RELIGION OF CHRIST HAD NO DOGMA, NO CREED, NO SYSTEM AND NO THEOLOGY

WHY SANATHANA DHARMA CAN ACCEPT CHRIST

A follower of Sanathana Dharma distinguishes the religion of the churches from the religion of Jesus Christ.

Speaking from the Hindu standpoint, the religion that the churches uphold and preach today, that has been built around the personality of Jesus the Christ, and which is popularly known as Christianity, should be called ‘Churchianity’, in contradistinction to that pure religion of the heart that was taught by Jesus the Christ and practised by his disciples.

The religion of Christ or true Christianity had no dogma, no creed, no system, and no theology. It was a religion of the heart, a religion without any ceremonial, without ritual, without priest-craft. It was not based upon any book, but upon the feelings of the heart, upon direct communion of the individual soul with the heavenly Father.

On the contrary, the religion of the church is based upon a book, believes in dogmas, professes a creed, has an organized system for preaching it, is backed up by theologies, performs rituals, practises ceremonials, and obeys the commands of a host of priests.

The popular history of churchianity begins from 325 years after Christ, the 20th year of the reign of Constantine the Great, when the famous Council was convened at the City of Nocea.

Those who have read the life of this august Roman Emperor will remember how remarkable was the character of this so called pious supporter of the church dogmas. He put to death his own son and his wife Fausta on groundless suspicion, cut off his brother-in-law Licinius and the unoffending son of Licinius and massacred everyone of his rivals. Nevertheless the Greek Church has canonized him, and adores the memory of St. Constantine.

It was Constantine the Great who issued a decree in 321 A.D., for the general observance of Sunday, instead of the Jewish Sabbath. He hated the Jews and everything connected with the Jews, and said: "This day shall be regarded as a special occasion of prayer, because it is the Sun’s day, the day of our Lord".

Since that time, the church has accepted that decree, ignoring the fact that this was the day for the worship of the sun among the pagans.

It was Constantine the great who decided what should be the creed of the church and commanded the assembled bishops to receive the decrees of the Council of Nicea as the dictates of the Holy Spirit.

Since that time the church has given authenticity to that creed, which is repeated almost every Sunday in all the orthodox churches in Christendom.

The horrifying accounts of fraud, political wire pulling, theological jugglery, ecclesiastical scandal-mongering, passions breaking forth into curses and anathemas, bloody massacres and inhuman assassinations in the ecumenical councils, show that these were the principal instruments in the building up of the creed of Churchianity.

Readers of ecclesiastical history will remember that in one of the disputes following the great Council of Nicea, maidens were insulted and scourged, the holy temple was profaned, books were thrown into flames, and the church and baptistery were burned and monks were trodden under foot. Such were the deeds of the pious bishops and founders of Churchianity.

In the Council of Ephesus, which was held in 431 A.D., monks and bishops screamed: "Whoso speaks of two natures is a Nestorius, and let him be cut asunder". A bishop was kicked to death by another bishop in course of their arguments, and 137 corpses were left in a church to attest the convincing reasons by which the most ruffian side proved its orthodoxy.

Such were the assemblies of saints who formed the pillars of the structure of Churchianity. We can easily imagine the nature of the guiding spirit of those councils, which established the creed of the church.

From the beginning of the history of churches, down to the present day, freedom of thought and freedom of speech, that are the most essential characteristics of true religion, have been suppressed; and fanaticism, bigotry, curses, anathema, religious persecution, tortures of inquisition and diabolical crimes have been committed in the name of religion. Hatred, cruelty and fighting have reigned in the place of love, mercy, kindness, peace and goodwill.

The creed of the church would have vanished from the world if swords were not drawn and innocent blood was not shed in the name of religion.

The deeds of Churchianity are written indelibly upon the pages of the religious history of the world. Shall we wonder, then, if the humane, kind, gentle, peace-loving hearts of the Hindus, that are ever ready to send forth blessings, good-will, benediction and a current of love toward humanity, nay, toward all living creatures, reject Churchianity? Shall we wonder that the Hindus, who recognize Divinity in the souls of all, should refuse to accept a system that was founded upon the barren soil of dogmas, fertilized with the vital forces squeezed out of the hearts of innocent humanity; and nourished by the blood of martyrs?

By a strange irony of fate, the Hindu sees today that the followers of Churchianity, ignoring its past history, have come over to India to tell the so-called ‘heathen’ how Churchianity has civilized the world, how it has brought peace on earth, and how it has saved the souls of sinners.

But a Hindu is a lover of Truth and Freedom. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are his guiding stars. From ancient times, search after Truth and unswerving love for Truth have forced the minds of the Hindus to make rational investigation into matters that have been presented to them. It is very difficult to persuade a Hindu to blindly believe in anything. Before he accepts a dogma as truth he must trace its source and weigh all the arguments, pro and con, and then compare it with the highest ideals that are known in his own country.

Stimulated by this natural tendency and by his love of Truth, when a Hindu studies the facts upon which Churchianity is founded, he first reads the Bible as critically as possible, applies logic and reason at every step, and then he looks into all the available writings of those Western scholars and critics who have made impartial examination of the Christian scriptures from the standpoint of historical researches.

Many persons read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason before they opened a page of the Bible.

A Hindu knows that there has been a great dispute in the present century among Western scholars regarding the historical personality of Jesus of Nazareth, as it is described in the Synoptic Gospels. Therefore he doubts the historical side of the personality of Jesus of the Gospels. He also knows that the researches of the higher critics of the Bible have shown that the description of the canonical Gospels regarding the events connected with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, do not harmonize with the facts of history, which can be gathered from other sources.

