New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.

New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 205 pages of information about New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century.

Another phase of that same divided mind, acknowledging Christ and resenting Indian discipleship, may be perceived in the willingness to discover Christian ideas in Hindu Scriptures, and Christ-like features in Hindu deities and religious heroes.  To express it from the Indian standpoint,—­they see Christ and Christianity bringing back much of their own “refined and modernised.”  In a sense, as a Bengali Christian gentleman put it, Christ and Christianity have become the accepted standards in religion.[100] Again we quote from the same page of the Hindustan Review:  “A revival of Hinduism has taken place....  It [Christianity] has given us Christ, and given us noble moral and spiritual lessons, which we have discovered anew in our own Scriptures, and thereby satisfied our self-love and made our very own.”  We have mentioned how missionaries used to find the doctrine of the atonement in the name of the Indian God Hari; the argument has now in turn been annexed by Hindus, and employed as an argument in their favour.  Within the last twenty years, there has been a great revival of the honouring of Krishna among the educated classes in Bengal and the United Provinces.  Krishna has set up distinctly as the Indian Christ, or as the Indian figure to be set up over against Christ.  A Krishna story has been disentangled from the gross mythology, and he has become a paragon of virtue,—­the work of a distinguished Bengali novelist.  I mean no sarcasm.  From the sermon of a Hindu preacher in a garden in Calcutta in 1898, I quote:  “The same God came into the world as the Krishna of India and the Krishna of Jerusalem.”  These are his words.  From the catalogue of the Neo-Krishnaite literature in Bengal, given by Mr. J.N.  Farquhar of the Y.M.C.A., Calcutta, it appears that since 1884 thirteen Lives of Krishna or works on Krishna have appeared in Bengal.  Many essays have appeared comparing Krishna with Christ.  There have been likewise many editions of the Bhagabat Gita, or Divine Song, the episode in the Mahabharat, in which Krishna figures as religious teacher.  It may be called the New Testament of the Neo-Krishnaite.  Perhaps the most striking of these Neo-Krishnaite publications is The Imitation of Sri-Krishna, a daily-text book containing extracts from the Bhagabat Gita and the Bhagabat Puran.  The title is, of course, a manifest echo of “The Imitation of Christ,” which is a favourite with religious-minded Hindus.  The Imitation of Buddha, likewise we may observe, has been published.  About “The Imitation of Christ” itself, we quote from a Hindu’s advertisement appended to the life of a new Hindu saint, Ramkrishna Paramhansa.  “The reader of ‘The Imitation of Christ,’” it says, “will find echoed in it hundreds of sayings of our Lord Sri-Krishna in the Bhagabat Gita like the following:  ’Give up all religious work and come to me as thy sole refuge, and I will deliver thee from all manner of sin.’” The notice goes on:  “The book has found its way into the pockets of many orthodox Hindus.”

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New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.