As I was reading through some of the lectures of Swami Vivekananda, I came across the following quote:
“Great sages come with special messages for the world, and not for name; but their followers throw their teaching overboard and fight over their names — this is verily the history of the world.”
Swamiji points out that saints seeks to spread their messages throughout the world, not their names; however, it is human tendency for us to worship the doer, not the deed. This happened in the case of Buddha, who created Buddhism expressly for the purpose of avoiding the senseless idol worship in Hinduism. He did not want to be worshipped, and did not mention “God” in his philosophy for that reason. However, within a few centuries, his purpose was overlooked, and some Buddhists began to worship Buddha, rather than just his philosophy. It is very hard to separate the doer from what they did; to be able to do so is the mark of a great personality.
Many saints view themselves simply as instruments of God’s will — they do not believe that the great actions they produce are their own; rather, they attribute their good deeds and discoveries to God. Mohammed’s philosophy of Islam was related to him by the Angel Gabriel, a messenger of God; Buddha received enlightenment after severe penance to God; Sri Ramakrishna knew he was an incarnation of God. These saints never claimed that their good deeds were done by them, in the physical sense; rather, they emphasized that they did good deeds because of the God who revealed himself to them. Only saints are able to make this distinction, and this is what distinguishes a truly holy person from the crowd.
Because we do not necessarily understand how to discriminate between the doer and the deed, we strictly follow the doer, leaving the essence of the meaning in the dust. This may be why followers of different religions fight amongt themselves, even though the essential teachings of all religions are similar, and this is what Swamiji says is “the history of the world.”
This inability to distinguish between the personality and the world seems to be the root of fanaticism, and it also seems to be a problem especially prevalent in Hinduism — as I wrote in one of my previous posts, we seem to have the tendency to put great souls on a pedestal, and we end up worshipping just the idol, instead of the ideals. We all worship Gandhi — how many of us really put the ideas of ahimsa and truthfulness into practice? By being conscious of this tendency, we can make sure that we do not let this history repeat.
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