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Any inductive approach
to the formulation of the principles of an
universal religion would tend more and more to
extreme generality. Considered in this sense we
have, in the Vedanta as presented by Swami
Vivekananda, the dominant characteristics i.e.
the Impersonal which is beyond all personalisms,
either of Gods or men; but this includes all
these because this principle or Absolute is
generalised from these several formulations.
Taken as a principle, there is hardly any doubt
that the Absolute must be impersonal. This is
the philosophical truth. But once the same is
approached from the point of religion the
Absolute becomes the Ultimate person; the One
Purusa or Puru-sottama. Thus the Ultimate
pramana is not reasoning or the books as such,
but the experience to which all seers and
prophets bear witness as being beyond reasoning,
mentation, sensation, etc. This experience is
not capable of being produced by any individual
effort whatsoever, however eminent one may be;
it is something that descends from the Ultimate
and delivers its message and vision and itself
finally. It is this that makes all inductive
presentations of the Ultimates of Religion only
general but not quite universal; all
generalisation being processes of comparison and
selection according to classification that one
arbitrarily chooses.
The other process by which one can come to a formulation of the principles
of an Universal Religion can be the study of the
history of evolution of Religions. It must be
remembered that given the same situations, the
existing religions would take the same shape or
form in regard to philosophy, myth and ritual.
The development of the
idea of God can proceed from the primitive to
the advanced conceptions through several stages.
Starting with the evolution of the idea in the
West, Swami Vivekananda says
“The Babylonians
and the jews were divided into many tribes, each
tribe having a god of its own, and these little
tribal gods had often a generic name. The gods
among the Babylonians were all called Baal, and
among them Baal Marodach was the chief. In
course of time one of these many tribes would
conquer and assimilate the other racially allied
tribes and the natural result would be that the
god of the conquering tribe would be placed at
the head of all the gods of the other tribes.
Thus the boasted Monotheism of the Semites was
created. Among the Jews the gods went by the
name of Moloch. Of these there was one Moloch
belonged to the tribe called Isreal, and he was
called the Moloch-Yahve or Moloch-Yava.”
(Vol.III.p.l85)
“In time this
tribe of Isreal slowly conquered some of the
other tribes of the same race, destroyed their
Moloch and declared its own Moloch to be the
supreme Moloch of all molochs. And I am sure
most of you know the amount of bloodshed, of
tyranny, and of brutal savagery that this
religion entailed. Later on the Babylonians
tried to destroy this supremacy of Moloch Yahva
but could not succeed in doing so.”
(Vol.III.p.186)
Swami Vivekananda thus
shows how monotheism has been established as a
handmaid or corollary of imperialistic political
designs and not because of any essential nisus
in the spiritual quest for the one God - Ekam
Sat. This of course has been the traditional
mode for quite a long time in almost all
religions tarred by the Semitic hopes of world
dominion. Despite the statement of the prophet
that His Kingdom was not of this world, the
semitics have not been able to sublimate their
materialistic empire of the Kingdom on Earth.
Swami Vivekananda also
essays the evolution of the religions
(Vol.1,p.323 & 324) from nature worship, which
has as many gods as the many phenomena of
nature. This is followed by the conception of
the necessity for integration of the several
departments of nature, and that made them divine
the existence of the One Overlord God who was
raised to the status of the Sovereign or the
greatest among them. Then it was seen that all
other gods were subordinates, and were
subservient to, and became supported by, the
Highest - a concept that led to only one being
called God; the rest were not God but demi-gods
or angels and so on. This led to the application
of the names of all gods to the One God - and
all functions being transferred to Him
alone.When one calls God by any name, even by
the names that one applied previously to the
nature gods, they were explained as referring
directly, if not indirectly to that One God. For
this, of course, philological and etymological
derivations were invented or devised.
