A Sydney tribute to Vivekananda

The man-making message of a Hindu spiritual leader comes alive on his 150 birth anniversary

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.

Knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man “knows,” should, in strict psychological language, be what he “discovers” or “unveils”; what man “learns” is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.

Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple. Religion has no business to formulate social laws and insist on the difference between beings, because its aim and end is to obliterate all such fictions and monstrosities.

The Swami preached the ideal of a strength-giving and man-making religion; the concept that it was better to teach a man to fish, than to feed him fish of women and so-called low-castes. He saw Hinduism for what it was.

“No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism, and no religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor and the low in such a fashion as Hinduism,” he said. “It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics”.

What Swami Vivekananda wished for was to awaken the belief in oneself and be the master of one’s own fate. “The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself”.

BY JYoti sHAnkAR

it was a time when the first stirrings of independence had been asserted from 1857 against British rule, and Indian intellectuals were questioning religious practices steeped in meaningless rituals and social ills such as sati and casteism. This little precocious boy, fondly called Naren, had an enquiring mind. Born of affluent parents, he had the best education and was a keen student of Western philosophy and history. It was from an English professor that Naren first learned of Sri Ramakrishna and sought him out to get an answer that had plagued him for a long time.

“Have you seen God?” he asked. “Yes, I have. I see Him as clearly as I see you, only in a more intense sense,” was Sri Ramakrishna’s answer.

It was not something the rational Naren accepted immediately, but nevertheless he was drawn to this spiritual man.

More meetings and many questions later, Naren was well and truly on his journey to spirituality, and joined the monastic order. Before long, as he wandered throughout India, he became known as Swami Vivekananda, a name bestowed upon him by the Maharaja of Khetri. His teachings and influence spread far and wide over India and many Western countries.

At the young age of 39, however, Swami Vivekananda passed away and left behind a rich legacy of deep understanding of the true meaning of life and religion, inspiring many thinkers including Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland and JD Salinger.

To mark the 150th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s birth, various Hindu organisations such as the Hindu Council of Australia (HCA), Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and Friends of

India (FOI) have jointly formed the Vivekananda 150 Committee Australia.

The official launch of the year of celebrations was conducted on July 14 with an address by Swami Sunishtananda of the Vedanta Society, Sydney. He spoke about the role Swami Vivekananda played in revitalising Indian society. India was truly a civilisation at the pinnacle of achievement in Vedic times but had since fallen into degradation, a period also marked by successive invasions by other countries. Swami Vivekananda tried to understand the cause of this in his travels around India, and concluded that the real path to spirituality was not in mindless rituals, but serving mankind.

The Swami preached the ideal of a strength-giving and man-making religion; the concept that it was better to teach a man to fish, than to feed him fish. His teachings tried to synthesise the humanism and scientific enquiry of the Western world with the knowledge of Hindu scriptures, in the process creating a bridge across cultures for both Indians and people of the Western world, each being more enriched. Swami Vivekananda left behind four outstanding treatises on Hindu philosophy, Jnana-Yoga, Bhakti-Yoga, Karma-Yoga and Raja-Yoga.

At the first World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda’s speech that began with the words, “Sisters and brothers of America” was greeted with a rousing welcome. He was not an official delegate, and had managed to reach there in extraordinary circumstances. However, he soon became a star delegate with invitations to speak in many cities and countries. He recognised that all religions are paths to the same destination, and so no path is truer than another. It is up to each one of us to choose and follow the path that attracts us.

Swami Vivekananda not only wanted to awaken India to its own glory, but also take the advantage of the progress in technology and science, to better the lives of humans. He was saddened by the condition of the masses, treatment

A strong advocate of physical fitness and caring for the body as a temple, it is believed he once said that it was better to play football than to read the Gita! A recent book by renowned Bengali writer Shankar, The Monk as Man, lists insomnia, liver and kidney diseases, malaria, migraine, diabetes and heart ailments as a few of the health problems from which the Swami suffered. On 4 July 1902, he passed away. “This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive,” Swami Vivekananda said.

These profound teachings are everlasting and to spread the message to the wider world once again, playwright Alex Broun will be staging a play based on the extraordinary life of this extraordinary man called Swami Vivekananda. Entitled Oneness: Voice Without Form, the play will be staged on September 17 and 18 at the Sydney Opera House, and also at Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The play, with a cast of Indian and Australian actors, aims to bring the essence of the Swami to life and introduce him to people who do not know about him. The manmaking message of Vivekananda will hopefully continue to inspire many generations to come.