Loading...

Hinduism - Lesson 24

Christian Response Case Studies (Part 1)

Brahmabandhav Upadhyay was an upper jati Brahman teacher who converted to Catholicism. He attempts to explain Christianity by using Advadic motifs. Brahmabandhav is an example of how a Brahman can address the Brahminical community using a Brahminical line of reasoning.

Lesson 24
Watching Now
Christian Response Case Studies (Part 1)

I. Summary of Ramanuja

II. Case study #1: Brahmabandhav Upadhyay

A. Life

B. Three themes

1. Upadhyay's use of natural theology/general revelation

2. Sat Cit Ananda in Upadhyay’s writings

3. Trinitarian hymn to saccidananda

C. Contributions of Brahmabandhav

D. Questions and answers

E. Upadhyay's view of Maya


Lessons
About
Resources
Transcript
  • Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world and one of the oldest. It is about 12% of the world population and about 95% are in India. Hinduism is difficult to define. There is evidence of civilization in the Indus valley as early as 2800 BC. The sacred literature that is the basis for Hinduism was created and developed over hundreds of years. It was originally transmitted orally and was eventually written down.

  • Introduction to fundamental ideas and literature that are basic to the Hindu religion. The first lecture given for this class is not available at this time. This lecture begins on the class outline at II, C.

  • Discussion of the influence that the Vedic tradition has on Hinduism. 

  • Mahavakyas is made up of two words meaning, “great utterances.” The creation stories are a collection of different stories with various themes. The world is created by a divine figure dismembering themself and their body becomes the world. The caste system has a racial element to it based on some of the creation narratives in the RgVeda.

  • The Upanishads are one strand of the Vedas. Brahman refers to the all-pervading reality in the Upanishads, not the Brahmin caste. The question throughout the Upanishads is, “Who or what is Brahman?”

  • Brahman is the ultimate reality of the universe. Our atman is encrusted with karma and stuck on the wheel of Samsara. A Hindu's goal, in the process of being reincarnated through thousands of lifetimes, is to rid themselves of karma so they can achieve moksa, oneness with Brahman.

  • Maya is the ability of the gods to create the world and give it the appearance they choose, thereby concealing the true nature of Brahman. Karma is the principle that what you sow, you alone reap.

  • A Hindu must work off their karma to be released from the wheel of Samsara and achieve moksa when their atman becomes one with Brahman. Yoga was developed as a way to achieve the goals of the Samkhya philosophy. Hindus see God as a material cause of the universe, not an efficient cause.

  • The Mahavakyas are “great sayings” that give you insights into core teachings of Hinduism. The Brehed Aranyaka Upanishad shows that Hindus believe that diversity can come through oneness and not be an “other.”

  • Sankara says that Brahman is unknowable and we can't perceive any of his qualities. The rope-snake metaphor is often used by Hindus to discuss the difference between perception and reality.

  • Hindu writers often use metaphors to illustrate and teach the essentials of the Hindu philosophy. In their writings, they refer to these metaphors in a way that assumes that you know and understand them.

  • The purpose of this lecture is to see the structure of Hinduism at a glance. Hinduism operates and a philosophical level and a popular level. Hinduism attempts to resolve the relationship between knowledge, works and devotion. The four stages of life and the caste system determine much of cultural structure of Hinduism. Hindus worship many Gods.

  • The three major dissent movements that area a challenge Hinduism are Buddhism, Janism and materialism. Hinduism is adept at absorbing other movements. Buddhism claims that there is a teaching that makes it possible for you to reach the state of Nirvana which is liberation from all suffering. The founder of Buddhism is Siddhartha Gautama. The content of his teaching is the four noble truths and the eight-fold path.

  • The key insight of the Upanishads is the identification of atman with Brahman. Buddhists deny both atman and Brahman.

  • The Bhakti marga is branch of Hinduism that emphasizes a spiritual journey undertaken by a devotee that will culminate in a state of union with God or mutual indwelling of the deity and the bhakta.

  • The Hindu gods have identifying characteristics that make them easy to recognize when you see them in temples or other settings. The Trimrti are the three major gods of India which are Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Brahma is not often visually represented, so Vishnu and Shiva are seen the most. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. Vishnu has 10 incarnations or avatars. These are partial incarnations and don’t represent the fullness of Vishnu.

  • The Siva icon always has the presence of the Trishal, which is a sacred weapon of destruction. There is also the nag (cobra), damaru (drum), third eye, Ganges river flowing out of his head. The dancing Siva has a damaru in one hand and a flame of fire in the other that represents creation and destruction of the world. He also has dreadlocks and the trunk of an elephant.  The third eye of siva is what Hindu women have on their forehead. The Siva Lingum is the most dominant icon in north India.

  • The Brahminical branch teaches that works and devotion lead to true knowledge (Upanishadic vision, tat twam asi). Bhaktis say that knowledge and works should lead to devotion.

  • The Ramayana is an epic account of India. It is the story or epic of Rama and Sita, and is the origin of the tradition of Suti. Mahabharata is the epic of India. It’s the longest collection of poems in the world. The Bhagavad-Gita  is the most important part of the Mahabharata. It talks about both the dharma of caste and the dharma of denial and renunciation.

  • Gurus integrate different parts of the marga system. Paramahamsa Ramakrishna declared the unity of all religions. He claimed to have visions of Hindu gods and Jesus Christ and Mohammed and that all religions lead to the same ultimate reality, sat chit ananda. Swami Vivekananda was the most well-known follower of Ramadrishna and brought his message to the western world. He accepts tat twam asi, the great insight of the Upanishads, but thinks that everyone, not just Brahmans can perceive that unity. (The last point of the lecture was cut short due to a technical limitation.)

    You may download the text of Vivekananda's speech by clicking on the Handouts link in the upper left corner.

  • These are nine of the major holidays celebrated in India. Sankara has been called India’s greatest philosopher. Sankara emphasized universals and Ramanuja emphasized the particulars, similar to Plato and Aristotle in Western thought. Sankara has greater status as a philosopher, but Ramanuja has had a great influence on how the masses practice Hinduism.

    The chart Dr. Tennent refers to near the end of the lecture is the “Three Vehicle Structure of Hinduism,” which is labeled Lecture 6 in the complete class outline pdf document on the class page.

  • Brahmabandhav Upadhyay was an upper jati Brahman teacher who converted to Catholicism. He attempts to explain Christianity by using Advadic motifs. Brahmabandhav is an example of how a Brahman can address the Brahminical community using a Brahminical line of reasoning.

