In search of wisdom and its blind spots: Catholic reflections on Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary

Sheveland International Journal of Dharma Studies 2014, 2:11 http://www.internationaljournaldharmastudies.com/content/2/1/11 RESEARCH Open Access In search of wisdom and its blind spots: Catholic reflections on Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary John N Sheveland Correspondence: Religious Studies Department, Gonzaga University, 502 E Boone Ave., Spokane, WA 99258, USA Abstract The 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda is an occasion for interreligious reflection on the enduring significance of his teachings and their potential for reflective engagement. This essay presents and engages select motifs from his four lectures on 'Practical Vedanta', particularly his understandings of sin, solidarity, and the relevance of his thought to the pervasive challenge of religious absolutism in contemporary experience. The essay notes some blind spots or vulnerabilities in his teachings owing to historical context and adopts these as tools to assist in Catholic theological reflection on analogous weaknesses in that tradition. Keywords: Swami Vivekananda; Vedanta; Interreligious dialogue; Sin; Solidarity; Parliament for the world’s religions It gave me pause when I was asked by an organizing member of the Hindu-Catholic Dialogue Group of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to present some Catholic reflections on the enduring contributions of Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) in honor of his 150th birth anniversarya. Pause because while I am generally comfortable with Vivekananda’s thought and with the Neo-Vedanta intellectual trajectory of Hinduism which he represents, his eight volumes of collected works are expansive, dynamic, deeply reflective, delicately situated in a complex historical context, and are therefore unfavorable to quick judgments and easy expressions meant to capture his meaningfulness. The invitation quickly became an opportunity to get clearer on who I am as a reader and as a comparative theologian who investigates Vedanta for interreligious meanings and possibilities. Of course this particular Catholic represents only himself, and the Buddhist in this Catholic understands the ‘self’ to be composite and dynamic, a moving target, one who fluctuates and responds over time to received tradition, new experience, and learning. How one apprehends and internalizes Vivekananda’s thought is a dynamic affair situated in time and place, and will likely shift in the future, and this observation feels fitting with respect to the superabundant content and interreligious possibilities contained in Vivekananda’s corpus. A second source of pause arose upon checking out from my university library and reading through the eight volumes of his collected works and realizing that my current age of thirty-nine is the same age at which Vivekananda prematurely succumbed to an untreated diabetic condition. So the pause quickly became an anxiety, a sense of being © 2014 Sheveland; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Sheveland International Journal of Dharma Studies 2014, 2:11 http://www.internationaljournaldharmastudies.com/content/2/1/11 quite outmatched by someone who at least with respect to age was my peer. Reading the volumes became an unusual experience of reflecting upon he and I together – our age, stamina, and abilities, but also historical and cultural locations, systems of injustice, and joint interest in the Parliament for the World’s Religions which he and I both attended just once – his the first ever in 1893 in Chicago, mine the most recent in 2009 in Melbourneb. Three sets of observations follow. The first addresses two areas in which Catholics might learn more about sinfulness and solidarity from Swami Vivekananda. A second observation raises discomforts with a few tendencies in his thinking which, through interreligious encounter, can function like a mirror into which Christians might gaze to perceive analogous shortcomings in their own tradition. A third observation explores how Vivekananda’s thought helps us to understand and confront pervasive global experiences of religious fundamentalism and absolutism. Catholic leanings: sin & solidarity Christians may find a somewhat natural, spontaneous entrance into the thought world of Vedanta, and perhaps especially Vivekananda’s Vedanta, since he taught it as a kind of export from India to the rest of the world which supplies humanizing sources of wisdom that teach people about their inherent ‘divinity’, and in ways that appeal to universal human understanding. Review of his various lectures given in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere makes it clear that much of his communication was to first-timers, people who knew little or nothing about Hinduism or the Vedas but perhaps a lot about what suffering and ignorance feel like. His charismatic and straightforward language can help Christians to recognize his diagnosis of the human condition as resonant or familiar. In the fourth and last lecture he gave on the topic of ‘Practical Vedanta’ in November 1896, Vivekananda offered what he called ‘the highest prayer that the Advaita teaches’. It reads as a summons: Rise thou effulgent one, rise thou who art always pure, rise though birthless and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest thy true nature. These little manifestations do not befit thee (Vivekananda 1976d, 357). So stark, so pristine that last statement: these little manifestations do not befit thee, disclosing what should be recognized upon examination, namely, that much conditioned thinking and acting diminishes persons’ presence in the world because it dissociates them from the true self which is non-different from the ground of all being, or Brahman. A few sentences later he continued: So if we are advaitists, we must think from this moment that our old self is dead and gone. The old Mr., Mrs., and Ms. so-and-so are gone, they were superstitions, and what remains is the ever-pure, the ever-strong, the almighty, the all-knowing – that alone remains for us, and then all fear vanishes from us. Who can injure us, the omnipresent? All weakness has vanished from us, and our only work is to arouse this knowledge in our fellow beings. We see that they too are the same pure self, only they do not know it; we must teach them, we must help them to rouse up their infinite nature (Vivekananda 1976d, 358). Page 2 of 16 Sheveland International Journal of Dharma Studies 2014, 2:11 http://www.internationaljournaldharmastudies.com/content/2/1/11 Christians reading these words from his fourth lecture on Practical Vedanta may feel at home. The old self: gone. Upon conversion from the tattered and defeated old self to the real, pure, and all-knowing self: fearlessness. From recognition of the self as one’s t (...truncated)