I
am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or
Japan, or Ceylon 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 fulfill 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 realize the import of his teachings. As the Jew did not
understand the fulfillment of the Old Testament, so the Buddhist did
not understand the fulfillment of the truths of the Hindu religion.
Again, I repeat, Shâkya Muni came not to destroy, but he was the
fulfillment, 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.
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