The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Bhakti-Yoga/Incarnate Teachers and Incarnation
CHAPTER VI
INCARNATE TEACHERS AND INCARNATION
Wherever His name is spoken, that very place is holy. How much more so is
the man who speaks His name, and with what veneration ought we to approach
that man out of whom comes to us spiritual truth! Such great teachers of
spiritual truth are indeed very few in number in this world, but the world
is never altogether without them. They are always the fairest flowers of
human life —
The moment the world is absolutely bereft of these, it becomes a hideous hell and hastens on to its destruction.
Higher and nobler than all ordinary ones are another set of teachers, the
Avatâras of Ishvara, in the world. They can transmit spirituality with a
touch, even with a mere wish. The lowest and the most degraded characters
become in one second saints at their command. They are the Teachers of all
teachers, the highest manifestations of God through man. We cannot see God
except through them. We cannot help worshipping them; and indeed they are
the only ones whom we are bound to worship.
No man can really see God except through these human manifestations. If we
try to see God otherwise, we make for ourselves a hideous caricature of Him
and believe the caricature to be no worse than the original. There is a
story of an ignorant man who was asked to make an image of the God Shiva,
and who, after days of hard struggle, manufactured only the image of a
monkey. So whenever we try to think of God as He is in His absolute
perfection, we invariably meet with the most miserable failure, because as
long as we are men, we cannot conceive Him as anything higher than man. The
time will come when we shall transcend our human nature and know Him as He
is; but as long as we are men, we must worship Him in man and as man. Talk
as you may, try as you may, you cannot think of God except as a man. You may
deliver great intellectual discourses on God and on all things under the
sun, become great rationalists and prove to your satisfaction that all these
accounts of the Avataras of God as man are nonsense. But let us come for a
moment to practical common sense. What is there behind this kind of
remarkable intellect? Zero, nothing, simply so much froth. When next you
hear a man delivering a great intellectual lecture against this worship of
the Avataras of God, get hold of him and ask what his idea of God is, what
he understands by "omnipotence", "omnipresence", and all similar terms,
beyond the spelling of the words. He really means nothing by them; he cannot
formulate as their meaning any idea unaffected by his own human nature; he
is no better off in this matter than the man in the street who has not read
a single book. That man in the street, however, is quiet and does not
disturb the peace of the world, while this big talker creates disturbance
and misery among mankind. Religion is, after all, realisation, and we must
make the sharpest distinction between talk; and intuitive experience. What
we experience in the depths of our souls is realisation. Nothing indeed is
so uncommon as common sense in regard to this matter.
By our present constitution we are limited and bound to see God as man. If,
for instance the buffaloes want to worship God, they will, in keeping with
their own nature, see Him as a huge buffalo; if a fish wants to worship God,
it will have to form an Idea of Him as a big fish, and man has to think of
Him as man. And these various conceptions are not due to morbidly active
imagination. Man, the buffalo, and the fish all may be supposed to represent
so many different vessels, so to say. All these vessels go to the sea of God
to get filled with water, each according to its own shape and capacity; in
the man the water takes the shape of man, in the buffalo, the shape of a
buffalo and in the fish, the shape of a fish. In each of these vessels there
is the same water of the sea of God. When men see Him, they see Him as man,
and the animals, if they have any conception of God at all, must see Him as
animal each according to its own ideal. So we cannot help seeing God as man,
and, therefore, we are bound to worship Him as man. There is no other way.
Two kinds of men do not worship God as man — the human brute who has no
religion, and the Paramahamsa who has risen beyond all the weaknesses of
humanity and has transcended the limits of his own human nature. To him all
nature has become his own Self. He alone can worship God as He is. Here,
too, as in all other cases, the two extremes meet. The extreme of ignorance
and the other extreme of knowledge — neither of these go through acts of
worship. The human brute does not worship because of his ignorance, and the
Jivanmuktas (free souls) do not worship because they have realised God in
themselves. Being between these two poles of existence, if any one tells you
that he is not going to worship God as man, take kindly care of that man; he
is, not to use any harsher term, an irresponsible talker; his religion is
for unsound and empty brains.
God understands human failings and becomes man to do good to humanity:
यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत। अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम्॥ परित्राणाय साधूनां विनाशाय च दुष्कृताम्। धर्मसंस्थापनार्थाय सम्भवामि युगे युगे॥
— "Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from Yuga (age) to Yuga."
— "Fools deride Me who have assumed the human form, without knowing My real nature as the Lord of the universe." Such is Shri Krishna's declaration in the Gita on Incarnation. "When a huge tidal wave comes," says Bhagavan Shri Ramakrishna, "all the little brooks and ditches become full to the brim without any effort or consciousness on their own part; so when an Incarnation comes, a tidal wave of spirituality breaks upon the world, and people feel spirituality almost full in the air."