Swami Vivekananda Complete Works Pdf

Our Master & His Message

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works Pdf 2017

  • Swami Vivekananda, one of Hinduism's the most prominent exponents, was pivotal in introducing the Hindu philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world. He is known for his path-breaking works on the Hindu scriptures, especially, the Vedas and the Upanishads, and his re-interpretations of Hindu philosophy in the light of modern pluralistic thought.
  • The complete works of swami vivekananda Download the complete works of swami vivekananda or read online books in PDF, EPUB, Tuebl, and Mobi Format. Click Download or Read Online button to get the complete works of swami vivekananda book now. This site is like a library, Use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want.
  • Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Vol-9 PDF Free E-book Download Swara Yoga The Tantric Science Of Brain Breathing by Swami Muktibodhananda PDF Free E-book Download The Life Of Ramanujacharya Pdf Free E-Book Download.

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 1 by Swami Vivekananda Book Summary: This is the first volume of the collection of the books, lectures, letters, poetry of Swami Vivekananda. This Special Master Edition has been crafted with great care in a 7.5' x 9.5' two-columns format.

Sister Nivedita


Swami Vivekananda Complete Works Pdf Converter

Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works Pdf Online

In the four volumes (Now in nine volumes — Ed.) of the works of the
Swami Vivekananda which are to compose the present edition, we have what
is not only a gospel to the world at large, but also to its own
children, the Charter of the Hindu Faith. What Hinduism needed, amidst
the general disintegration of the modern era, was a rock where she could
lie at anchor, an authoritative utterance in which she might recognise
her self. And this was given to her, in these words and writings of the
Swami Vivekananda.
For
the first time in history, as has been said elsewhere, Hinduism itself
forms here the subject of generalisation of a Hindu mind of the highest
order. For ages to come the Hindu man who would verify, the Hindu mother
who would teach her children, what was the faith of their ancestors
will turn to the pages of these books for assurance and light. Long
after the English language has disappeared from India, the gift that has
here been made, through that language, to the world, will remain and
bear its fruit in East and West alike. What Hinduism had needed, was the
organising and consolidating of its own idea. What the world had needed
was a faith that had no fear of truth. Both these are found here. Nor
could any greater proof have been given of the eternal vigour of the
Sanâtana Dharma, of the fact that India is as great in the present as
ever in the past, than this rise of the individual who, at the critical
moment, gathers up and voices the communal consciousness.
That India should have found her own need satisfied only in carrying
to the humanity outside her borders the bread of life is what might have
been foreseen. Nor did it happen on this occasion for the first time.
It was once before in sending out to the sister lands the message of a
nation-making faith that India learnt as a whole to understand the
greatness of her own thought — a self-unification that gave birth to
modern Hinduism itself. Never may we allow it to be forgotten that on
Indian soil first was heard the command from a Teacher to His disciples:
'Go ye out into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every
creature!' It is the same thought, the same impulse of love, taking to
itself a new shape, that is uttered by the lips of the Swami
Vivekananda, when to a great gathering in the West he says: 'If one
religion true, then all the others also must be true. Thus the Hindu
faith is yours as much as mine.' And again, in amplification of the same
idea: 'We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every
religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before
the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian.
We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the
highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp
and realise the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and, binding
them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet
of worship.' To the heart of this speaker, none was foreign or alien.
For him, there existed only Humanity and Truth.
Of the Swami's address before the Parliament of Religions, it may be
said that when he began to speak it was of 'the religious ideas of the
Hindus', but when he ended, Hinduism had been created. The moment was
ripe with this potentiality. The vast audience that faced him
represented exclusively the occidental mind, but included some
development of all that in this was most distinctive. Every nation in
Europe has poured in its human contribution upon America, and notably
upon Chicago, where the Parliament was held. Much of the best, as well
as some of the worst, of modern effort and struggle, is at all times to
be met with, within the frontiers of that Western Civic Queen, whose
feet are upon the shores of Lake Michigan, as she sits and broods, with
the light of the North in her eyes. There is very little in the modern
consciousness, very little inherited from the past of Europe, that does
not hold some outpost in the city of Chicago. And while the teeming life
and eager interests of that centre may seem to some of us for the
present largely a chaos, yet they are undoubtedly making for the
revealing of some noble and slow-wrought ideal of human unity, when the
days of their ripening shall be fully accomplished.
Such was the psychological area, such the sea of mind, young,
tumultuous, overflowing with its own energy and self-assurance, yet
inquisitive and alert withal, which confronted Vivekananda when he rose
to speak. Behind him, on the contrary, lay an ocean, calm with long ages
