Kontempliatyvus krikščionybės ir hinduizmo susitikimas: Dom Henri Le Saux atvejis

ENIn the article the author explores a case of the contemplative meeting of Christianity and Hinduism reflected by the experience of the French Benedictine monk Dorn Henri Le Saux (Svami Abhishiktänanda). In our times of religous conflicts and narrow fundamentalism fearful of losing its self-identity, a dialogue of religions is not a luxury, but a necessity. But the extreme of an indiscriminate mixing of traditions in a "spiritual supermarket" has to be avoided. Dialogue only becomes worth it when it is accompanied by full openness to one another and when both sides accept the fact that each has something to receive and learn from the other. Dialogue in the true - and etymological - sense should mean a piercing through the logos, transcending the logical, the verbal, the social and institutional levels in order to come to a real meeting beyond the infinite differences of religious expression. The true meeting point is at the mystical level, or in the Words of Dorn Henri Le Saux, "in the cave of the heart". His own spiritual path essentially consisted in the complete appropriation of the advaitic experience of Upanishadic rishis, without however losing hold of his rootedness in the Christian tradition. Having personal contacts with the Hindu avadhūtas (yogis) living in caves on the banks of the Ganges, he underlines the profound link between the call to samnyäsa (the ancient Indian tradition of renunciation) and the call to the desert which was heard by the first Christian monks of the 3rd and 4th centuries.According to him, Samnyäsa is a mighty challenge to the Christian conscience. What we really need in the Church as a whole, and especially in the Indian Church, is a theology which meditates on the mysteries of the Christian faith, no longer as mere concepts - after the fashion inherited from the Greeks - but by starting directly from the experience of the Self, which is at the centre of every Indian theological and spiritual tradition. While analysing the contemplative experience of Dom Henri Le Saux, it is pointed out that his main idea is that the integration of the advaitic experience (not the Hindu or Buddhist formulations of it) into his own faith is for the Christian a necessary task. Therefore, he states, if Christianity should prove to be incapable of assimilating Hindu spiritual experience from within, Christians would thereby at once lose the right to claim that it is the universal way of salvation.