Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-1883) was the world’s renaissance man. He was a Vedic scholar, an accomplished yogi, a saint-spiritualist and a nationalist social reformer all rolled into one. He awakened us to the core truths of all life and existence like none had done in the last many centuries. Vedas are the primeval, eternal, divinely revealed scriptures.
Ordinary scholars have translated and interpreted Vedic hymns in different ways because of their deficient knowledge of Pali Sanskrit and Panini grammar. However, Swami Dayanand mastered both and rendered the best translation and interpretation of the Vedas of the last 3,000 years. His translations of the Rigveda and Yajurveda are unmatched to this day.
Based on his understanding of the Vedas, he preached that there are three prime, eternal entities in the universe—the creator Ishwar, the primordial matter and countless living souls. Ishwar creates or fashions out the visible universe from the inanimate primordial matter for the living souls for their evolution. For this purpose, he creates abodes like the earth for them to prepare them for corporeal existence as sentient beings with bodies.
Through corporeal existence, these souls (jeevatmas) acquire experiential knowledge and evolve gradually to perfection to reach blissful salvation.
The knowledge of the Vedas is universalistic as it applies to all humans cutting across narrow divisions of caste, class, race, sex or location on this planet. Swami Dayanand enlightened us to the fact that the Vedas are not just worldly but cosmic scriptures and are intrinsically incorruptible, being created by Ishwar who is omnipotent and omniscient. He stated that human evolution and progress are multidimensional which requires adherence to eternal dharma. There are no shortcuts to salvation.
