Practical Vedanta An Introduction

Practical Vedanta An Introduction What is Vedanta? Since time immemorial, human energy has tried to express itself on two spheres of activity. One has been on the external sphere. The other has been in the internal sphere. While the outcome of the former has been Art & Science, the latter resulted in mystical experience of the core of human existence. While the former was the forte of the West, India has been the stronghold of the latter. And this entire body of mystical experience has been termed as Vedanta. Many of the best brains of the land dedicated their entire lives for this research into their own consciousness. All their efforts were recorded. All their findings too were recorded. It must be admitted that these ancient Indians had a different view of time & history and hence we do not find any mention of dates. Nor is there any reference to contemporary events, natural or political, which could help us infer their approximate dates. Nevertheless, the method of recording the efforts & the findings is nothing short of an elaborate laboratory manual. These records have been called the Upanishad. It has often been contended that the Upanishads propagate a particular philosophy. Philosophers in India have gone to great lengths to hammer out their pet philosophies from the seemingly incoherent recordings in the Upanishads. Thus, the same entries of the Upanishads have been used by Shankara to explain his Advaita Vedanta Philosophy, while Madhva does so for his Dvaita Vedanta Philosophy and Ramanuja does the same for his Qualified-Advaita Philosophy. Each of these philosophies gave rise to innumerable schools within the main body of the philosophy; and as is common in India, from each of those schools in turn blossomed out hundreds of religious sects. It is important to note that all of them use the very same Upanishad mantras to justify their lines of thought & arguments. What exactly do the Upanishad mantras signify then? Which of these philosophies are true? Or in other words, which of these sects is Universal? While talking to Indians at Lahore on the Common Bases of Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda himself clarifies this question. He says, There are certain principles which are common to all sects that call themselves Hindu. Firstly, we believe the Vedas to be the eternal teachings of the secrets of religion. Secondly, we all believe in God, the creating and preserving power of the whole universe. [Of course, while some hold that God is entirely Personal, some others believe that God is Personal but not human, while a few believe that God is entirely Impersonal]. Thirdly, we all agree in the theory of Samsara and the eternity of souls. [Nature & man were not created at any point of time.] Fourthly, we all accept that soul is essentially the spirit, pure & perfect, infinite & blissful. Fifthly, all of us believe that religion means realization, and nothing short of it. So, although there seems to be cacophony in all these philosophies & sects in India, Swami Vivekananda showed us that there was underlying unity among them in these five ideas. Now what about the question as to which of these schools is universal? Swami Vivekananda proposed a new concept that answers this question. He says that there is a definite gradation in the different Vedanta philosophies that have been propounded over the ages. If we consider a spectrum of ideas from gross to the subtle, then, a clear hierarchy will be discerned among the different Vedanta Philosophies with
Page 1 of 6

Practical Vedanta An Introduction

Materialism & Advaita at the extremes, and all others occupying their positions in between. And this entire spectrum of ideas constitutes Vedanta. Hence, Swamiji contends that while no one single school of thought or sect can claim to be Universal, Vedanta as a whole can certainly claim to be Universal. Meaning of the term Practical: The general use of this word is to indicate something that is useful. It is also generally used to mean that an idea can be translated into some action instead of remaining in the form of mere frothy words. Indian Religion has always had to face this onslaught from the western mind. The Western Religion [mainly Christianity] had a great practical purpose. It was a pol itically unifying force. The Cross actually unified the different warring tribes in Europe into great kingdoms. Under the benign rule of these great kingdoms arose subsequent social & scientific developments. Later on, commerce flourished. Again the Christian religion bolstered the endeavors of the Joint Stock Companies and guided by the Protestant Ethic of frugality & hard-work, the world saw an unprecedented growth of economic power. Thus the Western people were quite justified in questioning the utility of the Indian Religion. What purpose did the Indian Religion serve? It could not bring political unity among them. It could not bring social & scientific growth among them. It could not bring economic prosperity among them. Was it then a liability on the society? Would it be better to throw all Indian religious ideas overboard and turn to other practical religions? Swami Vivekananda showed that this word Practical has some interesting colors when used with respect to religion. The so-called consequences of religion that Europe derived from religion, which they termed as the practicality of their religion, had nothing to do with religion per se. The political advancements, military successes & economic prosperity were actually the outcome of social awareness in Europe. Christianity was able to achieve social cohesion in Europe, and these followed from that social cohesion. In India, people lack social cohesion and hence there is backwardness in political, military & economic areas. But these have nothing to do with religion. What then is practicality with respect to religion? Swami Vivekananda says, Religion means realization of the spiritual ideal. And that religion can be termed the most practical that helps in this realization of the spiritual ideal in man. We may need to stop and understand the importance of this statement. Realization of the spiritual ideal is the central idea here. Religion doesnt mean realization in general parlance. Even World Religions like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. do not insist that you need to realize the spiritual ideal by making use of their teachings. Most religions have some specific ideas, which are called Dogma. You need to accept these ideas without questioning their rationality. Accepting the dogmas of religions makes you religious. This is what all religions, even the World Religions profess. Not so with Swami Vivekananda. He says that you are religious only if you have realized the spiritual ideal in yourself.
Page 2 of 6

Practical Vedanta An Introduction

The spiritual ideal: This brings up the question what is the spiritual ideal? Is it always a singular ideal? Arent there more than one spiritual ideal? Let us try to answer these questions. Man is a composite of body, mind and consciousness. Every person has a sense of individual identity. Where is the locus of this individuality? What part of a man is his essence? Sages of ancient India, people who dedicated their entire lifes energy to discovering this truth have proclaimed that the essence of man is consciousness. This is a staggering, paradigm-altering proclamation. Why? Because, in our daily experience, we dont feel this is so. We all feel we are the body. If the body is hurt, we feel we are hurt. We all feel we are the mind. If our ideas are laughed at, if our feelings are trifled with, we feel hurt. As regards consciousness, yes, we all feel we are conscious; but, then, nothing more about it. We never feel that we are consciousness itself. Since we never feel that we are consciousness itself, this proclamation of the Indian sages seems preposterous! However, this is the greatest benefit that the Indian Religion Hinduism [or Vedanta, as Swami Vivekananda calls it] confers on us. This is a fact that Vedanta claims is its discovery. Srunvantu VishweVedahametam Purusham Mahantam it says. Which means Listen, everyoneI have discovered the essence of my being. A particular sage, now unknown, but definitely one of the greatest persons to have walked on Earth, discovered that the essence of his personality was neither the body, nor the mind, but pure consciousness! And that is the spiritual ideal. Since the essence has to be singular, the spiritual ideal has always to be one and not two or more. This being cleared, we shall again turn our attention to the term Practicality with respect to religion. Swami Vivekananda says that Vedanta specifies the spiritual ideal for us; it presents a particular framework of ideas regarding Man, God & Universe that are in consonance with this ideal; then it delineates a procedure by following which we can realize this ideal in ourselves. And therefore, he says, Vedanta can justifiably be called a most practical religion. Why the term Practical Vedanta? From what we have explained above, it is clear that according to Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta is the most practical religion. Now, if Vedanta is a practical religion, why would he coin the term Practical Vedanta? It is would seem to be tautology, since it would mean Practical practical religion! In order to understand the probable reason why Swami Vivekananda coined that term, we need to briefly study the history of Hinduism. The sages of the Vedic age busied themselves with discovering facts related to man. All those attempts and their results were recorded in what are now called Upanishad, as mentioned above in the first section of this article. When the essence of man was discovered, there remained nothing more to discover regarding man. Then the Indian genius started formulating philosophies that would string as many of these truths as possible in a logical fashion. Basically, a philosophy has to explain three issues Man, God & Universe. Many philosophies were hammered out over the ages in India, each trying to best explain the wonderful truths enshrined in the Upanishad. Of all of them, the most logical one has
Page 3 of 6

