GE POLITICAL SCIENCE

ASSIGNMENT

PC Lalhruaizela
Id: 22BHST052
BA History Hons

Topic: The message of

Vivekananda to the West had
elements that he found unique to
the spiritual East. Explain the
varied facets of Vivekananda’s
thoughts.
 Swami Vivekananda played a significant role in introducing Hindu philosophy and spirituality to
the Western world. He was one of the first Indian spiritual leaders to travel to the West, where he gained
widespread recognition and respect for his teachings. In 1893, Vivekananda represented Hinduism at the
World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where he delivered a speech that captivated the audience and
introduced Hinduism to the Western world. In his speech, he emphasized the universality of religion and
the importance of respecting and learning from different faiths. Swami Vivekananda characterized the
West as excelling in material power, and knowledge of the material world, while the East excelled in
spiritual knowledge. This polarity of the East and West, or Orient and Occident, is expressed in various
ways in Vivekananda’s works. While Vivekananda never doubted that the West needed to learn
spiritually from India, he was less consistent in maintaining that Western knowledge could benefit the
East. We must also consider that the East from which Vivekananda brought his message to the West was
thus at least partly a Western construct.

According to Vivekananda Jesus Christ was from the Orient. He claimed that as an Asian he was
better placed to understand and interpret Jesus than Western Christians. He believed that the most
profound and noble ideas of Christianity were never understood in Europe because the ideas and images
used by the writers of the Bible were foreign to it. However, Vivekananda’s interest in Jesus is limited by
the fact that he treats him only as a specimen of a type that is represented by the Buddha, Confucius, and
Zoroaster. For this reason, he is not much concerned about his historicity, and while he claims that
Westerners fail to understand Jesus because they do not know his culture understand Jesus as an
Asiatic”.

One of Vivekananda’s assertions that is distinct from others was that he was able to establish a
relationship between India and Jesus which did not depend on the dubious identification of the lands
bounding the eastern Mediterranean with those between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean under the
name of Asia. This new relationship was based on Western attempts to account for similarities in the
teachings and biographies of Jesus and Buddha. In fact, from the 1850s, a theory had been current that
the Jewish ascetic Community of Essenes, known to have existed between the 2 nd century BCE and 2nd
century CE, had been influenced or shaped by Buddhism, and that Jesus had belonged to this community.
A particularly eccentric and ambitious version of this theory was put forward by an amateur scholar who
had served as an army officer in India, Arthur Lille. Swami Vivekananda went on to claim that Buddha was
a Vedantist and as Lille has claimed, Vivekananda claimed that Jesus is the Maitreya predicted by the
Buddha.

The place of Buddhism in Vivekananda’s discourse changed considerably in the course of his
career. Before the visit to the West, the Buddha is ‘my Ishta-my God’, a manifestation of God who, like
Jesus, has been misrepresented by his followers. He said that ‘Hinduism threw away Buddhism after
taking its sap’. In America where, where Buddhism was constantly confused with Hinduism, he declared:
‘I am not a Buddhist, as you have heard, and yet I am’. He presents a close analogy between the Buddha
and Jesus: each fulfilled the tradition he was born into, and each was misunderstood by his
contemporaries and his followers. However, he described Buddhism as ‘only a gigantic social movement’
which was no longer needed in India, or which failed because it did not understand the organic and
evolutionary nature of the history of religion. On his return to India, his condemnation of Buddhism
becomes more extreme. Nevertheless, in the last years of his life, Vivekananda once more embraces
Buddhism as a social-political revolution, and as a source of strength such as can be seen in Ashoka’s
empire and contemporary Japan.

Vivekananda’s ideas on the ethics of Vedanta can be traced to the German philosopher and
Vedanta specialist Paul Deussen. Vivekananda presented a very similar view to Deussen which is based
on Schopenhauer’s idea: ‘compassion, which is the basis of all genuine, that is unselfish, virtue’ arises
from a realization that one’s inner being is also that of all other beings. Vivekananda believed that ‘each
individual soul is a part and parcel of that Universal Soul, which is infinite. Therefore, in injuring his
neighbours, the individual actually injures himself. This is the basic metaphysical truth underlying all
ethical codes’. Paul Hecker claimed that as late as 1895 Vivekananda was unaware of the tat tvam asi
(you are that) ethic. This claim rests on a talk dated in 1895, in which Vivekanand disperses compassion:
‘In reality all pity is darkness, because whom to pity?’ This comes in context of a familiar theme of
Vivekananda’s ethical thinking: that the world, as a field of action, is only a ‘moral gymnasium’ in which
we do ourselves good through exercises in which we appear to help others, but in fact do not, either
because our moral efforts can produce no net of utilitarian gain, or because the beings which we set out
to help do not really exist as individuals. Vivekananda may have used ideas from Western contemporaries
in his interpretation of the Indian tradition, and even remodelled his interpretation during his Western
tours based on ideas he had recently picked up.

While Vivekananda was glad to claim evolution as an ancient Indian idea, he also
claimed that the Indian version was superior. He said: ‘The moderns have their evolution, and so have the
Yogis. But I think the Yogis' explanation is the better One. In speaking of the Yogis' version of evolution,
Vivekananda is thinking of rebirth, though he gives this idea his own slant: 'The basic idea is that we are
changing from one species to another, and that man is the highest species.' The ancient Indian version of
evolution was better, in his view, in that it was spiritual and not merely physical: "The Hindus, as
spiritualists, explain it by the conscious efforts of individual souls, and the materialistic school of
evolutionists, by hereditary physical transmission. It was morally superior to the Western view.
Vivekananda separates the Indian theory of evolution from the view called ‘social Darwinism’, according
to which competition was necessary for the progress of society.

Vivekananda wished to show that the modern and scientific theory of evolution was known in
ancient India: 'The idea of evolution was to be found in the Vedas long before the Christian era; but until
Darwin said it was true, it was regarded as a mere Hindu superstition'. But at the same time, he wished to
show that its objectionable aspects were not part of its ancient Indian version. These aspects had already
been repudiated by Thomas Huxley, in a lecture on 'Evolution and ethics' given in 1893 and published the
following year. Huxley denies that any ethical lesson can be derived from biological evolution, and points
out the fallacy of supposing that 'survival of the fittest' means survival of that which is better in any
absolute sense, rather than that which is best adapted to a particular environment. He then implies that
the struggle for existence and the consequent survival of the strong, which he calls here the cosmic
process, is not merely different from social progress but inimical to it. Huxley thus differentiates between
humankind, where ethical considerations are relevant, and the rest of nature, where they are not.
Vivekananda makes similar differentiation, though he goes on to give it a characteristically spiritual slant.
Another point made by Huxley is that progress in civilization brings an increase in pain as well as pleasure.
Vivekananda was of the same opinion.
 To conclude it is evident Vivekananda is no less as compared to great thinkers, in fact, his
philosophy and teachings are of great virtue and distinct from others. Overall, Vivekananda’s teaching
and ideas had a significant impact on the Western world and helped to promote greater understanding
and appreciation of Indian culture and philosophy. His message was a unique blend of Indian spirituality
and western philosophical thought, which helped to bridge the gap between eastern and western
cultures and inspire a new generation of spiritual seekers. His message has continued to inspire people
around the world and embrace spirituality to seek the inner self