Swami Vivekananda on Buddhism – II

Continues the swamiji, “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.” And the funny thing is, neither the Hindus could have had the slightest clue that this was so, nor the Shakya Muni himself! It goes to the credit of the swamiji to see the relationships that not only no one could see, but simply didn’t exist! We can say Newton is the logical conclusion, the fulfillment, of Aristotle, that though he destroyed the authority of Aristotle that had lasted for nearly 2000 years, he simply continued the same spirit of scientific theorizing and investigation, and also the truth is that Newton existed because Aristotle existed before him. Whereas in the case of the Buddha, by all sources, his discovery of certain truths is quite an independent achievement, and he would have done exactly what he had done had there been no widespread Vedic religion at all. The thing that came to destroy the Vedic religion and yet is a logical fulfillment of it in some ways is Vedanta (Veda + anta = the ending of Vedas), or the powerful mystical doctrine of the Upanishads. One cannot say for sure whether Upanishads existed by the time of the Buddha, or how many of the approximately 108 of them had been around. But I don't think there is one single direct or indirect reference in vast Buddhist literature to Upanishads or the ultimate truth, the Brahman, of the Upanishads. Now consider the fact that the New Testament is littered with references to the Old, and one can realize how asinine the ‘ratio’cination of Vivekananda is, Judaism : Jesus:: Hinduism: Buddha.

Next para: “The religion of the Hindus is divided into two parts: the ceremonial and the spiritual. The spiritual portion is specially studied by the monks.” This is again such trash. Monks is an invention of the Buddha, in the Indian context. I don’t think celibate sannyasins, as the hindu monks are called, existed in the ages of Rishis and Munis. There were gurukulas, not monasteries. Though there is a reference to a beggar sannyasin, in the legend of Buddha’s awakening, this whole story of Buddha discovering sorrow for the first time in his life when he was 29 is obviously a silly fabrication and can be dismissed. What Vivekananda says applies to his own time, not to Buddha’s time.

“In that [spiritual portion] 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.” This is more prattling. There is a very famous story of Upanishads where the guru asks a young lad seeking admission into the gurukula, to which caste he belongs to and the boy says he doesn’t know that since he doesn’t know his father. Apparently the guru takes in only Brahmins and Kshatriyas as is the norm, and he becomes happy as he is of the opinion that only Brahmins can be so honest as this boy and so grants him admission. So gurukulas of the ancient times were only meant for the higher castes, and they were the only places where some kind of spiritual or scientific or other possibly useful things were taught. Vivekananda is so dumb that he cannot see such a simple thing: if there is no caste in spiritual portion, the highest caste and the lowest caste don’t become equal, they become non-existent. Equality could have happened if some other uniformitarian caste were imposed in the place of old castes. Swami asserts boldly that “In religion there is on caste,” but two sentences earlier he was saying the Hindu religion consists of the ceremonial portion, which is obviously founded on the caste distinction! Just shoot off anything that comes to your mouth, never hesitate, never even think – that seems to be style of Vivekananda! It is strange that he himself comes from the lower classes, and still has no courage to denounce the utterly stupid and cruel caste system. He says, caste is simply a social institution, as if it has meaning or purpose or any kind of sense even in the social sense. Besides, in Indiam society the whole social system was based on religion, you cannot separate them!

“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.” A monk is a member of a religious order, you don’t call the founder of a religion order a monk! Even in hindu sense, a sannyasin is one who has renounced in order achieve enlightenment, and the one who has achieved is usually no more called a sannyasin. It seems to me that Vivekananda could have had a bout of stage fear when he was speaking to the international audience, and forgot his lines, and went on prattling whatever came into his mind for the few minutes allotted to him!

By the way, why were the Vedas hidden, what are these hidden Vedas? I don’t think anyone knows what Vivekanda meant by “hidden Vedas” except himself. He himself must have searched for them for long years, the hidden Vedas of India, but if only he spent that time studying some stuff in some library, he could have at least managed to speak out something meaningful and not come out so stupidly ignorant and dumb.