  • There are opportunities for preaching the gospel and planting churches, but there are significant challenges. There is a difference between being unreached and being unevangelized. Homogenus unit principle is one factor that makes it difficult for the gospel to spread in India. It’s important to send people to unreached groups and use a strategy that is effective for those groups.

In-depth survey of philosophical and popular Hinduism’s historical and theological themes. Exposure to current strategies being used to bring the gospel to Hindus and how Christian theology is being formulated in the Indian context.

Dr. Tennent occasionally uses pictures of Hindu gods or other visual resources in his lectures. You can download a document with these pictures by clicking on the Hindu Deity Pictures link. 

 

 

Dr. Timothy Tennent
Hinduism
wm645-24
Christian Response Case Studies
Lesson Transcript

 

Okay, we're really press. We put still material last time and I was like, ambitious to get through the whole thing. When you're talking about like the Avatars came down and they were free from the effects of karma. Right. The distinction actually was the fact that whether or not Brahman is free from all effects of karma. So in the Avatar state, the avatar can have the appearance of suffering even which would have the appearance of karmic and crustaceans, but in fact is free. So it's a matter of, again, the whole rope snake appearance versus reality. That's really how they would come down on that. So discussion is really about whether or not Brahman could be involved in the world and yet free from karma. And that is a perennial tension within Hindu thought. Actually, it's a good point. It's not something they actually resolve fatefully because if you take chakras view, then you have to abandon any possibility of interaction with the world. That solves the problem, but then it creates a new problem. How can a person be devoted to God or speak about God or know God or worship God with any certainty if God is completely separate from the world? The other solution is to favor some kind of interaction with the world. But then you raise the problem of how can God be free from karma unless you abandon monism? And so Mudville will eventually try to abandonment monism. But that's not actually actually true to the punishment division. So if you stick to monism, then it creates the problem very profoundly because you have no distinction between the worshiper and the one who is worshiped in the ultimate sense.

 

Other comments or thoughts about Ramana is a question about who is spilling the beans, so to speak. Sacred. It has the power to affect. Definitely. I mean, I think actually it comes down to this distinction here as well, because if you argue that a mantra has inherent power apart from the believers being incorporated in that over many years of study, because the idea was that the mantra was supposed to be based on decades of study of the Vedas and the punish gods and finally be given the mantra. So just to say a mantra would supposedly not be considered valid. In fact, in the Buddhist tradition, the mantras play a very important role as well. So when you come into the chamber of the Master and he is giving you a cone, I mean, the most the most basic one is what is the sound of one hand clapping or what is your face like before your mother was born, Things like that. So you could give the same answer, like a person who will say, told you there what they said, and they got accepted and they weren't whispering it to you. And you gave the same answer. They were slap in the face and send you out. So the whole point was you can't just like parents meals is the answer. You've got to show that you have that insight. So that line of argument would say that just knowing that mantra had no power. But in fact, in practice, we saw that on the banks of the Ganges, that when you go down to the river bank and you want to put your loved one into the river, I have sat there and watched these poor people sit there and try and reciting the mantra, learning a little phrase of Sanskrit.

 

They have no idea what it means. I mean, at least presumably when money is shot at it down, people in Manhattan, at least what it meant are what they were hearing, but they don't even know what it means. They're recite the mantra and they believe that by simply reciting it, it releases the power. So that tension, you're quite right, is there. I don't know that a Christian has tried to exploit that. That's an area you could work into. That's one great thing about this theology. There's just so many opportunities for study. This is not a field that's been like massively hashed through by Christian thinkers. There's a lot of opportunities for study and reflection. Okay, that ties off for a and so then we have that marvelous quote, which we ended in briefly last time. But I think this summarizes not just repeat this for the sake of bringing this back again to a close where Max Miller makes this marvelous inside, it must be admitted that there in India, instead of one Vedanta philosophy, we have to spring from the same root. But it's in this branch in the two very different directions that a Shankara being kept for unflinching prisoners who supported by an unwavering faith humanism do not shrink back from any of its consequences. This is the the real heart of Shankara. He's going to protect the freedom of God at all cost. He's willing to abandon any possibility of us knowing God, worshiping God devoted to God. All of that for the sake of preserving the absolute freedom of God from interaction with the human race. Another Omanis are trying hard to reconcile their monism with the demands of the human heart. The required and always will require a personal god as the last cause of all that is, and an eternal soul that yearns for an approach to our reunion without being so.

 

This you have a personal ascetic emphasis. You have the idea of an eternal soul. This would keep your soul, your atman, separate. Even in the Moksha state, which is not accepted by Shankara and kind of this relational union with God in a way that is a little closer to the beatific vision in Catholicism than it is to Shankar's idea of being swallowed up or absorbed into Brahman. And yet, in both cases, Shankar and the manager are deeply committed as a starting point to monism. So in that sense, is the point you raised last time, there's no fundamental shift from the overall philosophical foundation. The real question is how it's worked out in terms of really a functional theism as opposed to an ontological theism. And that's important distinction in the Hindu context because ontologically there's no debate between Romans and Shankara about the monastic conception. Okay. Yes. One of these quotations, it was made at the end of his Gifford lecture on Vedanta ism at Oxford University. The Gifford lectures, famous lectures given by Marcus Miller around the world. These lectures are given and it was at the end of that. That's how he ended the lecture, actually. It's a very powerful kind of climactic ending. Let's now focus on our case study. And what we're going to do is we're going to look at two figures, one from a bond a little bit higher, a 19th century Bengali, and the second a 19th century 20th century figure named Adolf Asami, who I think illustrate some of the Christian response to all of this. At least the different poles of it all from a bunch of is going to try. To reconcile Christian faith with Shankar, that he's going to go all out and say basically he wants to argue that one cannot really have victory in India unless you have victory at the level of near Brahman after some is, on the other hand, going to focus on the bhakti tradition and seek to show how to contextualize the Christian faith and the bhakti tradition.