A missionary preaches in India that the New Testament is the revealed scripture, or word of God.

The educated Hindus, however, know that Jesus did not leave any writings of his own, nor did any of his direct disciples write any of the Gospels, which were accepted by the church as the infallible and revealed word of God. They are also familiar with the fact that there are absolutely no contemporary records or accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus, either in the Bible itself or outside of it; and that the earliest of the writings, in the order of their composition, were the genuine epistles of Paul.

Out of the fourteen epistles attributed to Paul, four only are held to be authentic; they are these: Epistle to the Romans, First and Second Epistles to the Corinthians, and the Epistle to the Galatians.

Again, Paul never saw Jesus the Christ except once in a vision, and only once did he quote the language of Jesus – a single phrase in connection with a reference to the commemoration of the last supper: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; this do, as often as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." It is admitted by many of the orthodox ministers of churches that Paul introduced many of the doctrines and dogmas that were afterwards accepted by Churchianity.

It is a well-known fact that Paul did not preach the religion of Christ; if he did, he could not have boasted that he withstood Peter at Antioch to his very face.

To the followers of Churchianity who preach to the Hindus that the New Testament is the revealed word of God, the Hindu asks: "If God intended to reveal His word, why did He inspire so many different men to write the history of one transaction, and why is it that almost all of these writings, except four, were afterwards rejected by human beings as fraudulent and incorrect?"

We do not hear about the four canonical Gospels until the time of Irenius, Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, who lived in 178-200 A.D. He was the real founder of the Church Canon. It was Irenius who first mentioned four Gospels. His arguments for accepting four Gospels were very remarkable, though not convincing. He says: "It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than four.

For, since there are four quarters of the earth, four elements, four seasons and four cardinal winds, the church ought to have four pillars; for this reason there should be four Gospels".

Moreover, there are so many inconsistencies, discrepancies and errors in the Gospels, that no critical student among the Hindus could say that they are infallible and revealed word of God. As the church upholds this theory, and preaches the infallibility of this book, the Hindus reject it as a dogma of the church.

When one reads the Apostles’ Creed or the ‘Twelve Articles of Faith’ which were maintained and amplified in the Nicene creed, which formed the main body of the Reformation Theology, and which eventually developed into the Thirty-nine Articles of the Episcopal creed, they find there a set of dogmas which are neither supported by science nor by philosophy, nor do they appeal to reason. They must be accepted whether they appeal to reason or not.

But a Hindu’s mind is not ready to accept any of these articles of faith as true unless it is based upon sound reasoning and supported by science or philosophy. A Hindu says that while God has given us reason, understanding and intellect, and freedom to use them, we should be acting against His wish if we accepted anything blindly upon the authority of anybody’s statement. We must question, we must test every claim in the crucible of logic upon the fire of right reasoning.

The first article of the creed is a great stumbling block to a Hindu, because it is backed by the story of creation. The genesis account of creation of the world in six days out of nothing by an extra-cosmic being seems absurd and childish to a Hindu, because he has been brought up with a belief in the doctrine of evolution; that the world is the result of a gradual evolution. The Hindu mind cannot believe that this world was created 6000 years ago, and that this earth came into existence before the sun was created.

The Hindu says that the writer of such a story, whether he was divine or human, should have offered a more reasonable explanation, that he cannot believe in a creation out of nothing. In the voluminous writings of the Hindus sages and philosophers, ancient and modern, you will search in vain for any theory of creation out of nothing or creation by any extra-cosmic being. As Churchianity believes in such a creation, and preaches it, the Hindu rejects it as an absurd dogma.

The second article of the creed is based upon a belief in Jesus the Christ as the only begotten Son of God. This article offers nothing new to the Hindu mind except in its exclusiveness. The doctrine of Incarnation of God or Logos (the Word), is an Indo-Aryan theory, and the Hindus believe that there have been and will yet be many such incarnations. The theory of Logos, or Word, or Son of God, travelled from India to Greece, and found expression in the writings of the early Greek philosophers, Heraclitus, Plato, Neo-Platonists, in the writings of Philo and his followers – the writer of the fourth Gospel – until it was accepted by the church as its fundamental doctrine.

Although many of the Hindus believe in the doctrine of the incarnation of God in a human form, still they strongly object to the dogmatic method by which the churches preach it among the heathens. Their first objection is that if God could incarnate in one place for a certain purpose, why should He not incarnate whenever and wherever such an incarnation was needed?

The church dogmas make the love of God for humanity limited by time, place and nationality. The love of God for humanity must be unlimited by such narrow considerations. God loves all humanity; His love shines equally upon all living creatures like the light of the sun.

The Hindu conception of the incarnation of God is beautifully expressed in the Bhagavad Gita. In that Lord Krishna says: "Wherever irreligion prevails and true religion declines, I manifest Myself in a human form to establish righteousness and to destroy evil".

Among the incarnations of God recognized by the Hindus are Krishna, Buddha, Rama, etc. When a Hindu reads the life and teachings of Jesus the Christ, as given in the Synoptic Gospels, and compared them with the life and teachings of Krishna and Buddha, he is amazed to find the singular coincidences in every minute detail, from the immaculate conception and the rising of the stars, to the resurrection and ascension to Heaven.

[Note: The period when Krishna lived can be established by geological expertise that can help determine when the city of Dwarka sank beneath the waves of the ocean. Buddha was born in 547 B.C.].

Many eminent European scholars who have impartially studied Oriental religions have shown by their able articles and non-partisan criticism that the synoptic Gospels, being the productions of a later date, might well have drawn many of their important truths from the accounts of the lives and teachings of Krishna and Buddha in India.

When the Christian missionaries first came to India, they were so astonished to find these singular coincidences in the lives and teachings of Krishna, Buddha and Christ that they satisfied their questioning minds by assuming as Sir William Jones said; "That the devil foreseeing the advent of Christ, originated a system of religion in advance of His, and just like it". The readers of the history of symbolism know that the cross as a religious symbol had existed in India ages before Christ was born, and many centuries before it was accepted by the Christian church and monopolized by it as its own property. The Hindu mind does not believe in any monopoly in religion, therefore it rejects the claim of Churchianity.

Churchianity depicts in a dramatic way the temptation and fall of Adam from Paradise, seeking in this ‘fall’ to find the origin of evil and to explain the way that sin came into the world. But this account finds no acceptance from the Hindu. He looks upon it as the mythology of a primitive people, the explanation of undeveloped minds, who believes that one man who lived about 4000 years before Christ was the parent of the whole human race, and that because he sinned, all his descendants are born sinners.

The Hindus know, and have known for countless ages, that such an account of creation is irrational and unscientific.

[Note: Modern researchers have proved the correctness of their views, with evidences of a vast nation with highly developed civilization, existing tens of thousands of years before Christ. Some artefacts recovered from the recently discovered sunken city of Dwarka, are carbon dated to around ten thousand years. Nasa satellite images show the existence of man-made bridge between India and Sri Lanka predating by far all other civilizations.

How, then, is it possible for a Hindu to accept such a theory of the origin of sin? Millions of people lived and died before Adam was ‘created’. How could his conduct affect them? The Hindu believes that all men are children of God, and that they inherit divinity as a birthright.

They say that sin means selfishness and trace its cause, not to any mythological devil, nor to a super-natural power of evil, but to man’s ignorance of his divine nature, and of the fact that God dwells in every individual soul. As long as we do not know our true nature, we identify ourselves with the limitations of mind and body and become selfish; but the moment we can realize that God dwells in us and come to understand our true nature, we become unselfish and free from all sin.

The fire of true knowledge of the divine nature burns all sin into ashes and makes the soul realize that it is free. Such being the conception of sin among the Hindus, they do not care for any special scheme for the salvation of souls.

They do not believe in the hell-fire doctrine, nor in any hell as a place for eternal punishment, therefore they do not need any help of a mediator. Those who believe in eternal punishment may feel the need of a Saviour from it.

The church dogma teaches the doctrine of vicarious atonement; it horrifies the tender feelings and loving nature of the Hindus. They do not interpret this act as an act of mercy or of love on the part of the heavenly Father, but they say it was an act of cruelty and injustice on His part to allow such a sacrifice of His innocent child.

The next dogma of Churchianity is the resurrection of the body. Most of the churches believe that Jesus the Christ was the "first fruits of the dead," the only one that ever arose after death. The Hindus do not believe in physical resurrection, for the same reasons that the scientists and the best thinkers of the West do not accept this dogma.

The Hindu belief is that the soul is immortal and indestructible; and by death they mean only a change of body. The whole of Hindu philosophy and religion is based upon the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; but many of the missionaries affirm that the Hindus do not believe in immortality.

On the contrary this doctrine is so well known and so largely accepted by the Hindus that it is unnecessary for anyone to go to India to prove it by the traditional resurrection of a single person. The Hindus have better arguments than this. They say that there are two things necessary for the proof of immortality, the pre-existence of the soul, and its existence after death. If anything is created, or if anything has a beginning, it must have an end. This is the law of nature.

If the souls of men were created by God out of nothing, they cannot be immortal, they must die. It is illogical to assert that the soul which is created should exist forever. If you wish to preserve immortality, first prove the pre-existence of the soul. The churches do not believe in the pre-existence of the soul, but preach its everlasting life after death, which the Hindus say is absurd on the face of it, and on the contrary to all we know of nature’s laws.

In the writings of the Hindus you will find that the soul of man is described as free from birth and death. In the Katha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita, occurs that beautiful passage made so familiar in America by Emerson: "If the slayer thinks that he has slain, or if the slain thinks that he is slain, they know not well that the soul can neither slay nor be slain".

As Churchianity preaches that the soul of man had a beginning, but will have no end, the Hindus cannot accept it.

The next dogma of the church is the doctrine of pre-destination and grace, which makes God partial and unjust; while the Hindu believes in the more rational and scientific doctrine of the reincarnation of souls. This theory explains most satisfactorily the problems of life and death, without imputing partiality and injustice to God.

Churchianity teaches that God punishes the wicked and rewards the virtuous; while the philosophy of the Hindus teaches the law of karma, that is, the law of cause and effect, and says that God neither punishes nor rewards, but that we punish and reward ourselves by our deeds.

Punishment and reward are the reactions of our own actions. Another reason why Hindus cannot accept Churchianity is that its (Churchianity’s) highest ideal is going to heaven and enjoying the pleasures of life through eternity.

The highest ideal of religion, according to the Hindus, however, is not enjoying the eternal pleasures, but the attainment of God-consciousness and freedom in this life from the bondages of ignorance and selfishness. Salvation must begin here. We must be perfect here, and the hereafter will take care of itself.

Although the Hindus do not agree to accept the doctrines and dogmas of Churchianity, still they do not hesitate to believe in Jesus the Christ as the Son of God, as an incarnation of Divinity in a human form on earth. The Hindu conception of the incarnation of God is much more rational and deeper in meaning than that of the Christians. Those who have read the Bhagavad Gita will understand what the Hindus mean by the incarnation of Divinity on earth.

Whether Jesus the Christ had a historical personality or not, is not discussed by the Hindus. They understand by the word Christ that supreme state of God-consciousness where all dualities vanishes, where all idea of separateness ceases forever, and where the tremendous onrush of the divine essence of the universal Spirit, breaking down all the barriers and limitations of our human consciousness, causes us to realize our eternal oneness with the heavenly Father on the spiritual plane.

Whoever reaches that state becomes a Christ, whether he be Krishna or Buddha, or a Jesus of Nazareth. The particular name makes no difference to a Hindu. They are all great, all divine, all incarnations of God on earth.

The Christian may think that Jesus was the greatest of all incarnations. The Buddhist may think that Buddha was the greatest of all, and a follower of Krishna or Rama may say the same thing regarding his Master, but when we examine the lives of these divine men we find that each of them was as great as the other. One may have manifested one phase of divinity; another may have presented another phase.

When Jesus of Nazareth lived the life of renunciation and preached the ideal of spiritual oneness as the highest goal of all religions, he showed that he understood that state of Christhood. But ordinary people, forgetting the great mission of Jesus the Christ, fight for his historical personality. The masses quarrel and fight regarding the superiority of this or that incarnation, and the followers of each try to convert the others, but the wise man pities them all and tries to help them out of superstition, bigotry, race prejudice, fanaticism and religious persecution.

The religion of Christ was a religion of love, renunciation and self-control; it was a religion of God-consciousness. As these are the highest ideals among the Hindus, they accept Christ and His true religion in so far as it is one with their ideals; but when they see that Churchianity does not preach renunciation, and that its advocates do not practise love for all, nor show self-control, when they see that Christian governments encourage vice by opium trade, liquor trade, and introduce intoxicating things among innocent and temperate people for the sake of gain, they reject a religion which allows such things.

The duty of true religion is to broaden the human mind, to open the spiritual eyes, to lead humanity to the realization of oneness with the supreme Father in Heaven, and to repress all quarrels over dogmas and creeds. As long as we are not spiritual, we fight and quarrel, but when we realize that God dwells within us, that we are all children of God, irrespective of nationality, creed or denomination, when we rise above all dogmas, above beliefs, theories, and sectarianism, then, and then alone, we are the true followers of the Christ.

Then, and then alone, are we able to say with Jesus, "I and my Father are one". The Hindus leave aside the disputed personality that dwells in each individual soul and believes that each soul is a latent Christ. They believe that the voice of God tells this truth within each soul, but we do not listen to it, through our ignorance and selfishness. Krishna says: "Giving up all the formalities of religion, come unto Me, take refuge in Me, I shall make thee free from sins, sorrows and sufferings".

Jesus says: "Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest". Let us listen to that voice, for it is one and the same, and let us follow it. Let us realize the spirit of true Christianity that was exhibited in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us live as he lived, and be living Christs on earth.

The Hindu is not satisfied merely to accept Christ in theory, but he strives hard to live the life, which Jesus lived, to lead a life of renunciation, of self-control and of love to all. Thus he seeks to fulfil the mandates of that eternal Religion which is taught by Christ-Krishna, Christ-Buddha, and Christ-Jesus.

Did Christ teach a new religion?

The religion of Jesus the Christ was not like the orthodox Christianity of today; neither did it resemble the faith of the Jewish nation. His religion was a great departure from Judaism in principles and ideals as well as in the means of attaining them. It was much simpler in form and more sublime in nature.

The religion that Christ taught had neither dogma, creed, system, nor theology. It was a religion without priests, without ceremonials, without rituals, or even strict observances of the Jewish laws.

As in India, Buddha rebelled against the ceremonials, rituals, and priest-craft of the Brahmins and introduced a simpler form of worship and a religion of the heart, so among the Jews, nearly five hundred years after Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth rebelled against the priest-craft of Judaism.

Jesus saw the insufficiency of the Jewish ethics and ideals and the corruption and the hypocrisy of the priests. He wished to reform the religion of his country and establish a simpler and purer form of worship of the Supreme Being, which should rest entirely upon the feelings of the heart, not upon the letter of the law.
The God of Jesus was not the cruel and revengeful tribal deity of the house of Israel; He was the Universal Spirit.

He was not like the tyrannical master of modern orthodoxy, who kills, damns, or saves mankind according to his whim; He was a loving Father. Jesus’ worship consisted not in ceremonials, but in direct communion between his soul and the Father, without any priestly intermediary.

The idea of God as the ‘Father in Heaven’ did not, however, originate with Jesus the Christ, as modern Christians generally believe; it existed in the religious atmosphere of northern Palestine as a result of the Hellenic influence of the worship of Jupiter – Greek, Zeus-pitar; Sanskrit Dayus-pitar, which means Father in Heaven, and hence Father of the Universe.

The worship of Jupiter was introduced into Babylon and northern Palestine by Antiochus Epiphanes between 175 and 163 B.C. Although the orthodox Jews revolted against this innovation, yet there were many liberal minded Jews among the Pharisees who liked the idea, accepted it, and preached it.

One of the most prominent of the Jewish priests, who was considered by many as the true master and predecessor of Jesus and who was held in great esteem by the Pharisaic sect of the Jews, inculcated this belief in the merciful and fatherly character of God. His name was Rabbi Hillel.

The Talmud speaks of this Babylonian teacher in glowing terms, declaring that he was next to the Prophet Ezra. It was Hillel who first preached this Golden Rule among the Jews. He used to spend much time in meditation and study, and recommended such practices to his disciples. Hillel died when Jesus was about ten years old.

