Paper on Sanatana Dharma

This is Sanatana Dharma 101. This speech right here started my journey of understand what Sanatana Dharma was all about. I have no words to describe the genius of Swami Vivekananda in his ability to succinctly explain something as complex as Sanatana Dharma to the world.

This is step 1 for anyone interested in attempting to understand Sanatana Dharma. I feel unless and until someone completely understands this speech their journey cannot even begin.

Paper on Hinduism
At The World's Parliament of Religions
Chicago, 19th September 1893

 

--- Swami Vivekananda
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three religions now stand in the world which have come
down to us from time prehistoric - Hinduism,
Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. They have all received
tremendous shocks, and all of them prove by their
survival their internal strength. But while Judaism
failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of
its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and
a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the
tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in
India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to
its very foundations, but like the waters of the
sea-shore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only
for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing Hood,
a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of
the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in,
absorbed and assimilated into the immense body of the
mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta
philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science
seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with
its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the
Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all
have a place in the Hindu's religion.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common
center to which all these widely diverging radii
converge? Where is the common basis upon which all
these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this
is the question I shall attempt to answer.
The Hindus have received their religion through
revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are
without beginning and without end. It may sound
ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without
beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant.
They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws
discovered by different persons in different times.
Just as the law of gravitation existed before its
discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it,
so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual
relations between soul and soul and between individual
spirits and the Father of all spirits were there
before their discovery, and would remain even if we
forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and
we honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell
this audience that some of the very greatest of them
were women.
Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be
without end, but they must have had a beginning. The
Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or
end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total
of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there
was a time when nothing existed, where was all this
manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form
in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and
sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable.
Everything mutable is a compound and everything
compound must undergo that change which is called
destruction. So God would die, which is absurd.
Therefore, there never was a time when there was no
creation.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and
creator are two lines, without beginning and without
end, zoning parallel to each other. God is the
ever-active providence, by whose power systems after
systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run
for a time, and again destroyed. This is what the
Brahmin boy repeats every day:"The sun and the moon,
the Lord created like the suns and the moons of
previous cycles."And this agrees with modern science.
Here I Stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to
conceive my existence, "I," "I," "I," what is the idea
before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but
a combination of material substances? The Vedas
declare, "No" I am a spirit living in a body: I am not
the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here
I am in this body; it will fall, bull shall go on
living. I had also a past. The soul was not created,
for creation means a combination, which means a
certain future dissolution. If then the soul was
created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy
perfect health with beautiful body, mental vigor, and
all wants supplied. Others are born miserable; some
are without hands or feet; others again are idiots,
and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they
are all created, why does a just and merciful God
create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so
partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to
hold that those who are miserable in this life will be
happy in a ôare one. Why should a man be miserable
even here in the reign of a just and merciful God?
In the second place, the idea of a creator God does
not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the
cruel Rat of an all-powerful being. There must have
been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man
miserable or happy and those were his past actions.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body
accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two
parallel lines of existence - one of the mind, the
other of matter. If matter and its transformations
answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for
supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be
proved that thought has been evolved out of matter;
and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual
monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than
a materialistic monism; but neither of these is
necessary here.
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies
from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the
physical configuration through which a peculiar mind
alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other
tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past
actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would, by
the laws of affinity, take birth in a body which is
the fittest instrument for the display of that
tendency. This is in accord with science, for science
wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got
through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to
explain the natural habits of a new born soul. And
since they were not obtained in this present life,
they must have come down from past lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for
granted, how is it that I do not remember anything of
my past life? This can be easily explained. I am now
speaking English. It is not my mother tongue; in fact,
no words of my mother tongue are now present in my
consciousness; but let me try to bring them up, and
they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only
the surface of mental ocean, and within its depths are
stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they
would come up. and you would be conscious even of your
past life.
This is direct and demonstrative evidence.
Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and
here is the challenge thrown to the world by the
Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the
very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up -
try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of
your past life.
So then the Hindu believes that he is a spirit. Him
the sword cannot pierce - him the fire cannot burn -
him the water cannot melt - him the air cannot dry.
The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose
circumference is nowhere but whose center is located
in the body, and that death means the change of the
center from holy to body. Nor is the soul bound by the
conditions of matter. In its very essence, it is flee,
unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or
other it finds itself tied down to matter and thinks
of itself as matter.
Why should the free, perfect, and pure be thus under
the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can
the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is
imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the
question and say that no such question can be there-
Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or
more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific
names to fill up the gap. But naming is not
explaining. The question remains the same. How can the
perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure,
the absolute change even a microscopic particle of its
nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to
take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to
face the question in a manly fashion; and his answer
is: "I do not know. I do not know how the perfect
being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect,
as Joined to and conditioned by matter." But the fact
is a fact for all that. It is a fact in everybody's
consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body.
The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks
one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God
is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the
Hindu says, "I do not know."
Well, then, the human soul is eternal and immortal,
perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of
center from one body to another. The present is
determined by our past actions, and the future by the
present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting
back from birth to birth and death to death. But here
is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest,
raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and
dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to
and from at the mercy of good and bad actions - a
powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging,
ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and
effect - a little moth placed under the wheel of
causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its
way and waits not for the widow's tears or the
orphan's cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is
the law of nature. Is there no hope? Is there no
escape? - was the cry that went up from the bottom of
the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy,
and words of hope and consolation came down and
inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the
world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad
tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye
that reside in higher spheres! I have found 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. We are the Children
of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and
perfect beings. e divinities on earth - sinners! It
is a sin to call a ma. so; it is 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.
Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful
combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison
of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these
laws, in and through every particle of matter and
force, stands One, "by whose command the wind blows,
the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon
the earth."
And what is His nature?
He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the
Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father,
Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou
art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou
art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help
me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the
Rishis of the Veda. And how to worship Him? Through
love. "He is to be worshiped as the one beloved,
dearer than everything in this and the next life."
This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas,
and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by
Krishna whom the Hindus believe to have been God
incarnate on earth.
He taught that a man ought to live in this world like
a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never
moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the
world - his heart to God and his hands to work.
It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or
the next world, but it is better to love God for
love's sake; and the prayer goes: "Lord, I do not want
wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I
shall go from birth to birth; but grant me this, that
I may love Thee without the hope of reward - love
unselfishly for love's sake." One of the disciples of
Krishna, the then Emperor of India, wag driven from
his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter
with his queen, in a forest in the Himalayas and there
one day the queen asked how it was that he, the most
virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery.
Yudhishthira answered, "Be hold, my queen, the
Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love
them. They do not give me any- thing but my nature is
to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love
them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of
all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to
beloved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I
love. I do not pray for any- thing; I do not ask for
anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must
love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love."
The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in
the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when
this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is,
therefore, Mukti - freedom, freedom from the bonds of
imperfection, freedom from death and misery.
And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy
of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is
the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act?
He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the
stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and
then only all the crookedness of the heart is made
straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the
freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very
center, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The
Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories,
If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous
existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If
there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there
is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will Rota Him
direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy
all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about
the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have
seen God." And that is the only condition of
perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in
struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine
or dogma, but in realizing - not in believing, but in
being and becoming.
Thus the whole object of their system is by constant
struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach
God, and see God; and this reaching God, seeing God,
becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is
perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.
And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection?
He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite
and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in
which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and
enjoys the bliss with God.
So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common
religion of all the sects of India; but then
perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two
or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be
an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and
absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it
would only realize the Lord as the perfection, the
reality, of its own nature and existence, the
existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss
absolute. We have often and often read this called the
losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a
stone.
"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is
happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small
body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the
consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness
increasing with the consciousness of an increasing
number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness,
being reached when it would become a universal
consciousness.
Therefore, to gain this infinite universal
individuality, this miserable little prison -
individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when
I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I
am one with happiness itself, then alone can all
errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and
this is the necessary scientific conclusion- Science
has proved to me that physical individuality is a
delusion, that really my body is one little
continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of
matter, and Advaita (unity) is the necessary
conclusion with my other counterpart, Soul.
Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon
as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop
from further progress, because it would reach the
goal. Thus chemistry could not progress farther when
it would discover one element out of which all others
could be made. Physics would stop when it would be
able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy
of which all the others are hut manifestations, and
the science of religion become perfect when it would
discover Him who is the one life in a universe of
death, Him who is the constant basis of an
ever-changing world, One who is the only Soul of which
all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it,
through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate
unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is
the goal of all science.
All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the
long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word
of science today; and the Hindu is only glad that what
he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going
to be taught in more forcible language and with
further light from the latest conclusions of science.
Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to
the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I
may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In
every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will
find the worshipers applying all the attributes of
God, including omnipresence. to the images. It is not
polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the
situation.
"The rose, called by any other name, would smell as
