation of Hinduism, the scholars seem to agree, even a
hundred years later, that Swami Vivekananda has exercised immense influence on
our modern conception of Hinduism—though not always for the good. Richard King
thus declares that thanks to the influence of Swami Vivekananda, and the later
writings of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Western Orientalists, “Advaita Vedanta
in its modern form (often called neo-Vedanta, or more accurately, neo-Advaita)
has become a dominant force in Indian intellectual thought.” That is, because
of Vivekananda’s persuasive and widely influential interpretation of Hinduism
from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta, Indian religion—both in India and in
the West—has come to be seen largely as a religion with a neo-Vedantic message.
Unfortunately, for these scholars, this represents a distortion of Hinduism as
practiced.
Even
as these scholars object to Swami Vivekananda’s interpretations of Hinduism,
they also testify to his importance and lasting influence in our understanding
of Hinduism today. Keeping in mind the continuing volume of works devoted to
his life and teachings, if anything, Swami Vivekananda seems an even larger
figure in the history of India and of Hinduism today than a hundred years ago.
IN CONCLUSION
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S
INFLUENCE ON OUR WORLD TODAY, says Prof. Long, and in the West in particular,
is almost impossible to calculate. His philosophy of religious pluralism,
proclaimed in his first address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893,
developed in his later lectures, and drawn from the teaching and example of his
master, Sri Ramakrishna, energized the interfaith movement of his time and,
through the influence of the Vedanta Society and the Western intellectuals who
were drawn to it, shaped mainstream American views on religious diversity.
The
teaching and life of his master, Sri Ramakrishna, would likely be unknown in
the Western world but for Vivekananda’s global travels. The floodgates that he
opened, leading to the coming of a variety of Hindu spiritual teachers to the
West, made a range of Hindu beliefs, practices and imagery far more familiar in
America than is otherwise conceivable.
His
philosophy of selfless service led to the emergence of the massive education
and relief efforts in India of the Ramakrishna Mission. His impassioned
patriotic calls to all Indians made a profound impression on the mind of
Mahatma Gandhi and numerous other leaders across the spectrum of India’s
independence movement.
Swami
Vivekananda was instrumental in making Hinduism into a tradition with a global
following, not confined to India or to persons of Indian descent. In deciding
to emphasize only one facet of the religion, Advaita Vedanta, he formed an
opening wedge for bringing Hinduism into Western mainstream thought, and
preparing the West for the arrival, one hundred years later, of a more
convoluted and theistic form of the faith. As we celebrate the 150th
anniversary of his birth, we cannot but stand in awe of his incredible legacy,
a legacy whose full implications may have yet to be felt in the
as-yet-unforeseen future.
Om Tat Sat
(My humble salutations to Sadguru Sri Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
ji, Satguru Bodhianatha Velayanswami ji, Hinduism
Today for the collection)
(The Blog is reverently for all the seekers of truth,
lovers of wisdom and to share the Hindu Dharma with others on the
spiritual path and also this is purely a non-commercial blog)
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