Why should one only talk about sin and hell, and such things?” Thus he knocked the bottom out of Christianity.  Without sin, there was no need for the atoning death of a historical saviour.

Vivekananda carried forward the same idea.  “The greatest error,” he said, “is to call a man a weak and miserable sinner.  Every time a person thinks in this mistaken manner, he rivets one more link in the chain of avidyA that binds him, adds one more layer to the “self-hypnotism” that lies heavy over his mind.” He compared the Hindu and Christian concepts of the soul.  “One of the chief distinctions,” he said, “between the Vedic and the Christian religion is that the Christian religion teaches that each human soul had its beginning at its birth into this world, whereas the Vedic religion asserts that the spirit of man is an emanation of the Eternal Being and has no more a beginning than God Himself.” He hailed humans as Children of Immortal Bliss – amritasya putrAH – in the language of the Upanishads.  “Ye are the children of God,” he proclaimed while addressing the Parliament of Religions, “the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings.  Ye divinities on earth – sinners!  It is a sin to call man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.  Come up, lions! and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal.”

Vivekananda repudiated the idea of vicarious saving also.  He proclaimed the Hindu doctrine that everyone has to work out his own salvation.  “The Christians believe,” he said, “that Jesus Christ died to save man.  With you it is belief in a doctrine, and this belief constitutes your salvation.  With us doctrine has nothing whatever to do with salvation. 

Each one may believe in whatever doctrine he likes; or in no doctrine.  What difference does it make to you whether Jesus Christ lived at a certain time or not?  What has it to do with you that Moses saw God in the burning bush?  The fact that Moses saw God in the burning bush does not constitute your seeing him, does it?… Records of great spiritual men in the past do us no good whatever except that they urge us onward to do the same, to experience religion ourselves.  Whatever Christ or Moses or anybody else did, does not help us in the least, except to urge us on.”

He was aware that the historicity of Christ had become highly controversial among scholars of the subject.  “There is a great dispute,” he wrote, “as to whether there ever was born a man with the name of Jesus.  Of the four books comprising the New Testament, the Book of St. John has been rejected by some as spurious.  As to the remaining three, the verdict is that they have been copied from ancient books; and that, too, long after the date ascribed to Jesus Christ.

Moreover, about the time that Jesus is believed to have been born, among the Jews themselves there were born two historians, Josephus and Philo.  They have mentioned even petty sects among the Jews but not made the least reference to Jesus or the Christians or that the Roman judge sentenced him to death on the cross. Josephus’ book had a single line about it, which has now been proved to be an interpolation. The Romans used to rule over the Jews at that time, and the Greeks taught them all arts and Sciences.

They have all written a good many things about the Jews but made no mention of either Jesus or the Christians.” He also knew that doubts had been raised whether Jesus had himself said what was attributed to him in the gospels. “Another difficulty,” he continued, “is that the sayings, precepts, or doctrines which the New Testament preaches were already in existence among the Jews before the Christian era, having come from different quarters, and were being preached by Rabbis like Hillel and others.”

The miracles of Christ also failed to impress Vivekananda. In fact, they repelled him strongly. “What were the great powers of Christ,” he asked, “in miracles and healing, in one of his characters? They were low, vulgar things because he was among vulgar beings… Any fool could do those things. Fools heal others, devils can heal others. I have seen horrible demoniacal men do wonderful miracles. They seem to manufacture fruits out of the earth. I have known fools and diabolical men tell the past, present and future. I have seen fools heal at a glance, by the will, the most horrible diseases. These are powers, truly, but often demoniacal powers.” And he was not at all interested in the historical Jesus. “One gets sick at heart,” he said, “at the different accounts of the life of the Christ that Western people give. One would make him a great politician; another, perhaps, would make of him a great military general, another a great patriotic Jew; and so on.”

What interested him was Jesus the spiritual teacher. He saw several points of strength in the life and teachings of Jesus, particularly the purity of heart and renunciation of worldly pursuits. “If you want to be Christian,” he said, “it is not necessary to know whether Christ was born in Jerusalem or Bethlehem or just the exact date on which he pronounced the Sermon on the Mount; you only require to feel the Sermon on the Mount. It is not necessary to read 2000 words on when it was delivered. All that is for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have it; say amen to that. Let us eat the mango.”

