Not Tolerance, but Acceptance : The Quiet Greatness of Sanatana Dharma...

Not Tolerance, but Acceptance : 

The Quiet Greatness of Sanatana Dharma...

A short clip reached me via WhatsApp a few days ago, as so many things reach us these days, forwarded from one phone to another. It was from a session at the Bharat Literature Festival, where renowned author Shri.Shashi Tharoor was recalling Swami Vivekanandaji’s address at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893.

The line he dwelt on is one most of us learnt in school : Swamiji said he was proud to belong to a faith that had taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.

I paused and began to think of the quotation.  Tharoor said that as a teenager, he had taken  tolerance to be a virtue, because that is what our history lessons told us : the tolerant king was the good king, the one who allowed his subjects to believe as they wished. Only later did he see how patronising the idea could be.

In effect, the tolerant king was saying that I have the truth; you are in error, but I shall graciously permit you,  your right to be wrong.

Acceptance is something else altogether.

It says : I believe I have the truth; you believe you have the truth. I respect yours; please respect mine. That distinction, small as it sounds, carries within it something fundamental to the spirit of Sanatana Dharma.

Long before any parliament of religions, the Rig Veda had expressed it in a single line:

'Ekam sat vipraa bahudhaa vadanti.'

Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.

This is not an idea added later to make an ancient tradition sound modern. It lies deep within the tradition itself.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that in whatever way people approach Him, in that same way He receives them. Elsewhere, He says that whatever form a devotee chooses to worship with faith, He makes that faith steady.

A God who steadies the faith of those who worship the Divine in different forms is not a God who needs rivals defeated.

Far to the south, Thiruvalluvar expressed a similar insight in the language of everyday wisdom:

Epporul yaar yaar vaai ketpinum apporul

meipporul kaanbadhu arivu.

(Kural 423)

Whatever is said, and by whomever, wisdom lies in discerning the truth within it.

Notice what the Kural does not ask. It does not ask who the speaker is, which book he follows or which god he worships. It asks only whether there is truth in what he says.

The festival clip ended with the same thought in simple words : some find their truth within, some in a temple, some in a mosque. These are different ways of stretching our hands towards the Absolute. I cannot think of a better description of a faith that never needed to count heads.

Sanatana Dharma did not historically develop a single centralised missionary structure. It has no single founder whose word must be spread, no one book that everyone must accept, and no central authority measuring its strength by numbers.

A seeker may begin at the feet of a guru, at a village shrine, in the silence of meditation or in the pages of the Upanishads. There has always been room for many beginnings.

And yet its ideas travelled far, the temples of Angkor, the living traditions of Bali, yoga and meditation across continents, and the Upanishads that fascinated thinkers far beyond India.

Ideas can travel not only through organised propagation, but also through human encounter, through traders, teachers, travellers and seekers and endure because succeeding generations find meaning in them. There is a quiet dignity in that.

But it would be dishonest to write only in praise. The oldest living traditions also carry the marks of history and not every wound was inflicted from outside. Some were self-inflicted. The first is discrimination.

A philosophy that sees the same Brahman ( God) in every being cannot, without contradiction, deny dignity to some of its own people. Yet for long periods of our history, social practices did exactly that. Many who were denied dignity within the fold understandably sought it elsewhere. The loss was not theirs alone; it was ours.

Thiruvalluvar had warned us centuries ago:

Pirappokkum ellaa uyirkkum sirappovvaa

seithozhil vetrumaiyaan. (Kural 972)

All beings are equal by birth; distinction comes only from the quality of one’s deeds.

Had we listened more carefully to our own sages, perhaps fewer would have felt excluded from traditions that should have embraced them.

The second is rigidity. When ritual overtook meaning, when crossing the seas became a sin and questions came to be seen as disrespect, a tradition that had once thrived on debate sometimes began guarding its forms more carefully than its spirit. The Upanishads are, after all, conversations. Gargi and Maitreyi questioned sages openly. A dharma that forgets how to question forgets a part of itself.

The third is more subtle, because it arises from one of our greatest strengths openness. A tradition that makes room for many paths does not easily insist that everyone remain within its own. It has absorbed, assimilated and accommodated across centuries. Such openness need not become weakness. But it does create a responsibility : those who inherit a tradition must know it, understand it, live it and pass on its essence, not merely its rituals. And perhaps the answer has always come from within the tradition itself. Whenever the fabric wore thin, saints, poets and reformers rewove it.

Sant Dnyaneshwar, barely out of boyhood, closed his great commentary on the Gita not with a demand, but with a prayer, the Pasaydan:

"Je khaḷaanchi vyankati saando, 

tayaa satkarmi rati vaadho

bhuta paraspare jado maitra jivanche"

May the wicked shed their crookedness,

may their love for good deeds grow,

may friendship bind all living beings to one another.

He did not pray for the wicked to be defeated. He prayed for them to be transformed.

Sri Narayana Guru in Kerala spoke of one caste, one religion and one God for humankind. In Tamil Nadu, Subramania Bharati taught children:

Saadhigal illaiyadi paappa,

kulath thaazhchi uyarchi sollal paavam.

There are no castes, little one;

to call any birth high or low is a sin.

Vivekananda carried a message of acceptance to Chicago and returned to remind India of divinity

 and the dignity of service. Each strengthened the tradition not merely by defending it, but by holding up a mirror to it. That is still the work before us.

The greatness of Sanatana Dharma will not be sustained by numbers or by noise. It will be sustained when every person can feel equally at home within it;  when our daughters study the Gita and the Upanishads as freely as Gargi and can question it,  when learning is valued as much as ritual and when we practise in our own homes the acceptance we so proudly quote.

From the Rig Veda to the Gita, from Dnyaneshwar on the banks of the Indrayani to Thiruvalluvar and Bharati in the Taminadu, a broad vision runs across Bharat. It belongs to no single region or language. And if acceptance is truly at the heart of Sanatana Dharma, it must be practised all the way.

Acceptance that stops at the edge of our own comfort is only tolerance wearing better clothes.

Let every person therefore be free to choose the path that speaks to their heart or to walk none at all without fear, pressure or inducement. Faith chosen freely has meaning; faith imposed or purchased loses something essential.

Nor should any faith need to establish its worth by placing itself above another. The moment we do that, we return to the tolerant king graciously permitting others their supposed right to be wrong.

The word sanatana means eternal. What is eternal does not need to hurry, compete or conquer. It does not need to be declared the best. It needs to be lived truly.

Perhaps its quiet greatness lies precisely here: that it can look at another human being walking a different path towards the Divine and say, sincerely: “Yours too is a way home.”

Vivekananda was right to be proud. May our pride rest not on being above anyone, but on being able to embrace everyone.

After all, Sarve bhavantu sukhinaḥ.

R. Vimala, IAS Retired, MH 2009

Subject Matter Expert, CBC & YASHADA

Former Resident Commissioner, Maharashtra Sadan & Secretary, GoM,

Founder AnirvedShakti Foundation,

PhD Scholar at IIT Bombay 

* Views expressed are personal and those of the author.