Christian-Hindu dialogue has been a silenced activity and a silent discipline because of the challenges of such activity within the history of the British Empire, the Partition of India, and the development of a Hindu nation with Christianity as a minority within India. These essays attempt to develop a dialogue that arises out of the study of practice by both traditions in the context of India. Hinduism developed before the arrival of the British in India and Christianity became a movement in Palestine and Israel before any European Christianity became part of oppressive empires or genocidal military. It was even before their human conception that both traditions were grounded in the Trinity and in Brahma. Within a milliard of people who attempted such reflection Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010), the Hindu and the Christian, was the closest interpreter of such dialogue because he belonged ethnically to the two traditions. Thus, to be a Christian and to be a Hindu reflects the marvellous conception and practice of a divine and human life that is larger than our practice and understanding of one sole tradition.
These volumes of essays on Christian-Hindu dialogue do not provide the solution to the difficulties of a Christian-Hindu dialogue but they provide the foundations of the problem, the difficult understandings of epistemology and philosophy that make both so different and the love and devotion that make both so close to each other and so important for humanity. Both traditions represent not a political way of managing the city, but they give answers to the basic human questions of what happened at the beginning of life and at the end of life. The essays explore the possibilities or impossibilities of a Christian who has learned and lived Hinduism within the Indian context and who with Panikkar believes that an identity is not a personal mark but a mark of sociability in which Jerusalem, Rome and Varanasi offer parts of the vision of a humanity that touches the Absolute and the divine imperfectly but surely. This first volume looks at some texts that explain the differences between Hindus and Christians, and some of the historical plausibility of a journey together, outlined by the philosophical and devotional work by Raimon Panikkar and the devotional and altruistic life of Mother Teresa of Kolkata.
The Comparative and the Mystical
This work is a study of the comparative and the mystical in a pro-posed contemporary Christian-Hindu dialogue within an ongoing postcolonial Indian setting of the 21st century, an Indian setting that V.S. Naipaul has described in his Indian trilogy as 'a million mutinies'.' Indeed, the Indian understanding of a mutiny has a lot in common with the plausibility of disordering colonial knowledge, and indeed any other knowledge, including Christianity as a colonial tool.2 Knowledge invented nations according to the colonizers and such knowledge was passed on to those who wanted opportunities, employment, and survival within the empires whereby Hinduism did not cease to exist, but it was peripheral to the European and Christian colonial construction of reality.3 Further, the science of knowledge about the Orient allowed for a pro-cess of the construction of Orientalism, and more recently of neo-Orientalism, so that the ideological conception and comparison of the West and the East (Orient) made of the Orient a subject of study of an under-colonial achievement that was only mildly corrected by the post-colonial.' The postcolonial has brought the rich-ness of diverse ideas through the use and assessment of Hindu theology within an ongoing tension between the primacy of the written and the prophetic life of the oral.' However, out of this creative tension, and within a tension so familiar to Hindu theologies, authors such as Anantanand Rambachan have pointed to the richness of the rediscovery of Hindu theology and the enormous possibilities of the end of the Vedas as not only a mystical period but also as a comparison between the unreality and the reality of the world.6 For Rambachan 'if the world can be seen positively as the outcome of the intentional creativity of brahman, expressing and sharing Brahman’s nature, it does not have to be rejected, ne-gated, or argued away'.? Moreover, Hindu theology finds its justification on trying to find out the plausibility and implausibility of the oral teachings and the traditions that arise out of such exercises of creativity and transmission not as one, or two, but many.' Thus, the postcolonial has shifted a paradigm of universalism into a diversity of cross-hybridisation that exists in every constitution and agreement, including India, but that is challenged daily by fundamentalism, essentialism, Euro-centrism, terrorism, national-ism, homophobic discourses, excessive nationalism, self-indulgence and selfishness.9 The 'cogito' and the truth/false propositions have been challenged by the Other who was suppressed and those propositions have lost positioning within a rationality that now knows malleable boundaries and epistemological creativities. Thus, the other has developed indigenous epistemologies that are positioned beyond European logic and beyond the intellectual borders of empire. Such postcolonial dialogue is not an intellectual exercise but the foundational nature of understanding within diversity, the possibilities of the `if and the 'but' within the context of an insider's point of view, and within the context of a heavily marked experience of India, Hinduism, and of other world religions present in India. It is the 'if' of moving together even when tenants of traditions within the big 'T' (dogmatic Christianity) or inadequate practices of dialogue with the small’t’ (contextual Christianity) make it difficult indeed. Thus, dialogue takes place beyond the difference of equals and in human terms can take place more meaningfully within the realm of the absolute power of the metaphysical, of the unthinkable and of the divine (un)realities of a small planetary world in communion with other worlds. Ultimately such dialogue becomes a mirror-like connection with the area of the mystical and the beginning and end as principles of non-existence. What is an essence, or an accident is not a central concern any longer but comparatively one asks how do we understand the richness of the experience of a chair with four legs in Europe and three legs in Africa, for example? Thus, if it becomes plausible and necessary to dialogue on a different proposition such as 'it is from space that all these beings arise, and into space that they are finally absorbed; for space indeed existed before them and in space they ultimately end', ° then we have arrived at this moment in time for a comparative and mystical Hindu-Christian dialogue. Elsewhere, I have dealt with the possibilities of human activity together within the realms of peace, the care of the poor and marginalised, and the common shared vision of a. just society." In this work I deal with the less applied and more epistemological realm of the contradictory and the complexity of such contradiction, even when poverty and social injustice could also be labelled a divine contradiction. **Contents and Sample Pages**
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist