Dayananda Saraswati
Swami Dayananda Saraswati ( Hindi: स्वामी दयानन्द सरस्वती; * 1824 in Tankara, Gujarat, India, † October 30, 1883 in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India) was a reformist scholar of Hinduism.
Life
Dayananda was born in an orthodox Brahmin family under the name Mula Shankara. Only later he called himself Dayananda Saraswati. He was a sannyasi, a Hindu ascetic who arrived in search of a guru in Mathura on Swami Virajananda. In 1875 he founded Arya Samaj in Mumbai to a socio - religious reform movement. First, even with little success in spreading his teachings before he had already failed in other parts of India with the establishment of similar movements, it was 1877/78 during a sermon stay in the Panjab to the big breakthrough. Within months, thousands of new members were recruited and in all major cities of the region founded the Arya Samaj local affiliates. During this time, here was a network that played an important role in the socio- political development of Northwest India, especially after the death Dayananda Sarasvatis. From 1878, there was also a collaboration between temporal Arya Samaj with the Theosophical Society which was expressed in the form of the Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj. 1882, however, there was a break between the two organizations, as the Theosophists Dayananda rejected supremacy of Vedas as the only truth. In his book Satyartha Prakasha Dayananda makes its great distance from Islam to Christianity and clearly, which was a significant difference in the recognition of the reformer Ram Mohan Roy from the 1820s. This had specifically looked for his religion interfaces to these traditions.
Teaching
Dayananda wanted to find the pure doctrine again, which was rooted in his view, in the Veda. He criticized the then Hinduism, which he viewed as degenerate, above all because of the great importance of the Puranas in the everyday religiosity. That is why he condemned image worship, ancestor worship, pilgrimage and sacrifice cult temples on the grounds that all these things the Vedic foundation whatsoever. The Arya Samaj was also the Brahminism, the caste system, untouchability and child marriage critically. His goal was a generally accessible religious community of all Hindus on the basis of the Veda. Although at the Arya Samaj Dayananda and was also a universal mission claim against other religions outside India in this context, these trends were not essential to wear as opposed to Vivekananda. To the violent internal conflicts with the Brahmanic orthodoxy and competing reform movements among Muslims ( Ahmadiyya ) and Sikhs were ( Singh Sabhas ), in which the movement saw entangled soon.
Dayananda based his theory primarily on the Rigveda, to a lesser extent on the Samaveda and Yajurveda, but not to the Brahmanas and Upanishads. He advocated the worship of a formless God and developed a monotheistic interpretation of the Vedas. The doctrine of karma, the retribution causality of actions, as well as of samsara, the endless cycle of rebirths until the redemption, he advocated and emphasized the traditional ideals of Brahma Carin ( student who lives in chastity ) and the Samnyasin, which all for redemption striving family ties rid of.
As one of the first Indians he made the concept of Svaraj ( autocracy, autonomy ) at the time of British colonial rule popular.