Part 20 (1/2)
(Detroit Journal) If Vive Kananda, the Brahmin monk, who is delivering a lecture course in this city could be induced to remain for a week longer, the largest hall in Detroit would not hold the crowds which would be anxious to hear him. He has become a veritable fad, as last evening every seat in the Unitarian church was occupied, and many were compelled to stand throughout the entire lecture.
The speaker's subject was, ”The Love of G.o.d”. His definition of love was ”something absolutely unselfish; that which has no thought beyond the glorification and adoration of the object upon which our affections are bestowed.” Love, he said, is a quality which bows down And wors.h.i.+ps and asks nothing in return. Love of G.o.d, he thought, was different. G.o.d is not accepted, he said, because we really need him, except for selfish purposes. His lecture was replete with story and anecdote, all going to show the selfish motive underlying the motive of love for G.o.d. The Songs of Solomon were cited by the lecturer as the most beautiful portion of the Christian Bible and yet he had heard with deep regret that there was a possibility of their being removed. ”In fact,” he declared, as a sort clinching argument at the close, ”the love of G.o.d appears to be based upon a theory of 'What can I get out of it?' Christians are so selfish in their love that they are continually asking G.o.d to give them something, including all manner of selfish things. Modern religion is, therefore, nothing but a mere hobby and fas.h.i.+on and people flock to church like a lot of sheep.”
THE WOMEN OF INDIA.
(Detroit Free Press, March 25, 1894) Kananda lectured last night at the Unitarian church on ”The Women of India.” The speaker reverted to the women of ancient India, showing in what high regard they are held in the holy books, where women were prophetesses. Their spirituality then was admirable. It is unfair to judge women in the east by the western standard. In the west woman is the wife; in the east she is the mother. The Hindoos wors.h.i.+p the idea of mother, and even the monks are required to touch the earth with their foreheads before their mothers. Chast.i.ty is much esteemed.
The lecture was one of the most interesting Kananda has delivered and he was warmly received.
* * * (Detroit Evening News, March 25, 1894) Swami Vive Kananda lectured at the Unitarian Church last night on ”The Women of India, Past, Medieval and the Present.” He stated that in India the woman was the visible manifestation of G.o.d and that her whole life was given up to the thought that she was a mother, and to be a perfect mother she must be chaste. No mother in India ever abandoned her offspring, he said, and defied any one to prove the contrary. The girls of India would die if they, like American girls, were obliged to expose half their bodies to the vulgar gaze of young men. He desired that India be judged from the standard of that country and not from this.
(Tribune, April 1, 1894) While Swami Kananda was in Detroit he had a number of conversations, in which he answered questions regarding the women of India. It was the information he thus imparted that suggested a public lecture from him on this subject. But as he speaks without notes, some of the points he made in private conversation did not appear in his public address. Then his friends were in a measure disappointed. But one of his lady listeners has put on paper some of the things he told in his afternoon talks, and it is now for the first time given to the press: To the great tablelands of the high Himalaya mountains first came the Aryans, and there to this day abides the pure type of Brahman, a people which we westerners can but dream of. Pure in thought, deed and action, so honest that a bag of gold left in a public place would be found unharmed twenty years after; so beautiful that, to use Kananda's own phrase, ”to see a girl in the fields is to pause and marvel that G.o.d could make anything so exquisite.” Their features are regular, their eyes and hair dark, and their skin the color which would be produced by the drops which fell from a p.r.i.c.ked finger into a gla.s.s of milk. These are the Hindus in their pure type, untainted and untrammeled.
As to their property laws, the wife's dowry belongs to her exclusively, never becoming the property of the husband. She can sell or give away without his consent. The gifts from any one to herself, including those of the husband, are hers alone, to do with as she pleases.
Woman walks abroad without fear; she is as free as perfect trust in those about her can render her. There is no zenana in the Himalayas, and there is a part of India which the missionaries never reach. These villages are most difficult of access. These people, untouched by Mahometan influence, can but be reached by wearisome and toilsome climbing, and are unknown to Mahometan and Christian alike.
INDIA'S FIRST INHABITANTS.
In the forest of India are found races of wild people - very wild, even to cannibalism. These are the original Indians and never were Aryan or Hindu.
As the Hindus settled in the country proper and spread over its vast area, corruptions of many kinds found home among them. The sun was scorching and the men exposed to it were dark in color. Five generations are but needed to change the transparent glow of the white complexion of the dwellers of the Himalaya Mountains to the bronzed hue of the Hindu of India.
Kananda has one brother very fair and one darker than himself. His father and mother are fair. The women are apt to be, the cruel etiquette of the Zenana established for protection from the Mohammedans keeping them within doors, fairer. Kananda is thirty-one years old.
A CLIP AT AMERICAN MEN Kananda a.s.serts with an amused twinkle in his eye that American men amuse him. They profess to wors.h.i.+p woman, but in his opinion they simply wors.h.i.+p youth and beauty. They never fall in love with wrinkles and gray hair. In fact he is under a strong impression that American men once had a trick - inherited, to be sure - of burning up their old women. Modern history calls this the burning of witches. It was men who accused and condemned witches, and it was usually the old age of the victim that led her to the stake. So it is seen that burning women alive is not exclusively a Hindu custom. He thought that if it were remembered that the Christian church burned old women at the stake, there would be less horror expressed regarding the burning of Hindu widows.
BURNINGS COMPARED The Hindu widow went to her death agony amid feasting and song, arrayed in her costliest garments and believing for the most part that such an act meant the glories of Paradise for herself and family. She was wors.h.i.+pped as a martyr and her name was enshrined among the family records.
However horrible the rite appears to us, it is a bright picture compared to the burning of the Christian witch who, considered a guilty thing from the first, was thrown in a stifling dungeon, tortured cruelly to extort confession, subjected to an infamous trial, dragged amid jeering to the stake and consoled amid her sufferings by the bystander's comfort that the burning of her body was but the symbol for h.e.l.l's everlasting fires, in which her soul would suffer even greater torment.
MOTHERS ARE SACRED Kananda says the Hindu is taught to wors.h.i.+p the principle of motherhood. The mother outranks the wife. The mother is holy. The motherhood of G.o.d is more in his mind than the fatherhood.
All women, whatever the caste, are exempt from corporal punishment. Should a woman murder, her head is spared. She may be placed astride a donkey facing his tail. Thus riding through the streets a drummer shouts her crime, after which she is free, her humiliation being deemed sufficient punishment to serve as a preventive for further crime.
Should she care to repent, there are religious houses open to her, where she can become purified or she can at her own option at once enter the cla.s.s of monks and so become a holy woman.
The question was put to Mr. Kananda whether the freedom thus allowed in the joining the monks without a superior over them did not tend to hypocrisy among the order, as he claims, of the purest of Hindu philosophers. Kananda a.s.sented, but explained that there is no one between the people and the monk. The monk has broken down all caste. A Brahmin will not touch the low-caste Hindu but let him or her become a monk and the mightiest will prostrate himself before the low-caste monk.
The people are obliged to take care of the monk, but only as long as they believe in his sincerity. Once condemned for hypocrisy he is called a liar and falls to the depths of mendicancy - a mere wandering beggar - inspiring no respect.
OTHER THOUGHTS A woman has the right of way with even a prince. When the studious Greeks visited Hindustan to learn of the Hindu, all doors were open to them, but when the Mohammedan with his sword and the Englishman with his bullets came their doors were closed. Such guests were not welcomed. As Kananda deliciously words it: ”When the tiger comes we close our doors until he has pa.s.sed by.”
The United States, says Kananda, has inspired him with hopes for great possibilities in the future, but our destiny, as that of the world, rests not in the lawmakers of today, but in the women. Mr. Kananda's words: ”The salvation of your country depends upon its women.”
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BUDDHISTIC INDIA ( Reproduced from the Swami Vivekananda Centenary Memorial Volume, published by the Swami Vivekananda Centenary, Calcutta, in 1963. The additions in square brackets have been made for purposes of clarification. Periods indicate probable omissions. - Publisher.) (Delivered at the Shakespeare Club, Pasadena, California, on February 2, 1900) Buddhistic India is our subject tonight. Almost all of you, perhaps, have read Edwin Arnold's poem on the life of Buddha, and some of you, perhaps, have gone into the subject with more scholarly interest, as in English, French and German, there is quite a lot of Buddhistic literature. Buddhism itself is the most interesting of subjects, for it is the first historical outburst of a world religion. There have been great religions before Buddhism arose, in India and elsewhere, but, more or less, they are confined within their own races. The ancient Hindus or ancient Jews or ancient Persians, every one of them had a great religion, but these religions were more or less racial. With Buddhism first begins that peculiar phenomenon of religion boldly starting out to conquer the world. Apart from its doctrines and the truths it taught and the message it had to give, we stand face to face with one of the tremendous cataclysms of the world. Within a few centuries of its birth, the barefooted, shaven-headed missionaries of Buddha had spread over all the then known civilised world, and they penetrated even further - from Lapland on the one side to the Philippine Islands on the other. They had spread widely within a few centuries of Buddha's birth; and in India itself, the religion of Buddha had at one time nearly swallowed up two-thirds of the population.
The whole of India was never Buddhistic. It stood outside. Buddhism had the same fate as Christianity had with the Jews; the majority of the Jews stood aloof. So the old Indian religion lived on. But the comparison stops here. Christianity, though it could not get within its fold all the Jewish race, itself took the country. Where the old religion existed - the religion of the Jews - that was conquered by Christianity in a very short time and the old religion was dispersed, and so the religion of the Jews lives a sporadic life in different parts of the world. But in India this gigantic child was absorbed, in the long run, by the mother that gave it birth, and today the very name of Buddha is almost unknown all over India. You know more about Buddhism than ninety-nine per cent of the Indians. At best, they of India only know the name - ”Oh, he was a great prophet, a great Incarnation of G.o.d” - and there it ends. The island of Ceylon remains to Buddha, and in some parts of the Himalayan country, there are some Buddhists yet. Beyond that there are none. But [Buddhism] has spread over all the rest of Asia.
Still, it has the largest number of followers of any religion, and it has indirectly modified the teachings of all the other religions. A good deal of Buddhism entered into Asia Minor. It was a constant fight at one time whether the Buddhists would prevail or the later sects of Christians. The [Gnostics] and the other sects of early Christians were more or less Buddhistic in their tendencies, and all these got fused up in that wonderful city of Alexandria, and out of the fusion under Roman law came Christianity. Buddhism in its political and social aspect is even more interesting than its [doctrines] and dogmas; and as the first outburst of the tremendous world-conquering power of religion, it is very interesting also.
I am mostly interested in this lecture in India as it has been affected by Buddhism; and to understand Buddhism and its rise a bit, we have to get a few ideas about India as it existed when this great prophet was born.
There was already in India a vast religion with an organised scripture - the Vedas; and these Vedas existed as a ma.s.s of literature and not a book - just as you find the Old Testament, the Bible. Now, the Bible is a ma.s.s of literature of different ages; different persons are the writers, and so on. It is a collection. Now, the Vedas are a vast collection. I do not know whether, if the texts were all found - n.o.body has found all the texts, n.o.body even in India has seen all the books - if all the books were known, this room would contain them. It is a huge ma.s.s of literature, carried down from generation to generation from G.o.d, who gave the scriptures. And the idea about the scriptures in India became tremendously orthodox. You complain of your orthodoxies in book-wors.h.i.+p. If you get the Hindus' idea, where will you be? The Hindus think the Vedas are the direct knowledge of G.o.d, that G.o.d has created the whole universe in and through the Vedas, and that the whole universe exists because it is in the Vedas. The cow exists outside because the word ”cow” is in the Vedas; man exists outside because of the word in the Vedas. Here you see the beginning of that theory which later on Christians developed and expressed in the text: ”In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with G.o.d ” It is the old, ancient theory of India. Upon that is based the whole idea of the scriptures. And mind, every word is the power of G.o.d. The word is only the external manifestation on the material plane. So, all this manifestation is just the manifestation on the material plane; and the Word is the Vedas, and Sanskrit is the language of G.o.d. G.o.d spoke once. He spoke in Sanskrit, and that is the divine language. Every other language, they consider, is no more than the braying of animals; and to denote that they call every other nation that does not speak Sanskrit [Mlechchhas], the same word as the barbarians of the Greeks. They are braying, not talking, and Sanskrit is the divine language.
Now, the Vedas were not written by anybody; they were eternally coexistent with G.o.d. G.o.d is infinite. So is knowledge, and through this knowledge is created the world. Their idea of ethics is [that a thing is good] because the law says so. Everything is bounded by that book - nothing [can go] beyond that, because the knowledge of G.o.d - you cannot get beyond that. That is Indian orthodoxy.
In the latter part of the Vedas, you see the highest, the spiritual. In the early portions, there is the crude part. You quote a pa.s.sage from the Vedas - ”That is not good”, you say. ”Why?” ”There is a positive evil injunction” - the same as you see in the Old Testament. There are numbers of things in all old books, curious ideas, which we would not like in our present day. You say: ”This doctrine is not at all good; why, it shocks my ethics!” How did you get your idea? [Merely] by your own thought? Get out! If it is ordained by G.o.d, what right have you to question? When the Vedas say, ”Do not do this; this is immoral”, and so on, no more have you the right to question at all. And that is the difficulty. If you tell a Hindu, ”But our Bible does not say so”, [he will reply] ”Oh, your Bible! it is a babe of history. What other Bible could there be except the Vedas? What other book could there be? All knowledge is in G.o.d. Do you mean to say that He teaches by two or more Bibles? His knowledge came out in the Vedas. Do you mean to say that He committed a mistake, then? Afterwards, He wanted to do something better and taught another Bible to another nation? You cannot bring another book that is as old as Vedas. Everything else - it was all copied after that.” They would not listen to you. And the Christian brings the Bible. They say: ”That is fraud. G.o.d only speaks once, because He never makes mistakes.”
Now, just think of that. That orthodoxy is terrible. And if you ask a Hindu that he is to reform his society and do this and that, he says: ”Is it in the books? If it is not, I do not care to change. You wait. In five [hundred] years more you will find this is good.” If you say to him, ”This social inst.i.tution that you have is not right”, he says, ”How do you know that?” Then he says: ”Our social inst.i.tutions in this matter are the better. Wait five [hundred] years and your inst.i.tutions will die. The test is the survival of the fittest. You live, but there is not one community in the world which lives five hundred years together. Look here! We have been standing all the time.” That is what they would say. Terrible orthodoxy! And thank G.o.d I have crossed that ocean.