Vedanta and Jesus
Frank Eaddy of Auckland opens his review of Vedanta and Jesus, with a quotation.
"A book on The Sermon on the Mount should be no novelty in a Christian community. But when that book is written by a Hindu swami [teacher], a follower of the Vedanta and the "Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna", a book moreover not only interpreting but also extolling the Sermon as though it were a scripture of its own, that certainly is, to say the least, unusual."
In case one thinks that "Vedanta" is out of the comfort zone of Europeans, [it was embraced by] Aldous Huxley, Emerson, Longfellow, William James and Joseph Campbell. Huxley and Campbell contributed to the introduction to The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.
In The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta it talks of the "5 moods" in the "Path of Devotion". In respect of the "Path of Knowledge" it talks of discriminating between the real and the unreal. Service characterises the "Path of Work" and there is a discussion of the "Path of Psychic Control". Different mixtures of these Paths account for our different stages of development and maturity.
Frank Eaddy, Auckland
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Vedanta
The Vedas (pr. "vaydahs") are the oldest Indian scriptures. They were transmitted in oral form for a long period before being committed to writing. One manifestation of the Axial Period (about 800BCE to 200BCE) is the challenges to the Vedas from Buddhism and Jainism. But the Hindu Vedanta tradition is a sympathetic development of the Vedas and the word literally means 'the end of the Vedas’ both in the sense of ending the period of Vedic revelation and of rounding-out its teaching.
Ramakrishna (1836-1886) emphasised personal experience as the touchstone of true religion. He believed that 'all religions are one'.
[From several sources - ed]