spirituality
To read more about Henri
le Saux or Swami Abishiktananda, read The Priest and the Swami
by Shirley du Boulay in the Bede
Griffiths Sangha Newsletter (September 2001).
A video about Le Saux's life in India is also available.
"the realization of this "all-pervading"
presence of God in my being, as in everything . . . Satori, the illumination
is the real baptism. This new view of oneself and
of the world is not an intellectual knowledge, but an abyssal, cataclysmal transfiguration
of one’s being."
—Swami Abhishiktananda
In
subsequent years many spiritual seekers from the West made their way to the
ashram and Fr Bede Griffiths, especially through
his travels and writings, came to have a profound influence on the development
of spiritual dialogue.Bede Griffith’s thinking developed during his years
in India. His biographer, Shirley Du Boulay, says:
It is a great mistake to see the work of Bede in the context of Christian missionaries, whose avowed intention was to convert Hindus to Christianity; this was never his aim, nor was it the aim of his two predecessors at Shantivanam. Their vision of a deep meeting of Hindus and Christians, at a time when the ecumenical movement among Christians was only just beginning, was far ahead of its time and its leaders are now accepted as spiritual giants.
Photo: Father Bede with the Dalai Lama
When he first came to India, Bede Griffith’s concern seems to have been primarily to develop an Indian pattern of monasticism, which both in its way of life and its spirituality would draw upon Hindu sources. Increasingly, however, the mystical path led him to discover that One Supreme Being is common to all religions, each of which has its own symbols.
In the Introduction to Universal Wisdom - a selection of readings from ‘the sacred Wisdom of the World’ - which Bede edited, he wrote, that Ultimate Reality which has no proper name, since it transcends the mind and cannot be expressed in words, was called Brahman and Atman (the Spirit) in Hinduism, Nirvana and Sunyata (the Void) in Buddhism, Tao (the Way) in China, Being in Greece, and Yahweh (“I am”) in Israel, but all these are but words which point to an inexpressible mystery, in which the ultimate meaning of the universe is to be found, but which no human word or thought can express.
In his New Vision of Reality, Bede Griffiths speaks of rediscovering:
the perennial philosophy, the traditional wisdom, which is found in all religions and especially in the great religions of the world. These religions, however, have each to be renewed, not only in themselves but also in relation to one another, so that a cosmic, universal religion can emerge, in which the essential values of Christian religion will be preserved in living relationship with the other religious traditions of the world.
Marcus Braybrooke, while sympathetic to Bede Griffiths approach, questions whether
It is only a rediscovery of the perennial philosophy that we need? This takes away the sense of newness about the insights we are discovering as we relate the inherited wisdom of the great religions to the amazing advances in so many fields of human intellectual endeavour.
Cosmic
Cross
[Used as a Shantivanam community symbol by Bede Griffiths] The Cosmic
Cross bears the inscription: Saccidananda Namah around the circle, and OM at
the centre of the cross. This means that we try to live our Benedictine Life
in the context of Indian spirituality, that is, in the recognition of the Divine
Presence in the whole cosmos and in the centre of our own being." -Dom
Bede Grififiths. For more see www.bedegriffiths.com/