of spiritual development. Behind him lay a world that dated itself from
the Vedas, and remembered itself in the Upanishads, a world to which
Buddhism was almost modern; a world that was filled with religious
systems of faiths and creeds; a quiet land, steeped in the sunlight of
the tropics, the dust of whose roads had been trodden by the feet of the
saints for ages upon ages. Behind him, in short, lay India, with her
thousands of years of national development, in which she had sounded
many things, proved many things, and realised almost all, save only her
own perfect unanimity, from end to end of her great expanse of time and
space, as to certain fundamental and essential truths, held by all her
people in common.
These, then, were the two mind-floods, two immense rivers of thought,
as it were, Eastern and modern, of which the yellow-clad wanderer on the
platform of the Parliament of Religions formed for a moment the point
of confluence. The formulation of the common bases of Hinduism was the
inevitable result of the shock of their contact, in a personality, so
impersonal. For it was no experience of his own that rose to the lips of
the Swami Vivekananda there. He did not even take advantage of the
occasion to tell the story of his Master. Instead of either of these, it
was the religious consciousness of India that spoke through him, the
message of his whole people, as determined by their whole past. And as
he spoke, in the youth and noonday of the West, a nation, sleeping in
the shadows of the darkened half of earth, on the far side of the
Pacific, waited in spirit for the words that would be borne on the dawn
that was travelling towards them, to reveal to them the secret of their
own greatness and strength.
Others stood beside the Swami Vivekananda, on the same platform as he,
as apostles of particular creeds and churches. But it was his glory
that he came to preach a religion to which each of these was, in his own
words, 'only a travelling, a coming up, of different men, and women,
through various conditions and circumstances to the same goal'. He stood
there, as he declared, to tell of One who had said of them all, not
that one or another was true, in this or that respect, or for this or
that reason, but that 'All these are threaded upon Me, as pearls upon a
string. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary
power, raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.' To
the Hindu, says Vivekananda, 'Man is not travelling from error to truth,
but climbing up from truth to truth, from truth that is lower to truth
that is higher.' This, and the teaching of Mukti — the doctrine that
'man is to become divine by realising the divine,' that religion is
perfected in us only when it has led us to 'Him who is the one life in a
universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing
world, that One who is the only soul, of which all souls are but
delusive manifestations' — may be taken as the two great outstanding
truths which, authenticated by the longest and most complex experience
in human history, India proclaimed through him to the modern world of
the West.
For India herself, the short address forms, as has been said, a brief
Charter of Enfranchisement. Hinduism in its wholeness the speaker bases
on the Vedas, but he spiritualises our conception of the word, even
while he utters it. To him, all that is true is Veda. 'By the Vedas,' he
says, 'no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of
spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.'
Incidentally, he discloses his conception of the Sanatana Dharma. 'From
the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the
latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the lowest ideas of
idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the
Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in
the Hindu's religion.' To his mind, there could be no sect, no school,
no sincere religious experience of the Indian people — however like an
aberration it might seem to the individual — that might rightly be
excluded from the embrace of Hinduism. And of this Indian Mother-Church,
according to him, the distinctive doctrine is that of the Ishta Devatâ,
the right of each soul to choose its own path, and to seek God in its
own way. No army, then, carries the banner of so wide an Empire as that
of Hinduism, thus defined. For as her spiritual goal is the finding of
God, even so is her spiritual rule the perfect freedom of every soul to
be itself.
Yet would not this inclusion of all, this freedom of each, be the
glory of Hinduism that it is, were it not for her supreme call, of
sweetest promise: 'Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that
dwell in higher spheres! For I have found that Ancient One who is beyond
all darkness, all delusion. And knowing Him, ye also shall be saved
from death.' Here is the word for the sake of which all the rest exists
and has existed. Here is the crowning realisation, into which all others
are resolvable. When, in his lecture on 'The Work Before Us,' the Swami
adjures all to aid him in the building of a temple wherein every
worshipper in the land can worship, a temple whose shrine shall contain
only the word Om, there are some of us who catch in the utterance the
glimpse of a still greater temple — India herself, the Motherland, as
she already exists — and see the paths, not of the Indian churches
alone, but of all Humanity, converging there, at the foot of that sacred
place wherein is set the symbol that is no symbol, the name that is
beyond all sound. It is to this, and not away from it, that all the
paths of all the worships and all the religious systems lead. India is
at one with the most puritan faiths of the world in her declaration that
progress is from seen to unseen, from the many to the One, from the low
to the high, from the form to the formless, and never in the reverse
direction. She differs only in having a word of sympathy and promise for
every sincere conviction, wherever and whatever it may be, as
