As discussed earlier, Vivekananda was a thorough Vedantist. Vedanta philosophy takes God and ultimate reality, Brahman, to be one and the same thing. When the ultimate reality Brahman was looked at from the empirical viewpoint, it assumed various attributes related to mankind like love, goodness, morality etc. When people worshipped the ultimate reality in these attributes it was called God or Ishwar, otherwise in Brahman there is no distinction. Shankaracharya emphasized more the attribute-less or nirguna aspect of Brahman, whereas Ramanuja, another Vedantist, emphasized attributed or saguna interpretation of Brahman. For this reason, Shankaracharya’s philosophy is called Advaita and Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita.

          Vivekananda rejected any distinction between Brahman and God. For him, the Absolute or the ultimate reality and God are one and the same thing. Unlike sophisticated philosophers, Vivekananda does not make distinction between the ultimate reality and God per se. This is also because of the social reformist nature of Vivekananda who believed that all concepts are redundant if they don’t fit in with the simple mind of a layman for whom God and Reality would not be different. At times, Vivekananda called this reality Absolute which is one, unique and indeterminate. To be indeterminate means to be unable to define something. We can say that a certain thing is salty or sweet which is its determinate nature; like to be sweet is the determinate nature of sugar. But such attributions can’t be made of the ultimate reality or the Absolute. To say that it is kind, compassionate, large-hearted, forgiving, is to fix it in boundaries. Vivekananda asserts that Absolute can’t be bound in this way. The moment you try to define the Absolute through metaphors, you are trying to bind it, and Absolute is boundless.