Practical Vedanta An Introduction

been Advaita Vedanta. Acharya Shankara has been generally hailed as the formulator of this philosophy. So, what we have seen up to now is this first some truths were discovered. Then came the formulation of a philosophy that was logically tenable. But, the peculiarity of India has been that things never stopped at this stage. The circle had to be completed. Using that philosophy, anyone should be able to re-discover those truths for oneself. So anyone who formulated a philosophy here had to draw up a scheme of ethical & religious practices that would enable the votary to reach to the empyrean state from which the ancient, unknown Indian sage had proclaimed, Srunvantu VishweVedahametam Purusham Mahantam. Just as everyone had done before him, and just as everyone has done after him, Acharya Shankara too spelled out a Praxis related to Advaita Vedanta. The crux of this praxis has been Renounce all activity. Such was the force of his personality over the Indians that for over a thousand years, Acharya Shankaras methods of thinking & the ethical & religious procedures he popularized, colored every school of mainstream religious thought. As a result, two things happened. Firstly, religion became more and more remote, out of reach, as far as the man in society was concerned. If anyone was interested in religion, he had to take to monasticism. For the married man of the world, there remained only some vague rituals. Moreover, religion became heavily encrypted into social norms for the man of the world. Why? Because he was unable to renounce all activity, without which he was debarred from hardcore religion! Secondly, the nation became mired in a confusion of interests. How did this happen? Since activity itself was considered as an obstacle to the higher aspirations of life, people who engaged in activity in the world did so with lot of guilt, not wholeheartedly, but always feeling that they were compromising with the highest ideals of religion. So, the incentive for active work disappeared from Indian society. Thus began the famous 1000 years of darkness in India. Swami Vivekananda was able to diagnose the national malady with great precision. He said that it was wrong to blame Advaita Vedanta or Acharya Shankara [or even Buddha] for Indias degradation. Despite the phenomenal national fiasco in the wake of popularizing Advaita Vedanta, the Vedanta was wrong, neither as religion nor as philosophy. Of course, a correction was needed. And that he presented in the form of his now famous Practical Vedanta. Practical Vedanta: what is it? So what exactly is this Practical Vedanta? Is it a new concept given by Swami Vivekananda? In a way, yes, it is indeed something entirely new. We shall try to explain how this is so. Vedanta was accessible only to people who had sufficient knowledge of Sanskrit. This was because the Upanishad and the later text books on Vedanta were all couched in that archaic language. And Sanskrit education was accessible to mainly those from the upper class of the caste system who formed a miniscule percentage of the entire society. Thus, even an intellectual understanding of Vedanta was unavailable for the masses.
Page 4 of 6

Practical Vedanta An Introduction

Swami Vivekananda threw open this gold mine of Vedanta literature by allowing it to be translated into the local vernaculars and into English and other foreign languages. Thus Vedanta was brought down from the empyrean heights of the Himalayas onto the plains below where the multitudes live their daily life. Thus the Vedanta was brought down from the ivory towers of the elite into the homes, classrooms, factories and shops of the common man. While all along, Vedanta was meant to cater only to a handful of elite in the land of its discovery, Swami Vivekananda presented it in a form that made sense to the man busy in everyday society. Long ago, Acharya Shankara had already established, using his polemical philosophy, that all men are essentially the spirit. He had also established that Spirit alone exists; anything else you may see or perceive is but a wrong reading of the divine. As we explained just a little while before, due to various exigencies of history, this grand philosophy could not get translated into a meaningful social practice. Swami Vivekananda said, If all men & living beings are indeed the same divine being [which is established by logical reasoning, pragmatic experience & as the final conclusion of the Upanishad], then, we will have to interact with them as one divine being interacts with other divine beings. If divinity is all that exists, then this world that we see as Evil, impinging on us day & night [and therefore worthy of being renounced] has to be worshipped as such, for, doesnt the divine being deserve to be worshipped? This change in our behavior has to start right now and has nothing to do with monasticism or formal renunciation of activity or any such thing. If we truly believe in the conclusions presented by Advaita Vedanta, then that belief has to be reflected in our behavior right now, right here. The ideal of Vedanta must cover the whole field of life and must enter into all our thoughts and find expression in all our actions. This is the gist of Practical Vedanta. In a nutshell, Swami Vivekananda seems to point out that Advaita Vedanta needs to be worked out right now, right here. No further conditions are to be imposed. One doesnt necessarily need to renounce activity in order to realize the ideal presented by Vedanta. An all-renouncing monk can realize this ideal [which has been demonstrated repeatedly over the ages], but so can anyone who wishes to do so, no matter what his social standing is. Be he a student, a farmer, a baker, blacksmith, a leader, a monk, if he wishes, and applies himself rightly to it, he can realize the ideal presented by Vedanta. This is the gist of Practical Vedanta. It has been traditionally claimed that formal renunciation is a sine-qua-non for realizing divinity, in India. On the contrary, Swami Vivekananda goes on to specify that people who are actively involved in the activities of this world stand a better chance of realizing the ideal of Vedanta! Why is that so? Because, by deifying the world, by deifying all living beings, and by working in this deified world and interacting with these deified persons, you clearly have a greater chance of realizing the ideal than you have by meditating on the conscious core of your being for an hour and a half every day. Just do the arithmetic yourself and see. For how long in a day can you engage in ritualistic worship in a puja-room? Or for how long in a day can you truly meditate in a formal manner on divinity within yourself? Assuming that you are totally unencumbered by all worldly cares and duties, it simply cannot be done for more than a couple of hours in a day, in most cases. Now, this apotheosis that Swami Vivekananda presents before you
Page 5 of 6