 Christians were welcome to seek salvation through Christ. According to Hinduism, everyone has the right to choose his own ishTadeva. “It is absolutely necessary,” he said, “to worship God as man, and blessed are those races which have such a ‘God-man’ in Christ; therefore, cling close to Christ; never give up Christ.

That is the natural way to see God in man. All our ideas of God are concentrated there.” Christians go wrong only when they insist that Christ is the only saviour. “The great limitation Christians have,” he continued, “is that they do not heed other manifestations of God besides Christ.

He was a manifestation of God; so was Buddha, so were some others, and there will be hundreds of others. Do not limit God anywhere.”Delivering a lecture on ‘Christ, the Messenger’, he quoted Sri Krishna, “Wherever thou findest a great soul of immense power and purity struggling to raise humanity, know that he is born of My splendour, that I am working there through him.” And he advised the Christians, “Let us, therefore, find God not only in Jesus of Nazareth but in all the great ones that have preceded him, in all that came after him, and all that are yet to come. Our worship is unbounded. They are all manifestations of the same infinite God.”

Yet it was Christ that Vivekananda found missing from Christianity. He wondered which Church, if any, represented Christ. All churches were equally intolerant, each threatening to kill those who did not believe as it did. The person of Christ rather than his teaching had become more important for Christianity. He had been turned into the “only begotten son of God.”Christian baptism remained external and did not touch the inner man. It aimed at instilling some mental beliefs and not at transforming human behaviour.

Most men remained the same after baptism as they were before it. What was worse, the mere sprinkling of water over them and muttering of formulas by a priest made them believe that they were better than other people. He quoted the Kenopanishad in this context

: “Ever steeped in the darkness of ignorance, yet considering themselves wise and learned, the fools go round and round, staggering to and fro like the blind led by the blind.”

The Eucharist was nothing more than the survival of a savage custom.

“They sometimes killed their great chiefs,” said Vivekananda, “and ate their flesh in order to obtain in themselves the qualities which made their leaders great.” Human sacrifice was a Jewish idea which was borrowed by Christianity “in the form of atonement.” This seeking for a “scapegoat” had made Christianity “develop a spirit of persecution and bloodshed.”

Christian missionaries were attacking the Puranas for containing passages which they considered somewhat obscene. Vivekananda had studied the Bible and knew that it contained a lot which was downright pornography. But he had his own method of exposing the Bible. “The Chinese,” he wrote, “are the disciples of Confucius, are the disciples of Buddha, and their morality is quite strict and refined. Obscene language, obscene books, pictures, any conduct the least obscene – and the offender is punished then and there.

The Christian missionaries translated the Bible into Chinese tongue. Now in the Bible there are some passages so obscene as to put to shame some of the Puranas of the Hindus. Reading those indecorous passages, the Chinamen were so exasperated against Christianity that they made a point of never allowing the Bible to be circulated in their country… The simpleminded Chinese were disgusted, and raised a cry, saying: Oh, horror! This religion has come to us to ruin our young boys, by giving them this Bible to read… This is why the Chinese are very indignant with Christianity. Otherwise the Chinese are very tolerant towards other religions. I hear that the missionaries have printed an edition, leaving out the objectionable parts; but this step has made the Chinese more suspicious than before.”

 The history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere had simply horrified Vivekananda, as it does any person with any moral sensibility. Besides being blood-soaked, Christianity has been inimical to all free enquiry. “The ancient Greeks,” wrote Vivekananda, “who were the first teachers of European civilisation attained the zenith of their culture long before the Christians.

Ever since they became Christians, all their learning and culture was extinguished.” When he was passing by Egypt on his way to Europe, a missionary mentioned to him the miracles which, according to the Bible, Moses had performed in that country. But Vivekananda had read history. He knew the record of Christianity in Egypt.

“Here was the city of Alexandria,” he said, “famous all over the world for its university, its library, and its literati – that Alexandria which, falling into the hands of illiterate, bigoted and vulgar Christians suffered destruction, with its library burnt to ashes and learning stamped out. Finally, the Christians killed the lady savant, Hypatia, subjected her dead body to all sorts of abominable insult, and dragged it through the streets, till every bit of flesh was removed from her bones.”

Christianity had spread with the help of the sword since the days of Constantine and tried to suppress science and philosophy. “What support,” asked Vivekananda,

“has Christianity ever lent to the spread of civilisation, either spiritual or secular? What reward did the Christian religion offer to the European Pandit who sought to prove for the first time that the Earth is a revolving planet? What scientist has ever been hailed with approval and enthusiasm by the Christian Church?”

