|| योग: कर्मसु कौशलम् ||
Taking Brotherhood to all nations was the mission of India since time immemorial. Swami Vivekananda once again did it on 11 Sep 1893. Vivekananda Kendra also is to do this work was vision of Mananeeya Eknathji. He had taken it from Sri Guruji.
Sri Guruji further tells us :
It was not mere dry knowledge confined to the intellectual speculations of a few thinkers sitting in their forest hermitages. It was a living thought driving our ancestors – thinkers, administrators, merchants, scientists, artists and philosophers – to reach distant lands carrying that message of world brotherhood. Wherever they stepped, they taught the local people the spiritual and cultural values of life, taught them the sciences of material prosperity as well and built up a homogeneous brotherhood of nations under their benign wings. Our Hindu Society, strong, self-confident and self-effulgent, acted as the fulcrum of that far-flung empire of the Spirit.
Our arms stretched as far as America on the one side – that was long long before Columbus 'discovered' America! – and on the other side to China, Japan, Cambodia, Malaya, Siam, Indonesia and all the South-East Asian countries and right up to Mongolia and Siberia in the North. Our powerful political empire too spread over these South-East areas and continued for 1,400 years, the Shailendra Empire alone flourishing for over 700 years – standing as a powerful bulwark against Chinese expansion.
During all these centuries, there were neither uprisings by the local people nor their exterminations which would have been the inevitable result if there had been the slightest sign of domination or exploitation by a foreign people and a foreign culture. On the contrary, those people were grateful to us. They adored our nation and longed to give up their mortal coils on the banks of Ganga. That stands in glowing contrast to the bloodstained pages of the history of expansion of Islam, Christianity and now Communism and of the various 'world conquerors' produced by other countries. Even to this day, the basic life-pattern of many of those people is Hindu. They bear Hindu names. We find so many Hindu faces all over there, proud of their Hindu heritage, even though many of them are now Muslims by religion.
Our society which has given rise to such great souls down their centuries – each one of them a lustrous star on the horizon of world thought – is still throwing up a host of luminaries right upto the present-day such as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who could identify himself not merely with the joys and sorrows of human beings but with all animate and inanimate objects as well! When he saw a cow thrashed with a whip, he shrieked with pain and red stripes were found on his back! On another occasion, a bullock grazing on a meadow left a bruised imprint of its hoof on his chest. Such is the extent of identification that our great teachers of the science of Spirit have attained and preached.
Sri Guruji further tells us :
It was not mere dry knowledge confined to the intellectual speculations of a few thinkers sitting in their forest hermitages. It was a living thought driving our ancestors – thinkers, administrators, merchants, scientists, artists and philosophers – to reach distant lands carrying that message of world brotherhood. Wherever they stepped, they taught the local people the spiritual and cultural values of life, taught them the sciences of material prosperity as well and built up a homogeneous brotherhood of nations under their benign wings. Our Hindu Society, strong, self-confident and self-effulgent, acted as the fulcrum of that far-flung empire of the Spirit.
Our arms stretched as far as America on the one side – that was long long before Columbus 'discovered' America! – and on the other side to China, Japan, Cambodia, Malaya, Siam, Indonesia and all the South-East Asian countries and right up to Mongolia and Siberia in the North. Our powerful political empire too spread over these South-East areas and continued for 1,400 years, the Shailendra Empire alone flourishing for over 700 years – standing as a powerful bulwark against Chinese expansion.
During all these centuries, there were neither uprisings by the local people nor their exterminations which would have been the inevitable result if there had been the slightest sign of domination or exploitation by a foreign people and a foreign culture. On the contrary, those people were grateful to us. They adored our nation and longed to give up their mortal coils on the banks of Ganga. That stands in glowing contrast to the bloodstained pages of the history of expansion of Islam, Christianity and now Communism and of the various 'world conquerors' produced by other countries. Even to this day, the basic life-pattern of many of those people is Hindu. They bear Hindu names. We find so many Hindu faces all over there, proud of their Hindu heritage, even though many of them are now Muslims by religion.
Our society which has given rise to such great souls down their centuries – each one of them a lustrous star on the horizon of world thought – is still throwing up a host of luminaries right upto the present-day such as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who could identify himself not merely with the joys and sorrows of human beings but with all animate and inanimate objects as well! When he saw a cow thrashed with a whip, he shrieked with pain and red stripes were found on his back! On another occasion, a bullock grazing on a meadow left a bruised imprint of its hoof on his chest. Such is the extent of identification that our great teachers of the science of Spirit have attained and preached.
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