Hindus have
received their religion through revelation
"The Srutis are
called the Vedas, or the Amnaya. The Hindus have received
their religion through revelation, the Vedas. These are
direct intuitional revelations and are held to be
Apaurusheya or entirely superhuman, without any author in
particular. The Veda is the glorious pride of the Hindus,
nay, of the whole world!
The term Veda comes from the root Vid, to know. The word Veda
means knowledge. When it is applied to scripture, it
signifies a book of knowledge. The Vedas are the foundational scriptures of the
Hindus. The Veda is the source of the other five sets of scriptures, why, even
of the secular and the materialistic. The Veda is the storehouse of Indian
wisdom and is a memorable glory which man can never forget till eternity.
Revealed Truth Without Beginning Or End
The Vedas are the eternal truths revealed by God to the great
Rishis of India. The word Rishi means a seer, from DRIS, to see. The Rishi is
the Mantra-Drashta, a seer of Mantra or thought. The thought was not his own.
The Rishis saw the truths or heard them. Therefore, the Vedas are what are heard
(Sruti). The Rishi did not write. He did not create it out of his mind. He was
the seer of thought which existed already. He was only the spiritual discoverer
of the thought. He is not the inventor of the Veda.
The Vedas represent the spiritual experiences of the Rishis
of yore. The Rishi is only a medium or an agent to transmit to people the
intuitional experiences which he received. The truths of the Vedas are
revelations. All the other religions of the world claim their authority as being
delivered by special messengers of God to certain persons, but the Vedas do not
owe their authority to any one. They are themselves the authority as they are
eternal, as they are the Knowledge of the Lord.
Lord Brahma, the Creator, imparted the divine knowledge to the
Rishis or seers. The Rishis disseminated the knowledge. The Vedic Rishis were
great realised persons (souls) who had direct intuitive perception of Brahman or
the Truth. They were inspired teachers. They built a simple, grand and perfect
system of religion and philosophy from which the founders and teachers of all
other religions have drawn their inspiration.
The Vedas are the oldest books in the library of man. The
truths contained in all religions are derived from the Vedas and are ultimately
traceable to the Vedas. The Vedas are the fountain-head of religion. The Vedas
are the ultimate source to which all religious knowledge can be traced. Religion
is of divine origin. It was revealed by God to man in the earliest times. It is
embodied in the Vedas.
The Vedas are eternal. They are without beginning and end. An
ignorant man may say how a book can be without beginning or end. By the Vedas,
no books are meant. Vedas came out of the breath of the Lord. They are the words
of God. The Vedas are not the utterances of persons. They are not the
composition of any human mind. They were never written, never created. They are
eternal and impersonal. The date of the Vedas has never been fixed. It can never
be fixed. Vedas are eternal spiritual Truths. Vedas are an embodiment of divine
knowledge. The books may be destroyed, but the knowledge cannot be destroyed.
Knowledge is eternal. In that sense, the Vedas are eternal."
(Swami Shivananda)
“Three religions now stand in the world which have come down
to us from time prehistoric - Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and
Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks, and all
of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But
while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven
out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter,
and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the
tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India
and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very
foundations, but like the waters of the sea-shore in a
tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to
return in an all-absorbing Hood, a thousand times more
vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these
sects were all sucked in, absorbed and assimilated into the
immense body of the mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy,
of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes,
to the low 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.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common center
to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is
the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless
contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall
attempt to answer.
The Hindus have received their religion through revelation,
the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning
and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience,
how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas
no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of
spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different
times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its
discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is
it with the laws that govern the spiritual relations between
soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father
of all spirits were there before their discovery, and would
remain even if we forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we
honor them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this
audience that some of the very greatest of them were women.”
Hindus have received their religion through revelation
Swami Vivekananda's Address at The World's Parliament of
Religions
