Sunday, June 6, 2010

“Christ the Yogi”


Anti-Blasphemy Central: Documents, articles blasphemous against the christian religion, posts a piece, “Origin of Fantastical tales about Yus Asaf of Rozbal also known as Jesus of Kashmir,” suggesting that Nicolas Notovitch’s (1858-?) 1894 La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ, translated as The Unknown Life of Christ, owed its inspiration to a passage on Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, “in which a traveler with the broken leg is taken to Mount Athos in Greece where, in the monastery library, he discovers the text of Celsus’ True Doctrine. The idea of Jesus’ flight to India was also inspired by particular a statement in Isis Unveiled that alludes to his travel to the Himalayas. She wrote”:

Do what we may, we cannot deny Sakya-Muni Buddha a less remote antiquity than several centuries before the birth of Jesus. In seeking a model for his system of ethics why should Jesus have gone to the foot of the Himalayas rather than to the foot of Sinai, but that the doctrines of Manu and Gautama harmonized exactly with his own philosophy, while those of Jehovah were to him abhorrent and terrifying? The Hindus taught to return good for evil, but the Jehovistic command was: “An eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth.”
Isis Unveiled
, 2:164

This is nothing new. Notovitch’s entry in Wikipedia says as much. When his book, based on a manuscript he claimed to have discovered in a monastery in Ladakh, appeared in 1894, revealing the early years of Jesus were spent in India, the Orientalist F. Max Muller denounced it as a fraud. Repeated searches for the manuscript failed to produce anything conclusive. As usual, HPB is blamed for this, that, and every other thing, without giving her qualification about Jesus—if he ever existed. Louis Jacolliot had already published his Bible dans l’Inde (vie de Iezeus Christna), suggesting Indian parallels before Blavatsky started writing her books. The mythic appeal of Jesus having been in India, like all myths, has taken on a life of its own, and books on the subject continue to be published.

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