But anyway, now the drift of Vivekananda’s speech is clear, there are obviously some great spiritual books known to no one, except for Buddha and Vivekananda and perhaps some other luminaries like that, and all Buddha did was copy everything from these book and propagate it as his own religion! As I said, Vivekananda must have tried it too, to find some new hidden Vedas, so that he could start off his own religion, but failing which he had to be content to travel around the world and give ridiculously dumbo speeches like this. Mercifully though, many of his other speeches are nowhere near as dumb as this, at least I hope! Anyways, where does ‘large-heartedness’ come from: “his glory that he had the large-heartedness to bring out the truths”? Maybe these truths were languishing and suffering in their secrecy and loneliness, and Buddha went and liberated them and set them free all over the world, indeed a glorious thing to do!

Vivekananda goes on bumbling like this for another para, observing that Buddhist texts were written in the vernacular of that age and not the literary Sanskrit, how great, how noble! True, but he seems to be unaware that entire Mahayana corpus is in Sanskrit language!

And now he takes leave of senses completely and starts raving without restraint! “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.” But Buddha’s whole genius was to establish a religion which has no God in it, technically speaking there is not even soul either in Buddhism. Only Vivekananda should know what he is so vehemently raving about! Is he saying, philosophies do not matter, metaphysics does not matter, but only puerile superstitious dogmatic belief in some imaginary God? And funnily, Vivekananda’s own brand of spirituality doesn’t have any God! The Brahman of the Upanishads is simply an abstract principle, he (or actually ‘It’) wouldn’t care whether there is weakness in human heart or people are dying about all over the place!

But now listen to this: “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.” The Vedas are not rocks, they are simply mud, except for some interesting verses scattered here and there. Buddhist disciples or any one with any sense, except historians and research scholars, wouldn’t want to put their foot in it. What Vivekananda is saying is this: Buddha actually preached a religion with a wonderful and merciful God, he brought out all the truths of the hidden Vedas, however after his death, his disciples plotted the greatest evil conspiracy in the history of the world, wiped out all the Vedic-sounding teaching of the original Buddha, and instead planted their own version of diabolical nonsense and set about spreading it as the actual Buddhism. So the Buddhism that the world knows today and the Buddha that the world knows today are just results of evil machinations of godless minds! Now just imagine, even Hinduism as everyone knows it doesn’t have and especially in those days didn’t have any “eternal God.” Hinduism is a notoriously pantheistic and mythology-based religion. There are Rama, Krishna, Hanuman, Yanesh, Shiva, Vishnu and so many gods and demigods, but there is no God, the creator of this universe! In fact the creator god, Brahma (not to be confused with Brahman of Vedanta) is treated as a buffoon in the mythologies, and there is not a temple built to him anywhere, except for one in some remote corner, I believe.

Vivekananda goes on prattling for two more paragraphs, but let me not go into it lest people who are reading this or I myself may get nauseated and vomit on the computer! Bravo Vivekananda, what a soul-stirring speech! Claps everybody!

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PS: If the original gurus are this idiotic, we can imagine how much more stupid their disciples will be! I've received a comment for this post which I paste here in full, followed by my response to it:

I found your critique of SV and Buddhism interesting. But you have to missed the following paragraph.

"To many the path becomes easier if they believe in God. But the life of Buddha shows that even a man who does not believe in God, has no metaphysics, belongs to no sect, and does not go to any church, or temple, and is a confessed materialist, even he can attain to the highest. We have no right to judge him. I wish I had one infinitesimal part of Buddha's heart. Buddha may or may not have believed in God; that does not matter to me. He reached the same state of perfection to which others come by Bhakti — love of God — Yoga, or Jnâna. Perfection does not come from belief or faith. Talk does not count for anything. Parrots can do that. Perfection comes through the disinterested performance of action."

The gist of SV's message is that the highest spiritual achievement through Vedantic philosophy or Buddhism is the same. The conceptualization of being one with God or attaining Nirvana is the same state. Therein lies his true message.

Sir Anonymous, thanks for your comment. But I don't know whether you are a human being or a mechanical pre-programmed robot (oh robots too can be intelligent and self-learning, but you seem to be a more primitive kind). I have analyzed line-by-line and explained to you "the gist of SV's message" in two long essays, which you have presumably read and apparently found 'interesting', but unfortunately couldn't digest one bit! There you go muttering like a parrot about some supposed profound mystic essence of SV's message, or rather 'true' message. You seem to be truly and profoundly asleep, but by any chance if you are awake a little, kindly and patiently read on my analysis of this missed-out passage.

