PAPER ON HINDUISM
Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893
Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time
prehistoric — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received
tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal
strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of
its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all
that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India
and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like
the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a
while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous,
and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in,
absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest
discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its
multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of
the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these
widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all
these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall
attempt to answer.
The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They
hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound
ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by
the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of
spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law
of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity
forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral,
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