Ramakrishna
said to have encountered Christ in the Dakshinshyeswar grove in 1874.
But to
most Hindus, Jesus is the equivalent of a Muslim prophet, and the Muslim rulers
of India thought.
In fact,
they have been retelling his story ever since Portuguese Catholics first came
to Goa in the early sixteenth century. The Jesus tradition that the Vedantists
brought to the United States is, therefore, quite old in American terms older,
in fact, than the Jesus traditions of home-grown American religions such as the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Church of Christ,
Scientist.
Ram
Mohun Roy (1772-1833), the leader of the Brahmo Samaj (established in 1828),
helped to bring Indian christology into being as he attempted to reconcile
Hinduism with Christianity. Like his contemporary Thomas Jefferson, Roy was a
monotheist with Unitarian sympathies who denied the divinity of Jesus while
affirming the excellence of his moral teachings. The Precepts of Jesus: The
Guide to Peace and Happiness (1820), stripped all supernaturalism from the
Gospel accounts. And was not unlike Ramakrishna’ Shaktism with a kind of
neo-Vedantism at its core.
During
the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth century, Hindu interest in Jesus
quickened. In an 1866 lecture on “Jesus Christ: Europe and Asia,” Keshub
Chunder Sen, an advocate of a reform movement called the “New Dispensation,”
argued that Jesus was “not a European, but an Asiatic.
In The
Oriental Christ (1883), P. C. Mohomdar, another Brahmo Samaj leader, followed
Sen in describing Jesus as Oriental. He went a step further, however, when he
called himself not only a Hindu but also a Jesus devotee.
Inspired
by Ramakrishna, on the one hand, and this Indian Jesus tradition on the other,
American Vedantists produced hundreds of books, lectures, and articles about
Jesus during the twentieth century.
Three
of the most important are “Christ, the Messenger” (1900) by Swami Vivekananda;
Christ and Oriental Ideals (1923) by Swami Paramananda; and Hindu View of
Christ (1949) by Swami Akhilinanda. Swami Paramananda (1884-1940), who
established Vedanta enters in Boston and Los Angeles, was one of the most
popular Hindu leaders in the United States before the guru explosion of the
1960s and 1970s. Long before the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi « as turning
seekers on to Transcendental ‘Meditation, Paramananda was instructing Americans
in Hinduism. No world-denying renunciant, Paramananda loved fashionable clothes
and fast cars; one wag dubbed him the “Hollywood star swami.” Swami Akhilananda
(1894-1962) established and led the Vedanta Society of providence, and
spearheaded the Boston Vedanta Society after Paramananda’s death in 1940.
Though not as flashy as Paramananda, he was instrumental in introducing Vedanta
to a generation of American intellectuals, particularly Boston-area
philosophers and theologians, during and after World War II.
On
first blush, “Christ the Messenger,” Christ and Oriental Ideals, and Hindu View
of Christ all look remarkably traditional. While American Jewish interpreters
(and Ram Mohun Roy himself) denied his divinity, these three texts all glory in
Jesus’ godliness. Vivekananda called Jesus “a messenger of light” and a
“sannyasin.” Akhilananda described him as a miracle-working “yogi.” But the
most popular Vedantist appellation for Jesus was divine incarnation. Whereas
American Jewish admirers of Jesus were careful to call him, simply, Jesus,
Vedantists lauded him as Christ.
Vivekananda,
Paramananda, and Akhilananda all saw Jesus as a ‘self realized’ incarnation,
worthy of worship.
Of
course, when Vedantists such as Vivekananda, Paramananda, and Akhilananda
referred to Jesus as an incarnation, they meant something different by it than
what most Christians mean. In the Christian tradition, incarnation is typically
seen as a once-and-for-all event, the mystery of God taking on a body in the
person of Jesus Christ. The Sanskrit word for incarnation is avatar, literally
a “descent” of divinity = to earth, and according to Hindus this is a recurring
rather than a unique role. Vishnu, for example, is said to have ten
incarnations, descending, among other things, as a tortoise, a fish, a dwarf,
and as both Krishna and the Buddha. Vivekananda, Paramananda, and Akhilananda
all quoted a classic proof text from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita to
underscore the multiplicity of avatars. “Whenever, wherever virtue declines and
vice prevails, then I embody Myself,” Paramananda’s translation went. “For the
protection of the good and for the destruction of the evil and for the
reestablishment of religion, I am born from age to age.
So
while Jesus is an avatar, he is not to be mistaken as the only one. And
what is the role in this scheme of such a Christ? It is not to save humans from
sin and deliver them to heaven. Vedantists reject original sin, as according to
Vedantists, all human beings are “inherently perfect.”
The
problem is that such perfection is in most of us latent rather than manifest.
Humans, in short, are ignorant. And what they are ignorant of is their own
divinity. Jesus role in salvation, then, is not atoning for our sins. “The idea
... that if we believe in a certain Savior we have only to fold our hands and
let Him save us,” writes Paramananda, “is a grave mistake.” The avatar’s
purpose, rather, is to embody the divinity of humanity and lead others to
perfection. The Christian notion that Jesus “’taketh away the sin of the
world,’ “ wrote Vivekananda, “means that Christ would show us the way to become
perfect.”
Of
course, the vast majority of modern American Christians hold a very different
view of Jesus, insisting on both the reality of sin and the uniqueness of their
Savior. But that is the problem, these swamis believed. By affirming the status
of Jesus as God’s one and only Son, traditional Christians were limiting an
infinite God, dogmatizing Jesus, and turning Christians into haters of
so-called “heathens.” So while traditional Christians clung “to the dogmatic
Christ, the creed-bound Christ of organization and institution,” Vedantists
looked “to that Christ who is the soul of Divinity, who cannot be partitioned
off any more than we can partition off the infinite sky.
Along
with Jesus the avatar, Hindus also lauded Jesus the Oriental Christ. This view,
first announced in the West in P. C. Mozoomdar’s Oriental Christ, quickly took
on a life of its own, and a variety of different meanings.
In
some Vedantist writing, to call Jesus Oriental is to make a claim about his
race or ethnicity, to contend that Asian blood coursed through his veins. Swami
Vivekananda seemed to affirm this under standing when he excoriated Christian
missionaries for their naive attempts to paint [Jesus] with blue eyes and
yellow hair.
The
Nazarene,” he insisted, was “an Oriental,” at least as long one understood it
to be ‘Brahmana/Aryan’.
From
another Vedantist perspective, to call Jesus Oriental was to make a historical
claim shy that Jesus was influenced by Oriental thought or, perhaps, visited
India during his youth (or, in some stories, after his crucifixion).
Paramananda gave voice to a widespread myth when he asserted that Indian
Buddhist missionaries to Palestine inspired the founding of the Essenes, who
influenced John the Baptist, who influenced Jesus himself. Other Vedantists,
drawing on Notovitch’s The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, claimed that Jesus
studied in Asia during the “lost years” of his teens and twenties. One purpose
of such historical claims was to subvert stereotypes of Asians as heathens: if
Jesus sat at the feet of Asian teachers in India and Tibet, then perhaps Asians
are worthy of respect.
Still,
when Vivekananda, Paramananda, and Akhilananda referred to Jesus as an
Oriental, they were generally making neither a racial nor a historical
argument. Rather they were associating Jesus with certain beliefs and values.
None of these swamis was particularly interested in the historical Jesus, and
all three saw Christ more as a timeless principle than a living person an
embodiment of “Oriental ideals.” In an effort to define what they called “the
Christ-Ideal,” Vivekananda, Paramananda, and Akhilananda all called down
stereotypes of East and West, linking Jesus with the Orient rather than the
Occident. The three conjured those categories differently, but all portrayed
the East as the land of the spirit par excellence, and the West as the land of
political, economic, and technological achievement. “The voice of Asia has been
the voice of religion,” wrote Vivekananda, “The voice of Europe is the voice of
politics.” Paramananda wrote that “the Eastern heart yearns primarily for
spirituality,” while, in Akhilananda’s words, Western civilization “emphasized
the path of pleasure as the solution to the problems of man.
Jesus
was considered characteristically Oriental in that he made manifest the unity
of divinity and humanity rather than merely preaching it. Paramananda
illustrated that point with a novel interpretation of a New Testament parable:
“It was this which Christ meant when he gave the parable of the two houses: one
built on the rock, the other on the sand, typifying the two lines of the
religious life, the one of theory or mere belief, the other of practice.” The
house built on the sand was the house of the dogmas, creeds, and rites of
organized religion-the house of going to church and going through the motions.
The house built on the rock was the house of the genuine spirituality of Jesus.
“One becomes a good Christian,” concluded Paramananda, “not by clinging to a
special creed, but by living.
The
Vedantists’ representations of East and West also drew on Victorian stereotypes
of the masculine and the feminine. Like many other interpreters, they aligned
the East with femininity and the West with masculinity. Here again Jesus was
said to be more Eastern than Western. In “If Christ Came Today,” a piece
written with Charles Sheldon’s bestseller, In His Steps, in mind, Paramananda
asked (as Sheldon did) what Jesus would do if he “came today.” Paramananda
wrote the article in 1938, with World War II in the offing, and in it he
concluded that Jesus would 6e “the Prince of Peace,” blessing the meek, the
pure in heart, and the peacemakers. Jesus was a renunciant, Paramananda argued.
He was “meek and humble, forgiving and merciful . . . tender and loving.” If he
returned today he would renounce the descent of civilizations into fruitless
violence. He would also renounce decades of efforts to turn him into a macho
warrior. Great nations, Paramananda wrote, should stop teaching “young boys to
stand up for their rights and to fight back lest they should be called
‘sissies.’ “ Young men should imitate Jesus instead by practicing “true
renunciation.”)
In the
contest between the feminizers and the masculinizers of Jesus, the Vedantists
cast their lot with the feminizers. Like Ramakrishna, who came to believe in
Jesus’ divinity after gazing at an image of the Madonna and Child, some U.S.
Vedantists focused their adoration on the baby Jesus. Sister Daya, a friend of
Paramananda and one of his most valued assistants, wrote an essay comparing the
“Christ Child and Child Krishna,” and like other women of the late Victorian
era she seemed drawn primarily to the infant Jesus. Inside America’s Vedanta
societies, the key day for remembering Jesus has typically been neither Good
Friday nor Easter but Christmas, a holiday that Paramananda described as “a
symbol of that infinite tenderness, interwoven with everything helpless and
childlike.
In
organs such as Vedanta Magazine, Vedantists often ran images of Jesus to
illustrate their Christmas sermons on him. The images they circulated most
widely generally emphasized Jesus’ infancy over his adulthood, his femininity
over his masculinity. Heinrich Hofmann’s Christ in the Temple (1871) was one
such picture, though Vedantists typically reprinted only a close-up of this
Jesus’ youthful face. A twelve-year-old boy debating fine points of theology
with scribes in the Jerusalem Temple (the original context for this narrative
painting) evidently did not interest them. What attracted them was, in the words
of New York City’s Swami Abhedananda, the tender face of “Jesus the Christ” as
a “meek and gentle and self-sacrificing Son of Man..
Early
in the twentieth century, Vedantists decided they need a Jesus picture of their
own. Swami Trigunatita, who led the San Francisco Vedanta Society and oversaw
the building there of the first Hindu temple in North America, commissioned
Eugene Oliver to paint Christ the Yogi.
That
picture too has all the machismo of a St. Francis holy card. It evokes a meek
rather than a militant Jesus, emphasizing qualities that Teddy Roosevelt and
other muscular Christians of the era would have associated with femininity
rather than masculinity.
From
the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, immigrants lave shaped their
identity as Americans by adapting their religious beliefs and practices to
American soil. When Vedantists referred to Jesus as an Oriental, they were
saying something not only about his character but also about theirs.
Like
others, they were saying, Jesus lives n America, but his spiritual home is in
India. As they relocated and interpreted Jesus, Indian-American swamis and
their American followers staked a claim to participate fully in the drama of
American religion.
By
calling into question widespread stereotypes of Hinduism, the Vedantists
asserted their right to define their own religious heritage, rather than having
hostile missionaries define it for hem. If Christ was an Oriental, then perhaps
Western stereotypes of Hinduism were suspect.
The
Oriental Christ fashioned by Vedantists was both orthodox and Inorthodox,
radical and traditional. In their emphasis on Jesus as an incarnated divinity,
Vivekananda and his successors were more theologically conservative than many
of their Protestant contemporaries, who at the turn of the twentieth century
were gravitating toward a liberal form of Christianity that soft-pedaled heaven
and hell, accusations of sin, and signs of supernaturalism.
April 5, 2004