Vedanta is one of the world's most
ancient religious philosophies and one of its broadest.
Based on the Vedas, the sacred
scriptures of India, Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of
the soul, and the harmony of religions. Vedanta is the philosophical foundation
of Hinduism; but while Hinduism
includes aspects of Indian culture, Vedanta is universal in its application and
is equally relevant to all countries, all cultures, and all religious
backgrounds.
A closer look at the word
"Vedanta" is revealing:"Vedanta" is a combination of two
words: "Veda" which means "knowledge" and "anta"
which means "the end of" or "the goal of." In this context
the goal of knowledge isn't intellectual, the limited knowledge we acquire by
reading books. "Knowledge" here means the knowledge of God as well as
the knowledge of our own divine nature. Vedanta, then, is the search for
Self-knowledge as well as the search for God.
What do we mean when we say God?
According to Vedanta, God is infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and
infinite bliss. The term for this impersonal, transcendent reality is Brahman, the divine ground of being.
Yet Vedanta also maintains that God can be personal
as well, assuming human form in every age.
Most importantly, God dwells within
our own hearts as the divine Self or Atman. The Atman is never born nor will it
ever die. Neither stained by our failings nor affected by the fluctuations of the body or mind,
the Atman is not subject to our grief or despair or disease or ignorance. Pure,
perfect, free from limitations, the Atman, Vedanta declares, is one with
Brahman.
The greatest temple of God lies
within the human heart.
Finally, Vedanta affirms that all
religions teach the same basic truths about God, the world, and our
relationship to one another. Thousands of years ago the Rig Veda declared:
"Truth is one, sages call it by various
names." The world's religions offer varying approaches to God, each one
true and valid, each religion offering the world a unique and irreplaceable
path to God-realization.
The conflicting messages we find
among religions are due more to doctrine and dogma than to the reality of
spiritual experience. While dissimilarities exist in the external observances
of the world religions, the internals bear remarkable similarities.
The Oneness of Existence: Unity in Diversity
The unity of existence is one of the great themes of
Vedanta and an essential pillar of its philosophy. Unity is the song of life;
it is the grand theme underlying the rich variations that exist throughout the
cosmos. Whatever we see, whatever we experience, is only a manifestation of
this eternal oneness. The divinity at the core of our being is the same divinity
that illumines the sun, the moon, and the stars. There is no place where we,
infinite in nature, do not exist.
While the concept of oneness may be intellectually
appealing, it is nevertheless difficult to put into practice. It's no hardship to
feel oneness with great and noble beings or those we already love. It's also
not too much of a stretch to experience a sense of unity with the trees, the
ocean, and the sky. But most of us balk at experiencing oneness with the
cockroach or the rat, let alone the obnoxious co-worker whom we barely tolerate.
Yet this is precisely where we need to apply Vedanta's teachings and realize
that all these manifold aspects of creation are united in and through divinity.
The Self that is within me, the Atman, is the same Self that is within you, no
matter whether the "you" in question is a saint, a murderer, a cat, a
fly, a tree, or that irritating driver at the our-way stop.
The Self is the essence of this universe, the
essence of all souls . You are one with this universe. He who says he is
different from others, even by a hair's breadth, immediately becomes miserable.
Happiness belongs to him who knows this oneness, who knows he is one with this universe.
Concept of Maya
Vedanta declares that our real nature is divine:
pure, perfect, eternally free. We do not have to become Brahman, we are
Brahman. Our true Self, the Atman, is one with Brahman.
But if our real nature is divine, why then are we so
appallingly unaware of it? The answer to this question lies in the concept of
maya, or ignorance. Maya is the veil that covers our real nature and the real
nature of the world around us. Maya is fundamentally inscrutable: we don't know
why it exists and we don't know when it began. What we do know is that, like
any form of ignorance, maya ceases to exist at the dawn of knowledge, the
knowledge of our own divine nature.
Brahman is the real truth of our existence: in
Brahman we live, move, and have our being. "All this is indeed
Brahman," the Upanishads, the scriptures that form Vedanta philosophy declare.
The changing world that we see around us can be compared to the moving images
on a movie screen: without the unchanging screen in the background, there can
be no movie. Similarly, it is the unchanging Brahman, the substratum of
existence, in the background of this changing world that gives the world its
reality. Yet for us this reality is conditioned, like a warped mirror, by time,
space, and causality—the law of cause and effect. Our vision of reality is
further obscured by wrong identification: we identify ourselves with the body,
mind, and ego rather than the Atman, the divine Self.
