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The Golden String, Vol 10 No 1, May 2003, Special 10th Anniversary Issue
MY ENCOUNTERS WITH BEDE GRIFFITHS
by Michael Von Brück
It was in summer 1976 that
I arrived in India. I was on a scholarship of the World Council
of Churches to engage in research on Indian theology and
the Dialogue of Religions at the United Theological College
in Bangalore. Soon after my arrival I discovered that the
theology taught at the college was not much shaped by Indian
cultural patterns but was basically a second hand theology
of Western origin. Therefore, I looked for other options
and met the Indian artist Jyoti Sahi, a disciple of Bede
Griffiths. The name of Fr Bede sounded familiar, for Father
Enomiya-Lassalle, the German Jesuit who had become a Zen
master in Japan, had introduced me not only to Zen earlier
in Germany but had mentioned his visit to Shantivanam as
an extraordinary experience in his life—during the
Zen sesshin he had quoted from Abhishiktananda's
book on Prayer, and he told us that he had met Bede Griffiths
in India who to him was a wonderful companion on the journey
of the discovery of a mystical life. Jyoti explained to me
how to board the Island Express train from Bangalore to Kulitalai,
and off I went the next night.
Just before sunrise the train arrived at
Kulitalai station. I got on a small oxcart and traveled through
a time machine into the past—small huts which allowed
the smoke of the cooking fire to escape through the roof,
women being busy to prepare the early breakfast before dawn,
small circles of men squatting in the bushes to relieve themselves,
smoking on a pipe and discuss God and the world, no cars
yet, a sleepy Indian morning. Some temple bells were ringing
far away indicating that a morning puja was underway. Half
an hour later I arrived at Shantivanam Ashram just before
the morning mass in the chapel. I was guided to the small
hut of Father Bede who looked curiously out at the new arrival
through his window, came out of the door and greeted me with
Anjali mudra and one of the warmest smiles I have ever been
given in my life. Not strangers, but old acquaintances seemed
to meet here. It was an encounter that should deeply alter
my life.
I had intended to stay for a week, but I
remained in Shantivanam for six months, in the company of
Bede and a whole group of Benedictines from all over the
world. These months were filled with study and talks, work
in the library and countless hours of dialogue with Fr Bede.
Every afternoon all the visitors would meet with Bede under
the coconut trees and Fr Bede would give his famous discourses
on the Bhagavad Gita which later were edited as the book River
of Compassion. Late in the evening we would meet for
satsang, the traditional Indian meeting with the guru, where
small talk and deep philosophical reflection would go hand
in hand, no artificiality there, but a deep sense of humanness,
friendship and caring for each other. I remember one trip
we undertook together to Shembaganur, a Jesuit centre in
the mountains near Kodaikanal, to attend an interreligious
conference. On the bus Bede asked me what I had read recently,
and I reported my studies of Goethe's
Faust. I explained the deep philosophical meaning of the
famous German drama as I understood it and as we had discussed
it at university. After some time, Bede replied: "Well,
it sounds interesting, but all this human confusion…I
think I have gone beyond it!" Many years later we would
recall this first encounter with joy.
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Later, when I came back to India in the
1980s to stay and teach at Gurukul Lutheran Theological College,
Madras, with my wife and the three children, we would spend
Christmas and Easter, many different Hindu holidays and much
of our vacation at Shantivanam, the three girls enjoying
the simple life under the palm trees, the idlis for breakfast
and the cleaning of the vessels afterwards, the cows (and
not so much the mosquitoes) and the Sanskrit chanting in
the chapel, but most of all the gentle company with Father
Bede. He was a father, friend, guru, grandfather to the children—all
in one. Once in the early 80s my wife Regina, the three children
and Fr Bede traveled together by train to visit Tibetan monasteries
in Northern Karnataka. During the long journey our daughter
Angelica who was about 8 years old at that time, asked Bede
again and again why he was not married. With painful patience
he explained the one-pointedness in the search for truth
to a child, an explanation that we vividly remember, because
it was so simple and beautiful but at the same time without
any pretension. After we had visited the great Tibetan monastic
universities at Drepung and Gaden, Bede commented that he
was impressed by the learning and the charm of the humourous
lamas, but at the same time he felt too much hierarchy, too
much of organization and scholastic routine—very
similar to the Christian monasteries with all their grandeur.
