Christianity as Bhakti Marga

Lam the bread ot lite. Your fathers did eat the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This ts the bread which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereot, and not die. I am the living bread which came down out of heaven: tf any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: yea and the bread which I will give ts. my flesh, for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove one with another, saying, How can this man give us his tlesh to eat? Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not lite in yourselves. He that eateth my tlesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal lite; and [ will raise him up at the last day. For my tleshis meat indeed, and my blood zs drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth.in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and TI live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me.. This ts the bread which came down out of heaven: not as the fathers did eat, and died: he that eateth this bread shalt live tor ever. These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. Many therefore of his dis ciples, when they heard this, said, This is a hard saying > who can hear it? But Jesus knowing in Hiniself that His disciples murmured at this, said unto them, Doth this cause you to stumble? What then tf ye should behold the Son of man ascending where he was betore? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh protiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and are

In: the preceding chapters we have studied the different ways in which the man whose Bhakti is awakened by the gracious love of God may seek tu attain oneness with Him. We have seen how necessary it is for him to place at the feet of God all that he has in a spirit of utter love and we have seen further how this love for God realizes itself in the love of man. Then, in considering the significance of the cross asa manifestation of God’s great love for man, we have found that in our conformity with Christ in His sufferings, our union with Him becomes close and intimate. In this chapter we shall proceed to consider another important direction along which we should strive to realize our oneness with the Lord.

The appetites of hunger and thirst are elemental facts in human life. They lie at the bottom of all endeavour and profoundly modify all the activities of men. To quote again, in an abbreviated form, Ramalinga Swami’s essay already referred to’: ‘Even brave warriors who can vanquish their foes in a moment lose their strength when they become hungry. Ascetics who despise the enjoyments of the world and, controlling their senses, are seated in contemplation, leave it and walk towards the next village in search of food. Men who are ready to give up their lives even if they dream of some insult coming to them complain of their hunger to those to whom they should not do so and lose their dignity. Orthodox religious teachers forget their orthodoxy when they become hungry and wait expectantly for food. Learned men, who possess insight and power, lose their judgement in the presence of hunger. Men who are always under the power of lust turn away from lust with bitter minds when attacked by hunger. The proud and the independent give up — their egotism and speak in flattering terms of those who give them food. And spendthrifts lose all their extravagance when they are brought face to face with hunger.’* ‘This passage is quoted here not because it says any thing that is new, but because it expresses certain perfectly familiar facts in forceful language, accumulating numerous instances. People who go on -hunger-strikes display, it is true, a marvellous capacity to endure hunger, but do not their very strikes indicate the importance of the appetite? They want to appeal dramatically and impressively to an instinct, of the presence of which all men are overwhelmingly conscious.

If hunger is so elemental and so profoundly determinative of man’s. activities, there must be some peculiar significance in the food which satisfies this hunger. Whatever importance we attach to the function of hunger in life must reflect itself on food. This idea must have inspired the ancient seer of the: Taittiriya Upanisad who says: ‘Food is Brahman: for from food creatures are born; by food the creatures: thus born live; and into food they enter and perish.’ * This verse which has deeply affected the course of Hindu thought, embodies an important idea, however much we may differ from its particular formulation.

The Fourth Gospel teaches us that Jesus uses this familiar connexion between hunger and food to bring home to our minds the strength of the connexion between Him, and those who iove Him. Jesus speaks. of the life that He gives as water: ‘ Whosoever drinketh the water that I shall give him shall never thirst but: the water that I shall give him shall become in him 2 well of water springing up into eternal life.’* Again > ‘He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’* Here He uses an illustration which has been rendered, immortal by the Old Testament prophets.* But he goes much farther in our present passage: “I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat there-. of, and not die. I am the living bread which came down out of heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: yea and the bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.’ ®

A Taittiriya Upanisad, iii. 2. ' 2 John iv. 14.:

According to the Fourth Gospel the words which

_ form the subject of our study in this chapter were uttered by Jesus the day after He had miraculously fed the five thousand people who had gathered together to hear His teaching. The effect of this manifestation of His power was immediate and rather strange. Attracted by this power, the people wanted to take Him by force and make Him king. Apparently they felt that: with a person of such supernatural gifts at the head of the realm they would not lack anything. Jesus, of course, could not yield to such a materialistic impulse and withdrew from them probably to meditate on the strange ways: of men and to hold converse with God. But on the following day He was in Capernaum.and the multitude came to Him again, still obviously under the influence of the ideas which the miracle had given rise to. John tells us that on this occasion Jesus delivered a long discourse in which the words which we are studying occur. There are four other places in the New Testament where somewhat similar words are reported as having been spoken by Jesus:' All these four accounts describe an incident which took place on the night in which Jesus was betrayed. The account given in Mark, being the earliest and therefore likely to be the most accurate, may be quoted here. ‘And as they were eating, he took bread, and when he had blessed, he brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take ye: this is my body. And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many.’ These words are practically repeated in the other accounts. We should compare these accounts with that in the Fourth Gospel. These four accounts refer in language of varying emphasis to the fact that His blood is shed for many unto remission of sins. In the discourse in the Fourth Gospel there is © no phrase pointing to stich an interpretation. It is significant that in the long discourse given in the Fourth Gospel there is no reference to an idea so important in the much shorter accounts of the Synoptic Gospels and the Pauline Epistle. It is wholly concerned with the teaching that the body and blood of Christ become the food and drink of men. With much repetition and considerable emphasis the body and blood of Christ are taught as.being the source of life. There is another feature of the discourse which calls for thought. Why does John put this teaching not in the context of the last supper but here? Either Jesus. spoke these words at the last supper and John has deliberately taken them from that context and put them here; or He spoke more or less the same words after the feeding of the five thousand and on the occasion of the last supper and John has emphasized. the former occasion. Spoken at the last supper the words would seem to be closely related to the sacrifice which was to take place immediately on Calvary but spoken after the feeding of the five thousand, they would appear naturally enough as an exposition of the mportance of spiritual food in human life. The whole setting of the discourse in the Fourth Gospel as well as the line along which it moves show that John understood the teaching of Jesus in some such sense. What has impressed him most is the fact that Christ is the heavenly food of His bhaktas.

It is quite likely that John was influenced in the formulation of his thought by the rites of the mystery religions which prevailed in his day. He was seeking to express in words the influence of the living Christ, particularly as it was felt in the act of partaking of His table. That there was a definite influx of spiritual power he knew from his own experience and the experience of his fellow-Christians. Somehow the reverent worshipper had partaken of a new spiritual energy in this act of exalted communion. This was, of course, the fundamental fact. In giving expression to this fact it is not at all improbable that at least in some dim way John’s language was affected by that used in the contemporary religions of his day. In the earlier stages of the mystery religions there was a strong belief that it. was possible to partake of the life of a God by eating him inaholy meal. In the Thracian- Dionysiac Mysteries the worshippers were called Saboi or Sabazioi after the name of their god as they partook of his divine life in such a meal. In the Dionysus- Zagreus cult the devotees rushed together in sacred frenzy towards the sacrificial animal and ate it raw in the belief that the god dwelt in the offering. Sucha crude semi-physical idea of communion gave place in,course of time to a more spiritual understanding. - The average communicant in the mystery religions came to believe that in some real sense he obtained a share of the divine life by participating in a common meal consecrated to the god. He was not particularly. concerned to explain how this took place but he knew that in some détfinite way he had become one with the deity as the result of such participation., Familiar as John is likely to have been with this phraseology, he had no difficulty in developing the teaching of Jesus along these lines.

The question forces itself upon us: Is it right to convey something so essentially spiritual as our relation to Christ in terms of the flesh? Is not the flesh the source of sin? ‘The Hindu Bhaktas have often sung of the degrading power of the flesh.

‘The body given us by God is excellent for his service;

Yet it has become a field fruitful in error and confusion,

When a man stiffens and straightens his neck through self conceit, there is no bending it.

Such a man cannot frame his tongue to call himself a servant of God, but he opens wide his throat for wanton speech.

Tuka says, Where shall I go to leave this filth

behind me, and purify myself by ablution?’ * The Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen complains:

Tara, my mother, listen to the story of my woe. Thou who art all supreme, behold this house of mine, how poor a thing it is.

Thus do these live, my mother, with whom I share the house!

Five of them are there with five different wills, and all seek nothing but to please themselves.

Eight million houses have I lived in heretofore, and now am come again to occupy the house of Man.

A fool’s part doI play upon the stage of life, the cup of sorrow brimming over. That is reality for me, my mother!

Heed then, O mother, the word of Ramprasad. My mind is not at rest.

No longer would I live here in this house; those six, the masters of the house, have made an end of me.’?

The idea that the flesh is the source of evil is found in other countries besides India. When John was writing there were many Gnostics who taught that matter was evil and believed that Jesus did not really

2 E. J. Thompson and A. M. Spencer, Bengali Religious Lyrics, Sakta, Calcutta, 1923; p. 58. The five fellow tenants in this poem are the five senses; the eight million houses are the bodies occupied in previous incarnations; and the six masters of the house are the six passions.

have a human body. ‘They supposed that if He had one it would have contaminated Him. But from the vigour with which he bears testimony to having seen the actual Jesus it is clear that John did not agree with them: ‘That which was. from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handied, concerning the Word of life. (And the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us); that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us.’* These emphatic words reflect the strong conviction of the Fourth Evangelist that the Jesus with whom he had come into contact was no phantom but a real human being. In fact it is often thought that one of his chief aims in writing the book was to oppose Docetism. John’s idea was that the Logos had become flesh. As has been pointed out, this conception ran counter to much philosophic thinking in John’s day.” Contemporary thinkers would have been shocked at the way in which John taught that the Logos became flesh. ‘lhis startling conclusion was the result of his familiarity with the life and death of Jesus and of the thoughts which were forced upon his mind by them. The daring assertion of the Evangelist that the Logos became flesh shows how the incarnation of Jesus had illumined for him the whole process of human life and history. The body of man is no. base thing to be despised. If it has been the medium for revealing the Divine, its capacities are indeed of an infinitely high order. The flesh therefore possesses in the mind of the Evangelist a different value from that which it has for others.

Another characteristic idea of John is that life with Christ can begin now.* There is no hard and fast distinction between life and eternal life, Death does not introduce any violent change into the character of our fellowship with Christ. The implication of this teaching is that life here is_not as low as might be imagined. — If we can enter into fellowship with Christ. even now, there must be some inherent capacity of goodness in the flesh; it cannot be altogether evil.

But the heart of the Johannine teaching on the subject is not yet reached. We come to it only when we consider John’s further teaching about life. We are in the habit of speaking and thinking of life in physical as well as in spiritual terms. Life in its physical aspects, we think, is the special subject of study of the biologist. Life in its spiritual aspects, we think, comes more within the range of the religious teacher’s knowledge and work. Life of these two kinds, we consider, are absolutely different. We therefore ask in what sense John uses life. Does he refer to physical or to spiritual life? But John seems to have no such distinction in his mind. Life to him is all one. It is we who are in the habit of marking off physical from spiritual life. But he regards them as cohering in a larger unity.

. It is perhaps not difficult to see the facts from which the Fourth Evangelist drew his conclusion that the physical and the spiritual are not so widely-sundered as they are ordinarily taken to be. To. begin with, the very importance attributed to food in the Gospel shows us that the physical and the spiritual lie close to each other. The same food which creates in one man the brutal strength which leads him to do all kinds of wild deeds gives to another the vitality that spends itself in love and devotion and service. The one man develops with the food which he takes nothing but the muscular power which is capable of mischief and violence. The other transmutes the physical food that he takes into the energy that sustains him in a course of noble living. Again it is the same instinct which under certain circumstances shows itself as lust and under certain other circumstances as love, The passion which draws men and women together may witha man dominated by the physical become nothing else than savage lust, whereas in another it may be refined and spiritualized into the highest kind of love purged of all that is base. Again the strongly embedded instinct of self-preservation which renders many a person narrow and unmindful of others often becomes the devoted love of the mother, who, exercising the instinct of self-preservation in a nobler way, forgets her own self but guards and protects her children. The instinct of self-preservation we consider as belonging to a purely physical category but its refinement as the love of the mother we exalt to the lofty sphere of the spiritual. There is then no chasm between the physical and the spiritual. The. two indeed are not one and yet the transition from the one to the other is not impossible.

That with John and the early Christian thinkers there was no clear and marked distinction, such as we are apt to draw, between the physical and the spiritual, is evident from, among other things, the narratives of the resurrection of Jesus.* The Fourth Evangelist tells more clearly than the Synoptic writers of the wonderful body of Jesus which was at once physical and hyperphysical.” The disciples were together and the doors were shut; yet Jesus came and stood in their midst and showed unto them His hands and His side.. One of the disciples, Thomas, was absent and doubted the report of the other disciples who told him that they had seen the Lord. But he said unto them, ‘ Except I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side I will not believe.’ So eight days later Jesus. appeared again in the same way and said to Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger and put into my side and be. not faithless but believing.’ Apparently the body of Jesus after His resurrection was not subject to the limitations of the ordinary physical body and yet it was within the reach of the senses. In some way the boundary line between the physical and the spiritual became obliterated. This record of the resurrection experience shows us that it would not have been as. hard for the Fourth Evangelist as for the modern man to make the transition in thought from the physical, to the spiritual.

