14 February :
14 Feb 1897 : Swami Vivekananda spoke on 'The Future of India' in
Madras - The glory of India - Race, religion, language, government — all
these together make a nation - The one common ground that we have is
our sacred tradition, our religion. That is the only common ground, and
upon that we shall have to build....We know that to the Indian mind
there is nothing higher than religious
ideals, that this is the keynote of Indian life, and we can only work in
the line of least resistance....The one tendency will be to strengthen
the man, to make the blood pure, the body vigorous, so that it will be
able to resist and throw off all external poisons.... this vitality in
religion .. is the life of our race and that must be strengthened. You
have withstood the shocks of centuries simply because you took great
care of it, you sacrificed everything else for it. Your forefathers
underwent everything boldly, even death itself, but preserved their
religion. Temple alter temple was broken down by the foreign conqueror,
but no sooner had the wave passed than the spire of the temple rose up
again. Some of these old temples of Southern India and those like
Somnâth of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom, will give you a
keener insight into the history of the race than any amount of books.
Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and a hundred
regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out
of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever! That is the national mind,
that is the national life-current. Follow it and it leads to
glory....My idea is first of all to bring out the gems of
spirituality..the ideas must be taught in the language of the people; at
the same time, Sanskrit education must go on along with it, because the
very sound of Sanskrit words gives a prestige and a power and a
strength to the race...The solution for caste problem is not by bringing
down the higher, but by raising the lower up to the level of the
higher. And that is the line of work that is found in all our
books....What is meant by a Rishi? The pure one. Be pure first, and you
will have power....Therefore to make a great future India, the whole
secret lies in organization, accumulation of power, co-ordination of
wills...We must have life-building, man-making, character-making
assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them
your life and character, you have more education than any man who has
got by heart a whole library... we will make it a non-sectarian temple,
having only "Om" as the symbol, the greatest symbol of any sect. If
there is any sect here which believes that "Om" ought not to be the
symbol, it has no right to call itself Hindu.
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