This original misperception creates more ignorance
and pain in a domino effect: identifying ourselves with the body and mind, we
fear disease, old age and death; identifying ourselves with the ego, we suffer
from anger, hatred, and a hundred other miseries. Yet none of this affects our real
nature, the Atman.
Maya can be compared to clouds which cover the sun:
the sun remains in the sky but a dense cloud cover prevents us from seeing it.
When the clouds disperse, we become aware that the sun has been there all the
time. Our clouds, maya appearing as egotism, selfishness, hatred, greed, lust, anger,
ambition, are pushed away when we meditate upon our real nature, when we engage
in unselfish action, and when we consistently act and think in ways that
manifest our true nature: that is, through truthfulness, purity, contentment,
self-restraint, and forbearance. This mental purification drives away the
clouds of maya and allows our divine nature to shine forth. Shankara, the great
philosopher-sage of seventh-century India, used the example of the rope and the
snake to illustrate the concept of maya. Walking down a darkened road, a man
sees a snake; his heart pounds, his pulse quickens. On closer inspection the
"snake" turns out to be a piece of coiled rope. Once the delusion
breaks, the snake vanishes forever.
Similarly, walking down the darkened road of ignorance,
we see ourselves as mortal creatures, and around us, the universe of name and
form, the universe conditioned by time, space, and causation. We become aware
of our limitations, bondage, and suffering. On "closer inspection" both
the mortal creature as well as the universe turn out to be Brahman. Once the
delusion breaks, our mortality as well as the universe disappears forever. We
see Brahman existing everywhere and in everything.
4. Karma
Human suffering is one of religion's most compelling
mysteries: Why do the innocent suffer? Why does God permit evil? Is God
helpless to act or does he choose not to? And if He chooses not to act, does
that mean he is cruel, or merely indifferent?
Vedanta takes the problem out of God's court and
places it firmly in our own. We can blame neither God nor a devil. Nothing
happens to us by the whim of some outside agency: we ourselves are responsible
for what life brings us; all of us are reaping the results of our own previous
actions in this life or in previous lives. To understand this better we first
need to understand the law of karma.
The word
"karma" comes from the Sanskrit verb kri, to do. Although karma means
action, it also means the result of action. Whatever acts we have performed and
whatever thoughts we have thought have created an impression, both in our minds
and in the universe around us. The universe gives back to us what we have given
to it: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap" as Christ said. Good action and
thoughts create good effects, bad ones create bad effects.
Mental Imprints
Whenever we perform any action and whenever we think
any thought, an imprint, a kind of subtle groove is made upon the mind. These
imprints or grooves are known as samskaras. Sometimes we are conscious of the
imprinting process; just as often we are not. When actions and thoughts are
repeated, the grooves become deeper. The combination of "grooves", samskaras creates our individual characters and also strongly influences our
subsequent thoughts and actions.
If we anger easily, for example, we create an angry
mind that is predisposed to react with anger rather than with patience or
understanding. As water when directed into a narrow canal gains force, so the
grooves in the mind create canals of behavior patterns which become
extraordinarily difficult to resist or reverse. Changing an ingrained mental
habit literally becomes an uphill battle. If our thoughts are predominantly
those of kindness, love, and compassion, our character reflects it, and these
very thoughts will be returned to us sooner or later. If we send out thoughts
of hatred, anger, or pettiness, those thoughts will also be returned to us.
Our thoughts and actions aren't so much arrows as boomerangs, eventually
they find their way back home. The effects of karma may come instantly, later
in life, or in another life altogether; what is absolutely certain, however, is
that they will appear at some time or other. Until liberation is achieved, we
live and we die within the confines of the law of karma, the chain of cause and
effect.
5. Reincarnation
What happens at death if we haven't attained liberation?
When a person dies, the only "death" is
that of the physical body. The mind, which contains a person's mental
impressions, continues after the body's death. When the person is reborn, the
"birth" is of a new physical body accompanied by the old mind with
the impressions or "grooves" from previous lives. When the
environment becomes conducive, these samskaras again reassert themselves in the new life.
Thankfully, this process doesn't go on eternally.
When we attain God-realization or Self-realization, the law of karma is
transcended, the Self gives up its identification with the body and mind, and
regains its native freedom, perfection and bliss.
An Absurd Universe
When we take a hard look around us, the world
doesn't seem to make much sense. If we go by appearances, it would seem that
countless people have escaped the noose of fate: many an evil person has died
peacefully in bed. Worse, good and noble people have suffered without apparent cause,
their goodness being repaid by hatred and torture. Witness the Holocaust;
witness child abuse.
