Swami Vivekananda

In his preaching and teaching for the west, the swami, while expressing admiration for the progressive spirit of the west, never allowed himself to be carried away by it. He uncompromisingly stood for the cultural dignity of India and her incomparable spiritual excellence, and gave expression to it in bold and powerful words. A quotation from his masterly oratorical pieces, My Master, is illustrative of this point.

He says, “but before going into the life of this man (Sri Ramakrishna), I will try to present before you the secret of India, what India means. If those whose eyes have been blinded by the glamour of material things, whose whole dedication of life is to eating and drinking and enjoying, whose ideal of possession is lands and gold, whose ideal of pleasure is that of the senses, whose god is money, and whose goal is a life of ease and comfort in this world and death after that, whose minds never look forward, and who rarely think of anything higher than the sense objects in the midst of which they live;-such as these go to India, what do they see? Poverty, squalor, superstition, darkness, hideousness everywhere. Why? Because in their minds enlightenment means dress, education, social politeness. Whereas, occidental nations have used every effort to improve their material position, India has done differently. There live the only men in the world, who, in the whole history of humanity, never went beyond the frontiers to conquer anyone, who never coveted that which belonged to anyone else, whose only fault was that their lands were so fertile, and they accumulated wealth by the hard labour of their hands, and so tempted other nations to come and despoil them. They are content to be despoiled, and to be called barbarians, and in return thet want to send to this world visions of the supreme, to lay bare for the world the secrets of human nature, to rend the veil that conceals the real man, because they know the dream, because they know that behind this materialism lives the real divine nature of man which no sin can tarnish, no crime can spoil, no lust can taint, which fire cannot burn, nor water wet, which heat cannot dry, nor death kill; and to them this true nature of man is as real as is any material object to the senses of an occidental.