Coming to modem times, Vivekananda found Christianity very vindictive: “The great thinkers of Europe Voltaire, Darwin, Buchner, Flammarion, Victor Hugo and a host of others like him – are in the present time denounced by Christianity and are victims of vituperative tongues of its orthodox community.”

Christian missionaries in India were crediting to Christianity the rise and progress of modern Europe. This was a great falsehood. “Whatever heights of progress Europe has attained,” continued Vivekananda, “every one of them has been gained by its revolt against Christianity – by its rising against the Gospel. If Christianity had its old paramount sway in Europe today, it would have lighted the fire of the Inquisition against such modern scientists as Pasteur and Koch, and burnt Darwin and others of his school at the stake.

 In modern Europe Christianity and civilization are two different things. Civilization has now girded up her loins to destroy her old enemy, Christianity, to overthrow the clergy and to wring educational and charitable institutions from their hands. But for the ignorance-ridden rustic masses, Christianity would never have been able for a moment to support its present despised existence, and would have been pulled out by its roots; for the urban poor are, even now, enemies of the Christian Church!”

Christian missionaries were citing the prosperity of the modern West as an example of the superiority of Christianity. Much of that prosperity, however, was derived from the plunder of other peoples. “We who have come from the East,” he said in an interview to a U.S. newspaper on September 29, 1893, “have sat here day after day and have been told to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250,000,000 Asiatics.

We look back into history and see that the prosperity of Christian Europe began with Spain. Spain’s prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here and heard the height of intolerance. I have heard the creed of Moslems applauded, when the Moslem sword is carrying destruction into India. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the laws of love.”

The newspaper described it as a “savage attack on Christian nations.” Vivekananda had a lot to say on Western colonialism and the massacre of natives in America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. But that is not the subject at present.

What really amazed him was the utter lack of logic in Christian propaganda. “On metaphysical lines,” he wrote on his return to India in 1897, “no nation on earth can hold a candle to the Hindus; and curiously all the fellows that come over here from Christian lands have that one antiquated foolishness of an argument that because the Christians are powerful and rich and Hindus are not, so Christianity must be better than Hinduism. To which the Hindus very aptly retort that, that is the very reason why Hinduism is a religion and Christianity is not; because in this beastly world, it is blackguardism and that alone which prospers, virtue always suffers.”

Hindus have nothing to gain from Christianity as it is only a system of superstitions. Hindus should not get frightened when the missionaries threaten them with hell; in fact, hell is better than the company of a Christian missionary. “There came a Christian to me once,” recalled Vivekananda, “and said, ‘You are a terrible sinner.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Go on.’ He was a Christian missionary.

That man would not give me any rest. When I see him I fly. He said, ‘I have very good things for you. You are a sinner and you will go to hell.’ I said, ‘Very good, what else?’ I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I am going to heaven,’ he answered. I said, ‘I will go to hell.’ “That day he gave me up.” If Christ could help people become good, why has he failed in the Christian countries where he has been worshipped for so long? “Here comes a Christian man,” continued Vivekananda, “and he says, ‘You are all doomed; but if you believe in this doctrine, Christ will help you out.’ If this were true – but of course it is nothing but superstition – there would be no wickedness in Christian countries. Let us believe in it – belief costs nothing – but why is there no result? If I ask, ‘Why is it that there are so many wicked people?’ They say, ‘We have to work more.’ Trust in God but keep your power dry!”

Criticism of Christianity, however, was not the primary task which Vivekananda had set for himself. He was first and foremost an exponent of Hinduism. He had to speak out about Christianity because the missionaries forced it upon him by their unceasing sallies against Hinduism. This is not the occasion even for a summary of his voluminous writings and speeches on various aspects of the subject he loved above all. We shall only touch a few points which he upheld against missionary attack.

The missionaries were highly critical of the Vedas which Hindus have always held in the highest esteem. Vivekananda upheld the Vedas as depositories of divine wisdom. For him, scriptures like the Bible and the Quran were paurusheya, that is, revelations accessible only to particular persons whose experience could not be verified by other people. The Vedas, on the other hand, were apaurusheya, that is, statements of spiritual truths which any seeker could verify by spiritual practice. “Although we find,” he said, “many names, and many speakers, and many teachers in the Upanishads, not one of them stands as an authority of the Upanishads, not one verse is based upon the life of any one of them.

