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1396 THE CENTRAL IDEA OF THE VEDAS

Home / Complete-Works / Volume 9 / Newspaper Reports / Indian Newspaper Reports /

[The Indian Mirror, July 20, 1894]

Swami Vivekananda explained in America the central idea of the Vedas as follows:

I humbly beg to differ from those who see in monotheism, in the recognition of a personal God, apart from Nature, the acme of intellectual development. I believe, it is only a kind of anthropomorphism which the human mind stumbles upon in its first efforts to understand the unknown. The ultimate satisfaction of human reason and custom lies in the realisation of that universal essence which is the All. And I hold an irrefragable evidence that this idea is present in the Vedas, the numerous gods and their invocations notwithstanding. This idea of formless All, the Sat, i.e., esse or being, called Atman and Brahman in the Upanishads, and further explained in the Darsans, is the central idea of the Vedas, nay, the root-idea of the Hindu religion in general. (Unidentified source.)