10. Encounter with Sariskrit Pandits

Yet another dialogue between Hinduism and Christianity was held from 1839 to 1845.  It is particularly interesting because it took place through the medium of Sanskrit.  John Muir (1810-1882) published the first draft of his MataparikshA in 1839 and the final in 1840.  It drew three rejoinders from Hindu Pandits.  SomanAtha, whose real name was Subaji Bapu, published his MatataparIkshAsikshA in 1839.  Harachandra TarkapañchAnana came out with his MataparIkshottara in 1840.  NIlakaNTha Goreh reacted somewhat late and published his ShAstratattvavinirNaya at the end of 1844.

John Muir had come to Calcutta in 1828 as a civil servant of the East India Company.  He was, for some time, a student of William Carey at the Fort William College.  From 1840 to 1853, he occupied several senior positions in the administration of North Western Provinces (later on the United Provinces and now Uttar Pradesh).  In 1844-1845 he �supervised the reorganisation� of the Benares Sanskrit College founded by Jonathan Duncan in the late eighteenth century.  By that time he had acquired a working knowledge of Sanskrit and collected what he considered an arsenal against Hinduism.  All through his service career, he was a Christian missionary except in name.

The atmosphere in North Western Provinces (NWP) at that time was particularly favourable for his mission because the majority of Englishmen in the administration were inclined the same way.  �Historians have long recognised,� writes Dr. Young, �that committed Christians took an active role in the British administration in NWP and that many of them engaged, privately or publicly, in religious and social causes... The ideals that drew these administrators (for the most part Hailesbury graduates from the 1820s and 1830s) together were evangelical, expansionist, and reformist.  Under the leadership of James Thomason, Lieutenant Governor of NWP (1843-1853), these Christian administrators coalesced even more tightly.� It may be added that by �social reform� they meant interference with Hindu religious and social traditions.  Whatever Hindu practice did not conform to the Christian standard of correctness was a �social evil� for them.

James Thomason was a follower of Charles Simeon, a Cambridge clergyman and leader of the Clapham Sect, the missionary brigade of the Church of England organised earlier by William Wilberforce.  Simeon exercised great influence on Charles Grant, member of the Board of Directors of the East India Company.  He secured through Grant the appointment of many administrators in India.  They were and remained �his own curates.� Thomason was one of them.  �Administrators,� continues Dr. Young, �who looked to Thomason for leadership in matters of government and religion, linked themselves with missionaries, especially Evangelicals, wherever they served.  Pockets of Evangelicals, consequently, existed in most provincial centres wherever Muir served.�

At the time Muir started using his official prestige and power for spreading Christianity, a section of the missionaries, led by William Carey were experimenting with what came to be known as Church Sanskrit.  Carey was convinced that Hindus believed what they believed because it was written in Sanskrit, a language which they regarded as sacred.  He wanted to train a group of �Christian Pandits� who would probe �these mysterious sacred nothings� and expose them as worthless.  He could not help being deeply impressed by the structure and diction of Sanskrit, but he was distressed that this �golden casket exquisitely wrought� had remained �filled with nothing but pebbles and trash.� He was out to fill it with �riches-beyond all price�, that is, the doctrines of Christianity.  That was what he meant by Church Sanskrit.  He was joined in this enterprise by several other Sanskritists, notably William Hodge and H. H. Wilson.  Helped by Hindu Pandits, they translated Christian terminology and the New Testament into Sanskrit and wrote some other Christian tracts in this language.  The enterprise continued till long after Carey was dead.  �Such, indeed, is the exuberance and flexibility of this language and its power of compounding words,� M. Monier-Williams would write in 1861, �that when it has been, so to speak, baptised and thoroughly penetrated with the spirit of Christianity, it will probably be found, next to Hebrew and Greek, the most expressive vehicle of Christian truth.�

These learned men believed sincerely that Hindus honoured certain doctrines simply because they were expressed in Sanskrit.  It never occurred to any of them that Hindus honoured those doctrines no less when they were stated in other languages.  Long before Carey and his tribe appeared on the Indian scene, the Alvars, the Nayanars, the Siddhas, the Sants and the Bhaktas had produced a prolific literature in all Indian vernaculars, expounding the same spiritual truths as the earlier spiritual seekers had done in Sanskrit.  All this vernacular literature was held by Hindus in equal reverence.  The missionary conviction that Hindus will buy the abomination that is Christianity if it is wrapped up in Hindu forms, persists in our own days.  The missionary mind has so far failed to grasp the simple truth that what Hindus find fundamentally objectionable in Christianity is its doctrine.  The objection will not disappear because that doctrine is stated in Sanskrit or dressed in an ochre robe.