Thus we see the idea of Fatherhood of God existed in northern Palestine at the time of Jesus, and was preached in public by Rabbi Hillel. Moreover, at the same time Philo and other Neo-Platonist Jews in Alexandria were teaching the fatherly character of God and the only-Begotten Sonship of the Logos or Word.

Both the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of the Word were known to the Greeks and other Aryan nations, especially the Hindus of ancient India. Jesus of Nazareth took up this grand Aryan idea and emphasized it more strongly than any of his predecessors in Palestine.

At the time when Jesus appeared in Galilee, the religious atmosphere of the place was permeated with Persian doctrines, Hellenic ideas, Pythagorean thoughts, and the precepts of the Essenes. Therapeutae, Gymonosophists, and the Buddhists of India. Galilee was then aglow with the fire of religious enthusiasm, kindled by the ardour of social and political dissensions.

The Jews were already divided into three principal sects, the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. Each of these was trying to gain supremacy and power over the others. The Sadducees were the conservative and aristocratic class, while the Pharisees and the Essenes were essentially liberal.

It was a time of great disturbance and intrigues, insurrections, rebellions, and wars. Such a period naturally kindles the fire of patriotism in the heart of a nation and forces its members to become active in every possible way.

The misfortunes and calamities that befell the descendants of Israel made them remember the promises of Jahveh which were handed down to them through the writings of the prophets, and forced them to seek supernatural aid in the fulfilment of those promises.

The unconquerable pride of the sons of Israel- that they were the ‘chosen people’ of Jahveh; the only true God, who was their governor and director – stimulated their minds with the hope that, through the supernatural power of Jahveh, the kingdom of their great ancestors would be restored: that a member of David’s house would appear as the Messiah (the anointed), sit on the throne, and unite the twelve tribes of Israel under his sceptre, and govern them in peace and prosperity.

This was the first conception of a Messiah that ever arose in the minds of the Jews. It was the principal theme of the poets and Prophets who lived during the Babylonian Exile.

The glory of the house of Israel and the earthly prosperity of the sons of Jahveh, were the highest ideals of the Jews. They did not mean by ‘Messiah’ a spiritual saviour of the world.

The Christian idea of this term owes its origin to the Zoroastrian conception of the coming Messiah Soshiyanta, who, according to the promise of Ahura-Mazda, would appear on the day of judgement, destroy the evil influence of Ahriman, and renovate the world. This idea was accepted by the Pharisees while the orthodox Jews repudiated it.

Although the mind of Jesus, according to the Synoptic Gospels, was not free from the superstitious beliefs of the Jews and the national traditions of his time; although he accepted the Zoroastrian conception of a ‘coming Messiah’ and that the end of the world was imminent, as well as the Persian ideas (which did not exist in Judaism before the Babylonian Captivity) of the renovation of the world, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, the day of judgment, the punishment of the wicked, and the salvation of the righteous; although Jesus believed with the Pharisees in the Persian conception of heaven and hell and the devil, and saw many angels ascending and descending over his head – yet he realized that the Kingdom of God was a spiritual kingdom: that it was within himself.; he felt the presence of the Father within him, and asked his disciples to feel likewise. The Jews understood by the Kingdom of Jahveh the Kingdom of this world and the prosperity of the house of Israel.

But Jesus spiritualized that ideal and taught a reign of righteousness and justice; not a reign of strife between nations, but a kingdom of peace and love.

Jesus preached this idea among his people in the same way as Buddha declared that he came to establish a kingdom of peace and love and righteousness upon earth. Buddha did not use the expression ‘Kingdom of God’, but preferred ‘kingdom of justice, peace and love’. Jesus had to use the former expression, because it was dominant in the minds of the people about him.

These ideas regarding a kingdom of peace and love were scattered in northern Palestine for at least two centuries before the Christian era by the Buddhist missionaries. It is indeed a well-known historic fact that the gospel of peace, goodwill and love was preached in Syria and Palestine by Buddhist monks nearly two hundred years before Christ.

Their influence was felt most deeply by the Jewish sect called the Essene, or the Therapeutae, to which sect, as many scholars believe, Jesus himself belonged. It is interesting to note the similarities between the Essene and the followers of Buddha. The Buddhists were also called Theraputta, a Pali form of the Sanskrit Sthiraputra, meaning the son of Sthira, or Thera: one who is serene, enlightened, and undisturbed by the world. Thera was one of Buddha’s names. These people had the power to heal disease.

Readers of the history of India are aware that in 249 B.C. Ashoka the Great, the Buddhist emperor, made Buddhism the state religion of India and sent missionaries to all parts of the world, then known to him, to preach the gospel of Buddha. He sent missionaries from Siberia to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and from China to Egypt.

These missionaries preached the doctrines of Buddhism, not by bloodshed and sword, but by scattering blessings, goodwill and peace where they went. The edicts and stone inscriptions of Ashoka were written during his lifetime. One of these edicts mentions five Greek kings who were Ashoka’s contemporaries, - Antiochus of Syria, Ptolemaos of Egypt, Antigonus of Macedon, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander of Epiros.

The edict says that Ashoka made treatise with these kings and Buddhist missionaries to their kingdoms to preach the gospel of Buddha. "Both here and in foreign countries" says Ashoka, "everywhere the people follow the doctrine of the Beloved of the gods, wheresoever it reacheth." Mahaffy, the Christian historian says: "The Buddhist missionaries preached in Syria two centuries before the teaching of Christ, (which has so much in common with the teaching of Buddha), and this was heard in northern Palestine".

The labours of these Buddhist monks were not fruitless in these places. They continued to preach through parables the highest ideals of religion from generation to generation. Their communities, bound to a life of celibacy, which was not a Jewish custom, increased from age to age as outsiders joined their ranks.

Even the Alexandrian Neo-Platonist Philo, who was a contemporary of Christ, mentions in his writings once or twice the Indian Gymnosophists or the Buddhists, and says that the Essenes numbered about four thousand at that time.

The doctrines of the Essenes, their manner of living, and the vows of their communities show the results of the Buddhist missionary work during the two centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ. Pliny says: "The Essenes live on the western shore of the Dead Sea. They are a hermit clan – one marvellous beyond all others in the world, without any women, without the joys of domestic life, without money, and the associates of the palm-trees". If we read Josephus we find how highly the Essenes of those days were respected.

One of the peculiar practices of the Essenes was the ‘Bath of Purification’, which was also peculiarity of the Buddhist monks. The life led by John the Baptist was typical of that of a Buddhist monk. Exactly like a Buddhist, the Essene rose before sunrise and made his morning prayers with his face turned towards the east.

When the day broke, he went to work. Agriculture, cattle-breeding, bee-keeping and other peaceful trades were among his ordinary occupations. He remained at work until eleven o’clock; then he took a bath, put on white linen, and ate plain vegetable food.

The Essenes abstained from meat and wine.

They also wore leather aprons, as did some of the Buddhist monks. The Essene novice took solemn oath to honour God, to be just toward his fellow-men, to injure no one either of his own accord or by order of others, not to associate with the unrighteous, to assist the righteous, to be ever faithful to all, always to love truth, to keep his hands from theft and his soul from unholy gain. There were some who joined the order after having lived a married life.

Earnest Renan says: "The Essenes resembled the Gurus (spiritual masters) of Brahmanism". "In fact", he asks, "might there not in this be a remote influence of the Munis (holy saints of India)"? According to Renan: "Babylon had become for sometime a true focus of Buddhism. Boudasp (Bodhisattva, another name of Buddha) was reputed as a wise Chaldean and the founder of Sabaism, which means, as its etymology indicates, Baptism".

He also says: We may believe at all events that many of the eternal practices of John, of the Essenes, and of the Jewish spiritual teachers of the time were derived from influences then existing, but recently received from the far East" – meaning India. Thus we can understand that there was an indirect influence of the Buddhist monks upon the mind of Jesus through the Essenes, and especially through John the Baptist.

Although Jesus never pretended to have created the world, nor to govern it, yet his followers worshipped and loved him as the Messiah; and later on the writer of the Fourth Gospel identified him with the ‘Word’, or Logos of Philo, about the latter part of the third century of the Christian era.

According to the Synoptic Gospels, the idea of the advent of the end of the world and of the reign of justice and the kingdom of God grew so strong in the mind of Jesus that apparently it forced him to think that he – the Son and the bosom friend of his Father – must be the executor of God’s decrees and that through him such a Kingdom of Justice and Goodness should be established.

This thought gradually led him to believe that, as he was the Son of God, he should be the Universal Reformer, and was born to establish the Kingdom of God.

The fundamental principles of the religion of Jesus, however, were purity, self-denial, control of passions, renunciation, non-attachment to wealth and to earthly things, intense faith, forgiveness and love for enemies, and the realization of the unity of the soul with the ‘Father in Heaven’. During the one year of his public life as a spiritual teacher, Jesus taught his disciples these principles and showed them the way to practise them by his living example.

But all these grand ethical and spiritual doctrines, upon which the religion of Jesus was founded, were practised for nearly three centuries before Christ by the Buddhist preachers in Babylon and Syria, and they were taught in India for ages before that.

The same ideas were inculcated by the Vedic sages, by the Vedanta philosophers, and afterwards by the Avataras, or incarnations of God, like Rama, Krishna, Buddha (547 B.C.) Sankara, Chaitanya, Nanaka, and also by Ramakrishna of the nineteenth century. If we study the lives of these men, we find that, like Jesus, each one of them lived a pure, spotless and unselfish life of renunciation, always loving humanity and doing good to all. Those who have read the doctrines of Buddha know that the ethical teachings of Jesus seem like repetitions of what Buddha taught. Those who have read the Bhagavad Gita (the Song Celestial), will remember that the fundamental principles of Krishna’s teachings were purity of heart, self-denial, control of passions, renunciation, love towards enemies, forgiveness, and the realization of the unity of the soul with the Father. In short, the religion of Christ was taught before him by Buddha and Krishna in India.

Like Jesus the Christ, Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am the path. Follow Me and worship one God. I existed before the world was created. I am the Lord of all". And again: "Giving up the formalities of religion, come unto Me; follow Me; take refuge in Me. I shall free thee from sins and give eternal peace unto thee. Grieve not".

But although Jesus the Christ did not teach a new religion, still he came to fulfil and not to destroy. He gave a new life to the old truths, and by his wonderful personality impressed them upon the minds of his own people.

Christ and his Teachings

Jesus the Christ lived the same simple life, always trusting the Lord, and without thinking of the morrow, as was lived by Buddha, Krishna and other Vedantic seers and sages of ancient times, and his wonderful career had shown to the world that he possessed divine powers and he manifested those powers through his acts. From his childhood, he lived in God-consciousness and he realized that intimate relation that exists between the individual soul and the Heavenly Father.

He proved to the world by his glorious works that he was the embodiment of purity and righteousness and that he was the personification of divine wisdom and divine powers. We cannot deny this. By his unique life of renunciation, self-denial and sacrifice, he has conquered the hearts of all the spiritually minded people among all nations and has taught them how to live the life of blessedness, how to work for others, how to live and to die for the good of humanity; he has lived a life that stands as an example before all the seekers after spirituality.

