A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

"""""THE VEDANTA IN ITS APPLICATIONTO INDIAN LIFE.*is a word which has become very common a$,an appellation of our race and our Religion.I"*mean the wordHindu,"which requires a littleexplanation in connection with what I mean by Yedanta"and Vedantism. This word Hindu was the name tha othe ancient Persians used to applyWherever in Sanskrit there is an"it changes intoH,"so thatS,"Sindhuto the river Sindhu.in ancient Persian,became"Hindu" ;and you are all aware how the Greeks found it hard to"pronounce H and dropped it altogether, so that webecame Indians and so on. Now this word, whatevermight have been its meaning in the ancient times as theinhabitants of the other side of the Indus, has lost all itsforce in modern times ;for all the people that live on thisside of the Indus no more belong to one religion. Thereare the Hindus proper, the Mahomedans, the Parsees, theChristians, some Buddhists and Jains. The word "Hindu,"in its literal sense, ought to include all these ; but, assignifying the religion, it would not be proper to call allthese Hindus. It is very hard, therefore, to find any common name for our religion seeing that this religion is acollection, so to speak, of various religions, of variousideas, of various ceremonials and forms, all gatheredtogether almost without a name, and without a church andwithout an organization. The only point where, perhaps,*A lecture delivered in Madras.