If we look only on the surface, the universe appears
absurd at best, malevolent at worst. But that's because we're not looking
deeply; we're only viewing this lifetime, seeing neither the lives that precede
this one nor the lives that may follow. When we see a calamity or a triumph,
we're seeing only one freeze frame of a very, very long movie. We can see
neither the beginning nor the end of the movie. What we do know, however, is
that everyone, no matter how depraved, will eventually, through the course of
many lifetimes and undoubtedly through much suffering, come
to realize his or her own divine nature. That is the
inevitable happy ending of the movie. Karma=Fatalism?
Doesn't the law of karma make Vedanta a cold and
fatalistic philosophy? Not in the slightest. Vedanta is both personally
empowering and deeply compassionate. First, if we have created—through our own
thoughts and actions—the life that we are leading today, we also have the power
to create the life that we will live tomorrow. Whether we like it or not,
whether we want to take responsibility or not, that's what we are doing every
step of the way. Vedanta doesn't allow us to assign blame elsewhere: every
thought and action builds our future experience. Doesn't the law of karma then
imply that we can be indifferent to our fellow beings because, after all,
they're only getting what they deserve? Absolutely not. If a person's karma is
such that he or she is suffering, we have an opportunity to alleviate that
suffering in whatever way we can: doing so would be good karma. We need not be
unduly heroic, but we can always offer a helping hand or at least a kind word.
If we choose not to do whatever is in our limited power to alleviate the pain
of those around us, we're chalking up bad karma for ourselves. In fact, we're
really hurting ourselves.
Oneness is the law of the universe, and that truth
is the real root of all acts of love and compassion. The Atman, my true Self,
is the same Spirit that dwells in all; there cannot be two Atmans. Consciousness cannot be divided; it's
all-pervasive. My Atman and your Atman cannot be different. For that reason
Vedanta says: Love your neighbor as yourself
because your neighbor IS yourself.
The Avatar: God in Human Form
Swami Shivananda, one of Ramakrishna's disciples,
said: "If God does not come down as a human being, how will human beings
love him? That is why He comes to human beings as a human being. People can
love Him as a father, mother, brother, friend—they can take any of these attitudes.
And He comes to each in whatever form that person loves."
Throughout the ages, spiritual renewal has come to
humanity through God manifesting in human form. The Sanskrit word
"avatar" literally means "descent of God." Most of the
world's religions have been given impetus and direction by these spiritual
giants—the incarnations, prophets, and messengers of God. Jesus and Buddha,
Rama and Krishna, Moses and Muhammad, Chaitanya and Ramakrishna—all have been
torchbearers in the world of spirituality, pouring new energy into religions
that were sliding into hypocrisy and self-indulgence. The Bhagavad Gita
declared thousands of years ago:
When
goodness grows weak,
When evil
increases,
I make
myself a body.
In every
age I come back
To deliver
the holy,
To destroy
the sin of the sinner,
To
establish righteousness.
One of the great distinctions between Western and
Eastern thought is that the West tends to think in terms of linear time, the
world and human history having a definitive beginning, middle, and end. On this
horizontal time line, God has specific, historical interventions. In contrast,
the East thinks in terms of great cycles: ascension and dissension, creation
and destruction, growth and decay; these cycles are seen as continually
repeating waves in an eternal cosmic process.
Civilizations, religions, and individuals are all
part of this ongoing cycle. The appearance of the avatar is essential to this
eternal movement of spiritual decline followed by regeneration. According to
Vedanta, spiritual truth is eternal and universal: no particular religion or
sect can have a monopoly on it. The truth that Christ discovered is the same
truth that was revealed to the sages of the Upanishads; it is the same truth
that Krishna and Buddha taught as well. Gautama said that there were many
Buddhas before him, and in the years to come there will be many more manifestations
of God on earth.
Is there a purpose in all this? Yes. First, every
avatar has a specific message to impart to humanity: Muhammad taught equality
and the brotherhood of humanity; Christ revealed the primacy of God's love over
the letter of the Law; Buddha rejected priestcraft and taught people to be lamps
unto themselves; Krishna taught mental equanimity and detached action;
Ramakrishna taught the ideal of the harmony of religions. Each incarnation has
a message particular to the age in which he appears.
The second reason why the avatar incarnates is to reestablish
the one eternal religion—spiritual truth. While every avatar has specific
teachings, all incarnations come to pour spiritual fire into a world sinking
into religious mediocrity. No matter where the avatar appears on earth, the entire
world is uplifted and regenerated by his advent.
