The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Lectures from Colombo to Almora/The Sages of India
THE SAGES OF INDIA
In speaking of the sages of India, my mind goes back to those periods of
which history has no record, and tradition tries in vain to bring the
secrets out of the gloom of the past. The sages of India have been almost
innumerable, for what has the Hindu nation been doing for thousands of years
except producing sages? I will take, therefore, the lives of a few of the
most brilliant ones, the epoch-makers, and present them before you, that is
to say, my study of them.
In the first place, we have to understand a little about our scriptures. Two
ideals of truth are in our scriptures; the one is, what we call the eternal,
and the other is not so authoritative, yet binding under particular
circumstances, times, and places. The eternal relations which deal with the
nature of the soul, and of God, and the relations between souls and God are
embodied in what we call the Shrutis, the Vedas. The next set of truths is
what we call the Smritis, as embodied in the words of Manu. Yâjnavalkya, and
other writers and also in the Purânas, down to the Tantras. The second class
of books and teachings is subordinate to the Shrutis, inasmuch as whenever
any one of these contradicts anything in the Shrutis, the Shrutis must
prevail. This is the law. The idea is that the framework of the destiny and
goal of man has been all delineated in the Vedas, the details have been left
to be worked out in the Smritis and Puranas. As for general directions, the
Shrutis are enough; for spiritual life, nothing more can be said, nothing
more can be known. All that is necessary has been known, all the advice that
is necessary to lead the soul to perfection has been completed in the
Shrutis; the details alone were left out, and these the Smritis have
supplied from time to time.
Another peculiarity is that these Shrutis have many sages as the recorders
of the truths in them, mostly men, even some women. Very little is known of
their personalities, the dates of their birth, and so forth, but their best
thoughts, their best discoveries, I should say, are preserved there,
embodied in the sacred literature of our country, the Vedas. In the Smritis,
on the other hand, personalities are more in evidence. Startling, gigantic,
impressive, world-moving persons stand before us, as it were, for the first
time, sometimes of more magnitude even than their teachings.
This is a peculiarity which we have to understand — that our religion
preaches an Impersonal Personal God. It preaches any amount of impersonal
laws plus any amount of personality, but the very fountain-head of our
religion is in the Shrutis, the Vedas, which are perfectly impersonal; the
persons all come in the Smritis and Puranas — the great Avatâras,
Incarnations of God, Prophets, and so forth. And this ought also to be
observed that except our religion every other religion in the world depends
upon the life or lives of some personal founder or founders. Christianity is
built upon the life of Jesus Christ, Mohammedanism upon Mohammed, Buddhism
upon Buddha, Jainism upon the Jinas, and so on. It naturally follows that
there must be in all these religions a good deal of fight about what they
call the historical evidences of these great personalities. If at any time
the historical evidences about the existence of these personages in ancient
times become weak, the whole building of the religion tumbles down and is
broken to pieces. We escaped this fate because our religion is not based
upon persons but on principles. That you obey your religion is not because
it came through the authority of a sage, no, not even of an Incarnation.
Krishna is not the authority of the Vedas, but the Vedas are the authority
of Krishna himself. His glory is that he is the greatest preacher of the
Vedas that ever existed. So with the other Incarnations; so with all our
sages. Our first principle is that all that is necessary for the perfection
of man and for attaining unto freedom is there in the Vedas. You cannot find
anything new. You cannot go beyond a perfect unity, which is the goal of all
knowledge; this has been already reached there, and it is impossible to go
beyond the unity. Religious knowledge became complete when Tat Twam Asi
(Thou art That) was discovered, and that was in the Vedas. What remained was
the guidance of people from time to time according to different times and
places, according to different circumstances and environments; people had to
be guided along the old, old path, and for this these great teachers came,
these great sages. Nothing can bear out more clearly this position than the
celebrated saying of Shri Krishna in the Gitâ: "Whenever virtue subsides and
irreligion prevails, I create Myself for the protection of the good; for the
destruction of all immorality I am coming from time to time." This is the
idea in India.
