Swami Vivekananda on Buddhism

Swami Vivekananda was the original inspiration of my life. Long back when I was in my mid-teens, the day that I got hold of a small book of his quotations marked a key turning point of my life. This man is a path-breaking revolutionary, so much fire, and I feel forever indebted to him for everything I learnt from his complete works. Quite a lot of what Vivekanda has written (or rather spoken) is powerful and insightful, but at the same time there is plenty of nonsense too; and because of the considerable confusion and deficiencies in Vivekananda, I had to grope my way in spirituality for a long time, moving via D T Suzuki, Alan Watts, all that Zen and New Age thing, until finally I hit upon Osho in my early 20’s.

Vivekananda was not enlightened nor did he claim to be, he was basically supposed to be a spokesperson for Hindu philosophy and for his master Ramakrishna; the swami had serious limitations, and he had his share of delusion and confusion, which was not in meager quantities either. And above all, he had only 10 years of preaching career and very unfortunately died young in the first years of the 20th century. Supposedly he got enlightened just before death, if only he lived and preached after his enlightenment I think it could have been really tremendous.

Here let me examine a brief speech of his, made during the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 (please note that he was only 30, really a kid by todays standards); this was the occasion when he got his big break and stunned the world audience with his originality and dynamism. The lecture is entitled “Buddhism, the Fulfillment of Hinduism.”

He begins thus: “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.” Well, whether he considered himself to be a Buddhist or not, he should have at least known that in China and elsewhere, Buddha is literally worshipped as God himself, and except in zen schools which could have comprised less than one tenth of a percent of the total Buddhist populace, nobody was actually following or trying to follow Buddha’s teaching. It was and is just a ritual and worship thing. And in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), in Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism, Buddha’s teachings somehow got badly distorted. Strangely, Vivekananda visited Japan and other places on his way to Chicago, but couldn’t he even notice they had temples built for Buddha everywhere? In India though, there is not one temple for Buddha (except perhaps at BodhGaya, the place of his enlightenment) and only occasionally he appears as a sidekick stacked in a long array of pictures of the Hindu pantheon, as can be found in a typical Hindu worship place or pooja room.

Vivekananda starts off with this massive blunder and continues fumbling badly throughout. He says, 'I am not here to criticize Buddhism, far be it from me, how can I criticize whom I worship as God incarnate on earth'. On the one hand he is the voice of Vedanta, the Atman is the Brahman, the soul is God, non-duality and all that, and still he utters such puerile nonsense as Buddha being some God incarnate, Vivekananda says he himself believes that and even worships Buddha. What a pitiful lack of integrity indeed! Vedanta is the fantastically sublime philosophy which says only God exists, so how come some guy becomes special God incarnate? Seems like Vivekananda could not digest his own philosophy well.

He continues, 'But our views about Buddha are that he was not understood properly by his disciples'. Who is ‘our’? I have never heard of this view any time! Besides, by any standards Buddha had the best and highest-caliber disciples, far superior to those any enlightened master ever had. Sariputta, Moggalana, Manjushri, Mahakashyapa, these were all stalwarts. And of all the enlightened masters who existed in history, only Buddha could pass down the legacy, totally unsullied, generation after generation, for nearly 800 years in India itself after which the tradition passed unto China and Japan. And of all religions in the world, Buddhism is the only one where the central-most exposition of faith was written by a disciple and not by the Master himself, i.e., the Heart Sutra by Bodhisatva Avalokiteshwara! Vivekananda seems to have absolutely no notion of what he is speaking about!

“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.” Such a totally superficial, even repulsive comparison. Jesus Christ was not a Jew, he was born a Jew, and the same applies for Buddha, what a sloppy way of thinking indeed! You cannot say Lenin was bourgeois simply because he was born into a bourgeois family. Everybody has to be born somewhere, how is it in anyway relevant to their philosophy or achievement. The swamiji seems to have this patronizing grandmotherly approach to things, ‘Look, Buddha may have done great things, but he was after all born a Hindu and he will remain a Hindu, we Hindus must be proud that we produced a Buddha, he is one of us'!

And then more of such of immaturity and utter lack of insight, “the Jews crucified Jesus, the Hindus worship him.” Oh what a great thing Hindus have done! Vivekananda doesn’t seem to have any notion that worshipping can be a far worse thing than crucifying. In the first place Shakya Muni didn’t want to be accepted as a God and be worshipped, his whole life he had been fiercely battling such nonsense, but Vivekananda seems to be very proud of what Hindus had done. Besides, he has totally forgotten how Buddhism, a thriving religion during one epoch, second half of the first millennium, was cruelly persecuted, its practitioners burnt alive in hundreds maybe and the religion was hounded away from India, so that not a trace of Buddhism was left – and all this was accomplished not through the work of any evil Hindu fanatic king, but by the will of common people at the behest of their enlightened spiritual leaders! And then worshipping Buddha, it could be seen as pure hypocrisy typical of Hindu mind, or as a clever tactical safeguard to keep away Buddhism. 'Yeah we already worship Buddha, we don’t need all that doctrinal philosophical thing'! Nice strategy.

“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.”

Oh man, it is Hinduism that has so much lost touch with its original teachings of Upanishads and Vedanta, Buddhism remains largely true to its roots and original teachings, in so far as it is actively practiced by the Buddhist monks. Vivekananda shamelessly persists in his grandmother mode. ‘Ah big deal, nothing new, we had it all in Hinduism, Buddha was just a little confused, rebelled, but finally found out that all he had to preach was already there in Hinduism’! He came to fulfill, Vivekanda says. Fulfill what? The simple fact of which this great spiritual leader of Hinduism seems to have no knowledge is that Hinduism as we know it today didn’t exist then at all. The epics, Ramayana, Mahabharatha, the scriptures, Bhagavadgita, Bhagavata and puranas, (except for the Upanishads), the gods, the goddesses all came later. The religion of Vedas is called Vedic religion, it bears hardly any resemblance with the Hinduism of more recent history. They had totally a different set of gods, Indra, Varuna, Maruts, Aswini twins, and what not! As for Vedas, a Hindu walking in the street has no clue what is in them, just the sound Om and a couple of mantras like the famous Gayatri have survived. Vedic religion is what is being revived by Maharshi Mahesh yogi and the gang, you cannot equate it to Hinduism. So, according to Vivekanda, Buddha came to fulfill something which didn’t even exist in his time!

I have a hypothesis: Vivekanda had been sightseeing Chicago, went to the Chicago science fair or something, came back and wrote this speech in five minutes. Blabber off anything to the Americans, who would not notice it anyway, what nonsense you are talking is never an issue, you just have to say it with absolute conviction, and deliver it powerfully, which Swamiji could effortlessly pull off no doubt! Also much of his audience could have been women wondering how handsome this ‘hindoo monk’ from India was, with men engaged at doing more productive American know-how things! So go on yakking away anything, but do it with style and use beautiful-sounding words, typical Christian evangelical thing – that seems to be Vivekananda’s approach too.

This man really has the gall to suggest that nobody understood the Buddha, not his immediate followers who lived and moved with the Buddha for long decades, not the great geniuses of Buddhist tradition who appeared in the following centuries such as Nagarjuna or Nagasena, not the great zen masters or anyone, in fact Buddha himself doesn't seem to have understood himself. Vivekananda seems to be the first and last person on the earth to have understood the Buddha, that Buddha is actually all about Hinduism! The secret is out finally! The fulfillment, the epitome! But I don't think it is the gall, Vivekananda like most of the gurus featured in this blog is so unconscious, he seems to have no idea what he is talking about. And it is really a pity because Vivekananda can be compared to be no one, not especially to these other mediocre swamiji and sadgurus -- and yet he seems to have no control to contain the nonsense spouting off his mouth with such vigorous force.