Turning back to Muir, he started �urging missionaries to learn Sanskrit in order to �combat� hydra-headed paganism�.� As no other missionary came forward with Christian lore composed in Sanskrit, he himself took the lead by publishing his MataparIkshA in 379 anuSTubha verses in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and his disciple.  It was published by Bishop�s College, Calcutta, in 1839.  Next year it was expanded to 1032 Slokas, quoting many Sanskrit sources.  Muir was out to impress Hindu Pandits with his mastery of Sanskrit literature.  The mastery came easy to him, as to many other Christian scholars and missionaries, because he could employ poor Hindu Pandits to find for him the references he fancied.

Muir said nothing in his MataparIkshA that had not been stated earlier by other missionaries.  He laid down three criteria for characterising a true scripture: the founder�s power to work miracles, source in the one True God, and universality, that is, equal validity for every race.  He faced no trouble in �proving� that the Christian scripture alone was true in terms of these criteria, while Hindu Shastras were false.  He asserted that miracles mentioned in Hindu Shastras were �merely ornamental in that religion instead of being at its very centre as in Christianity.� This way of arguing is pompously called Evidential Apologetics in Christian theology.  At one point, however, Muir was deliberately dishonest.  He criticised the cosmography of the Puranas as erroneous.  Surely he must have known what Galileo and Copernicus had done to the cosmography of the Bible and how they had suffered persecution at the hands of the Church. 

SomanAtha

The challenge thrown by Muir was accepted immediately by a Maharashtrian scholar, Subaji Bapu, who published his MataparIkshAsikshA soon after Muir�s shorter treatise became known in 1839.  Subaji published his work under a pseudonym, SomanAtha. He was working in Central India with an English civil servant and Orientalist, Lancelot Wilkinson, as an interpreter of Jyotisha (Hindu astronomy and astrology) and thought it prudent not to use his real name.  Association with an Englishman had earned him some bad name among his own people.  But work with Wilkinson had proved advantageous to him in one way.  He had acquired knowledge of Christianity and come to know that �on rational grounds, Christianity, too was defective in physical sciences.�

MataparIkshAsikshA was a short treatise of 107 verses divided in three chapters.  It was also in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and a disciple.  Subaji started by dismissing the miracles of Jesus as nothing special.  Books belonging to all mArgas mention miracles.  If the miracles of Jesus are true, so also those of the others, and vice versa: �But if some believe that Christ alone was the greatest by virtue of his power, then why was he killed by weak men?� Nor can Jesus be held as the only saviour: �If (Christ) destroyed mankind�s sins by the sacrifice of his own body, then can that not be done... by those who, like him, are virtuous?�

Next, he showed that what Muir regarded as universality was, in fact, uniformity and unsuited to all because human nature varied from race to race: �Since God made men with particular natures, those belonging to a specific race must follow a particular scripture uttered by God.  If only one scripture is agreeable to God, why did he... not make mankind singlenatured?  For this very reason, that he made spatial, temporal and other differences, it would be perfectly certain that differences between scriptures would also he quite pleasing to him.� It is, therefore, the same One God who gave different scriptures to different people: �Worship him, the universal atman, true God who is honoured as Buddha in the Buddhist darshana, Jina in the Jain scripture, known by the name Christ in the Christian religion, as Allah in the Mohammedan religion and by the name Arka, Pramathesha, Shakti, Girisha, Srisha and so forth in the threefold Veda, various Tantras and
Puranas.�

In one respect, however, Subaji found Christianity quite sinful.  The followers of this religion injure and slaughter animals: �The worst sin is injuring bulls, helpers in ploughing, and cows, who regularly give milk.� He weakened his argument by giving economic grounds for protection of animals.  The Hindu doctrine of ahiMsA goes much deeper.  Perhaps he thought that economic justification was better suited to minds for whom life by itself held no sanctity.

Finally, he appealed to the missionaries to stop their campaign against other religions: �You should never revile people who are satisfied with their own religion... Listen you disciples of Christ!  I, solicitous of your own welfare, tell you this truthfully... Diminution of Hari�s religion, anger, cruelty, subversion of authority and dissensions among the populace would result from reviling the religion of others.  Increase of God�s religion, contentment, gentleness, harmony between the ranks would result from praising all religions.  For each person his own religion is best; the same religion would be perilous for another person.�

Harachandra TarkapañchAnana

The MataparIkshottara of Harachandra was published in Calcutta but before Muir brought out the second and bulkier edition of his MataparIkshA.  Harachandra was a poor Bengali Brahmana about whom nothing is known except the authorship of this book.  The book itself was a short treatise of only 137 Sanskrit verses in Bengali script with a two-page Preface in English.  He was, however, prepared to write more if Muir agreed to �bear the cost of printing and remunerated him for his labours.�

Harachandra started by taking note of the missionary epidemic.  He said that there was no escape from the missionaries �either in the market-place or on the roads, with their constant refrain, �convert to our religion and be happy for ever.�� He rebuked rather strongly the Hindu converts: �Only that man... who is deluded, who is desirous of acquiring profits, who has neither deliberated upon his own religion, nor looked at the defects in Christianity, would become a Christian.� They should have known that compared to Christianity Hinduism was a very ancient religion and had prevailed through the ages because of its innate strength: �If there is to be faith in a book, let it be in the Veda, since it has prevailed on earth from the time of creation onward.�

Harachandra was familiar with the debunking of Christianity at the hands of Western scholars: �Since many fearless, intelligent men such as Hume, Tom Paine, the great Voltaire, Palmer and Gibbon, confuted these priests, the priestly classes, answerless, called them infidels.� Pointing to the rise of successive Christian sects, he asked, �How could that religion, the religious customs of which would constantly change, deserve respect from intelligent men endowed with reasoning?� He added sarcastically, �As the world-creator was powerless at the time of creation to establish religious customs, he (taking) the form of Christ established them afterwards: when Christ died, the world-creator (assuming) the form of Pope and others established them.� Being devoid of substance, Christianity has always depended upon force and fraud: �Formerly there was a certain king there, named Constantine.  This deluded king stupidly converted to Christianity and strove to propagate this worthless religion by fraud, distributing wealth, craft and force.  He made citizens everywhere in his realm convert to that religion.  From that time until now, its propagation comes by nothing other than royal decree.  Men don�t convert to it by their own will.�

Harachandra demonstrated what could be done to Jesus if Hindus resorted to missionary methods of polemics.  He knew how historico-critical studies in Europe had reduced Jesus to a pathetic figure.  The story of his virgin birth had been subjected to searching questions.  In the gospel of Luke, the Pharisee contemporaries of Jesus had told him to his face that he was a �bastard�, a �winebibber� and a �glutton� Harachandra had �read the New Testament - between the lines.�

Finally, Harachandra presented the ten tenets of Sanatana Dharma - constancy (dhriti), forgiveness (kshamA), self- control (dama), non-stealing (asteya), purity (Saucha), restraint of senses (indriyanigraha), devout thought (dhI), knowledge (vidyA), truth (satyam) and absence of anger (akrodha).  He invited the Christians to practise these dharmas.  They will be born as Hindus in their next life. What he was saying was that Christians will then make a start on the path of moksha (freedom from the bondage of birth, disease, old age and death).  This was his way of putting Christianity in its proper place in the scale of spiritual evolution.  He was anticipating Mahatma Gandhi who will say, �For me there can be no deliverance from this earthly life except in India... anyone who seeks such deliverance... must go to the sacred soil of India.�

The MataparIkshottara �caused a sensation in Calcutta.� Christians, white and native, were up in arms against Harachandra.  Krishna Mohan Banerjea, a Hindu convert, wrote a tract in Bengali in order to refute Harachandra�s �insinuations� against converts and explain away the differences among various Christian sects.  On the other hand, Harachandra was hailed as �defender of the faith� in awakened Hindu circles.  Christian scholars find it difficult to forgive him even today.  Dr. Young calls him �tactless and pugilistic.� It is a classical case of seeing the mote in the other man�s eye while missing the beam in one�s own.

NIlakaNTha Goreh

The third Hindu who reacted to Muir�s MataparIkshA was NIlakaNTha Goreh, a Maharashtrian Brahamana resident in Varanasi.  He had been �outraged by bazaar preaching in his sacred city� and wanted �to silence the missionaries.� He said he would �compel them either to leave the country or confine themselves to the instruction of Christians.� He had been holding a dialogue with William Smith of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) when he was given a copy of MataparIkshA in April 1844.  It was the second and enlarged edition which Muir had completed in 1840.  Muir had tried to dispute Harachandra�s argument about the antiquity of the Vedas by borrowing H. T. Colebrook�s historico-criticism of the Vedic literature.

Before he wrote his ShAstratattvavinirNaya in reply to Muir, Goreh had sent to Smith a small treatise in Hindi which he had circulated in Varanasi �in order to stem the tide of conversions.� He had raised in it six �Doubts concerning Christianity.�

First, he had wondered that if �none can be saved except those who believed in Christ�, why had God delayed the message for so long and �created many nations and innumerable generations for hell?�

Second, he had asked, �Is it justice that the innocent should suffer for the guilty and the guilty escape?� Only an unjust God could devise this scheme of atonement.  If God is just, �repentance and amendment� are what he should demand.

Third, the miracles ascribed to Jesus are tales �not worthy of credit� by wise men.  One hears such tales everywhere.  Moreover, Christians refuse to believe the �wonderful works, which wise men amongst us have related.� Why should Hindus �believe in yours?�

Fourth, why do Christians ascribe justice and mercy to a God who created �disordely� and �unfortunate� souls though it was in his power to create only good souls because he created them out of nothing?

Fifth, Christianity condemns image-worship as if the worshipper regards the image as the creator of the world.  This is a misconception.  Hindus �set apart one thing in particular, in order, by meditating upon it, to remember God.� This is quite in keeping with the Hindu perception that �God�s essence is in everything.�

Sixth, Christians reject transmigration and believe that there is only one birth.  This is convenient only for those �who after death attain salvation.� But it is very unjust to those who �die in their sins and are never to obtain birth again.� Sending these souls to ever-lasting punishment, �is not only useless, but it would prove God guilty of enmity, cruelty and injustice.�

Goreh�s ShAstratattvavinirNaya, published at the end of 1844, consisted of 786 anuSTubh verses divided into six chapters.  It has survived in one complete and two fragmentary manuscripts.  A critical edition prepared by S. L. Katre was published in 1951 by the Scindia Oriental Institute of Ujjain.

Goreh starts where Muir had started - the miracles of Jesus.  How can people at present know that the powers ascribed to Jesus really existed in him?  Christians claim that those powers were witnessed by contemporary people who were adversaries of Jesus.  They also claim that their scriptures have a divine source and cannot lie.  But these are not rational proofs.  Miracles and contemporary witnesses can be invented once you have decided to claim divine origin for some books. Conversely, when Christians say that those miracles really happened because they are mentioned in divinely inspired books, they are only proving what they have already assumed.  If Jesus was God incarnate and cured blind people in the past, �why are blind people who firmly believe in him, not now also possessed of eyesight?� Has God ceased to be compassionate as before?  Moreover, Christians say that Jesus performed miracles �for the sake of confidence in (his) divinity.� Why has he stopped doing the same today?  �Are not people anxious to have confidence now as well?� The entire argument based on miracles is bogus. Christians are simply saying, �Believe it because we say so.�

The Christian doctrine that God created everything including human souls out of nothing, involves God in serious difficulties.  �If God was going to create people intending only to send them to heaven, he would neither have frivolously made them human beings in the meantime nor have given them a place to sin.� But if he created them so that they may commit sins, he and not human beings are responsible for those sins.  If he sends sinners to hell, he is unjust.  �The one who brings thieves into existence� is himself a thief.  Moreover, what is the sense in bringing into existence human beings who die in childhood or are retarded since their birth?  It is funny that the same God who creates sinners comes out next to give them salvation.  Hindus have a better doctrine.  They explain human nature in terms of deeds done in past births.  Sounder still is Vedanta which says that sin and suffering and salvation are illusions from the viewpoint of Brahma.

