Before We Judge Others…

By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali as well as the Bhagavad Gita stress on celibacy and chastity respectively. Without celibacy in particular, within the various branches of Hinduism, including Tantra (as distinct from Buddhist Tantric practices), it is impossible to experience God (ईश्वर). But most of us reading this post are neither celibate nor even chaste. We have not been able to obey Jesus when He asks to pluck out our eyes if they perchance lead us to watch pornography in the privacy of our homes.

Then there are unscrupulous wo/men in my own religious tradition of Hinduism, who exploit others because of man-made caste rules and their own failures to study Hinduism. All these are but natural because according to Hinduism we are living in a time-cycle which is stained with radical evil. Following the Catholic theologian Raimundo Panikkar, I peep into the world of Indian Christianity with its various Rites as he peeped into the world of Hinduism and this is what I see.

I see that the Indian Catholic laity is very angry and rightly so, at the behaviour of some of their vowed-to-celibacy leaders. The corruption extends to fiscal matters too. But the solution cannot be to throw the baby out with the bath-water. The answer is neither knee-jerk finger-pointing. The solution is to go back to the staples of Catholic life, to the commands of the Saints: eschew the seduction of money, shun the powerful drives arising out of the sarx and cultivate hatred of this body made of the elements (bhutas) and to embrace the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

The Second Vatican Council among many things else taught Catholics to study the Bible mediated through their theology. Before St. Benedict of Nursia spoke of Lectio Divina, we have the Hindu and Buddhist stress on swadhyaya. This way is renewal. A way bereft of calmness cultivated through studies is wrong. How many Catholics in India of the three major Rites have bothered to study St. Isaac of Nineveh, Joseph Hazzaya and Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx or the writings of Meister Eckhart written long ago? It is only when the mind is purified by swadhyaya will Bodhicitta arise and with the arising of Bodhicitta will the need to blame the system disappear, and unrighteous anger go. For who amongst us can say that we have done no wrong?

But at the same time, like within Hinduism, Hindus have repeatedly cleansed my religion from inside utilising inputs from the outside; the Church in India too needs to cleanse itself both internally by heeding Frs. Congar and de Lubac and et al., and through external feedback. God, as the Bible and Sri Ramanujacharya tell us, works through human agency propelling history to a revelatory telos. The time for dialogue is at hand.

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Subhasis Chattopadhyay teaches English at Nara Sinha Dutt College ( PG & UG), affiliated to Calcutta University.