In Monotheism also
there have been three statuses. The One God may
be conceived as an Extra-Cosmic Deity, who
created the world and governed it, staying
outside it as the Overlord. Secondly He was
considered as immanent in Mature and supporting
its evolution and history, both on the whole and
in each one of its members. Third, as the Divine
in oneself as one’s self and establishing His
Kingdom eminently in the heart of man, the
seeker, the mystic. Perhaps all these three
statusses of God are capable of being considered
as co-existent statusses or, permanent
statusses, though potentially. These three may
be thought of as stages of growth according to
the capacity of the individual seeker, but it is
just possible also to hold them as three eternal
statusses of the One Impersonal but ‘living’
Godhead. Swami Vivekananda seems to be quite
aware of the lurking view that the impersonal
does not include livingness,
and emphasizes that fullest freedom that is
spirit is available to it.
The whole problem of
creation is the problem of how the Impersonal
one could bring into being the personal, and
also how the infinite diversity could be there
at all. He says
“I will tell you
my discovery. All of religions are contained in
the Vedanta, that is in the three stages of the
Vedanta Philosophy, the dvaita, the
visishtadvaita and advaita, one comes after the
other. These are the three stages of spiritual
growth in man, each one is necessary. This is
the essential of religion.
The Vedanta
applied to the various ethnic customs and creeds
of India is Hinduism. The first stage, i.e.
Dvaita-applied to the ethnic groups of Europe is
Christianity; as applied to semitic groups it is
Mohemmedanism.
The Advaita as
applied in its yoga perception form is
Buddhism. Now by religion is meant the
Vedanta. The applications must vary according to
different needs, surroundings and other
circumstances of different nations.” (Vol.V.
p.82)
On another occasion he
has stated, “My religion is one of which
Christianity is an off-shoot and Buddhism a
rebel child,” (Vol.VI.p.105)*
* It can be
seen that there is no mention of Visistadvaita,
It is clear that though Vivekananda had devoted
his study of visistadvaita to bhakti and his
work on bhakti yoga is a neat presentation yet
his specific omission of Visistadvaita in this
context is significant. His own conception of
Advaita that it at once includes diversity and
excludes it also reveals that his major concern
was only to make all accept the view that There
is one Religion, the Vedanta, the Universal,
all-inclusive Oneness or One. When asked why
he preached Advaita he said “To rouse up the
hearts of men to show them the glory of the
souls. I do so not as a sectarian -but upon
universal and widely acceptable grounds. (Vol.
III .p.191)
His own philosphical
statements reveal his originality towards
synthesis:
“Monism and dualism
are essentially the same. The difference
consists in the expression. As the dualists hold
the father and son to be two, monists hold them
to be really one. Dualism is in Nature, in
manifestation; monism is pure spirituality in
the essence. Religion is the realisation of
spirit as spirit, not spirit as matter.”
(Vol.VI.p.98)
While it is contended
by theologians that philosophical thinking leads
to the Impersonal Universal principle, religion
aims at presenting the Ultimate as personal
universal Deity.
Swami Vivekananda
writes
“Man can become
Brahman but not God. If anybody becomes God show
me his creation. Visvamitra’s creation is his
own imagination. It should have obeyed his law.”
(Vol.IV.p.112)
This is clearly to
reveal that philosophical or even mystical
ontology is not easily capable of religious
ontology. It is difficult to try to prove the
mystical ontology by means of our sensuous
experiences, for, as Swami Vivekananda states,
religion belongs to the supersensuous, and the
logic of sense and sense-dependent rationality
or inference cannot lead to it.
Swami Vivekananda
considers the constituents of other religions,
especially Christianity.
Their problems concern
the relationship between the creator and
creature; the existence of Heaven and God in it;
the reality of sin, and the belief in a personal
God, who is omniscient and incarnating once for
the redeeming of the souls.
The Vedanta he wishes
to present is one which negates all these
beliefs.
“There is indeed
no creation and no creatures. Existence always
has been. The idea of God in heaven is crass
materialism. What is to be believed is the God
in every one. God is in every one, has become
every one and everything.” (Vol.VIII.p.125)
“He also holds
that there is only one sin, and that is to
believe that one is a sinner. Certainly the
impersonal God gives infinitely more happiness
than the personal God can.” * (ibid.127) One
need not go out of oneself to know the truth.
(ibid. p.128)
If then we see things
differently, and as created, and as matter, it
is also to be noted that all this is mere
appearance. Of course all are appearances of
divine presence, not of nothing. All that is a
formulation of thought; ‘whatever you dream and
think of, you create.’ All these are creations
of dream and of thought.
*
Vol.V.p.l46 : “The one great lesson I was
taught is that life is misery, nothing but
misery” - echoeing the words of Buddha and of
Samkhya. The great incentive to renunciation of
the world. The world-negating philosophies arise
from this. So too, or consequent on this, the
earnestness to remove the load of human misery -
love of hunanity, the feeling of brotherhood of
all men, and the divinity in all perceived under
such conditions.
This difference between
appearance and reality is sought to be explained
in terms of Maya or illusoriness or laziness.
“Men create personal Gods of whom they are
afraid. They have made themselves helpless and
dependent on others. We are so lazy.” (ibid.131)
“Our consciousness
is linked up with or bound to the body, and has
itself become a bondage.” (Vol.VII.p.58)
To liberate
consciousness from its tie-up with the body is
to attain the state of liberation from matter or
materialism.
It is clear that Swami
Vivekananda definitely considers Maya as an
instrument of illusion that makes for diversity,
variety, and materialism and so on. He does not
embark on the exposition as to how and why this
is produced from the Impersonal. Some are
overwhelmed by the illusoriness of nature,
wherein everything is changing and everything is
misery, and renunciation seems to be the only
right way to attain mukti or even happiness.
The worship, or
realisation of the Impersonal, which obviously
is used to refer to the transcendent which is
beyond human categories of thought, and is
apprehended only through direct revelation or
illumination, is seen to be more
happiness-producing than the worship of personal
gods and gurus, since they are conditioned, and
hence productive of sorrows of different kinds,
Man passes from one relation to another and
exploring all relations with others of his own
sex or otherwise, arrives at the conclusion that
one should go beyond all these relations -
understood not in the logical sense but in the
human social sense. Attachment to any one or
even to all leads to misery. “Only the
Unconditioned, the Transcendent, seems to secure
that equality, that balance, that equanimity -
samatva -. which makes for profound association.
God, then, is the,One with whom any relationship
whatsoever can never produce misery or the
occilation that takes place in the dvandva,, ie
the pairing of opposites whose result is sorrow
and joy, honour and dishonour, heat and cold,
victory and defeat, life and death, etc.
Indeed it is only
when one gets the shock in ordinary
relationships that one turns his back on all
relations - even deserting or abandoning all
social intercourse, and becomes an avadhuta.
Revulsion from family, from throne and power and
wealth, can happen, and the stories of saints
will reveal this phenomenon of renunciation
which becomes the stepping stone for some to the
attachment to God or the transcendent, whose
attractiveness is enhanced by such
renunciation. No wonder all through history
renunciation has been honoured and worshipped -
and not the householder, the renunciation is
said to be equivalent to an illumination or
knowledge which consciously or unconsciously has
prompted the renunciations. Jnana-vairagya
leads to a devotion to the Highest, the para,
transcendent, the Brahman, It is also averred
that only those who have risen to this level of
renunciation through discipline and knowledge of
the Ultimate are capable of having the insight
into Brahman as Transcendent to the processes of
the world. Such a person alone is qualified to
enter into the Divine Experience. Mercy, Purity,
Love, all these begin to flow out of him, and
one recognizes the divine nature as permeating
him. The impersonal divine begins to materialise
itself in the human person; indeed the human
being becomes a person, as it were when the
Transcendent, impersonal, unconditioned Person
enters into him, and is manifested in him.
