New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗
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"It is with Pantheism, not Polytheism, that a rising morality will have to reckon," says Sir Alfred Lyall.[87] The result of all our observation has been different. Pantheism is melting out of the sky of the educated, and if nothing else take its place, it will be a selfish materialism or agnosticism, not avowed or formulated yet shaping every motive, that the new morality will have to reckon with.
CHAPTER XV JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF "Tandem vicisti, Galilaee"
—said to have been uttered by Julian, the Apostate emperor.
Pantheism, it has been said, lends itself to the lead to belief idea of avatars or incarnations of deity, and Hinduism, therefore, is familiar with avatars. Observation contradicts this à priori reasoning, nay, it justifies a statement almost contrary. To the philosopher who is thinking out a pantheistic system, or to the ascetic who is seeking after identity of consciousness with the One, the Hindu Avatars are only a part of the delusion, the Maya, in which men are steeped. To a pantheist, holding that his own consciousness of individuality is delusion, born of spiritual darkness and ignorance, the conception of an avatar or concrete presentation of deity as an individual is only still grosser delusion. "The name of God and the conventions of piety are as unreal as anything else in Maya," writes a modern British apostle of Hinduism, while advocating the realisation of Maya as our salvation.[88] It does not seem to me justifiable to say that through Pantheism the Indian mind can approach the thought of Christ the Son of Man and the Son of God. But pantheism, with its allied doctrine of transmigration, may encourage the thought that our Lord was a great jogi or religious devotee, the last climax of many upward transmigrations, and that Christ had attained to the goal of illumination of the jogi, namely, identity of consciousness with deity, when he felt "I and the Father are one." That statement about Our Lord is sometimes made in India.
It is not through the pantheism of the brahmanically learned and of religious devotees that the Indian mind has come within Christ's sphere of influence, but rather through the beliefs of the multitude and the new education of the middle class. And how, we ask, has Christ been introduced to India by association with the popular beliefs—how, rather, has the attempt been made to do so? The theology of the people begins, as has been already stated, with the Hindu Triad, the three great personal deities, namely, Brahmā, Vishnu, and Siva,—Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer respectively. From these and other deities, but particularly from Vishnu, the Preserver, there descended to earth at various times and in various forms, human and animal, certain avatars.[89] Best known of these avatars of Vishnu, the Preserver, are Ram, the hero of the great epic called after him, the Rāmāyan; and secondly, Krishna, one of the chief figures of the other great Indian epic, the Mahābhārat; and thirdly, Buddha, the great religious teacher of the sixth century B.C. Ram and Krishna have become deities of the multitude over the greater part of India. Buddha, latest in time of these three avatars, and unknown as an avatar to the multitude, has not yet been lost to history. Such is the genealogy of certain of the Hindu gods and their avatars, and the object of setting it forth is to enable us to see how Jesus Christ has presented Himself or been presented to the Hindu people.
When Christian doctrine was presented to India in modern times, the Christian Trinity and the Hindu Triad at once suggested a correspondence, which seemed to be confirmed by the coincidence of a Creator and Preserver in the Triad with the Creator and the Son, Our Saviour, in the Trinity. The historical Christ and the avatars of Vishnu would thus present themselves as at least striking theological and religious parallels. "On the one hand, learned brahmans have been found quite willing to regard Christ himself as an incarnation of Vishnu for the benefit of the Western world."[90] On the other, Christian missionaries in India have often preached Christ as the one true avatar.[91] The idea and the word avatar are always recurring in the hymns sung in Christian churches in India. Missionaries have also sought to graft the doctrine of Christ's atonement upon Hinduism, through one of the avatars. A common name of Vishnu, the second member of the Triad, as also of Krishna, his avatar, is Hari. Accepting the common etymology of Hari as meaning the taker away, Christian preachers have found an idea analogous to that of Christ, the Redeemer of men. Then the similarity of the names, Christ and Krishna, chief avatar of Vishnu, could not escape notice, especially since Krishna, Christ-like, is the object of the enthusiastic devotion of the Hindu multitude. In familiar speech, Krishna's name is still further approximated to that of Christ, being frequently pronounced Krishta or Kishta. In the middle of the nineteenth century the common opinion was that there was some historical connection between Krishna and Christ, and the idea lingers in the minds of both Hindus and Christians. One is surprised to find it in a recent European writer, formerly a member of the Indian Civil Service. "Surely there is something more," he says, "than an analogy between Christianity and Krishna worship."[92]
Much has been made by the late Dr. K.M. Banerjea, the most learned member of the Indian Christian Church of the nineteenth century, and something also by the late Sir M. Monier Williams, of a passage in the Rigveda (x. 90), which seems to point to Christ. The passage speaks of Purusha (the universal spirit), who is also "Lord of Immortality," and was "born in the beginning," as having been "sacrificed by the Gods, Sadyas and Rishis," and as becoming thereafter the origin of the various castes and of certain gods and animals. A similar passage in a later book, the Tāndya Brāhmanas, declares that "the Lord of creatures, Prajapati, offered himself a sacrifice for the devas" (emancipated mortals or gods). Of the parallelism between the self-sacrificing Prajapati, Lord of creatures, and the Second Person in the Christian Trinity, propitiator and agent in creation, we may hear Dr. Banerjea himself: "The self-sacrificing Prajapati [Lord of creatures] variously described as Purusha, begotten in the beginning, as Viswakarma, the creator of all, is, in the meaning of his name and in his offices, identical with Jesus.... Jesus of Nazareth is the only person who has ever appeared in the world claiming the character and position of Prajapati, at the same time both mortal and immortal."[93]
But it must be confessed that these parallels, real or supposed, between Christianity and Hinduism have not brought Christ home to the heart of India. In themselves, they only bring Christianity as near to Hinduism as they bring Hinduism to Christianity. Uneducated Hindus feel that the two religions are balanced when they have Krishna and Christians have Christ. Educated Hindus, as we shall see, are employing some of these very parallels to buttress Hinduism. Far be it from me, however, to depreciate the labours of scholars and earlier missionaries who have thus established links between Hindus and Christians, and have thus at least brought Christ into the Hindu's presence. To Indian Christians also such reasoning has often been a strength, furnishing as it were a new justification of their baptism into Christianity; for looking back they can perceive the finger of Hinduism itself pointing the way. But had no other influence been exerted on the Indian mind, one could not say what I now say, that Christ Himself is the feature of Christianity that has most powerfully moved men in India. The person of Christ Himself has been the great Christian dynamic. I am now speaking of educated India, the India that is not dependent solely upon the preacher for its religious ideas and feeling.
The grand new political idea in India is the idea of nationality, and one of its corollaries is the championing of things Indian and depreciation of things British. The strong anti-British bias among the educated is one of the noteworthy and regrettable changes in the Indian mind within the last half-century. It is not surprising then that all over India the influence of Christ and of Christianity is lessened from the identification of Christianity with the British. For a native of India to accept the British religion is to run counter to the prevailing anti-British and pro-Indian feeling; it is unpatriotic to become a convert to Christianity. "Need we go out of India in quest of the true knowledge of God?" wrote a distinguished Indian littérateur a few years ago.[94] All that feeling is of course in addition to the instinctive hostility to things foreign that has been nowhere stronger than in self-contained India—self-contained between the Himalayas and the seas. The exclusiveness of caste is based upon that feeling. The statement of the late Rev. M.N. Bose, B.A., B.L., a native of Eastern Bengal, regarding his youth [1860?] is: "I had a deep-rooted prejudice against Christianity from my boyhood.... At this time I hated Christianity and Christians, though I knew not why I did so."[95] We find the instinctive hostility more bluntly expressed in China in the cry that drops spontaneously from the opening lips of many Chinamen, as their greeting, when they unexpectedly behold a European. The involuntary ejaculation is: "Strike the foreign devil."
In the first part of the nineteenth century, along with the great development of modern missions, and of modern education, we may say that Christ came again to India. The national and anti-British feeling had not then arisen to interpose in His path,
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