1. Introductory INDIA is noted for her long cultural history unbroken for over five thousand years. During this impressively long career, she has experienced life from every conceivable angle, height, and depth. This has invested her cultural life with a rare quality of richness, variety, and maturity, as a result of the guidance it received from a broad Weltanschauung or world view and the sustenance it received from religion and the spiritual motive. 2. Origin of the Word 'Hindu' What is that religion or philosophy-for both are inextricably connected from the Indian point of view-which has comprehended and sustained every aspect of her culture and life? India herself has given no particular name to this religion or philosophy, though she has evolved and fostered in later ages, within her mother-heart, a large number of cults and creeds bearing specific names and forms. The terms 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism' were coined by nations outside India, especially the ancient Iranians, to designate the people and religion of the country (India) to the east of the river Sindhu or Indus. The term 'India' itself is a Greek and modern Western derivation from the older Iranian, term 'Hind.' Indian thinkers themselves called their religion by the general but significant term Sanatana Dharma, 'Eternal Religion.' 3. The Scientific Approach of the Upanisads We can study the emergence of the central features of this Sanatana Dharma in the Upanisads, or Vedanta, which are the closing portions of the Vedic literature. It is not a set creed or dogma that is set forth in these Upanisads; in them we are in the presence of that earnest passion and mood in the search for truth in nature, life, and experience, characteristic of all true science; and fearlessness pervades that search and the announcement of the insights gained. A dispassionate and intelligent study of the way ancient India raised this enduring structure of religion, as well as the nature and content of that religion, with its limitless and allcomprehending spirituality, can be a very rewarding intellectual and spiritual discipline to men and women today. The Vedic age of ancient Indian history was drawing to a close. The atmosphere was charged with a mood of questioning and inquiry; the spirit of freedom was in the air. The interest of the Indian mind was shifting from the study of the external world to the study of the internal world, from external physical nature to the inner nature of man. The previous study could not give conclusive answers to the pressing problems of thought-the nature of the universe, of man, and of his destiny. Perhaps, the study of man, it was felt, might help to unravel the mystery of existence; even otherwise, it offered a new and mysterious field of investigation. This phenomenon in the history of ancient India is paralleled by a similar interest in the subject of man and in his inner being evinced by thinkers in the modern age. The inner world constituted by the mind of man, with its facts of consciousness, the moral sense, the feeling of individuality, logical and rational powers, the states of waking, dream, and sleep, and a vague sense of deathlessness and survival, offered a challenge to the gifted thinkers of the day, and they accepted this challenge and wrestled with it individually and in groups with a persistence and objectivity rare in the history of philosophic thought. 4. The Vedanta: A Mighty Synthesis The impressive record of these endeavours and the truths and insights gained therefrom have been preserved for humanity in the immortal literature, the Upanisads, which form the closing portions of the vast and varied Vedic literature. Since they contain the philosophy, the quintessence of the Vedas, the Upanisads are also known as Vedanta. Vedanta is the product of a fearless quest of truth by minds which were 'undisturbed by the thought of there being a public to please or critics to appease', as Max Muller terms it (Three Lectures on Vedanta Philosophy, p. 39). And the search was thoroughly objective and detached; free from the moods and predilections of personality, thought forged ahead step by step under the stimulus of a passion for truth and in a perfect atmosphere of freedom: diverse facts of the world of internal nature were noted and classified; theories were advanced, challenged, subjected to verification, and finally accepted or rejected, unhampered by fear of authority or love of dogma; accepted beliefs were questioned, sometimes ridiculed, often rejected without a tear; and there emerged the beautiful edifice of thought known as Vedanta, impersonal in approach and therefore universal in spirit, whose rationality and spirituality have made it a synthesis of science and philosophy, religion and ethics, in one. This was the fruit of the intellectual and spiritual ferment which swept over a portion of India at that time-the regions comprised in modern eastern Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and western Bihar. The best minds of the age were involved in it, sages and kings, men and women, and youths.
