A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

THE SAGES OF INDIA.*speaking of the sages of India, my mind goes back tothose periods of which history has no record, andtradition tries in vain to bring the secrets Qut of theof the* past. The sages of India have been almostinnumerable, for, what have the Hindu nation been doingfor thousands of years except producing sages ? I willtake, therefore,the lives of a few of the most brilliantones, the epoch-makers, and present them before you, thatit to say, my study of them. In the first place, we haveto understand a little about our Scriptures. Two ideals oftruth are in our scriptures, the ono is what we call theeternal, and the other not so authoritative, yet bindingunder particular circumstances, and time, and place. Theeternal relations which deal with the nature of the soul,and of God, and the relations between souls and God, areembodied in what we call the Srutis, the Vedas. The nextset of truths is what we call the Smritis, as embodied inthe works of Manu, Yagnavalkya, and other writers, andalso in the Puranas, down tojthe Tantras. This secondclass of books and teachings is subordinate to the Srutis,inasmuch as whenever any one of these contradicts anything in the Srutis, the Srutis must prevail. This is thelaw. The idea is that the framework of the destiny andgoal of man has been all delineated in the Yedas, the details have been left to be worked out in the Smritis andPuranas. As for general directions, the Srutis are enough ;*A lecture delivered in Madras.