Swami Vivekananda gave this brilliant lecture in England on June 7, 1896. It was transcribed by J. J. Goodwin and subsequently included in the book Jnana Yoga and also in the Complete Works (2: 57-69). Swamiji discusses here some of the most vital issues connected with religion: the beginning of religion, the role of religious study, and the connection between ethics and "renunciation."
Religion: The Most Potent Force
Of all the forces that have worked and are still working to mould the destinies of the human race, none certainly is more potent than that, the manifestation of which we call religion. All social organizations have as a background, somewhere, the workings of that peculiar force, and the greatest cohesive impulse ever brought into play amongst human units has been derived from this power. It is obvious to all of us that in very many cases the bonds of religion have proved stronger than the bonds of race or of climate or even of descent. It is a well-known fact that persons worshipping the same God, believing in the same religion, have stood by each other with much greater strength and constancy than people of merely the same descent or even brothers.
Beginning of Religion: Two Theories
- Ancestor Worship
- Nature Worship
1 Ancestor Worship
Various attempts have been made to trace the beginnings of religion. In all the ancient religions which have come down to us at the present day, we find one claim made--that they are all supernatural, that their genesis is not, as it were, in the human brain, but that they have originated somewhere outside of it.
Two theories have gained some acceptance amongst modern scholars. One is the spirit theory of religion, the other the evolution of the idea of the Infinite. One party maintains that ancestor worship is the beginning of religious ideas; the other, that religion originates in the personification of the power of nature. We want to keep up the memory of our dead relatives and think that they are living even when the body is dissolved, and we want to place food for them and, in a certain sense, to worship them. Out of that came the growth we call religion.
Studying the ancient religions of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, and many other races in America and elsewhere, we find very clear traces of this ancestor worship being the beginning of religion. With the ancient Egyptians, the first idea of the soul was that of a double. Every human body contained in it another being very similar to it; and when a person died, this double went out of the body and yet lived on. But the life of the double lasted only so long as the dead body remained intact, and that is why we find among the Egyptians so much solicitude to keep the body uninjured. And that is why they built those huge pyramids in which they preserved the bodies. For, if any portion of the external body was hurt, the double would be correspondingly injured. This is clearly ancestor worship. With the ancient Babylonians we find the same idea of the double, but with a variation. The double lost all sense of love; it frightened the living to give it food and drink, and to help it in various ways. It even lost all affection for its own children and its own wife. Among the ancient Hindus also, we find traces of this ancestor worship. Among the Chinese, the basis of their religion may also be said to be ancestor worship, and it still permeates the length and breadth of that vast country. In fact, the only religion that can really be said to flourish in China is that of ancestor worship. Thus it seems, on the one hand, a very good position is made out for those who hold the theory of ancestor worship as the beginning of religion.
2. Nature Worship
On the other hand, there are scholars who from the ancient Aryan literature show that religion originated in nature worship. Although in India we find proofs of ancestor worship everywhere, yet in the oldest records there is no trace of it whatsoever. In the Rig-Veda Samhita, the most ancient record of the Aryan race, we do not find any trace of it. Modern scholars think, it is the worship of nature that they find there. The human mind seems to struggle to get a peep behind the scenes. The dawn, the evening, the hurricane, the stupendous and gigantic forces of nature, its beauties, these have exercised the human mind, and it aspires to go beyond, to understand something about them. In the struggle they endow these phenomena with personal attributes, giving them souls and bodies, sometimes beautiful, sometimes transcendent. Every attempt ends by these phenomena becoming abstractions whether personalized or not. So also it is found with the ancient Greeks; their whole mythology is simply this abstracted nature worship. So also with the ancient Germans, the Scandinavians, and all the other Aryan races. Thus, on this side, too, a very strong case has been made out, that religion has its origin in the personification of the forces of nature.
Their Reconciliation: The Struggle to Transcend the Limitations of the Senses
These two views, though they seem to be contradictory, can be reconciled on a third basis which, to my mind, is the real germ of religion, and that I propose to call the struggle to transcend the limitations of the senses. Either, people go to seek for the spirits of their ancestors, the spirits of the dead, that is, they want to get a glimpse of what there is after the body is dissolved, or, they desire to understand the power working behind the stupendous phenomena of nature. Whichever of these is the case, one thing is certain, that they try to transcend the limitations of the senses. They cannot remain satisfied with their senses; they want to go beyond them.
The explanation need not be mysterious. To me it seems very natural that the glimpse of religion should come through dreams. The first idea of immortality we may well get through dreams. Isn’t that a most wonderful state? And we know that children and untutored minds find very little difference between dreaming and their waking state. What can be more natural than that they find, as natural logic, that even during the sleep state, when the body is apparently dead, the mind goes on with all its intricate workings? What wonder that they will at once come to the conclusion that when this body is dissolved forever, the same working will go on? This, to my mind, would be a more natural explanation of the supernatural, and through this dream idea the human mind rises to higher and higher conceptions. Of course, in time, the vast majority of mankind found out that these dreams are not verified by their waking states, and that during the dream state it is not that we have a fresh existence, but simply that we recapitulate the experiences of the waking state.
Source : www.vivekananda.org
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