Complete works of Swami Vivekananda
Vol III Compilation of lectures of Swami Vivekananda from
Colombo to Almora
Extract
The Swami was presented with an address of welcome by the
Hindus of Madura, which read as follows:
Most Revered Swami,
We, the Hindu Public of Madura, beg to offer you our most
heartfelt and respectful welcome to our ancient and holy city. We realise in
you a living example of the Hindu Sannyasin, who, renouncing all worldly ties
and attachments calculated to lead to the gratification of the self, is
worthily engaged in the noble duty of living for others and endeavouring to
raise the spiritual condition of mankind. You have demonstrated in your own
person that the true essence of the Hindu religion is not necessarily bound up
with rules and rituals, but that it is a sublime philosophy capable of giving
peace and solace to the distressed and afflicted.
You have taught America and England to admire that
philosophy and that religion which seeks to elevate every man in the best
manner suited to his capacities and environments. Although your teachings have
for the last three years been delivered in foreign lands, they have not been
the less eagerly devoured in this country, and they have not a little tended to
counteract the growing materialism imported from a foreign soil.
India lives to this day, for it has a mission to fulfil in
the spiritual ordering of the universe. The appearance of a soul like you at
the close of this cycle of the Kali Yuga is to us a sure sign of the
incarnation in the near future of great souls through whom that mission will be
fulfilled.
Madura, the seat of ancient learning, Madura the favoured
city of the God Sundareshwara, the holy Dwadashântakshetram of Yogis, lags
behind no other Indian city in its warm admiration of your exposition of Indian
Philosophy and in its grateful acknowledgments of your priceless services for
humanity.
We pray that you may be blessed with a long life of vigour
and strength and usefulness.
The Swami replied in the following terms:
I wish I could live in your midst for several days and
fulfil the conditions that have just been pointed out by your most worthy
Chairman of relating to you my experiences in the West and the result of all my
labours there for the last four years. But, unfortunately, even Swamis have
bodies; and the continuous travelling and speaking that I have had to undergo
for the last three weeks make it impossible for me to deliver a very long
speech this evening. I will, therefore, satisfy myself with thanking you very
cordially for the kindness that has been shown to me, and reserve other things
for some day in the future when under better conditions of health we shall have
time to talk over more various subjects than we can do in so short a time this
evening. Being in Madura, as the guest of one of your well-known citizens and
noblemen, the Raja of Ramnad, one fact comes prominently to my mind. Perhaps
most of you are aware that it was the Raja who first put the idea into my mind
of going to Chicago, and it was he who all the time supported it with all his
heart and influence. A good deal, therefore, of the praise that has been
bestowed upon me in this address, ought to go to this noble man of Southern
India. I only wish that instead of becoming a Raja he had become a Sannyasin,
for that is what he is really fit for.
Wherever there is a thing really needed in one part of the
world, the complement will find its way there and supply it with new life. This
is true in the physical world as well as in the spiritual. If there is a want
of spirituality in one part of the world, and at the same time that
spirituality exists elsewhere, whether we consciously struggle for it or not,
that spirituality will find its way to the part where it is needed and balance
the inequality. In the history of the human race, not once or twice, but again
and again, it has been the destiny of India in the past to supply spirituality
to the world. We find that whenever either by mighty conquest or by commercial
supremacy different parts of the world have been kneaded into one whole race
and bequests have been made from one corner to the other, each nation, as it
were, poured forth its own quota, either political, social, or spiritual.
India's contribution to the sum total of human knowledge has been spirituality,
philosophy. These she contributed even long before the rising of the Persian
Empire; the second time was during the Persian Empire; for the third time
during the ascendancy of the Greeks; and now for the fourth time during the
ascendancy of the English, she is going to fulfil the same destiny once more.
As Western ideas of organization and external civilisation are penetrating and
pouring into our country, whether we will have them or not, so Indian
spirituality and philosophy are deluging the lands of the West. None can resist
it, and no more can we resist some sort of material civilization from the West.
A little of it, perhaps, is good for us, and a little spiritualisation is good
for the West; thus the balance will be preserved. It is not that we ought to
learn everything from the West, or that they have to learn everything from us,
but each will have to supply and hand down to future generations what it has
for the future accomplishment of that dream of ages — the harmony of nations,
an ideal world. Whether that ideal world will ever come I do not know, whether
that social perfection will ever be reached I have my own doubts; whether it
comes or not, each one of us will have to work for the idea as if it will come
tomorrow, and as if it only depends on his work, and his alone. Each one of us
will have to believe that every one else in the world has done his work, and
the only work remaining to be done to make the world perfect has to be done by
himself. This is the responsibility we have to take upon ourselves.
