CONTRIBUTION OF SWAMI DAYANANDA SARSWATI
Work place of humans has two departments. The first one is Action or Karma and other is Spirituality or Adhyatma. Most of the ancient sages and religious teachers all over the world have advised to follow either of the two departments in order to attain perfection. But it was Swami Dayananda Sarswati, who made it clear to the world that both of them are necessary in a balanced form to reach Truth.
The ultimate aim of mankind is to Realise the one who is Ultimate. A Rig Vedic verse has meaning that a scholar person keeps looking toeards the path of God, in the same way, a person’s healthy eyes keep enjoying the Sun rays.
Swamiji’s biggest contribution was in the revival of rituals, form which people were getting repelled due to wrong samsakaras from their birth itself. He cautioned the people that they have been worshipping artificial God imagining that they were actually worshipping the real God. A potter makes a statue of Sri Krishna and boats himself for having this. But this is just a result of his imagination.
Arya Samaj was a result of his clear thinking. In it’s second law, he made clear the features and nature of the real God. He believed that God is one who is omnipresent, most powerful, honest, unborn, un-decaying, incomparable, possessor of the whole knowledge, ever-young, fearless, regular, pure and creator of this whole world. So only he should be worshipped.
By giving such exact and honest description of religion, Swamiji proved that a Shudre is also religious if he does his Karma in right way And even a Brahmin is most irreligious if he does anything wrong to others. By discripting religion in such a way, he made religion a regular part of regular life from a matter of temples. This introduced the questioning over many wrong rituals that existed on the name of religion in the whole society. Sages of the middle ages have mentioned religion, philosophy and unworldly powers but they have missed to mention the existing troubles in the society of their time. Sri Adi Sankaracharya opposed the wrong beliefs of Jains and he established the theory of one Brahman. He took favour of the Vedas. But he did not touch wrong beliefs like Child Marriage, Widow no-re-marriage, caste descrimination, touchable and untouchables and eatable and uneatable. Ramanuja and many others kept their movements limited to temples only. None took favour of education of women and Shudras or invitation to other religious groups to understand our religion. It was his the result of his strenuous efforts that today Vedic knowledge is being seek by the whole world. He gave special effort to this since Vedas contain the whole knowledge.
Swami Vivekananda, favourite desciple of Sri Rama Krishna Paramhansa, also took his earlier spiritual education from Arya Samaj. Many other great leaders too received a lot of knowledge from it.
Swamiji’s contributions cannot be weighed ever. Generations too come will feel the education he gave to the world.