INDIA’S MESSAGE TO THE WORLD

By Swami Vivekanaada
I am grateful to the land of the West for the many warm hearts that received me with all the love that pure and disinterested souls alone could give; but my life’s allegiance is to my motherland; and if I had a thousand lives, every moment of the whole series would be consecrated to your service, my countrymen, my friends. For to this land I owe whatever I possess, physical, mental and spiritual; and if I have been successful in anything, the glory is yours, not mine.
What a land! Whoever stands on this sacred land, whether alien or a child of the soil, feels himself surrounded by the living thoughts of the earth’s purest sons, who have been working to raise the animal to the divine through centuries, whose beginning history fails to trace. The very air is full of the pulsations of spirituality.
This land is sacred to philosophy, to ethics and spirituality, to all that tends to give a respite to man in his incessant struggle to the preservation of the animal, to all training that makes man throw off the garments of brutality and stand revealed as the spirit of immortal, the birthless, the deathless, the ever blessed the land where the cup of pleasure was full, and fuller has been the cup of misery, until here, first of all, man found out that it was all vanity.
Here, in this ocean of humanity, amidst the sharp interaction of strong current of pleasure and pain ,of strength and weakness, of wealth and poverty, of joy and sorrow, of smile and tear, of life and death, in the melting rhythm of eternal peace and calmness, across the throne of renunciation!
Here in this land, the great problem of life and death, of the thirst for life, and the vain and struggles to preserve it only resulting in the accumulation of woes, were first grappled with and solved. This is the land where alone religion was practical and real, and here alone men and women plunged boldly into realize the goal, just as in other lands they madly plunge in to realize the pleasures of life by robbing their weaker brethren.
Here and here alone the human heart expanded till it included not only the human, but birds, beasts and the plants; from the highest gods to grains of sand, the highest and lowest, all find a place in the heart of man, grown great, infinite. And here alone, the human soul studied the universe as one unbroken unity whose every pulse was his own pulse.
Ay, a glorious destiny, my brethren, for as back as the days of the Upanishads we have thrown the challenge to the world: “Not by progency, not by wealth, but by renunciation alone immortality is reached.”Race after race has taken the challenge up and tried their utmost to solve the world riddle on the plane of desire. The question has yet to be decided whether peace will survive or war; weather patience will survive or non-forbearance; whether goodness will survive or wickedness; whether muscle will survive or brain; whether worldliness will survive or spirituality. We have solved our problems ages ago, and held on to it through good or evil fortune, and mean to hold on to it till the end of time. Our solution is unworldliness- renunciation.
This is the theme of Indian life work, the burden of her eternal songs, the backbone of her existence, the foundation of her being-the spiritualism of the human race. In this her life course she has never deviated, whether the Tartar ruled or Turk, whether the Mugul ruled or English.
And I challenge anybody to show one single period of her national life when India was lacking of spiritual giants capable of moving the world. But her work is spiritual, and that cannot be done with blasts of war trumpets or the march of cohort. Her influence has always fallen upon the world like that of the gentle dew, unheared and scarcely marked, yet bringing into bloom the fairest flowers of earth. This influence, being in its nature gentle, would have to wait for a fortunate combination of circumstances, to go out of the country into other land, though it never ceased to work within the limit of its native land. As such every educated person knows that whenever the empire-building Tartar or Persian or Greek or Arab brought this land in contact with the outside world, a mass of spiritual influence immediately flooded the world from here.
Mark my words, this is but the small beginning, but things are to follow; what the result of the present work outside the India will be I cannot exactly state, but this I know for certain that millions , I say deliberately, millions in every civilized land waiting for the message that will save them from the hideous abyss of materialism into which modern money worship is driving them headlong, and many of the leaders of the new social movements have already discovered that Vedanta in its highest form alone can spiritualize their social aspirations.