The disinterested love for humanity that was shown by Jesus the Christ, was unique, and following his example we must try to love all human beings; nay, all living creatures, as Buddha said.

We must show that in our lives, we must follow the path of Jesus the Christ, in that universal love.

It is for this reason that Vedanta accepts the ideal of Christ and presents it before the world, before all the seekers after spirituality and asks them to follow the path of Jesus the Christ, to be like Christ, to live the life of Jesus the Christ, and to obey his teachings, worshipping him as the Saviour of mankind and the Redeemer of the world.

In whatsoever heart the Christ ideal is accepted, there is sown the seed of charity, self-denial, renunciation, control of passions, universal love and faith in God. These are the cardinal virtues of the religion of Jesus the Christ, and there in fullness of time the tree will surely grow, bearing the fruit of the realization of that oneness with the Heavenly Father which was expressed by Jesus the Christ in his famous saying: "I and my Father are one".

What He said, we must realize, each one of us. By following the example of Jesus the Christ, each one of us will be able to say in the same way, "I and My Father are one". If we cannot do this, we are not followers of Jesus the Christ.

The moment that we shall be able to do it, to realize that truth which was explained by Jesus the Christ, then we shall be able to call ourselves the true disciples of our Master, and not until then.

When the cave of the human soul will be illumined by the Divine light and glory of the newly born Spiritual Christ, when our hearts will be filled with that light, then the spiritual self of the true devotee will enjoy the blessings of spiritual Christmas and understand the true meaning of Trinity by realizing the oneness of his individual soul with the Heavenly Father through the state of super-consciousness.

Jesus the Christ used to commune with the Lord by entering into the state of super-consciousness, by rising above this material plane, by forgetting the earthly existence. When we shall be able to do the same, then the birth of Spiritual Christ has taken place in our souls, then the spiritual Christmas will spread its glory within us and all around us. That is the time for rejoicing.

The external Christmas is only a form, but let us understand the spirit of Christmas and let us understand the meaning; that spirit and that meaning we can only grasp through the sublime teachings of Vedanta which harmonize with the teachings of Jesus the Christ, and through Vedanta we shall be able to realize the spiritual, ideal Christ within ourselves and become one with the Heavenly Father.

If we read in the Bible the life and teachings of Jesus the Christ, we believe that he was the incarnation of Divinity. We cannot help believing in the ideal life and exemplary character as depicted in the Synoptic Gospels as of one who was not only the Son of God, but the divine incarnation, manifestation of that Supreme Deity who is the Lord of the universe and God of all nations.

We cannot deny this fact. The students of Vedanta regard him, with his sublime character and wonderful powers, as an incarnation of the Logos, the eternal Word of God, as in the case of all other Saviours of the world. The Eternal Word that dwelt in heaven with the Lord is the Logos, and that Logos appeared in the form of Jesus the Christ, in the form of Krishna, of Zoroaster, Buddha and all other saviours of the world. The students of Vedanta regard him as the Incarnation of divinity, as the Son of God, as the Saviour of the world.

Christian Science and Vedanta

Most startling are the similarities that exist between the fundamental principles of modern Christian Science and those of the ancient system of philosophy known in India as Vedanta.

In the earliest edition of ‘Science and Health’ Mrs. Eddy had the courage to quote certain passages from one of the most authentic books of the Vedanta philosophy, thus herself acknowledging the harmony that exists between the basic principles of the Vedanta philosophy and Christian Science. Unfortunately, for some reason, since the publication of the 34th edition, these passages have been omitted.

In the 24th edition of ‘Science and Health’, published in 1886, we find the 8th chapter devoted to Imposition and Demonstration. This chapter has been entirely suppressed in later editions. It begins with four quotations. The second is from Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, entitled ‘Song Celestial’. Those who have read the Bhagavad Gita know that it contains the essence of the Vedas, as well as all truths expounded by the Vedanta philosophy. The passage runs thus:

"Never the Spirit was born; the Spirit will cease to be never;Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams;Birthless and Deathless and Changeless remaineth the Spirit forever;Death has not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.

Again, in the same chapter of the 24th edition Mrs. Eddy says: ‘The ancient hindoo philosophers understand something of this principle when they said in the Songs Celestial, according to an old prose translation: ‘The wise neither grieve for the dead nor for the living. I Myself never was not, nor thou, nor all the princes of the earth; nor shall we ever hereafter cease and old age, so in some future frame will it find the like. One who is confirmed in the belief is not disturbed by anything that may come to pass. The sensibilities of the faculties giveth heat and cold, pleasure and pain; which come and go and are transient and inconstant. Bear them with patience, for the wise man whom these disturb not, and to whom pain and pleasure are the same, is formed for immortality’.

This is a quotation from one of the old translations of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins, published in London in 1785 and in New York in 1867. In recent editions of Science and Health, this has been omitted, perhaps to show that the founder of Christian Science did not draw the water of truth from any other fountain than the Christian Bible.

These four propositions form the four main pillars upon which rests the structure of Christian Science. A critical student of philosophy, however, can reduce these four to two. First accept God, who is spirit, mind, life, being, omnipotent, good and all in all. Second, deny matter and that which exists besides God.

According to Christian Science, God, spirit, life, mind, being, omnipotence, infinite good, all these terms are synonymous and are applicable to the one real substance of the universe; and in the same manner, matter, sin, disease, ignorance, error, and illusion are also synonymous terms, which can be applied to that which exists as distinct and separate from the God of Christian science, It has no existence, no reality. Therefore the whole phenomenal world with its innumerable appearances does not exist in reality.

