A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

360 VEDANTA.daring the noblest truths that have ever been preachedunto humanity, without any compromise, without any fear.This, my countrymen, I want to lay before you. Even theJnana Kanda of the Vedas is a vast ocean ; many lives arenecessary to understand even the least bit of it. Truly hasit been said of the TJpanishads by Raman uja that the Ved.anta is the head, the shoulders, the crested form of theVedas, and surely enough it has become tfce Bible ofmodern India. The Hindus have the greatest respect forthe Karma Kanda of the Vedas, but for all practical purposes, we know that for ages by S ruti has been meant theUpanishads and the Upanishads alone. We know that allour great Philosophers, either Vyasa, or Patanjali, orGautama, or even the great father of all Philosophy, thegreat Kapila himself, wherefer they wanted an authorityfor what they wrote, from the Upanishads every one ofthem got it and nowhere else, for it is therein that are thetruths that remain for ever.There are truths that are true only in a certain line, ina certain direction, under certain circumstances, and forcertain times, those that are founded on the institutions ofthe time ;there are other truths that are based on thenature of man himself that must endure so longhimself endures. These are the truths that alone can beas manuniversal, and in spite of aH the changes that we are suremust have come in India, a to our social surroundings, ourmethods of dress, our manner of eating, our modes ofworship, even all these have changed, but these universaltruths of the S rutis, the marvellous Vedantic ideas, standin their own sublimity, immovable, unvanquishable, deathless, and immortal. Yet the germs of all the ideas thatare developed in the Upanishads have been taught alreadyin the Karma Kanda. The idea of the cosmos, which all