BUDDHISM, THE FULFILMENT OF HINDUISM

BUDDHISM, THE FULFILMENT OF HINDUISM

26th September, 1893
I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am. If China, or Japan, or
Ceylon follow the teachings of the Great Master, India worships him as God
incarnate on earth. You have just now heard that I am going to criticise
Buddhism, but by that I wish you to understand only this. Far be it from me to
criticise him whom I worship as God incarnate on earth. But our views about
Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples. The relation
between Hinduism (by Hinduism, I mean the religion of the Vedas) and what is
called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and
Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shâkya Muni was a Hindu. The Jews
rejected Jesus Christ, nay, crucified him, and the Hindus have accepted Shâkya
Muni as God and worship him. But the real difference that we Hindus want to
show between modern Buddhism and what we should understand as the
teachings of Lord Buddha lies principally in this: Shâkya Muni came to preach
nothing new. He also, like Jesus, came to fulfil and not to destroy. Only, in the
case of Jesus, it was the old people, the Jews, who did not understand him,
while in the case of Buddha, it was his own followers who did not realise the
import of his teachings. As the Jew did not understand the fulfilment of the Old
Testament, so the Buddhist did not understand the fulfilment of the truths of the
Hindu religion. Again, I repeat, Shâkya Muni came not to destroy, but he was
the fulfilment, the logical conclusion, the logical development of the religion of
the Hindus.
The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the
spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks.
In that there is no caste. A man from the highest caste and a man from the
lowest may become a monk in India, and the two castes become equal. In
religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution. Shâkya Muni
himself was a monk, and it was his glory that he had the large-heartedness to
bring out the truths from the hidden Vedas and through them broadcast all over
the world. He was the first being in the world who brought missionarising into
practice — nay, he was the first to conceive the idea of proselytising.
The great glory of the Master lay in his wonderful sympathy for everybody,
especially for the ignorant and the poor. Some of his disciples were Brahmins.
When Buddha was teaching, Sanskrit was no more the spoken language in
India. It was then only in the books of the learned. Some of Buddha's Brahmins
disciples wanted to translate his teachings into Sanskrit, but he distinctly told
them, "I am for the poor, for the people; let me speak in the tongue of the
people." And so to this day the great bulk of his teachings are in the vernacular
of that day in India.
Whatever may be the position of philosophy, whatever may be the position of
metaphysics, so long as there is such a thing as death in the world, so long as
there is such a thing as weakness in the human heart, so long as there is a cry
going out of the heart of man in his very weakness, there shall be a faith in
God.
On the philosophic side the disciples of the Great Master dashed themselves
against the eternal rocks of the Vedas and could not crush them, and on the
other side they took away from the nation that eternal God to which every one,
man or woman, clings so fondly. And the result was that Buddhism had to die a
natural death in India. At the present day there is not one who calls oneself a
Buddhist in India, the land of its birth.
But at the same time, Brahminism lost something — that reforming zeal, that
wonderful sympathy and charity for everybody, that wonderful heaven which
Buddhism had brought to the masses and which had rendered Indian society so
great that a Greek historian who wrote about India of that time was led to say
that no Hindu was known to tell an untruth and no Hindu woman was known to
be unchaste.
Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism.
Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot
stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin
without the heart of the Buddhist. This separation between the Buddhists and
the Brahmins is the cause of the downfall of India. That is why India is
populated by three hundred millions of beggars, and that is why India has been
the slave of conquerors for the last thousand years. Let us then join the
wonderful intellect of the Brahmins with the heart, the noble soul, the
wonderful humanising power of the Great Master.