 

And really, in some ways, that is illustrative of the whole tension among how Christians have responded. So we're going to begin with a couple of case studies just to give you a little in-depth view. And then we're going to look at a much more extensive categories of how Christians have interacted with Hinduism and trying to preach the gospel in India. And then our final class will be looking at specifically the work that I'm involved in North India. And you can kind of see, for better or for worse, some of our strategies and how we're seeking to reach Hindus for Christ. And we'll hopefully start that next time and then go also into our next next week without the substance of what I'm going to be sharing with you about from a bunch of is taken from my book on him. It's a portion of chapter five. One of the positive things about what were we looking at is that virtually the first couple of chapters of this book highlights things that we are all very well familiar with basic theology of Hinduism, especially Shankara. The problematic part in terms of doing this as a case study is that Brahma Bartov is deeply, deeply influenced by Thomson. He himself is a Roman Catholic. He was born into a very high caste, hijacked the Brahmin caste family. So because of that, he grew up steeped in the whole of medical tradition, the sacred thread. He studied philosophy. He graduated through all of the Vedic schools primarily that taught him virtually everything that we've been looking at in terms of the advantages of Shankara. He also had a grandmother who was deeply influenced by the buck to tradition, and so he grew up like a lot of Indians, even Brahmins very well acquainted with all of the popular religious stories.

 

And that becomes also in his money. He one time he said in his writing, in one of his notes that he wrote that he had read the Ramanujan I mean, the Ramayana something like 25 times, you know, I mean, this guy was deeply interested in the popular literature and epic material, as well as the philosophical material. He became part of a movement known as the Brahma Samaj, which we have not discussed, but this was part of the 19th century revival movement that occurred in India during the British Raj and the Brahma Samaj. You might recognize this is the word for God. The Brahma Samaj means the Society of God and is still active today in India, though it's not as active as it once was. It's founded by a man named Ram Mohan Roy, who is a well-known reformer in 19th century India. And Roy was a very well acquainted, for example, with William Carey. And there was a lot of interest, especially in Bengal, which was the capital of British Empire at that point, to find ways to integrate Western thought with Hindu thought. So there was a number of people who were also studied under Western education who also were well aware of the Indian tradition. So a bunch of became deeply acquainted with Western learning. He was sent to Western schools in Calcutta, British schools in Calcutta. So he became very well acquainted with English and he began to be exposed to English literature. He greatly love Shakespeare, for example. He loves a lot of the English discourse that wasn't part of the normal upbringing of people prior to the British presence in India. So during that time there was an attempt to say, Why don't we cleanse Hinduism of its more, as we said, repulsive elements, some of the crass idolatry and things like the collie, blood thirsty collie and all of that, and try to reconcile Hinduism with Western thought monotheism.

 

So this created a revivalism in terms of Hindu philosophy, which was more separate from the kind of the popular religion of the people. So the result was and by the way, his dates are 1861 to 1907, he became involved in this movement. This was really the heyday of British presence in India after the turn of the 20th century, or actually after 1905. The British presence begins to be questioned in August. 1905. That's when British partition Bengal, which is why West Bengal, which is is in East India. And the reason it's called West Bengal is because in those days, of course, Bangladesh was part of India. And so they separated Bengal into West Bengal and East Bengal east in the Muslim part, which of course, today now is Bangladesh. And West Bengal, the Hindu part. Now, when the British partition Bengal, this was received very poorly by Indians in Bengal, they viewed it as attempt by Indians to divide India. They had no idea what would eventually happen with partition, where they would lose, you know, what's now Pakistan. They would lose Bangladesh. All this before that happened. Once 1905 came over here, Bambaataa, who has spent his entire adult life writing theology, abruptly stops all theological writing in August 1905. And that's the end of it, because the whole of Bengal was an uproar. And from then on the next two years, he focused exclusively on nationalistic writings, and he found in several new journals and everything is based on British nationalism and breaking free from the British this long before Gandhi comes back to India. And that becomes, of course, a much later development with Gandhi. But Gandhi is working among an area that's he's a Gujarat. He's from north west India, but he finds his greatest supporters.

 

And the movement really is something that's fueled largely from Bengal. So that doesn't really concern us. But in his early life, when he was in the Brahma Samaj, he was good friends with another figure who was at that time the leave the of Sharma's name, because Shandra Sen, you do not need to know these figures names, but just to give you a build up to the his conversion concept from the SEN was the head of the Samaj at the time of open air. He's also a very well-known reformer at that time period in India. SEN And when I became very good friends, he was more or less the mentor for, for open higher and the process of their time together. Priya became a Bromo teacher, so he would tell over India, demonstrating how the upon shards were not inconsistent with the sun on the mount. And so through that, he was trying to demonstrate. I think they're actually very well. There's a number of Indians in this primary became Unitarians, that Unitarianism was very strong in India. And so there was a lot of discussion about Christianity and how it relates to Unitarianism Trinitarian ism, all of this. Well, Sen suggested the possibility that the set chit ananda of the upon Assads could be a Trinitarian formulation, and Sen is actually the first one to propose a Trinitarian explanation of set ted on Indo, which we've looked at earlier in the class, was actually very poorly done. It was a kind of mode holistic view of the Trinity, but it was the idea I think was planted in open his mind, but he took time to study Christ life more. He felt like it deserved more study. So he began to take time to to study Christianity.

 

He read the Bible carefully, and at one point his father became very ill and he went to sit by his father's bedside. And an Indian tradition. If your father is sick, it's very important to keep vigil, as it were. So he had weeks where he just sat by his father's bedside and he picked up a copy of this book called Catholic Belief. Now, Catholic belief is not a text that we're familiar with, but everybody in 19th century knew this book. It was the standard theological book of Catholicism. In fact, the one that he had was the 15th edition of this book. It's had many more since then. But when I was in Calcutta, I actually went and picked up a 15th edition. I didn't want one of the new ones. I wanted to see the actual one that he had. And I read through it just to see what was his exposure to Christianity from that perspective. So his first real knowledge of Christian theology came from Catholic writers. It's like a standard compiled by Jesuit scholars. It's not actually a single author of work. I don't know if our library has it. We should, but it may not be present here, but you definitely find it down. In Beattie Catholic Belief. There probably is a single Jesuit editor or something, but it's has contributions from a number of Jesuits anyway. So he begins to be acquainted with this. And this of course leads him to tome. So he begins to read through, especially the Summa theological and the Summa Contra Gentiles, the two major works of Aquinas. So the result is he becomes very, very convinced that Jesus Christ is sinless and he begins to think higher and higher of Christ. And he .1..

