Swami
Bruce
and the Future of Vedanta - Yoga Journal, Dec. ’95, p. 80
The Vedanta that arrived in the West a century ago has little to do
with
traditional sectarian worship of Shiva or Rama - the faith of the
common
Indian villager, one that most Westerners find impenetrable and
off-putting
- and everything to do with the experience of the Bengali mystic Sri
Ramakrishna
(1836-1886). After serving for years as a temple priest of
Kali,
the Divine Mother, Ramakrishna had visions of Muhammad, Jesus, and the
Buddha. He subsequently accepted the teaching of
all three,
leading him to make the statement that "all religions have a valid
claim
to the truth."
Through
the influence of Ramakrishna’s favorite disciple, Swami
Vivekananda (1863-1902),
Ramakrishna’s brand of Vedanta, influenced by
Vivekananda’s integrated,
intellectualized, idealized vision of Hinduism, has become what most
Westerners
know as Hinduism. Even today, the aspects of Hindu belief
most often
embraced by Americans bear only a nominal relation to the culturally
oriented
worship of the average Indian. For one thing, Vivekananda was
the
first sannyasin in a major lineage to live outside the Indian
system.
Well traveled in the West and educated in British-run colleges in
Calcutta,
where he studied Western logic, philosophy, and history, Vivekananda
developed
a genuine affection for Western ways. He saw how Vedanta
could thrive
in an environment free of the crushing restrictions of caste
that
Ramakrishna had repudiated (going so far as to clean the
toilets
of untouchables with his own hair)……
…..Vivekananda
was also one
of the earliest voices raised for religious pluralism. "If
anybody
dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the
destruction
of the others," he told the Parliament*, "I pity him from the
bottom
of my heart."
*the
first World Parliament of Religions
in Chicago in 1893
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