A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

\HINDUISM AS A RELIGION. 33ibsorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birthby its all-conquering daughter, and a hundred thousand>Parsis are all that are left to bear witness to theirgrand religion ;sect after sect arose in India and seemedto shake the religion of the Yedas to its very foundations,but, like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake, it receded only for a while, again to return in anall-absorbing flood, and when the tumult of the rush wasover, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed and assimilated in the immense body of the mother faith.From the high spiritual flights of Vedantic philosophy,of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes,from the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism ofthe Jains to the low ideas of idolatry and the multifariousmythologies, each and all have a place in the Hindu sreligion.Where then, the question arises, where then is thecommon centre to which all these widely diverging radiiconverge ? Where is the common basis uponwhich allthese seemingly hopeless contradictions rest ? And thisis the question which I shall attempt to answer.ABOUT THE VKDAS.The Hindus have received their religion through therevelation of the Vedas. They hold that the Yedas arewithout beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant.They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual lawsdiscovered by different persons in different times. Justas the law of gravitation existed before its discovery andwould exist if allhumanity forget it,so it is with the lawsthat govern the spiritual world ;the moral, ethical, andspiritual relations between soul and soul, and between3