Does this mean that, according to Vedanta, God can
be realized only through his personal aspect? No. Does this mean that Vedanta
says that we must think of God as a person? No.
What Vedanta says is that God can and does manifest
through human form, and that, for most people, it is easier to meditate upon
and love a God with form rather than a nebulous idea of infinite being,
consciousness, and bliss. This, however, is a matter of temperament. Many
people achieve spiritual growth through meditation upon the avatar; they are
followers of the path of Bhakti yoga. Yet for others this is entirely the wrong
approach: those who are more intellectual than emotional may well achieve
greater spiritual awareness through jnana yoga.
Harmony of Religions
"Truth is one; sages call it by various
names," the Rig Veda, one of Vedanta's most ancient texts, declared
thousands of years ago. We are all seeking the truth, Vedanta asserts, and that
truth comes in numerous names and forms. Truth—spiritual reality—remains the truth
though it appears in different guises and approaches us from various
directions. "Whatever path people travel is My path," says the Bhagavad
Gita. "No matter where they walk, it leads to Me."
If all religions are true, then what is all the
fighting about? It is about politics, mostly, and the distortions that cultures and limited
human minds superimpose upon spiritual reality. What is generally considered
"religion" is a mixture of essentials and non essentials; as
Ramakrishna said, all scriptures contain a mixture of sand and sugar. We need
to take out the sugar and leave the sand behind: we should extract the essence
of religion, whether we call it union with God or Self-realization and leave the
rest behind. Whatever helps us to manifest our divinity we embrace; whatever
pulls us away from that ideal, we avoid. The carnage inflicted upon the world
in the name of religion has precious little to do with genuine religion. People
fight over doctrine and dogma: we don't see people being murdered over attaining
divine union! A "religious war" is really large-scale egotism gone
berserk. As Swami Prabhavananda, the founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern
California, would smilingly say, "If you put Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad
in the same room together, they will embrace each other. If you put their
followers together, they may kill each other!"
Truth is one, but it comes filtered through the
limited human mind. That mind lives in a particular culture, has its own
experience of the world and lives at a particular point in history. The infinite
Reality is thus processed through the limitations of space, time, causation,
and is further processed through the confines of human understanding and language.
Manifestations of truth—scriptures, sages, and prophets—will necessarily vary
from age to age and from culture to culture.
Light, when put through a prism, appears in various
colors when observed from different angles. But the light always remains the
same pure light. The same is true with spiritual truth.
This is not to say that all religions are
"really pretty much the same." That is an affront to the distinct
beauty and individual greatness of each of the world's spiritual traditions.
Saying that every religion is equally true and authentic doesn't mean that one
can be substituted for the other like generic brands of aspirin.
Every Religion Has a Gift
Every religion has a specific gift to offer humankind;
every religion brings with it a unique viewpoint which enriches the world.
Christianity stresses love and sacrifice; Judaism, the value of spiritual
wisdom and tradition. Islam emphasizes universal brotherhood and equality while
Buddhism advocates compassion and mindfulness. The
Native American tradition teaches reverence for the earth and the natural world
surrounding us. Vedanta or the Hindu tradition stresses the oneness of
existence and the need for direct mystical experience.
The world's spiritual traditions are like different
pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle: each piece is different and each piece is
essential to complete the whole picture. Each piece is to be honored and
respected while holding firm to our own particular piece of the puzzle. We can
deepen our own spirituality and learn about our own tradition by studying other
faiths. Just as importantly, by studying our own tradition well, we are better
able to appreciate the truth in other traditions.
Deepening in Our Path
Just as we honor the various world religions and
respect their adherents, we must grow and deepen in our own particular
spiritual path--whatever it may be. We shouldn't dabble in a little bit of
Buddhism and a little bit of Islam and a little bit of Christianity and then
try a new combo plate the following week. Spiritual practice is not a
smorgasbord. If we throw five varieties of desserts into a food processor,
we'll just get one unpalatable mess.
While Vedanta emphasizes the harmony of religions,
it also stresses the necessity of diving deep into the spiritual tradition of
our choice, sticking with it, and working hard. To paraphrase
Ramakrishna, If you want to dig a well, you have to
choose your location and keep digging until you reach water. It doesn't do any
good to dig a bunch of shallow holes.
While a shallow spiritual life is probably better
than no spiritual life at all, it nevertheless doesn't take us where we want to
go: to freedom, to God-realization. Once we choose which spiritual path we wish
to follow, we should doggedly pursue it until we reach the goal. The point is, we
can do this while not only valuing other traditions, but also learning from
them.