I think I deliberately left this passage out because such stupidity as made manifest in it is a pure abomination. Okay here goes my line-by-line. "To many the path becomes easier if they believe in God." Blabber on, Vivekananda! Any stupid idiot can and every stupid idiot does believe in God, take all those heaps of orthodox Hindus and fundamentalist Christians, for example, or even the tribal cultures who believe in Voodoo god. Believing in God or god is not the path, it is the closing of all paths, shutting down the little mind one has and going into permanent coma. No one achieves by passively taking on any stupid belief in God or in any deity from parents or gurus, but by actively seeking, searching, enquiring and experiencing, like Buddha did.

"But the life of Buddha shows that even a man who does not believe in God, has no metaphysics, belongs to no sect, and does not go to any church, or temple, and is a confessed materialist, even he can attain to the highest. We have no right to judge him." Now stupid Vivekananda gets all so condescending, it is so distasteful. 'Even a man who...' - oh god! 'We have no right to judge him' - aha! Not one bit of shame at all, freaking moron, but right you are this time, SV, especially you have no right to judge Buddha simply because you seem to have lost all ability to think and judge anything at all in any rational sense. Buddha has no metaphysics? Buddha is a confessed materialist? I am appalled, aghast, petrified at such totally lunatic statements.

It is just that Buddha was not prone to speak to lay persons and novices about those eleven or twelve forbidden metaphysical questions, concerning whether God exists and so on, simply because he wanted to shift the emphasis to practical workable things, instead of getting people addicted to speculation and blind belief systems. But Buddhism has tons of metaphysics alright, perhaps more than any other religion, the central concepts of incarnation and the wheel of Samsar in buddhist philosophy, and in fact the whole of Mahayana is metaphysics, and all of which evolved right from the time of Buddha and his immediate disciples. Zen, in fact, evolved as an extreme rebellion against copious metaphysicalizing of Mahayana. Zen doesn't have any kind of philosophy or world-view, it is so funny, just to think that however did they manage! As for Buddha, he didn't actually even deny God, he denied the existence of a soul in an individual isolated sense, but not God. He simply said let's better not talk about these things for now, and get ourselves busy with more useful and relevant matters. Even Patanjali did that, whta's the big deal? Patanjali is even worse: if you want, you can worship some idol god just for time pass, or else don't bother, it makes no difference! Buddha's attitude is in fact such a sensible and scientific approach to take too. Because what is the point of asserting God exists or doesn't exist when the concept of God itself is not clearly defined. For example, in Christianity any stupid idiot who can walk on water and perform some simple magic tricks or miracles becomes the supreme God who created this universe or the son thereof, while in Hinduism the creator God of the universe, Brahma of the Trimurtis fame, as we have seen earlier, is even looked upon in disdain and is hardly bothered with, people worship his wife who is supposed to grant good marks in exams but not the one who is supposed to have created the universe! Had Buddha asserted that God exists, it would have been a disaster, people would have again clung to belief systems and went into comfortable sleep just in the way of SV and his somnambulistic disciples (Awake! Arise! - is their slogan!). God is not a question of believing or not believing, but of experiencing, being and becoming. It is so unfortunate, though, that Buddha himself had to become the God of Buddhism in Tibet, China and South East Asia.

And next, Buddha a confessed materialist? By making this stupidest statement ever, SV is virtually confessing: I am the most blithering idiot you can ever find on this planet! Buddha's whole realization, the central doctrine of Buddhism, is that matter has no substance, that the world itself is unsubstantial, re: Heart Sutra "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" - and SV is alleging that Buddha was some materialist like that other freaking idiot Karl Marx. The earth is so full of all kinds of idiots, it is sickening. Did Vivekananda ever read one line of what Buddha said? However, here is an interesting observation: ironically if only Buddha were a stupid materialist like Karl Marx and as SV portrays him to be, then he would have got interested in economics and perhaps could have been of much more use to India and the world than he actually was. Alas! Buddha had absolutely no sense of material world, it simply didn't occur to him that one can escape from poverty, disease and even the ills of old age by social progress and medical advancement, without the need of resorting totally nihilistic and utterly depressing, demotivating metaphysical concepts such as Shunya and Nirvana! So, Buddha was the greatest immaterialist one can think of, on par with Adi Shankara, Berkeley, Hume, Hegel or whoever, and even surpassing them in some ways, and SV says Buddha is a confessed materialist! If only!

