Learning Interreligiously

In the Text, in the World

SJ X. Clooney

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781506417714
• eBook ISBN: 9781506440132
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöse Ökumene & Interreligiösität

Learning Interreligiously offers a series of about one hundred short pieces, written online between 2008 and 2016. They are meant for a wide range of readers interested in interreligious dialogue, interreligious learning, and the realities of Hindu-Christian encounter today, and are rich in insights drawn from teaching, travels in America and India, and the author's research on sacred texts. The author, a Catholic priest who has spent more than forty years learning from Hinduism and observing religion as a plus and minus in today's world, has much to share with readers. Some pieces were prompted by items in the news, some go deeper into traditions and probe the rich Scriptures and practices going back millennia, some seek simply to provoke fresh thinking, and others invite spiritual reflection. The book is divided into several parts so that readers can focus on individual events that made the news or on longer term and more concerted study. Familiar texts such as the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an, and key passages from the New Testament will be considered for their spiritual possibilities. Readers will find much here to learn from and respond to as they too consider religion in today's world.

I

Interreligious Readings

Krishna in Advent I

November 30, 2008

Cambridge, MA. I have been teaching a seminar on the Bhagavad Gita, reading it with two classical commentaries (by Ramanuja [eleventh century] and by Madhusudana Sarasvati [sixteenth century]) and two modern commentaries (by Mahatma Gandhi and by Bede Griffiths, the Catholic monk who lived for many years in an ashram in South India). The Gita itself is a rather short work, just over seven hundred verses, that is perhaps a bit more than two thousand years old. It is part of the very large epic Mahabharata, which tells of a great war between two sides of a princely family; the Gita begins just as the terrible final battle is about to occur. At the final moment, the leading warrior Arjuna hesitates in the face of the terrible slaughter that will surely follow and is overcome by grief as he considers the various awful possible outcomes. His charioteer is Krishna, a leading prince who does not personally fight in the war but has agreed to help Arjuna and his brothers in their battle; as the Gita tells us little by little, he is also the lord of the universe, divine savior come down to earth. His teaching constitutes the verses of the Gita, which leads Arjuna on an intellectual and spiritual journey that unfolds the meaning of self, duty, detachment and detached action, service, and love of God, so that he can recover himself and get up and fight, as is his duty.

While the entire Gita is a fascinating topic for study, I am thinking about it right now because today is the first day of Advent, when we begin to think in a prolonged, deeper way about the meaning of the birth of the Son of God in our midst. Advent, like other important times in the church year, is an occasion for learning from other religions, bringing our Christian expectations and intuitions to bear on their texts, images, and practices—and thereafter bringing what we learn from some particular religious tradition back into our reflection on Christian truths, values, and practices. This is the richer intelligent cultural exchange and learning, rooted in actual study and conversation. Pope Benedict has repeatedly reminded us that careful, contextual study—in culture—is superior to an unprepared effort to share on a neutral or purely religious level. We have minds, we must use them, even in the religious sphere, and so we must study.

Hence the “Krishna in Advent,” focused on five verses near the beginning of chapter 4, where Krishna explains his coming into the world:

Many a birth have I passed through, and [many a birth] have you [Arjuna]: I know them all but you do not.

Unborn am I, changeless is my Self, of [all] contingent beings am I the Lord! Yet by my creative energy I consort with Nature—which is mine—and come to be [in time].

For whenever the law of righteousness withers away and lawlessness arises, then do I generate myself [on earth].

For the protection of the good, for the destruction of evil­doers, for the setting up of the law of righteousness, I come into being age after age.

Who knows my godly birth and mode of operation thus as they really are, he, his body left behind, is never born again: he comes to Me.

(trans. R. C. Zaehner, Oxford University Press, 1969)

These verses, even more than most of the verses of the Gita, have occupied Hindu commentators and modern Western scholars, including Christian theologians. Many books have been written to compare and contrast Krishna and Christ and to ponder the differences between their births and activities in the world. (See, for instance, Steven Tsoukalas’s essay “Krishna and Christ” in Song Divine and Jesuit Fr. Ishanand Vempeny’s older book Krishna and Christ). Often, such reflection has had a win/lose edge to it: if there are too many similarities, the uniqueness of the Christ event gets lost from sight, and so distinctions must be made to show how the Christ event is more unique, more important, and more true. Our faith tells us it is more true, but we need not read with a competitive, must-win spirit. While such concerns are quite understandable and important in the larger realm of Christian faith and theology, I suggest that we have much to learn by a more refined, narrower inquiry that is really simple: what is Krishna saying in these verses, what did Hindu theologians find in his words, and what do they mean for us? And so, this and two more entries to In All Things before Christmas: Today, (1) What is Krishna saying? and then, in two segments, (2) What did the great Hindu commentator Ramanuja think Krishna was saying? and (3) What therefore do we learn from the Gita, in this Advent meditation, about the coming of Christ?

So, for today, what is Krishna saying? Verse 5: Krishna identifies himself with the human condition—that we all are born into human bodies many times over. It is not that the fact that Krishna is born multiple times that distinguishes him from Arjuna, but that Krishna understands the cycle of births and remembers his previous births. Verse 6: Krishna describes himself in paradoxical language—he is transcendent and perfect, unchanging and unborn—and yet he comes into union with material nature, for the sake of birth, without losing his transcendent perfection. Verse 7: Krishna repeatedly responds to the situation on earth, the waning of that right order that is dharma and the arising of chaos and violence (in adharma). Verse 8: Krishna’s interventions in the world are for the sake of good people and to destroy evildoers, and thus to restore the right order of things. This is a repeated activity, since in every age good and evil are in tension and conflict in our world. Verse 9: The key human response to this divine activity is to know what Krishna has done, in truth, since it is this knowing that leads to union with Krishna.

I hope my very brief comments state at least part of what Krishna is saying to Arjuna and thus give us something to think about: how in Jesus, God identifies himself with our human condition, yet without losing divine perfection; how God enters our world in order to side with those in need, against oppressors; how meditating on how Krishna does all of this enables us to come into union with Jesus, born among us.

Read the verses for yourself, of course, and read more of the Gita if you can. (There are innumerable translations, including excellent, more recent ones by Laurie Patton, Graham Schweig, and George Thompson; R. C. Zaehner’s old edition has most helpful notes; and you can find many useful resources online). To know this about how God is and how God acts is the task we have in Advent, for the sake of a loving knowledge by which we approach him again. You may, of course, wish also to list difference (one birth vs. many births, for instance), but I hope you will not allow even important differences to make impossible the reflection to which the Gita invites us in Advent.

Krishna in Advent II

December 12, 2008

Cambridge, MA. My first reflection in this series made clear my hope that in this Advent season we can engage in interreligious, intercultural learning by considering, as an example, the teaching on the birth of Lord Krishna in the world, according to the Bhagavad Gita. I continue now with verses I cited in last week’s reflection:

Many a birth have I passed through, and [many a birth] have you [Arjuna]: I know them all but you do not. Unborn am I, changeless is my Self, of [all] contingent beings am I the Lord! Yet by my creative energy I consort with Nature—which is mine—and come to be [in time]. For whenever the law of righteousness withers away and lawlessness arises, then do I generate myself [on earth]. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of evildoers, for the setting up of the law of righteousness, I come into being age after age. Who knows my godly birth and mode of operation thus as they really are, he, his body left behind, is never born again: he comes to Me.

(4.5–9, Zaehner translation)

The verses are worthy of our reflection, and much is achieved just by reading them and thinking about them.

Yet, we would be missing something if we simply read the verses by themselves, as if there were no readers before us—pious and learned Hindus who took the Gita to heart over many centuries. A willingness to listen to believers in other traditions and to learn from their theological reflection is also part of the great intercultural exchange to which we are invited in the twenty-first century. To hear this wisdom, I turn today to Ramanuja (by tradition, 1017–1137, South India) and his reading of Gita 4.

Ramanuja, one of the great theologians of Indian history was, tradition tells us, a versatile figure—scholar, teacher, writer of philosophical and theological treatises and commentaries, reformer of temple ritual and daily order, and ardent proponent of love of God. One of the most intriguing and inviting stories about Ramanuja was that after long testing and delay, his teacher taught him the sacred Tiru Mantra, a brief prayer rich in meaning and efficacy, with the stipulation, imposed by his teacher, that he reveal it to no one else, under pain of hell. Ramanuja received the mantra humbly and with devotion and then went to the temple veranda, and from there proclaimed it to the crowds in temple courtyard. When his stunned teacher asked him why, Ramanuja is said to have replied with words to this effect: “To share this great grace with my community, I would gladly risk damnation.”

In any case, Ramanuja wrote a commentary on the Gita, and in his reading of our verses from chapter 4, among many points, he made four key ones.

First, Krishna is clearly insisting that he was born, as Arjuna was born, even if “my birth” and “your birth” are in some way distinguished. There is no talk here of illusory births, merely appearances of being born.

Second, Ramanuja also insists that while humans are born over and again by the force of their bad karma, compelled, as it were, to reenter the world, Krishna freely chooses to be born whenever there is a need, but without any compulsion or imperfection.

Third, Ramanuja asks about the nature of Krishna’s body and decides that Krishna had a real body but one made of perfect matter free from all the imperfections of other bodies: it was made not of prakriti (natural matter) but of a non-natural material (a-prakriti). While this clearly divides Krishna from others taking ordinary bodies, it is interesting to note that in Ramanuja’s tradition, that non-natural matter appears again: it is the bodies that all those who reach liberation receive upon entrance into Krishna’s heaven. What Krishna is at birth, all shall one day be.

These three points are all quite interesting because they point to ways in which Krishna’s birth is like—and unlike—the birth of Jesus. It is not that Ramanuja believed in an illusory appearance of divine birth; rather, in a different religious and cultural context, he defended divine reality differently, on different grounds.

But a fourth and most interesting point deserves special mention. Why, Ramanuja asks, does Krishna bother taking on a human body at all, simply to “protect the good and destroy evildoers”? Could he not do this without bothering to take on a body, simply by the exercise of divine power? Here, Ramanuja does not offer our Christian answer, that the omnipotent God chooses to empty himself and share our lives, deaths, and sufferings. But he does offer a striking answer of spiritual depth: namely, the omnipotent Krishna came to earth and was present during the great battle that Arjuna faced, took on the great project of insuring the victory of righteousness, and taught the Gita in order that by such pretexts he might simply be present, accessible to human physical senses, nearby to those who would know and love him. A cosmic emergency occasions divine intervention, but it seems that to Ramanuja, Krishna would have found some reason to come among us anyway, so we could see him, hear him, be with him, touch him—and thus with our five material yet spiritual senses find God nearby and in our midst. This insight is not far from our Christian tradition’s felix culpa insight: by a happy fault, Adam’s sin was the cause for the great gift of God’s physical presence in the world.

A Christian need not change their view of the incarnation in light of Ramanuja’s insights into the reality, uniqueness, and loveliness of Krishna’s divine birth. But our world is too small, and our well­-being too fragile, for us to imagine that we cannot benefit from the wisdom of other believers in other traditions, particularly those who, like us, believe that God is among us. The unique, irreplaceable truth of Christ cannot be damaged by genuine, vulnerable appreciation for the wisdom and insight of Ramanuja into Krishna’s birth.

Krishna in Advent III

December 19, 2008

Cambridge, MA. I return today for a third time to the theme of Krishna in Advent. In my first reflections on this theme, I highlighted famous verses from chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita and from the commentary on the verses by the medieval theologian Ramanuja. There is a lot going on in both the verses and in Ramanuja’s comments on them, and much of it can be welcomed as insightful and wise by the Christian reader, helping us to think anew about the how and why of Christ’s birth.

Thinking about Krishna in Advent marks a way of practicing what we preach: interreligious learning is not merely a matter of ideas or confessions of faith aimed at one another, but it is a true intercultural exchange. By attentive study, we find our way into the literature of another religious tradition, we learn from it, and we consider in respectful detail what is said and how it is said. While this kind of study does not lead to answers to life’s enduring questions, it changes us little by little, and we find ourselves to be Christians who have genuinely learned from another religious tradition. While it may not be possible for a Christian simply to believe in Krishna, for instance, there is no reason why a Christian, pondering the meaning of Christ’s coming this Advent season, cannot learn greatly from how Hindus have interpreted the coming of Krishna into the world.

For this final meditation on Krishna in Advent, I go back a few centuries before Ramanuja, drawing not on a Sanskrit text but on a verse from the Tiruvaymoli of Shatakopan, a ninth-century Hindu poet saint. Tiruvaymoli is a set of 100 songs, 1,102 verses in the Tamil language, a vernacular South Indian language that is the first language of over seventy-five million Indians even today. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, disciples of Ramanuja wrote commentaries on the verses of Tiruvaymoli, and I have for many years enjoyed reading those commentaries, by Pillan, Nanjiyar, Periyavacchan Pillai, Nampillai, and other great medieval scholars. (Unfortunately, almost nothing by these commentators is translated; however, for a sampling of verses by Shatakopan, see if you can find a copy of A. K. Ramanujan’s Hymns for the Drowning, a lovely selection of verses from Tiruvaymoli, or, I dare to add, my 1996 book, Seeing through Texts.)

In the third book of his songs, Shatakopan reflects on Krishna this way:

Griefless bright light, he is fire, abiding ever the same; grief abounds in human birth, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Author’s Preface
• Interreligious Readings
• In Dialogue