SWAMIJI ON BUDDHA

It was the great Buddha, who never cared for the duelist gods, and who has been called an atheist and materialist, who yet was ready to give up his body for a poor goat. That Man set in motion the high¬est moral ideas any nation can have. When¬ever there is a moral code, it is ray of light from that Man. We can¬not force the great hearts of the world into narrow limits, and keep them there, especially at this time in the history of humanity when there is a degree of intellectual development such as was never dreamed of even a hundred years ago, when a wave of scientific knowledge has arisen which nobody, even fifty years ago, would have dreamed of. By trying to force people into narrow limits you degrade them into animals and unthinking masses. You kill their moral life. What is now wanted is a combination of the greatest heart with the highest intellectuality , of infinite love with infinite knowledge. The Vedantist gives no other attributes to God except these three—that He is Infinite Existence, Infinite Knowledge, and Infinite Bliss, and he regards these three as One. Existence with¬out knowledge and love can¬not be; knowledge with¬out love and love without knowledge cannot be. What we want is the harmony of Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss Infinite. For that is our goal. We want harmony, not one-sided development. And it is possible to have the intellect of a Shankara with the heart of a Buddha.
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Buddha was a great Vedantist (for Buddhism was really only an off¬shoot of Vedanta), and Shankara is often called a “hid¬den Buddhist.” Buddha made the analysis, Shankara made the syn¬the¬sis out of it. Buddha never bowed down to anything—neither Veda, nor caste, nor priest, nor custom. He fearlessly reasoned so far as reason could take him. Such a fearless search for truth and such love for every living thing the world has never seen. Buddha was the Washington of the religious world; he conquered a throne only to give it to the world, as Washington did to the Amercan people. He sought nothing for himself.
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Look at Buddha’s heart! Ever ready to give his own life to save the life of even a kid—what to speak of “bahujana hitāya bhahujana sukhāya—for the welfare of the many, for the happiness of the many”! See, what a large heartedness—what a compassion! … What was there in this country before Buddha’s advent? Only a number of religious principles recorded on bundles of palm leaves—and those too known only to a few. It was Lord Buddha who brought them down to the practical field and showed how to apply them in the every¬day life of the people. In a sense, he was the living embodiment of true Vedanta.
From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda