CONFLUENCE OF REALITIES

LORD BUDDHA , THE EMBODIMENT OF PEACE

What do you think Hinduism and Buddhism have got any line of difference in between them? A socio-cultural movement over the stagnant order of stringent castes-system in Hinduism during the reign of the Haryanka dynasty in India, to reform it from within and thereby taking it to a new height, invited my attention to several lines in the book of Old Indian History. However, my first acquaintance with this topic was by means of a palaver in one of the gymnasiums in the country. A widely debated issue and still a moot-point; I concluded I would recourse to the discourse by Swami Vivekananda philosophising from the heights of spiritual solemnity on the confluence of realities at the Parliament of Religions in the ‘Art Institute’ of Chicago in the morning of 11 September 1893.

ADDRESSES AT THE PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS, SEPTEMBER 11, 1893

VIVEKANANDA

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.

BUDDHISM, THE FULFILMENT OF HINDUISM, SEPTEMBER 26, 1893

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China or Japan or Ceylon (Srilanka) follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worship 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 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 his 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.

IMAGE OF LORD BUDDHA

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 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 Brahman disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sankrit, 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 bulks 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 weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry going out of the heart of man in his 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 couldn’t crush them and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which everyone, 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 himself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

But at the same time, Brahmanism 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 lead to say that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

OM, A HOLY EMBALM OF THE HINDUS

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.