influence on Christianity
Dr. Koenraad ELST
Christianity was born in a region and
age full of cross-pollination between different religions and
philosophies. In particular, Indic traditions had been influencing the
intellectual climate in the Eastern Mediterranean and among them, Buddhism
made its mark most strongly on the scriptures and doctrines of the nascent
religion named after Jesus Christ. Some of these borrowings are anecdotal
and peripheral, others go to the heart of Christianity's distinctive
beliefs, e.g. the doctrine of Incarnation. The Christian doctrine of
Salvation (in a non-worldly sense, as distinct from the Jewish belief in a
political "salvation" amounting to the restoration of David's kingdom by
the Messiah) is borrowed in its essential features from Upanishadic-Buddhist
notions of Liberation transformed in a devotional-theistic sense. It sets
Christianity apart from the other members of the "Abrahamic" tradition.
Indeed, a closer study of the Indic elements in Christianity reveals a
dimension which cuts through the neat dichotomy between Abrahamic
and Pagan religions.
1. Introduction: Jesus in India?
In the 19th century, the Hindu reform
movement Brahmo Samaj (°1820) tried to protect the essence of Hinduism
against the perceived threat from missionary Christianity by incorporating
the latter's most attractive elements and "recognizing" them as somehow
part of Hinduism's own tradition. In particular, monotheism, the notion of
"the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" and the rejection of
idol-worship were borrowed from Protestant Christianity. The Brahmoists
didn't simply replace Hindu notions with Christian ones but rather
reinterpreted Hinduism, e.g. they explained Hindu polytheism as a masked
monotheism ("polymorphous theism"), taking support from the Vedic verse:
"Indra, Agni, Varuna, the wise ones call the One True Being by many
Another reform movement, the Arya Samaj
(°1875), followed suit: though it took a more polemical stand against the
Christian missionaries than the Brahmos ever did, it professed monotheism
and actively campaigned against idol-worship. Next, the mixed
Indian-European membership of the syncretistic Theosophical Society added
more colourful ideas of Hindu-Buddhist-Christian interaction and mystical
common denominators, e.g. by explaining the Christian notion of "the
Kingdom of God" as referring to a blissful yogic state of consciousness.
The Brahmo Samaj and the Theosophical Society, though numerically small,
were very influential among the anglicized bourgeoisie, while the Arya
Samaj exercised a strong influence on India's national liberation movement
and on Hindu nationalism. Though the strictures against idol-worship and
participation in popular Hindu festivals gradually gave way to an
accommodation with the Hindu mainstream, some doctrinal innovations
persisted and started influencing the mainstream in turn. It should not
come as a surprise, then, that numerous Hindus have interiorized certain
Christian notions, most prominently a highly favourable prejudice
regarding the person of Jesus Christ.
With hindsight, we can say that this
partial incorporation of Christian elements was the most effective defence
of Hinduism against the lure of Christian conversion campaigns under
circumstances of Christian colonial dominance. Rather than confronting
Christianity, this approach neutralized its appeal by understanding Jesus
in Hindu terms, as a spiritual teacher, venerable yet only one among many,
not as a unique saviour. By giving Jesus a place, it made the acceptance
of the full doctrinal package of Christianity seem superfluous. Instead,
modern Hindus including Mahatma Gandhi started evaluating all religions as
roughly equivalent "paths" leading to the same goal. Most of them don't
realize that this idea is not welcomed but rather abhorred by orthodox
The incorporation of Jesus in Indian
spiritual tradition was given a more concrete shape in the belief that
Jesus learned his trade in India before going on an eventful preaching
tour in Palestine whence he returned to stay and breathe his last in
Kashmir at the ripe age of 115 (e.g. Kersten 1986). This claim of Jesus'
sojourn among Indian yogis is frequently heard among Hindus, Theosophists,
some South-Asian Muslims and even -- since Indian spirituality is
internationally often identified with its Buddhist variant -- among
Buddhists from Japan to California. In 1983, I attended a lecture by the
Japanese Zen teacher Hogen-san, in which he held up a photograph of an
ancient painting purportedly showing a meeting of the Buddha and Christ!
