Tell
the Pope how Hindu he is
By Francois Gautier
Indian Express - Monday,
October 25, 1999
The Pope is arriving in India on the 5th of November.
Does he know that he may be stepping on a land from which Christianity
originated? Indeed, over the centuries, numerous historians and sages have
pointed out that not only has Hinduism had a predominant influence on
Christianity, but that many of the Christian rites could be directly borrowed
from Buddhist and Hindu India.
French historian Alain
Danielou had noticed as early as 1950 that
"a great number of events which surround the birth of Christ - as it is
related in the Gospels - strangely remind us of Buddhists and Krishnaites
legends".
Danielou quotes as examples the structure of the
Christian Church, which resembles that of the Buddhist Chaitya; the rigorous
asceticism of certain early Christian sects, which reminds one of the asceticism
of Jain and Buddhist saints; the veneration of relics, the usage of holy water,
which is an Indian practice, or the word 'Amen', which comes from the Hindu
'OM'.
Another historian, Belgium's Konraad Elst,also remarks
"that many early Christian saints, such as Hippolytus of Rome, possessed an
intimate knowledge of Brahmanism". Elst even quotes the famous Saint
Augustin who wrote: "We never cease to look towards India, where many
things are proposed to our admiration". Unfortunately, remarks American
David Frawley, "from the second century onwards, Christian leaders decided
to break away from the Hindu influence and show that Christianity only started
with the birth of Christ". Hence, many later saints began branding Brahmins
as "heretics" and Saint Gregory set a future trend by publicly
destroying the "pagan" idols of the Hindus.
Great Indian sages, such as Sri Aurobindo or Sri Sri
Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living,
which is practized in more than 80 countries, have often remarked that the
stories recounting how Jesus came to India to be initiated, are probably true.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar notes, for instance, that Jesus sometimes wore an orange
robe, the Hindu symbol of renunciation in the world, which was not a usual
practice in Judaism. "In the same way", he continues, "the
worshipping of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism is probably borrowed from the
Hindu cult of Devi." Bells too, which cannot be found today in synagogues,
the surviving form of Judaism, are used in church and we all know their
importance in Buddhism and Hinduism for thousands of years. There are many other
similarities between Hinduism and Christianity: incense, sacred bread (prasadam),
the different altars around churches (which recall the manifold deities in their
niches inside Hindu temples); reciting the rosary (japamala), the Christian
Trinity (the ancient Santana Dharma: Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh), Christian
processions, the sign of the cross (Anganyasa), and so on.
In fact, Hinduism's pervading influence seems to go
much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has for
example shown that the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics,
constitute thesource of mathematics in the antique world, from Babylon to
Greece: "The arithmetic equations of the Sulbasutras were used in the
observation of the triangle by the Babylonians, as well as in the edification of
Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in form of pyramid known in
the Vedic world as smasanacit."
In astronomy too, the "Indus" (from the
valley of the Indus) have left a universal legacy, determining for instance the
dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French astronomer Jean-Sylvain
Bailly : "The movement of stars which was calculated by Hindus 4,500 years
ago, does not differ even by a minute from the tables which we are using
today." And he concludes: "The Hindu systems of astronomy are much
more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews derived from the Hindus
their knowledge ". There is also no doubt that the Greeks heavily borrowed
from the "Indus".
Danielou notes that the Greek cult of Dionysius, which
later became Bacchus with the Romans, is a branch of Shaivism: "Greeks
spoke of India as the sacred territory of Dionysius and even historians of
Alexander the Great identified the Indian Shiva with Dionysius and mention the
dates and legends of the Puranas".
French philosopher and Le Monde journalist, Jean-Paul
Droit, recently wrote in his book The Forgetfulness of India that "The
Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy that Demetrios Galianos had even
translated the Bhagavad Gita".
Many western and Christian historians have tried to
nullify this Indian influence on Christian and ancient Greece, by saying that it
is the West, through the Aryan invasion, and later the onslaught of Alexander
the Great on India, which influenced Indian astronomy, mathematics,
architecture, philosophy -- and not vice versa. But new archaeological and
linguistic discoveries have proved that there never was an Aryan invasion and
that there is a continuity from ancient Vedic civilisation to the Saraswati
culture. The Vedas, for instance, which constitute the soul ofpresent day
Hinduism, have not been composed in 1500 BC, as dear Max Mueller arbitrarily
decided, but may go back to 7000 years before Christ, giving Hinduism plenty of
time to influence Christianity and older civilisations which preceded it.
Thus, instead of protesting the Pope's visit, the VHP
and other Hindu organisations should rather point out to him the close links
which exist between Christianity and ancient India, which bind them into a
secret brotherhood.
This article gives the gist of Gautier's forthcoming
book, 'The Indian Origin of Things
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