We would organize conferences together, especially with Tibetan Lamas and Western scientists on the exploration of consciousness and the limits of knowledge. Bede was so curious, always eager to learn something new and to integrate it into his worldview which was never closed but open and in the making. We invited a Tibetan shaman whom I had met during one of my visits to Gaden monastery, and he spent a whole week at Shantivanam, relating his story and experiences. Later I made the transcripts of his talks into one chapter of one of my books on Tibetan Buddhism. Bede asked and wondered and was excited about the unfathomable depths of our conversations. We realized that the gift of shamanic trance was a deep responsibility, full of suffering for the medium, because the many trances made the medium tired, both physically and mentally. At another occasion there were Samdhong Rinpoche and Rupert Sheldrake talking about science and consciousness in the mystical traditions. Samdhong Rinpoche, the head of the Tibetan Buddhist University and today head of the Tibetan Government in Exile, was deeply impressed by the life style in Shantivanam and the genuine radiance of Father Bede. He felt, as he said, very much at home. And later, in January 1985, I was fortunate enough to organize a conference at Gurukul in Madras which was attended by Bede Griffiths and the Dalai Lama (Raimon Panikkar, Mar Gregorios and Swami Chidananda were present as well), and I had the joy to introduce the two great personalities right in my house where cake and tea was served by my wife and the three daughters. Observing the Dalai Lama and Bede Griffiths in conversation was like seeing two hearts and minds in a rhythmic exchange that sparkled with joy, the mystery of ananda in a perfect union of consciousness.
My relationship with Bede did not end when
our family returned to Germany in March 1985. We used to
return to India and to Shantivanam once a year, and I took
the chance to work on a German translation of the Bhagavad
Gita and rework Father Bede’s commentary on this great
text of the Hindu tradition in order to get it published
in German. Bede also visited us in Germany several times,
accompanied by Christudas, his loving and faithful disciple.
In Germany he visited our ecumenical meditation centre near
the French border, called Neumühle,
where he gave talks and impressed many of my students deeply.
He looked around at the centre, where Zen is being taught
next to the Prayer of the Heart, Christian contemplation,
Yoga and Tibetan forms of meditation, where an ecological
awareness is being tested so that we use solar energy and
try to avoid waste, where people from all walks of life and
religions can gather and work for a deeper understanding
of their own life, he looked and exclaimed: "This is really
a model." Well, Neumühle had received a lot of inspiration
from Shantivanam in India, indeed.
During my visits to Shantivanam in the late 1980s and early 1990s we spent three summers, concentrated for one or two weeks each time, on the Gita. We debated the meanings of certain passages and Bede was eager to learn more, to bring out new dimensions of the text and, most of all, apply it to present day questions. For there were so many people from all over the world, from all walks of life, with all kinds of expectations, frustrations, hopes and gifts who met in Shantivanam. Bede was the centre of their quest for a few weeks, before they went on their spiritual journey, and he was so modest, so sensitive, so non-judgmental and all-embracing, that everybody felt touched by a special holiness that Bede himself received everyday and was able to pass on through his shining eyes and his gentle touch of blessing.
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What was so special about Bedeji?("-ji":
an Indian honorific term which expresses respect, gratitude
and love.) Bede was a person of a warm heart and an investigating,
curious intellect at the same time. With typical British
reluctance to show emotions a special tenderness surrounded
him, a gracious gentleness which impressed me every time
we met, always fresh and with amazement, even after more
than 20 years of knowing each other. He was deeply enchanted
with India and had even a romantic perception of the Indian
village though he lived there right in the midst of all the
dirt and noise and even so much of human quarrelling. He
was able to infect others with his love for India and thus
awaken a curiosity and depth in all the travelers who would
gather at Shantivanam at tea time or in the chapel or in
front of his hut for philosophical explanations or private
counseling. His deepest intention was, to reconcile the contradictions
of the intuitive and the rational, of religious experience
and science, of arts and philosophy which had torn apart
Western culture so deeply. This new synthesis should bear
fruit in the Gandhian style of life in the Indian village—at
an international conference held in Shantivanam on "Appropriate
Technology" he would point at the ox cart. And Bede
was very proud when the new installation for biogas-technology
was introduced to the Ashram kitchen. "Small is beautiful"—this
famous statement by the economist E F Schumacher was one
of his often quoted sayings. He felt that the message of
India was one of genuine simplicity of village life on the
one hand and of the existential realization of the oneness
of reality on the other hand. Again and again he tried to
apply these two insights when people came to him with countless
questions about how to live a meaningful life, how to attain
God realization, how to build lasting human relations, how
to meditate, how to get rid of the use of drugs—just
to name a few of the problems Bede was confronted with daily.
What was his attitude towards Christianity? He loved the church as the mystical body of Christ, and he suffered under the rationalistic and ritualistic misunderstanding of the Christian heritage. He felt the truth in the Upanishadic expression of the Oneness of reality and at the same time celebrated mass according to the Catholic ritual. Certainly, indigenous elements such as Sanskrit mantras, readings from the Holy Scriptures of India, Tamil hymns and so on were part of the daily liturgy. But the mystery of the sacrifice of the mass remained the centre of daily life in Shantivanam. Bede was open to non-catholic Christian traditions, but it did not bother him too much to study the differences. For him, the great mystical traditions were the answer to overcome the differences within Christianity and between the different religions of the world. Thus, Islam was of interest to him only with regard to its mystical traditions, especially in the form of the nondualistic philosophy of religion as exposed by Ibn Al Arabi. Bede felt that this understanding of reality came close to Shankara, and even Mahayana Buddhism as interpreted by T R V Murti and D T Suzuki seemed to be not so different from the great sayings of the Upanishads, the Gita and the great Christian mystics. I found this quote from Suzuki and related it to Bede, because it corresponded closely to his experience:
It is not the nature of prajna (mystical intuition) to remain in a state of sunyata (the void) absolutely motionless. It demands of itself that it differentiate itself unlimitedly, and at the same time it desires to remain in itself. This is why sunyata is said to be a reservoir of infinite possibilities and not just a state of mere emptiness. Differentiating itself and yet remaining in itself undifferentiated, and thus to go on eternally in the work of creation…we can say of it that it is creation out of nothing. Sunyata is not to be conceived statically but dynamically, or better, as at once static and dynamic.¹
However, during the last years of his life
he suffered more and more under the impression that all present
day religions are masculine in their character. Bede who
had left his monastery in England precisely for that reason
and had embarked on his adventure to India, wanted to discover
the feminine side, both in the religions and in himself.
This was the main concern of the last months of his life,
especially after his first stroke which had brought him the
gift of a deep spiritual experience of "the mother",
as he would say. This feminine side, he said, needs to be developed
and nurtured. All the dualities of world and God, nature and
mind, heaven and earth, male and female need to be integrated,
and this was, so Bede, the task for our generation and the
next ones to come.
Bede has always remained a Christian, if the usage of this terminology is proper altogether. However, he had heard an echo in the Hindu contemplative experience which he had discovered first in the great mystic texts of Christianity. And he took the Great Mother not only as a symbol, but as a basic mental and even political attitude from which a transpersonal pattern of our understanding of God and world would emerge so that our life should become more harmonious, softer, more graceful and gentle. This was his message.
For nearly twenty years I had the privilege
to know Father Bede, to be with him and read under his guidance
the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, especially
John's gospel. We would meditate together in silence at the
banks of the Kaveri and we celebrated joyfully—but
always with some emotional restraint—the great festivals
of the Christian and Hindu religions. Bede radiated the gentleness
of a sage, and he knew that in reality all is quite different
from even our loftiest mental perceptions and projections,
even in the transpersonal and mystic forms. Now he probably knows.