In the meanwhile, in India there is a tremendous revival of
religion. There is danger ahead as well as glory; for revival sometimes breeds
fanaticism, sometimes goes to the extreme, so that often it is not even in the
power of those who start the revival to control it when it has gone beyond a
certain length. It is better, therefore, to be forewarned. We have to find our
way between the Scylla of old superstitious orthodoxy and the Charybdis of
materialism — of Europeanism, of soullessness, of the so-called reform — which
has penetrated to the foundation of Western progress. These two have to be
taken care of. In the first place, we cannot become Western; therefore
imitating the Westerns is useless. Suppose you can imitate the Westerns, that
moment you will die, you will have no more life in you. In the second place, it
is impossible. A stream is taking its rise, away beyond where time began,
flowing through millions of ages of human history; do you mean to get hold of
that stream and push it back to its source, to a Himalayan glacier? Even if
that were practicable, it would not be possible for you to be Europeanised. If
you find it is impossible for the European to throw off the few centuries of
culture which there is in the West, do you think it is possible for you to
throw off the culture of shining scores of centuries? It cannot be. We must
also remember that in every little village-god and every little superstition
custom is that which we are accustomed to call our religious faith. But local customs
are infinite and contradictory. Which are we to obey, and which not to obey?
The Brâhmin of Southern India, for instance, would shrink in horror at the
sight of another Brahmin eating meat; a Brahmin in the North thinks it a most
glorious and holy thing to do — he kills goats by the hundred in sacrifice. If
you put forward your custom, they are equally ready with theirs. Various are
the customs all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake made is
that ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of our
religion.
But beyond this there is a still greater difficulty. There
are two sorts of truth we find in our Shâstras, one that is based upon the
eternal nature of man — the one that deals with the eternal relation of God, soul,
and nature; the other, with local circumstances, environments of the time,
social institutions of the period, and so forth. The first class of truths is
chiefly embodied in our Vedas, our scriptures; the second in the Smritis, the
Puranas. etc. We must remember that for all periods the Vedas are the final
goal and authority, and if the Purânas differ in any respect from the Vedas,
that part of the Puranas is to be rejected without mercy. We find, then, that
in all these Smritis the teachings are different. One Smriti says, this is the
custom, and this should be the practice of this age. Another one says, this is
the practice of this age, and so forth. This is the Âchâra which should be the
custom of the Satya Yuga, and this is the Achara which should be the custom of
the Kali Yuga, and so forth. Now this is one of the most glorious doctrines
that you have, that eternal truths, being based upon the nature of man, will
never change so long as man lives; they are for all times, omnipresent,
universal virtues. But the Smritis speak generally of local circumstances, of
duties arising from different environments, and they change in the course of
time. This you have always to remember that because a little social custom is
going to be changed you are not going to lose your religion, not at all.
Remember these customs have already been changed. There was a time in this very
India when, without eating beef, no Brahmin could remain a Brahmin; you read in
the Vedas how, when a Sannyasin, a king, or a great man came into a house, the
best bullock was killed; how in time it was found that as we were an
agricultural race, killing the best bulls meant annihilation of the race.
Therefore the practice was stopped, and a voice was raised against the killing
of cows. Sometimes we find existing then what we now consider the most horrible
customs. In course of time other laws had to be made. These in turn will have
to go, and other Smritis will come. This is one fact we have to learn that the
Vedas being eternal will be one and the same throughout all ages, but the
Smritis will have an end. As time rolls on, more and more of the Smritis will
go, sages will come, and they will change and direct society into better
channels, into duties and into paths which accord with the necessity of the
age, and without which it is impossible that society can live. Thus we have to
guide our course, avoiding these two dangers; and I hope that every one of us
here will have breadth enough, and at the same time faith enough, to understand
what that means, which I suppose is the inclusion of everything, and not the
exclusion. I want the intensity of the fanatic plus the extensity of the
materialist. Deep as the ocean, broad as the infinite skies, that is the sort
of heart we want. Let us be as progressive as any nation that ever existed, and
at the same time as faithful and conservative towards our traditions as Hindus
alone know how to be.
In plain words, we have first to learn the distinction
between the essentials and the non-essentials in everything. The essentials are
eternal, the non-essentials have value only for a certain time; and if after a
time they are not replaced by something essential, they are positively
dangerous. I do not mean that you should stand up and revile all your old
customs and institutions. Certainly not; you must not revile even the most evil
one of them. Revile none. Even those customs that are now appearing to be
positive evils, have been positively life-giving in times past; and if we have
to remove these, we must not do so with curses, but with blessings and
gratitude for the glorious work these customs have done for the preservation of
our race. And we must also remember that the leaders of our societies have
never been either generals or kings, but Rishis. And who are the Rishis? The
Rishi as he is called in the Upanishads is not an ordinary man, but a
Mantra-drashtâ. He is a man who sees religion, to whom religion is not merely
book-learning, not argumentation, nor speculation, nor much talking, but actual
realization, a coming face to face with truths which transcend the senses. This
is Rishihood, and that Rishihood does not belong to any age, or time, or even
to sects or caste. Vâtsyâyana says, truth must be realised; and we have to
remember that you, and I, and every one of us will be called upon to become
Rishis; and we must have faith in ourselves; we must become world-movers, for
everything is in us. We must see Religion face to face, experience it, and thus
solve our doubts about it; and then standing up in the glorious light of
Rishihood each one of us will be a giant; and every word falling from our lips
will carry behind it that infinite sanction of security; and before us evil
will vanish by itself without the necessity of cursing any one, without the
necessity of abusing any one, without the necessity of fighting any one in the
world. May the Lord help us, each one of us here, to realise the Rishihood for
our own salvation and for that of others!
