There has been a good deal of discussion recently in Indian online discussion forums and in the media more broadly about the theme of tolerance and intolerance.  As an outside American bystander, I will not comment here on the particulars of any of the various controversies connected with this topic–the pronouncements of actors or literary figures returning awards in protest, or their various critics.  I am sure that everyone involved, on all sides, feels justified in the things they have said and done.  They are all quite capable of speaking for themselves.

I would like to reflect, rather, on what Swami Vivekananda might have said on the topic of tolerance and intolerance, were this wise sage with us today.  In fact, this does not take too much speculation, because he spoke on a number of occasions on this very question.

In his first major public appearance in the West, at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, he said of the Hindu tradition, of which he was a representative, “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.  We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.”

This ideal of universal acceptance, and of accepting all religions as true, is often attacked in internet discussions today as teaching that “all religions are the same.”  But this is not, in fact, an accurate characterization of Swami Vivekananda’s teaching; for Swamiji was well aware of the differences among the world’s religions.  He addressed this objection in a 1900 address called “The Way to the Realisation of a Universal Religion.”  “How can contradictory opinions be true at the same time?  This is the question which I intend to answer.  But I will first ask you: Are all the religions of the world really contradictory?  I do not mean the external forms in which great thoughts are clad.  I do not mean the different buildings, languages, rituals, books, etc. employed in various religions.  But I mean the internal soul of every religion.  Every religion has a soul behind it, and that soul may differ from the soul of another religion; but are they contradictory?  Do they contradict or supplement each other?”

Swamiji immediately answers his own question by saying, “I believe that they are not contradictory; they are supplementary.  Each religion, as it were, takes up one part of the great universal truth, and spends its whole force in embodying and typifying that part of the great truth.”  Rather than seeing the various religions as mutually exclusive, Swamiji expresses a vision of each religion as adding something to humanity’s total vision of the truth.  “It is, therefore, addition, not exclusion.  That is the idea.  And this is the march of humanity.  Man never progresses from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lesser truth to higher truth–but it is never from error to truth.”

This last point is important; for what Swami Vivekananda is expressing is not what today is often called “relativism”–that is, the view that all perspectives are of equal value.  He does have an idea of “lesser truth” and “higher truth,” which of course implies a standard by which degrees of truth are to be determined.

For Swami Vivekananda, a committed Hindu, this standard is the Vedas.  He says in a 1902 essay titled “Hinduism and Shri Ramakrishna,” “Although the super sensuous vision of truths is to be met with in some measure in our Puranas and Itihasas and in the religious scriptures of other races, still the fourfold scripture known among the Aryan race as the Vedas being the first, the most complete, and the most undistorted collection of spiritual truths, deserve to occupy the highest place among all scriptures, command the respect of all nations of the earth, and furnish the rationale of all their respective scriptures.”

At the same time, though, for Swami Vivekananda, the written Vedas, although having the pride of place among the world’s scriptures that he describes, are but a manifestation of the eternal, non-man-made (apaurusheya) Veda: “It may sound ludicrous to this audience–how a book can be without beginning or end; but by the Vedas no books are meant.  They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.”

In summary, for Swami Vivekananda, those scriptures known as the Vedas and held to be sacred by Hindus are the pre-eminent scriptures in the world, “the first, the most complete, and the most undistorted collection of spiritual truths.”  But they are not the only true scriptures, for “the super sensuous vision of truths is to be met with in some measure…in the religious scriptures of other races,” and the Vedas in the highest, eternal sense, refer to “the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.”

If one’s perspective is informed by Swami Vivekananda, then, one will view the various religions with, on the one hand, a critical eye, mindful that religions are not all the same, and that there are lesser and higher levels of truth, but also with an open mind, aware also that the eternal Vedas have been manifested everywhere, in various forms, appropriate to the times and places and peoples to whom they were revealed.

The attitude that stems from this perspective is not one of mere tolerance, according to Swami Vivekananda.  Tolerance is certainly better than intolerance.  But even tolerance falls far short of the highest ideal.  Swamiji asks, “Why should I tolerate? Toleration means that I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live.  Is it not a blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live?  I accept all religions that were in the past, and worship with them all.”  “Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not exclusion.  Not only toleration, for so-called toleration is often blasphemy, and I do not believe in it.  I believe in acceptance.”