United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Vivekananda honored and revered and followed, according to his interpretation of the message, Sri Ramakrishna, whom an increasing number of Hindus regard as the latest incarnation of Aum the Absolute. Not that the reader is to understand, that Sri Ramakrishna's message contradicted the essential character of the basic principles of orthodox Hinduism, as set down in the Vedas and the Upanashads.

But a convert cannot enter the fold by any simple ceremony like baptism. The community to which he belongs must adopt Hindu usages and then it will be recognized as a caste, at first of very low standing but in a few generations it may rise in the general esteem. A Hindu is bound to his religion by almost the same ties that bind him to his family. Hence the strength of Hinduism in India.

It would be folly to underrate the resistance which the reactionary elements in Hinduism are still capable of putting forth. I have shown how it can still be seen operating in extreme forms, and not upon Hindus alone, in the two pictures which I have drawn from Delhi and Calcutta. It meets one in a lesser degree at almost every turn all over India.

They were infant widows, condemned according to the laws of Hinduism by the premature death of their husbands to whom they had been wedded, but whom they had never known, to lifelong widowhood, and therefore in most cases to lifelong contempt and drudgery.

So that when they study their own faith they do so with these Christian prepossessions; and even when they defend their ancestral religion, they really defend not the indigenous product of India, such as is taught by the Hindu pandit and believed by the mass of the people, but Hinduism Christianized and clothed in the garb of the West and spoken in the accents of a Christian.

It is in fact one of the most powerful and interesting forms which Hinduism has assumed and it has even attracted the sympathetic interest of Christians. The fervour of its utterances, the appeals to God as a loving father, seem due to the temperament of the Tamils, since such sentiments do not find so clear an expression in other parts of India.

When this was composed, somewhere about the second or third century of our era, there was no little conflict between the different schools of philosophy; and its unknown author attempted to unite them all in a poem which should harmonize their contradictions and exalt the virtues of each, and at the same time reiterate all the best maxims of Hinduism.

The Christian seeks, as his ideal, the perfect blending of the ethical and the spiritual in his life; in Hinduism, faith has always been divorced from morality, and there has never seemed to be any incongruity, in their minds, in the act of ascribing true saintliness and spiritual excellence to those who are known daily to trample under foot every command of the Decalogue.

Nevertheless, at the very moment at which we were attempting to extend a wide and generous application of those principles to the domain of political rights and liberties, we were being confronted with unexpected forces of resistance which, even in Mahomedan Delhi, drew their chief inspiration from Hinduism.

Of Hinduism as a religious or ecclesiastical institution we had something to say in another chapter; of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made. And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement of all the women and the majority of the men who come within its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism.