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Updated: June 25, 2025
If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more clearly and escape the confusion into which the slight and quick, the sentimental, hurl themselves.
This college is one of the strongest educational forces in North India. Returning to Hindu progress, we mark the work of such men as the Swami Vivekananda. It will be remembered that he represented India at our Chicago Parliament of Religions, where Joseph Cook challenged the priests of the Orient to answer Lady Macbeth's question, "Who shall cleanse this red right hand?"
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.
Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an incarnation of God Himself."
Writes the latest British apostle of Hinduism, for the leaders of reaction in India are a few English and Americans: "There is no longer a vague horrible something called sin: This has given place to a clearly defined state of ignorance or blindness of the will." I quote again also from Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893.
Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore have already studded their lectures with jewels from the Indian Scriptures. The Hindus themselves delight in their holy writings, but if these writings are to become known in the West, the grain must first be sifted. I will venture to add a few quotations:
Vivekananda sought to blend Christian philanthropy with the Vedantic philosophy. Identity with the Supreme is to be attained, not only by passive contemplation, but also by active unselfish service. But this truth was mixed with strange interpretations of Scripture. Jesus' declaration, "I and my Father are one," was made to mean, "Every man and woman is God."
And Vivekananda was quite willing himself to be worshiped. His fundamental error, indeed, was his lack of the sense of sin. He said to his audience in Chicago: "The Hindus refuse to call you sinners. Ye divinities on earth, sinners? It is a sin to call a man so. It is a standing libel on human nature."
But it should be understood that the philosophy taught by Vivekananda is not strictly orthodox Hinduism. It bears the same relation to the old religious systems of India that Unitarianism bears to orthodox Christianity such as we find in Catholicism, and its off-shoots.
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