 

Mr. Sen. I really believe that Christ is greater than any of the Hindu teachers that we've ever known. Sen had on the cut on his wall a huge picture of Krishna and a podgy head on his office wall, a picture of Christ as a guru. But nevertheless, this was as he was just slowly being oriented toward Christ. Eventually, a Protestant friend of his led him to Christ. He accepted Christ, but he refused to join the church because he associated the British Protestant presence as anti-India. And this was before his nationalistic thing. But nevertheless, he he was already wary of that. So he finally decided that Catholicism really represented the only universal Christianity because it was nonsectarian from his point of view. He had a large tent that encompassed people all over the world, and Protestantism was associated, he thought, with certain European countries. And so he was much more attracted to Catholicism. So eventually he was baptized as a Catholic. Now, this created a huge firestorm because it's very rare, as you might imagine, for a Brahmin to convert to Christianity, especially a Bromo teacher who was traveling all over India promoting this kind of gentler, kinder version of Hinduism. He is essentially put out of the political community and they tell him he can no longer wear the sacred thread and all of this. And he says, Fine. And he becomes an avid follower of Christ. But he begins to revisit all of this and he begins to wonder why he cannot still be a Hindu as fully an Indian as a Christian. So he goes to a long process where he works out ways in which a Vedic thought in Christian thought can be reconciled and be interpreted and accepted as Christian. That's essentially his program.

 

So this book is essentially describing what he does and how he tries to develop that. What I want to do for our purposes is just focus on a few key themes to demonstrate what he does and how he reconciles it with Thomas. And one of the a little disadvantage you may have is that it's hard to understand what he's driving at theologically without a background in Thomas. So this is this would be a lecture that could be given very easily to a Catholic audience that's very familiar with Tom ism. It's not as easy to give in a Protestant group like this, but nevertheless, the few points we need to make, we'll make the first thing he does is he decides that you cannot succeed in India unless you actually penetrate the political community. So he said, We cannot create a popular Christianity that relates to popular Hinduism. So he's going to reject Upper Sami and we'll see later. Instead, he argues for an acceptance of the basic Laguna Sagan vision. So, for example, let me give you a quote from him here. He found a number of journals and one of his journals. He makes the point, he says Brahman, the supreme being per se is ner guna that is, he possesses no external attributes, no necessary correlation with any other being other than his infinite self. He has sat existing by himself. He has checked self-knowledge, knowing himself without any external intervention. He has. Ananda is supremely happy in his self colloquy, but looked at from the standpoint of relation he is. He is this Vara, creator of heaven and earth, possessing attributes relating him to create nature. So what he's going to do is he's going to try to find a way to reconcile then the goodness, again, a distinction with tome ism.

 

That's essentially implying because he's not going to challenge Shankar's basic starting point. This is page 218. So when he says that the supreme being Brahman is near goona, that means he possesses no external attributes, no necessary correlation with any other being than his infinite self. So he's going to be arguing that total mystic distinction between necessary being and contingent being is critical to whole the whole of Tom ism. God is a necessary and necessary being. We are contingent beings. We are dependent on God. God has no dependance upon us. So he says, essentially that's what the goodness of distinction is talking about, is saying God has no external need for anything in his creation. He was free to create, free to redeem. And he develops a lot, the whole Shankar right point that the whole point of near goodness to point out that God is free. He didn't need to create us so romantic. We'll say there's a distinction between looking at God as He is in himself, which we would call the society of God in our theology. With how God chooses to reveal himself. So he would say, in terms of gods, a society, he has no external attributes, no necessary excuse in domestic way, no necessary correlation with any other being other than himself. He's completely self dependent. He exists by himself. He has sat, he has checked self-knowledge, knowing himself about any external intervention. But if he chooses to create, that's a free choice of God. God was not under any compulsion to create. He chose to create the world. He chose to redeem the world that represent a different kind of way of looking at God. So if we say God is creator, he was as different from saying God is because God is is an eternal reality.

 

God as creator is something that God chose to do. He chose to create. He is on in a supremely happy in his self. Colloquy This is the original citation about where he one of his journals called SciFi a weekly looked at from the start of creation relation. He is Sigona He is as far a creator having an earth possessing attributes relating him to the creator nature. So he's not saying that God is not related to creation He's in. That came out of a self chosen act of God that's very tall, mystic in his basic approach. So he accepts the going to disagree the distinction, but he interprets it as consistent with Saint Thomas's famous necessary and contingent distinction. He reconciles this with the terms that you already are well aware of the Sanskrit paramount ethics. Remember, this was the highest level of knowledge of God's been is paramount to that. To him is what Thomas meant by necessary being. The view of a hurricane number was a subcategory of. So that's what we like China and this is that which is truly real little aria like the world, the material existence of the world. All of these things, not allusions like seen as snake, but actually the rope is you have a hierarchy. There actually is a rope crawled up there in your tent that's contingent though that rope is not has no existence apart from God's existence. If God ceases to exist, the rope ceases to exist. If the ropes is to exist, in no way affects or changes or impacts God's existence. So he's just talking about two different kinds of existence the independent existence of God and the contingent existence of the human race. He's making a distinction between what we would call the society of God, his unchanging essence versus the free exercise of his attributes, which does strike at the heart of a lot of our own, I think, sloppy theology when we failed to make careful distinctions between God as He is in Himself and God as He chooses to act in the world to save or redeem.

 

Sometimes we act as if God was under some kind of compulsion to save us, redeem us. And that is unbiblical. So in that sense, I think he's operating essentially on, at least in the broadest terms, Christian grounds. Certainly he's consistent with domestic thought. So this is kind of the bridge that he tries to go across. THOMAS It's a very complex work, but it's also very simple to read. I mean, he's over augmentations very, very precise, but he operates on a very logical progression of thought. And my favorite story about Thomas is that he was so interested in showing the superiority of the Christian worldview at the time that he lived, maybe aware that Aristotle was considered to be taboo. It was not taught in universities in Europe because it was considered to be a major challenge to Christian faith. So people were intimidated by the reemerges in Aristotelian thought, Thomas says. And he's a Dominican. He's not even a not a Jesuit Dominican. He's a there's a beggar beggar class of Catholics, and he is a brilliant scholar. So he kind of combines all of this. And so Thomas says to himself, Why would Christians be intimidated by any world view? Why can't we take what is present in Aristotle and Christianize it? And essentially, Thomas builds the entire Christian formulation on Aristotelian thought to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian worldview. We can criticize that forever, but the point is, later on, relevant. I would say, Well, if Thomas could use Aristotle, why can't we use Shankara? So that's the kind of connections he made. So at one point at the time, one of the big controversies was the Manichean controversy. And because he was a well-known scholar at this point, he was invited to this big banquet and he was at this table and they were serving food and all this and somebody was this.

 

It's an enjoyable time to talk and relax. And suddenly, in the middle of this meal, Thomas throws his fist down the table and shouts out. He was apparently totally buried in his thoughts. I thought of an answer to the Manichean controversy that was like what I. He was totally absorbed in how he would respond to the mannequins. He was so prolific. I mean, he died at maybe 42 years old, Thomas Aquinas and yet is so prolific. I sat down and figured out one time in one of my spare moments how much he had to write per day in order to produce what he produced. At the time that I was writing Mr. Dissertation, I was writing a thousand words per day to produce my dissertation, and so I figured that acquaintance, in order to produce what he produced in his adult career, would have to be in that kind of writing mode his entire life. It's like he was right. He was always writing his dissertation his entire life, as well as, you know, performing math and all the other functions he did. And this may be hagiography, but Catholics say that he was so brilliant that he had several amanuensis that work with him because in those days there's no word processors and all that. So he was dictating all this and apparently it was out of his head directly onto the page. No drafts and all that. And he would. He had so many ideas that he wanted to get across that he would be dictating to one amanuensis, one, you know, argumentation. And while he was writing, he would go to the other amanuensis and dictate another argument. So he was having two people writing at once. Pretty remarkable man. Well, then the other story is the end of his life.

 

Toward the end of his life. He was probably about 40 years old. He goes into the sanctuary to pray by himself. He looks up at the crucified. And of course, in the Catholic tradition, this is the Christ on the cross, the crucifix crisis affixed to the cross. He's meditating, praying, and he has a vision of Christ on the cross. But we're not sure exactly what happened. But he had some kind of remarkable vision of Christ, you know, in the sanctuary. And he stumbles out after this and his people who took care of him and his amanuensis and other helpers saw he was obviously visibly shaken. They said to him, what what happened? And he said, I saw a vision and he said, everything I have written and he's already produced this image theologically. He's already produced some of Contra Gentiles. The major work against the Muslim scholars. All of this has been completed. And he says, everything I've written is but hay and stubble compared to what I've seen. And he refused to write again. He never another word after that amanuensis were sent away. And he said, All I've written is just this straw, just nothing compared to the knowledge of the face of Christ. And then he had a stroke about a year after that, and he never actually even spoke for about a year. And then he died. Remarkable. Remarkable man. So pick up his theological some time and just have a quick read through. It took me about three months to read through it, but, you know, it can be done. So the distinction between what is necessary this is actually a quote from my book, the distinction of what is necessary to the infinite and what is contingent to the infinite is an important and frequently traveled bridge which prior Pariah uses to reconcile invaders with tone ism.

 

Thus, to say that God is not necessarily related to creation does not deny that He is the Creator or that creation is related to him contingently. It's essentially a summary of his overall hermeneutic she explores. Now, the other problem that he has to reconcile is once you accept the paramount of a kind of a contingent hermeneutic he still has to reconcile the problem with the Christianity also proclaims a personal God and invades and does not. So essentially what he argues is that external relationship indeed implies limitation, but not so internal relationship. So what he basically argues is, is that all this discussion of Shankara about us not knowing him is just simply pointing out that God cannot be known unless God reveals himself. He cannot be known through any kind of human revelation or a human attempts to discover revelation earlier in his life. Oprah is very, very excited about general relation, what you can know about God, all of that. I spent a whole chapter dealing with that and that's something that is important. But he gradually begins to back away from that. Instead, he says, what the audience missed is not the point that God cannot be known unless he reveals himself, but that God has knowing within himself the Trinity. The Trinity is the point where he says that the evidence missed and therefore they couldn't understand how God could have internal relationships within himself, the infinite self sufficient being of related within himself. He is not necessitated to enter into relationship with any objective unit external to himself. I know it sounds like this is like the cold, austere Brahman of the Punisher adds, but he goes on to say The subjective self of God sees and contemplates the objective self of God, and it's a single eternal act or his knowledge and love fully satisfied.

 

So he's basically trying to say that within the Trinity there is this great colloquy, this great relational joy and fellowship and knowing and known. And that is something that you must establish first before you can say we know God. We cannot say we know God unless there's first a trinity among whom the members of the Trinity know one another, because that establishes relationship in the society of God, not in the self-revelation of God that we have uncovered or discovered later. God is eternally relational, not just when He creates Adam and Eve. That's an important point. So to go back to the basic such head on and he develops a marvelous and lengthy theological analysis of each of these, which goes on for many, many articles that he publishes over a number of years. To summarize it, he essentially argues that this is how you should interpret set it on in the SAT refers to the society of God. God as He is in himself. He challenges Descartes famous dictum, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Instead, he says, Actually that puts the starting point with the thinking person. But this there can be no thinking person without first the God who is behind that, the God of thought. So he says actually it should be incest. Ergo cogito being is therefore I think because God is because God exists therefore, and only because of that can we think and contemplate God's essence. So he develops set in kind of that again to mystic sense of establishing first God's freedom from us before we discuss how is related to us in any way through redemption. And there are people I've read and certainly heard sermons where people sometimes speak as if Christology was a subset of so ology.

 

And that's not true. Christology is not a subset of materiality. Christology is a set, so Trilogy is a subset. So Christ saving us is the great, wonderful truth of God's incarnation. But after all, there was the wonderful fellowship of the Trinity, the Father and the Son before the decree thought to use the term decree, the decree to create or the decree to redeem the world. He develops Chet as referring to this self-knowledge of God, this inter-relationship. It goes back to the whole discussion in the Eastern Church about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or Father and the Son. He says the son is the and this is actually applied to the son here, but the son is the eternal procession from God's being. Just the way your thought progresses from your being, your consciousness progresses from you're being you're being is not your consciousness. They're separate. And so that's a very famous upon a description in The Punisher is that you now have read you'll know they spend a lot of time talking about what is the nature of the self. And they would say, Is it a person when they dream? Is it their consciousness? What is the nature of the self? And so this idea of consciousness is tied in to a very powerful theme in Hinduism. And finally, Ananda, which he says is the spirit, is the blissful overflow of his essence. The word blessed means that God was free to do it. He didn't have to do it, but his joy, his creativity that was already present. The Trinity overflows and he creates the world out of compassion. He redeems the world not because he saw that we were sinners, but he already was the fulfillment of all and the apex of all compassion.

 

And so the redemption was an overflow of his nature and overflow as being. It wasn't called forth because of our. Sinfulness by any necessity. It was a free act of God to save us and redeem us. That's a very quick overview of a lot of his discussion, and I refrained myself from having you purchase and read this book because I thought you might go crazy. But if you are interested in this area and you want to look at how one theologian in 19th century Bengal takes on Shankara, as a committed Christian, I recommend it. Bedtime reading. But I do want to expose you to one little thing he did on the worship side that I think is quite beautiful. He wrote a hymn to Ananda. I have a handout to give you the helm to this thing. See it for yourself. But this has been called by a number of scholars of India. The greatest Christian hymn ever written by an Indian. And I was in a service down in Bangalore a year and a half ago. I guess it was. I was down there and I was so amazed within the service as a Christian service of Brahmans who had come to faith in Christ. It was like a Pinnacle Fellowship. They had some outsiders there to some Westerners, but it was a worship service in the context they were singing in Sanskrit, a hymn to God. And it was this. They were singing this him to God. I was just so I was deeply moved. So I want to share it with you. So he argues that we can use the language of a Veda ism and even the language of popular Hinduism. This thing is also filled with popular Hinduism to express the Trinity.

 

He believes it is best expressed as an act of worship because, he says the only way to talk about the Trinity ultimately is not in a theological discourse like Thomas, but is an act of worship. So here is some of this is the helm. This is my translation of it. Now, there's different ways that can be translated, but this is a sense of how it goes. I adore the SAT chit and honored of being conscious of intelligence. Bless the highest goal, which is despised by world lanes, which is desired by yogis. Now this. This is the refrain. You always come back to this. So the whole thing is Trinitarian. At the end of every verse you repeat this. This highest goal can actually be also and translate the highest step. Now, if you tell is the highest step and it's definitely an allusion to a very famous Vishnu. I think we discussed the whole thing in a homily who made himself into a little dwarf and asked for three steps. And so this is that whole story. And so he took one step, you know, over the world, in the universe, and he took control of everything. So this idea of the highest out, the highest goal is a very popular theme that he's weaving into this as well. Then you have, again, a very first stanza, a celebration of the Trinity, the Supreme, the ancient, higher than the highest full, indivisible, transcendent and imminent. So he's playing on his near goona. So going he is transcendent and yet is imminent. All that is played in here in the way the language he uses. One having a triple interior relationship celebrating that the Trinity is an interracial relationship wholly unrelated near goona without relations from a point of view ontology self-conscious.

 

He knows himself hard to realize you cannot know him through your own effort and ingenuity in the following three stanzas. And of course you do the refrain after each one we will not break into song, by the way. And then each of the next three stanzas, two, three and four are dedicated to each person of the Trinity. So the first is the father. The father begets her, which of course comes out of the creed, the highest Lord un begotten the rootless principle of the tree of existence. This is another thing we haven't discussed, but the idea of they say that the ottoman is the seed of the seed and all of that. This is that plays on that whole thing about the ottoman, the cause of the universe, the one who created intelligently the preserver of the world. So he is also, you can see the whole. He draws on the tribe. Murti God is the creator, the preserver and the destroyer of the world. He brings out how God is the one who not only creates, but who preserves the world. So those are things that again, are popularly recognized in the Hindu tradition. And yet he is trying to is, as a Christian, the cause, the universe, the creator, the preserver, we would say creator and sustainer of the universe. Stanza three is dedicated to the the second verse, the Trinity, the end create infinite logos or word supremely great the image of the Father, the reflection of the Father, one whose form is intelligence, the giver of the highest freedom. This is the giver of the highest. Moksha is the word used here. The greatest release comes through Jesus, by the way. He has another him, which we want. We'll not look at it in my book.

 

Eye him to the incarnate logos. Equally beautiful him which simply illustrates and worships Christ as the logos and find the Spirit. The one who proceeds from the Union of set and chit the blessed Spirit. Intense Bless the sanctify, the one whose movements are swift. One who speaks the word the life giver. These are all drawn from their own tradition. A lot of this is drawn from popular as well as one. I didn't show on the refrain I should have mentioned in the refrain. He is a very powerful word here. The highest goal was despised by worldliness, which is desired by yogis and devotees. The word he uses here is a very unusual word, but he actually is playing on who your devotion is ultimately given to because a devotee will be devoted to, say, a guru. And the question arose, Well, who is the guru devoted to and the guru devoted to Vishnu or whatever? And so this is a word that says this is the one to which ultimately everyone must be devoted to. This is the only true bhakti focus. Everything else is ultimately nothingness. It's only the true devotion that the guru and the devotee must give. The desire for this God. So he plays a lot of very powerful themes in the Hindu tradition. How successful was he in this program? I think that there are definitely some problems with it. It would take a lot more time than we have to develop it. But I think he also has a lot to offer. I develop about seven major ways. I think his writings have contributed to the whole Hindu Christian interface. My own thinking about this in general is that I don't believe that from Ivanov or anybody else that matter has the key to unlocking the Hindu worldview.

 

I believe that he is representing a particular strand of how a Brahmin, a call Christian, can address the medical community where the particular line of reasoning and I think is very helpful, though limited in that regard. I think he has a very powerful statement to say, I think a secondary way. I shouldn't say it's only for Brahmin political strand. I think he's also given a lot of courage to ordinary Christians in India who can be intimidated by Vedas. I found this in our school in India. I found their students find that despite what they learn about Christianity, they don't know how they can possibly engage or interact or talk to people from the Vedic tradition, because this is us a very, you know, lofty tradition with a lot of long centuries of reflection. So when they read Open Higher, they realize, here's a person who knows all of this and yet is still a fully convinced Christian at the end of his life was more problematic. I will say more about the end of his life. Let me just pause there. Are there questions or reactions? What kind of reaction you have been exposed to this? Any thoughts about from a bath? About This is his Sanskrit name. He wasn't. When you became a Saint Yasin, you take on a name and so from a bond of is his chosen name just the way? Like when you become a pope, you know, you choose a name that tells you about the kind of pope you will be or whatever, in the same way in this innocent tradition. If your name is, you know, Bill Smith and you become a Saint Yasin, you will take on a sacred name. So he chose the name Brahma Bahnhof, because it means, as you can probably see and hear, the word for God is here.