The course which Johannine thought on the subject is likely to have taken may now be suggested. John was no doubt an earnest observer of men who saw clearly the importance which the deeply-rooted instincts of hunger and thirst have for them. It needs no philosopher to understand how firmly these. appetites form the basis of human. life. But to the. keenly spiritual mind of John they were not merely low appetites to be considered as inevitable necessities and to be treated with scant attention but were indication of certain vital needs which held as true of the soul as of the body. In fact he conceived of life springing from these appetites as one. And therefore it was most natural, particularly in view of contemporary religious phraseology, that he should have stated our close connexion with Christ through these means in language more clear and more emphatic than anywhere else in the New Testament. Behold, the living Christ enters into us and forms a part of our inmost self in the same organic way in which food and drink become a part of our being. Through Him all our life is sustained and without Him our energy wanes and droops in a moment. His activities are interwoven with our life-processes and at every moment both of them occur together. Our argument has made it evident that there is no reason why the vital relation which food and drink bear to our life need be despised. On the other hand, it may show unmistakably to every one the vitality and closeness of the connexion between man and God.

Some realization of the close connexion between the physical and the spiritual might have lain behind the utterance of Krsna in the Gita:

‘Becoming fire, I inhabit the bodies of creatures, and mingling with the life-breaths, I digest the four kinds of food.’ +

Would it be wrong to suppose that to the seer who wrote these words the thought of the food that we take sustaining merely our physical existence was difficult and that therefore he taught that the food we take does not result merely in a physical process but that the physical process itself is indwelt and energised by the Divine. The food that we eat is, therefore, assimilated not only by the body but also by the inner spirit.

_ There is a well-known Tamil legend of a saint, often referred to by the Saiva poets. He was called Siru Thondar or ‘the lowly devotee’ and it was his habit never to take any food until he had fed that day a Saiva devotee. One day Siva himself came to his door disguised as a mendicant. On Siru Thondar urging him ‘to take a meal in the house, Siva pointed out that he ate only once in six months and on that occasion only a meal prepared of a human being, five years old, faultless in limb and the only child of his parents. With joy the mother must hold the child and the father must cut it up. ‘Siru Thondar and his wife had a child answering to that description and gladly killed him and prepared ‘a meal from his flesh. The guest sat down and insisted on the father joining him. Then he demanded that the son also should be invited. Siru Thondar went out and called out the name of his son and the child came running as if he were coming back from school as usual. By this time, the strange guest had disappeared leaving the meal uneaten. He appeared in the sky seated on a bull and took Siru-Thondar, his wife, his son, and his son’s nurse to heaven. It is rather strange that the meal remains uneaten and the participation in the flesh and blood, though it be not that of the Lord,” but that of the offering, never takes place. The immense popularity of this legend shows clearly how participation in flesh and blood, strange as it may appear at first sight to the Hindu mind, may yet appeal to it and stir in it a genuine response. Tayumanavar gives a striking exhortation:

‘The experience of Siva is an all pervading flood of infinite joy..

It foams and overflows and is one whole mass of water.

Before our mortal bodies fall off, come, O ye of the world, let us taste it together to gain future bliss.’ °

At this point we must note a striking contrast between Hindu Bhakti Literature and the Fourth Gospel. For the Bhaktas, the God within is infinite joy. He is milk, sugar-cane, nectar, luscious fruit, the finest of delicacies.

2 Tayumanavar, ‘Kakamurayu.’ The first line of this stanza has not been translated.

Bhakti hymns use'these terms again and again to describe the immanent God. Ramalinga-Swami piles idea upon idea to bring out the sweetness of the Lord:

‘One by one squeeze and strain three kinds of fruit. eat

Mix weil with sugar and powdered candy.

Pour fresh clear honey with milk and pure coconut juice.

Then add sweet pulse dod melted fraaia ghee and cook it over a slow fire.

Thou aS finer than such a sweet, Thou tverise Pure.’

On the other hand, the Fourth Evangelist speaks ot the Christ within as water, bread, the staple of ' human food. What the Bhaktas desire is rapture, écstacy-: flights of emotion reserved for the few and that in extraordinary hours. What the Fourth Evangelist emphasizes is the moral strength which all men and women need to exercise every day of their lives. The Bhaktas would sing and dance, using highly aesthetic means for expressing their emotion. According to the Fourth’ Evangelist, the Christian brings forth “ fruits ’"— deeds of love and help. In the Fourth Gospel, mystic. union is union’ with Christ, dominating dur normal moments ‘and providing us with the strength and peace necessary for our daily life. The in dwelling Christ means enhanced energy for ordinary tasks, increased vitality for daily work. Mystic union for the Bhaktas spells sweetness, joy, all those pea and thoughts and activities which belong to the realm of emotion.

