SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S SPEECH ATWORLD PARLIAMENT OF RELIGION, CHICAGO

RESPONSE TO WELCOME

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, 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 honour 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 remnant Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a

hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, 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, through 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 civilisation 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 is come; and I fervently hope that the bell

that tolled this morning in honour 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.

Why We Disagree

 15 Sep 1893

     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 which 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 Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The

Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks 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.

Paper on Hinduism

 Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893

     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 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", "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 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, now 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; mut 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 by 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 belives 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 belives 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. Not is the soul bound by the

conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free. unbounded. holy, pure, and perfect. But

somehow of 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; an 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; anmmortal, 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 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

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 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

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, 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.

Religion not the crying need of India

 20th September, 1893

      Christians must always be ready for good criticism, and I hardly think that you will mind

if I make a little criticism. You Christians, who are so fond of sending out missionaries to

save the soul of the heathen--why do you not try to save their bodies from starvation? In

India, during the terrible famines, thousands died from hunger, yet you Christians did

nothing. 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. They ask us for bread, but we give them stones. It is an insult to a

starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him

metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by

the people. I came here to seek aid for my impoverished people, and I fully realised how

difficult it was to get help for heathens from Christians in a Christian land.

Buddhism, the fulfillment of Hinduism

 26th September, 1893

      I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Ceylon follow

the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have

just now heard that I am going to criticise Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand

only this. Far be it from me to criticise him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But

our views about Buddha are 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 was a Hindu. The Jews rejected Jesus Christ, nay,

crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shakya Muni as God 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 Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shakya Muni

came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy. Only, in

the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the

case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise the import of this teachings. As

the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not

understand the fulfilment of the truths of the Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shakya Muni

came not to destroy, but he was the fulfilment, 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 that there is no caste. A man from the

highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and 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 from the hidden Vedas and throw them broadcast all over the world. He was the

first being in the world who brought missionarising into practice--nay, he was the first to

conceive the idea of proselytising.

     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 heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a 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 is

not one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

     But at the same time, Brahminism 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

realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain

and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist. This

separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins 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 Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the wonderful humanising power of

the Great Master.

Address at the Final Session

 27th September, 1893

     The World's Parliament of Religions has become an accomplished fact, and the merciful

Father has helped those who laboured to bring it into existence, and crowned with success

their most unselfish labour. My thanks to those noble souls whose large hearts and love of

truth first dreamed this wonderful dream and then realised 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 any one here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of

any one of the religions and the destruction of the other, to him I say, "Brother, 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 his individuality and grow according to his 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 anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the

destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him 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."