New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - John Morrison (best english books to read .TXT) 📗
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The third movement is that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ascetic Mahbub Shāh, left all and followed him as his "familiar" disciple. How this relationship between Hindu and Mahomedanism is quite possible in India, we have already explained on pages 163-4; Mahbub Shāh's strange combination of religious asceticism with the consumption of opium and wine, it takes some years' residence in India to understand. Then Mahbub Shāh died, and the disciple succeeded the master. According to one account, Chet Ram made his bed on the grave in which his master lay; according to another, for three years his sleeping place was the vault within which his master was buried. It was at this time that he had the vision of "Jesus God," already referred to, between the years 1860 and 1865. Like Caedmon, he has described his vision in verse—
"Upon the grave of Master Mahbub ShahSlept Sain Chet Earn.
A man came in a glorious form,
Showing a face of mercy.
Sweet was his speech and simple his face,
Appearing entirely as the image of God.
He called aloud, 'Who sleeps there?
Awake, if thou art sleeping.
Thou art distinctly fortunate,
Thou art needed in the Master's presence.'
'Build a church on this very spot,
Place the Bible therein.'
Then said that luminous form,
Jesus, the image of Mary:
'I shall do justice in earth and heaven,
And reveal the hidden mysteries.'
Astonished there alone I stood,
As if a parrot had flown out of my hands.
Then my soul realised
That Jesus came to give salvation.
I realised that it was Jesus God
Who appeared in a bodily form."[103]
Whence came the Christian seed of Chet Ram's vision? His master Mahbub Shah was a Mahomedan, and Jesus Christ is reckoned one of the Mahomedan prophets. But it is the Christ of Christianity, not of Mahomedanism, that Chet Ram saw in his vision of the glorious form showing the face of mercy, at once the dispenser of justice, the revealer of mysteries, and the giver of salvation. Whatever the source of the vision, Chet Ram saw and believed and began to hold up Jesus Christ before other men's eyes, and Chet Ram himself thus became the guru or religious teacher of what may be called an indigenous Christian Church. A moderate estimate reckons the Chet Ramis at about five thousand souls, the religious force of the sect being represented by the Chet Rami ascetics, who go about making their gospel known and living on alms. Chet Ram himself died in 1894, and at the headquarters of the sect at Buchhoke, near Lahore, his ashes and the bones of his master Mahbub Shah are kept in two coffins, which the faithful visit, particularly on certain Chet Rami holy-days, on which fairs are held. In keeping with the command of the vision, several copies of the New Testament and one complete Bible were also on view when the writer of the article in East and West visited the sanctuary in 1903. The Census Report for 1901 sums the Chet Ramis up by saying that "the sect professes a worship of Christ," and that is our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are four doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,—the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics'] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors—expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. Their theology is a corresponding conglomeration. It includes a Christian trinity of Jesus Son of Mary [the Mahomedan designation of Christ], the Holy Spirit, and God; and a Hindu triad of the world's three potencies, namely, Allah, Parameswar, and Khuda, a jumble of Hindu and Mahomedan names, but representing the Hindu triad of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.
In respect of the phenomenon of the homage shown to Christ over against the hostility shown to His Church, the second, third, and fourth centuries in the history of the Church present a striking parallel to the nineteenth century in India. Steadily in these centuries Christianity was progressing in spite of contempt for its adherents, philosophic repudiation of the doctrines of the superstitio prava, and official persecution unknown in British India at least. Then also, as always, Christ stood out far above His followers, lifted up and drawing all men's eyes. Such in India also, in the nineteenth century, has been the course of Christianity; parts of the record of these centuries read like the record of the religious movements in India in these latter days. Describing the Neo-Platonists of these centuries, historians tell us that at the end of the second century A.D. Ammonius of Alexandria, founder of the sect, "undertook to bring all systems of philosophy and religion into harmony, by which all philosophers and men of all religions, Christianity included, might unite and hold fellowship." There are the four doors of the Chet Rami sanctuary. There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its constitution to be "the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed." Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian.[104] We recall that of Indian Theosophy in general, in 1891, the late Sir Monier Williams declared that it seemed little more than another name for the "Vedanta [or Pantheistic] philosophy." Exactly like the earlier theosophists also, Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist, held that the purified soul could perform physical wonders, by the power of Theurgy. In its constitution the Theosophical Society professed "to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man." Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet. Again Ammonius, we read, "turned the whole history of the pagan gods into allegory." There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day. "He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of God, and an admirable Theurgus." There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ's spell. For two centuries the successors of Ammonius followed in these lines. "Individual Neo-Platonists," Harnack tells us, "employed Christian sayings as oracles, and testified very highly of Christ. Porphyry of Syria, chief of the Neo-Platonists of the third century, wrote a work "against Christians"; but again, according to Harnack, the work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the teaching of Christ. It was directed against the Christians of his day and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written by impostors and ignorant people. There we have the double mind of educated India,—homage to Christ, opposition to His Church. There also we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian. Some, we read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best for them to remain among those who worshipped the gods. There is the present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new Ārya sect declare to be "the Scripture of true knowledge." The practical outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old Græco-Roman religion,—Julian the apostate emperor had many with him. There we have the revival of the worship of Krishna in India, and the apologies for idolatry and caste. The most recent stage of the Theosophical Society in India reveals it as virtually a Hindu revival society. Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and others were represented on the stage dressed in imitation of Christ Himself, and the Emperor Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed the figure of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern Indians who fully recognise Christ alongside of their own avatars. The whole parallel is complete.[105] In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness of His Church, through the force
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