sweet." Names are not explanations. I remember, as a
boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to crowd in
India. Among other sweet things he was telling them
was, that if he gave a blow to their idol with his
stick. what could it do? One of his hearers sharply
answered, "If I abuse your God, what can He do?" "You
would be punished," said the preacher, "when you die."
"So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted
the Hindu.
The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen
amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like
of whom, in morality and spirituality and love, I have
never seen anywhere, l stop and ask myself, "Can sin
beget holiness?"
Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is
worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the
cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in
prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic
Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of
Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can Do
more think about anything without a mental image than
we can live without breathing- By the law of
association the material image calls up the mental
idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an
external symbol when he worships. He will tell you. it
helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he
prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is
not God, is not omnipresent. finer all, how much does
omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands
merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area?
If not, when we repeat that word "omnipresent", we
think of the extended sky. or of space - that is all.
As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our
mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of
infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the
sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with
the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The
Hindus have associated the ideas of holiness, purity,
truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with
different images and forms. But with this difference
that while some people devote their whole lives to
their idol of a church and never rise higher, because
with them religion means an intellectual assent to
certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the
whole religion of the Hindu is centered in
realization. Man is to become divine by realizing the
divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only
the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood;
but on and on he must progress.
He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material
worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage;
struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next
stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been
realised." Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling
before the idol tells you, "Him the sun cannot
express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning
cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire;
through Him they shine." But he does not abuse
anyone's idol or call its worship sin. He recognizes
in it a necessary stage of life. "The child is father
of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say
that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?
If a man can realize his divine nature with the help
of an image, would it be right to call that a sin?
Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he
call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling
from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from
lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from
the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean
so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and
realize the Infinite, each determined by the
conditions of its birth and association, and each of
these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a
young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more
and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun.
Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu
has recognized it. Every other religion lays down
certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to
adopt them. It places before society only one coat
which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If
it does not fit John or Henry he must go without a
coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered
that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of,
or stated through the relative, and the images,
crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols - so
many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that
this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do
not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor
is it compulsory in Hinduism.
One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not
mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of
harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of
undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The
Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their
exceptions; but mark this, they are always for
punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the
throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns
himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of
Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door
of his religion any more than the burning of witches
can be laid at the door of Christianity.
To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is
only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and
women, through various conditions and circumstances,
to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a
God out of the material man, and the same God is the
inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many
contradictions? They are only apparent, says the
Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth
adapting itself to the varying circumstances of
different natures.
It is the same light coming through glasses of
different colors- And these little variations are
necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart
of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has
declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna:
"I am in every religion as the thread through a string
of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness
and extraordinary power raising and purifying
humanity, know thou that I am there." And what has
been the result? I challenge the world to find,
throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy,
any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be
saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men
even beyond the pale of our caste and creed." One
thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole
fabric of thought centers in God, believe in Buddhism
which is agnostic, or in Jainism which is atheistic?
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but
the whole force of their religion is directed to the
great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God
out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they
have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son bath
seen the Father also.
This, brethren, is a short sketch of the religious
ideas of the Hindus. The Hindu may have failed to
carry out all his plans, but if there is ever to be a
universal religion, it must be one which will have no
location in place or time; which will be infinite like
the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon
the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and
sinners alike; which will not be Brahminic or
Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total
of all these. and still have infinite space for
development; which in its catholicity will embrace in
infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being
from the lowest grovelling savage, not far removed
from the brute, to the highest man towering by the
virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity,
making society stand in awe of him and doubt his human
nature. It will be a religion which will have no place
for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which
will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and
whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centered
in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine
nature.
Offer such a religion and all the nations will follow
you. Asoka's council was a council of the Buddhist
faith. Akbar's. though more to the purpose. was only a
parlor meeting. It was reserved for America to
proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is
in every religion.
May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the
Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the
Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in
Heaven of the Christians, give strength to you to
carry out your noble idea! The star arose in the East;
it travelled steadily towards the West, sometimes
dimmed and sometimes effulgent, till it made a circuit
of the world, and now it is again rising on the very
horizon of the East, the borders of the Sanpo¹, a
thousand fold more effulgent than it ever was before.
Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been
given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her
neighbor's blood, who never found out that the
shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one's
neighbors, it has been given to thee to march at the
vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony.