Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) was a French Benedictine monk who went to India to establish a true Indian Christian monasticism. Together with Jules Monchanin, he founded the Christian ashram Shantivanam. Abhishiktananda tried to emulate the advaitic (nondual) experience of the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi. Abhishiktananda is inconsistent in how he interprets his experience. This reflects inconsistencies in Ramana's own interpretation of advaita. Ramana was not the traditional advaitin that Abhishiktananda believed him to be. He relied on many non-traditional sources, including yoga, tantra, neo-Hinduism, theosophy and even Christianity. Furthermore, the story of Ramana's enlightenment is not as simple as Abhishiktananda assumed. This book explores Abhishiktananda's Hindu/Christian experience and how it changed his Christian beliefs. Using comparative philosophy, this book also analyzes what nondual experience means for our perception, our thinking, our ethics, our experience of reality, and our relation to God.

Publisher Description

Drawn from the world's religions, this work takes the reader on a pilgrimage to the heart of prayer and reveals why prayer is the essence of the human condition.

With rare exceptions, serious intentional, reflective and sustained interfaith encounter is a novel and recent enterprise. This book looks in detail at one such encounter--the intentional recent Hindu-Christian dialog in India--and asks why and how the practice of dialog came to replace previous attitudes of confrontation and monologue (especially on the part of Christians). Part I sets the encounter in its global context. Part II offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of the actual encounter. Part III draws on aspects of the Christian tradition as it critically examines the ways in which the dialog has been justified in Christological categories. A final chapter discusses the future of the encounter. Unlike many other works in the area of interfaith studies, this work combines both descriptive detail of the actual encounter and critical theological analysis of the strengths and weakness of the dialog model.

In late 20th-century India, Christian-Hindu dialogue was forever transformed following the opening of Shantivanam, the first Christian ashram in the country. Mario I. Aguilar brings together the histories of the five pioneers of Christian-Hindu dialogue and their involvement with the ashram, to explore what they learnt and taught about communion between the two religions, and the wide ranging consequences of their work. The author expertly threads together the lives and friendships between these men, while uncovering the Hindu texts they used and were influenced by, and considers how far some of them became, in their personal practice, Hindu. Ultimately, this book demonstrates the impact of this history on contemporary dialogue between Christians and Hindus, and how both faiths can continue to learn and grow together.

Since his death in 2010, there has been continuing and growing interest in the life, vision, and thought of the late Spanish-Indian mystical theologian Raimon Panikkar. As well as offering both a personal affirmation and critique of Panikkar‘s thought from a Catholic and Protestant perspective, the work compares and contrasts him with a range of Western and Indian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, and outlines the possibilities of learning from Panikkar in an ecumenical context.