276 J NANA YOGA better than the reHgion of the Prophet of Arabia. It came out of crudeness, this fight for the httle self, cHnging on to this "I" not only in the passage through this life, but also in the desire to continue it even after death. This they declare is unselfishness; this is the foundation of morality. Lord help us all, if this be the foundation of morality! Selfishness is made the foundation of morality, and men and women who ought to know better stand aghast, think all morality will be destroyed, if these little selves go. The watch- word of all well-being, of moral good, is not I, but thou. Who cares whether there is such a thing as heaven or hell, who cares if there be a soul or not, who cares if there be an unchangeable or not? Here is the world, and it is full of misery. Come out into it as Buddha came and struggle to lessen it or die in the attempt. Forget yourselves; this is the first lesson to be learned, whether you are a theist or an atheist, whether you are an agnostic or a Vedantist, a Christian or a Mohammedan. The one lesson obvious to all is destruction of the little self and building up of the Real Self.
Two forces have been working side by side in par- allel lines. The one says "I," the other says "not I.'^ Their manifestation is not only in man but in animals, not only in animals but in the lowest of worms. The tigress that plunges her fangs into the red hot blood of a human being, would give up her life to protect her young. The most depraved of men, who thinks nothing of taking the lives of his brother men, will perhaps do anything to save his starving wife or his little children. Thus throughout creation these two PRACTICAL VEDANTA 2'J'J forces are working side by side, where you find the one you find the other. The one is selfishness, the other is unselfishness. The one is assumption, the other is renunciation. The one takes, the other gives up everything. From the lowest to the highest, the whole universe is the playground of these two forces. This does not require any demonstration; it is obvious to all.
What right has one section of the community to base the whole work and evolution of the universe upon one of these two, upon competition and struggle? What right has it to base the whole working of the universe upon passion, and fight, and quarrel, and struggle? That these exist we do not deny; but what right has any one to deny the working of the other force? Can men deny that this love, this "not I," this renunciation, is the only positive power in the universe? The other is misguided employment of the same power of love; the power of love brought com- petition also. The real genesis of the competition was in love. The real genesis of even evil was in unselfish- ness. The creator of evil is good, and the end is also good. It is only misdirection of the power of good. A man who murders another man is moved to do it perhaps, by the love of his own child. His love had become limited, and had come down to that one little baby, and been taken oflf from the millions of other people in the universe. Yet, limited or unlimited, it is the same love.
Thus the motive power of the whole universe, in whatever way it manifests itself, is that one wonderful thing, unselfishness, renunciation, love, the real, the 278 J NANA YOGA only living force in existence. Therefore the Vedan- tist insists upon that oneness and not duality. We insist upon this explanation because we cannot admit two causes of the universe. If we simply hold that by limitation the same unit, beautiful wonderful love appears to be evil or vile, we find the whole universe explained by the one force of love. If not, two causes of the universe have to be taken for granted, one good and one evil; two forces — one love and the other hatred. Which is more logical? Certainly the one.
I have been going into things which do not belong to the dualists possibly. I cannot stand long with the dualists, I am afraid. My idea is to show that the highest ideal of morality and unselfishness goes hand in hand with the highest metaphysical conception; that you need not lower your conception to get ethics and morality; on the other hand, to reach a real basis of morality and ethics you must have the highest philosophical and scientific conceptions. Human knowledge is not antagonistic to human well-being. On the other hand, it is knowledge alone that will save us in every department of life — in knowledge is worship. The more we know the better. As the Vedantist says, the cause of all that is apparently evil is the limitation of the Unlimited. The love which gets limited into little channels and seems to be evil, eventually comes out at the other end and manifests God. And the Vedanta says that the cause of all this apparent evil is in ourselves; do not blame any super- natural being, neither be hopeless and despondent, nor think w^e are in a place from which we can never escape until some one comes and lends us a helping hand.
PRACTICAL VEDANTA 279 That cannot be, says the Vedanta; we are like silk- worms. We make the thread out of our own sub- stance, and spin the cocoon, and in course of time are bound inside. But not forever. In that cocoon we have to develop spiritual realization and, like the butterfly, come out free. This network of karma we have thrown around ourselves; in our ignorance we feel as if we were bound, and sometimes weep and wail for help. But help does not come from without; it comes from within ourselves. Cry to all the gods in the universe. I cried for years, and in the end I found that I was helped; but help came from within. And 1 had to undo what I had done by mistake. That is the only way. I had to cut the net which I had thrown round myself, and the power to do this is within. Of this I am certain, that not one aspiration, well-guided or ill-guided, in my life has been in vain, but I am the resultant of all my past good and evil both. I have committed many mistakes in my life, but mark you, I am sure of this, without every one of those mistakes I would not be what I am to-day, and I am quite satisfied to have made them. I do not mean that you are to go home and commit mistakes; do not misunderstand me that way. But do not mope because of some mistakes you have committed, but know that in the end they will all come out straight. It cannot be otherwise, because goodness is our nature, purity is our nature, and that nature can never be destroyed. Our essential nature always remains the same.