What follows? That on the one hand, there are these eternal principles which
stand upon their own foundations without depending on any reasoning even,
much less on the authority of sages however great, of Incarnations however
brilliant they may have been. We may remark that as this is the unique
position in India, our claim is that the Vedanta only can be the universal
religion, that it is already the existing universal religion in the world,
because it teaches principles and not persons. No religion built upon a
person can be taken up as a type by all the races of mankind. In our own
country we find that there have been so many grand characters; in even a
small city many persons are taken up as types by the different minds in that
one city. How is it possible that one person as Mohammed or Buddha or
Christ, can be taken up as the one type for the whole world, nay, that the
whole of morality, ethics, spirituality, and religion can be true only from
the sanction of that one person, and one person alone? Now, the Vedantic
religion does not require any such personal authority. Its sanction is the
eternal nature of man, its ethics are based upon the eternal spiritual
solidarity of man, already existing, already attained and not to be
attained. On the other hand, from the very earliest times, our sages have
been feeling conscious of this fact that the vast majority of mankind
require a personality. They must have a Personal God in some form or other.
The very Buddha who declared against the existence of a Personal God had not
died fifty years before his disciples manufactured a Personal God out of
him. The Personal God is necessary, and at the same time we know that
instead of and better than vain imaginations of a Personal God, which in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are unworthy of human worship we have in
this world, living and walking in our midst, living Gods, now and then.
These are more worthy of worship than any imaginary God, any creation of our
imagination, that is to say, any idea of God which we can form. Shri Krishna
is much greater than any idea of God you or I can have. Buddha is a much
higher idea, a more living and idolised idea, than the ideal you or I can
conceive of in our minds; and therefore it is that they always command the
worship of mankind even to the exclusion of all imaginary deities.
This our sages knew, and, therefore, left it open to all Indian people to
worship such great Personages, such Incarnations. Nay, the greatest of these
Incarnations goes further: "Wherever an extraordinary spiritual power is
manifested by external man, know that I am there, it is from Me that that
manifestation comes." That leaves the door open for the Hindu to worship the
Incarnations of all the countries in the world. The Hindu can worship any
sage and any saint from any country whatsoever, and as a fact we know that
we go and worship many times in the churches of the Christians, and many,
many times in the Mohammedan mosques, and that is good. Why not? Ours, as I
have said, is the universal religion. It is inclusive enough, it is broad
enough to include all the ideals. All the ideals of religion that already
exist in the world can be immediately included, and we can patiently wait
for all the ideals that are to come in the future to be taken in the same
fashion, embraced in the infinite arms of the religion of the Vedanta.
This, more or less, is our position with regard to the great sages, the
Incarnations of God. There are also secondary characters. We find the word
Rishi again and again mentioned in the Vedas, and it has become a common
word at the present time. The Rishi is the great authority. We have to
understand that idea. The definition is that the Rishi is the
Mantra-drashtâ, the seer of thought. What is the proof of religion? — this
was asked in very ancient times. There is no proof in the senses was the
declaration.यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह
— "From whence words reflect back with thought without reaching the goal."
न तत्र चक्षुर्गच्छति न वाग्गच्छति नो मनः ।
— "There the eyes cannot reach, neither can speech, nor the mind" — that has
been the declaration for ages and ages. Nature outside cannot give us any
answer as to the existence of the soul, the existence of God, the eternal
life, the goal of man, and all that. This mind is continually changing,
always in a state of flux; it is finite, it is broken into pieces. How can
nature tell of the Infinite, the Unchangeable, the Unbroken, the
Indivisible, the Eternal? It never can. And whenever mankind has striven to
get an answer from dull dead matter, history shows how disastrous the
results have been. How comes, then, the knowledge which the Vedas declare?
It comes through being a Rishi. This knowledge is not in the senses; but are
the senses the be-all and the end-all of the human being? Who dare say that
the senses are the all-in-all of man? Even in our lives, in the life of
every one of us here, there come moments of calmness, perhaps, when we see
before us the death of one we loved, when some shock comes to us, or when
extreme blessedness comes to us. Many other occasions there are when the
mind, as it were, becomes calm, feels for the moment its real nature; and a
glimpse of the Infinite beyond, where words cannot reach nor the mind go, is
revealed to us. This happens in ordinary life, but it has to be heightened,
practiced, perfected. Men found out ages ago that the soul is not bound or
limited by the senses, no, not even by consciousness. We have to understand
that this consciousness is only the name of one link in the infinite chain.
