‘Swami Vivekananda galvanised a somnambulant continent into a new awakening’

Swami Vivekananda held that religious truths are verifiable by the experimental method as are scientific truths as they were also predicated by experience except that they could not be measured in a laboratory and thanks to him, have now become the hallmarks of our religious life and discourse; indeed stirring a “somnambulant continent into a new awakening”, says a new book on the “modern monk” in “flaming robes”.

“Just as scientific truths are verifiable by the experimental method, Vivekananda claimed so are religious truths. Empiricism and rationalism…were the foundational principles of modern science. Vivekananda wanted to do something similar to religion; he wanted empiricism and rationalism to also underwrite religious truths and beliefs” – and succeeded, writes Makarand R. Paranjape in the extensively researched “Swami Vivekananda – Hindusim and India’s Road to Modernity” (Harper Collins).

“To him, religious facts were also predicated upon experience, except that such experience could not be measured in a laboratory. Rather, it had to be measured in the laboratory of the spirit. In this sense, he was different from his predecessors, who were much more bound by tradition and scriptural authority,” writes, Paranjape, the Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.

It is because of “inspiring” leaders like Vivekananda that rationality, verifiability and experience “have become the hallmarks of our religious life and discourse. Vivekananda endorses rationality but does not make it the supreme epistemological principle. Rather, rationality gets mediated, moderated and in a sense, re-placed in the order of things, placed below gnosis or higher (re)-cognition of our identity with the supreme consciousness,” Paranjape writes.

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