These are simple figures like shadows moving in the background, unfelt, unseen, unrealised, but the real force is in the marvellous, the brilliant, the effulgent texts of the Upanishads, perfectly impersonal. If twenty Yajnavalkyas came and lived and died, it does not matter; the texts are there. And yet it is against no personality: it is broad and expansive enough to embrace all the personalities that the world has yet produced, and all that are yet to come. It has nothing to say against the worship of persons, or Avataras, or sages.

On the other hand, it is always upholding it. At the same time, it is perfectly impersonal.”Rather than processing the Vedas in terms of the Bible, as the Brahmos had started doing, the Bible should be weighed on the Vedic scale and prove its worth. “So far as the Bible,” he observed, “and the scriptures of other nations agree with the Vedas, they are perfectly good, but when they do not agree, they are no more to be accepted.”

Vivekananda warned the missionaries about the effect which their propaganda was having on the moral and mental health of people who listened to them. “If not for the sake of truth,” he said, “for the sake of the morality of their own children, the Christian missionaries ought not to allow such things going on. Is it any wonder that such children grow up to be ruthless and cruel men and women?… A servant-girl in the employ of a friend of mine had to be sent to a lunatic asylum as a result of her attending what they call here a revivalist-preaching. The dose of hell-fire and brimstone was too much for her.”

He saw how various missions were competing for collecting money and pouring calumny on each other. “Those to whom religion is a trade,” he observed, “are forced to become narrow and mischievous by their introduction into religion of the competitive, fighting and selfish methods of the world.”

Having witnessed their ways, many educated Americans were losing respect for the missionaries. On the other hand, they were eager to listen to exponents of other cultures. “I have more friends,” he wrote in a letter to India in 1895, “than enemies, and only a small number of the educated care about the missionaries. Again, the very fact of the missionaries being against anything makes the educated like it. They are less of a power here now, and are becoming less so every day.”

While Vivekananda caused a stir among the intellectual elite of America as was obvious from reports in the American press, the missionary circles were infuriated. “The Christian missionaries,” wrote The Indian Mirror on June 23, 1897, “rage and fume over the success of Swami Vivekananda’s mission in America. In its impotent fury, the Missionary Review of the World says that ‘Swami Vivekananda is simply a specimen of the elation and inflation of a weak man over the adulation of some silly people. If America ever gives up Christ, it will be for the devil, not Buddha or Brahma or Confucius. It will be lapse into utter apostasy, unbelief and infidelity.’ The writer, when penning these lines, was evidently under a fit of insanity brought on by the unlooked for spectacle of a Hindu preacher making disciples among American members of the Christian Church.”

The Christian Literature Society which had its headquarters in London and a branch in Madras published a book, Swami Vivekananda and his Guru with letters from prominent Americans on the alleged programme of Vedantism in United States, in 1897.

The book was reviewed by The Indian Mirror which wrote, “The object of the first part of this book is to show that, on account of his Shudra birth and for his want of knowledge as well as on the part of his Guru, Vivekananda is not qualified for teaching the Vedanta; that he, in consequence of his doings, is not entitled to be called a ‘Swami’; that Schopenhuer, the admirer of the Upanishads, was a bad man, and that Professor Max Muller (in connection with his opinion of Vedantic books) is a ‘man having two voices’.”

Rev. Dr. W. W. White, Secretary to the College Young Men’s Christian Association of Calcutta, had written to “a number of ladies and gentlemen of America, mostly belonging to missions and educational institutions” in order to find out if there was any “likelihood of America abandoning Christianity and adopting… Hinduism… in its stead.” The replies he had received were reproduced in the second part of the above-mentioned book. “Some of the writers say,” continued The Indian Mirror, “that the Swami made no impression on the people, while some others asserted that the Swami may have made a few converts, but such converts were vaccilators and seekers of novelty. All of them consoled the enquirers with the assurance that Christianity had made a firm footing in America and there was no fear of its being Supplanted by any other religion.”

Vivekananda had said again and again that he was not out to make any converts to Hinduism and that what he aimed at was the deepening and purification of Christianity which had been vulgarised by theologians and debased by missionaries. But the missionaries had their fears and wanted to be reassured that their citadel was not in danger of imminent collapse.

