WHITHER VEDANTA? WHITHER THE ASSERTIVE PREACHERS?

WHITHER VEDANTA? WHITHER THE ASSERTIVE PREACHERS?

The Vedanta is failing to make much of an impact on a violent world of ideological oppositions owing to the lack of prolific preachers well-grounded in spiritual realisation and powered by yoga that can meet the challenges of the times. Mere meek preaching from the pulpit will not do. The preachers of the glory of the Atman must be able to demonstrate that they are not bodies fearing death but are fearless souls who can plunge into battle against the forces of evil. If Sri Ramakrishna was a divine incarnation and could effect significant changes in mass consciousness, at least among the Hindus in India, it was due to his stupendous spiritual efforts that empowered him to do so. So must all those following him do. Else, they will prove to be patent failures as they indeed have thus far turned out to be with the sole exception of Swami Vivekananda.

India has been tormented for 1300 years, partitioned and bled to death, civilisation halted, ruptured, ravaged, well nigh destroyed in parts by barbarism emanating from the desert. For 500 years Euro-Christian colonisation has reduced her to unspeakable poverty and destitution from where she has not yet recovered. An estimated 80 million Hindus died at the edge of the sword of Islam, 20 million died of Britain-induced famines, 44 trillion dollars of wealth were looted from the land and a subcontinent dismembered along wicked religious lines, creating permanent enmity among its constituents. And today France is burning.

Christianity began in peace with Jesus Christ supposedly suffering death by crucifixion for preaching heretical truths and raising mass consciousness among the Jews against the tyrannical Roman regime, this in the perception of his enemies in religion and in the regime. The early Christians suffered 300 years of terrible persecution which martyred thousands before the conversion of Constantine empowered the Church to reverse roles. Then followed the tyranny of Christendom with its mass purging of local cultures and entire populations till Christianity had spread to every nook and corner of the globe, as stated, not by Christ-like piety but by force of arms.

The reaction followed in Arabia with the rise of Islam and its brutal conquests across Asia and Europe. Christianity and Islam were now in titanic tussle for supremacy in the world. And so the 150 year long Christian Crusades began to fight off Islamic Jihad.

The colonisation of the world by major European powers led to unprecedented horror with civilisations wiped off, countries depopulated of locals and permanently possessed by invading forces backed by the merchants and the missionaries, and the drainage of wealth to reduce colonies later quit, to destitution. And worst of all was the human carnage that it all involved. Asia, the seat of ancient civilisation, was enslaved till it finally broke off its fetters post the destruction of Europe in the Second World War.

To bring our attention now to slavery and racism, a hot topic of discussion these days. Slavery is an ancient institution with all ancient civilisations having had it as an integral component of their social systems in larger or smaller measure. The institution continued through the medieval age into the modern age and exists in places even today. Even scriptural texts contain commandments on the possession of slaves. The Qur'an, for instance, mandates that war booty may include both female and male slaves. So, to blame the Euro-Americans only for possessing slaves and practising racism is unjustified. Dreadful crimes of racism the whites have committed against the blacks, especially in Africa where millions have lost their lives to the white master's bullet, but millions in Africa had died earlier at the hands of invading Islamic forces as well who no less practised scripturally mandated slavery.

Christianity and Islam both have the supremacist attitude, each claiming to be the only way to spiritual salvation as each declares itself to be the only true path to Godhead. This has led to innumerable clashes, conflicts and wars over the centuries, conquest of infidel territory in the name of expansion of the religious domain with consequent oppression of the local infidel population, converting them or often wiping whole populations and cultures out of existence. The bloody history of conquest, enslavement and looting has left the world gory for the last 1700 years. White supremacy and racism has been the last of these lasting legacies of tribal barbarism in 'civilised' form. Africa and Asia have suffered and now the wheel of karma is turning the other way. Europe is inundated with Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa and this is causing serious cultural conflict, racial tension, in short, a civilisational war. France, with its easy immigration policy has now a 10% immigrant population and is finding it hard to contain the peroodic lawlessness arising out of it whose latest manifestation is the current conflagration in the country.

The French unrest is now spilling over to neighbouring Belgium and Switzerland. In France nearly 3000 cars have been gutted, hundreds of houses set on fire, shops and stores looted, and fire-rockets propelled by rioters as 45,000 police personnel struggle with them to control the ire of the crowd gone berserk at the behest of jihadis, leftists, rightists and God knows who else who may benefit from the toppling of the Emmanuel Macron government. Jihad in full scale is on in Europe in the garb of reaction to racism practised by the descendants of the erstwhile white colonial masters. But is this true? Or, what is the truth after all? What causes this phenomenal violence? Racism? Geopolitics? Islamic expansionist agenda using jihad?

While USA's imperial agenda through its eastward expansion of the NATO has precipitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the West's oppression of the Islamic countries of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and the lot has resulted in global jihad whose gory accounts we get to know everyday from mainstream and social media, there yet remains unresolved how the death of a single seventeen year old French boy by name Nahel and of Algerian Muslim immigrant descent, could have resulted in such a catastrophic national mayhem in France. The reaction seems disproportionately large and orchestrated by an organised international set-up that has used Nahel's death as the right ruse to precipitate such monstrosity of epic proportions. 

In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington had in his book 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order' outlined the prospective civilisational conflicts of the world which are now in evidence. The world is at its modern civilisational crossroads. Civilisation itself is in churn, a new age on the verge of being born out of the much mangled past. In which direction will it go and what will be the price that humanity will have to pay for this transition, for this emergence, especially since the world, divided as it is into several broad cultural zones, is in unequal developmental mode? And what role will the Vedanta play to help humanity emerge unto a higher understanding of things, unto an enlightened, integrated view of life and existence?

When the world burns, is it good enough to engage in ineffectual preaching, or must not such preaching be done zealously with the Voice of God that will kindle faith in drooping souls, stir the mass mind unto life-giving action and enlighten governments unto pursuing programmes of peace and universal welfare rather than narrow nationalistic agenda that run contrary to the interests of humanity as a whole? And will it be deemed dabbling in politics thereby? No, not at all. Having a genuine human concern and propagating vigorously the Vedanta to combat proliferating evil is humanity, not politics. So long as monks practise absolute chastity and live austere lives shorn of the ease of easy access to money, so long as the zeal to save burning humanity be uppermost in the thinking mind, so long as conviction in Swamiji's words bring forth fearlessness and the willingness to die while in harness to the rolling chariot of the Dharma, so long no petty politics of perverted human society will touch the preacher of the Vedanta. Like the lotus unstained by water he/she will float on the waters of philosophy and usher a new awakening in sleeping humanity. Unto such a day of combative reckoning and consequential regeneration let us unite the forces of good. 🕉 

Written by Sugata Bose