The Impact in the East
Within the religious worlds of the East as much as in the West, in Africa, or Islam, there has always been the same potential dualism. The social order and indeed the whole universe are seen as sustained by the great unfolding of a spirit that seeks only to return ultimately to itself.
All steadily moves, in the great cosmic dance, in ‘the commonwealth of transmigration’ (reincarnation), through innumerable phases of existence towards the final purification and reunion. The social order, the pantheons of gods, the castes of humans, gradually process through degrees of impurity to the ultimate purity. Kings and rulers are charged with maintaining the temporal order while it lasts to enable all to attain to the eternal.But there have always been spiritual alternatives, which broke out of the normative pattern to offer a more immediate access to the divine, the so-called ‘renouncer movements’. The renouncers quitted worldly society, left their place at the hearth to reach beyond all the gods and, like Kipling’s Purun Bhagat, to seek final liberation. In Hinduism they were the founders of sects, in Buddhism the most dedicated monks. The convention was that the ‘renouncer’ would not return. Even the Bodhisattva, the Buddhist who does postpone his enlightenment painfully to stay and help others, is still essentially orientated towards final liberation from this world.
The arrival of Western commerce, culture and political rule posed a new threat to the pattern. Their powerful stress on this world and its material transformation, together with new resources, skills and knowledge, has shifted the Eastern emphasis. It could be argued that Christian missionaries and teachers, with their hospitals, schools and good works, have emphasised karma, the way of selfless service propounded in the Bhagavadgita, to a point where it has presented a new mode of spiritual response, in order to deal with the new stress on this world.
This mode is that of the renouncer who does return. Churches, missions and the person and story of Christ have thus provided a more secularised, reformist style of religious action. Christian influence has helped to generate a vast succession of new ‘returned renouncer’ movements, from that of Rammohan Roy (founder of the early nineteenth-century Brdhmo Samdj) to Swami Vive- kananda, with his Ramakrishna Mission, and other founders of religious societies, churches, samdjs and ashrams. The whole so-called Hindu renaissance, with its peak figures such as Radhakrishnan, a distinguished President of India, or Gandhi himself, as well as its populous foothills of Sai Babas, Rajneeshes, Maharishis and the like, has its Christian connections. While the old centres of Hindu orthodoxy, such as the schools of the pundits in Varanasi, have been relatively neglected, the Westernised movements have laid a new emphasis on fragments of the tradition, on mere extracts from the Upanishads, and supremely on the Bhagavadgita itself, peripheral to the main literature of the past, as a kind of‘New Testament’ in its own right. The story and person of Christ have widespread appeal and influence in such circles.The Church itself, on the other hand, with its Westernised forms and its seemingly exclusive emphasis on baptism, has won far less ground. It has been more a part of modern secularised society than of the traditional scene, and more attractive to the harijan outcastes, with their mass movement into Christianity, than to the higher castes. Indeed it could be shown that even in the Church, which has sought to oppose the caste system, as have other sectarian movements before it and the neo-Buddhist movement since, there has in fact been a subtly pervasive influence of caste. The churches in the north of India, the area where traditionally new religions have to win their way if they are to have any widespread success, are still fragmentary and scattered, a kind of remnant of the raj, with a heritage of large British-style buildings.
Although there are movements to unity among Protestants in the Church of North India, and in the far stronger Church of South India, in the area where ancient Indian Christianity began, Protestants are still divided by lawsuits and other forms of conflict. In spite of their impressive contribution to society through their hospitals, rural community developments and social action, in spite too of Mother Teresa and the work of the old Oxford Mission to Calcutta, their churches remain largely extraneous, seemingly Westernised institutions. The exceptions are the many Christian ashrams, exploring Hindu-Christian dialogue along the lines made famous by Abishiktanda and Bede Griffiths, both indigenised Westerners. But even here, and in the communities of the ancient Syrian Orthodox Church and its more modernised offshoot the Mar Thoma Church, there is no real mediation, which could be its gift, between the two halves of Indian consciousness, the modern, urban, materialistic, pragmatic aspect once personified by Nehru and the vast inchoate tradition.Even in East Asia there is the sense of an unfulfilled potential confronting Christian churches in the face of social and material change. In the modern commercial and capitalist centres such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, or indeedjapan, traditional religions have tended to fade and disintegrate at the centre. New religions and new religious movements have once again offered a haven for some, a way of dealing with modernity in an enclosed community. The Christian churches have provided impressive institutions—colleges, schools, hospitals, church buildings. In Hong Kong the Church still has overtones of power and patronage from the past. It is an effective organisation. There are also dynamic evangelistic groups at work. But the Church often wears the appearance of an efficient business. It could, with advantage, release a more profound yet socially and materially effective spiritual dynamic. In modernised Japan with its polarisation of intimate, private spiritual remnants on the one side and a streamlined, neutral public machine on the other, the Church remains a largely Westernised fragment with a ‘high threshold’.
New Catholic monastic and Anglican charismatic movements offer a hint of change. In Singapore, South Korea, Java and parts of Indonesia the churches are thriving and growing. In these areas of more recent expansion, a genuine spiritual and communal dynamic is apparent. Real needs are being dramatically met and lives touched and changed. But even here the realisation of a corporate gospel is tantalisingly incomplete. The movement has not yet provided an integrated approach to the whole society and the issues confronting it. Those Christians who are concerned for a political and social witness seem sometimes, as in the West, to be isolated and to lose touch with their spiritual roots. Those in the wider movement of renewal and evangelism remain content to provide what is still often a private, inward leisure activity, not greatly affecting the social context. There are outstanding exceptions, for example Tom Takami’s Asian Rural Institute in Japan, High Rise House Churches in Singapore, Batak Christian communities in Indonesia and Catholic community witness in the Philippines. Yet that integration and mediation, the ‘marriage of East and West’, have still to be attained in both.