Swami
Vivekananda: Paradoxical Prophet (Part 1)
If you were to make a collection
of the great prophets and preachers in the history of the various
world religions, you might very well find Swami Vivekananda's
life and teachings among the simplest to understand. But just
there is our first reason for calling him paradoxical: both his
life and teachings are deceptively simple; in reality they are
crowded with apparent contradictions, which is what we call a
paradox.
Let us look at some of the more
outstanding and evident anomalies in the Swami's life and thought,
not only in order to try to comprehend just what was going on
in him, but also to try to get ourselves better acquainted with
him generally.
There was nothing prosaic about
Vivekananda. Referred to in newspapers as the "Cyclonic
Hindu," he was a dynamo of energy -- not restless, but controlled.
He came to bring peace and a sword, and was at the eye
of many a storm. Praised and cursed, lionized and ostracized,
loyally followed and shabbily betrayed, Swamiji in his brief
thirty-nine years experienced all the vicissitudes to which a
public figure can be exposed ; and he held aloft above it all,
the message of a prophet, the mission of a prince and the character
of a saint.
The first paradoxical aspect of
the Swami's life to be noted here is the fact that although he
was monk par excellence, he was also a dedicated patriot . I
should not call his love of India fanatical, but I should call
it "fierce;" perhaps equalling any in Indian history.
That he was a monk and the embodiment of renunciation and the
strict adherence to vows, is obvious to those who know his life.
After all, the poem he composed, "Song of the Sannyasin,"
was the perfect picture of his own nature -- the life-style he
preferred above all others when he could obtain it. He was the
natural-born leader of Sri Ramakrishna's monastic band and counted
the founding of the Monastery at Belur on the Ganges as probably
his greatest work.
But how he loved India! He thought
about her future and her welfare and her people, day and night.
One night, in the state of New York, a brother-disciple happened
to come into his room and discover him lying on the floor, sleepless.
When asked why he did not use his bed he replied, "I could
not sleep up there in all that comfort, thinking of the millions
of my countrymen who have no place to lay their heads."
Page after page of the Complete Works is devoted to his
visions and plans for the nation. Jealousy was the national weakness:
people would have to learn to pull together if there was to be
a nation called India. He did not talk about nationalism in terms
of revolution or violent overthrow; rather he believed the Indian
people had yet to deserve their political freedom, through
the independence of their inner spirit and he would illustrate
this with stories of the Rajputs, of the Rani of Jhansi and of
Guru Govind Singh, and Sivaji.
Yet of all these heroes, the greatest
to him was Buddha. He said, "Buddha is my ishta (chosen
ideal)." That calmness, that detachment, that self-forgetful
benevolence, the welfare of all creatures. India, he reminded
us, must never put politics above religion. "I am no politician,"
he warned, "and no one must put political implication to
my declarations." The monk, he said, has no nationality
and belongs to no religion. He did not talk about nationality
and nation-making; he talked about "man-making." Yet,
says Sister Nivedita, his British Disciple, the resentment he
felt at the suffering of his country made him appear to her as
one who "wore the armour of the warrior under the habit
of the monk."
How can we absorb this very evident contrast in Swamiji's
life?
Perhaps we can do so with his
own great idea of synthesis: that to renounce really means to
conquer. Like Sri Ramakrishna before him, he wanted renunciation
to be positive, to come through strength and never through weakness.
Strong thinking, strong feeling, strong will, were required.
"Our ochre robe," he told Nivedita, "is the robe
of death on the field of battle." He put out his whole heart
and soul for his own land but when the time came to drop it,
he wrote to Miss Josephine McLeod, "After all, Joe, I am
only the boy who used to listen with rapt wonderment to the wonderful
words of Ramakrishna under the banyan at Dakshineswar....working
and activities, doing good and so forth are all superimpositions."
In general, this intensity of
Swami Vivekananda's emotion stands over against the rationalism,
dispassion and serenity which characterized his behavior, as
another of the dichotomies. If one reads his letters and talks,
one has a picture of how passionately, how vehemently, this man
could feel. "I wouldn't give a straw," he said one
day, "for the person who is incapable of appreciating a
love song." In that mood he would sing the songs the Gopis
sang, or come out with one of the many Persian poems he had memorized
in his student days. His great weakness was his own mother: he
worried all his life over the grief she had experienced on his
account and how he might make up to her for that. When his stenographer
and disciple, J.J. Goodwin died of malaria in India, he was all
broken up for several days, and he used to lament over the weakness
of his feelings for his friends. Most intense of all was his
feeling for his Master and the Holy Mother.
A contrast with his impersonality
Yet this is the same person who,
during a teaching retreat with Western disciples suddenly announced
that he would have to be alone, and went off into the forest,
remaining there for ten hours at a stretch. "A leader,"
he said on another occasion, "must be impersonal. I see
persons giving me almost the whole of their love. But I must
not give anyone the whole of mine in return, for then the work
would be ruined." Too much sentiment hurts work, he used
to say. In him discretion always came to the rescue and would
mercilessly demolish the sentiment which so easily welled up
in him. "Often I say strange and angry things," he
told a friend, "yet remember that in my heart I never seriously
mean to preach anything but love!" Sri Ramakrishna had called
him "outwardly a jnani, inwardly a bhakta."
In order better to control his
all-too-ready sympathies, he would avoid staying in any one place
very long. Swamiji used to say to people, about meditation, "strive
to realize yourself there without the slightest trace of emotion."
And once again we can find the resolution of this internal struggle
in his message to us. This was his prayer for Nivedita: "It
is immense power -- irresistible -- that I pray for you, and,
if possible, along with it infinite peace..." To all of
us he prescribed the madness of love, but in it no bondage.
If people sinned against us, what should we do? We must love
them till it is impossible for them to resist us. One suspects
that Gandhi must have read that.
Money in the life of Swami Vivekananda
Another paradox was that he was
as quick to dispose of money as he was to raise it. Like a child
he could gleefully calculate how was coming in through lectures
to cover the expenses, and then would forget all about it. In
his childhood, his mother would have to lock him up whenever
beggars came around, because the boy was likely to hand over
to them anything in the house that was valuable. On one such
occasion he threw clothes out the window to them. Yet he wanted
to accumulate funds -- he told Sister Nivedita she would have
to go out and raise the money for her school -- and he tried
repeatedly to get his mother and brothers out of poverty by making
special provisions for them from what he could collect.
But money had this tendency to
drift through his fingers. It eluded him, as he declared it always
would elude a monk. The money for his trip to the West had to
be collected by the Rajas and his friends in Madras twice. In
fact he several times refused it. The first collection he had
distributed among the poor: "Let us test the Lord,"
he told them; "if He really wants me to go, all the money
will come again." Of course it did. Then there were certain
close friends, such as Miss McLeod and Mrs. Ole Bull, from whom
he did not hesitate to beg if necessary. Later, Swami Vivekananda
was to be accused of being poor at taking care of money; probably
he admired those who handled it well, for he taught that to go
from the perfect utilization of material means to their perfect
renunciation, was just a short step. If one can do the one, one
can manage the other.
Continued
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