What we are to understand is this, that what we call mistakes, or evil, we commit because we are weak, 28o J NANA YOGA 28o J NANA YOGA and we are weak because we are ignorant. I prefer to call them mistakes. The word sin, although orig- inally a very good word, has got a certain flavor around it that frightens me. Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We throw our hands before our eyes and weep that it is dark. Take the hands off and the light exists always for us, the self-effulgent nature of the human soul. Do you not see what your modern scien- tific men say? What is the cause of all this evolution? Desire. The animal wants to do something else, but does not find the environment satisfactory, and there- fore manufactures a new body. Who manufactures? He himself, his will. You have developed from the lowest amoeba. Exercise that will and it will take you higher still. The will is almighty. If it is almighty you will say, why cannot I do many things? But you are thinking only of your little self. Look back on yourselves from the state of the amoeba to the human being; who made all that? Your own will. Can you deny then that it is almighty? That which has made you come up so high can make you go higher still. What we want is character, strengthening this will, and not weakening it.
If I teach you, therefore^ that your nature is evil, and tell you to go home in sackcloth and ashes and weep your lives out because you made certain false steps it will not help you, but will weaken you all the more, and I shall be showing you the road to more evil than good. If this room were full of darkness for thousands of years and you come in and begin to weep and wail "Oh, the darkness," will the darkness vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match and light PRACTICAL VEDANTA 281 comes in a moment. So what good will it do you to think all your lives *'Oh, I have done evil, I have made many mistakes?" It requires no ghost to tell us that! Bring in the light and the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up your- selves, the effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one that you see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see the vilest of human beings we could see the real Self within, and instead of condemning, say ''Rise, thou effulgent one, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest your true nature. These little manifes- tations do not befit thee." This is the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer, to remember our nature, the God Who is always within us, thinking of Him always as the Infinite, the Almighty, the ever good, the ever beneficent, the selfless, bereft of all this little self, little limitations, and because that nature is selfless, it is strong and fearless; only to selfishness comes fear. He who has nothing to desire for himself whom does he fear, what can frighten him? What fear has death for him? What fear has evil for him? So we must think, if we are Advaitists, that we are dead and gone from this moment. The old Mr., Mrs. or Miss So-and-So is gone, mere superstition, and what remains is the ever pure, the ever strong, the almighty, the all-knowing — that remains for us, and then all fear has vanished from us. Who can injure us, the omnipresent? Thus all weakness has vanished from us, and our only work is to rouse this knowledge in our fellow beings. We see that they too are the 282 J NANA YOGA same pure self, only they do not know it; we must teach them, we must help them to rouse up the infinite nature in each. This is what I feel is absolutely neces- sary over the whole world. These doctrines are old, older than many mountains possibly. All truth is eternal. Truth is nobody's property; no race, no indi- vidual can lay any claim to truth. Truth is the nature of all souls. Who lays any special claim to it? But it has to be made practical, to be made simple, for the highest truths are the simplest of all. It m.ust be made thoroughly simple, so that it may penetrate every pore of human society, that it may become the property of the highest intellects and the commonest minds; of the child, the woman, and the man at the same time. All these ratiocinations of logic, all these bundles of metaphysics, all these theologies and ceremonies, may have been good in their own time, but let us try to make things simpler and bring about the golden days when every man is a worshipper, and the Reality in every man is the object of worship.
XVI VEDANTA IN ALL ITS PHASES (Lecture delivered at Calcutta.)
Far back where no recorded history, nor even the dim Hght of tradition can penetrate, has been steadily shining a Hght, sometimes dimmed by external cir- cumstances, at others effulgent, but undying and steady — a light shining not only over India, but per- meating the whole thought-world with its power, silent, gentle, yet omnipotent; unperceived like the dew that falls in the evening unseen and unnoticed, yet bringing into bloom the fairest of roses — ^this light has been the thought of the Upanishads, the philosophy of the Vedanta. Nobody knows when it first came to flourish on the soil of India. Guess- works have been vain. The guesses, especially of the Western writers, have been so conflicting that no certain date can be ascribed to them. But we Hindus, from the spiritual standpoint, do not admit that they had any origin. This Vedanta, the philosophy of the Upanishads, I would make bold to state, has been the first as well as the final thought that on the spiritual plane has ever been vouchsafed to man. From this light have been going westward and eastward, from time to time, waves from the ocean of Vedanta. In 284 J NANA YOGA the days of yore it traveled westward and gave its impetus to the minds of the Greeks, either in Athens, or in Alexandria, or in Antioch. The Sankhya sys- tem clearly must have made its mark on the minds of the ancient Greeks: and the Sankhya, and all other systems in India, had that one authority, the Upani- shads, the Vedanta. In India, too, the one authority, the basis of all religious and philosophical systems, has yet been the Upanishads, the Vedanta. Whether you are a monist, or a qualified monist: an Advaitin or Dvaitin, or whatever you may call yourself, there stand behind you as your authority, your Shdstras, your Scriptures, the Upanishads. Whatever system in India does not obey the Upanishads cannot be called orthodox, and even the systems of the Jains and the Buddhists have been rejected from the soil of India only because they did not bear allegiance to the Upanishads. Thus, the Vedanta, whether we know it or not, has penetrated all the sects in India, and what we call Hinduism, this mighty banyan with its immense, almost infinite ramifications, has been throughout inter-penetrated by the influence of the Vedanta. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we think the Vedanta, we live in the Vedanta, we breathe the Vedanta, and we die in the Vedanta, and every Hindu does that. To preach Vedanta in the land of India, and before an Indian audience, seems there- fore to be an anomaly. But it is the one thing that has got to be preached, and it is the necessity of the age that it shall be preached. As I have just told you, all the Indian sects must bear allegiance to the Upanishads, but among these sects, there are many VEDANTA IN ALL ITS PHASES 285 apparent contradictions. Many times the great sages of yore could not themselves understand the underly- ing harmony of the Upanishads. Many times even sages quarreled, and so much so that at times it became a proverb: "They are not sages who do not differ." But the time requires that a better inter- pretation should be given to this underlying harmony of the Upanishadic texts, whether they are dualistic, non-dualistic, or quasi-dualistic. It has to be shown before the world at large, and this work is necessary as much in India as outside of India, and I, through the grace of God, had the great good fortune to sit at the feet of one whose whole life was such an inter- pretation— whose life, a thousandfold more than whose teaching, was a living commentary on the texts of the Upanishads, was in fact, the spirit of the Upanishads living in a human form. Perhaps, I have got a little of that harmony, I do not know whether I shall be able to express it or not, but this is my attempt, my mission in life, to show that the Vedantic schools are not contradictory, that they all necessitate each other, and one, as it were, is the stepping-stone to the other, until the goal, the Advaita, is reached (the Tat Tvam asi). There was a time in India when the Karma Kanda had its sway. There have been many grand ideals, no doubt, in that por- tion of the Vedas. Some of our present daily worship is still according to the precepts of the Karma Kanda. But with all that, the Karma Kanda of the Vedas has almost disappeared from India. Very little of our life at the present day is bound or regulated by the orders of the Karma Kanda of the Vedas. In our ordinary 286 J NANA YOGA lives, we are mostly Paurdnics or Tantrics, and even where some Vedic texts are used by the Brahmins of India, the adjustment of the texts is not according to the Vedas mostly, but according to the Tdntras or the Purdnas. As such, to call ourselves Vaidics in the sense of following the Karma Kdnda of the Vedas, I do not think, would be proper. But the other fact stands that we are all of us Vedantins. The people who call themselves Hindus, had better be called Vedantins, and as I have shown you just now, under that one name Vaiddntika come all our various sects, either dualist or non-dualist.
