Why Christians Should Study the Gita

"When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-Gita and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Why should a Christian read Hindu scripture?
I see myself as a heir to an important Christian tradition which uses alternate philosophical and religious systems to enhance Christian understanding and theology. In a very revealing passage at the end of The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, by Raimundo Panikka, an inter-religious theologian of Christian/Hindu parents, who sums up this inter-religious tradition by pointing to Thomas Aquinas:
‘I have tried to do mutatis mutandis what the Christian scholastics, especially St Thomas Aquinas, did with Hellenic wisdom in general and with Aristotle in particular. . . . [H]e was not simply performing the academic work of an interpreter, but undertaking a theological mission of assimilation, namely an explanation of Christian truths by adoption of the Aristotelian framework conveniently transformed. He was not concerned with aseptic “scientific” hermeneutics, but sought only the truth.’
For Aquinas, the other is interpreted in the light of Christ, but not with the goal of simply absorbing the other, but properly discovering what the other really means.’
I first read the Bhagavad Gita when I was 18 years old. I was at the Seattle airport and Hare Krishna devotees were passing out beautiful hardcover books of the Upanishads. They were beautifully illustrated and written in Sanskrit and English. Because the book was an inter-linear text I was able to learn basic Sanskrit. There is no doubt the text of the Gita is one of the greatest religious texts in human history. But it was filled with Hindu names and concepts that were alien to me and it was so difficult to separate the basic story and lessons embedded in a highly cultural text. Nevertheless, I was able to see that the story which was a conversation between Krishna and his friend was a sophisticated metaphor of the human condition. It was an attempt to answer basic questions of human existence. Why is there war? How do we transcend suffering? How can we determine good and evil? What is wisdom? Unfortunately I did not fully appreciate the genius of the text. It was so dreamy and surreal. Of course it was aligned with the spirit of the age in 1968 when so many young people were drifting into a groundless world of drugs ,sex, and rock and roll. I wanted nothing to do with this way of life. I was a serious Christian and I found the writings of Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis resonating with my soul.
After 40 years I have read the Bhagavad Gita again. I resonate with it's wisdom in the same way I resonated with Merton and Lewis. It lays out a path to God that every mystic heart would recognize. Each yoga (way) is a step toward God through renunciation, service, and meditation. It reminds me so much of the Syriac Liber Graduum, the Book of Steps, a fourth century book by an anonymous author, revered in Orthodox Christianity.
The Book of Steps divides humanity into two types: the Perfect of the Upright or those who live in the Garden of Eden and those who live outside. The Book of Steps refers to a Holy War we must fight and clearly identifies this battle as as interior war disguised by outward humility.
“Blessed is whoever has entered that heavenly church upon which our Lord shines openly, just as this visible sun shines upon this visible church and upon these temples of the body. How many times will this sun set on these ? The light of the face of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ does not depart for that church that is above. For even if our Lord is everywhere , he is clearly visible only in that heavenly church, but only to those who have lowered themselves and have become calm and gentle with everyone, and have fought and made war only with the evil spirits, and have purified their hearts from evil thoughts, just as the apostle said, ‘ your struggle has not been against people of flesh and blood, but against the principalities and the powers and the evil spirits’, and against Satan the destroyer…”
The reason that the Gita reminds me so much of the Book of Steps is that the Gita is a living scripture that guides the awakened human soul on the path to perfection. The Book of Steps is also a text that guides the believer to perfection. It both texts the techniques of ascetic discipline, renunciation, sacrificial and selfless action are steps to perfection. Early Christian fathers such as Ephrem and Philoxenus were influenced by this text. The doctrine of perfection is a golden thread that weaves its way through the texture of his writings. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church in the 18th century, read Ephrem and adopted the doctrine of perfection in a theology phrased as “going onto perfection” that appears frequently in his writings.
The Book of Steps divides humanity into two groups: the perfect and the just. That latter live by the Golden Rule. In the Gita the Golden Rule is embedded in the doctrine of karma.
In addition to the law of karma, the Bhagavad Gita contains a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna with the statement:
That one I love who is incapable of ill will, And returns love for hatred.
This is the Golden Rule in another form as stated by Krishna.
These parallels between Christianity and Hinduism were often from direct contacts. A large and influencial Hindu/Buddhist community lived in Alexandria, Egypt, during the early centuries of Christianity.
Many early Christian saints, such as Hippolytus of Rome, possessed an intimate knowledge of Vedic wisdom and Hinduism. Saint Augustine wrote: "We never cease to look towards India, where many things are proposed to our admiration."
Inter-religious dialogue is an important field of theological study in the 21st century. The ability of ordinary people to travel the world, visit various cultures, and volunteer in remote lands has challenged exclusivistic doctrines and attitudes. Also the explosion of multimedia through global communication systems allows even the most remote peasant to have accesss to almost anywhere or anyone in the world. Therefore inter-religious studies has invited both theologians and ordinary believers to consider the consequences of an inclusivistic faith. It is easy to think that a Hindu or Moslem will go to hell if we do know know him or drank tea with his spouse, or visited his village. We have all become Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians in a certain way. They live with us in our living rooms through our television sets; they stand before us in our shopping malls in the local movie theaters, and they sit next to us in our university classrooms. We love them, hate them, argue with them and they have become us and we have become them. So the challenge of modern theology is how to embrace them and allow them to embrace us. We do this not as a trick to win them to our side or to use this as an excuse to rebel against our faith community. We are challenged to engage them as our brothers and sisters in the heart of God.
How should we read the Gita
I believe there are four methods needed to develop a full inter-religious theology:
Compare
Contrast
Criticize
Compliment(arity)
Compare
To compare religious traditions one must be fully grounded in one's own faith tradition and even the variations within ones faith tradition. Roman Catholic theology, while guided by the official teachings of the Church still varies widely from liberal Jesuit to the moderate traditions of Benedictine theology. Evangelical theology can vary from Emergent experimental theology to Calvinistic Baptist doctrines. For Panikka, abstractions, such as Hinduism and Christianity, do not exist. He writes:
‘Hinduism does not exist; there are only living and separated traditions, sampradayas and such. Christianity also is non-existent; there are thousands of churches, doctrines, and groups that seen from the outside, appear as baroque and overwhelming as Hinduism may appear to the outsider.’
Inter-religious study or dialogue should not be undertaken by the mildly interested or believer who is not sufficiently grounded.
When comparing texts or tenets of faith one is looking for common ground. I have often been asked to lecture to inter-faith groups. Years ago at Bradley University in Illinois I spoke before the student Islamic organization. I spoke about common points between Christianity and Islam. Mostly I spoke about the oneness of God. During the question and answer time the first question posed to me was why I was not Muslim. The question revealed that I had made my point but what I did not do was make sufficient contrasts.
Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) was a Benedictine monk, pioneered direct engagement of Christian and Hindu doctrine. He compared Hindu and Christian faiths both academically and most importantly, experientially. He moved to India in 1955 and became a sannyasi. An Oxford educated (he was taught by C. S. Lewis) convert to Roman Catholicism, he became a leading advocate for the importance of Christians reading Hindu scriptures, especially the Gita. His interests were vast and included the mystical, the New Physics, as well, as Hinduism. He moved to India; he took on a Hindu form of community life – he formed an Ashram. He learned the languages; he worked hard to understand Hindusim from the inside. He was a master at finding common ground between religions.
The goal for Griffiths in comparing religions was nothing less than an experience of the God of Hinduism. So he writes:
‘It is in this cave of the heart that the meeting has to take place. That is the challenge. It’s no good just studying Hinduism in the university or reading about it in books. We have to live this Hindu experience of God, and we must live it from the depth of our experience of God’s revelation in Christ and in the Church.’
The activity of experiencing the Hindu God is one that involves the ‘heart’ rather than the ‘head’. It is the foundation of true wisdom. He recommends against endless discussion about doctrine; instead it is the experience that is important. He recommends interfaith prayer. He writes:
‘It is only in prayer that we can communicate with one another at the deepest level of our being. Behind all words and gestures, behind all thoughts and feelings, there is an inner center of prayer where we can meet one another in the presence of God. It is this inner center which is the real source of all life and activity and of all love. If we could learn to live from that center we should be living from the heart of life, and our whole being would be moved by love. Here alone can all the conflicts of this life be resolved, and we can experience a love which is beyond time and change.’
To realize this goal, he insists that the participants need to be ‘mature Christians’. Griffiths agrees with the Book of Steps when he writes:
‘I believe that God has given this experience of the Upanishads, the Gita, and the Hindu tradition to the world. We are being called to encounter it and to relate it to the Christian experience of God. In our ashram we have had many people coming to share this experience with us and we have found that those who come with a mature Christian faith find that their faith is enriched and deepened by this experience of the Hindu scriptures. I may say that immature people can be thrown off their balance very easily if they have no deep understanding of their own faith. One must really understand one’s Christian faith and live one’s Christian faith, and only then can one understand and live out the Hindu experience in the light of Christ’
For Griffiths, rootedness is a precondition of the dialogical enterprise. Here he is stressing that the rootedness makes the appropriate interpretation of the experience possible. Rootedness, then, makes possible both the empathy (to appreciate the role of a faith tradition is an encounter with God) and interpretation (to see how that a Christian already knows is true relates to the new experiential dimensions) necessary for the engagement. And the goal of this engagement is a fresh illumination of the nature of God. He warns against starting with doctrine; instead, he insists you must start with experience.
Finding common ground through comparison is a key feature of Griffiths method. As he expounds Hinduism so he moves back and forth. He explicates the Hindu worldview, then, in search for common ground, turns to the Christian scriptures. So, for example, Griffiths is explaining the relationship between the One and the many in Hinduism. He writes:
‘There is one absolute, infinite, transcendent Being who is beyond all the gods and all that can be named in heaven and on earth. The gods are devas in Sanskrit, “the shining ones.” They are much more like angels, though that distinction was never made clear as in the Hebrew tradition. They are perhaps nearest of all to the “cosmic powers” of St. Paul.'
Contrast
Contrasting texts and ideas is a major theme of his writing. On a more theological level, he believes that the contrasting accounts of the ultimate reality are complementary. He starts with the marvelous story of Fr. Monchanin, the founder of a Christian Ashram while visiting a school:
‘[H]e went up to a group of children and asked them, “Where is God?” Some were Catholics and some where Hindus. All the Catholic children pointed up: God is in Heaven. All the Hindus pointed to their breasts: God is in the heart. These are two different ways of looking at God: God is everywhere and nowhere, but you can think of Him as above and you can pray to Him and ask His grace to descend, you can kneel in penitence, and ask for mercy. This is obviously a completely, valid way. But equally you can think of God as immanent, present in the earth, in the water, in the air. There is a beautiful passage in the Upanishads which says: “To that God who is in the plants, to the God who is in the trees, to the God who is in the earth, to that God who is in everything, adoration to Him, adoration to Him.”
I feel these two different ways are complementary. Just as the Christian, starting from above, discovers the Holy Spirit as immanent and realizes the presence of God in the whole creation around him, so the Hindu, starting with the immanence of God in the creation, in the human heart, rises to the idea of God beyond the creation and beyond humanity.’
One must be ready and willing to learn of God from Hinduism through the illumination of contrasts. This was the theme of his best known work The marriage of East and West. The scientific, rationalism of the West needs to meet the spiritual, emotion of the East. Griffiths believes that a failure to have this encounter could be catastrophic for the West. He talks of it as male meeting female. He writes:
‘The balance can be restored only when a meeting takes place between East and West. This meeting must take place at the deepest level of the human consciousness. It is an encounter between the two fundamental dimensions of human nature: the male and the female – the masculine, rational, active, dominating power of the mind, and the feminine, intuitive, passive, and receptive power. … [T]he past two thousand years, coming to a climax in the present century, the masculine, rational mind has gradually come to dominate Western Europe and has now spread its influence all over the world. The Western world – and with it the rest of the world which has succumbed to its influence – has now to rediscover the power of the feminine, intuitive mind, which has largely shaped the cultures of Asia and Africa and of tribal people everywhere.’
An important reason, then, for entering into engagement with Hinduism is to have our understanding and perception of the world transformed. And it is a transformation, argues Griffiths, that the West desperately needs. He also believes that Hindu culture needs to learn about democracy, science, and human rights. This willingness to learn of God from another faith tradition is, for Griffiths, the underlying motivation needed to search for contrasts and comparisons between the faiths..
Critical Analysis
Griffith was also willing to identify difficulties and problems with Hinduism. In Return to the Center, he explains, ‘I cannot help feeling that the present situation of India, with its masses of poor, illiterate people, of people suffering from disease and being left to die in the streets, really stems from basic philosophy – all are caught in this wheel of samsara. … This sense of cyclic time and constant recurrence can, of course, lead to a terrible fatalism, which can be sad but which can also be sustaining.’
Although Griffiths did recognize that there are modern Hindu attempts to reinvent the doctrine of samsara, it remained true that for the masses in India it was deeply destructive. Unlike the doctrine of the incarnation that triumphs in a resurrected form of human life, he believed that the doctrine of reincarnation undermined the value of the individual. So he writes:
‘The divine life penetrates history, time, suffering, and death, and then raises history and time and suffering and death into a new creation, a new order of being in which these things are not lost, not destroyed, but transfigured. This gives a value to every human person. With the doctrine of karma human persons get mixed up: you may have been Cleopatra in a past life, or somebody else. You are not yourself any longer, and in the end everything merges into one. You will enjoy the absolute bliss of the one. But “you” are really no longer there.’
So Griffiths is critical. While he admires the Hindu concept of God; he is deeply critical of the doctrines of samsara and reincarnation. His method invites us to be equally critical.
Complemetarity
Griffiths explicitly refers to ‘the principle of complementarity.’
This is a term that arises from modern physics. Within the micro-cosmic world of physics there is a process of entanglement and complimentarity are used to describe objects that are both apart and together at the same time. In the strange world of quantum physics, it is these states that makes teleportation possible so that one atom can be in two places at once. There is, for Giffiths, many true ways of speaking of the complexity and irony of the one ultimate reality.
While Krishna and Jesus may seem vastly different by contrast, Griffiths conviction is that it is the one true God who is being disclosed in Hinduism. The result of merging and experiencing inter-religious encounter is a cross fertilization of faith.
Panikka puts it thus:
‘I have insisted on saying that the relationship between the two religious traditions, Christian and Hindu, is not one of assimilation, or of antagonism, or of substitution (the latter under the misnomer of “conversion”), but one of mutual fecundation.’
Panikka identifies three requirements for the encounter:
‘a deep human honesty in searching for the truth wherever it can be found; a great intellectual openness in this search, without conscious preconceptions or willingly entertained prejudices; and finally a profound loyalty towards one’s own religious tradition.’
Panikka is offering the following: faithful Christians are called to allow the wisdom of God to shape our understanding of Christianity. Hindus are invited to enter into the same process. The result is cross-fertilization and mutual complimentarity of each faith
‘A Christian will never fully understand Hinduism if he is not, in one way or another, converted to Hinduism. Nor will a Hindu ever fully understand Christianity unless he, in one way or another, becomes Christian. There are, of course, levels of understanding as there are levels of conversion. It is not necessary however for everyone to “meet” everyone else like this. Certain meetings could be extremely dangerous. Not everyone is able – much less obliged – to incarnate himself in another religion. But if an encounter has to be more than a mere diplomatic move, we cannot escape its exigencies. Since it is not just an individual but a collective and social endeavor, those involved must grasp the dynamics of the history of the encounter up to date, in order to catch and use its momentum and thus continue it in a meaningful way.’
The goal must be such a complete understanding that one sees the beauty, the distinction and coherence of the other all at the same time in the here and now.
We should expect to encounter Christ in Hinduism. For Christianity does not have the entire truth about the nature of God in Jesus. Instead we discover more about the mystery of God in Hinduism; hence the importance of the encounter.
At first this seems to be a radical thought. Yet, as Christians we learn and experience God not only through scripture but also through nature as well. So, if not nature, why not through the vastness and complexity of other religious tradition as well? Paul models this approach on Mars Hill by studying the Helenistic temples and votive naves and points to the temple to an unknown God. To offers the unknown Christ to a critical Greek audience through the encounter with pagan religious tradition.
We approach Hinduism is the same way we approach and encounter with God in nature. We look to the starry skies and we see that a cosmic Christ is already present; we stare into a microscope and discover the mystery of the divine. In the same way Panikka writes: ‘Hence from the point of view of Christianity, Christ is already present in Hinduism. The Spirit of Christ is already at work in Hindu prayer. Christ is already present in every form of worship, to the extent that it is adoration directed to God. … [I]n meeting and accepting Hinduism as it is, the Christian will find Christ already there.’
The propositional encounter is secondary to the abiding recognition of a deeper unity within the life of God.
The principle of complemintarity is that no tradition should assume it has the entire truth about the nature of God. There are good reasons to believe that there is much more we can learn about God from other faith traditions.
Complimentarity is grounded in an obligation to learn of God from Hinduism; the content is a transformed, modified account of what it means to believe in Christ.

Notes
The quotes for support of this chapter are from the following writings of Bede Griffiths and Raimundo Panikka.Bede Griffiths, The Cosmic Revelation (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate 1983) Bede Griffiths, The Golden String (London: Fount 1954) Bede Griffiths, The Cosmic Revelation, p.17Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West: A sequel to the Golden String, (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate Publishers 1982) Bede Griffiths, Return to the Center (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate Publishers, 1976) Bede Griffiths, The Cosmic RevelationRaimundo Panikka, The Silence of God. The Answer of the Buddha, (Marykoll, New York: Orbis Books 1989) Raimundo Panikka, ‘Forward: The Ongoing Dialogue’ in Harold Coward (ed.) Hindu-Christian dialogue (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis books 1989)Raimundo Panikka, ‘The Ongoing Dialogue’ in Howard Coward (ed.) Hindu-Christian Dialogue: Perspectives and Encounters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1989) Raimundo Panikka, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis books 1964, 1981)