Urgent message of a swami

JEROME TEELUCKSINGH

SOME PEOPLE will remember the towering statue of Swami Vivekananda that once stood in the Divali Nagar in central Trinidad during the 1990s.

However, few people know the impact he had on India and the rest of the world.

Modern India found its saviour in Vivekananda, who was born in 1863 and died in 1902 at the relatively young age of 39.

This dynamic prophet’s influence was welcome and opportune, peaking during an era of sociopolitical evolution and turmoil in the Asian sub-continent.

Vivekananda was an expositor of Hinduism and the teachings of the Vedanta.

His teachings, philosophy and thinking reflected a soul willing to rescue India from the moral, spiritual and social doldrums which had completely enveloped it during previous centuries.

Indeed, the swami’s austere life of piety, his penetrating analysis of India’s sociopolitical and religious difficulties placed him among the pioneers who led his country along the road of self-determination.

India welcomed the embodiment of this peaceful soul. It was an era, described by B Bhattacharya in Vivekananda and His Times, as a bitter time, a killing time and a miserable time.

Indeed, it was certainly a time fully matured for the emergence of a new prophet of deliverance.

Any attempt to better understand the ideas of Vivekananda will lead to the influence of the teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

Vivekananda was the servant and disciple of Paramahamsa and believed his master was God incarnate.

Vivekananda, in Ramakrishna and His Message, confessed, “Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was the latest and the most perfect – the concentrated embodiment of knowledge, love, renunciation, catholicity, and the desire to serve mankind. My supreme good fortune is that I am his servant through life after life. A single word of his to me is far weightier than the Vedas and the Vedanta.”

Furthermore, Vivekananda once remarked, “All the ideas that I preach are only an attempt to echo his (Ramakrishna’s) ideas.”

Additionally, he believed that from Ramakrishna’s incarnation had sprung the satya-yuga (golden age) and that the world will be unified by means of bhakti (devotion) and prema (divine love).

In a land of religious diversity, the swami was able to defuse and delay a violent conflict among the religions of India. Undoubtedly, he was able to offer a rational perspective which would be acceptable to all religions.

In an address in London in 1900 on The Real Nature of Man, he preached about unity in diversity which drew references from the main religious texts – Bible, Quran, Upanishads and Vedas.

During this colonial era there were certain attitudes prevalent in India which were averse to consequences of any religious compromise: “The church worked as a wing of imperial control and imposed humility...Islam enforced conversion by compulsion and threats.”

An underlying theme in Swami Vivekananda’s lectures was the emphasis on the need for harmonisation in religion.

His comparative approach and reference to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus were a concerted effort to establish a commonality among these world religions.

The swami also added the conviction that the Shiva Linga, converted into two across, would form the shape of the Christian cross.

Not surprisingly, in India, some of his worst enemies were Christian missionaries who were distraught at the work of the swami because he had put an end to their era of unchallenged supremacy.

Vivekananda was feared and constantly mocked by those who had denounced Hinduism as paganism.

On September 11, 1893, at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda made a profound statement on the state of religion.

He believed that “if 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...which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these and still have infinite space for development.”

This was one of his many public appeals to emphasize the common ground among religions and reconcile differences.

It was obvious that in the swami’s quest for the regeneration of India, he believed that religion should be made more dynamic and that sectarianism and fragmentation of Hinduism was inimical to social solidarity.

He felt it was necessary since the Indian people needed to cultivate faith and view themselves as a total community.

The swami’s message of tolerance and peace is needed in the world’s conflict zones and in TT, as we often overlook the ideal vision of seeing ourselves as a complete citizenry.