The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 4/Writings: Prose/Stray Remarks on Theosophy
STRAY REMARKS ON THEOSOPHY[1]
The Theosophists are having a jubilee time of it this year, and several
press-notices are before us of their goings and doings for the last
twenty-five years.
Nobody has a right now to say that the Hindus are not liberal to a fault. A
coterie of young Hindus has been found to welcome even this graft of
American Spiritualism, with its panoply of taps and raps and hitting back
and forth with Mahâtmic pellets.
The Theosophists claim to possess the original divine knowledge of the
universe. We are glad to learn of it, and gladder still that they mean to
keep it rigorously a secret. Woe unto us, poor mortals, and Hindus at that,
if all this is at once let out on us! Modern Theosophy is Mrs. Besant.
Blavatskism and Olcottism seem to have taken a back seat. Mrs. Besant means
well at least — and nobody can deny her perseverance and zeal.
There are, of course, carping critics. We on our part see nothing but good
in Theosophy — good in what is directly beneficial, good in what is
pernicious, as they say, indirectly good as we say — the intimate
geographical knowledge of various heavens, and other places, and the
denizens thereof; and the dexterous finger work on the visible plane
accompanying ghostly communications to live Theosophists — all told. For
Theosophy is the best serum we know of, whose injection never fails to
develop the queer moths finding lodgment in some brains attempting to pass
muster as sound.
We have no wish to disparage the good work of the Theosophical or any other
society. Yet exaggeration has been in the past the bane of our race and if
the several articles on the work of the Theosophical Society that appeared
in the Advocate of Lucknow be taken as the temperamental gauge of Lucknow,
we are sorry for those it represents, to say the least; foolish depreciation
is surely vicious, but fulsome praise is equally loathsome.
This Indian grafting of American Spiritualism — with only a few Sanskrit
words taking the place of spiritualistic jargon — Mahâtmâ missiles taking
the place of ghostly raps and taps, and Mahatmic inspiration that of
obsession by ghosts.
We cannot attribute a knowledge of all this to the writer of the articles in
the Advocate, but he must not confound himself and his Theosophists with the
great Hindu nation, the majority of whom have clearly seen through the
Theosophical phenomena from the start and, following the great Swami
Dayânanda Sarasvati who took away his patronage from Blavatskism the moment
he found it out, have held themselves aloof.
Again, whatever be the predilection of the writer in question, the Hindus
have enough of religious teaching and teachers amidst themselves even in
this Kali Yuga, and they do not stand in need of dead ghosts of Russians and
Americans.
The articles in question are libels on the Hindus and their religion. We
Hindus — let the writer, like that of the articles referred to, know once
for all — have no need nor desire to import religion from the West.
Sufficient has been the degradation of importing almost everything else.
The importation in the case of religion should be mostly on the side of the
West, we are sure, and our work has been all along in that line. The only
help the religion of the Hindus got from the Theosophists in the West was
not a ready field, but years of uphill work, necessitated by Theosophical
sleight-of-hand methods. The writer ought to have known that the
Theosophists wanted to crawl into the heart of Western Society, catching on
to the skirts of scholars like Max Müller and poets like Edwin Arnold, all
the same denouncing these very men and posing as the only receptacles of
universal wisdom. And one heaves a sigh of relief that this wonderful wisdom
is kept a secret. Indian thought, charlatanry, and mango-growing fakirism
had all become identified in the minds of educated people in the West, and
this was all the help rendered to Hindu religion by the Theosophists.
The great immediate visible good effect of Theosophy in every country, so
far as we can see, is to separate, like Prof. Koch's injections into the
lungs of consumptives, the healthy, spiritual, active, and patriotic from
the charlatans, the morbids, and the degenerates posing as spiritual beings.
- Notes
- ↑ Found among Swami Vivekananda's papers.