1893 Speech at Chicago
Sisters and brothers of America, 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 the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks 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. 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 world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between 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, 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 Brahmin 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 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 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?
Men 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, 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 newborn 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 in 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 center is located in the body, and that death means the change of the center 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 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 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 Is the law of nature. Is there no hope?
Is there no escape? Was the cry that rings 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, we shall be freed 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, ye 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, blessed 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. 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. Yudhishtira 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." 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 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 Brahma, 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 error 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, or unity, is a necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul. Science is nothing but a 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 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. 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. 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. 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 associations, 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.
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 their life. 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 fire, 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 a 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 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 Son will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike, which will not be Brahmanic 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.
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.
May he who is the Brahma 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 sun pole, a thousandfold more effulgent than it ever was before.