“We are” says
Swami Vivekananda, ”born believers in a personal
religion” (Vol.IV.p.l2l).
It is because the
Transcendent is, according to Swami Vivekananda,
what it is, that it is capable of assuming all
personalities or Ishta-devatas-varupas, The
Nature of Religion is essentially based on the
central concept of God. All religions are
generally theistic. Indeed it appears that they
cannot do without a God. No doubt the nature of
God would vary with the aspect that one holds to
be the Object of worship - omnipotence,
oinnipervasiveness, omnireality, omniscience and
so on.
Buddhism, for example,
may be said to do without a God, but we find
that Buddha became the God to whom all buddhists
surrender, and either without him or along with
him, Dharma became the Godhead. As it was
pointed out a whole pantheon of gods and
bodhi-sattvas entered into the picture of
buddhist religious worship.
Jainism did not
accept an Isvara, but its tirthankaras quietly
entered in, and occupied the place of God in
jaina worship. The liberated jainas became
Isvaras possessed of all siddhis, and beyond all
bondage to karma-matter.
The Tao does duty for
the Confucian God.
Religious
fervour, which animates all religious attitudes,
will always set up an object of worship
according to its need, whether it is for cosmic
order and liberation or individual liberation,
cosmic welfare or individual welfare.
Similarly, the
religious ecstacy that one feels when one
contemplates the Omnipervasive or omnipresent
Being, or intuites His presence in each and
every individual and atom, is profoundly
religious and mystical. The Upanisads indeed
speak of this super-personal purusa who is
universally present, and as such is every bit of
it wholly present everywhere. Ordinary persons
are individual human beings - their masks so to
speak are human, characterised by finite
attributes and are limited. It is
inconceivable that such individuals could be
everywhere and in everything. So much so,
persons have been ruled out as capable of being
omnipresent. Even to an introspective vision,
the fora of the Divine is not like any gross
form, or person as such. However the superhuman
Divine is not according to religious seeking
just an impersonal principle relieved of all
limitations of persons, masks of nan or
creature. He is not just a law, either.
Philosophical impersonalism is natural to
thought or philosophical knowledge, but
religious impersonaliam is contrary to the
genius of religious quest and aspiration.
Rational philosophy always thinks that the
impersonal is higher than the sensory personal,
but it is clear that the religious personal is
higher, and more truly universal, than the
rational impersonal. Hence it is called
super-personal. It is at once concrete
experience for the human individual aspirant,
and enters into intimate unitive relationships
with him, whilst yet maintaining in its
universality the same unitive relationship with
all other selves and in fact with the whole of
reality, animate and inanimate.
It is this peculiar
genius of religion that places it higher than
mere philosophy of the abstract reason, and
philosophical theology meets with specious
difficulties even when it seeks to reconcile the
impersonal universal with the universal
personal.
The term impersonal has
another significance. The notion that whatever
is personal (pauruseya) is imperfect has become
almost axiomatic in the consciousness of
philosophers. Therefore any source of knowledge
that is in any sense dependent on any person,
however exalted and that means any god even - is
bound to imperfection or vitiated by
imperfections of all sorts. And it seems also a
fairly common opinion that gods also are
misleaders, illusionists and so on, and even
prophets are said to be sent from above to
mislead mankind, with the ulterior motive of
weeding out or teaching the mass of mankind the
discrimination between the false and the true.
Buddha is thought to be one such avatar by some
orthodox Hindu thinkers. In any case the
prophets of heretical sects are classified as
mis-leaders rather than as leaders. They are, of
course, caruvakas - sweet-tongued men, sophists,
hedonists and so on.
Therefore it was
claimed that the Vedas are a-pauruseya, not
owing their teaching to any person, human or
divine. They are eternal truths, and it is God
who abides by them. This impersonality being the
characteristic of the truths of the Veda, it
becomes clear that Brahman, the Ultimate Reality
taught by it, must also be Impersonal if it is
to be free from all imperfections in respect of
vakta, of content, and communication.