Being is not identical with consciousness, but consciousness is only one
part of Being. Beyond consciousness is where the bold search lies.
Consciousness is bound by the senses. Beyond that, beyond the senses, men
must go in order to arrive at truths of the spiritual world, and there are
even now persons who succeed in going beyond the bounds of the senses. These
are called Rishis, because they come face to face with spiritual truths.
The proof, therefore, of the Vedas is just the same as the proof of this
table before me, Pratyaksha, direct perception. This I see with the senses,
and the truths of spirituality we also see in a superconscious state of the
human soul. This Rishi-state is not limited by time or place, by sex or
race. Vâtsyâyana boldly declares that this Rishihood is the common property
of the descendants of the sage, of the Aryan, of the non-Aryan, of even the
Mlechchha. This is the sageship of the Vedas, and constantly we ought to
remember this ideal of religion in India, which I wish other nations of the
world would also remember and learn, so that there may be less fight and
less quarrel. Religion is not in books, nor in theories, nor in dogmas, nor
in talking, not even in reasoning. It is being and becoming. Ay, my friends,
until each one of you has become a Rishi and come face to face with
spiritual facts, religious life has not begun for you. Until the
superconscious opens for you, religion is mere talk, it is nothing but
preparation. You are talking second-hand, third-hand, and here applies that
beautiful saying of Buddha when he had a discussion with some Brahmins. They
came discussing about the nature of Brahman, and the great sage asked, "Have
you seen Brahman?" "No, said the Brahmin; "Or your father?" "No, neither has
he"; "Or your grandfather?" "I don't think even he saw Him." "My friend, how
can you discuss about a person whom your father and grandfather never saw,
and try to put each other down?" That is what the whole world is doing. Let
us say in the language of the Vedanta, "This Atman is not to be reached by
too much talk, no, not even by the highest intellect, no, not even by the
study of the Vedas themselves."
Let us speak to all the nations of the world in the language of the Vedas:
Vain are your fights and your quarrels; have you seen God whom you want to
preach? If you have not seen, vain is your preaching; you do not know what
you say; and if you have seen God, you will not quarrel, your very face will
shine. An ancient sage of the Upanishads sent his son out to learn about
Brahman, and the child came back, and the father asked, "what have you
learnt?" The child replied he had learnt so many sciences. But the father
said, "That is nothing, go back." And the son went back, and when he
returned again the father asked the same question, and the same answer came
from the child. Once more he had to go back. And the next time he came, his
whole face was shining; and his father stood up and declared, "Ay, today, my
child, your face shines like a knower of Brahman." When you have known God,
your very face will be changed, your voice will be changed, your whole
appearance will he changed. You will be a blessing to mankind; none will be
able to resist the Rishi. This is the Rishihood, the ideal in our religion.
The rest, all these talks and reasonings and philosophies and dualisms and
monisms, and even the Vedas themselves are but preparations, secondary
things. The other is primary. The Vedas, grammar, astronomy, etc., all these
are secondary; that is supreme knowledge which makes us realise the
Unchangeable One. Those who realised are the sages whom we find in the
Vedas; and we understand how this Rishi is the name of a type, of a class,
which every one of us, as true Hindus, is expected to become at some period
of our life, and becoming which, to the Hindu, means salvation. Not belief
in doctrines, not going to thousands of temples, nor bathing in all the
rivers in the world, but becoming the Rishi, the Mantra-drashta — that is
freedom, that is salvation.
