The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 5/Epistles - First Series/II Panditji Maharaj
II
Bombay,
20th September, 1892.
Dear Panditji Mahârâj,[1]
Your letter has reached me duly. I do not know why I should be undeservingly
praised. "None is good, save One, that is, God", as the Lord Jesus bath
said. The rest are only tools in His hands. "Gloria in Excelsis", "Glory
unto God in the highest", and unto men that deserve, but not to such an
undeserving one like me. Here "the servant is not worthy of the hire"; and a
Fakir, especially, has no right to any praise whatsoever, for would you
praise your servant for simply doing his duty?
. . . My unbounded gratitude to Pandit Sundarlalji, and to my Professor
[2]for this kind remembrance of
me.
Now I would tell you something else. The Hindu mind was ever deductive and
never synthetic or inductive. In all our philosophies, we always find
hair-splitting arguments, taking for granted some general proposition, but
the proposition itself may be as childish as possible. Nobody ever asked or
searched the truth of these general propositions. Therefore independent
thought we have almost none to speak of, and hence the dearth of those
sciences which are the results of observation and generalization. And why
was it thus? — From two causes: The tremendous heat of the climate forcing
us to love rest and contemplation better than activity, and the Brâhmins as
priests never undertaking journeys or voyages to distant lands. There were
voyagers and people who travelled far; but they were almost always traders,
i.e. people from whom priestcraft and their own sole love for gain had taken
away all capacity for intellectual development. So their observations,
instead of adding to the store of human knowledge, rather degenerated it;
for their observations were bad and their accounts exaggerated and tortured
into fantastical shapes, until they passed all recognition.
So you see, we must travel, we must go to foreign parts. We must see how the
engine of society works in other countries, and keep free and open
communication with what is going on in the minds of other nations, if we
really want to be a nation again. And over and above all, we must cease to
tyrannise. To what a ludicrous state are we brought! If a Bhângi comes to
anybody as a Bhangi, he would be shunned as the plague; but no sooner does
he get a cupful of water poured upon his head with some mutterings of
prayers by a Pâdri, and get a coat on his back, no matter how threadbare,
and come into the room of the most orthodox Hindu — I don't see the man who
then dare refuse him a chair and a hearty shake of the hands! Irony can go
no further. And come and see what they, the Pâdris, are doing here in the
Dakshin (south). They are converting the lower classes by lakhs; and in
Travancore, the most priestridden country in India — where every bit of land
is owned by the Brahmins . . . nearly one-fourth has become Christian! And I
cannot blame them; what part have they in David and what in Jesse? When,
when, O Lords shall man be brother to man?
Yours,
Vivekananda.
- Notes