Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

 Therefore the world is waiting for this grand idea of universal toleration.  It will be a great acquisition to civilisation.  Nay, no civilisation can long exist unless this idea enters into it.  No civilisation can grow unless fanatics, bloodshed, and brutality stop.  No civilisation can begin to lift up its head until we look charitably upon one another; and the first step towards that much-needed charity is to look charitably and kindly upon the religious convictions of others.  Nay more, to understand that not only should we be charitable, but positively helpful to each other, however different our religious ideas and convictions may be.  And that is exactly what we do in India as I have just related to you.  It is here in India that Hindus have built and are still building churches for Christians and mosques for Mohammedans.  That is the thing to do. In spite of their hatred, in spite of their brutality, in spite of...

Two such scientific conclusions drawn from comparative religion, I would specially like to draw your attention to: the one bears upon the idea of the universality of religions, and the other on the idea of the oneness of things.  We observe in the histories of Babylon and among the Jews an interesting religious phenomenon happening.  We find that each of these Babylonian and Jewish peoples was divided into so many tribes, each tribe having a god of its own, and that these little tribal gods had often a generic name.  The gods among the Babylonians were all called Baals, and among them Baal Merodach was the chief.  In course of time one of these many tribes would conquer and assimilate the other racially allied tribes, and the natural result would be that the god of the conquering tribe would be placed at the head of all the gods of the other tribes.  Thus the so-called boasted monotheism of the Semites was created.  Among the Jews the gods...

A very small amount of religious work performed brings a large amount of result.  If this statement of the Gita wanted an illustration, I am finding every day the truth of that great saying in my humble life.  My work has been very insignificant indeed, but the kindness and the cordiality of welcome that have met me at every step of my journey from Colombo to this city are simply beyond all expectation.  Yet, at the same time, it is worthy of our traditions as Hindus, it is worthy of our race; for here we are, the Hindu race, whose vitality, whose life-principle, whose very soul, as it were, is in religion.  I have seen a little of the world, travelling among the races of the East and the West; and everywhere I find among nations one great ideal which forms the backbone, so to speak, of that race.  With some it is politics, with others it is social culture; others again may have intellectual culture and so on for their national background....

The second claim of the Vedanta upon the attention of the world is that, of all the scriptures in the world, it is the one scripture the teaching of which is in entire harmony with the results that have been attained by the modern scientific investigations of external nature.  Two minds in the dim past of history, cognate to each other in form and kinship and sympathy, started, being placed in different routes.  The one was the ancient Hindu mind, and the other the ancient Greek mind.  The former started by analysing the internal world.  The latter started in search of that goal beyond by analysing the external world.  And even through the various vicissitudes of their history, it is easy to make out these two vibrations of thought as tending to produce similar echoes of the goal beyond.  It seems clear that the conclusions of modern materialistic science can be acceptable, harmoniously with their religion, only to the Vedantins or Hindus ...

Every one of the great religions in the world excepting our own, is built upon such historical characters; but ours rests upon principles.  There is no man or woman who can claim to have created the Vedas.  They are the embodiment of eternal principles; sages discovered them; and now and then the names of these sages are mentioned — just their names; we do not even know who or what they were.  In many cases we do not know who their fathers were, and almost in every case we do not know when and where they were born.  But what cared they, these sages, for their names?  They were the preachers of principles, and they themselves, so far as they went, tried to become illustrations of the principles they preached.  At the same time, just as our God is an Impersonal and yet a Personal God, so is our religion a most intensely impersonal one — a religion based upon principles — and yet with an infinite scope for the play of persons; for what religio...

On behalf of the Hindu inhabitants of this ancient and religiously important town of Kumbakonam, we request permission to offer you a most hearty welcome on your return from the Western World to our own holy land of great temples and famous saints and sages. We are highly thankful to God for the remarkable success of your religious mission in America and in Europe, and for His having enabled you to impress upon the choicest representatives of the world's great religions assembled at Chicago that both the Hindu philosophy and religion are so broad and so rationally catholic as to have in them the power to exalt and to harmonise all ideas of God and of human spirituality. The conviction that the cause of Truth is always safe in the hands of Him who is the life and soul of the universe has been for thousands of years part of our living faith; and if today we rejoice at the results of your holy work in Christian lands, it is because the eyes of men in and outside of In...

On the occasion of his visit to Kumbakonam, the Swamiji was presented with the following address by the local Hindu community: I have become used to hear all sorts of wonderful claims put forward in favour of every religion under the sun. You have also heard, quite within recent times, the claims put forward by Dr. Barrows, a great friend of mine, that Christianity is the only universal religion. Let me consider this question awhile and lay before you my reasons why I think that it is Vedanta, and Vedanta alone that can become the universal religion of man, and that no other is fitted for the role. Excepting our own almost all the other great religions in the world are inevitably connected with the life or lives of one or more of their founders. All their theories, their teachings, their doctrines, and their ethics are built round the life of a personal founder, from whom they get their sanction, their authority, and their power; and strangely enough, upon the historicity o...

Ay, it is a curious fact that while nations after nations have come upon the stage of the world, played their parts vigorously for a few moments, and died almost without leaving a mark or a ripple on the ocean of time, here we are living, as it were, an eternal life.  They talk a great deal of the new theories about the survival of the fittest, and they think that it is the strength of the muscles which is the fittest to survive.  If that were true, any one of the aggressively known old world nations would have lived in glory today, and we, the weak Hindus, who never conquered even one other race or nation, ought to have died out; yet we live here three hundred million strong!  (A young English lady once told me: What have the Hindus done? They never even conquered a single race!)  And it is not at all true that all its energies are spent, that atrophy has overtaken its body: that is not true.  There is vitality enough, and it comes out in t...