Coming down to later times, there have been great world-moving sages, great
Incarnations of whom there have been many; and according to the Bhâgavata,
they also are infinite in number, and those that are worshipped most in
India are Râma and Krishna. Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the
embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, the
ideal father, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented
before us by the great sage Vâlmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster,
none more beautiful and at the same time simpler than the language in which
the great poet has depicted the life of Rama. And what to speak of Sitâ? You
may exhaust the literature of the world that is past, and I may assure you
that you will have to exhaust the literature of the world of the future,
before finding another Sita. Sita is unique; that character was depicted
once and for all. There may have been several Ramas, perhaps, but never more
than one Sita! She is the very type of the true Indian woman, for all the
Indian ideals of a perfected woman have grown out of that one life of Sita;
and here she stands these thousands of years, commanding the worship of
every man, woman, and child throughout the length and breadth of the land of
Âryâvarta. There she will always be, this glorious Sita, purer than purity
itself, all patience, and all suffering. She who suffered that life of
suffering without a murmur, she the ever-chaste and ever-pure wife, she the
ideal of the people, the ideal of the gods, the great Sita, our national God
she must always remain. And every one of us knows her too well to require
much delineation. All our mythology may vanish, even our Vedas may depart,
and our Sanskrit language may vanish for ever, but so long as there will be
five Hindus living here, even if only speaking the most vulgar patois, there
will be the story of Sita present. Mark my words: Sita has gone into the
very vitals of our race. She is there in the blood of every Hindu man and
woman; we are all children of Sita. Any attempt to modernise our women, if
it tries to take our women away from that ideal of Sita, is immediately a
failure, as we see every day. The women of India must grow and develop in
the footprints of Sita, and that is the only way.
The next is He who is worshipped in various forms, the favourite ideal of
men as well as of women, the ideal of children, as well as of grown-up men.
I mean He whom the writer of the Bhagavata was not content to call an
Incarnation but says, "The other Incarnations were but parts of the Lord.
He, Krishna, was the Lord Himself." And it is not strange that such
adjectives are applied to him when we marvel at the many-sidedness of his
character. He was the most wonderful Sannyasin, and the most wonderful
householder in one; he had the most wonderful amount of Rajas, power, and
was at the same time living in the midst of the most wonderful renunciation.
Krishna can never he understood until you have studied the Gita, for he was
the embodiment of his own teaching. Every one of these Incarnations came as
a living illustration of what they came to preach. Krishna, the preacher of
the Gita, was all his life the embodiment of that Song Celestial; he was the
great illustration of non-attachment. He gives up his throne and never cares
for it. He, the leader of India, at whose word kings come down from their
thrones, never wants to be a king. He is the simple Krishna, ever the same
Krishna who played with the Gopis. Ah, that most marvellous passage of his
life, the most difficult to understand, and which none ought to attempt to
understand until he has become perfectly chaste and pure, that most
marvellous expansion of love, allegorised and expressed in that beautiful
play at Vrindâban, which none can understand but he who has become mad with
love, drunk deep of the cup of love! Who can understand the throes of the
lore of the Gopis — the very ideal of love, love that wants nothing, love
that even does not care for heaven, love that does not care for anything in
this world or the world to come? And here, my friends, through this love of
the Gopis has been found the only solution of the conflict between the
Personal and the Impersonal God. We know how the Personal God is the highest
point of human life; we know that it is philosophical to believe in an
Impersonal God immanent in the universe, of whom everything is but a
manifestation. At the same time our souls hanker after something concrete,
something which we want to grasp, at whose feet we can pour out our soul,
and so on. The Personal God is therefore the highest conception of human
nature. Yet reason stands aghast at such an idea. It is the same old, old
question which you find discussed in the Brahma-Sutras, which you find
Draupadi discussing with Yudhishthira in the forest: If there is a Personal
God, all-merciful, all-powerful, why is the hell of an earth here, why did
He create this? — He must be a partial God. There was no solution, and the
only solution that can be found is what you read about the love of the
Gopis. They hated every adjective that was applied to Krishna; they did not
care to know that he was the Lord of creation, they did not care to know
that he was almighty, they did not care to know that he was omnipotent, and
so forth. The only thing they understood was that he was infinite Love, that
was all. The Gopis understood Krishna only as the Krishna of Vrindaban. He,
the leader of the hosts, the King of kings, to them was the shepherd, and
the shepherd for ever. "I do not want wealth, nor many people, nor do I want
learning; no, not even do I want to go to heaven. Let one be born again and
again, but Lord, grant me this, that I may have love for Thee, and that for
love's sake." A great landmark in the history of religion is here, the ideal
of love for love's sake, work for work's sake, duty for duty's sake, and it
for the first time fell from the lips of the greatest of Incarnations,
Krishna, and for the first time in the history of humanity, upon the soil of
India. The religions of fear and of temptations were gone for ever, and in
spite of the fear of hell and temptation of enjoyment in heaven, came the
grandest of ideals, love for love's sake, duty for duty's sake, work for
work's sake.
And what a love! I have told you just now that it is very difficult to
understand the love of the Gopis. There are not wanting fools, even in the
midst of us, who cannot understand the marvellous significance of that most
marvellous of all episodes. There are, let me repeat, impure fools, even
born of our blood, who try to shrink from that as if from something impure.
To them I have only to say, first make yourselves pure; and you must
remember that he who tells the history of the love of the Gopis is none else
but Shuka Deva. The historian who records this marvellous love of the Gopis
is one who was born pure, the eternally pure Shuka, the son of Vyâsa. So
long as there its selfishness in the heart, so long is love of God
impossible; it is nothing but shopkeeping: "I give you something; O Lord,
you give me something in return"; and says the Lord, "If you do not do this,
I will take good care of you when you die. I will roast you all the rest of
your lives. perhaps", and so on. So long as such ideas are in the brain, how
can one understand the mad throes of the Gopis' love? "O for one, one kiss
of those lips! One who has been kissed by Thee, his thirst for Thee
increases for ever, all sorrows vanish, and he forgets love for everything
else but for Thee and Thee alone." Ay, forget first the love for gold, and
name and fame, and for this little trumpery world of ours. Then, only then,
you will understand the love of the Gopis, too holy to be attempted without
giving up everything, too sacred co be understood until the soul has become
perfectly pure. People with ideas of sex, and of money, and of fame,
bubbling up every minute in the heart, daring to criticise and understand
the love of the Gopis! That is the very essence of the Krishna Incarnation.
Even the Gita, the great philosophy itself, does not compare with that
madness, for in the Gita the disciple is taught slowly how to walk towards
the goal, but here is the madness of enjoyment, the drunkenness of love,
where disciples and teachers and teachings and books and all these things
have become one; even the ideas of fear, and God, and heaven — everything
has been thrown away. What remains is the madness of love. It is
forgetfulness of everything, and the lover sees nothing in the world except
that Krishna and Krishna alone, when the face of every being becomes a
Krishna, when his own face looks like Krishna, when his own soul has become
tinged with the Krishna colour. That was the great Krishna!
Do not waste your time upon little details. Take up the framework, the
essence of the life. There may be many historical discrepancies, there may
be interpolations in the life of Krishna. All these things may be true; but,
at the same time, there must have been a basis, a foundation for this new
and tremendous departure. Taking the life of any other sage or prophet, we
find that that prophet is only the evolution of what had gone before him, we
find that that prophet is only preaching the ideas that had been scattered
about his own country even in his own times. Great doubts may exist even as
to whether that prophet existed or not. But here, I challenge any one to
show whether these things, these ideals — work for work's sake, love for
love's sake, duty for duty's sake, were not original ideas with Krishna, and
as such, there must have been someone with whom these ideas originated. They
could not have been borrowed from anybody else. They were not floating about
in the atmosphere when Krishna was born. But the Lord Krishna was the first
preacher of this; his disciple Vyasa took it up and preached it unto
mankind. This is the highest idea to picture. The highest thing we can get
out of him is Gopijanavallabha, the Beloved of the Gopis of Vrindaban. When
that madness comes in your brain, when you understand the blessed Gopis,
then you will understand what love is. When the whole world will vanish,
when all other considerations will have died out, when you will become
pure-hearted with no other aim, not even the search after truth, then and
then alone will come to you the madness of that love, the strength and the
power of that infinite love which the Gopis had, that love for love's sake.
That is the goal. When you have got that, you have got everything.
To come down to the lower stratum — Krishna, the preacher of the Gita. Ay,
there is an attempt in India now which is like putting the cart before the
horse. Many of our people think that Krishna as the lover of the Gopis is
something rather uncanny, and the Europeans do not like it much. Dr.