 

It means lover of God. And this is the Sanskrit equivalent of Theophilus in the New Testament. So this is Theophilus from heaven to their equivalent terms. One's Greek, one's Sanskrit. So he chose the name Theophilus, essentially a lover of God for his name. Okay. Questions. Comments. Curious in the 100 and. Bravo to have advocated what he called the setup of Christian mutts, which like Christian seminaries the way that Shankara did, where you would work out all of this theologically to decide where are we willing to go, where we will not willing to go. He also believed and this is one of the points in our was really interested in some of your responses to this, because one of his points was the role of the yat sen to him was indispensable in India. So he believed that if you could raise up a small army of Sunni Muslims who would be wandering mendicant all over India, that they could teach people the Christian way of all this. So I think he would encounter all the same problems that anybody would have in India in terms of carefully teaching and explaining things and all the rest. Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to implement a lot of this. The Catholics, by the way, eventually turned on him and believe that he had gone over the line. So the Catholics, which once really endorsed his journals, he had a journal called Safi, a weekly Sufi, a monthly one called the 20th Century, that he found at the turn of the 20th century. They banned all these journals and they refused to let Catholics read them, which might have been more popular. But anyway, he was under all kinds of problems with the Catholic hierarchy over this very point.

 

So you're quite right. To this day in India, there are raging debates that go on about whether he was just a master forerunner of contextualization or whether he was, you know, a mass of syncretism, in fact. Did you meet went him the New York trip? New York Times. Did you meet Rick Haefner when you were down there? The guy that Kiriakou was kind of going to a little TV over? Well, Rick Haefner is a great believer and Roman Bontemps as the key to solve all of India's problems. I mean, he thinks that open hire is the best that's going to crush Hinduism. So he's written a book. I was asked to give lectures down there. We've interacted quite a bit. I myself am not convinced that he's the best. I think he's one of the fingers. I think he's a part of this overall strategy. But I see Australia as much more complex. And I think this is very helpful to a very, very narrow strand. But it's an important strand of Hindu thought. But I don't view it as a program that can be used as a paradigm for all Hindu interactions. And I think a lot of a lot of Hindus have to spend more time explaining to them advaita ism in order to explain what he means. I mean, what's the purpose of that? And so I don't see any value for a lot of village Hindus, but there's definitely a crowd there and there's many Brahmins who come to faith because of I am. So in that sense, it's been a you know, there have been some positive side to it. Other thoughts? Yes. I don't see anything in here as far as a reaction to what is. To me, part of worship is realization of our own foreignness.

 

I think about how does Moksha and karma tie in to his thought. He, of course, does not accept monism, obviously. So what he terms everything is simply to say that all of this discussion about Monism is actually Shankara is way of trying to establish the absolute freedom of God and the independence of God. He says the problem with Shankara is that he did not realize that the eternal being could be related to us as separate contingent beings. So actually this will come back a little bit later and look at his view of Maya. So in that sense, he breaks from the overall worldview, obviously of Shankara that mean his writings, the recruitment points. He's not trying to Christianize Monism at all. This whole him is actually in the context of people who are worshiping that which is other than them, other than they are holy other, not as a recognition of tot. Tomasi has a lot of discussion. Of course it does want to see how he interprets it, and he basically says that taught primacy cannot. One thing it cannot mean is thou art. That cannot mean thou equals that. And a lot of Hindu philosophers agree with that, actually. So he he taps into many Hindu philosophers as well that do not accept kind of the classic monism that Advait is trying to promote. Yes. One of the criticisms that appears in a book by Robin Boyd called Ending Christian Theology. His one criticism of O'Brien he spends about six pages on the guy's entire writings. But at the end of that six page kind of overview, he says, for him, Thomas looms way too large and the Christian faith is too small. My reaction to that was, But for him, Tom is and was the greatest exposition of Christian faith.

 

This is his only knowledge of Christian teaching and he thought was actually dealt with the ideas philosophically that could actually address invaders. And the Protestants were not at all discussing these issues. So he saw in Tom ism a ray of light that would help him. I'm not a convinced Catholic, obviously. I'm convinced evangelical. I'm not even, like, tempted to become a Catholic. No temptations. If you hear a rumor that Tenet is converted to Catholicism or Eastern orthodoxy, they say it ain't true. Okay, I am a total, absolute thoroughgoing to the bone Protestant. But I've always said, as you know, in this class, there's so much we can learn from Catholicism and it's an orthodoxy. So I think in that sense, maybe I'm not as critical because his starting point communication really is the Hindu tradition in the sense that he's a we have to communicate to them. We can't ask them to come to us, but to start with their language. But we have a desire to be faithful to the tradition. So in that sense, he's trying to find a way to communicate within their worldview, not within our worldview. I don't actually have a problem with that basic approach in the sense that we have to communicate in human language. And the moment you invoke any human language, you have to submit yourself to the language forms, the people to whom you're communicating. So when you ask yourself if you're going to talk to rabbinical Hindus, you can't just download for them our theology. You have to show how their vocabulary is missing, whatever. I mean, he says. For example, Aquinas used Aristotle minus his errors. So he acknowledges that Aristotle is full of errors. He's working with you. Chakra minuses, errors. So he's not to say, Oh, Shankar is wonderful.

 

He's just trying to say, Can we harvest the language? And he back. He says a great quote in here. He says, Christianity will never be victorious in India until we make Hindu philosophy hew wood and draw water for us. That's the essence of the quote. In other words, we got to make it serve us. We can't just ignore it. And I think that's kind of where he's coming from. Yes. Yeah, he cared. Deeply cared. But he saw himself, as, you know, within the Jesuit tradition. So he was he had a lot of Jesuits who were upset. The fact is, his works were banned. But he eventually said, I don't care about that because I'm a Hindu Christian. This is I call him a Hindu Christian. Back to our whole discussion, wanting to be a Hindu, you know that all that thing comes up at this point, 19th century. But he was trying to say what really matters. I'm an Indian, and if the Catholics don't see it yet, they eventually will. And his work, by the way, was carried on by a group of Belgium Jesuits who deeply appreciate his writings. And there was a man named Peter Johanns, a Belgian Jesuit, who spent years developing the ideas thoughts in a lot of the ways that we discussed earlier in terms of concerns and working out theologically, establishing the much, the ashrams. All of that was done. And one of our students, Sean Doyle, graduated three years ago. Sean is doing his doctorate in Edinburgh on these Belgium Jesuits. So there's a lot of people still interested in the way they followed up on it. His sort of Catholic Church was very problematic and he essentially was excommunicated. One of the challenges is that he wanted to be accepted into the medical community and they also had difficulty accepting.

 

The only way you could be accepted back into the community was to go to a repentance service where you repent of your sins that separate you from your caste. And so he performs a ceremony called Try Ashtar, which we've not discussed in this class, but the sermon repentance, where you have to eat Chaldean publicly, and when you eat the cow dung, you confess that you've eaten with foreigners, you converse to foreigners and so forth, and that you want to be brought back in the clean. Well, he does this well. This creates a huge stir because people interpret as he's coming back in the Hinduism. But he was trying to say, no, I want to be a criminal Christian, only a good Brahmin and a good Christian. And that created a lot of his Christian friends broke from him. Well, then later on he begins to advocate things like performing Puja to Durga and things like that as cultural icons where he really goes berserk, A lot of very radical ideas and he reinterprets Krishna. He has all kinds of ways that he can spend a whole section of book discussing his interpretation of Krishna. And it's very, very controversial. And I think in many ways he goes too far in those respects. But again, I think there's a lot we can learn from his concerns because he's still asking what do we do with the India of Indian people when they come to Christ right now? The point is, is that if you're a Christian, you have to deny your indianness and he's really against that. And so he says, the Protestant movement especially has not helped people to become Christians without leaving India culturally. So, in fact, let me give you his last two quotes.

 

It was 1897. He wrote this We have no definite ideas as regards the modus operandi of making Hindu philosophy the handmade of Christianity. This is the point that you raised. The task is difficult and beset with many dangers. He admits that. But we have a conviction and it's growing day by day that the Catholic Church will find it hard to conquer India unless she makes Hindu philosophy hew wood and draw water for her very famous quote of a Podger saying we can't go around Hindu philosophy. I'll go through it. You may disagree with that, but this is certainly one strain of thought. The other thing he says at the very end, this is the last line of the book, largely due to his influence. No longer can the Indian church be characterized today as a pariah, dead in his day as quote. Is that how you characterize Christianity standing in the corner like an exotic, stunted plant with poor foliage showing little or no promise of blossom? Is that we had this plant called Christianity in some foreign soil and we can have a potted plant, Christianity. But at some point we've got to plant that in indigenous soil. So he has this radical idea about what do we have to do to make Christianity indigenous in India. He may have gone over the top. He may have ideas that are should be dismissed. But there's no question he's the first person that has really seriously engaged, for better or worse, with the Hindu tradition, especially at them. He is called by major Christian theologians such as KP Alireza, who teaches in Calcutta and Bishop's College, who and many others who would call and hire the father of Indian Christian theology. So he's widely regarded as the forerunner of a whole body of literature that's now out there.

 

Hundreds of Indian theologians are trying to, some less fatefully than others, interact with Christianity and the Hindu tradition. I would say most people today that are drawing on the Hindu tradition are hopeless liberals that have done great damage to the Christian faith. And the reason that I studied him was because I felt like that Christian evangelicals should reengage in this enterprise. And there's no Protestant has done this. So I had to go to the Catholic. But evangelicals should. With all of our concerns for historic Christianity, we should engage with Hinduism and find a better way to communicate the gospel and the Indian context. And if we reject 70% of his ideas, we need to understand why he is driven by this and his goals, his what? His passion. Because largely today the passion has been by liberal scholars to show that there's no difference between Ayurveda ism and Christianity, and that really Christianity is the same as Hinduism. That was not at all his program. So that's the kind of thing, in fact, in the book that came out recently by a well-known Indian scholar, he draws on open air throughout his book and takes it, put his quotes to make him say things that he would never have said, because I know I know what he would say. I mean, I've seen his work for three years. And so I was so upset by this that people were harvesting him for liberal purposes. When I know that you may not agree with this tome ism, but he's a committed Thomas. I mean, he's definitely a Catholic, he's a Christian in that sense. And he believes the Nicene Creed as much as anybody in this room. So in that sense, he's valuable and we need to keep reminding people what he actually taught.

 

His view of Maya is also the other problematic area, because as we've seen, if my isn't true, it is illusory. Then you cannot have a legitimate engagement with the world. It's illusory. That goes against everything, both Christian and Aristotelian. So he develops Maya along very carefully worked out lines that I think are consistent with, at least in a broader sense, where Christian thought. He basically says that Maya refers to contingency, that we are contingent beings, that creation is contingent, not necessary. We've already discussed that and Maya is our mistakenly attributing independent existence to the universe. So people think that all that is, is what is. All that we see is what is don't recognize that fact that all that we see is actually dependent upon God. And therefore that is a false way of looking at the world. And we define Maya as a false way of looking at the world. And that's exactly what he's exploiting here. And finally, Maya, in the Vedic period, especially, the regulator refers to the power of God to create the world. It's God's power that comes out. So he draws on Vedic ideas to say, is the power of God to give birth, to communicated multiplicity and to sustain finite dependent beings everlasting life. So he basically explores the idea How do we as Christians live for eternity? Is it because we become ontologically eternal? No, he says. We are always created beings, even heaven. The reason we live forever is because we become related to his ontology. Through his power, God chooses to sustain us eternally. It is not that we have a transformation of our being. Ontologically, but we have a eternal relationship with God to which he sustains us, that we're finite, everlasting life. Even in heaven, if God was ceased to exist, we would cease to exist.

 

That whole argument. He basically develops Maya along these lines. So rather than saying the world is illusory, you just know the world is contingent. It has a dependent existence, not an independent existence. That gives you a little idea. I mean, you can go through this whole program, all the Vedic doctrines, but this is two of the most problematic areas the relationship to the absolute and the ratio to the world. Probably two of the biggest theological hurdles that you can see kind of how he seeks to reconcile it for better or for worse. All right. Any final thoughts, comments or questions about trauma on top of it? Higher. Higher means teacher, The teacher who loves God. When I was doing my research on him, I spent quite a bit of time in Calcutta reading all this and studying it. And I went through all of his journals and I was plucking all the articles he wrote and all that. Well, there was an article, articles from China, written by a guy named what would be the Sanskrit? It's Dosha. I can't. I'm drawing a blank on the exact phrase, but it means servant of God. But if there's a cause, it's a name. So there's several articles by this name. And so I think it was on his writings. I kept going on one the very end of I went this whole process, going through thousands of journals. I finally get to the end of the process and I was going through some archival material like notes had written personal notes and blah blah. And at one point I found this letter he had written to some woman in Calcutta, and he said that when he was under a bind for publication to publish his journal and he didn't have enough articles to go to print, he would put another one in that he had written under this name.

 

My heart fell through my feet, so I realized there were other things he had written that I thought was for somebody else. Had to go back through the entire thing and pluck out all the article by this fella is quite amazing experience. Sometime when we have time, I'll tell you more stories about the archival work on this man. But he's a remarkable man.