Dearest brother,
The karma doctrine of the Vedas is the karma doctrine of the Jews and of every other dharma: purifying the inner self by outward means, yajña and the like. Buddha was the first man in this world to stand up against it. But the spirit and the style all stayed as they were of old. The same again in his doctrine of inner karma; the same in his order to believe in the Sūtras in place of the Vedas. The same jāti was there too, only now it went by guṇa — jātibheda did not go in Buddha’s time — and the same calling of those who do not accept his dharma ‘pāṣaṇḍas’. ‘Pāṣaṇḍa’ is a very old catchword of the Buddhists, though the poor fellows never wielded the sword, and there was great toleration. By argument the Vedas were blown away; but the proof of your own dharma? Believe!! Just what every dharma has. Still, it was very much needed for that age, and that is why he was an Avatāra. His doctrine of Māyā is like Kapila’s. But Shankara’s, how far more grand and rational! Buddha and Kapila say only this: the world is misery, misery; run, run! Is there no happiness at all, then? It is the same kind of talk as when the Brahmos say it is all happiness. Misery; well, what am I to do about it? What if someone says that by bearing it and bearing it, once one is used to it, misery itself will be felt as happiness? Shankara does not go that way. He says, ‘Neither being nor non-being, neither different nor non-different’: this world that is and yet is not, that is different and yet not different, its truth I will know: whether there is misery, or what there is. I do not run away for fear of the bogeyman. I will know; and the endless misery that comes in the knowing, I take it on with all my heart. Am I a beast, that you frighten me with the pleasure and pain of the indriyas, with old age and death? I will know; to know, I will lay down my life. There is nothing to be known in this world; so if there is anything beyond this relative, what the blessed Buddha has pointed to as Prajñāpāram, if it is there, that is what I want. Whether misery comes of it or happiness, I do not care. What a lofty idea! What a mighty idea! On the Upaniṣads rose the dharma of Buddha, and on that, Shankara’s doctrine. Only, Shankara did not get so much as an atom of Buddha’s wonderful heart; only dry intellect. For fear of the Tantras, for fear of the mob, he set out to heal a boil and cut off the hand along with it. To go into all this one would have to write a book, and I lack both: that much learning, and the need.
Buddha is my Iṣṭa, my Īśvara. He has no doctrine of Īśvara; he himself is Īśvara, this I firmly believe. But no one has the power to say ‘thus far and no further’. Even Īśvara has no power to make Himself limited. The translation you have written of the Rhinoceros Sutta from the Sutta Nipāta is excellent. In that same book there is another sutta of the kind, the sutta of the rich man, and it has much the same idea. In the Dhammapada too there are many sayings of that sort. But that too is for the end, when one is ‘his self content with jñāna and vijñāna, kūṭastha, the indriyas conquered’: one who has not an atom of body-consciousness left about his body, he will roam here and there like an elephant maddened with rut. Only when a little creature like me has sat down in one place, done his sādhana and become siddha will he behave like that; that is far off, very far off.
The knowers’ food: by bhikṣā, without a care and without abasement; their drink from the waters of rivers; free by their own will, living unchecked; fearless sleep in the burning-ground or the forest; clothes that need no washing and no drying, or the four quarters for clothes; the earth for a bed; their walking in the lanes of Vedānta; their play in the supreme Brahman. Riding this body as a chariot of the sky, he enjoys whatever viṣayas come to him, moved by another’s will, like a child: the knower of the Ātman, who bears no outward mark and clings to nothing outside. Sky-clad, or else clothed, or clad in a hide, he dwells clothed in Cit; like a madman, or like a child, or like a ghoul, he roams the earth.
The food of the knower of Brahman comes to him without effort; wherever there is water, that he drinks. By his own will he wanders here and there; he is without fear, sleeping sometimes in the forest, sometimes in the burning-ground; he moves along the path of Vedānta, where the Veda has come to its end. His body is like the sky; like a child he is led by the will of others. He is sometimes naked, sometimes wearing fine clothes, sometimes with jñāna alone for a covering; sometimes he behaves like a child, sometimes like a madman, sometimes like a ghoul.
I pray at the Guru’s feet that this may be yours, and that you may roam like the rhinoceros. Here I close.
Vivekananda.