So-and-so does not like it. Certainly then, the Gopis have to go! Without
the sanction of Europeans how can Krishna live? He cannot! In the
Mahabharata there is no mention of the Gopis except in one or two places,
and those not very remarkable places. In the prayer of Draupadi there is
mention of a Vrindaban life, and in the speech of Shishupâla there is again
mention of this Vrindaban. All these are interpolations! What the Europeans
do not want: must be thrown off. They are interpolations, the mention of the
Gopis and of Krishna too! Well, with these men, steeped in commercialism,
where even the ideal of religion has become commercial, they are all trying
to go to heaven by doing something here; the bania wants compound interest,
wants to lay by something here and enjoy it there. Certainly the Gopis have
no place in such a system of thought. From that ideal lover we come down to
the lower stratum of Krishna, the preacher of the Gita. Than the Gita no
better commentary on the Vedas has been written or can be written. The
essence of the Shrutis, or of the Upanishads, is hard to be understood,
seeing that there are so many commentators, each one trying to interpret in
his own way. Then the Lord Himself comes, He who is the inspirer of the
Shrutis, to show us the meaning of them, as the preacher of the Gita, and
today India wants nothing better, the world wants nothing better than that
method of interpretation. It is a wonder that subsequent interpreters of the
scriptures, even commenting upon the Gita, many times could not catch the
meaning, many times could not catch the drift. For what do you find in the
Gita, and what in modern commentators? One non-dualistic commentator takes
up an Upanishad; there are so many dualistic passages, and he twists and
tortures them into some meaning, and wants to bring them all into a meaning
of his own. If a dualistic commentator comes, there are so many nondualistic
texts which he begins to torture, to bring them all round to dualistic
meaning. But you find in the Gita there is no attempt at torturing any one
of them. They are all right, says the Lord; for slowly and gradually the
human soul rises up and up, step after step, from the gross to the fine,
from the fine to the finer, until it reaches the Absolute, the goal. That is
what is in the Gita. Even the Karma Kanda is taken up, and it is shown that
although it cannot give salvation direct; but only indirectly, yet that is
also valid; images are valid indirectly; ceremonies, forms, everything is
valid only with one condition, purity of the heart. For worship is valid and
leads to the goal if the heart is pure and the heart is sincere; and all
these various modes of worship are necessary, else why should they be there?
Religions and sects are not the work of hypocrites and wicked people who
invented all these to get a little money, as some of our modern men want to
think. However reasonable that explanation may seem, it is not true, and
they were not invented that way at all. They are the outcome of the
necessity of the human soul. They are all here to satisfy the hankering and
thirst of different classes of human minds, and you need not preach against
them. The day when that necessity will cease, they will vanish along with
the cessation of that necessity; and so long as that necessity remains, they
must be there in spite of your preaching, in spite of your criticism. You
may bring the sword or the gun into play, you may deluge the world with
human blood, but so long as there is a necessity for idols, they must
remain. These forms, and all the various steps in religion will remain, and
we understand from the Lord Shri Krishna why they should.
A rather sadder chapter of India's history comes now. In the Gita we already
hear the distant sound of the conflicts of sects, and the Lord comes in the
middle to harmonise them all; He, the great preacher of harmony, the
greatest teacher of harmony, Lord Shri Krishna. He says, "In Me they are all
strung like pearls upon a thread." We already hear the distant sounds, the
murmurs of the conflict, and possibly there was a period of harmony and
calmness, when it broke out anew, not only on religious grounds, but roost
possibly on caste grounds — the fight between the two powerful factors in
our community, the kings and the priests. And from the topmost crest of the
wave that deluged India for nearly a thousand years, we see another glorious
figure, and that was our Gautama Shâkyamuni. You all know about his
teachings and preachings. We worship him as God incarnate, the greatest, the
boldest preacher of morality that the world ever saw, the greatest
Karma-Yogi; as disciple of himself, as it were, the same Krishna came to
show how to make his theories practical. There came once again the same
voice that in the Gita preached, "Even the least bit done of this religion
saves from great fear". "Women, or Vaishyas, or even Shudras, all reach the
highest goal." Breaking the bondages of all, the chains of all, declaring
liberty to all to reach the highest goal, come the words of the Gita, rolls
like thunder the mighty voice of Krishna: "Even in this life they have
conquered relativity, whose minds are firmly fixed upon the sameness, for
God is pure and the same to all, therefore such are said to be living in
God." "Thus seeing the same Lord equally present everywhere, the sage does
not injure the Self by the self, and thus reaches the highest goal." As it
were to give a living example of this preaching, as it were to make at least
one part of it practical, the preacher himself came in another form, and
this was Shakyamuni, the preacher to the poor and the miserable, he who
rejected even the language of the gods to speak in the language of the
people, so that he might reach the hearts of the people, he who gave up a
throne to live with beggars, and the poor, and the downcast, he who pressed
the Pariah to his breast like a second Rama.