Yoga Swami: Sage of Lanka

Yoga Swami: Sage of Lanka

SANATHANA DHARMA - BY SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

PAPER PRESENTED AT THE WORLD'S PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS, Chicago 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 (Zoroastrianism), 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 sea shore 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?

There never was a time when there was no creation.

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 into different times.

Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and 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 and 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.

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.

I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die.

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 substance?

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.

The natural habits of a new-born soul; since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives.

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, for 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, how 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; but 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 the experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would be 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 believes that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce, him the fire cannot burn, him the water cannot melt (or make wet)- him the air cannot dry. The Hindu believes 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. Nor is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow or 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; and his answer is: "I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter." But the fact is a fact for all that.

It is a fact in everybody’s consciousness that one thinks of oneself as the body. The Hindu does not attempt to explain why one thinks one is the body. The answer that it is the will of God is no explanation. This is nothing more than what the Hindu says: "I do not know."

The human soul is eternal and immortal, 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 there is another question; Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on a 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 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 that 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, who 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 disciple 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. King 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 in love."

Purity is the condition of His mercy.

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 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 Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism.

The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him, which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God." And that is the only condition of perfection.

The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising- not in believing, but in being and becoming.

Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven, is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus.

And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God.

So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India: but then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute.

If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal consciousness.

Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison-individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion.

Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.

Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion become perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus it is, 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.

There is no polytheism in India

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.

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 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.

The whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation.

As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the images 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 anyone’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, means 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.

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. 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 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.

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!

Was there a specific founder of the religion (Hinduism?)

Hinduism cannot be described as an organized religion. It is not founded by any individual. Hinduism is God centred and therefore one can call Hinduism as founded by God, because the answer to the question ‘Who is behind the eternal principles and who makes them work?’ will have to be ‘Cosmic power, Divine power, God’

There are these eternal principles, which stand upon their own foundations without depending on any reasoning, even much less on the authority of sages however great, of Incarnations however brilliant they may have been. We may remark that as this is the unique position in India, our claim is that the Vedanta only can be the universal religion, that it is already the existing universal religion in the world, because it teaches principles and not persons.

If you want to be religious, enter not the gate of any organised religion.

They do a hundred times more evil than good, because they stop the growth of each one's individual development....

Religion is only between you and your God, and no third person must come between you.

Think what these organised religions have done! What Napoleon was more terrible than those religious persecutions? If you and I organise, we begin to hate every person . It is better not to love, if loving only means hating others. That is no love. That is hell!

If loving your own people means hating everybody else, it is the quintessence of selfishness and brutality, and the effect is that it will make you brutes.

Truth is of two kinds: (1) that which is cognisable by the five ordinary senses of man, and by reasonings based thereon; (2) that which is cognisable by the subtle, super-sensuous power of Yoga.

Knowledge acquired by the first means is called science; and knowledge acquired by the second is called the Vedas.

The whole body of super sensuous truths, having no beginning or end, and called by the name of Vedas, is ever existent. The Creator Himself is creating, preserving and destroying the universe with the help of these truths.

The person in whom this super-sensuous power is manifested is called a Rishi, and the super-sensuous truths, which he realises by this power, are called the Vedas.

This Rishihood, this power of super-sensuous perception of the Vedas, is real religion. And so long as this does not develop in the life of an initiate, so long is religion a mere empty word to him, and it is to be understood that he has not taken yet the first step in religion.

The authority of the Vedas extends to all ages, climes and persons; that is to say, their application is not confined to any particular place, time and persons.The Vedas are the only exponent of the universal religion.

How did Hinduism start and when did it begin?

Hinduism is God centred.

Other religions are prophet centred.

Hinduism is based upon Eternal Principles. Eternal principles apply to all human beings everywhere. The laws of physics exist and work all the time. The healing principle will get to work immediately the moment a little cut is sustained on a finger. No one can tell when this healing principle began or when it will end. It is there existing eternally, all pervading (available everywhere), omniscient (aware all the time and therefore healing principle gets to work when injury is sustained). (These simplified examples serve to understand God’s power: omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent).

Hinduism is based upon Eternal Principles. If a great scientist like Einstein, discovered or realized laws of physics, Hinduism would call him a great Rishi (Maharshi or seer of truth.) Such seers of truth are not confined to any one age or country.

Self realized persons like Jesus Christ would be called Rishis (seers) and their teachings would be readily acceptable to those who properly understand the principles of ‘Hinduism’.

From the ancient times, many great Rishis achieved self-realisation through such practices as meditation and austerities and they realised knowledge concerning Eternal Principles. Their knowledge, taught to disciples, and eventually made available in written form, is known as the Vedas (Ved = knowledge), the scriptures upon which Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) is based. Sanatan means eternal and Dharma means religion.

The word 'Hinduism ‘ does not appear anywhere in Hindu scriptures, The proper name for Hinduism is ‘Sanatan Dharma’ Sanatan = eternal Dharma = religion.

Hinduism is God centred whereas other religions are prophet centred.

For this reason the whole of mankind has to abide by (or is affected by) the eternal principles. The question of acceptance or rejection of Hinduism by any individual simply does not arise, or is irrelevant.

It is illogical to talk of conversion to Hinduism. It is like saying that the laws of physics (e.g.gravity) will apply to you only if you belong to an organization or organized religion.

[The ceremonies and rituals connected with Hinduism (and other religions) are designed to cultivate increased spirituality. At advanced level of spirituality, rituals and ceremonies are dispensed with]