Thus there is much to
be said in favour of philosophical truth and
even reality with which it is identical in the
ultimate sense as impersonal. However it is an
impersonal which permits the personal in a
special way without imperfection and impurity.
It may however be equally argued that
Personality may be such that it may dissolve all
impurity and present the Ultimate truth
impersonally, impartially and immutably too.
This is the dilemma of theism - the veracity of
God. Is God imperfect and thus incapable of
granting true and ultimate knowledge of all
things and reality, in the philosophical sense
as well as the religious sense? If he is
incapable it is dear he cannot be God. A finite
God, which is a hypothesis of some thinkers who
wish to explain the nature of the struggle
between good and evil, right and wrong, just and
unjust, on the basis of God’s finite ness - if
not in knowledge at least in power - has
provided quite a plausible solution to the
actuality of the ineffectiveness of virtue,
against vice, the impotency of good against the
bad. The very concept of a hero-God is clearly
an acceptance of this ‘finiteness’, though
optimistically one could go on saying ‘satyameva
jayate’ - Truth alone triumphs (ultimately). The
temporal nature of this hope is such that it
becomes almost a mockery. However we are
presented with this ahura mazda - ahriman
conflict the Rama-Ravana yuddha,
Krishna-Narakasura yuddha, and so on, taking us
to the Indra-Vrtra yuddha. Hindu thought has
always held that the Vibhava or Avatar-descent
form of God is for the protection of the good,
the destruction of the wicked and the
restoration of the kingdom of righteousness or
Justice on earth.
Swami Vivekananda, in
his analysis of the constituents of religion,
has pointed out that religion comprises a
philosophy, a myth and a ritual. These three
elements are integral to one another. We may add
that philosophy itself is a rationalising, or
rather communicating verbal aspect, of a
revealing experience. Further, if religion is to
be a natural growth in man, or if it were to be
something blossoming out of a revelational
datum, be this of the form of wonder or awe or
the intuitive flash or lightning as the Seer of
the Kena Upanisad puts it, then this philosophic
form would not conform to the patterns of
dialectical or non-dialectical logic of the
intellect. This is the most important crux of
the problem of religious philosphy. Mystic
intuitions or lightnings tear up our logical
categories, and transform the entire movement of
the ordinary popular mind. Sometimes it happens
that the popular mind preserves this genius of
the supralogical in its usage, whilst the
intellect has kneaded the truth of the
supralogical out of shape.
Religious philosophy is
not just our ordinary philosophy which tries to
explain scientifically or materialistically, the
gamut of human experiences. Its avenues or paths
of knowing are much more vast and more
penetrating than that of sensate philoephers who
depend on one or two like sensations and
inference for understanding. The struggle
between philosophers and mystics is only too
well-known. It is a struggle of the pramanas.
Problems of conflict between intellectual
demands or criteria and intuitive demands or
criteria have bogged down much of our
philosophical investigation. Purists have always
striven to put up exacting criteria, and the
parting of ways has occured again and again
between philosophy and religion.
The second conflict
that has also arrested the march of religion, or
the growth of religious consciousness, has been
between the priest and the philosopher. In a
sense it was profoundly true that priests were
claimed to have direct experience of God or were
God-possessed. Their worship of God was intimate
and covered their entire routine of being.
God-inspired, they were better fitted by their
spiritual vocation to guide others to that
divine state. The rite or ritual was originally
a technique discovered by the priest to put a
person in rapport with the Divine Godhead, his
creator and saviour. The priest knew the
technique of yoga and was the Guru or Teacher of
the path. He was credited with this mysterious
power of linking an individual with the
Infinite. He became a man of mystery. Mystery
cults grew up in order to provide schools of
training for this spiritual task, and these were
also called schools of regeneration. This is a
universal phenomenon, and the more interesting
fact is that they became sacred persons also.
The aloofness enjoyed by some of these bred many
superstitions which were not always creditable
or credible.
The interpretation of
the spiritual act of yoga was rather difficult.
Mystic insights in many parts of the world
suffered this eclipse of meaning, and we have a
host of literature that remains undeciphered
because of this incommunicability of meaning
about the technique. To provide a philosophy for
these becomes a necessity. Men, trained in the
higher way of intuitive realisation, could
hardly undertake the task of interpreting the
same to the lower mind. Their media of
expression or communication was through symbols,
myths, or gestures, and the use of unusual words
which more easily led to comprehension of
meaning though not amenable to analysis of
experience. Primitive religions, or rather
religions which had lost the capacity even to
formulate a philosophical vocabulary of
communication have remained at this level of
rite and symbol and gesture, and have retained
those techniques of establishing communication
or link with the supreme power transcendental to
all the powers that man has known. This lag has
in fact provided a second reason for the split
into priests (the custodians of mystical
insights and techniques) and the philosphers,
who curiously and genuinely seek to unravel the
mysterious ways of supralogical communication,
Rarely have the primitive religions provided the
combination of priest-philosopher which in
Indian language we could call divya-jnani and
tattva- jnani or Alvar-Acarya.
It is a peculiar
amalgam, this integration between the
revelational knowledge or experience and
philosophical understanding. It is seen that
however primitive the revelation is to the
discerning philosophical mind, it reveals layers
of meaning and levels of insight. It is this
peculiar quality of the intuitive or
revelational experience that makes it different
from the abstract unidimenaional nature of
intellectual understanding, even when it is
granted a synthetic-datum. Poetry has been the
medium adopted by some of the revelational
seers, and it was recognized that this poetic or
prophetic capacity or ability was quite unlike
any that we know. Plato did not have much
regard for the poets of his day who only wrote
about the natural and the human reflected
beauty, and who had hardly any access to genuine
Reality. The Kavi or Alvar is one who has delved
into the abyss of the Infinite, and speaks, or
praises, or adores the Infinite Transcendent,
tended to repeat a technique or rite that failed
to bring about the experience. The Reasons are
indeed many. Religion realises that it is not
our technique that brings about the experience
but God’s Grace or gift. Technique of Yoga and
God’s Grace are the most important elements for
direct, Revelational, Kavi-experience. This
supramental descent about which Sri Aurobindo
speaks, and which he exemplifies in his higher
poetic works, makes the transition to wisdom and
prophetic power possible. The priest,
unfortunately in most religions, remains
‘chanting his beads’, performing rites and
rituals formally, though with faith in their
efficacy, and remains a good custodian, rather
than a living embodiment. Exceptions like Sri
Ramakrishna would always rule out the inefficacy
of the ‘priesthood’ of God, though the word
“priest-craft” might suffer obloqy.
Pythagoras, Heraclitus
and others were masters of the mysteries as well
as of philosophical knowledge. In India the
rishis were both masters of mysteries and
philosophical knowledge. A divorce between the
two spells the divorce between the
transcendental and the world. The restoration of
the unity between the
spiritual-mystic-revelational experiences and
the philosophical could be brought about only
when we realise that there is a universal
mystical transition which can be brought about,
and interpreted in a universal manner by the
supra-philosophical understanding. Our
understanding may be unequal to this task.
Indian philosophic
schools invariably were said to have been
propounded by seers or rishis (who saw the
mantras directly, non-sensorially and
non-mentally) as well. Undoubtedly there has
been criticism between these rishis among
themselves, and such mutual super-sensorial
criticism has been valuable aid to
thedevelopment of Darsana - of which the Vedanta
has been acclaimed as the darsana
par-excellence, as being both a philosophy
(tattva-Jnana) and a religion (yoga or union
with the Ultimate, sayujya) that is also
release from all ignorance.
Man’s concern in
religion is with the Divine, not with himself or
with Nature. The concern with the Divine needs
the rite and the ritual, the sadhana of getting
into touch with the Divine, to melt into it, or
as has been clearly enunciated, one must go near
it (samipya), take the same form as the Guru
suitable for entering into communion with that
divine nature (sarupya), begin to live and move
and have one’s being in the world of the Divine
Master, (salokya) and finally attain the
covetable experience of union itself (sayujya).
These four are apparently stages of the progress
towards spiritual, as well as material, expert
ness. Yoga is this quarternary process, and this
is the practical Vedanta or Religion. On this
must be erected man’s understanding of the true,
the beautiful and the good - the philosophies,
so to speak, of expression and existence in the
world of transitoriness. Theory should
naturally develop out of experience and
disciplined attainment, though it would be
unwise to think that there could be no
integrating activity at every stage. We can have
theories arising out of samipya, theories
arising out of sarupya, as well as philosophies
of salokya, and of course there would not be
anything but a reflection of the Sayujya that is
beyond commanicability to the lower levels of
thought.
Perhaps this would
explain Swami Vivekananda’s enthusiastic
statement about his ‘discovery’ - that Dvaita,
Visistadvaita and Advaita are but stages on the
path to the Ultimate, each one of them necessary
for comprehending that which is above or below,
to such a one, Truth which is One only will
comprehend and include all, and have no quarrel
with any one view of reality, dualistically, or
attributively or organistically or unitarily or
for that matter any other point of view of
thought or experience. The All-inclusiveness
of the Advaita, according to Swami Vivekananda,
is its merit, its claim for universal tolerance
and assimilation of meaning about the technique.
NOTE: It
can be seen that Swami Vivekananda at one stage
explains that all religions have the four
ingredients - a scripture or book, a myth or
myths, rite or rituals, and a philosophy or
intellectual presentation. At another place,
expounding Hinduism or rather Vedanta (Advaita)
he contents that Hinduism or Vedanta has none
of these. He denies creation and creator. He
speaks about the Absolute which always Is, and
never was not. There is the Nature always, or It
never has been for All is Brahman and Brahman
only. Nature, the souls, and God are all
appearance. This exposition goes contrary to the
first. The first conception makes Vedanta and
its Brahman all-inclusive. The second conception
makes Vedanta exclude all creation and
multiplicity or duality and so on. Further, at
one point, he criticises all those who hold a
twofold conception, a paramarthika and a
vyavaharika views of Reality, and holds that
there should be only One view of Reality and not
two.
If we accept the
discovery of Swami Vivekananda as the latter
view, and it would appear that this kind of
bringing the three Vedantas into one of gradual
ascent is realisation, there would yet be
difficulty in holding all of them to be
all-inclusive.
We can see that Swami
Vivekananda had to exemplify the spiritual
realisation or Experience of his Master, the
Paramahamsa, which was one of all-inclusive
Brahman, and yet he was intellectually aware of
the logical attempt at an all-exclusive Identity
or Oneness. We find that his greatness lay in
somehow assuming that the all-inclusive Reality
is also the all-exclusive one and the great
Mahavakya “Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma” is in fact
but another manner of expressing “Ekam eva
advitiyam” or “Ekarm Sat”. This would be correct
if it was assumed that these two are the two
statusses of Brahman; Brahman in His
Manifestation and Brahman in His Immanence or
Non-manifestation, or as Sri Ramanuja held that
the first is the Sthula cidacid visista Brahman
and the second is the suksma cidacid visista
Brahman, and also that Brahman and Isvara are
one and the same.
The transfomation of
Advaita from the Sankara view of Ekam Sat to the
Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma dons by Vivekananda is a
radical transformation which found its fuller
exposition in the Philosophies of Sri Aurobindo
and Dr. Radhakrishnan. The latter two recall
strongly Sri Ramanuja’s mediation efforts to
secure the truth of both the kinds of texts of
identity and difference, of non-creation and
creation. |