You all know about his great work, his grand character. But the work had one
great defect, and for that we are suffering even today. No blame attaches to
the Lord. He is pure and glorious, but unfortunately such high ideals could
not be well assimilated by the different uncivilised and uncultured races of
mankind who flocked within the fold of the Aryans. These races, with
varieties of superstition and hideous worship, rushed within the fold of the
Aryans and for a time appeared as if they had become civilised, but before a
century had passed they brought out their snakes, their ghosts, and all the
other things their ancestors used to worship, and thus the whole of India
became one degraded mass of superstition. The earlier Buddhists in their
rage against the killing of animals had denounced the sacrifices of the
Vedas; and these sacrifices used to be held in every house. There was a fire
burning, and that was all the paraphernalia of worship. These sacrifices
were obliterated, and in their place came gorgeous temples, gorgeous
ceremonies, and gorgeous priests, and all that you see in India in modern
times. I smile when I read books written by some modern people who ought to
have known better, that the Buddha was the destroyer of Brahminical
idolatry. Little do they know that Buddhism created Brahminism and idolatry
in India.
There was a book written a year or two ago by a Russian gentleman, who
claimed to have found out a very curious life of Jesus Christ, and in one
part of the book he says that Christ went to the temple of Jagannath to
study with the Brahmins, but became disgusted with their exclusiveness and
their idols, and so he went to the Lamas of Tibet instead, became perfect,
and went home. To any man who knows anything about Indian history, that very
statement proves that the whole thing was a fraud, because the temple of
Jagannath is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and
re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet. That is
Jagannath, and there was not one Brahmin there then, and yet we are told
that Jesus Christ came to study with the Brahmins there. So says our great
Russian archaeologist.
Thus, in spite of the preaching of mercy to animals, in spite of the sublime
ethical religion, in spite of the hairsplitting discussions about the
existence or non-existence of a permanent soul, the whole building of
Buddhism tumbled down piecemeal; and the ruin was simply hideous. I have
neither the time nor the inclination to describe to you the hideousness that
came in the wake of Buddhism. The most hideous ceremonies, the most
horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human
brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name
of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism.
But India has to live, and the spirit of the Lords descended again. He who
declared, "I will come whenever virtue subsides", came again, and this time
the manifestation was in the South, and up rose that young Brahmin of whom
it has been declared that at the age of sixteen he had completed all his
writings; the marvellous boy Shankaracharya arose. The writings of this boy
of sixteen are the wonders of the modern world, and so was the boy. He
wanted to bring back the Indian world to its pristine purity, but think of
the amount of the task before him. I have told you a few points about the
state of things that existed in India. All these horrors that you are trying
to reform are the outcome of that reign of degradation. The Tartars and the
Baluchis and all the hideous races of mankind came to India and became
Buddhists, and assimilated with us, and brought their national customs, and
the whole of our national life became a huge page of the most horrible and
the most bestial customs. That was the inheritance which that boy got from
the Buddhists, and from that time to this, the whole work in India is a
reconquest of this Buddhistic degradation by the Vedanta. It is still going
on, it is not yet finished. Shankara came, a great philosopher, and showed
that the real essence of Buddhism and that of the Vedanta are not very
different, but that the disciples did not understand the Master and have
degraded themselves, denied the existence of the soul and of God, and have
become atheists. That was what Shankara showed, and all the Buddhists began
to come back to the old religion. But then they had become accustomed to all
these forms; what could be done?
