"Did Buddha teach that the many was real and the ego unreal,
while orthodox Hinduism regards the One as the real, and the many as
unreal?" the Swami was asked. "Yes", answered the Swami.
"And what Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and I have added to this is, that the
Many and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the same mind at different
times and in different attitudes."
"Remember!" he said once to a disciple, "Remember! the message
of India is always "Not the soul for nature, but nature for the
soul."
"What the world wants today is twenty men and women who can dare to stand
in the street yonder, and say that they possess nothing but God. Who will go?
Why should one fear? If this is true, what else could matter? If it is not
true, what do our lives matter
"Oh, how calm would be the work of one who really understood the divinity
of man! For such, there is nothing to do, save to open men's eyes. All the rest
does itself."
"He (Shri Ramakrishna) was contented simply to live that great life and to
leave it to others to find the explanation!"
"Plans! Plans!" Swami Vivekananda explained in indignation, when one
of his disciples had offered him some piece of worldly wisdom. "That is
why . .. Western people can never create a religion! If any of you ever did, it
was only a few Catholic saints who had no plans. Religion was never preached by
planners!"
"Social life in the West is like a peal of laughter; but underneath, it is
a wail. It ends in a sob. The fun and frivolity are all on the surface: really
it is full of tragic intensity. Now here, it is sad and gloomy on the outside,
but underneath are carelessness and merriment.
"We have a theory that the universe is God's manifestation of Himself just
for fun, that the Incarnations came and lived here 'just for fun'. Play, it was
all play. Why was Christ crucified? It was mere play. And so of life. Just play
with the Lord. Say, '"It is all play, it is all play". Do do
anything?"
"I am persuaded that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born
for it. For the difficulty is not in organisation and making plans; the test,
the real test, of the leader, lies in holding widely different people together
along the line of their common sympathies. And this can only be done
unconsciously, never by trying."
In explanation of Plato's doctrine of Ideas, Swamiji said, "And so you
see, all this is but a feeble manifestation of the great ideas, which alone,
are real and perfect. Somewhere is an ideal for you, and here is an attempt to
manifest it! The attempt falls short still in many ways. Still, go on! You will
interpret the ideal some day."
Answering the remark of a disciple who felt that it would be better for her to
come back to this life again and again and help the causes that were of
interest to her instead of striving for personal salvation with a deep longing
to get out of life, the Swami retorted quickly: "That's because you cannot
overcome the idea of progress. But things do not grow better. They remain as
they are; and we grow better by the changes make in them."
It was in Almora that a certain elderly man, with a face full of amiable
weakness, came and put him a question about Karma. What were they to do, he
asked, whose Karma it was to see the strong oppress the weak? The Swami turned
on him in surprised indignation. "Why, thrash the strong, of course!"
he said, "You forget your own part in this Karma: Yours is always the
right to rebel!"
"Ought one to seek an opportunity of death in defense of right, or ought
one to take the lesson of the Gita and learn never to react?" the Swami
was asked. "I am for no reaction", said the Swami, speaking slowly
and with a long pause. Then he added "--for Sannyasins. Self-defense for
the householder!"
"It is a mistake to hold that with all men pleasure is the motive. Quite
as many are born to seek after pain. Let us worship the Terror for Its own
sake."
"Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was the only man who ever had the courage to say
that we must speak to all men in their own language!"
"How I used to hate Kali!" he said, referring to his own days of
doubts in accepting the Kali ideal, "And all Her ways! That was the ground
of my six years' fight--that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at
last! Ramakrishna Paramahamsa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She
guides me in everything I do, and does with me what She will. . . . Yet I
fought so long! I loved him, you see, and that was what held me. I saw his
marvelous purity. . . . I felt his wonderful love. . . His greatness had not dawned
on me then. All that came afterwards when I had given in. At that time I
thought him a brain-sick baby, always seeing visions and the rest. I hated it.
And then I, too, had to accept Her!
"No, the thing that made me do it is a secret that will die with me. I had
great misfortunes at the time. . . . It was an opportunity. . . . She made a
slave of me. Those were the very words: 'a slave of you'. And Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa made me over to Her. . . . Strange! He lived only two years after
doing that, and most of the time he was suffering. Not more than six months did
he keep his own health and brightness.
"Guru Nanak was like that, you know, looking for the one disciple to whom
he would give his power. And he passed over all his own family--his children were
as nothing to him--till he came upon the boy to whom he gave it; and then he
could die.
"The future, you say, will call Ramakrishna Paramahamsa an Incarnation of
Kali? Yes, I think there's no doubt that She worked up the body of Ramakrishna
for Her own ends.
You see, I cannot but believe that there is somewhere a great Power that thinks
of Herself as feminine, and called Kali and Mother. . . . And I believe in
Brahman too. . . . But is it not always like that? Is it not the multitude of
cells in the body that make up the personality, the many brain-centres, not the
one, that produce consciousness? . . . Unity in complexity! Just so! And why
should it be different with Brahman? With Brahman it is the One. And yet--and
yet--it is the gods too!"
"The older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness.
This is my new gospel."
Referring to some European reference to cannibalism, as if it were a normal
part of life in some societies, the Swami remarked, "That is not true! No
nation ever ate human flesh, save as a religious sacrifice, or in war, out of
revenge. Don't you see? That's not the way of gregarious animals! It would cut
at the root of social life!"
"Sex-love and creation! These are at the root of most religions. And these
in India are called Vaishnavism, and in the West Christianity. How few have
dared to worship Death or Kali! Let us worship Death! Let us embrace the
Terrible, because it is terrible, not asking that it be toned down. Let us take
misery for misery's own sake!"
"The three cycles of Buddhism were five hundred years of the Law, five
hundred years of images, and five hundred years of Tantras. You must not
imagine that there was ever a religion in India called Buddhism with temples
and priests of its own order! Nothing of the sort. It was always within
Hinduism. Only at one time the influence of Buddha was paramount, and this made
the nation monastic."
"The conservative's whole ideal is submission. Your ideal is struggle.
Consequently it is who enjoy the life, and never you! You are always striving
to change yours to something better; and before a millionth part of the change
is carried out, you die. The Western ideal is to be doing; the Eastern to be
suffering. The perfect life would be a wonderful harmony doing and suffering.
But that can never be.
"In our system it is accepted that a man cannot have all he desires. Life
is subjected to many restraints. This is ugly, yet it brings out points of
light and strength. Our liberals see only the ugliness and try to throw it off.
But they substitute something quite as bad; and the new custom takes as long as
the old for us to work to its centres of strength.
"Will is not strengthened by change. It is weakened and enslaved by it.
But we must be always absorbing. Will grows stronger by absorption. And
consciously or unconsciously, will is the one thing in the world that we
admire. Suttee is great in the eyes of the whole world, because of the will
that it manifests.
"It is selfishness that we must seek to eliminate. I find that whenever I
have made a mistake in my life, it has always been because entered into the
calculation. Where self has not been involved, my judgment has gone straight to
the mark.
"Without self, there would have been no religious system. If man had not
wanted anything for himself, do you think he would have had all this praying
and worship? Why! he would never have thought of God at all, except perhaps for
a little praise now and then, at the sight of a beautiful landscape or
something. And that is the only attitude there ought to be. All praise and
thanks. If only we were rid of self!
"You are quite wrong when you think that fighting is a sign of growth. It
is not so at all. Absorption is the sign. Hinduism is a very genius of
absorption. We have never cared for fighting. Of course we could strike a blow
now and then, in defense of our homes! That was right. But we never cared for
fighting for its own sake. Every one had to learn that. So let these races of
newcomers whirl on! They'll all be taken into Hinduism in the end!"
"The totality of all souls, not the human alone, is the Personal God. The
will of the Totality nothing can resist. It is what we know as law. And this is
what we mean by Shiva and Kali and so on."
"Worship the Terrible! Worship Death! All else is vain. All struggle is
vain. That is the last lesson. Yet this is not the coward's love of death, not
the love of the weak or the suicide. It is the welcome of the strong man who
has sounded everything to its depths and that there is no alternative."
"I disagree with all those who are giving their superstitions back to my
people. Like the Egyptologist's interest in Egypt, it is easy to feel an
interest in India that is purely selfish. One may desire to see again the India
of one's books, one's studies, one's dreams. hope is to see again the strong
points of that India, reinforced by the strong points of this age, only in a
natural way. The new stage of things must be a growth from within.
"So I preach only the Upanishads. If you look, you will find that I have
never quoted anything but the Upanishads. And of the Upanishads, it is only
that One idea, strength. The quintessence of the Vedas and Vedanta and all lies
in that one word. Buddha's teaching was non-resistance, or non-injury. But I
think this is a better way of teaching the same thing. For behind that
non-injury lay a dreadful weakness. It is weakness that conceives the idea of
resistance. I do not think of punishing or escaping from a drop of sea-spray.
