Arya Samaj: An Account Of Its Origin, Doctrine, And Activities, With a Biographical Sketch Of The Founder [Reprint ed.] 8185199752, 9788185199757

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THE ARYA SAMAJ AN ACCOUNT OF ITS AIMS, DOCTRINE AND ACTIVITIES WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE FOUNDER

LA J PAT RAI

24

SWAM DAY AN AND A SARASWATI I

saw that the best of the Hindus had cultivated a morbid and ridiculous desire for peace that instead of fighting the passions and lower instincts and leading the way by their successes, they were flying from them out of sheer cowardice. He was for conquest, and he wished a guide, a friend and a teacher who would, by practice as well as precept, show him the way. He wished to conquer death by conquering ignorance and superstition and fear, and at the same ;

time to put others in the way of doing the same. He wished to imitate nature, which was ever active, ever vigilant, ever conquering, even amid scenes that impressed the superficial observer with the peace of death and the calm of inactivity. He had conferred with the Himalayas, with their eternal snows and cloud-masked summits he had conversed with the Ganges and Narbadda be had penetrated the sanctuaries of the dense and almost inaccessible he had slept in jungles and forests of the plains the top of the loftiest Himalayan deodar he had enjoyed the embraces of the hardest of primeval all rock and the caresses of the swiftest of waters ;

;

;

;

:

these friends of his youth and companions of his

wander-years had told him not to seek the peace of repose or the lassitude of an inactive life. They had inspired him with the desire for increasing activity they had given him the strength of their simple but they had unshaken faith in duty and in service ;

;

added to the purity, loftiness, and strength of his soul, not to enable him to enjoy unearned peace, but to nerve him to play the man and to establish the reign of intellectual and religious freedom in Hindu India. The soil had been well-prepared. The seed

;

EARLY LIFE had been sown.

It

25

required only to be watered

by a

careful gardener able to appreciate the capabilities of

In due time the soil and the strength of the seed. he found the man he wanted, the Guru for whom he had searched all these years, the teacher, guide, and philosopher who was to water the seed already

sown. 5.

Virjananda Saraswati

Swami Virjananda Saraswati, at whose feet Dayananda completed his education, was a Sannyasi of the order to which Dayananda belonged. He had been bred in the school of adversity. Dayananda had left his home because his parents loved him too much and wished to save him from a life of poverty to which he was minded to dedicate himself in the pursuit of what they considered to be only a phantasy he had left his home at the comparatively advanced age of twenty-one, by his own choice, to the great sorrow and disappointment of his parents. Poor Virjananda, on the other hand, was a child of only eleven when circumstances turned him adrift on the world, without anyone to care for him. He had lost both parents and was an orphan. Brothers are, as a rule, kinder in India, but in this case the biting tongue and the cruel temper of his brother’s wife proved too strong even for the child of eleven. What

added to the sadness

of his

orphanhood was the

fact

that he was totally blind, having lost his sight at the

age of five in consequence of a virulent attack of smallpox. He was too spirited, however, in spite of his blindness and his orphanhood, to submit to the

tyranny

of his brother’s wife.

He

left

Lis brother’s