This story apparently originates with
the Ahmadiyas, a Muslim sect founded in the later 19th
century by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He claimed to be a prophet in defiance of
the Islamic dogma that Mohammed was the final prophet. The belief that
Jesus, a high-ranking prophet in Islam, had lived in India, was meant to
buttress Ahmad's claim that India, though far away from the West-Asian
homeland of the Abrahamic religions, could nonetheless be the locus of a
legitimate prophet's mission. It is sometimes given additional support
with the late-medieval theory that the Pathans, who live just to the west
of Kashmir, are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, which would
explain how Jesus' Jewish parents could send their son to distant
relatives in north-western India for his education. Or how one eccentric
theory can carry an even more eccentric one in its bosom.
Meanwhile, there have also been
Christian overtures towards Hinduism, particularly in the "Christian
ashram" movement. The idea was launched by a Bengali convert,
Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (d. 1907), who was enough of a nationalist to
insist on giving a Hindu colouring to his adopted Christian religion. He
clashed with his superiors when he held a devotional ritual to goddess
Saraswati and gave praise to Krishna and the Vedas. After independence,
his inculturation experiments were revived by Catholic missionaries like
Jules Monchanin (d. 1957), Henri Le Saux (d. 1973) en Bede Griffiths (d.
1999), who justified this move as a necessary strategy to speed up the
disappointingly slow process of converting India.
In their "ashrams", designed with
temple-like architecture and ornamentation, they served vegetarian meals,
wore homespun saffron robes and incorporated into their liturgy Vedic
phrases such as: "Lead me from death to immortality". Le Saux renamed
himself Abhishiktananda, "bliss of the Anointed One [i.e. the
Messiah]", while Monchanin called his hermitage the Sacchidananda
Ashram, "hermitage of Being-Consciousness-Bliss": fortunately for
them, Hindu religious vocabulary contained not only explicitly
polytheistic and un-Christian god-names but also many abstract spiritual
concepts which a Christian may use without overtly lapsing into heresy.
All the same, Indian Christians and
especially recent converts rejected this "paganization of Christianity".
So do the guardians of orthodoxy, e.g. in his book On the Threshold of
Hope (1994), Pope John-Paul II denounced the trend among Christian
monks and laymen to explore Eastern forms of meditation, and in 2000, his
statement Dominus Jesus reaffirmed that salvation can only come
through Jesus, not through other "paths". Genuine Hindus aren't too
enthusiastic either. Thus, one of the favourite symbols of the Christian
ashram movement was the Aum sign on a cross. The combination is absurd, at
least if the cross is taken in its Christian sense as the symbol of
suffering. Though Hinduism has a place for the notions of suffering and
sin, the Aum sign by contrast represents the cosmic vibration and eternal
In this paper, we have no intention of
arguing for this relatively recent tradition of Hindu-Christian syncretism
or for the thesis of Jesus' sojourn in India. Instead, we will explore the
unsensational possibility of India-related influences on Christianity
which can be explained through cultural tendencies present in the Eastern
Mediterranean, in Jesus' surroundings. We will survey indications that
some elements in Judaism, in Jesus' preachings and in mature Church
doctrine can indeed be traced to the broader Indo-Iranian tradition
through three of its layers and offshoots: (1) the basic Indo-European
culture of which certain motifs were still palpable in the ambient
Hellenistic culture; (2) Zarathushtra's Mazdeism, a (partly
rebellious) offshoot of the Indo-Iranian religion, which influenced
Judaism in the 6th-4th century BC, and whose Romano-Hellenistic offshoot
Mithraism influenced the nascent Christian doctrine; (3) ideas from
missionary Buddhism and other Indian schools of thought which were in the
air in the eastern Roman empire and influenced the Gospels, sometimes
through the mediation of other Hellenistic philosophy schools. For
our present purposes, a brief overview of these common or borrowed
elements will suffice before we focus on their meaning and implications
for the science of comparative religion.
2. More than inculturation
It is well-known that in its
campaigns of conversion, Christianity followed a policy of
inculturation. This means that it adopted Pagan elements in
christianised form in order to ease the transition from Paganism to
Christianity. To be sure, the reinterpretation of religious items long
predates Christianity: Judaism turned an ancient spring festival into a
day of remembrance of the exodus from Egypt (replacing universal nature
with national history as its religious point of reference), Hindus turned
an ancient harvest celebration into a commemoration of victorious Rama's
coronation (Diwali), and Buddhists turned May day into a
celebration of the Buddha's birth or enlightenment (Wesak). But
Christianity was the first to use this type of reinterpretation
systematically as a strategy for conversion.
Pagan gods became Christian saints, e.g.
Isis with the babe Horus became the Madonna with Child. The bearded and
horse-borne Germanic god Wodan became Saint Nicolas, later americanized as
Santa Claus. Even the Buddha found a place on the saints' calendar under
the name Saint Josaphat. The autumnal celebration of the dead became All
Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, which is nowadays regaining its purely
Pagan colours in the form of Hallowe'en. The date of Easter (from
the Germanic dawn goddess Eostra/Ostarra) combines the Pagan
symbolism of Spring Equinox and Full Moon with the Christian innovation of
Sunday as the day of the Lord,-- an innovation which itself was borrowed
from the solar cult of Mithraism, a late-Roman type of Masonic Lodge
inspired by both Iranian Mazdeism and astrology. Winter Solstice as its
feast of the Invincible Sun became Christmas.
In fact, the whole cult of the year
cycle in Mithraism (not unrelated to that of the Vedic year-cycle god
Prajapati) deeply influenced the Christian liturgical calendar, so that
Protestant fundamentalists would later protest quite accurately that most
Church festivals including even Christmas are Pagan borrowings devoid of
scriptural foundation. The ritual of the Eucharist, in which
Christians are deemed to be drinking Christ's blood (sacrilege to Jews),
may also be of Mithraic origin.
A separate priesthood was created along
with a standard liturgy, on the model of religious professionalism in the
established Pagan religions or in the popular Mystery cults. Concepts and
terms from Greek philosophy were incorporated in Christian theology. Among
the typically Christian innovations vis-à-vis Judaism, the notion of the
Divine Trinity (rejected by Jews and Muslims as
crypto-polytheistic) clearly bears the imprint of the Indo-European
tripolar cosmology known as trifunctionality, well-attested e.g. in
the ancient Roman religion. Churches arose where temples or sacred trees
had stood, so that worshippers could keep on coming to their old places of
worship and gradually get used to the Christian liturgy there.
In this process of inculturation, the
Christian Church remained in control: it adapted old forms to its new
message, but made sure that through the Pagan veneer the Christian
doctrine was impressed upon the converts. However, the incorporation of
Indic and particularly Buddhist elements which we will now discuss, has
had a far deeper impact. It preceded the genesis of a discernible
Christian religion and Church and determined some of their most central
The Gospels contain a number of almost
literal repetitions of phrases, parables and scenes from the Buddhist
canon, particularly from the Mahaparinirvana-Sutra: the master
walking on water (and saying to the baffled disciples: "It's me"), the
simile of the blind leading the blind, the multiplication of the loaves of
bread, the master asking and accepting water from a woman belonging to a
despised community, the call not to pass judgment on others, the call to
respond to hostility with love, and other overly well-known motifs.
(Gruber & Kersten 1995, Derrett 2001) Both doctrinal elements and
biographical anecdotes have been borrowed. The Buddha's mother saw in a
dream how a white elephant placed the promising boy in her womb while a
heavenly being revealed the great news to the father, roughly like the
annunciation to Mary and Joseph. The loose but devout woman Mary Magdalene
is a neat copy of the Buddha-revering courtesan Amrapali. (Lindtner 2000)
The iconography of Jesus resembles that of the expected future Buddha
Maitreya, a name derived from maitri, "fellow-feeling,
friendship", close enough to the Christian notion of agape/charity.
The Maitreya is depicted with lotus flowers in the places where Jesus has
stigmata of the crucifixion.
This is becoming too much for
coincidence, and the similarity is moreover strengthened by very specific
details. Thus, Jesus relates how a widow offers two pennies
from her humble possessions and thereby earns more merit than a wealthy
man who gives a larger gift from his abundant riches. In Buddhist texts we
find the same message in several variants, among them that of a widow
offering two pennies; a holy monk disregards the larger gift of a
wealthy man and praises the widow's piety.
Not to make all this too idyllic, we can
point out a less fashionable item which Christianity may have borrowed
from Buddhism: the depreciation of woman as focus of lust and continuator
of life in this vale of tears. We do not mean the belief in the inequality
of man and woman, which is near-universal, even in fertility-promoting
religions like Judaism, Vedic Brahmanism or Confucianism. While these
cultures celebrate intercourse with woman and the harvest of her womb as a
grand sacrament of life, Christianity and Buddhism tend to condemn life as
tainted by sin and suffering, hence procreation and sexuality as sources
of misery, and woman as an inauspicious temptress. Celibacy as the
Buddhist monks' way of life was foreign to both Greeks and Jews but was
adopted and held up as ideal by Saint Paul and the Christian monks.
Buddhism and Christianity allow sex and procreation to the outer circle of
half-hearted followers ("better to marry than to burn"), but prefer total
asceticism for the inner circle of true seekers.
3. Abrahamic versus Pagan
The gap between the Hindu-Buddhist
tradition and Christianity is at first sight much deeper than that between
Christianity and Judaism or Islam. Unlike the latter two, Indic religions
have no common "Abrahamic" roots with Christianity. Hinduism in particular
may count as par excellence the representative of the ancient hate object
and scapegoat of the Abrahamic religions including Christianity:
Paganism. Hostility towards Paganism is historically the first and
defining commitment of the Abrahamic tradition. "Thou shalt have no other
Gods", or: "There is no God except Allah", concretely meant to its
original audiences: "Fight Paganism and its false Gods."
As mentioned above, many modern Hindus
have interiorized the Abrahamic strictures against polytheism and against
the use of icons in worship. It is only in recent decades that the late
Ram Swarup (1980, 1992) has taken up the defence of both polytheism and
"idolatry". He dismisses the numerical quarrel over one or many as silly
and irrelevant to Hinduism, which acknowledges both the unity and the
multiplicity of the Divine. Concerning idolatry, he points out that
depictions of the Godhead are only visual aides to mental concentration on
the Divine Person behind the image (as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox
segments of the Abrahamic family have also argued). As even ordinary
Hindus are heard arguing: does keeping a photograph of a loved one
diminish or harm your love for him or her? Does destroying the photograph
make the love more authentic? Ram Swarup also adds a spiritual critique:
Christian (and mutatis mutandis, Islamic) exclusivism, which
limits Salvation to those who believe in Christ's divinity and
resurrection, betrays a lack of confidence in God's omnipresence.
In contemporary forums for
Jewish-Christian or Muslim-Christian dialogue, the "common Abrahamic
roots" are eagerly highlighted. The religions concerned are said to have
plenty in common, starting with their belief in One Creator and in His
Self-Revelation through prophets. The dialogue delegates, and even the
less dialogue-minded orthodox theologians, agree that certain basic
doctrines set the Abrahamic religions collectively apart from all the
other religions, collectively known as Paganism. While inter-religious
dialogue is a recent fad, Christians have always made the distinction
between the Abrahamic (viz. Muslim or Jewish) and the Pagan
non-Christians, acknowledging in the former a far greater religious
kinship with themselves than in the latter.
Along with Ram Swarup, many contemporary
Hindus have interiorized this dichotomy between Abrahamic and Pagan
religions, but this time to line up against the Abrahamic
alternative, deemed narrow-minded and spiritually immature. While the
disagreement about which doctrine is good and which is bad remains, there
is now an agreement between these Hindu ideologues and their Abrahamic
opponents about at least this fundamental division of the religious
landscape in two opposing poles: the Pagan religions professed and
practised by mankind since the Palaeolithic, and Abrahamic religions
springing from God's Self-revelation to selected human beings in West Asia
in the last few millennia. And yet, this dichotomy may not be all that
Firstly, it has often been pointed out
that the crucial belief in monotheism may well have as one of its
tributaries an evolute of the Indo-Iranian religion, hence a sister of the
Vedic religion, viz. Iranian Mazdeism. In at least some layers of Mazdeic
scripture, we find the rejection of the Indo-Iranian gods (daevas),
who are turned into devils, in favour of the double-god Mitra-Varuna,
extolled under the appellative name Ahura Mazda, "Lord Wisdom".
This seems to prefigure Mohammed's rejection of most Arab gods in favour
of a single one among them, Allah, and also to resemble Moses' rejection
of Semitic gods like Ba'al in favour of Yahweh alone. Given that the
genesis of true monotheism in ancient Israel was a slow and complicated
process, and given the occupation of West Asia by the Mazdeic Iranians in
the 6th century BC (where they explicitly helped to re-establish the
Yahwist cult in the rebuilt temple of Jerusalem), it is not far-fetched to
propose a Mazdeic influence on Israelite monotheism, though its outline
However, if there was such a Mazdeic
influence, it cannot be construed as an indirect influence from the Vedic
upon the Israelite religion, for it concerns precisely that part of
Mazdeism which originated in the break-away from and reaction against the
Indo-Iranian polytheist mainstream as preserved in the Vedas. Likewise,
others elements attributed to Mazdeic influence, such as the eschatology
of physical resurrection, arrival of a redeemer and final judgment,
definitely originate in later internal developments in Mazdeism unrelated
(whether by conserving or rejecting) to the old Indo-Iranian core beliefs.
The second element interfering with the
neat dichotomy between Pagan and Abrahamic looks more promising for our
present study. We will be able to show that there are doctrinal
similarities between the Christian and the Hindu-Buddhist traditions which
set the former apart from the other Abrahamic religions, and the latter
from the other Pagan religions. These similarities are certainly the fruit
of historical contacts, though apart from the presence of a Buddhist
community outside Alexandria (the Therapeutai), the details of the
whereabouts of Buddhists in West Asia are as yet eluding us. We will
consider the two most important common points of doctrine: Incarnation and
In the Upanishads, the youngest
layer of Vedic literature, attention shifts from the ritual fire sacrifice
to the interior of man's consciousness. If we empty it of the sensory and
mental contents which usually occupy it, we see in it our true nature, the
Self. However, experiencing the mental silence in which the realization of
the Self dawns is easier said than done. So, determined seekers made it
their full-time occupation to pierce the veil of mental dross, to seek
liberation from the web of ignorance, false identification and attachment.
It is among this class of seekers that the Buddha emerged as the
discoverer and teacher of the most successful and well-rounded method.
The goal of the Upanishadic and Buddhist
yogis was "liberation" (mukti, moksha), or, in the Buddha's
more negative-sounding terminology, "blowing out" (nirvana). This
is a double-negative concept: first a problem intrinsically affecting all
people is defined (suffering, ignorance, attachment), then a method of
eliminating the problem is devised and put into practice, ideally
resulting in liberation. Exactly the same doctrinal structure forms the
core of Christianity: all human beings are afflicted with original Sin
incurred by Adam and Eve, and now they stand in need of Salvation, which
the religion provides. This notion of a radical wrongness in the human
condition and of a concomitant radical jump out of it and into the state
of Salvation does not exist in Judaism and Islam. Neither does it exist in
most Pagan religions, such as the ancient Greek religion, Confucianism or
Shinto, nor even, apparently, in the oldest Vedic layer of Hinduism.
How is Liberation or Salvation achieved?
The original Hindu-Buddhist answer is: through right effort, viz. through
a meditative practice which stills all mental distractions. However, this
path of self-liberation is demanding and fails to deliver the immediate
consolation ordinary people hope for. So, soon enough a devotional
practice developed which attributed to the Buddha, or to Shiva or Krishna,
the power to somehow "grant" Liberation to his devotees. Hindu
philosophers have distinguished between two approaches to Liberation: the
"way of the baby monkey", which clings to its mother through its own
effort, and the "way of the kitten", which is picked up by its mother
between her teeth. In practice, the way of the kitten is the most popular
by far: people make the effort of putting themselves into a religious mood
but expect the real breakthrough to Salvation from a caring and
interventionist Divine Person. Though most Hindus and Buddhists vaguely
know of the fruits of meditation, few of them actually practise it, while
most settle for devotional practices such as chanting and waving incense
sticks before an idol of a Divine or Liberated Person.
It is at this devotional stage, which
purists would evaluate as a degenerative stage, that Christianity has
picked up the Hindu-Buddhist notion of Salvation. Just like the Oriental
devotee expects Shiva or the Amitabha Buddha or Guan Yin (Chinese Buddhist
goddess) to save him, the Christian reveres Jesus Christ as the agent of
his Salvation. Though Christian mystics have tried to come closer to God
through meditative techniques, Christianity as such has no technology of
Salvation, unlike orthodox Buddhism. Official Christian doctrine confines
the possibilities of Salvation to the salvific intervention of God through
His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
Jews and Muslims have always denounced
Christianity as an incomplete or downright false pretender to monotheism.
They see the doctrine of the Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) as
detracting from God's unity and unicity. Leaving aside for now the Holy
Spirit, it is mainly the Divine Person of the Son, God Incarnate, which
strict monotheists find theologically incorrect.
In Hellenistic society, people had a
very fuzzy notion of "god" and didn't mind describing remarkably spiritual
people or purported miracle-workers as "divine". Ancient heroes such as
Hercules were deified after their deaths in a process known as
apotheosis, "transformation into a god", and placed among the stars in
the night sky. The Hindus posthumously deified their heroes Rama and
Krishna by reinterpreting their lives as incarnations of Lord Vishnu. In
Buddhism, the historical Buddha is gradually given the status of a divine
incarnation, one in a series of enlightened beings descended on earth in
order to bring Liberation to all the suffering beings. Pagan Semitic
cultures, e.g. in Ugarit, likewise gave a posthumous divine status to
their revered kings by associating them with one of the gods, such as El
or Ba'al. This process of association was called shirk, a term
generalized by Mohammed to every "association" of lesser beings with the
one God, Allah ("the god"). Muslims refer to all polytheists as
mushrikin, "associators", viz. of lesser beings with Allah.
In the opinion of the Muslims, the Jews
and the Arian heretics of Christianity, the allotment of a divine status
to Jesus Christ is not truly different from the procedure by which the
Pagans gave divine status to their kings and saints, to stars and
mountains, even to animal species (Egyptian cats, Hindu cows) and sculpted
statues and trees, briefly to creatures instead of the Creator.
They think, quite sensibly, that Christian belief detracts from monotheism
by adopting as its most central dogma the highly Pagan notion that a
creature, the son of a woman, could be God. On this point, Christianity is
undeniably less akin to Judaism and Islam than to those sects of Hinduism
and Buddhism which deify historic figures like Krishna and the Buddha.
Christianity's number one selling point
is its emphasis on the virtue of love (not to be misinterpreted as
erotic love) or charity. Missionaries love to contrast universal
Christian charity with Jewish ethnocentrism, Muslim or Marxist
conflict-prone fanaticism, Hindu callous indifference to the suffering of
anyone belonging to another caste, or Buddhism's ethereal disinterest in
any useful worldly work per se. However, this notion of universal
fellow-feeling and its implementation in works of charity definitely
Four centuries before Christ, the
Chinese school of Mozi already preached jian'ai, "universal love",
and put it into practice in self-supporting communities (comparable to
those established by the Epicureans in the Hellenistic world). These
Mohists argued that one's love should be distributed evenly over all
fellow-men, while their Confucian contemporaries contended that love
should be differentiated in intensity: more love for close relatives, less
for distant acquaintances, less still for unknown people. Yet, even the
Confucians taught that some fellow-feeling or "fellow-humanity" (ren)
should be extended to all mankind. Meanwhile in India, the Vedas and later
the Buddha extolled fellow-feeling or compassion (daya c.q.
karuna), not just towards one's fellow men but towards all sentient
It may be admitted that Christianity
gave its own twist to charity. The activist streak of going out and
opening orphanages or hospitals is less in evidence in Hinduism or
Buddhism than in Christian settlements. Unlike Buddhist and Hindu monks,
who are only expected to do their devotional or yogic duties, Christian
monks of most orders are required to work. It may be conceded that
Buddhist monks sometimes did take upon themselves certain charitable
activities, notably in medicine, which is after all an application of the
basic Buddhist vocation to relieve suffering. Among the duties of kings,
Hindu scriptures include the care for the needy and the handicapped. Even
so, there is just no denying that among religious personnel, Christian
monks were and are encouraged far more systematically than any others to
give a materially constructive expression to their sense of charity.
The reason for this difference,
according to Hindus and Buddhists convinced of the superiority of their
own tradition, is that Christian missionaries had to "sell" their
doctrinal "product" by giving the extra bonus of material help, just like
salesmen of inferior products try to make people buy them with the lure of
extras. In this view, a convert to Buddhism opts for the Buddhist Way,
while a convert to Christianity may take Christian beliefs in his stride
while primarily seeking access to the Christian network of charity. A less
polemical explanation would be that the wider family units in India could
better provide for the needs of their own sick and needy members, hence
requiring less help from "public" charities than the uprooted masses of
the late Roman empire or the industrial-age West (note that Mother Teresa
made her name in Kolkata among uprooted immigrants into the modern city,
not in a traditional Hindu social setting). The reason may also be that
Christianity simply happened to acquire its mature form in a pre-existing
activist culture: first the Romans with their no-nonsense dynamism and
their feats of engineering, later the Germanic peoples in their cold
climate requiring daily labour and inventiveness for sheer survival, as
contrasting with the Buddha's Gangetic setting where the relative opulence
of nature and the immense heat discourage physical exertion.
But the most fundamental reason why
traditions originating in India lay less emphasis on material compassion
and activist forms of charity, is simply that they pay more attention to
what they perceive as a deeper human need. Clothing the naked and feeding
the hungry is very fine, but as the Buddha knew from his own young days of
luxury, even the well-fed and well-clad are subject to unhappiness and
suffering. The highest compassion is therefore not the sharing of material
things or emotional attention, but the imparting of the ethical and
meditative methods leading to Nirvana.
In any case, the whole idea that man
should care about his brother, that he should take responsibility for the
welfare of society as a whole or for needy human beings in particular,
clearly precedes Christianity. Like the Christian, though since centuries
earlier, the Hindu or the Buddhist is his brother's keeper, and is taught
from childhood not to indulge in self-centred inanities and mindless
self-indulgence, of course not to be confused with disciplined
self-introspection. Caring for others may legitimately be called a
Christian virtue, but it is not exclusively Christian and finds older
models in at least Mohism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and no
doubt in other pre-Christian teachings as well.
Christianity is not as original as it
flatters itself to be. Just as it is now widely accepted that the Old
Testament has profusely borrowed from older Mesopotamian and Egyptian
sources, the New Testament has likewise borrowed some of its core imagery
and defining beliefs from the ambient Hellenistic-cosmopolitan culture and
from the Indic teachings which had gained a certain popularity in the
Eastern Mediterranean region. This implies that rather than being a direct
gift from God, Christianity is simply a human construct, just as it
already believes all other religions to be. Those who are inspired by
Jesus' example and teachings might do well to study their Saviour's own
sources of inspiration.
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Hindu-Christian Meeting-Point, Delhi 1976.
BROCKINGTON, John: Hinduism and
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DAYANANDA Swaraswati, Swami (of
Coimbatore), and GIRNDT, Helmut: A Vedantin's View of Christian
Concepts, Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Saylorsburg PA 1998.
DERRETT, J. Duncan M.: The Bible and
the Buddhists, Sardini, Bornato (Italy) 2001.
GOEL, Sita Ram: Papacy, Its Doctrine
and History, Voice of India, Delhi 1986.
--: Catholic Ashrams, Sannyasins or
Swindlers?, 2nd ed., Voice of India, Delhi 1994.
--: Jesus Christ, an Artifice for
Aggression, Voice of India, Delhi 1994.
--: History of Hindu-Christian
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