Francois Gautier on Christianity and Hinduism...

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Dear Jagbir,

 

This article could be uploaded to HSS. i will leave it up to you, if you think

it may be suitable. i don't know how far we want to go with the HSS, whether we

want to include this kind of article, or not. So, i leave the choice up to you,

in this instance for the Holy Spirit Shekinah (HSS) site.

 

Thanks,

 

violet

 

 

Francois Gautier on Christianity and Hinduism

 

Francois Gautier in Indian Express, Monday, October 25, 1999, wrote: (excerpts)

 

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 Buddhist and Krishnaite 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 Indologist 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.

 

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 worshiping 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, Christian processions (parikrama), 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. Seidenberg, has for example shown that

the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source

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 Dionysus, which later became Bacchus with

the Romans, is a branch of Shaivism: " Greeks spoke of India as the sacred

territory of Dionysus and even historians of Alexander the Great identified the

Indian Shiva with Dionysus 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 civilization to the Saraswati culture. The Vedas, for

instance, which constitute the soul of present 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 civilizations which preceded it.

 

This article gives the gist of Gautier's forthcoming book, 'The Indian Origin of

Things'.

 

http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/connections/Christianity.php#8