buddhism-the-fulfilment-of-hinduism.ftd

-- import: arpita-jaiswal.github.io/vivekanand/common-component as cc
-- import: arpita-jaiswal.github.io/vivekanand/lib

-- cc.page:

-- lib.h0: Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism (26 September 1893)

I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or Srilanka follow the teachings of the
Great Master, India worships him as God incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticise
Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to criticise him whom I worship as God
incarnate on earth. But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation
between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is called Buddhism at the present day is
nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shâkya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews
rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shâkya Muni as God and worship him. But the
real difference that we Hindus want to show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the teachings of
Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shâkya Muni came to preach nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and
not to destroy. Only, in the case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him, while in the
case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise the import of his teachings. As the Jew did not understand
the fulfilment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the truths of the Hindu
religion. Again, I repeat, Shâkya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the
logical development of the religion of the Hindus.

The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is
specially studied by the monks.

In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the lowest may become a monk in India, and the
two castes become equal. In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Shâkya Muni himself was
a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths from the hidden Vedas and
through them broadcast all over the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarising into practice
— nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytising.

The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody, especially for the ignorant and the poor.
Some of his disciples were Brahmins. When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in India.
It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of Buddha's Brahmins disciples wanted to translate his teachings
into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told them, "I am for the poor, for the people; let me speak in the tongue of the
people." And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular of that day in India.

Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of metaphysics, so long as there is such a
thing as death in the world, so long as there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a
cry going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in God.

On the philosophic side the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and
could not crush them, and on the other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which every one, man or
woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that Buddhism had to die a natural death in India. At the present day
there is not one who calls oneself a Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.

But at the same time, Brahminism lost something — that reforming zeal, that wonderful sympathy and charity for
everybody, that wonderful heaven which Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so
great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say that no Hindu was known to tell an
untruth and no Hindu woman was known to be unchaste.

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us,
that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of
the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why
India is populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been the slave of conquerors for
the last thousand years. Let us then join the wonderful intellect of the Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the
wonderful humanising power of the Great Master.