Practical Vedanta An Introduction

allows you to engage in a sustained meditation on divinity for hours at a stretch. This is the gist of Practical Vedanta. A new ideal for mankind: The above deliberation certainly might have given you the impression that Swami Vivekanandas contribution to religion has been in providing a vital shift in the emphasis of the Vedanta philosophy and its praxis. Many of you may have concluded that he did not add anything substantially new to Vedanta. All he did was to change the emphasis of Vedanta praxis from the individual to the community, which was no doubt necessitated by the zeitgeist. In fact this is the popular view regarding this great person today. We beg to differ. We hold that Swami Vivekananda formulated his Practical Vedanta as a consequence of something of much greater, much deeper significance than a mere need to correct the course of Indian history. Let us try to explain this stand of ours very briefly. [Details of this aspect of Practical Vedanta will be explained in a later article.] Persons like Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda do not merely reemphasize the conclusions of the past ages. They show new ideals to mankind and cleave out new paths for mankind to reach there. We hold that Sri Ramakrishna placed a new ideal for mankind of this age. What is that new ideal? Is it different from the spiritual ideal that Vedanta places before us? [As explained earlier, there can only be one spiritual ideal, that which Vedanta specifies; there cannot be any other spiritual ideal; secular ideals, on the other hand, can be many.] The new ideal that Sri Ramakrishna has shown us is like this we all have but one goal before us; Vedanta has specified that for us; all religions too specify the same ideal, although using different sets of words; and that ideal is to realize that our essence is pure consciousness. What Sri Ramakrishna showed us is - Once you realize that you are the pure consciousness, you can use that realization to enhance your life and the lives of those associated with you in myriad forms. Thus, a new type of person is presented to us here. Sri Ramakrishna himself was the first and best example of that new type. He used a term to signify that new ideal the Vijnani. And the associated mystical state that manifested as this new type of man was termed as Bhavamukha by him. Although Sri Ramakrishna presented a new ideal for us, there still remained the work of working out a full-fledged philosophy that explains Man, God & Universe in accordance with this new ideal. Then there was the need of Praxis, what is called in Sanskrit as Sadhana Pranaali, a scheme of practices that will lift us from where we stand now to the state of the new ideal. Swami Vivekananda has done both these things for us. Scattered in his lectures, letters, articles, poems and conversations are a blueprint for the philosophy that is in consonance with the new ideal. And the name he gave to the Sadhana associated with this new ideal is Practical Vedanta.

*****************
Swami Vedatitananda Ramakrishna Mission Shilpamandira Belur Math

Page 6 of 6