"I am a Christian," I said, "but I can no longer say I am not a Hindu or a Buddhist."
It was early December in Tokyo. I had been talking with a genial and most unclerical looking Roman Catholic priest who shared with me a lively interest in Eastern spirituality. The words came out unexpectedly, as they occasionally do when some hidden area of the mind wants to make a self-revelation. What I said seemed to cause my friend the priest no surprise. But I confess it startled me.
Twenty-five years as a monastic member of an important modern Indian religious order had led me to expect to end my days a Hindu. Then in 1963 some inner necessity cut me loose from my Eastern moorings and piloted me back to the Christian sphere of influence. In becoming a Roman Catholic, however, I was not led to forget or deny the profundities of my earlier faith. After the first flush of convert zeal subsided, I realized there was a deeper kinship between Hinduism and the teachings of Jesus Christ than most Westerners had up to now perceived.
Oddly enough, during this same period, between 1963 and the present, a new interest has arisen-first among Roman Catholics and then among Protestants in hearing what the non-Christian religions are saying.
Early in 1970 I was invited to write the present book on evidences of Christ beyond Christianity. I accepted the suggestion because of my continuing interest in the subject. Perhaps, I began to see, the real meaning of my becoming a Christian after so many years of dedication to another religious ideal lay in something more than a mere turning from an in-sufficient to a sufficient faith. As a result of what happened to me, a meeting of Hindu and Christian beliefs had taken place in my mind that had slowly transformed my religious outlook. It might be my task, now, to share whatever slender insights I had gained in the process allowing others to undergo, as it were, the confrontation I myself had undergone.
For the past half-dozen years or so I have pondered the relationship between Christian and Hindu beliefs. In 1966 and in 1969 I published papers on this relationship as I saw it at the time. First, as a good convert, I was concerned with how Hinduism could be fulfilled by accepting Jesus Christ as the sole mediator between God and man. Later I explored the situation more in terms of dialogue, urging Christians to beware of condescension toward other faiths. I even suggested their looking into the possibility that Christ was speaking to men through more than one revelation. What Christians must guard against, I said, was a premature assumption that God intended every-one in the East to become a professing Christian.
During the late summer and fall of 1970, preparatory to writing this book, I travelled in India and the Far East. In this way I renewed my acquaintance with modern Hinduism by making contact with men who knew it through practical experience as well as study, and was thus able to see its truths in clearer perspective. I was also able to become more familiar with Buddhism in several of its forms as they are practiced today.
As my trip progressed and the scope of my task began to dawn on me, I sometimes wondered if I was equipped to fulfil it. I am essentially a poet rather than a scholar let alone a theologian. It was my twenty-five years' experience of modern Hinduism at first hand, I realized, that had prompted the suggestion to write the book. But something my teacher in musical composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, Rosario Scalera, had told me many years before reassured me. In speaking of writing for solo instruments with orchestra, Maestro Scalera said, "You know, it doesn't always hurt if a composer is not too familiar with the instrument he is writing for. Brahms was not a violinist. When he wrote his concerto for violin, people thought certain passages were impossible to play as he intended them. Still, violinists learned to play them, and the art of the violin was advanced."
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