The Christian doctrine of ever-lasting punishment for human beings whom God himself created sinful, turns God into a criminal. Why should souls suffer in an eternal hell for no fault of theirs?  According to Hindu perceptions, sinful souls suffer in hell for a limited period.  �Thus, experiencing pleasure and pain in numerous existences, they also gradually attain mukti.� The Christian doctrine of original sin makes no sense at all.  Why should all human beings at all times inherit the sin of Adam and Eve?  Biologically also, the doctrine is absurd.  �The child�s body indeed but not his intellect is derived from his father.� This can be easily verified.  �The son even of a very wicked-minded man is seen to be the crest-jewel of virtuous people.� A child cannot be blamed because he has been begotten by a corrupt father.  �Surely, birth depends on God, not on man.�

Coming to Jesus, it is preposterous to believe that he saved mankind by himself suffering the punishment for the sins of mankind.  It is impossible for anyone to escape the consequences of one�s sins even if someone else comes forward to suffer as a substitute.  It is also unjust to make someone else suffer for one�s own sins.  Moreover, if sins get washed simply by believing in Jesus, �men who delight in sins would commit them at whim.� But if, on the other hand, belief in Jesus has to be accompanied by repentance, belief becomes redundant because it is repentance which serves the purpose.  That is what Hinduism teaches.  Repentance is the real cure for sins.

We see everywhere that persons who sincerely believe in Jesus continue to suffer in this world.  How do we know that the will not continue to suffer in the next world as well? Christianity says that God inflicts suffering in order to test men�s faith.  Why, then, are human beings who die at birth brought into existence?  They are not given a chance to pass the test.  Where do these human beings go? To heaven, or to hell?  In any case, �creating them is purposeless.� Moreover, �There is no equally just punishment for both major and minor sins.�

Christian salvation also is a very poor concept.  It �Is a state of being called heaven where there are celestial pleasures.� There is no place for �inward peace of good people� which comes from �world-renunciation, meditation and equanimity.� Celestial pleasures also arise from sense-objects.

Hankering for such pleasures cannot he extinguished by enjoying them.  On the contrary, the hankering grows.  The Christian heaven is, therefore, a place of perpetual dissatisfaction.  Hinduism says that �merit and demerit are produced because of ego-centric activities.� It is only when such activities cease that the wheel of pleasure and pain stops turning.  The Atman is completely purified by the destruction of Karma and exists in its own essential nature.

Christianity has not spared any thought for animals, birds and God�s other creatures.  If God has created them only to suffer as they do under man�s dispensation, he is very obnoxious.  Human hearts melt on seeing the suffering of animals.  �Does not God�s, too, who is compassionate?� Why has Christianity failed to see that animals and birds and other creatures are so much like human beings in many respects?  They know hunger and thirst, sleep and sex, fear and hope.  Birds build houses and rear families.  What is more, they do not need a scripture to tell them what is good and what is bad for them.  They know it by instinct.  Does not God who created them want them to have the happiness of knowing him?  Do they continue to exist after death?  Christianity has no answers for these questions.  Hinduism, on the other hand, envisages that �Creatures become animals by reason of sins in previous existences� and that �having experienced the fruit of their deeds, they are released� from their animal status.

Compared to Christianity, Hinduism is a very comprehensive philosophy.  Only �those who are dull-witted, their understanding vitiated by argumentation, have no aptitude for truth explained in the Upanishads.� But God is compassionate and solicitous of salvation for everyone.  He has, therefore, provided these dull-witted people with other scriptures suited to their understanding.  �Men have an endless number of aptitudes, high and low, in nature� on account of their �good and bad karman.� They worship Govinda in various ways and come to Vedanta in due course.  �Bhagwan, an ocean of compassion, made various kinds of margas by which everyone may attain salvation.� To each according to his aptitude.  Missionaries insist that there is only one mArga.  They have missed the point from which Hinduism makes its start.

