[Bibliography: Sir E.D. Maclagan’s Punjab Census Report of 1891; Mr. R. Burn’s United Provinces Census Report of 1901; Professor J. C. Oman’s Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India.]

List of Paragraphs

1. The founder of the sect, Dayānand Sāraswati.

Arya Samāj Religion.—This important reforming sect of Hinduism numbered nearly 250,000 persons in India in 1911, as against 92,000 in 1901. Its adherents belong principally to the Punjab and the United Provinces. In the Central Provinces 974 members were returned. The sect was founded by Pandit Dayānand Sāraswati, a Gujarāti Brāhman, born in 1824. According to his own narrative he had been carefully instructed in the Vedas, which means that he had been made to commit a great portion of them to memory, and had been initiated at an early age into the Saiva sect to which his family belonged; but while still a mere boy his mind had revolted against the practices of idolatry. He could not bring himself to acknowledge that the image of Siva seated on his bull, the helpless idol, which, as he himself observed in the watches of the night, allowed the mice to run over it with impunity, ought to be worshipped as the omnipotent deity.[1] He also conceived an intense aversion to marriage, and fled from home in order to avoid the match which had been arranged for him. He was attracted by the practice of Yoga, or ascetic philosophy, and studied it with great ardour, claiming to have been initiated into the highest secrets of Yoga Vidya. He tells in one of his books of his many and extensive travels, his profound researches in Sanskritic lore, his constant meditations and his ceaseless inquirings. He tells how, by dissecting in his own rough way a corpse which he found floating on a river, he finally discerned the egregious errors of the Hindu medical treatises, and, tearing up his books in disgust, flung them into the river with the mutilated corpse. By degrees he found reason to reject the authority of all the sacred books of the Hindus subsequent to the Vedas. Once convinced of this, he braced himself to a wonderful course of missionary effort, in which he formulated his new system and attacked the existing orthodox Hinduism.[2] He maintained that the Vedas gave no countenance to idolatry, but inculcated monotheism, and that their contents could be reconciled with all the results of modern science, which indeed he held to be indicated in them. The Arya Samāj was founded in Lahore in 1877, and during the remainder of his life Dayānand travelled over northern India continually preaching and disputing with the advocates of other religions, and founding branches of his sect. In 1883 he died at Ajmer, according to the story of his followers, from the effects of poison administered to him at the instigation of a prostitute against whose profession he had been lecturing.[3]

A meeting of the Arya Samāj for investing boys with the sacred thread

2. His methods and the scientific interpretation of the Vedas.

Dayānand’s attempt to found a sect which, while not going entirely outside Hinduism, should prove acceptable to educated Hindus desiring a purer faith, appears to have been distinctly successful. The leaders of the Brahmo Samāj were men of higher intelligence and ability than he, and after scrupulously fair and impartial inquiry were led to deny the infallibility of the Vedas, while they also declined to recognise caste. But by so doing they rendered it impossible for a man to become a Brahmo and remain a Hindu, and their movement has made little headway. By retaining the tenet of the divine authority of the Vedas, Dayānand made it possible for educated Hindus to join his sect without absolutely cutting themselves adrift from their old faith. But Dayānand’s contention that the Vedas should be figuratively interpreted, and are so found to foreshadow the discoveries of modern science, will naturally not bear examination. The following instances of the method are given by Professor Oman: “At one of the anniversary meetings of the society a member gravely stated that the Vedas mentioned pure fire, and as pure fire was nothing but electricity, it was evident that the Indians of the Vedic period were acquainted with electricity. A leading member of the sect, who had studied science in the Government college, discovered in two Vedic texts, made up of only eighteen words in all, that oxygen and hydrogen with their characteristic properties were known to the writers of the Rig Veda, who were also acquainted with the composition of water, the constitution of the atmosphere, and had anticipated the modern kinetic theory of gases.”[4] Mr. Burn gives the following parallel versions of a verse of the Rig Veda by Professor Max Müller and the late Pandit Guru Datt, M.A., of the Arya Samaj:

Professor Max Müller.—“May Mitra, Varūna, Aryaman, Ayu, Indra, the Lord of the Ribhus, and the Marūts not rebuke us because we shall proclaim at the sacrifice the virtues of the swift horse sprung from the Gods.”