PRANAM THAKUR
Let us today bow down in reverence to the greatest soul of the age, Sri Ramakrishna, whose 184th birth anniversary we are celebrating today. His words of wisdom, harmony and the spiritual well-being of all should inspire us to chart out individual paths of creative excellence and the exercise of our faculties in the service of all wherever men may be in wait to receive our adoration thus.
At a time of national reconstruction when the forces pitted against our motherland are many and malicious are their intents, when fissiparous forces tend to disintegrate our nation, it is bounden on our part to recall the words of Sri Ramakrishna and his protégé, Swami Vivekananda, and the latter's disciple at a distance, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and need to act upon them to help career our course to a strong and integrated India where every Indian is first an Indian and then anything else.
Sri Ramakrishna was incarnate purity, the embodiment of the spiritual tradition of India in all its diverse manifestation and the sanction and seal of the Divine through his life’s realisations. In a single lifetime of 50 years he he practised and perfected his realisations in all the major disciplines of the Sanatan Dharma and then ventured into alien religious territory to even master their essence and incorporate them into his universal spirit. He practised Islam and Christianity to be the first person of recorded history who has traversed the path of all the major religions of the world and thus to emerge as the highest human authority in vouching for the relative truth and relevance of all these spiritual sects as so many ways of approaching the Divine.
But his greatest work of tangible significance was the literal creation of Swami Vivekananda from the coarse clay of the lad Narendranath. This singular act of the peerless Paramahamsa has placed him on a pedestal which posterity can only cherish more and more as the history of our nation unfolds in all its cultural and spiritual greatness, for Vivekananda grew in stature as he matured into the voice of India as she addressed emerging humanity in this chaotic age of spiritual and material adjustment of forces. Every facet of Indian civilisation became incarnate in this leonine monk as he traversed America and Europe to plant the seeds of the Sanatan Dharma in its heart for its inevitable future fruition. And Vivekananda was the handiwork of Ramakrishna, the 'ashcharya vaktaa' fashioning the 'kushalasya labdha', to quote from that most poetic of the Upanishads, the Kathopanishad, the latter being the Swami's favourite among the Vedantic texts, one that he exhorted his disciples to commit to memory.
Ramakrishna's idea was to setting forth a few lads on to the task of transforming the spiritual consciousness of the world. This was a big idea, vast, universal in scope and one seemingly impossible of attainment in the then fallen condition of hoary India. And, yet, he attempted it and succeeded, for that was very mission on earth, the regeneration of spiritually fallen humanity and its uplift unto its native state of inherent divinity. At the end of his spiritual fulfilment he, thus, went forth with the catching of these young fishes in his master fisherman's net who in turn would draw other souls into their ambit and set sail the ship of the regenerating human spirit, set rolling what we in national parlance have dubbed the 'Wheel of the Dharma'.
When Ramakrishna passed away on 16 August, 1886, a band of penniless beggars set to transforming this mission of their Master into a reality. A thousand obstacles confronted them, a hundred hindrances obstructed their path but, led by Narendranath, the young eagles of Ramakrishna never lost sight of their goal of self-realisation and service to humanity as the basic building block for creation of a more enlightened order of emerging humanity, then mired in the morass of exploitative materialism on the one hand and colonial slavery on the other. The dollar ruled the roost and the pound sterling pounded the soul of man as these sterling stalwarts of the new age began giving shape to their Master's high ideals of renunciation of lust and greed as the basic formulation for the creation of spiritual culture in a dying world.
But the master spirit among them was the anointed of God and the eagle eye of Ramakrishna had recognised it on first sight at Surendranath Mitra's house long back and fashioned out of him the leader of man, the world teacher who would give dharma to the world and set its direction right for ages to come. He, Narendranath, was now in a ferment as he explored the depths of the scriptures, his Master's message and the motherland's vast body which he traversed through and through, meeting the prince and the pariah, the aristocrat and the commoner, the saint and the sinner, and as he plumbed the depths of his own soul to seek solutions to the anomalies of the times. His was a voyage across uncharted terrain, the discovery of the soul of India.
Vivekananda set forth across India. India, then in colonial chains, a subject nation, despised and despoiled by the white races of predatory intent, attributes and actions, was lying at the ebb-tide of her civilisation. The high seas carried a current but of a reverse order, post the peerless Paramahamsa's appearance, and this protege of the Master was the conduit of this regenerating flow that was destined to reaffirm the spiritual civilisation of hoary India once more in this modern world of forgotten fortunes for most of humanity. The young monk, freshly ordained into the absolute vows of monasticism, bore deep into the mind of ancient India to find solutions for the despicable physical conditions to which his countrymen were subjected following a thousand year slavery to alien powers, the last of whom was the most diabolical whose depredation left India starving and sterile. India was dying and here was this young man, charged by his spiritual preceptor to save her, desperately seeking solutions to resuscitate his mauled and maligned motherland. Revolution was the cry that went out of the bleeding heart of this tormented soul as he toured the length and the breadth of his motherland to ignite the fire of hope in his suffering people, a spark which he hoped he would in his lifetime get to see raging into revolutionary conflagration.
In palaces he dwelt and he slept in the huts of cobblers but everywhere the Swami found dead India, dying India with neither pulse nor vigour in the veins to rise up in rebellion against the ruthless ruffians from across the seas, the rogues who vaunted in the name of their religion and in that of their self-proclaimed superior culture that they had come to lift savage India into modernity and civilisation. The Swami bled as he saw India's fallen state and resolved to raise an army of revolutionaries of the spirit to strike off not only this colonial consequence but to usher in on earth a new civilisation of the Spirit that would help manifest the inherent divinity of all.
But when the Swami -- as yet a nameless mendicant monk -- approached the kings of the princely states of the day, he found that they had either sold their allegiance to the British or were too timid to effectively organise revolution against the British. Remember that the British in the 1890s were not yet as firmly entrenched as they later became at the victorious conclusion of the First World War when they had effectively liquidated all armed resistance to their ruinous rule which has been mischievously termed the Raj, for their was no element of the dharma that is mandatory and essentially characteristic in 'Rajdharma'. The Swami, youthful and hopeful as he was, after much harbouring such revolutionary hopes and instead now resolved to train up a generation of Indians who would carry out the mantle of this future mission of India's liberation from colonial yoke. And forget not that this was the charge his spiritual master had laid on his shoulders when he had exhorted the young man to 'look after India' before passed into peace in the autumn of 1886.
Vivekananda in his wanderjahre came across the plight of India at first hand and decided to travel to the West to seek financial support to ameliorate the condition of his people. But that turned out to be the epic journey of the first missionary from India to preach the dharma since the days of the Buddha when missionaries had spread out from mainland India throughout the then known world to fertilise the nations of the world with the spirituality of India. Thus, he appeared in the Chicago Parliament of religions in 1893 and delivered what has now been widely recognised as a moment in history when the old met the new, when science and religion shook hands, when the Orient met its Occidental sibling after millenia of separation, when reason and realisation complemented each other and when hoary India came into communion with the emerging modern world to give it direction in its flight to fresher horizons. What transpired at the Art Institute of Chicago on 11 September, 1893 is for posterity to fully apprehend and for generations from now to fully appreciate and revitalise their lives by.
There Vivekananda stood on the podium and preached the message of eternal India in a language with the most modern Occidental man could understand. There he proclaimed with trumpet voice the inherent divinity of immortal man. There he uttered the ancient mantras of the Vedas in a voice that bespoke of a Spirit and not a mortal messenger of Truth, a prophet of the age who had appeared from some luminous quarter of Reality to deliver the eternal message of undying man. There Vivekananda planted a seed in the heart of America, to quote Marie Louise Burke, a seed that is to fructify henceforth and afforest this desert world with the finest flora and fauna and usher in a new civilisation.
When Vivekananda, after his three and a half year sojourn in the West, returned home, the situation had become more ripe for revolutionary activity as the less moderate side of the Congress led by Tilak geared up for more confrontational politics against the Raj in their bid to unseat it from power over due course. Vivekananda returned to a hero's welcome accompanied by some of his western disciples and was soon joined in by the fiery Irishwoman, Miss Margaret Elizabeth Noble, indelibly linked to India's destiny since then as the unforgettable Sister Nivedita.
Maharashtra was rife with the fiery messages of Tilak in his newspaper articles that were spitting venom against British occupation of India and quickening the revolutionary spirit there which culminated in the Chapekar brothers seeking violent retribution against the British officers who had indulged in the dishonour of Indian households during the outbreak of plague. Tilak was imprisoned but the fire he had lit was raging and spreading to other parts of India, foremost of which was the Bengal Presidency. Aurobindo Ghosh brought the lamp of revolution to Bengal and the period of revolutionary terrorism had begun in Bengal.