�Images are never worshipped with the mind on either clay or wood - only with the mind on God, who is all-pervasive.� What is wrong with that?  �God is spotless like the sky.� He accepts whatever worship is offered to him, in whatever way.  Those who know the purpose of pilgrimages and image-worship �know that, although these things are said to cause merit, surely this, too, aims at commanding knowledge of God, patience of mind, purification of consciousness, etc.� The sun and the other symbols we worship, indicate God.  The worshipper�s imagination is fixed �squarely on God.�

Muir says that the differences in language render the Vedas defective.  �Now on account of the difference in subject-matter, the language of Mantras, Brahmanas and the Upanishads is somewhat mutually distinct... The language in the Mahabharata is seen to be clearer than the Veda; language of that sort, somewhat different than the Puranas, is also found in the Smritis.� That does not make them contradict each other.  Language is adopted to the theme and also to the level of understanding.  Nor do the variations in language make the Vedas less ancient.

Lastly, the Puranas are not books of geography.  The subject-matter of the Puranas is the glorification of God.  They describe the Cosmos in various ways.  If one is looking for science, one should go to the Siddhantas.  Moreover, it is not for Christians to find fault with the astronomy of the Puranas.  �In your religion there is also a conflict between religion and science.  In science it is acknowledged that the earth moves, but in (your) scripture the sun moves.�

Summing up

�Perhaps the most remarkable feature,� concludes Dr. Young, �of Hindu apologetics within the Matapariksha Context is not so much what it contained but what it lacked.  A most curious absence is Jesus Christ, the figure in the very centre of Christianity.  This lack of interest is especially surprising in view of the awe in which he was held even during the time of the Matapariksha Controversy by Hindus such as Rammohun Roy and Keshab Chandra Sen in Calcutta and the reverential fascination of contemporary Hindus.  To Somanatha, Harachandra and Nilakantha, Jesus was mostly a deus ex machina introduced by Christians to extricate their creator God from the dilemma he had brought upon himself by his ex nihilo creative act.  They were not interested in his beatitudes� neither did they adopt him as an avatara� or identify his name with Krishna.� He is right when he identifies the role which, according to Hinduism, Jesus plays in Christian theology.  Jesus is, in fact, no more than a deus ex machina.  But, like most Christians, he is sadly mistaken when he says that contemporary Hindus had a fascination for the figure of Jesus.  We shall see when we come to contemporary Hindu views of what they think of this myth.

Impact of MataparIkshA Controversy on Muir

Muir revised his MataparIkshA once more between 1852 and 1854 when he returned to Scotland.  Then he gave up writing in Sanskrit and took to publishing Original Sanskrit Texts.  �The materials in these still standard books never betray the author�s original purpose in amassing them: to demonstrate that Christianity is rationally superior to Hinduism.� Sanskrit studies had a beneficial effect on Muir and he no more regarded the language as a �golden casket full of pebbles and trash.� The contents of Sanskrit texts now so fascinated him that he endowed a Chair of Sanskrit Language, Literature, Philosophy and Comparative Philology at the University of Edinburgh in 1862.

Muir also moved away from Evangelism and towards the Broad Church movement which thought that �Christian doctrine was sorely out of alignment with modern science.� He now believed that �the Bible could not be exempted from the rigorous philological and historical analysis to which he had subjected the Vedas.� In 1861, Muir published his Brief Examination of Prevalent Opinions on the Inspiration of the Old and New Testaments.  He found that both had mutual discrepancies besides several other shortcomings.  The introduction to this book was written by H. B. Wilson who said that it �clearly reveals the impact of the Matapariksha Controversy upon Muir�s belief in the Bible.� Muir himself wrote, �We may be assured that as Christianity comes into actual close contact with Orientals of acute intellects�it will be met with a style of controversy which will come upon some among us with surprise.  Many things will be disputed which we have been accustomed to take for granted, and proofs will be demanded, which those who have been brought up in the external evidence school of the last century, may not be prepared to supply.�

Muir continued to believe for some time that Christianity had an immeasurably superior message in the sphere of morality.  But after a few years he gave-up that belief also �admitting that Christian virtues are neither superior to others nor sui genesis.� In 1879, he published Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers in which �didactic passages from Indian literature were juxtaposed with others from Biblical and classical Greek authorities.� He concluded, �These sentiments and observations are the natural expression of the feelings and experiences of Universal humanity; and the higher and nobler portion of them cannot he regarded as peculiarly Christian.�
 

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