constituting a step in the great ascent.
The Swami Vivekananda would have been less than he was, had anything
in this Evangel of Hinduism been his own. Like the Krishna of the Gitâ,
like Buddha, like Shankarâchârya, like every great teacher that Indian
thought has known, his sentences are laden with quotations from the
Vedas and Upanishads. He stands merely as the Revealer, the Interpreter
to India of the treasures that she herself possesses in herself. The
truths he preaches would have been as true, had he never been born. Nay
more, they would have been equally authentic. The difference would have
lain in their difficulty of access, in their want of modern clearness
and incisiveness of statement, and in their loss of mutual coherence and
unity. Had he not lived, texts that today will carry the bread of life
to thousands might have remained the obscure disputes of scholars. He
taught with authority, and not as one of the Pandits. For he himself had
plunged to the depths of the realisation which he preached, and he came
back like Ramanuja only to tell its secrets to the pariah, the outcast,
and the foreigner.
And yet this statement that his teaching holds nothing new is not
absolutely true. It must never be forgotten that it was the Swami
Vivekananda who, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the Advaita
Philosophy, as including that experience in which all is one, without a
second, also added to Hinduism the doctrine that Dvaita,
Vishishtâdvaita, and Advaita are but three phases or stages in a single
development, of which the last-named constitutes the goal. This is part
and parcel of the still greater and more simple doctrine that the many
and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the mind at different
times and in different attitudes; or as Sri Ramakrishna expressed the
same thing, 'God is both with form and without form. And He is that
which includes both form and formlessness.'
It is this which adds its crowning significance to our Master's life,
for here he becomes the meeting-point, not only of East and West, but
also of past and future. If the many and the One be indeed the same
Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all
modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are
paths of realisation. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and
secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself
religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to
avoid.
This is the realisation which makes Vivekananda the great preacher of
Karma, not as divorced from, but as expressing Jnâna and Bhakti. To him,
the workshop, the study, the farmyard, and the field are as true and
fit scenes for the meeting of God with man as the cell of the monk or
the door of the temple. To him, there is no difference between service
of man and worship of God, between manliness and faith, between true
righteousness and spirituality. All his words, from one point of view,
read as a commentary upon this central conviction. 'Art, science, and
religion', he said once, 'are but three different ways of expressing a
single truth. But in order to understand this we must have the theory of
Advaita.'
The formative influence that went to the determining of his vision may
perhaps be regarded as threefold. There was, first, his literary
education, in Sanskrit and English. The contrast between the two worlds
thus opened to him carried with it a strong impression of that
particular experience which formed the theme of the Indian sacred books.
It was evident that this, if true at all, had not been stumbled upon by
Indian sages, as by some others, in a kind of accident. Rather was it
the subject-matter of a science, the object of a logical analysis that
shrank from no sacrifice which the pursuit of truth demanded.
In his Master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, living and teaching in the
temple-garden at Dakshineshwar, the Swami Vivekananda — 'Naren' as he
then was — found that verification of the ancient texts which his heart
and his reason had demanded. Here was the reality which the books only
brokenly described. Here was one to whom Samâdhi was a constant mode of
knowledge. Every hour saw the swing of the mind from the many to the
One. Every moment heard the utterance of wisdom gathered
superconsciously. Everyone about him caught the vision of the divine.
Upon the disciple came the desire for supreme knowledge 'as if it had
been a fever'. Yet he who was thus the living embodiment of the books
was so unconsciously, for he had read none of them! In his Guru,
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda found the key to life.
Even now, however, the preparation for his own task was not complete.
He had yet to wander throughout the length and breadth of India, from
the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, mixing with saints and scholars and
simple souls alike, learning from all, teaching to all, and living with
all, seeing India as she was and is, and so grasping in its
comprehensiveness that vast whole, of which his Master's life and
personality had been a brief and intense epitome.
These, then — the Shâstras, the Guru, and the Mother land — are the
three notes that mingle themselves to form the music of the works of
Vivekananda. These are the treasure which it is his to offer. These
furnish him with the ingredients whereof he compounds the world's
heal-all of his spiritual bounty. These are the three lights burning
within that single lamp which India by his hand lighted and set up, for
the guidance of her own children and of the world in the few years of
work between September 19, 1893 and July 4, 1902. And some of us there
are, who, for the sake of that lighting, and of this record that he has
left behind him, bless the land that bore him and the hands of those who
sent him forth, and believe that not even yet has it been given to us
to understand the vastness and significance of the message that he
spoke.

N. of RK-V.
July 4, 1907