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 seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to
return in an all-absorbing flood, 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 centre
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 world. The
moral, ethical, and 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
honour 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, running 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 Brâhmin boy repeats every
day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and 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 am I in this body; it
will fall, but I 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 vigour 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 future 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 fiat 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 its 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 the 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 centre is located in the body, and that
death means the change of this centre from body to body. Nor is the soul bound
by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free, 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 being 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 centre 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 fro 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. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss,
holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth — sinners! It is a sin to call
a man so; it is a 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 Vedas. And how to worship Him?
Through love. "He is to be worshipped 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, was 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 him how it was that he, the most
virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered,
"Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love
them. They do not give me anything, 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 be loved; my nature
is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; 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 centre, 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 go to 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 realising — not in believing, but in being and becomin.
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 realise 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 alone 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 other could be made. Physics would
stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of
which all others are but 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
worshippers 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 a 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, I 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 no 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. After 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 idea 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 centred in realisation. Man
is to become divine by realising 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 any one's idol or call its worship sin.
He recognises 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 realise 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 realise 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
recognised 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 realised, or thought of, or stated, through the
relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols —
so many pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is
necessary for every one, 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 neighbours. 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
colours. 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 centres 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 hath 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 its 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 recognise divinity in
every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be created
in aiding humanity to realise 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 parlour-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
Sanpo,1 a thousandfold 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 neighbour’s blood, who never found out
that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbours, it has
been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilisation with the flag of
harmony.
