Why Jesus Belongs to the East

Why Jesus Belongs to the East
SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI

There’s news that Jesus Christ lived in India. According to a new book by the late Paramahansa Yogananda, the three wise men who went to Bethlehem to see Christ when he was born, came from India.

According to a Los Angeles Times report, the book titled The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You claims that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. The book also tells us Jesus practiced yoga and meditation with the great sages in India during from age 13 to 30.

In Chapter 27 of the book Beyond Psychology , Osho says: “Jesus himself had travelled to India while he was young. The Bible has no account of him between the age of thirteen to thirty; The Bible has no account of where Jesus had been. This looks strange - a small life - he lived only thirty-three years - and in those thirty-three years The Bible has accounts of only three years, the last three years.

Early life incidents

"About his earlier life are only two incidents - minor, meaningless. One was of his birth and the coming of the three wise men from the East to pay tribute; and second, his getting lost in the temple of Jerusalem, arguing with rabbis. These are the only two incidents. And then from the ages of 13 to 30, seventeen years, nothing is mentioned - what happened to this man, where he was.

“These seventeen years he travelled to Egypt, to India, to Ladakh, to Tibet, and all these places were Buddhist at that time. Buddha had died only five centuries before, and his impact was still very alive. Jesus visited Buddhist monasteries. I have been to a Ladakh monastery which Jesus had visited, and I looked in their records of visitors, which they have kept for two thousand years.

Jesus was here

And I asked them if they had a record of all the visitors and their impressions about the monastery. It is one of the most beautiful monasteries, and Jesus stayed there for almost six months, studying Buddhism from the monks.

There are, in their official record, the impressions of Jesus, his signature, the date. He became immensely influenced by Buddhism, so his celibacy, his ascetic attitude, his praise for poverty, his condemnation for riches, were all borrowed ideas from Gautam Buddha."

He did come to India

A German theologian Holger Kersten also wrote a book called Jesus Lived in India . It's about Jesus's travels to India, where he first lived from the age of 14 (two years after the last mention of Jesus as a child in the Bible) to the age of 29, just before he returned to Palestine to begin his ministry (where the story in the Bible resumes again). After the crucifixion (he only apparently died) he returned to India, eventually dying in Kashmir and being buried near Srinagar. In the final pages of the book Kersten points out that Christianity as it has come down to us is nothing like what Jesus himself taught.

Christ's Eastern philosophy

I feel this is the reason Jesus is widely respected in India, because there’s something of eastern mysticism in his teaching. The West is very aggressive, continues to dominate the rest of the world. This is totally against the spirit of Jesus who teaches compassion, forgiveness and love.

And it is ironical that he was crucified because he taught this way which was very alien to the Western milieu. The West worships Jesus out of repentance and the East worships Jesus out of understanding - the same way Buddha, Mahavira, Guru Nanak and other eastern mystics are understood.

(* This article is taken from following url: http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/966651.cms and is the sole proporty of Time of India group.)