Earlier in 1892 Swamiji in his wanderjahre had met Bal Gangadhar Tilak and had even received his hospitality at his residence in Pune. But Swamiji was then an unknown monk and Tilak had, it seems, providentially met him for some inscrutable purpose of independence of the Indian spirit that was brewing up in the distillery of Time. Later, when Swamiji had acquired worldwide fame in his western sojourn, Tilak remembered his nameless guest as the one who shone now with his midday lustre as the spiritual sun of the world. Tilak was overwhelmed with the advent of the Swami on the national stage and went to meet him thereafter at Belur Math.
It was one afternoon and Swamiji was resting in his room in Belur Math when the attendant monk (Swami Nishchayananda) came and informed Swamiji that a certain Mr. Tilak was waiting to see him. Swamiji forthwith had him ushered into his room and entered into animated discussion about national affairs with the veteran Maharashtrian leader. After refreshments had been served Swamiji escorted Tilak through the lawns of Belur Math and jokingly asked him to come over to Bengal to fire up like the people with revolutionary fervour just as he had dome to the Maharashtrians while he (Swamiji) himself would exchange places with him (Tilak) in Bombay to preach the principles of the Dharma. Later, however, the discussion grew serious as Swamiji started waving his arms and said to Tilak in an animated manner, 'What India needs today is a bomb."
These were significant words and reflective of what the ideas of the cyclonic monk were regarding India's struggle for political independence despite the pretensions of the votaries for non-violence among his latter-day followers who try to paint Vivekananda as a repudiator of armed resistance and an advocate of Gandhian passive methods. This they do to please the authorities that be there at the help of political affairs in the country and out of considerable cowardice as well, an aberration of the renunciate which Vivekananda had sought among the youth of India despite his declaration that the organisation named after his Master would, to all intents and purposes, shun politics of all sorts.
Written by Sugata Bose
Let us today bow down in reverence to the greatest soul of the age, Sri Ramakrishna, whose 184th birth anniversary we are celebrating today. His words of wisdom, harmony and the spiritual well-being of all should inspire us to chart out individual paths of creative excellence and the exercise of our faculties in the service of all wherever men may be in wait to receive our adoration thus.
At a time of national reconstruction when the forces pitted against our motherland are many and malicious are their intents, when fissiparous forces tend to disintegrate our nation, it is bounden on our part to recall the words of Sri Ramakrishna and his protégé, Swami Vivekananda, and the latter's disciple at a distance, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and need to act upon them to help career our course to a strong and integrated India where every Indian is first an Indian and then anything else.
Sri Ramakrishna was incarnate purity, the embodiment of the spiritual tradition of India in all its diverse manifestation and the sanction and seal of the Divine through his life’s realisations. In a single lifetime of 50 years he he practised and perfected his realisations in all the major disciplines of the Sanatan Dharma and then ventured into alien religious territory to even master their essence and incorporate them into his universal spirit. He practised Islam and Christianity to be the first person of recorded history who has traversed the path of all the major religions of the world and thus to emerge as the highest human authority in vouching for the relative truth and relevance of all these spiritual sects as so many ways of approaching the Divine.
But his greatest work of tangible significance was the literal creation of Swami Vivekananda from the coarse clay of the lad Narendranath. This singular act of the peerless Paramahamsa has placed him on a pedestal which posterity can only cherish more and more as the history of our nation unfolds in all its cultural and spiritual greatness, for Vivekananda grew in stature as he matured into the voice of India as she addressed emerging humanity in this chaotic age of spiritual and material adjustment of forces. Every facet of Indian civilisation became incarnate in this leonine monk as he traversed America and Europe to plant the seeds of the Sanatan Dharma in its heart for its inevitable future fruition. And Vivekananda was the handiwork of Ramakrishna, the 'ashcharya vaktaa' fashioning the 'kushalasya labdha', to quote from that most poetic of the Upanishads, the Kathopanishad, the latter being the Swami's favourite among the Vedantic texts, one that he exhorted his disciples to commit to memory.
Ramakrishna's idea was to setting forth a few lads on to the task of transforming the spiritual consciousness of the world. This was a big idea, vast, universal in scope and one seemingly impossible of attainment in the then fallen condition of hoary India. And, yet, he attempted it and succeeded, for that was very mission on earth, the regeneration of spiritually fallen humanity and its uplift unto its native state of inherent divinity. At the end of his spiritual fulfilment he, thus, went forth with the catching of these young fishes in his master fisherman's net who in turn would draw other souls into their ambit and set sail the ship of the regenerating human spirit, set rolling what we in national parlance have dubbed the 'Wheel of the Dharma'.
