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Difference in Language, not in the Thing!

[The concept and design of the animated .gif images below is originally developed by Swami Baneshananda, Vedanta Gesellschaft e.V., Germany, which has since been copied by some of our centres.]

"On the tree of wisdom there is no fairer flower than the Upanishads, and no finer fruit than the Vedanta philosophy. … Vedanta is one of the most valuable products of the genius of mankind in its researches of the eternal truth. …It was here that for the first time the original thinkers of the Upanishads …found it when they recognized our Atman, our innermost individual being,as the Brahman, the inmost being of universal nature and of all her phenomenon. …The Upanishads have tackled every fundamental problem of life. They have given us an intimate account of reality."

"He (God) is one and the same Being. Different people give Him different Names. It is like this: ­ there are four bathing points on four sides of a pond. Some persons are taking water from one point. On asking them they may say that they are taking ‘jal’. Those taking water at the other point may say that they are taking ‘paani’. At the third point they say it is ‘water’ and at the fourth they call it ‘aqua’. But it is the same water everywhere."

"The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth."

"My master [Sri Ramakrishna] used to say that these names as Hindu, Christian, etc., stand as great bars to all brotherly feelings between man and man. We must break them down first. They have lost all their good powers and now stand only as baneful influences under whose black magic even the best of us behave like demons."