The sects that are at the present time in India, may in general be divided into the two great classes of dualists and monists. The little differences, which some of these sects insist upon, and upon the authori- ty of which they want to take new names, as pure Advaitins or qualified Advaitins, and so forth, do not matter much. As a classification, either they are dualists or monists, and of the sects existing at the present time, some are very new, and others seem to be reproductions of very ancient sects. The one class I would represent by the life and philosophy of Ramanuja, and the other by Sankaracharya. Ramanuja is the leading dualistic philosopher of later India, whom all the other dualistic sects have fol- lowed directly or indirectly, both in the substance of their teaching, as well as in the organization of their sects, even down to some of the most minute points. You will be astonished if you compare Ramanuja and his works with the other dualistic Vaishnava sects in India, to find how much they resemble each other in VEDANTA IN ALL ITS PHASES 287 organization, teaching and method. There has been the great southern preacher, Madhva Muni, and fol- lowing him our great Chaitanya of Bengal taking up the philosophy of the Madhvas, and preaching it in Bengal. There have been some other sects in South- ern India also, as the qualified dualistic Shivites. The Shivites in most parts of India are Advaitins, except in some portions of Southern India and in Ceylon. But they also only substitute Shiva for Vishnu, and are Ramanujists in every sense of the term except in the doctrine of the soul. The followers of Ramanuja hold that the soul is anu, like a particle, very small, and the followers of Sankaracharya hold that it is vibhu, omnipresent. There have been several non- dualistic sects. It seems that there have been sects in ancient times which Sankara's movement entirely swallowed up and assimilated. In modern times the Advaitins have all ranged themselves under San- karacharya; and he and his disciples have been the great preachers of Advaita, both in Southern and in Northern India. The influence of Sankaracharya did not penetrate much into our country of Bengal, or into Cashmere and the Punjab; but in Southern India the Smdrtas are all followers of Sankaracharya, and with Benares as the centre, his influence is simply immense even in many parts of Northern India.
Now, both Sankara and Ramanuja laid aside all claim to originality. Ramanuja expressly tells us that he is only following the great commentary of Bodhayana. He takes it up and makes of it an abstract, and that is what we have to-day. Ramanuja is very plain on the point, and he tells us that he is 288 J NANA YOGA taking the ideas, and sometimes even passages out of this ancient commentator and condensing them into the present Ramanuja Bhashya. It seems that San- karacharya was also doing the same. There are a few places in his Bhashya, which mention older com- mentaries; and when we know that his Guru and his Guru's Guru had been Vedantins of the same school as himself, sometimes even more thoroughgoing, bolder even than Sankara himself on certain points, it seems pretty plain that he also was not preaching anything very original, and that even in his Bhashya he himself had been doing the same work that Rama- nuja did with Bodhayana, but from what Bhashya cannot be discovered at the present time. All these Darsanas (schools of philosophy) that you have seen, or ever heard of, are based upon Upanishadic authori- ty. Whenever they quote a Sruti.(scriptural lext), they mean the Upanishads. They are always quoting the Upanishads. Following the Upanishads there came other philosophies in India, but every one of them failed in getting that hold upon India which the philosophy of Vyasa obtained. The philosophy of Vyasa is a development out of an older one, the Sankhya; and every philosophy and every system in India — and possibly throughout the world — owes much to Kapila, the great founder of the Sankhya system, perhaps the greatest name in the history of India in psychological and philosophical lines. The influence of Kapila is everywhere throughout the world. Wherever there is a recognized system of thought, there you can trace his influence; it may be thousands of years back, but yet he stands there, the VEDANTA IN ALL ITS PHASES 289 shining, glorious, wonderful Kapila. His psychology and a good deal of his philosophy have been accepted by all the different sects of India with but very slight differences. In our own country, our Naiyayika phil- osophers could not make much impression on the philosophical world of India. They were too busy with little species and genera and that most cumber- some terminology, which is a life's work to study. They were very busy also with logic, and left philoso- phy to the Vedantins, but every one of the Indian philosophic sects in modern times has adopted the logical terminology of the Naiyayikas of Bengal. The philosophy of Vyasa as embodied in the Vyasa Sutras is firm-seated, and has attained the permanence of that which it intended to present to men, the orthodox and Vedantic side of philosophy. Reason was entirely subordinated to the Srutis and as Sankaracharya declares, Vyasa did not care to reason at all. His idea in writing the Sutras was just to bring together with one thread and make a garland of the flowers of Vedantic texts. His Sutras are admitted so far as they are subordinate to the authority of the Upani- shads and no further. And as I have said, all the sects of India now hold these Vyasa Sutras to be the great authority, and every new sect in India starts with a fresh commentary on the Vyasa Sutras accord- ing to its light. The difference between some of these commentators is often very great, giving rise to not a little text-torturing. The Vyasa Sutras how- ever have got the place of authority in India to-day, and no one can expect to found a new sect until he can write a fresh commentary on them.
290 J NANA YOGA Next in authority is the celebrated Bhagavad Gita. The great glory of Sankaracharya is his preaching of the Gita. It is one of the greatest works that this great man did among the many noble works of his noble life — the preaching of the Gita and the writing of a most beautiful commentary on it. And he has been followed by every founder of an orthodox sect in India, and they have each written a commentary on this Gita.