"I wish I had one infinitesimal part of Buddha's heart" - No, SV, again you are wrong! We wish, and you should wish too, that you had one infinitesimal part of some common sense a normal person is expected to have, forget Buddha's heart or Einstein's mind!

"Buddha may or may not have believed in God; that does not matter to me." No it should matter to you, because perhaps then you would have realized that believing in God, any kind of dogmatic belief, is a hindrance, and then who knows, maybe even you could have turned a little wise. Buddha didn't 'believe' in God, and that is a major achievement, nothing to be lightly dismissed; it is a radically new and refreshing approach to spirituality. In a way, though, it is the philosophy of Vedanta, which is what Vivekanda ostensibly professed, that first deposed God. Because, as mentioned earlier, the Brahman of upanishads is an abstract principle. Has anyone ever seen someone praying to the Brahman, oh Brahman give me this, give me that? There is no one to listen there! But Vedanta always remained a mystic philosophy and never became a mass movement like Buddhism, so what Buddha did was definitely an achievement, establishing a mass religion without any God, no wonder it degraded so soon. However, condescending as ever, SV seems to pardon Buddha for his sins "Poor soul, he was ignorant enough not to be worshipping any naked goddess adorned with garlands of skulls looking insane with her tongue protruding out, just like my own great guru Sri Ramakrishna did, but it doesn't matter to me!" -- oh! Incidentally, Mahavir too propounded a religion without God, but it is a rather lugubrious one with monadic, individual, isolated souls, so let's not get into it! I think Buddha had to resort to explicitly denying soul, as a reaction to Mahavira who was his contemporary.

"He reached the same state of perfection to which others come by Bhakti — love of God — Yoga, or Jnâna." Oh, glad to hear that! Buddha too finally reached, good for him! But hold on, the state of perfection? Whatever is this weird state, I have no idea, but surely taken from Raja Yoga! Enlightenment, I 've heard of Self-realization, God-realization, I've heard of. But perfection - in a spiritual context - is nonsense. Besides, 'state of perfection' sounds so dull, static, a state not only of arrested growth, but of no movement, an eternal claustrophobic prison, something like in Mahavira's philosophy maybe. Yogis go on doing gymnastics and breathing exercises hoping to reach perfection and physical immortality, but this is not a mainstream spirituality conception. Really, Vivekananda is such a total disgrace to Vedanta philosophy. Because it is this philosophy which Vivekananda goes on beating drums about that first propounded the concept "Thou art That," meaning, you are already freaking That! There is nothing to be achieved, no state of perfection, no nonsense. What is, is already perfect and supremely glorious, there is no need to improve upon that! In fact, even Buddha, in one of the first things he reportedly said after his enlightenment, when asked what he achieved, declared he in fact achieved nothing, if anything he lost something! And here comes Vivekananda saying, 'poor slob, even Buddha achieved the state of perfection', as if spirituality is some kind of art or skill. In fact, it is Vivekananda who achieved perfection -- in blabbering nonsense. Though, sadly, many more existed before him and many more would come who would outperform him, and achieve even higher peaks of perfection! Not that Vivekananda is lesser than anybody, see, he contradicts himself in the same sentence. 'Others come by Bhakti — love of God — Yoga, or Jnâna' - and SV was the one who soon went on to write a classic book on Jnana Yoga, so he should have known, 'Jnana' is the path of pure Vedanta, and it doesn't love or believe in God too. Neither does Yoga / Raja Yoga, for that matter. Buddha too realized (not that monstrous 'reached the state of perfection') through the path of Jnana. So what is Vivekananda mumbling and jumbling about? "May or may not have believed in God" - what nonsense!

Now, he contradicts himself big time! Make that Big Time! Two sentences back he was saying "the path becomes easier if they believe in God' Now he says "Perfection does not come from belief or faith." Where was this wisdom 10 seconds earlier? Such pathetic buffoons! God has given them great beauty, great style, great charm and charisma, but hardly any rational-thinking brains at all! "Parrots can do that" - yeah we know parrots, but I wonder why the kind commenter who sent this passage goes on pasting the same comment again and again, maybe just the power of habit, repeat, repeat, repeat, including repeat himself. Kinda compulsive-obsessive thing maybe.