There was a corollary to Vivekananda’s defence of Hinduism and critique of Christianity, particularly of the Christian missions. He called upon Hindu society to open its doors and take back its members who had been alienated from it by foreign invaders. Christian as well as Islamic missionaries were taking advantage of Hindu orthodoxy which was reluctant to receive those who had been forced or lured away from the Hindu fold but who were now ready to return to the faith of their forefathers. Vivekananda viewed this orthodoxy as nothing but a blind prejudice induced by the Hindus’ deep distrust of imported creeds.

The distrust he regarded as well founded but the prejudice against victims of force or fraud as unjustified. His thoughts on the subject were expressed in an interview he gave to the representative of the Prabuddha Bharata, a monthly magazine started by his disciples in Madras. The interview, published in the April 1899 issue of the monthly, deserves to be reproduced at some length:

“I want to see you, Swami,” I began, “on this matter of receiving back into Hinduism those who have been converted from it. Is it your opinion that they should be received?”

“Certainly,” said the Swami, “they can and ought to be taken.” He sat gravely for a moment, thinking, and then resumed. “Besides,” he said, “we shall otherwise decrease in numbers. When the Mohammedans first came, we are said – I think on the authority of Ferishta, oldest Mohammedan historian – to have been six hundred millions of Hindus. Now we are about two hundred millions. And then every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.

“Again, the vast majority of Hindu converts to Islam and Christianity are converts by the sword, or the descendants of these. It would be obviously unfair to subject these to disabilities of any kind. As to the case of born aliens, did you say? Why, born aliens have been converted in the past by crowds, and the process is still going on.

“In my own opinion, this statement not only applies to aboriginal tribes, to outlying nations, and to almost all our conquerors before the Mohammedan conquest, but also to all those castes who find a special origin in the Puranas. I hold that they have been aliens thus adopted.

“Ceremonies of expiation are no doubt suitable in the case of willing converts returning to their Mother-Church, as it were; but on those who were alienated by conquest – as in Kashmir and Nepal – or on strangers wishing to join us, no penance should be imposed.”

“But of what caste would these people be, Swamiji?” I ventured to ask. “They must have some, or they can never be assimilated into the great body of Hindus. Where shall we look for their rightful place?”“Returning converts,” said the Swami quietly, “will gain their own castes, of course. And new people will make theirs. You will remember,” he added, “that this has already been done in the case of Vaishnavism. Converts from different castes and aliens were all able to combine under that flag and form a caste by themselves,-and a very respectful one too.

From Ramanuja down to Chaitanya of Bengal, all great Vaishnava teachers have done the same.”

“And where should these new people expect to marry?” I asked. “Amongst themselves as they do now,” said the Swami quietly.

“Then as to names,” I enquired, “I suppose aliens and converts who have adopted non-Hindu names should be named newly. Would you give them caste-names, or what?” “Certainly,” said the Swami, thoughtfully, “there is a great deal in a name” and on this question he would say no more.

“But my next enquiry drew blood. ‘Would you leave these newcomers, Swamiji, to choose their own forms of religious belief out of many visaged Hinduism, or would chalk out a religion for them?’ “Can you ask that?” he said. “They will choose for themselves. For unless a man chooses for himself, the very spirit of Hinduism is destroyed. The essence of our Faith consists simply in this freedom of the Ishta.”

Vivekananda paid a second visit to the West from June 1899 to December 1900. During his stay in California in February-May 1900, he received a gift of 160 acres from one of his American admirers. The society which he had founded during his first visit for the propagation of Vedanta, had now a home in America. It was named the Shanti Ashram.

This is not the place to tell the story of how the precedent set by Vivekananda was followed in years to come by many other Hindu missionaries.

It should suffice to say that today no country in the West is without Hindu presence in some form or the other.
Seekers in the West have become increasingly aware of the major schools of Sanatana Dharma – Yoga and Vedanta, Buddhism and Jainism, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Tantra. The impact of Vivekananda in his own country was far more momentous.

He had taken over from where Bankim Chandra had left. Among the writers and thinkers of modern India, Bankim Chandra had fascinated him the most. During his lecture tour in East Bengal in 1901 he is reported to have advised Bengal’s young men to “read Bankim, and Bankim, and Bankim again.” Small wonder that Bankim’s AnandamaTha inspired revolutionary organisations fighting for India’s freedom and his Vande MAtaram became the national song par excellence when the awakening brought about by Vivekananda burst forth in a political movement soon after his death in 1902.

by Sita Ram Goel