Life of Dayanand Saraswati: World Teacher (An Old and Rare Book)

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SWAMI Dayanand Saraswati was born in 1824 A D. and died SW on 30th October 1883 A. D. Of the fiftynine years of his life, he spent the first twentyone at home, receiving such education as is ordinarily given to a scion of a well-to-do Brahmin family. As he grew up, his thirst for knowledge increased. While he wanted to devote himself to learning, his parents decided that he should marry and settle down. To escape the bonds of marriage which his parents were forging for him, he fled from home and spent the next fifteen or sixteen years in going about the country in search of Yogis to teach him how to conquer death, with which he had become acquainted at home when his sister and his uncle died. During this period he went from place to place, learning and practising Yoga, meeting sannyasis, monks and sadhus of all sorts, learned and pious men as well as hypocrites and ignorant mendicants, parasites of society. After about ten years of such life he became convinced that learning and practi sing Yoga was not sufficient. He then made up his mind to acquire learning and know the sastras. He began to look out for a guru who would make him master of the Dharma Sastras and the teachings of Rishis and Munis. In 1860 A. D., when he was thirtysix, he found a worthy guru at Muttra, and spent the next three years in studying some of the sastras but chiefly the science of Sanskrit language, which enabled him fully to understand the Vedas, the Upanisads, the Darsanas and other sastras and thus a thorough knowledge of the Vedic religion and philosophy.
His guru, Swami Virjanand Saraswati, a man of the highest character and a teacher of eminence soon found out that Dayanand was no ordinary man. He recognised Dayanand as a great genius. And as Dayanand was already a sannyasi, he commanded Dayanand to devote his whole life to spreading enlightenment in the country and teaching the truth to people. Dayanand accepted the mission.
Dayanand passed the next two years at Agra developing his. yogic powers and preparing himself for his work. He devoted the rest of his life-seventeen years-in active work going round the country from east to west and north to south, preaching the Vedic religion, denouncing hypocrisy, untruth and superstition of all kinds and descriptions, and proclaiming that the Vedas alone were Revelation and therefore authoritative. He denounced all ignorant priestcraft, the organized hierarchy of the Brahmins who had monopolized religious teaching and held the entire nation within their clutches, laying down the law for all and controlling their conduct throughout life by putting bans and restrictions of all sorts. He condemned the ignorant sadhus of various descriptions and persuations who flourished and grew fat on the ignorance, charity and devotional spirit of the Hindus. He strongly condemned idolworship, the present caste system based on birth, child marriage and all practices that had brought about the downfall of the nation.. He gave public lectures wherever he went, challenged the Brahmins who had become the sole custodians of the religion of the people, to hold religious debates with him and accept the Truth as he taught it or convince him of the Truth they professed to possess. As his mission was to proclaim the Truth and denounce falsehood wherever found, he held sastrarths or religious discussions not only with the Brahmins but also with the Muslim and Christian divines, Jain sadhus and all those who according to him followed untruth. His mission was to spread light and to chase away darkness from the land in whatever quarter and in whatever form it lurked. He, therefore, denounced. sham in whatever shape he found it. His activities embraced life in all its aspects, and he denounced social, economic and educational wrongs no less than religious untruths.
All that we know about the first thirtysix years of his life, from 1824 to 1860, is what he himself wrote out in Hindi at Colonel H. S. Olcott's request for publication in the Theosophist. Fragmentary as this autobiographical sketch is, it is the only reliable account of his life at home, his early education, his wanderings in India in search of Yogis and later, a guru for himself till he came to Muttral in 1860 A. D. In addition to this, the only other materials available. are (a) what various people who met him came to know from Swamiji himself during conversations in various places, a fact here and a fact there of his life in those days and (b) what he said in 1875 A. D. in one of his fifteen lectures in response to a request from people in Poona for information about his family and his early life. The Mahrathi report of those fifteen lectures published in book form at Poona by a Mahratha Brahmin has been translated in Hindi and published under name, Updesh Manjari. The account given in the book does not, however, possess the same authority as the autobiography published in the Theosophist: for, it is only a report of what Swami Dayanand is stated to have said in his lectures. The accuracy and fullness of the account given by the Mahratha gentleman depended upon his capacity to understand what he had heard and on his discretion in reporting only what he thought was important. And to some extent, the report naturally takes the colour of the religious beliefs of the writer; for instance, in the account which the Updesh Manjari gives of Swamiji advocating the cult of Siva at Jaipur in 1866 and encouraging the wearing of rudraksha rosaries at Agra and Jaipur.
There is no other absolutely reliable material available to supplement the account that Swamiji himself has given of this part of his life. There are no contemporaneous records of other people's lives or accounts of happenings of those days to throw further light on Swamiji's life.
The rest of the account of his life is based on the material collected by P. Lekhram, the Vedic Missionary, when he was deputed by the Punjab Arya Pratinidhi Sabha in 1888 A. D. to collect materials for a life of Swamiji. He toured the country for about nine years questioning people, taking down the statements of those who gave him any information about Swamiji. He was not able, however, fully to collate the material and write a biography of Swamiji. He had written a few chapters in Urdu when he met a martyr's death at Lahore at the hands of a Muslim fanatic on 6th March 1897 A.D.