It is nothing to me. Yet to the mosquito it would be serious. Now I would make
all injury like that. Strength and fearlessness. My own ideal is that saint
whom they killed in the Mutiny and who broke his silence, when stabbed to the
heart, to say, "And thou also art He!"
"But you may ask, 'What is the place of Ramakrishna in this scheme?'
"He is the method, that wonderful unconscious method! He did not
understand himself. He knew nothing of England or the English, save that they
were queer folk from over the sea. But he lived that great life: and I read the
meaning. Never a word of condemnation for any! Once I had been attacking one of
our sects of diabolists. I had been raving on for three hours, and he had
listened quietly. 'Well, well!' said the old man as I finished, perhaps every
house may have a backdoor. Who knows?'
"Hitherto the great fault of our Indian religion has lain in its knowing
only two words: renunciation and Mukti. Only Mukti here! Nothing for the
householder!
"But these are the very people whom I want to help. For are not all souls
of the same quality? Is not the goal of all the same?
"And so strength must come to the nation through education."'
The Puranas, the Swami considered, to be the effort of Hinduism to bring lofty
ideas to the door of the masses. There had been only one mind in India that had
foreseen this need, that of Krishna, probably the greatest man who ever lived.
The Swami said, "Thus is created a religion that ends in the worship of
Vishnu, as the preservation and enjoyment of life, leading to the realisation
of God. Our last movement, Chaitanyaism, you remember, was for enjoyment. At
the same time Jainism represents the other extreme, the slow destruction of the
body by self-torture. Hence Buddhism, you see, is reformed Jainism; and this is
the real meaning of Buddha's leaving the company of the five ascetics. In
India, in every age, there is a cycle of sects which represents every gradation
of physical practice, from the extreme of self-torture to the extreme of
excess. And during the same period will always be developed a metaphysical
cycle, which represents the realisation of God as taking place by every
gradation of means, from that of using the senses as an instrument to that of
the annihilation of the senses. Thus Hinduism always consists, as it were, of
two counter-spirals, completing each other, round a single axis.
"'Yes!' Vaishnavism says, 'it is all right--this tremendous love for
father, for mother, for brother, husband, or child! It is all right, if only
you will think that Krishna is the child, and when you give him food, that you
are feeding Krishna!' This was the cry of Chaitanya, 'Worship God through the
senses', as against the Vedantic cry, 'Control the senses! suppress the
senses!'
"I see that India is a young and living organism. Europe is young and
living. Neither has arrived at such a stage of development that we can safely
criticise its institutions. They are two great experiments, neither of which is
yet complete. In India we have social communism, with the light of Advaita--that
is, spiritual individualism--playing on and around it; in Europe you are
socially individualists, but your thought is dualistic, which is spiritual
communism. Thus the one consists of socialist institutions hedged in by
individualist thought, while the other is made up of individualist institutions
within the hedge of communistic thought.
"Now we must help the Indian experiment as it is. Movements which do not
attempt to help things as they are, are, from that point of view, no good. In
Europe, for instance, I respect marriage as highly as non-marriage. Never
forget that a man is made great and perfect as much by his faults as by his
virtues. So we must not seek to rob a nation of its character, even if it could
be proved that the character was all faults."
"You may always say that the image is God. The error you have to avoid is
to think God is the image."
The Swami was appealed to on one occasion to condemn the fetishism of the
Hottentot. "I do not know", he answered, "what fetishism
is!" Then a lurid picture was hastily put before him of the object
alternately worshipped, beaten, and thanked. "I do that!" he
exclaimed. "Don't you see," he went on, a moment later, in hot
resentment of injustice done to the lowly and absent, "don't you see that
there is no fetishism? Oh, your hearts are steeled, that you cannot see that
the child is right! The child sees person everywhere. Knowledge robs us of the
child's vision. But at last, through higher knowledge, we win back to it. He
connects a living power with rocks, sticks, trees and the rest.
And is there not a living Power behind them? It is symbolism, not fetishism!
Can you not see?"
One day he told the story of Satyabhama's sacrifice and how the word
"Krishna", written on a piece of paper and thrown into the balance,
made Krishna himself, on the other side, kick the beam. "Orthodox
Hinduism", he began, "makes Shruti, the sound, everything. The is but
a feeble manifestation of the pre-existing and eternal idea. So the of God is
everything: God Himself is merely the objectification of that idea in the
eternal mind. Your own name is infinitely more perfect than the person you! The
name of God is greater than God. Guard your speech!"
"I would not worship even the Greek Gods, for they were separate from
humanity! Only those should be worshipped who are like ourselves but greater.
The difference between the gods and me must be a difference only of
degree."