Here is an audio excerpt from Vivekananda's speeches,
starting at the end of the Third Speech. Scroll down for the
transcript.
It follows the full text transcript of
Vivekananda's six addresses, delivered at the
World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago - September 11-27,
1893.
Sisters and
Brothers of America,
It fills my heart
with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the
warm and cordial welcome which you have given
us.
I thank you in the
name of the most ancient order of monks in the
world. I thank you in the name of the mother of
religions. And I thank you in the name of
millions and millions of Hindu people of all
classes and sects.
My thanks go also to some of the speakers on
this platform who, referring to the delegates
from the Orient, have told you that these men
from far-off nations may well claim the honor of
bearing to different lands the idea of
toleration.
I am proud to belong to a religion which has
taught the world both tolerance and universal
acceptance. We believe not only in universal
toleration but we accept all religions as true.
I am proud to
belong to a nation which has sheltered the
persecuted and the refugees of all religions and
all nations of the earth.
I am proud to tell
you that we have gathered in our bosom the
purest remnant of the Israelites who came to
Southern India and took refuge with us in the
very year in which their holy temple was
shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny.
I am proud to
belong to the religion which has sheltered and
is still fostering the remnant of the grand
Zoroastrian nation.
I will quote to you brethren a few lines from a
hymn which I remember to have repeated from my
earliest childhood, which is every day repeated
by millions of human beings:
"As the
different streams having their sources in
different places all mingle their water in
the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths
which men take through different tendencies,
various though they appear, crooked or
straight, all lead to Thee."
The present convention, which is one of the most
august assemblies ever held, is in itself a
vindication, a declaration to the world of the
wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita:
"Whosoever
comes to me, though whatsoever form, I reach
him. All men are struggling through paths
which in the end lead to me."
Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible
descendant fanaticism have long possessed this
beautiful Earth. They have filled the earth with
violence, drenched it often and often with human
blood, destroyed civilizations, and sent whole
nations to despair. Had it not been for these
horrible demons, human society would be far more
advanced than it is now.
But their time has come. And 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.
Second Speech - Why We
Disagree
I will tell you a little story. You have heard
the eloquent speaker who has just finished say,
"Let us cease from abusing each other," and he
was very sorry that there should be always so
much variance.
But I think I should tell you a story that would
illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog
lived in a well. It had lived there for a long
time. It was born there and brought up there,
and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the
evolutionists were not there then to tell us
whether the frog lost its eyes or not but, for
our story's sake, we must take it for granted
that it had its eyes, and that it every day
cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli
that lived in it with an energy that would do
credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this
way it went on and became a little sleek and
fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in
the sea came and fell into the well.
"Where are you from?"
"I am from the sea."
"The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my
well?" and he took a leap from one side of the
well to the other.
"My friend," said the frog of the sea, "how do
you compare the sea with your little well?"
Then the frog took another leap and asked, "Is
your sea so big?"
"What nonsense you
speak, to compare the sea with your well!"
"Well, then," said the frog of the well,
"nothing can be bigger than my well. There can
be nothing bigger than this. This fellow is a
liar, so turn him out."
That has been the difficulty all the while.
I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well
and thinking that the whole world is my little
well. The Christians sit in their little well
and think the whole world is their well. The
Muslims sit in their little well and think that
is the whole world. I have to thank you of
America for the great attempt you are making to
break down the barriers of this little world of
ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord
will help you to accomplish your purpose.
Third Speech - Paper on
Hinduism
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 another 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 thralldom 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. The divinities on earth - sinners! It is
a sin to call a man 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 Rote 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 realized." 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 traveling 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 traveling, 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 sees 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 groveling
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 traveled 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.
Fourth Speech -
Religion Not the Crying Need of India
Christianity must always be ready for good
criticism, and I think that you will hardly mind
if I make a little criticism. Christian brethren
of America, you are so fond of sending out
missionaries to save the souls of heathens. I
ask you: what have you done and are doing to
save their bodies from starvation? In India,
there are 300 million men and women living on an
average of a little more than 50 cents a month.
I have seen them living for years upon wild
flowers. During the terrible famines, thousands
died from hunger but the missionaries did
nothing. They come and offer life but only on
condition that the Hindus become Christians,
abandoning the faith of their fathers and
forefathers. Is it right? There are hundreds of
asylums, but if the Muslims or the Hindus go
there, they are kicked out. There are thousands
of asylums erected by Hindus where anybody is
received. There are hundreds of churches that
have been erected with the assistance of the
Hindus, but no Hindu temples for which a
Christian has given a penny.
Brethren of America, you erect churches all
through India, but the crying evil in the East
is not religion. They have religion enough, but
it is bread that the suffering millions of
burning India cry out for with parched throats.
What they want is bread, but they are given a
stone. It is an insult to a starving people to
offer them religion; it is an insult to a
starving man to teach him metaphysics.
Therefore, if you wish to illustrate the meaning
of "brotherhood," treat the Hindus more kindly,
even though they are Hindus and are faithful to
their religion. Send missionaries to them to
teach them how better to earn a piece of bread
and not to teach them metaphysical nonsense.
The earlier speaker said something about the
miserable and ignorant priests in China. The
same may be said of the priests in India. I am
one of those monks who have been described as
beggarly. That is the pride of my life. I am
proud in that sense to be Christ-like. I eat
what I have today and think not of tomorrow.
"Behold the lilies of the field; they toil not,
neither do they spin." The Hindu carries that
out literally. Many gentlemen present in Chicago
sitting on this platform can testify that for
the last twelve years I never knew whence my
next meal would come. I am proud to be a beggar
for the sake of the Lord. The idea in the East
is that to preach or teach anything for the sake
of money is low and vulgar, but to teach the
name of the Lord for pay is such degradation as
would cause the priest to lose caste and be spat
upon.