On P. Lekhram's death, the Punjab Arya Pratinidhi Sabha deputed LaLa Atmaram of Amritsar on 21st March 1897 to finish the book. Accordingly, a life of Swamiji was written and published in 1897 A.D. under the name, Mahrishi Swami Daya nand Saraswati Ka Jiwan Charitra with an Introduction from the pen of Lala Munshiram, later Shraddhanand Sannyasi. But it was not written as a regular biography.
In the meantime, B. Devendranath Mukhopadhyaya, a Bengali gentleman, published a life of Swami Dayanand Saraswati in Bengali in 1894 A.D. in two parts under the title Dayanand Charita. This, therefore, was the first Life of Dayanand published by anyone. This book was later translated in Hindi and published by Raghubirsaran Dublish, proprietor of the Bhashkar Press of Meerut in 1911 A.D.

ROMAIN Rolland says:
"Indian religious thought raised a purely Indian Samaj, and at its head was a personality of the highest order, Dayanand Saraswati. This man with the nature of a lion, is one of those whom Europe is too apt to forget when she judges India. He was that rare combination, a thinker of action with a genius for leadership.
"He was a hero of the Iliad or of the Gita with the athletic strength of a Hercules, who thundered against all forms of thought other than his own, the only true one. He was so successful that in five years Northern India was completely changed."
Sri Aurobindo, one of the greatest thinkers of the present time and a spiritual force says:
"Among the great company of remarkable figures that will i appear to the eye of posterity at the head of the Indian Renaissance, one stands out by himself with peculiar and solitary distinctness, one unique in his type as he is unique in his work. It is as if one were to walk for a long time amid a range of hills rising to a greater or lesser altitude, but all with sweeping contours, green-clad, flattering the eye even in their most bold and striking elevation. But amidst them all, one hill stands apart, piled up in sheer strength, a mass of bare and puissant granite, with verdure on its summit, a solitary pine jutting out into the blue, great cascade of pure, vigorous and fertilizing water gushing out from its strength as a very fountain of life and health to the valley. Such is the impression created on my mind by Dayanand.
"Here was a very soldier of Light, a Warrior in God's world, a Sculptor of men and institutions, a bold and rugged victor of the difficulties which matter presents to spirit. And the whole sums itself up to me in a powerful impression of Spiritual practicality.
"It was Kathiawar that gave birth to this puissant renovator and new creator. And something of the very soul and temperament of that peculiar land entered into his spirit, something of Girnar and the rocks and hills, something of the voice and puissance of the sea that flings itself upon those coasts, something of that humanity which seems to be made of the virgin and unspoilt stuff of Nature, fair and robust in body, instinct with a fresh and primal vigour, crude but in a developed nature capable of becoming a great force of genial creation.
"He was not only plastic to the great hand of Nature but asserted his own right and power to use Life and Nature as plastic material. We can imagine his soul crying still to us with our insufficient spring of manhood and action, "Be not content, O Indian, only to be indefinite and grow vaguely, but see what God intends thee to be, determine in the light of His inspiration to what thou shalt grow. Seeing, hew that out of thyself, how that out of Life. Be a thinker, but be also a doer; be a soul, but be also a man be a servant of God, but be also a master of Nature". For this was what he himself was; a man with God in his soul, vision in his eyes and power in his hands to hew out of life an image according to his vision. Hew is the right word. Granite himself, he smote out a shape of things with great blows as in granite".
Dayanand Saraswati was one of those great personages whom History will pronounce as supermen. He was one of those whom the Vedas and the Brahmanas call Devas, to whom is due puja, i.e.. the respect of mankind.
In order to appraise the greatness of Dayanand we must have a vision of India, his motherland, of which he greatest modern representative.
India, the land of Dayanand's birth, according to the historian Abdullah Wassaf the Paradise on Earth." 1 Count Bjornstjerna says:
"But every thing is peculiar, grand and romantic in India-Nature, too, In this glorious country is chequered with variety and clad in glowing colours, see the luxuriance of her tropical vegetation and the hurricane of her monsoon; see the majesty of her snow-covered Himalayas and the dryness of her desert; see the immense plains of Hindustan and the scenery of her lofty mountains; but, above all, see the immense age of her history and the poetry of her recollections."2
Mr. Elphinstone says :-
"The scenery of the Himalayas is a sight which the soberest traveller has never described without kindling into enthusiasm, which if once seen, leaves an impression that can never be equalled or effaced."
But it is not Nature alone that has bestowed its best on India. Bewitching scenery, a most fertile soil, the densest forests, the highest mountain, some of the biggest rivers, most varied and extremes of climate, regions covered with snow all the year round, arid deserts hot with quivering air form a background against the highest intellectual and spiritual development of man. The English philosopher Sir William Hamilton says:
In the world there is nothing great but man;
In man, there is nothing great but mind.