Appreciation for the Bhagavad-gita
"I understand something about the deep spiritual concepts which are
upheld in India and I appreciate them," said Pope John Paul II. "I’ve heard
about Krishna. Krishna is great."
Srila Prabhupada was pleased when Southern Cross wrote a very favorable
article about the Hare Krishna movement. He wanted Christians and Vaishnavas
to cooperate and respect and appreciate each other’s faith.
"The Hare Krishna movement should be a source of inspiration and move us
Christians on to give closer attention to the very spiritual teachings of
Jesus," says Father Kenneth L. Robertson, a Roman Catholic priest in Nova
Scotia, Canada. "My prayer is that this good work prosper and be appreciated
by all men and women of good will for the greater good of mankind."
Father Robert Stephens, a Catholic priest in Australia, considers Krishna
"one of the many names of God." He writes that he is "saddened at the
narrowness and arrogance of many Christian fundamentalists;" "those who
claim a monopoly on all truth or goodness;" "those who desperately cling
only to external forms under the pretense of faith in God," and "those who
have turned their Sacred Scriptures into mere weaponry against those who
differ from themselves."
According to Father Stephens, we who engage in interreligious discussion
"have firm support from the Catholic Church, especially the Second Vatican
Council, and from such official bodies as the Pontifical Council for
Interreligious Dialogue, and the Dialogue Commission of the Catholic
Bishops’ Conference of India."
Father Stephens observes that "Because spiritual riches belong to all,
dialogue and sharing are not an optional extra in a pluralistic society. We
cannot live in a fortress of one-eyed people." Father Gerald O’Collins S.J.,
similarly, is of the opinion that the Bible does not necessarily provide
authoritative answers to new questions which arise in the life of the
Church, and that the Bible is not that kind of "norm for every problem and
every situation."
Father Bede Griffiths says of Bhagavad-gita, "For a Christian, this is a
wonderful confirmation of God’s love contained in the Gospel."
Meister Eckhart wrote: "When we say God is ‘eternal,’ we mean God is
eternally young." This is Krishna Consciousness. God is an eternal youth.
Matthew Fox’s statement that "God and God’s Son are ultimately attractive
and alluring because of their beauty" is also consistent with Vaishnavaism.
The name "Krishna" means "the all attractive one."
World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present, edited by Geoffrey
Parrinder, states that one conclusion of Bhagavad-gita is:
"...there is no rebirth when a man devotes his whole heart to the Lord. The
wicked man who adores the Lord becomes holy; even women, vaishyas and
shudras (are saved)."
The Vaishnava tradition is described as a warm, devotional religion, drawing
women and members of the low castes to itself...first announced in
the Gita...destined for a long and fruitful career through Indian history."
World Religions explains: "The Vaishnava saints...wrote ecstatic poetry in
praise of the Lord in the vernacular..."
A key Vaishnavaite doctrine is that of prapatti, or throwing oneself
completely on God’s mercy; feeling oneself completely dependent upon the
Lord. One school of thought teaches that receiving salvation is comparable
to the monkey, which carries its young clinging to its belly—the individual
must properly use his free will for grace to assent. Another school of
thought uses the analogy of the cat which carries its kitten by the
neck—God’s grace requires no human effort.
In Bhagavad-gita ("The Lord’s Song"), Lord Krishna reveals Himself as an
incarnation of God to His disciple Arjuna. According to the Gita (11:48),
one cannot come to know God personally by study of the scriptures, nor by
performing sacrifices, nor by charity, nor by good deeds, nor by penances.
The Gita (11:54-55) teaches that God can only be known through love and
devotion. The Brahma-Samhita (34) says the ascetics and deep thinkers who
try to understand God through their own abilities merely touch the outskirts
of His lotus feet, and do not know Him intimately. The Gita (Ch. 12)
explains one must lead a life of devotion to a personal God. Those
completely devoted to God are not affected by worldly conflicts, concerns,
and entanglements, and are very, very dear to Him.
The Lord’s devotees are lifted by the Lord into a state of spiritual grace;
free from the entanglements of the world and the flesh, because—by His
mercy—they are able to serve Him personally. (Gita 14:26-27) One can
understand God only by devotion. (Gita 18:55) Only through devotion can one
enter into the kingdom of God. One must surrender oneself completely to God.
By His grace ("tat-prasadat") one receives everlasting peace and the
spiritual Kingdom. (Gita 18:58-66)
The understanding of grace versus works in the Vaishnava tradition is
somewhat different compared to that of Christianity. Dr. William Deadwyler
(Ravindra Svarupa dasa), a leader in Krishna Consciousness, noted the
similarities and differences between the two theologies when giving an
account of his own religious upbringing and his observations of the
Christian devotional life:
"I was nominally a Methodist, but the Baptists had a strong influence on me.
In my childhood I was rather heavily evangelized. But I never made a full
commitment. And I think it was because well, I just never met anyone who
sufficiently inspired me by his personal example to make that commitment...
"As I grew older, I still looked for something more, something deeper than
that benign wholesomeness, that always-smiling friendliness and that
relentless cheerfulness. It all seemed so superficial, and so many of them
were, as my father put it, ‘on the quietus,’ doing in secret what the
unsaved did in the open.
"Having spent many years in their spiritual milieu, I had formed my own
judgement of them. I felt that their religious practice was severely
crippled by a lack of disciplined, progressive cultivation under expert
guidance. Spiritual advancement depends upon such cultivation, just as
athletic success requires a rigorous program of training under an expert
coach.
"But they had little sense of that. Their belief (correct enough) that
salvation comes from God’s grace became transmogrified in practice into a
curious sort of spiritual passivity. They depended upon sudden emotional
outpourings and flashes of inspiration (whose impact seemed to dissipate
swiftly). Thus their spirituality had a haphazard, hit-or-miss character; it
suffered from a lack of direction. It was immature.
"As a result, they stagnated in a sort of bland, superficial wholesomeness.
In the end, their religiosity simply gave a cachet to a kind of constrained,
genteel materialism—to prayers in the locker room after football or golf,
and to church barbecues where the girls from the choir managed to seem both
sexy and pure at the same time. And even all this was mostly for appearance.
Since niceness is not enough, deviance was rampant, if covert. Yet their
belief in inherent sinfulness led to a passive acceptance of that, too.
"On the other hand, I knew (these Christians) would view me as espousing the
error of Pelagius, the heresy that man can save himself by his own efforts.
Enough evangelicals had approached me in the streets to announce, ‘I don’t
have to work for my salvation,’ to let me know that the party line on us was
out. This charge had two sources. First of all, they saw any sort of regimen
as smacking of works. Second of all, they believed that every religion but
Christianity, no matter what its particular practices, was Pelagian.
"To be more precise, all religions were Pelagian, but Christianity, strictly
speaking, was not a religion. Religion they defined as the vain attempts of
man to reach God on his own; all such attempts are tainted by man’s inherent
sinfulness and so inevitably fail. Christianity, on the other hand, is God’s
own reaching out to man. It is not, of course, tainted by sinfulness."
Some Christian theologians, nonetheless, have acknowledged the Vaishnava
tradition as a religion of grace. One of the most renowned thinkers of the
early 20th century was a German scholar named Rudolf Otto (1869-1937),
recognized for his book The Idea of the Holy. Otto was especially concerned
with the Vaishnava faith as a competitor to Christianity.
A competitor, Otto explained, would make a claim to be equal or even
superior to Christianity, and would have a well-founded basis on which to
make that claim. According to Otto, a religious competitor is "whatever may
seek a place in our hearts or control over our lives that is not our faith
but in rivalry with it."
Otto wrote of "India’s religion of grace," or "bhakti-religion," as the
principal competitor to Christianity. He discussed this at length in his
book India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted.
He wrote: "In this Indian bhakti-religion there is presented, without doubt,
a real, saving God, believed, received, and—can we doubt it?--experienced.
And this is just why this religion appears to me to have been, and to be
today, the most astonishing ‘competitor’ to be taken most seriously.
"Here we are dealing with a genuine religion and religion of experience,"
Otto explained. "Religion here is no mere fringe sentiment furnishing a
border to the rest of our life, but is conceived as the true meaning of life
itself." Otto devoted a good portion of this book to demonstrating and
appreciating the numerous similarities between Vaishnavaism and
Christianity.
According to Otto, "The similarities present here are so important that it
is tempting to consider this religion, viewed from the outside, as a sort of
duplicate on Indian soil of that religion which emerged from Palestine and
which we call Christianity."
In his book, The Living God: Basal Forms of Personal Religion, Nathan
Soderblom similarly observed: "Warren Hastings was right in writing that of
all known religions this comes nearest to Christianity."
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