Beyond the Indus valley lies a vast land of long history and manifold experience, offering alternative ways to escape suffering and to find one’s true self. The broad reach of Hinduism suggests its peculiar richness: both theism and non-theism, both one and many, both personal and impersonal. The earliest scripture (Vedas) says: “The Real is One, though sages name it variously.” The brooding presence of Brahma is a striking way to affirm the uniqueness of God, in union with us (Tat tvam asi—That art thou). There are Hindu trinities (Trimürti), e.g. Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra. In fact Animananda spoke of God as Sac-cit-ananda, Being-Consciousness-Joy, with Logos as Cit (Intelligence). Most notably in Vaishnavism there is a divine “descent” (avatara). Vivekananda taught that Jesus was an avatara, and V. Chakkarai developed “the most comprehensive Indian treatment of Christology.” After the Vedas and Upanishads, the Great Epic (Mahabharata) introduces a personal deity, revealed in different forms, appropriate for different ages and needs. Its famous section the Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of the Lord) recounts Krishna’s manifestation to Arjuna, motivated by grace and justice:
Whenever there appears
A languishing of
Righteousness (dharma)
When Unrighteousness
(adharma) arises
Then I send forth [generate]
myself. (4:7f)
Only by love can men see me, and know me, and come unto me. (11:54)
The spirituality of such personal faith (bhakti) is sublime, and Arjuna responds to the incarnate revelation:
I bow before thee, I prostrate in adoration; and I beg thy grace, O glorious Lord! … As a father to his son, as a friend to his friend, as a lover to his beloved, be gracious unto me, O God. (11:44).
Among the many faces of Hinduism, a noteworthy image is Nataranja the dancing God, the form that Shiva takes in his joyful creation of the world, like our Christian image of Christ as Lord of the Dance. These multiple images resemble the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of Islam, or the variety of names and titles of our Bible. It is as if the divine reality is far richer and deeper than any single image can convey. In our case, the Logos is Word, Wisdom, Redeemer, Brother, Rock, etc.
The notorious difference between incarnations East and West pits the unique and unrepeatable Christian form against the multiform Hindu. Yet the reception of the Christian message in India, as elsewhere, is never an either/or decision—our missionaries may have sought simple conversion to Christianity but discovered that the responses took other forms. There is an Asian Christ incorporated in Eastern religions, with Jesus as an Avatar, “a devout Yogi and loving Bhakta” (Chandra Sen). The Ramakrishna Order associated with Swami Vivekenanda included worship of Jesus within its spiritual experience. For example, a Vedanta guru holding Christmas celebration said: “Meditate on Christ within, and feel his living presence.” One of his disciples reports: “For the first time I realized that Christ was as much our own as Krishna, Buddha, and other great illuminated teachers whom we revered.”
What do we make of this Oriental Christ? It rejects what it calls “Christian dogmatism” with its “jealous God” in favour of Hindu tolerance, “the hospitality of the Indian mind” (Radhakrishnan). And is not the New Testament’s God of love a corrective to earlier ideas of a wrathful omnipotent deity? Is it a case of two kinds of incarnation, one absolute and one relative? Christian orthodoxy interprets the incarnation of the Logos as unique, but that’s because two different ideas of history make for contradictory roles. East and West are separated by their sense of the historical.
Why is the human story cast in such different modes, making for different forms of faith? Westerners consider their worldview superior because it takes history to be decisive. But this is arguing in a circle: taking history decisively is better because history is decisive. The contrast between West and East has been termed “thisworldly and otherworldly,” or “anxiety and tranquillity.” For the Hindu, our Western philosophy of history is too simple. It misses the very Transcendent, which it thinks to protect, producing a spirituality often materialistic, even hedonistic (our fundamentalists say: “If you travel with the Lord, you travel first-class”). So we must move carefully in criticizing Eastern thought, so markedly different in its basis. Its orienting problem is not sin but suffering.
The religion called Buddhism is even more striking on the problem of suffering. Its early form (Theravda) has no concept of a saving god or a human soul, nor is Gotama the Buddha (Enlightened One) an object of worship. His prescription for overcoming suffering (the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path) has helped untold numbers from India to Japan find meaning in lives full of hardship and poverty. Later, Buddhism developed into “the Greater Vehicle” (Mahâyâna), where both God and the soul are defined, and the Buddha is himself divine, within a Trinity or “three-body doctrine” (the Lotus Sutra). This is the larger form of Buddhism in the East, with Japanese Zen (Chinese Ch’an) most familiar to Westerners. In 1549, Frances Xavier dubbed the Shin form of Buddhism featuring salvation by grace “the Lutheran heresy.”
What to compare and contrast? Many think that since every religion has a mystical dimension this is a solid category for mutual appreciation. The classic Christian definition of faith, for instance, is “union with Christ.” Mystics agree that they are trying to express the inexpressible, and so meet as one beyond words and dogmas. Does this point to genuine knowledge of the Transcendent through different forms of religious experience? Perhaps nowhere is this more poignant than in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, with their wild variety of experience and belief. Thomas Merton claimed to live in both sets of experience, as a “Zen Christian” — is this an example of the way ahead through our debate on pluralism? At the least, Merton challenges us to accept revelation beyond our narrow churchly boundaries, but compatible with the Logos or universal Spirit. Must my belief in Jesus as the Christ deny all other forms of faith? Only in open dialogue will we determine how far this can be true, like Jesus himself in dealing with the outsiders he encountered, treating them as fellow pilgrims in our “exploration into God.”
Online Study Guide for October: ‘The Eastern Way’
- Christians begin with the (Old Testament) idea of sin and Eastern religions with suffering; does this difference in the basic questions they seek to answer mean that they are alternatives or complementary?
- The Bhagavad-Gita (available in bookstores and online) or “Song of the Lord” describes the happy warrior Arjuna, whose qualms about fighting against neighbours and kinsmen are allayed by the Lord Krishna, who assures him that so long as he struggles without enmity (by “renunciation”) he will be saved. Chapter 11 is especially significant. Martin Luther wrote a tract in similar vein — “Whether Soldiers too can be saved”. How does this idea relate to our understanding of “justification by faith?”
- Matahma Ghandi found inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount and the Gita. Read Matt. 5-7 and Gita 11, and consider how their theologies are similar.
- Compare the Western idea of a single, unrepeatable Incarnation with the Eastern idea of multiple incarnations. Are they completely at odds? See J.C. McLelland, Ch. 9: “Incarnation in Hinduism and Islam” in Pluralism Without Relativism (2008), pp. 177-97.
- Buddhism is a vibrant and missionary religion that challenges Christians to explain suffering in better ways. We rely on the idea of an omnipotent God who allows suffering and evil for some inscrutable reason; Buddhists claim that suffering stems from self-centredness and false idea of the ego. Are they right to charge us thus? How do you “explain” the presence of so much evil God’s good creation?