When Ramakrishna passed away on 16 August, 1886, a band of penniless beggars set to transforming this mission of their Master into a reality. A thousand obstacles confronted them, a hundred hindrances obstructed their path but, led by Narendranath, the young eagles of Ramakrishna never lost sight of their goal of self-realisation and service to humanity as the basic building block for creation of a more enlightened order of emerging humanity, then mired in the morass of exploitative materialism on the one hand and colonial slavery on the other. The dollar ruled the roost and the pound sterling pounded the soul of man as these sterling stalwarts of the new age began giving shape to their Master's high ideals of renunciation of lust and greed as the basic formulation for the creation of spiritual culture in a dying world.
But the master spirit among them was the anointed of God and the eagle eye of Ramakrishna had recognised it on first sight at Surendranath Mitra's house long back and fashioned out of him the leader of man, the world teacher who would give dharma to the world and set its direction right for ages to come. He, Narendranath, was now in a ferment as he explored the depths of the scriptures, his Master's message and the motherland's vast body which he traversed through and through, meeting the prince and the pariah, the aristocrat and the commoner, the saint and the sinner, and as he plumbed the depths of his own soul to seek solutions to the anomalies of the times. His was a voyage across uncharted terrain, the discovery of the soul of India.
Vivekananda set forth across India. India, then in colonial chains, a subject nation, despised and despoiled by the white races of predatory intent, attributes and actions, was lying at the ebb-tide of her civilisation. The high seas carried a current but of a reverse order, post the peerless Paramahamsa's appearance, and this protege of the Master was the conduit of this regenerating flow that was destined to reaffirm the spiritual civilisation of hoary India once more in this modern world of forgotten fortunes for most of humanity. The young monk, freshly ordained into the absolute vows of monasticism, bore deep into the mind of ancient India to find solutions for the despicable physical conditions to which his countrymen were subjected following a thousand year slavery to alien powers, the last of whom was the most diabolical whose depredation left India starving and sterile. India was dying and here was this young man, charged by his spiritual preceptor to save her, desperately seeking solutions to resuscitate his mauled and maligned motherland. Revolution was the cry that went out of the bleeding heart of this tormented soul as he toured the length and the breadth of his motherland to ignite the fire of hope in his suffering people, a spark which he hoped he would in his lifetime get to see raging into revolutionary conflagration.
In palaces he dwelt and he slept in the huts of cobblers but everywhere the Swami found dead India, dying India with neither pulse nor vigour in the veins to rise up in rebellion against the ruthless ruffians from across the seas, the rogues who vaunted in the name of their religion and in that of their self-proclaimed superior culture that they had come to lift savage India into modernity and civilisation. The Swami bled as he saw India's fallen state and resolved to raise an army of revolutionaries of the spirit to strike off not only this colonial consequence but to usher in on earth a new civilisation of the Spirit that would help manifest the inherent divinity of all.
But when the Swami -- as yet a nameless mendicant monk -- approached the kings of the princely states of the day, he found that they had either sold their allegiance to the British or were too timid to effectively organise revolution against the British. Remember that the British in the 1890s were not yet as firmly entrenched as they later became at the victorious conclusion of the First World War when they had effectively liquidated all armed resistance to their ruinous rule which has been mischievously termed the Raj, for their was no element of the dharma that is mandatory and essentially characteristic in 'Rajdharma'. The Swami, youthful and hopeful as he was, after much harbouring such revolutionary hopes and instead now resolved to train up a generation of Indians who would carry out the mantle of this future mission of India's liberation from colonial yoke. And forget not that this was the charge his spiritual master had laid on his shoulders when he had exhorted the young man to 'look after India' before passed into peace in the autumn of 1886.
Vivekananda in his wanderjahre came across the plight of India at first hand and decided to travel to the West to seek financial support to ameliorate the condition of his people. But that turned out to be the epic journey of the first missionary from India to preach the dharma since the days of the Buddha when missionaries had spread out from mainland India throughout the then known world to fertilise the nations of the world with the spirituality of India. Thus, he appeared in the Chicago Parliament of religions in 1893 and delivered what has now been widely recognised as a moment in history when the old met the new, when science and religion shook hands, when the Orient met its Occidental sibling after millenia of separation, when reason and realisation complemented each other and when hoary India came into communion with the emerging modern world to give it direction in its flight to fresher horizons. What transpired at the Art Institute of Chicago on 11 September, 1893 is for posterity to fully apprehend and for generations from now to fully appreciate and revitalise their lives by.
There Vivekananda stood on the podium and preached the message of eternal India in a language with the most modern Occidental man could understand. There he proclaimed with trumpet voice the inherent divinity of immortal man. There he uttered the ancient mantras of the Vedas in a voice that bespoke of a Spirit and not a mortal messenger of Truth, a prophet of the age who had appeared from some luminous quarter of Reality to deliver the eternal message of undying man. There Vivekananda planted a seed in the heart of America, to quote Marie Louise Burke, a seed that is to fructify henceforth and afforest this desert world with the finest flora and fauna and usher in a new civilisation.
When Vivekananda, after his three and a half year sojourn in the West, returned home, the situation had become more ripe for revolutionary activity as the less moderate side of the Congress led by Tilak geared up for more confrontational politics against the Raj in their bid to unseat it from power over due course. Vivekananda returned to a hero's welcome accompanied by some of his western disciples and was soon joined in by the fiery Irishwoman, Miss Margaret Elizabeth Noble, indelibly linked to India's destiny since then as the unforgettable Sister Nivedita.
Maharashtra was rife with the fiery messages of Tilak in his newspaper articles that were spitting venom against British occupation of India and quickening the revolutionary spirit there which culminated in the Chapekar brothers seeking violent retribution against the British officers who had indulged in the dishonour of Indian households during the outbreak of plague. Tilak was imprisoned but the fire he had lit was raging and spreading to other parts of India, foremost of which was the Bengal Presidency. Aurobindo Ghosh brought the lamp of revolution to Bengal and the period of revolutionary terrorism had begun in Bengal.
Earlier in 1892 Swamiji in his wanderjahre had met Bal Gangadhar Tilak and had even received his hospitality at his residence in Pune. But Swamiji was then an unknown monk and Tilak had, it seems, providentially met him for some inscrutable purpose of independence of the Indian spirit that was brewing up in the distillery of Time. Later, when Swamiji had acquired worldwide fame in his western sojourn, Tilak remembered his nameless guest as the one who shone now with his midday lustre as the spiritual sun of the world. Tilak was overwhelmed with the advent of the Swami on the national stage and went to meet him thereafter at Belur Math.
It was one afternoon and Swamiji was resting in his room in Belur Math when the attendant monk (Swami Nishchayananda) came and informed Swamiji that a certain Mr. Tilak was waiting to see him. Swamiji forthwith had him ushered into his room and entered into animated discussion about national affairs with the veteran Maharashtrian leader. After refreshments had been served Swamiji escorted Tilak through the lawns of Belur Math and jokingly asked him to come over to Bengal to fire up like the people with revolutionary fervour just as he had dome to the Maharashtrians while he (Swamiji) himself would exchange places with him (Tilak) in Bombay to preach the principles of the Dharma. Later, however, the discussion grew serious as Swamiji started waving his arms and said to Tilak in an animated manner, 'What India needs today is a bomb."
These were significant words and reflective of what the ideas of the cyclonic monk were regarding India's struggle for political independence despite the pretensions of the votaries for non-violence among his latter-day followers who try to paint Vivekananda as a repudiator of armed resistance and an advocate of Gandhian passive methods. This they do to please the authorities that be there at the help of political affairs in the country and out of considerable cowardice as well, an aberration of the renunciate which Vivekananda had sought among the youth of India despite his declaration that the organisation named after his Master would, to all intents and purposes, shun politics of all sorts.
Written by Sugata Bose
Sugata Bose
It is an expanding article. Please keep reading the updated and enlarged version each time.
It is an expanding article. Please keep reading the updated and enlarged version each time.
Sugata Bose Please read the ever enlarging article that is in the brewing in the distillery of my mind and is seeking fresher expression by the hour.
Please read the ever enlarging article that is in the brewing in the distillery of my mind and is seeking fresher expression by the hour.
Sugata Bose Saumy Mishra Read Vivekananda, the entire set of his Complete Works, cover to cover, to begin with. Then fresh tips will follow. Tolstoy had famously said, "Vivekananda's English is perfect." So, you see, there is a point in this pointer by me towards the adoption of a measure effective enough to improving your adequately good English further and I sincerely hope you will heed it. In it will lie not only improvement of diction but addiction to the Swami's message as well which in turn will conduce to mighty spiritual good, the eventual purpose of your terrestrial sojourn.
Sugata Bose Thank you, Suresh Jhaji, for reading through this considerably long essay that is even now lengthening unto its natural end which shall come, hopefully when the revolutionary movement and its inspirational figure in Ramakrishna-Vivekananda has been duly covered. But that is yet a long way from fruition.
No comments:
Post a Comment