New Delhi: Swami Vivekananda, then an unknown monk from India, captivated the American audience when he shared his spiritual insight at the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893.
Appearing as a spokesman for Hinduism, he left the assembly spellbound. A newspaper account reportedly described him as “an orator by divine right and undoubtedly the greatest figure at the Parliament,” according to Britannica.
Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago speeches, it is believed, ushered in a new era in the understanding of Indian religious thoughts in the West.
He began his first speech with “Sisters and brothers of America”, making the words immortal as they remained etched in the memory of the listeners and still has a “thrilling effect on the readers even after more than 125 years”, Belur Math, the headquarters of Ramakrishna Mission that Swami Vivekananda founded after returning to India, says on its website.
He delivered a total of six speeches at the conference that started on September 11 and concluded on September 27.
On his birth anniversary, here is a look back at some of the most memorable quotes from his 1893 Chicago speeches.
1. “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.”
2. “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.”
3. “The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation.”
4. “...creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time, and again destroyed.”
5. “The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti — freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.”
6. "The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours."
7. “It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics. In India a priest that preached for money would lose caste and be spat upon by the people.”
8. “In religion there is no caste; caste is simply a social institution.”
9. “We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by his past actions.”
10. “...if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: ‘Help and not Fight’, ‘Assimilation and not Destruction’, ‘Harmony and Peace and not Dissension’.”
(Source: Belurmath.org)