Then came the brilliant Râmânuja. Shankara, with his great intellect, I am
afraid, had not as great a heart. Ramanuja's heart was greater. He felt for
the downtrodden, he sympathised with them. He took up the ceremonies, the
accretions that had gathered, made them pure so far as they could be, and
instituted new ceremonies, new methods of worship, for the people who
absolutely required them. At the same time he opened the door to the
highest; spiritual worship from the Brahmin to the Pariah. That was
Ramanuja's work. That work rolled on, invaded the North, was taken up by
some great leaders there; but that was much later, during the Mohammedan
rule; and the brightest of these prophets of comparatively modern times in
the North was Chaitanya.
You may mark one characteristic since the time of Ramanuja — the opening of
the door of spirituality to every one. That has been the watchword of all
prophets succeeding Ramanuja, as it had been the watchword of all the
prophets before Shankara. I do not know why Shankara should be represented
as rather exclusive; I do not find anything in his writings which is
exclusive. As in the case of the declarations of the Lord Buddha, this
exclusiveness that has been attributed to Shankara's teachings is most
possibly not due to his teachings, but to the incapacity of his disciples.
This one great Northern sage, Chaitanya, represented the mad love of the
Gopis. Himself a Brahmin, born of one of the most rationalistic families of
the day, himself a professor of logic fighting and gaining a word-victory
— for, this he had learnt from his childhood as the highest ideal of life
and yet through the mercy of some sage the whole life of that man became
changed; he gave up his fight, his quarrels, his professorship of logic and
became one of the greatest teachers of Bhakti the world has ever known — mad
Chaitanya. His Bhakti rolled over the whole land of Bengal, bringing solace
to every one. His love knew no bounds. The saint or the sinner, the Hindu or
the Mohammedan, the pure or the impure, the prostitute, the streetwalker —
all had a share in his love, all had a share in his mercy: and even to the
present day, although greatly degenerated, as everything does become in
time, his sect is the refuge of the poor, of the downtrodden, of the
outcast, of the weak, of those who have been rejected by all society. But at
the same time I must remark for truth's sake that we find this: In the
philosophic sects we find wonderful liberalisms. There is not a man who
follows Shankara who will say that all the different sects of India are
really different. At the same time he was a tremendous upholder of
exclusiveness as regards caste. But with every Vaishnavite preacher we find
a wonderful liberalism as to the teaching of caste questions, but
exclusiveness as regards religious questions.
The one had a great head, the other a large heart, and the time was ripe for
one to be born, the embodiment of both this head and heart; the time was
ripe for one to be born who in one body would have the brilliant intellect
of Shankara and the wonderfully expansive, infinite heart of Chaitanya; one
who would see in every sect the same spirit working, the same God; one who
would see God in every being, one whose heart would weep for the poor, for
the weak, for the outcast, for the downtrodden, for every one in this world,
inside India or outside India; and at the same time whose grand brilliant
intellect would conceive of such noble thoughts as would harmonise all
conflicting sects, not only in India but outside of India, and bring a
marvellous harmony, the universal religion of head and heart into existence.
Such a man was born, and I had the good fortune to sit at his feet for
years. The time was ripe, it was necessary that such a man should be born,
and he came; and the most wonderful part of it was that his life's work was
just near a city which was full of Western thought, a city which had run mad
after these occidental ideas, a city which had become more Europeanised than
any other city in India. There he lived, without any book-learning
whatsoever; this great intellect never learnt even to write his own
name,[1] but the most graduates of our university found in him an
intellectual giant. He was a strange man, this Shri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
It is a long, long story, and I have no time to tell anything about him
tonight. Let me now only mention the great Shri Ramakrishna, the fulfilment
of the Indian sages, the sage for the time, one whose teaching is just now,
in the present time, most beneficial. And mark the divine power working
behind the man. The son of a poor priest, born in an out-of-the-way village,
unknown and unthought of, today is worshipped literally by thousands in
Europe and America, and tomorrow will be worshipped by thousands more. Who
knows the plans of the Lord!
Now, my brothers, if you do not see the hand, the finger of Providence, it
is because you are blind, born blind indeed. If time comes, and another
opportunity, I will speak to you more fully about him. Only let me say now
that if I have told you one word of truth, it was his and his alone, and if
I have told you many things which were not true, which were not correct,
which were not beneficial to the human race, they were all mine, and on me
is the responsibility.
- Notes
- ↑ Later research has shown that although Shri Ramakrishna was almost illiterate in the Western sense, he could read and write Bengali.