Appreciating Christianity
BY: ROCANA DASA
Sep 10, CANADA (SUN) — We've been lately discussing the relevance or position of Christianity as compared to Krsna Consciousness, as presented by the bona fide Sampradaya Acaryas. Anyone who's schooled in our philosophy and has dedicated themselves to the Sampradaya will understand that Krsna Consciousness is the topmost philosophical understanding of God. Consequently, they will look upon Christianity as being a comparatively minor, or philosophically insignificant religion. But at the same time, one has to understand historically what Krsna Consciousness is, as presented by Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
Lord Caitanya, being the Yuga Avatar, came to establish the chanting of the Holy Name and the whole process associated with it. And we can see that Jesus Christ essentially helped to lay the preliminary groundwork for Lord Caitanya by challenging what had been a far more impersonalist conception of God being propagated by the Jewish faith, as opposed to the conception presented in the Bible.
Christ taught that you can have a personal relationship, as he had, and that you can go directly to God through a via media such as himself, the Son of God. In other words, one could be in his sampradaya. By following Christ, you could get prepared to surrender to God and do anything that God wishes, particularly preaching.
So Christ's teachings contained a superior spiritual philosophy compared to the Jewish faith, essentially because it encompassed personalism. Lord Caitanya predicted Krsna Consciousness would be spread throughout the world, and Srila Prabhupada, the nitya-siddha Sampradaya Acarya was sent to accomplish this task. He first journeyed to North America, where Christianity had firmly established this basic principle of religious faith. Krsna Consciousness took hold in part, because a foundation of personalism had been established by Christianity.
We know that Srila Prabhupada gave some credence to Christianity and that he made comments acknowledging Christ was a Vaisnava – essentially, a preacher. He had sacrificed everything, namely having to leave his body in an untimely manner as a result of his preaching activity. Likewise Srila Prabhupada followed the order of his Spiritual Master, and Lord Caitanya, to go west and sacrifice everything in order to preach Krsna Consciousness. And for all of us who preach Krsna Consciousness today, all the different stages of advancement will automatically, gradually, be given facility by the mercy of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
So this is our tradition, and it’s a Christian tradition as well. We know that many of the Christian saints and preachers sacrificed everything, and many accomplished great feats of spiritual heroism and fearlessness in order to have Christianity spreading throughout Europe, then worldwide.
This is the same emphasis and direction as that presented by our Sampradaya Acaryas, and we should take heart from that. Granted, we must challenge the Christian principles and preaching today that are not bona fide, and as many of our Sun contributors have pointed out, the meat-eating aspect of Christianity is particularly troublesome. Srila Prabhupada emphasized this more than anything else when he came in contact with Christian preachers. He immediately went to their Achilles Heel, hung on, and wouldn't move, even though they wanted to talk about lofty philosophical issues. They were anxious to get him off their weak point, which is the fact that they condone, and in some respects even encourage, animal killing for meat eating. Few if any of their spiritual leaders, from the Pope on down, practice non-meat eating, or ban animal slaughter, or advocate being kind to animals in this regard. Never mind all the pictures of Christ surrounded by animals, with everyone smiling and happy, just like Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu when he was traveling through the forest. All the animals had no fear of Him, of course, because He is their original father, and they identified with him as such.
I have no idea of the historic specifics of how the Christian religion devolved into the circumstance we find today, but we can't condone any aspect of it. Still, lessons can be learned, in the sense that if we do appreciate and understand Christ to be a great acarya and something of a precursor to Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, helping to lay the foundation for Lord Caitanya's message, then we'll appreciate and accept the reality that he was against animal slaughter, and primarily didn't eat meat himself. Even some Christians accept this.
How Christianity devolved is something we all have to be cautious of. The process occurs one step at a time. It can begin by compromising to facilitate cultural issues or circumstances, ostensibly "for the preaching". We know many of the Christian traditions, for example, were simply an amalgamation of aspects of the spiritual culture present at the time, which the preachers introduced with a Christian spin, like turning the pagan holiday into Christmas. Today we see the very same thing happening in ISKCON.
In Krsna Consciousness we are now in a period where the Sampradaya Acarya has physically departed quite recently, from a historical perspective, and we still have an opportunity to follow very closely. But if we don't appreciate or recognize Srila Prabhupada as the Sampradaya Acarya, we'll find ourselves wanting to compromise in our own personal life and in a preaching capacity, due to the mind, the senses, or our own lack of spiritual realization. And we've already seen this taking place, both inside Srila Prabhupada's original preaching movement and amongst those who have left it, deciding for whatever reasons to deviate from the Sampradaya Acarya.
One of the principles of the Sampradaya Acarya position is that you try to follow as closely as you possibly can, both individually and in our preaching, the philosophy as it was set down by the Sampradaya Acarya. It can't ever be changed. That's the greatest offense -- to change the philosophy. With the practice there's a certain amount of leeway, but not very much. The same thing with the process of preaching -- there's a certain amount of leeway, as long as it doesn't result in a misconception, or preaching that is contrary to the philosophy preached by the Sampradaya Acaryas.
In this article, I won't get into the different ways in which I think such deviation has taken place in Srila Prabhupada's name, and in his organization, as I've made those points in many of my previous dissertations. Obviously, we have the whole ISKCON and Rtvik initiation and diksa guru issue, neither of which are at all in line with Srila Prabhupada or the sastra, and are a major deviation. But I think an even greater deviation is not accepting Srila Prabhupada as the Sampradaya Acarya. I believe that's the essence of most of the problems in ISKCON – they are not identifying Srila Prabhupada as such, and consequently have come up with all sorts of problems that they cannot, and will not solve, until this fundamental issue is resolved.