We may now resume our study of the passage at the head of this chapter. If the line of thought here suggested is followed to its conclusion, it will be found to mean that a// food is not merely the source of physical life but after being transmuted by various fine processes passes into spiritual energy. But this conclusion is not by any means intended by the Fourth Evangelist. If there is anything which is more clear than any other in the passage which we are studying, itis that there is a fundamental difference between Christ the living bread and all other kinds of bread. The Jews were deeply impressed with the story of the miraculous manna which their fathers ate in the wilderness.1 The manna was no ordinary food according to the ancient accounts. It came down from heaven to supply the special need of the people. But the Gospel makes it quite clear that Christ as the living bread is infinitely superior to even the manna. ‘Your fathers did eat the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread (i.e., Christ) which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.’ It is absolutely important that this distinction should be carefully grasped. Why is it wrong to say that every time we take food Christ enters into our being to energise all the activities which take place in it? This question is answered in the words, ‘ He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my biood abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me.’ We cannot suppose that the Johannine formula about Christ abiding in the Christian and the Christian abiding in Christ occurs in this context also without some special significance. There zs a difference between ordinary food and the food of the soul. This difference is not due merely to the believer’s attitude. It is not because the Christian kneels reverently along with other devout persons in a place and in a manner that are hallowed by every means devised by the piety of man that the bread and wine have a different value from ordinary bread and wine. But it is because Christ himself comes into our souls through the elements and abiding in us endows us with His spiritual energy. Through faith we abide in Him. We turn our thoughts to Him in prayer surrendering all we have into His sacred keeping and He comes unto us and directs us from our inner self. Just as Jesus Himself lives because of the Father, so we also shall live because of Christ. He will take possession of our souls and, using any power of thought and love which we may have, infuse into us His own spirit.

It is important to note that this passage lays stress on the personal element in religious experience. ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me and I in Him.’ Here the experience of the living Christ is stated in most intimate and personal language. The value of the common meai js not due to priestly mediation or sacred fellowship but to Christ abiding in us- Some, at the one extreme, have seen its importance in the consecration’ of -the - elements by the accredited priests of the Church; and some, at the other extréme, in the fellowship of believers who devoutly join in it together. This passage has nothing to say about these but lays all the stress on the Lord’s gift of Himself in direct response to the love and faith of the bhakta. The difference between this and other. meals then is that in some special. measure the Lord comes into our souls through this. It may be asked why. He should. make this a special channel 'of His grace and not every meal that we take. Here we enter the region of mystery in which we can walk but with faltering steps. That in the divine over-ruling of the universe the law of choice obtains everywhere, eliminating, this and favouring that, isan experience with whichvall of us are familiar. -Some men, for instance, are chosen to be teachers and prophets so that they might lead their fellowmen into a fuller understanding of the Divine Will and a greater readiness to carry it out in their lives. It would not be right to ask as to why these only should have the privilege. In the same way Christ imparts Himself to His followers in a special measure while they participate in the act of eating His flesh and drinking His blood.

We have endeavoured to understand in what sense we eat the flesh and drink the blood of our Lord: We have found a probable reason for such strange language in the close connexion of the physical and the spiritual. But in doing this we have gone beyond the purport of this passage. According to the account we have here, the Jews themselves strove one with anothér ‘saying, ‘How can this man give us-his flesh to eat?” ‘In arresting language Jesus had declared that He was ‘the bread which man ought to eat in order to get eternal life. The Jews found it exceedingly hard to understand Him. When, Jesus saw their perplexity He. said unto them, ‘ Verily, verily; I say unto you, Except -ye ‘eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood; ye -have not life in yourselves.’ This is quite-strange. He does not care to answer the question which they have raised, It seems as if he tells them not to trouble ‘themselves about the explanation but to accept the fact. In the history of the Christian Church the question -of the Jews has. been asked again and again by other men. A great.deal of theological controversy has centred around this very question. Christian denominations are separated because they insist on the acceptance of this or that particular explanation of the doctrine..But this passage seems to teach us that it is less important to understand the reason behind the fact than to accept the fact itself. Atter all an explanation is not so important as the fact which it explains.