October 3: Hindu views / Yogananda on Jesus the yogi / Miracles

David Vishanoff

Tuesday, July 21st, 2015

Assignment

Read Yogananda, The Yoga of Jesus, Preface and Part 1 (“Jesus the Christ–Avatar and Yogi”) (pp. vii-xii and 1-40).

• Rather than disputing the canonical Gospels’ portraits of Jesus, Yogananda transposes them into a very different conceptual framework, and this seems to give everything the Gospels say a new meaning.
  • What are some key words or ideas about Jesus from the Gospels that get transposed?
  • Are Yogananda’s reinterpretations too drastic to be plausible? Can you see how they would make sense from the perspective of his background and mental framework?
• Yogananda makes some historical claims about Jesus. How might we evaluate those? What might have motivated them?
• Yogananda also gives his own assessment of the traditional Christian interpretations of Jesus. Let’s assess his assessment: is it historically or morally justifiable?

Then read Gregory Barker & Stephen Gregg, Jesus Beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts, pp. 153-199.

• What basic attitudes and strategies toward Jesus are represented by these authors? Which ones reject, modify, selectively approve, embrace, or even claim Jesus as their own?
• Can you detect how the colonial relationship between the British and Hindus affected the latter’s interpretations of Jesus?
• Why do you suppose Barker did not include Yogananda’s interpretation of Jesus in this anthology?

Then write and post a first draft of your gospel’s account of Jesus’ miracles, with explanatory comments. You could select one or more canonical or extra-canonical miracles to retell; you could invent original miracles; or you could have Jesus not do miracles at all but do something else instead. Please comment as well on the drafts that others post.

Notes from class

We see Yogananda doing three things with his interpretation of Jesus:

• He is showing his fellow Hindus how Jesus can be assimilated into their own framework.
  • Yogananda’s framework of Hindu concepts is unfamiliar to us, and we don’t entirely understand it yet. We’ll study it more next time. Or maybe we’ll find that it’s just not all that coherent.
  • Two clear examples: seven is taken as a reference to the seven “trap doors” in the spine, rather than as a number of completion; and straight is taken as an obvious reference to the spine.
  • He is taken as “just one more avatar,” which gives him a place in Hindu thought.
  • We debated whether this is a tolerant approach that affirms Jesus as a legitimate path, or an exclusivist approach that “steals” Jesus and insists he is only legitimate if he teaches Hinduism.
  • Yogananda even presents himself as on a level with Jesus. This strikes us as rather brash, but maybe it makes sense in a Hindu context to say that lots of holy people are on a level with Jesus.
• He is showing the colonizers that India invented religion, including what is best in Christianity.
  • The claim that Jesus studied in India is given some historical-sounding (but historically useless) evidence.
  • This makes Jesus’ message come from India.
  • This shows the colonizers that they aren’t the most enlightened, at least not in the area of religion, but that they are dependent on India, and even lesser than India since they don’t properly understand their own religion.
• He is critiquing institutionalized Christianity and its interpretations of Jesus.
  • He criticizes ritualism, doctrinalism, and institutionalism. Of course, lots of Christians would critique those things too, so the Christianity he critiques is a bit of a straw man.
  • Although he affirms Jesus, he says Christians have totally missed the point of his teaching.

We then saw the Hindu writers in the anthology doing the same three things, including even identifying themselves with Jesus.

We noted that all three religions we have studied so far have spent a lot of effort claiming Jesus as their own–even the Talmud that was bent on criticizing him! Everyone wants to own Jesus, or own the discourse about him.