And now comes the great climax! Here Vivekananda simply veers off the road and falls into a deep ditch straight on, very badly. "Perfection comes through the disinterested performance of action." Comes through means what, he is apparently implying, comes only through! So if perfection comes only through disinterested performance of action, i.e., karma yoga, then what about the three aforementioned yogas, bhakti, raja, and jnana?! And what about Buddha, is Vivekananda implying Buddha achieved perfection through disinterested performance of action?It is the beauty of Upanishadic philosophy that it so boldly propounded no matter what you do, nothing affects your soul or its original perfection (not achieved perfection). This is such a fantastically liberating philosophy, just incredibly daring approach to spirituality, which is usually mired in concepts of guilt and sin. And elsewhere, it is Vivekananda himself who goes on expounding Vedanta proper in thunderous phrases! It is such a shame that he cannot manage any kind of consistency or coherence. Moreover, I haven't the faintest notion what this central and most stupid doctrine of Bhagavad-gita "disinterested performance of action" means! In the first place, I have no idea where Krishna got it from! Raja yoga from Patanjali, jnana yoga from sankhya, mimansa, vedanta etc, bhakti yoga is of course a natural tendency of love, emotion, worship and belief, but whatever is this karma yoga nonsense I never could understand, especially the concept of anasakti yoga or disinterested action! I have once heard Sukhabodhananda saying "Only a lunatic will perform actions without any motives, but what Krishna meant is...." I forgot what he said then. Acting without any motivation -- I can't make head or tail of it. Why on earth would anyone act without any motive, and what will he act! So far as I know, there is only one kind of action without any kind of interest or motive, that is when a psycopath kills someone for no reason at all, or like Krishna says it is all just a dream, no one ever gets killed and then kills. This goes on to corroborate my theory (proposed in the introduction to this blog) that Krishna is some kind of psychopath! But even there, the killer is acting out of some kind of inner compulsion. Bhagavad-gita is the most famous scripture of India, and one of the two or three most famous sentences of this book is "ma phalesu kadachana" "don't seek results"! I mean, why would, and how can anyone act without expecting any kind of results! Leaders, including spiritual leaders, are supposed to motivate people, this Krishna however seems to be demotivator par excellance. No wonder India got mired lethargy and inaction for eons thereafter! If Krishna said, don't hanker for results, it would have made some sense! But no interest, no motive, no expectation, so far as I can imagine only brain-dead people act like that, to the extent that they can move around and do something. And it may not be that much exaggeration to say that, to the extent such people are capable of talking coherently, they would be talking like Swami Vivekananda, when he is in this nonsense mode, which I now think he not infrequently is! Still, what a man, what a style, a whole speech of nonsense, ending in a giant outburst of even more incomprehensible nonsense. That's why I have such a big poster of this man in my room, and not of Buddha! (It says: Faith, faith, faith in yourself, faith in God, only then great things will be achieved).

Finally, coming to the commenter's observation: "the highest spiritual achievement through Vedantic philosophy or Buddhism is the same." or through taoism, or hasidism, or sufism or simply having your head knocked off in an accident. Indeed, there seem to be many people who have achieved enlightenment accidentally and it proved too much for them. Anyways, we all know there are many traditions and paths to spiritual realization, since Truth is one, but I have dissected every sentence of SV's lecture, and I have not come across anything to that effect. His concluding sentence is "disinterested performance of action" and it says everything; like a dog's tail is crooked and can't be mended, Vivekananda is simply stuck with that stupidest notion of Krishna, and maybe in desperately trying to make sense of it he got demented, and he is simply unable to speak meaningfully anymore. Gist or grist there is nothing in it, but pure blabber. "The conceptualization of being one with God or attaining Nirvana is the same state." Sir, first learn your Vedanta before you start on a comparative philosophy course. Vedanta doesn't seek to be one with God, but to know God and be God (Brahm vit Brahmaiva bhavathi), and that is the whole original trademark distinction of Advaita philosophy. Being one with God is vishistadavaita or even dwaita philosophy. They are not the same as advaita, they are the opposite. So you are saying Vedanta/Advaita is its own opposite, and furthermore you compare it to Nirvana. In Nirvana, you are one with God! Hindu Muslim bhai, bhai, Rama = Allah. Carry on, sir, you are continuing the tradition well, the noble age-old tradition of merrily blabbering nonsense nonstop.