The Camaldolese Institute
for East-West Dialogue

The Anthropological Spirit in the Writings of Dom Bede Griffiths

by Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam

Fr. Bede Griffiths was an Oxford educated English Benedictine monk, author and spiritual leader, and a prominent, internationally known figure in the arena of interreligious dialogue. Formerly a monk of Prinknash Abbey, England and prior of Farnborough Abbey, Scotland, he had always found himself drawn to Eastern philosophy and religion. He moved to India in 1955, first to Kerala to assist in the foundation of Kurisumala Ashram, and then in 1968 to Saccidananda Ashram (also known as Shantivanam) in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Both of these monastic foundations were attempts to found Benedictine communities following the customs of a Hindu ashrarn and Hindu ways of life. As well, Fr. Bede sought through the study of the sacred writings from many of the world's religions to find the one Source common to all religion. At the beginning of his autobiographical work The Golden String, Griffiths had written of his awakening to what he called the "mystery of existence." This awakening had come to him through the experience of nature, an experience that he felt to be best expressed and interpreted by the words of the Romantic poets that he had always loved so muchWordsworth, Shelley and Keats. 

Wordsworth taught me to find in nature the presence of a power which pervades both the universe and the [human mind]. Shelley had awakened me to the Platonic idea of an eternal world, of which the world we see is a dim reflection. Keats had set before me the values of 'the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination'.

These ideas lay dormant in Griffiths during his years as a monk in England, but were re-awakened specifically after his move to India, where he discovered that this intuition of his favored poets was the common faith of Indian culture, and had been for countless centuries. This "power which pervades the universe and the human mind" had been revealed in the Hindu Vedas centuries before the birth of Christ; the eternal world of Plato that Shelley had suggested to him was something that had been intuited by the seers of the Upanishads; and Keats "truth of the imagination" was the primordial truth that hearkened back to the very roots of human experience.

According to Griffiths, the great insight that the Vedic philosophers had come to was an understanding of the threefold nature of reality, that the world is at once physical, psychological, and spiritual. These three realms of reality are always interdependent and interwoven. In other words, according to Vedic philosophy, every physical reality has a psychological aspect, and both the psychological and physical realms have an underlying reality which is the source of both other realms - spiritual reality. Just as all created reality has a spiritual, psychological, and material dimension, so each human being is spirit, soul, and body. It is this tripartite anthropology that became the core of Griffiths teaching and writings. On the one hand Griffiths saw the need always to distinguish between the spirit and the soul, between the spiritual and the psychic; on the other hand he saw the need to specifically understand and accentuate the importance of the spiritual realm, and so bring the other two realms to their fruition. Once, in a presentation just before his death, he said: "The body, mind, and spirit are the main focus of all my thinking presently; we have to integrate these three levels of reality that exist at every moment."

Fr. Cyprian's paper and presentation synthesize Bede Griffiths understanding of this anthropology as gleaned from his (Griffiths) study of the Vedanta, and make some connections in turn as to how this anthropology can be a bridge in interreligious dialogue, specifically between Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.