An excerpt from the book Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom.
Vegetarianism has been pushed on the nation with renewed energy since the BJP came to power in 2014. Yoga gurus, mystics, and bringers of spiritual peace have all been overtly or covertly pushing vegetarianism as the panacea for all health problems. Vegetarianism is also supposed to make you sattvic, or spiritual. Except for Brahmin castes (and there are exceptions among them too, like Kashmiri and Bengali Brahmins) Hindus have historically never been vegetarians uniformly. Nonetheless, there is a definitive association of vegetarianism with spirituality in the Hindu tradition, just as there is within Buddhism and Jainism. Vivekananda happened to be a renegade in this matter. In The Monk as Man, Sankar notes that he not only ate meat but enjoyed treating his friends to spicy mutton dishes he cooked himself, and most significantly, he advised Hindus to eat meat.
In the Hindu religious discourse of the day, (we find these basic ideas in the Bhagavad Gita) all things in nature, including humans, were believed to have one of three qualities (gunas). Tamas is the lowest quality, representing dullness and inertia. Next in order came rajas, the quality of activity and passion. The highest quality was sattva, of calmness and moral purity. Sattva was considered a prerequisite to attaining spirituality. Meat was believed to increase the quality of rajas or passion in people. The scientific knowledge of the time also advanced the proposition that the consumption of animal proteins made one stronger.
Vivekananda wrote a long essay in Bengali in Udbodhan titled ‘The East and the West’. After discussing the question of differing food habits and the different arguments put forward by meat eaters and vegetarians, he wrote, “Whatever one or the other may say, the real fact, however, is that the nations who take animal food are always, as a rule, notably brave, heroic and thoughtful. The nations who take animal food also assert that in those days when the smoke from Yajnas used to rise in the Indian sky and the Hindus used to take the meat of animals sacrificed, then only great religious geniuses and intellectual giants were born among them; but since the drifting of the Hindus into the Babaji’s vegetarianism, not one great, original man arose midst them.” Vivekananda’s final conclusion was that vegetarianism is better because it does not entail killing, but he acknowledged that in a world where there is competition among people, the strength provided by animal food was absolutely necessary.
A disciple’s account of his conversation with Vivekananda at Belur Math is a good example of Vivekananda’s views on the relationship between spirituality and vegetarianism, particularly in the Indian context.
Disciple: It is the fashion here nowadays to give up fish and meat as soon as one takes to religion… . How, do you think, such notions came into existence?
Swamiji: What’s the use of your knowing how they came, when you see clearly, do you not, that such notions are working ruin to our country and our society? Just see — the people of East Bengal eat much fish, meat, and turtle, and they are much healthier than those of this part of Bengal…
…Yes, take as much of that as you can, without fearing criticism. The country has been flooded with dyspeptic Babajis living on vegetables only. That is no sign of Sattva, but of deep Tamas — the shadow of death… .
Disciple: But do not fish and meat increase Rajas in man?
Swamiji: That is what I want you to have. Rajas is badly needed just now! More than ninety per cent of those whom you now take to be men with the Sattva quality are only steeped in the deepest Tamas… . So, I say, eat large quantities of fish and meat, my boy!
Vivekananda continued: ‘All liking for fish and meat disappears when pure Sattva is highly developed, and these are the signs of its manifestation in a soul: sacrifice of everything for others, perfect non-attachment to lust and wealth, want of pride and egotism…. And where such indications are absent, and yet you find men siding with the non-killing party, know it for a certainty that herein, there is either hypocrisy or a show of religion. In other words, to imagine that just by becoming vegetarian one could become more spiritual is like believing that if you wear trainer shoes you would become an athlete.
Vivekananda also had diametrically opposite attitudes towards many ideas and notions that the Sangh Parivar has made part of the mainstream discourse today. They are too many to enumerate fully, so I will mention just two. The first is the celebration of yoga exercises as a great part of India’s ancient heritage. The second is the tendency to give pseudo-scientific explanations for all kinds of Hindu religious beliefs. What Vivekananda taught in America and Great Britain was what he termed raja yoga, an eight-limbed system of yoga, taking Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra as its founding text. It did not contain any of the physical exercises of hatha yoga (simply called yoga today) and according to their biographers, neither Vivekananda nor Sri Ramakrishna ever learned this system.
The Indian government has made a huge push to introduce hatha yoga into schools and into public discourse as not only the best form of exercise from the point of view of health and physical well-being, but also as an integral part of India’s ancient wisdom. The government’s greatest achievement on this front was to get the UN General Assembly to declare 21 July as ‘International Yoga Day’ in 2015. While Vivekananda believed India’s past held wonderous spiritual treasures for the world, hatha yoga did not figure among them. On the contrary, he held hatha yoga to be quite unspiritual. In his first published book Raja Yoga, Vivekananda wrote: Hatha-Yoga…deals entirely with the physical body, its aim being to make the physical body very strong. We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult, and cannot be learned in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth. Many of these practices you will find in Delsarte (French physical educationalist) and other teachers, such as placing the body in different postures, but the object in these is physical, not psychological…. The result of this branch of Yoga is to make men live long; health is the chief idea, the one goal of the Hatha-Yogi. He is determined not to fall sick, and he never does…. A banyan tree lives sometimes 5000 years, but it is a banyan tree and nothing more. So, if a man lives long, he is only a healthy animal.”
In a letter to his brother disciple Akhandananda written from Ghazipur in March 1890 and included in the sixth volume of his Complete Works, he referred to hatha yoga as “nothing but a kind of gymnastics.”
Vivekananda held science in high regard, much more so than most of his Indian contemporaries. In fact, like so many nineteenth century Western intellectuals, scientific knowledge was for him the paradigmatic case of knowledge, because it is completely evidence based. Hence, he demanded that even religion should be scientific; in the sense that it should offer proportionate evidence for its claims. However, the Spirit is not something that can be demonstrated in a laboratory, any more than an atom can be expected to answer prayers. While Vivekananda held that people who asked for material evidence for spiritual truths were intellectually confused, people who gave ‘scientific’ explanations for their religious beliefs, met with his derision. This applied even more to Hinduism, for as a Hindu he was especially concerned with keeping Hindu thought free of irrationality and preserve its rational and philosophical character. He remarked of those among his contemporaries who took the aid of pseudoscience to explain Hindu customs, “There is another class of men among us who are intent upon giving some slippery scientific explanations for any and every Hindu custom, rite, etc., and who are always talking of electricity, magnetism, air vibration, and all that sort of thing. Who knows but they will perhaps some day define God Himself as nothing but a mass of electric vibrations!” One can scarcely imagine what Vivekananda would have said if he had heard of Ganesha being given an elephant head transplant through plastic surgery, gaushalas administering cow urine based mixtures to cure Covid-19, parliamentarians claiming that cow urine cured them of cancer, or high court judges who say cows inhale and exhale oxygen. We have probably missed out on some delightful rapier-sharp thrusts of Vivekananda’s sarcasm, and the rationalist monk has been spared the torture of the theatre of the absurd which Indians live in today.
Published by Aleph Book Company, the book, priced at Rs 899, is available on Amazon, Flipkart, and at all leading bookstores across India.
Govind Krishnan V is an award winning long form journalist based out of Bengaluru. He has previously worked with Fountain Ink, The Sunday Guardian, and The New Indian Express.