There is one suggestion in the earlier speaker’s
paper that is true: If the priests of China and
India were organized, there is an enormous
amount of potential energy that could be used
for regeneration of society and humanity. I
endeavored to organize it in India but failed
for lack of money. It may be I shall get the
help I want in America.
I came here to seek help for my impoverished
people and I fully realized how difficult it was
to get help for heathens from Christians in a
Christian land. I have heard so much of this
land of freedom, of liberty and freedom of
thought, that I am not discouraged. I thank you,
ladies and gentlemen.
Fifth Speech -
Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism
I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet
I am. If China and Japan and Sri Lanka follow
the teachings of the Buddha, India worships him
as God incarnate on earth.
You have just now heard that I am going to
criticize Buddhism, but by that I wish you to
understand only this. Far be it from me to
criticize him whom I worship as God incarnate on
earth. Our view about the Buddha is that he was
not understood properly by his disciples. The
relation between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean
the religion of the Vedas) and what is called
Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same
as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus
Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni [Buddha] was a
Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay,
crucified him, whereas the Hindus accept Shakya
Muni as God incarnate and worship him.
But the real difference that we Hindus want to
show between modern Buddhism and what we should
understand as the teachings of the Buddha lies
principally in this: Shakya Muni came to preach
nothing new. Like Jesus, the Buddha came to
fulfill and not to destroy. In the case of
Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did
not understand him, while in the case of the
Buddha, it was his own followers who did not
realize the import of his teachings. As the Jew
did not understand the fulfillment of the Old
Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand
the fulfillment of the truths of the Hindu
religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni came not
to destroy, but he was the fulfillment, the
logical conclusion, the logical development of
the religion of the Hindus.
The religion of the Hindus is divided into two
parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The
spiritual portion is specially studied by the
monks. In it, there is no caste. In India a man
from the highest caste and a man from the lowest
can become monks, thus the two castes become
equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is
simply a social institution. Shakya Muni himself
was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the
large-heartedness to bring out the truths hidden
in the Vedas and throw them broadcast all over
the world. He was the first being in the world
who brought missionaries into practice--nay, he
was the first to conceive the idea of
proselytizing.
The great glory of the Master lay in his
wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for
the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples
were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching,
Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in
India. It was then only in the books of the
learned. Some of Buddha's Brahmin disciples
wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit,
but he distinctly told them, "I am for the poor,
for the people; let me speak in the tongue of
the people." And so to this day the great bulk
of his teachings are in the vernacular of that
day in India.
Whatever may be the position of philosophy,
whatever may be the position of metaphysics, so
long as there is such a thing as death in the
world, so long as there is such a thing as
weakness in the human heart, so long as there is
a cry going out of the human heart, there shall
be faith in God.
On the philosophic side, the disciples of the
Great Master dashed themselves against the
eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush
them; and on the other side, they took away from
the nation that eternal God to which every one,
man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result
was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in
India. At the present day there are very few who
call themselves Buddhists in India, the land
where Buddhism was born.
But at the same time, Hinduism lost
something--that reforming zeal, that wonderful
sympathy and charity for everybody, that
wonderful leaven which Buddhism had brought to
the masses and which had rendered Indian society
so great that a Greek historian who wrote about
India of that time was led to say that no Hindu
was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman
was known to be unchaste.
Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor
Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realize what the
separation has shown to us, that the Buddhist
cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of
the Hindu, nor the Hindu without the heart of
the Buddhist. This separation between the
Buddhists and the Hindus is the cause of the
downfall of India. That is why India is
populated by three hundred millions of beggars,
and that is why India has been the slave of
conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us
then join the wonderful intellect of the Hindus
with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful
humanizing power of the Buddha.
Sixth Speech - Address
at the Final Session
The World's Parliament of Religions has become
an accomplished fact, and the merciful Father
has helped those who labored to bring it into
existence, and crowned with success their most
unselfish labor. My thanks to those noble souls
whose large hearts and love of truth first
dreamed this wonderful dream and then realized
it. My thanks to the shower of liberal
sentiments that has overflowed this platform. My
thanks to this enlightened audience for their
uniform kindness to me and for their
appreciation of every thought that tends to
smooth the friction of religions. A few jarring
notes were heard from time to time in this
harmony. My special thanks to them, for they
have, by their striking contrast, made general
harmony the sweeter.
Much has been said of the common ground of
religious unity. I am not going just now to
venture my own theory. But if anyone here hopes
that this unity will come by the triumph of any
one of the religions and the destruction of the
other, to them I say, "Friends, yours is an
impossible hope." Do I wish that the Christian
would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that
the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian?
God forbid.
The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air
and water are placed around it. Does the seed
become the earth, or the air, or the water? No.
It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of
its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth,
and the water, converts them into plant
substance, and grows into a plant. Similar is
the case with religion. The Christian is not to
become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a
Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must
assimilate the spirit of the others and yet
preserve their individuality and grow according
to their own law of growth.
If the Parliament of Religions has shown
anything to the world it is this: It has proved
to the world that holiness, purity and charity
are not the exclusive possessions of any church
in the world, and that every system has produced
men and women of the most exalted character. In
the face of this evidence, if some people still
dream of the exclusive survival of their own
religion and the destruction of the others, I
pity them from the bottom of my heart, and point
out to them that upon the banner of every
religion will soon be written, in spite of
resistance: Help and not Fight, Assimilation and
not Destruction, Harmony and Peace and not
Dissension.
Also called the
Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars were
fought for almost half a century from 492 BC -
449 BC. Greece won against enormous odds. Here
is more:
