Saquib Salim

“In worshipping Christ, I would rather worship Him just as He desires; on the day of His birth, I would rather worship Him by fasting than by feasting — by praying. When these are thought of, these great ones, they manifest themselves in our souls, and they make us like unto them. Our whole nature changes, and we become like them.” - Swami Vivekananda

Indian civilization has always been known for assimilating the different religious faiths and philosophies. Over the centuries, caravans from civilizations arrived to this land and constituted what we call India or Bharat. A great credit for this syncretism goes to the Indian philosophical system better known as Hinduism.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Ramakrishna Mission and Swami Vivekananda, emerged as the most well-known representatives of the Hindu faith for the World to see. Vivekananda took the Hindu faith to the World when he addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.

Vivekananda amazed the Western public with his great knowledge of Christianity. He challenged their religious faith and asked them to understand the real teachings of Jesus Christ with his mission. He believed that Jesus Christ was a great man, an Avatar like Krishna or Buddha.

Swami Akhilananda, in an article published in Indian Social Reformer in 1923, wrote, “It is customary with us - the members of the Ramakrishna Order - to celebrate the Christmas festival. At our monastery, in the village of Belur, beside the Ganges, we Hindu monks and devotees come together year after year to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ. And so it is at many monasteries. .... We fully agree with our Christian brethren when they claim that Jesus was the only-begotten Son of God, who came to bring salvation to the world. But with this, we carry the conviction that he who came as Jesus had come to earth before and that he incarnates again and again whenever the world needs Divine guidance. "It is the same avatar," Sri Ramakrishna has said, "who, having plunged into the ocean of life, rises in one place and is known as Krishna, and in another place and is called the Christ."

For Vivekananda, every geographical region and time produces its own Christ, Avatar, or Prophet, whatever name is given to them. He writes, “ I have only to preach that God comes again and again, and that He came in India as Krishna, Râma, and Buddha, and that He will come again. It can almost be demonstrated that after every 500 years the world sinks, and a tremendous spiritual wave comes, and on the top of the wave is a Christ.”

Jesus Christ, given Vivekananda, was a God who should be worshipped like Buddha or Krishna.

He writes, “Jesus Christ was God — the Personal God became man. He has manifested Himself many times in different forms and these alone are what you can worship. God in His absolute nature is not to be worshipped. Worshipping such a God would be nonsense. We have to worship Jesus Christ, the human manifestation, as God. You cannot worship anything higher than the manifestation of God. The sooner you give up the worship of God separate from Christ, the better for you. Think of the Jehovah you manufacture and of the beautiful Christ. Any time you attempt to make a God beyond Christ, you murder the whole thing. God alone can worship God. It is not given to man, and any attempt to worship Him beyond His ordinary manifestations will be dangerous to mankind. Keep close to Christ if you want salvation; He is higher than any God you can imagine.”

In a now-famous lecture, Christ, The Messenger, delivered in Los Angeles in 1900, Vivekananda argued that Christ came at a time when the World needed a saviour. He equated Buddha with Christ as a manifestation of God and wrote, “Whenever the world goes down, the Lord comes to help it forward; and so He does from time to time and place to place. In another passage He speaks to this effect: Wherever thou findest a great soul of immense power and purity struggling to raise humanity, know that he is born of My splendor, that I am there working through him.”

At a time when the West was the colonial master of almost the whole of Asia and Africa, Vivekananda pointed out to an American audience, “My view of the great Prophet of Nazareth would be from the standpoint of the Orient. Many times you forget, also, that the Nazarene himself was an Oriental of Orientals. With all your attempts to paint him with blue eyes and yellow hair, the Nazarene was still an Oriental. All the similes, the imageries, in which the Bible is written — the scenes, the locations, the attitudes, the groups, the poetry, and symbol, — speak to you of the Orient: of the bright sky, of the heat, of the sun, of the desert, of the thirsty men and animals; of men and women coming with pitchers on their heads to ll them at the wells; of the flocks, of the plough men, of the cultivation that is going on around; of the water-mill and wheel, of the mill-pond, of the millstones. All these are to be seen today in Asia.”

Teaching a Western audience Christianity, Vivekananda pointed out the racial discrimination practiced among the Christians of the West. He said, “In Asia, even today, birth or colour or language never makes a race. That which makes a race is its religion. We are all Christians; we are all Mohammedans; we are all Hindus or all Buddhists. No matter if a Buddhist is a Chinaman, or a man from Persia, they think that they are brothers because they profess the same religion. Religion is the tie, unity of humanity.”

In his different speeches, writings, and interviews, Vivekananda owns up to Jesus as one of the Asian messengers of God, rather than a manifestation of God, and asks the West to learn real Christianity from Asians.    

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Vivekananda doesn’t mince a word declaring, “If I, as an Oriental, have to worship Jesus of Nazareth, there is only one way left to me, that is, to worship him as God and nothing else. Have we no right to worship him in that way, do you mean to say? If we bring him down to our level and simply pay him a little respect as a great man, why should we worship at all? Our scriptures say, “These great children of Light, who manifest the Light themselves, who are Light themselves, they, being worshipped, become, as it were, one with us and we become one with them.”