Oh God, you are so very Big! Hindu schools of thought

Once again I thank Stan G for setting me straight on certain elements of Hinduism. 

I never claimed that Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda spoke for the entire vast spectrum of traditional Hinduism. They spoke for their own particular strain of modern Hinduism, and indeed may be said to have invented it. Vivekananda called it Practical Vedanta, some scholars call it Neo-Vedanta, others call it Ramakrishna Vedanta. It tries to synthesise and unify the many Hindu schools of thought. Some schools accept it, others don’t. 

Sri Ramakrishna followed a variety of religious paths in turn. Within Hinduism, he practiced Kali-worship, Vaishnavism, Tantra and Vedanta. Outside Hinduism, he practised Christianity and Islam. 

He discovered that, despite their different beliefs, they all led to the same ontological state of being, which he called Ishwar-labh, God-realisation. When people asked whether God is personal or impersonal, with form or without, absolute or relative, Sri Ramakrishna’s reply was that God is all of these. 

People will ask, “How can God be both an impersonal Absolute and the 330 million personal gods of popular Hinduism, and Buddha and Yahweh and Allah besides?” 

The eminent theologian John Cleese gives us the answer in that wonderful movie “The Meaning of Life” when, in a parody of prayer, he intones, “O God, you are so very Big!”

Bigger than we think, Sri Ramakrishna might have added. So big that he includes all contradictions, all opposites – and transcends them. If this sounds impossible, look at your own body. It contains billions of different cells, all performing different functions. But your body transcends its cells, and is more than the sum of its parts.

Service to God in man was just one of the religious practices that Sri Ramakrishna recommended, although Vivekananda made it the central point in his own teaching. Its intent was not to reform the caste system, but to uplift the downtrodden and help its practitioners to attain God-realisation. 

Stan G notes, “Nobody in his right mind would equate monks with street beggars”. They wouldn’t if they were viewing things from the perspective of individual multiple phenomena. But they might if they looked a lot deeper.

William Page