The Upanisads give us a picture of a dynamic age; an arresting procession of students and teachers in quest of truth and wisdom; an impressive record of their dialogues in small groups and large assemblies; a flight now and then into the regions of the sublime caught in snatches of poetry, vigorous and graceful ; an array of beautiful metaphors and telling imageries serving as feathers to their arrows of thought in flight-these varied features of the Upanisads invest them with the beauty and charm of enduring literature and the loftiness and vigour of lived philosophy. The rsis or sages of the Upanisads discovered the laws that govern the innerworld, much as physical scientists discover the laws of external physical nature. The laws or the facts, which they seek to explain, are not 'created' by the scientists; they are as beginningless as the universe itself, but they were unknown to man till he gave himself a discipline in detachment, objectivity, and precision born of a passion for truth, which constitutes the scientific mind and temper. 6.Definition of the Word 'Veda' The scientist is but the 'discoverer' of the laws of nature; and knowledge of these laws enables him to control the forces and workings of nature. The same is the position which Indian thought accords to these sages or rsis who discovered the spiritual truths recorded in the Vedas, aided as they were by minds sharpened by intellectual, moral, and spiritual discipline. Says Swami Vivekananda in his address to the Chicago Parliament of Religions (Complete Works. Vol. I, pp. 4-5, 5th Edition) ('By the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons at different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so it is with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forget them. 'The discoverers of these laws are called ,rsis (sages), and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.') This rsihood, this capacity to discover spiritual truths, is not a national Indian monopoly; Indian thought holds that it is a universal phenomenon. In fact, Vedanta or Sanatana Dharma holds that it is this very effort and its culmination that constitutes religion; religion is anubhava, realization, and not a matter of mere belief or conformity, creed or dogma. 7. The Universality of Vedanta Vedanta has taught India to recognize in non-Indian sages like Christ or Lao Tse, St. Francis or Eckhart, authentic expressions of man's highest spiritual experience. One of the enduring fruits of Vedanta has been peace and harmony, tolerance and acceptance. This flows from its teaching of the non-duality of the ultimate Reality and the possibility of different approaches to It. The Rg-Veda gave eloquent expressior to this great idea in its famous line: Ekam Sat; vipra bahudha vadanti-"Truth is one; sages call it by various names.' This sentiment was taken up and amplified by every subsequent age of Indian thought-from Sri Krsna in the Gita, through Buddha and Asoka, Sankara and Akbar, down to Sri Ramakrishna in our own age-until it has become a most distinguishing mark of the Indian religious and cultural outlook.
8. Man's Innate Divinity Another important teaching of Vedanta is the innate Divinity of man. To the purified vision of the Vedantic sages, man appeared as Divinity struggling for expression through the psycho-physical organism. Purity, knowledge, and freedom are his essential nature. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, assures Jesus. The story of evolution is the story of the manifestation of this Divinity through suitable changes in the environment and in the organism. This evolution is thwarted or helped by adverse or favourable natural conditions, in the early stages, and by social and personal factors, in the later ones. The spirit in man, in the march of evolution, overcomes all obstacles to its free expression and achieves civilization, culturt, and spiritual enlightenment, stage by stage. Christs and Buddhas represent the final goal of this long travail of evolution. 9. Religion as Realization And that introduces us to the third significant idea of Vedanta that the goal of life is spiritual realization, the fullest manifestation of the Divine within, in life and conduct. Food and clothing, shelter and security, power and knowledge, politics and society, are not ends in themselves, says Vedanta. They are but the means while the end is the fullest development of man, the complete manifestation of the perfection already in him. The exhortation of Jesus expresses this idea and this hope: 'Be ye therefore perfect even as the Father which is in heaven is perfect.' Vedanta views the life of man in its wholeness. Its theme is Man-Man in search of fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness. Part of this search is in the external world; but the most significant part of this search lies in the internal world; the first gives social welfare through the applications of the physical and social sciences; the second gives spiritual freedom through the disciplines of morality and religion. There can be no conflict between the two-the secular as against the sacred-as they both refer only to different stages in the growth of the same individual. And Vedanta emphasizes this idea of growth, development, and realization as the central characteristic of life at all levels-physical, mental, moral, or spiritual. Its absence constitutes stagnation and death at any level. Hence its constant refrain, in the adaptation given to the words of the Katha Upanisad (1. 3.14) by Swami Vivekananda, is: 'Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.' 10. Post- Upanisadic Developments of Vedanta Vedanta arose out of the literature of the Upanisads. At a later age, it found its best and most dynamic expression as a comprehensive spirituality through Sri Krsna in the Gita. Still later, it found another significant development as the spirituality of renunciation and compassion in the great Buddha; twelve hundred years later still, appeared the brilliant philosopher Sankara in whom Vedanta achieved its most rational formulation with the widest intellectual sweep. He was followed, during the next eight centuries, by the great Acarya Ramanuja and a succession of large-hearted saints and reformers in whom Vedanta achieved a unique emotional enrichment through the infusion of the bhakti element and a long longed-for egalitarian stress through the flow of the God-ward passion as a man-ward love. And in our own time, in the last century, Vedanta found two dynamic representatives in Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, who gathered up all the past developments of this ancient thought to produce a sweeping synthesis of all human thought, by joining to it the dynamic affirmations of modern scientific and social thought as well. 11. Conclusion In spite of its hoary antiquity, Vedanta has been young and dynamic in every past epoch of history. But its most fascinating story is only just opening up, in the context of modern world conditions created by science and technology, in which the thinking humanity of the whole world has become its audience. Speech delivered at the hall of the Archaeological Society, Athens, under the auspices of the National Committee of the Government of Greece for Co-operation with the UNESCO, on 14 April 1961, during the Swami's four-month lecture tour of seventeen European countries ---VIVEKANANDA
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