Jesus and Krishna
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church
Oct 22, 2006
About 20 years ago I had a friend from India by the name of Suddhir. He was a grad student at Stanford. He was a brilliant guy who was a devout Hindu, and we had many wonderful discussions about the intersection of Christianity and Hinduism. Suddhir was intellectually gifted but he had hardly a practical bone in his body. He was an upper-caste person from India who had never done physical work of any kind.
He was going back to India for a while and asked me if I could store a few boxes of books for him till he returned. My first wife and I lived in a tiny apartment above a garage, which was attached to a house in which an author lived. Duane Elgin is still a friend of mine – he was the author of the famous book Voluntary Simplicity back in the 70’s. Now he lives in Marin, still writing books. I put Suddhir’s boxes into the attic just opposite my apartment, above Duane’s part of the house. I told my wife not to let Suddhir get the boxes out of the attic when he returned – I told her that I’d take care of it, because they were in a delicate spot in the attic, and I didn’t think he’d be able to figure out how to remove them.
But sure enough, he came back when I was working and my ex-wife just told him, go ahead, get the boxes out of the attic.
Meanwhile, downstairs, Duane was watching television. President Reagan had just ordered the Air Force to bomb Libya. Duane was watching the bombs falling on Tripoli when all of a sudden he heard a tremendous boom in the back part of his house. He ran into his office room and there was a Hindu on his desk, covered with dust, bowing down to Duane’s statue of the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, Shiva. “Hare Shiva, hare hare, hare Shiva, hare hare,” Suddhir chanted. Above him was a big hole in the ceiling through which he had fallen from the attic while trying to extricate his boxes of books!
Well, that is one of ways that Christianity and Hinduism have intersected over the centuries!
But there are many more. One is through the sacred words Aum and Amen, which some scholars believe to be linguistically related, and probably are derived from the verb “to be” in Sanskrit and Hebrew. Aum or Om is not just the name of God; it is understood in Hinduism to be a direct manifestation of God. If you chant the Aum, you aren’t just calling to God – you are “doing” God, you are experiencing God directly through the sound. You know, in Christianity we sometimes get pretty chatty with God. Long-winded prayers that are like conversations with somebody you can’t see. Then you end the prayer with the word Amen, as if it were a period. The Hindus remind us that the word Amen isn’t just the last word, it’s THE word – it’s God’s essence: Being itself. So they sometimes pray by saying nothing more than Aum, over and over again. Not to pray to God, but to be one with God through praying the name Aum.
I have been studying and practicing Christianity for a lifetime and haven’t even come close to reading all its classical literature or hearing all its music or experiencing all its many ways of worship. It’s huge – it’s endless. Notch up that complexity by an order of magnitude and you get Hinduism, a religion that’s at least 5,000 years old and has not one Bible but dozens, not one doctrine but thousands. According to one of its traditions it is a religion that sees God in the form of 333,000,000 gods and goddesses. That is to say, Hinduism has no idea of its own boundaries – it can’t keep track of itself, so how can anyone fully fathom it?
One of the most well-known and loved of the god-manifestations of Hinduism is Lord Krishna. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of him: a lithe fellow with blue skin who plays the flute. Other images are of him stealing and eating butter from the butter-pails of giggling milkmaids. He’s a playful, frisky, charming god, quite the ladies’ man. He’s loveable. And that is partly why he is the main focus of what the Hindus call bhakti yoga for millions of Indians.
We think of yoga as a form of exercise, when in fact the exercise postures are preparation for the real yoga, which is spiritual practice and prayer. Originally the Hindus did what we call yoga in order to get ready to meditate and pray. The word “yoga” comes from the same root word as “yoke” – it’s about discipline. One form of spiritual yoga is called bhakti yoga, which is the soulful discipline of devotion.
This is another very important place where Christianity and Hinduism intersect. Many, many Christians and Hindus make bhakti yoga their primary practice. For Christians, this takes the form of adoration of Jesus the Christ. Millions of Christians worship Jesus with fervor, with heartfelt praise and prayer, focusing on his personality as a way of connecting them to God. Millions of Hindus do the same with Krisha or other god-manifestations. They revere the personage of Krishna, gaze at statues or pictures of him, chant his name over and over, give him “puja” or offerings of food and flowers. Bhakti yoga opens up the heart, it stimulates love and awe and warmth which can spill over to one’s self and one’s neighbors.
One thing to remember is that there is virtually no basis for the historical reality of anybody named Krishna. Hindus generally could care less when or if he was ever born as a real person. They are much more comfortable with accepting their religious figures as mythical than are a lot of Christians who want to believe in Jesus’ historical reality. Christians could learn from the bhakti yoga of India, and lighten up about expecting people to take the Bible literally. What matters is the experience of deep bonding and the sometimes ecstatic experience of devotion itself. Falling in love with Jesus or with Krishna can usher the bhakti yogi into the presence of the love that is the source and goal of the universe.
I practice bhakti yoga with Jesus pretty regularly. Often I imagine being near Jesus, imagining what he looks like and sounds like, and I deeply enjoy his presence, and love him. I find myself very inspired and warmed by Jesus as I imagine him to be. I imagine him to be a wiry little Jewish guy, a tough, sinewy fellow with dark skin and a short but heavy beard and longish hair, wearing a long, rough, off-white cloak. I imagine him to have a knowing twinkle in his eye, a grin on his face, a quick wit and a ready laugh. I imagine him to be checking me out, and everybody else out, very carefully with a discerning and compassionate eye. I want to be around him, I want to listen to him, I want him to stick around. Now, I doubt that my conjured image of Jesus is what the historically real Jesus really looked like. But the Jesus of my spiritual imagination is a very powerful and positive presence for me.
We all take flights of the imagination in describing to ourselves what the people nearest and dearest to us look like. I adore my wife and practice bhakti yoga toward her a lot: I revere her. But every so often she reminds me that my image of her is a head trip! She wants me to know her for who she really is, not just who I conjure her to be. So what I’ve learned to do with my wife is to go ahead and revere her as I ideally imagine her to be, which opens my heart toward her, but at the same time try to stay aware that she is not the same as my image of her, so that I can stay open to fresh revelations about who she really is. This is the same challenge for the practice of devotional religion. It can be very helpful for me to personalize God, to have a warm, strong connection to my image of Jesus as my bridge to God. But I fall into a trap if I presume that my image of Jesus is who the historical Jesus really was, or to presume that my image of God comes even close to who God really is. There’s a big difference between devotion and fanaticism, between bhakti and idolatry. Members of the Hare Krishna sect can get carried away with chanting Krishna’s name and singing bhajans to him night and day, to the exclusion of most all else. Bhajans are devotional songs, often mantra-like, which can be very beautiful. Marin has a number of really wonderful bhajan artists who aren’t restricted to just using sitars and tablas to accompany their music – they use guitars and other instruments, too. Overly charismatic Christians can sing syrupy praise songs to Jesus to the point of nausea. Bhakti can get carried away, it can be embarrassing. But a bit of embarrassment can be a good thing! Falling in love with God, offering sincere, heartfelt devotion to a manifestation of God can be a very healthy way to get going on a lifelong relationship with the divine.
In the Hindu epic story called the Ramayana, the monkey god, Hanuman, is depicted as pulling the chest on his skin apart to reveal images of the gods Rama and Sita, to whom he was utterly devoted. Hanuman is the god who is the model in Hinduism of bhakti yoga. It’s amazing to see the intersection between him and those images of Jesus found in Catholic iconography in which he is holding open his chest to reveal his heart. These are images that beckon us to abandon our egos and get out of ourselves and open ourselves to the heart of God.
Sometimes people get confused by Hinduism and think of it as a religion that worships a lot of gods – when really all those many gods are just different manifestations of one divinity. Giving loving devotion to any of them can take you to the divine source of all of them. Just as devotion to your spouse or friend or relative can do the same – love for your fellow people, if you follow it all the way, will take you into the presence of God, who is love itself. Hare Krishna, hare Jesus, hare hare --- Amen and Aum!