There is no doubt that we live in an interspiritual age, although this is not unequivocally accepted in all sectors of religious and non-religious discourse. However, although, in the past, theological debate was primary, there has now been a welcome shift to shared experience. Interspiritual engagement has as its aim a deep appreciation of, respect for and engagement with the spiritual experience of the ‘other’. In order to glean some insights regarding interspiritual mysticism, the aim of this article is to turn to a contemporary mystic for wisdom and guidance: Abhishiktananda (Dom Henri le Saux, O.S.B) (1910–1973) was a French Benedictine monk who left his homeland to live and work in India. Deeply Christian, he nevertheless entered profoundly into the mystical thought of Hinduism. A pioneer of mystical prayer, Abhishiktananda ventured into the realm of advaita, which leads to interior silence. Contemplative silence, in which a state of translucent emptiness occurs, effects a life of unceasing prayer, moment by moment; emanating from the silence of this state of consciousness, compassion, service and energy flow to the benefit of all.
In our pluralistic society, diverse religious traditions offer an opportunity not only for interreligious dialogue but also for interspiritual engagement, which has as its aim a deep appreciation of, respect for and engagement with the spiritual experience of the ‘other’. Post-modern spirituality exhibits openness to the deep treasures of the wisdom traditions of the world, bringing with it
Clearly, the differences between diverse religions relate to particular theological, cultural, religious and sociological parameters, affecting not only cognitive articulation of the tradition but also the very experiences of the adherents. Each is something
Bearing these considerations in mind, the aim of this article is to consider the life and teaching of Dom Henri le Saux, O.S.B.
There is no doubt that we live in an interspiritual age. Although, in the past, theological debate was primary, there has now been a welcome shift to shared
The global consciousness that is a feature of contemporary spirituality enables a shift from divergence to convergence and effects a ‘remarkable richness of spiritual wisdom, of spiritual energies and of religious cultural forms’ to come to the fore (Cousins
Cousins (
Born in 1910 at St Briac, Henri le Saux entered a Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of St Anne, in Kergonan, Brittany, in 1929. He is unequivocal with respect to his reason for becoming a Benedictine monk:
What has drawn me [
His monastic life, while interrupted by military service,
The aim of these two missionaries was to offer an Indianised Christianity, and clearly, they were influenced by the prevailing triumphalist and/or fulfilment mentality of the age; this was to change dramatically throughout Abhishiktananda’s life and experience in India. When not at Shantivanam, he travelled widely and entered more fully into India’s culture; his wish being to experience its spirituality for himself. As Du Boulay (
Meeting Ramana Maharshi was to impact powerfully the remainder of Abhishiktananda’s life.
… a call which pierced through everything, rent it in pieces and opened a mighty abyss …New as these experiences were, their hold on me was already too strong for it ever to be possible for me to disown them. (p. 9)
Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), a great mystic, was born in Tamil Nadu, India. At the age of 16, he left home for Arunachala, a mountain at Tiruvannamalai, and lived there for the rest of his life. As one of the most sacred mountains in India, Arunachala, which means ‘dawn-coloured mountain’, is identified with Siva, the Supreme Lord. Ramana recommended self-enquiry as the fastest path to liberation and maintained that the purest form of his teachings was the powerful
… where he underwent an over-powering sense of his inmost self together with the conviction that this self, the deepest core of his being, was ultimately one with the Absolute. (Wiseman
This mystical mountain drew him back on several occasions between 1952 and 1955. He speaks about the ‘gentle whisper’ of the mountain, its ‘spell-binding wiles’ and its ‘embrace’, which ‘… will never let him go until he has emptied him of everything in himself that is not the one and only Arunachala …’ (Abhishiktananda
Abhishiktananda’s encounter with Ramana Maharshi, and the resultant time spent at Mount Arunachala, impacted his prayer at a deeply personal level, gradually completely changing his understanding of mystical prayer. In the discussion that follows, the following questions form a backdrop to our investigation. What is prayer? Is it possible to ‘pray without ceasing’? Is it possible to engage in ‘interspiritual’ prayer? If so, how will this enrich our understanding of diverse mystical traditions? Will a deeper understanding of the nature of prayer lead to compassion and understanding of the ‘other’? What relevance has prayer for the future of humanity and the planet, particularly in the light of the ‘eco-crisis’ in which we find ourselves? These and related questions are of the utmost importance in contemporary society, divided as it is into innumerable conflicting religious, sociological, political and economic factions. How can Abishiktananda shed light on the nature of prayer?
Always a Christian, Abhishiktananda refers to Jesus’ own admonition to his disciples to remain awake and pray (Mk 13:33); his teaching on the contemplative life is also founded on Paul’s urging the followers of Jesus to ‘pray constantly’ (1 Th 5:17) and ‘Pray at all times in the Spirit’ (Eph 6:18). His small, yet deeply profound, book,
Thus, Abhishiktananda (
The life of prayer, the life of contemplation, is simply to realize God’s Presence to us. It is not therefore a special way of life reserved for those few individuals who are called to get away from the world and to dwell in the deserts. Contemplation and prayer ought to be the very breath of every disciple of Christ. (p. 3)
All that has to be done is to ‘wake up’ to this reality. Each inhalation and exhalation of the breath is prayer itself. Prayer is the natural state of being:
Willingly, unwillingly, consciously, unconsciously, we breathe and go on breathing; continuously air is entering our lungs. So it is with the divine Presence, which is more essential to our life, to our very being, than the air itself which we breathe. (Abhishiktananda
Mental images and ideas of God, while of value, can never be the actuality of the divine, but lead ‘… towards the
As a result of Abhishiktananda’s meeting with Ramana, and absorbing the teaching of
What is
One unitive awareness alone exists; it is that One whom we call Brahman, or God. This is the basis of all true religion and all true knowledge. The mystical vision reveals this truth clearly; all that exists is nothing but God. For He is Existence itself. The mystic who experiences identification with God sees all creation as the effusive production of one Consciousness. He realizes the fundamental truth expressed by Shankara, that God alone is the Reality, and He alone is. (Abhayananda
Abishiktananda avers that only in a higher light can
I am like someone who has one foot on one side of the gulf, and the other on the other side. I would like to throw a bridge across, but do not know where to fasten it, the walls are so smooth. (Du Boulay
Descending deeper into his ‘true self’, until ‘… finally nothing was left but he the Only One, infinitely alone, Being, Awareness, and Bliss, Saccidananda. In the heart of Saccidananda, I had returned to my Source’ (Abhishiktananda
The dilemma ‘gnaws away at his body and mind’. Writing to his friend Raimon Panikkar:
You cannot be torn apart in the depth of your soul, as we are by this double summons (from Advaitin India on one side, and from Revelation on the other) and by this double opposition (from India and the Church, in their ritualism, formalism and their intellectualism) without being lacerated even physically. (Du Boulay
This advaitic dilemma cannot be passed over glibly: as a deeply sensitive mystic, open to the rich experience of non-duality, he expressed the conflict in his diary by confessing that:
he had drunk too deeply of Advaita to return to the ‘Gregorian’ peace of a Benedictine monk and had enjoyed too much ‘Gregorian’ peace not to be disturbed by his Advaitic experience. (Egan
Abhishiktananda’s forays into the deep mystical insights of Hinduism further convinced him that Christianity was unduly ‘fettered by an inconvenient terminology, overly dependent on Hellenistic and scholastic categories’. He argued that a reformulation of Christian mystical experiences within the categories of Vedantic thought and the use of advaitic language would have served many mystics better, particularly in the medieval era, when many were persecuted for their mystical teaching (Wiseman
In the blinding light of this experience there is no conceivable place for any kind of differentiation; there is nothing but a-dvaita, ‘not two’. The Christian also is no doubt aware that God is in him and not merely that he comes to him (John 14:23; Revelation 3:20), and that the very center of his soul is God’s dwelling-place. He likewise knows that God is in all things; and in order to meet God, he seeks to plunge deep within himself and all things, in pursuit in his own and their final secret. (Abhishiktananda
As seen in the foregoing, Abhishiktananda did not consider the advaitic experience to be unique to Indian mysticism; referring to John 10:30, he maintained that this non-dual reality was also present in the gospel. The realisation is that the ‘self’, ‘the deepest core of his being, was ultimately one with the Absolute’. Thus, the Christian has to seek for the ‘apex’ of the soul, where he is an ‘I’ saying ‘Thou’ to his God. But going deeper in himself, he realises that his ‘I’ is submerged in the one ‘I AM’ (Gianfreda
… the Spirit reveals himself in that ‘cave of the heart’ that so deeply fascinates India … the last secret of man’s own being, the secret that his own origin lies deep within God’s infinite love. (Abhishiktananda
One could speak about a ‘reality transfer’ in the teaching of Abhishiktananda, namely the stimuli of the inner world become invested with the feeling or reality ordinarily bestowed on externals.
Abhishiktananda acknowledges the difficulty of trying to express the inexpressible in language, a constant in mystical discourse:
Of course I can stammer a few words. But that will never be more than some concepts, strictly dependent on my cultural, social, religious and mental environment, on all the previous development of my thought and my consciousness. (Panikkar
Gianfreda (
Abhishiktananda’s emphasis on the value of
India has taken with utter seriousness this word that tradition has adopted from Psalm 64:
We are reminded here of the Indian mystic, Patanjali, whose meditations on the divine name, the divine sound, OM, lead the yogin beyond intentionality and language by using language to transcend itself. Language is reduced from ‘word to sound to conscious silence’, and any ‘possible cultural or conceptual building blocks’ are eliminated (Pflueger
… returned to its source in conscious silence … This totally silent, totally inactive witness … is now isolated in its own unthinkable but conscious luminosity … (and) sound is reduced to conscious silence, quiescent and seedless Samadhi … (p. 69)
Abhishiktananda (
Such silence however is not a self-imposed silence, but a silence, we can say, which is imposed by the Self, the Spirit … (who) leads man freely and no-one can ever know or ask the Spirit from whence he comes and where he goes. (pp. 117–118)
Lacout (
The true
This leads to a translucent
During the final 2 years of his life, Abhishiktananda entered his final phase, namely a ‘liberation’ or ‘explosion,’ of all previous concepts. He had already experienced a profound realisation of non-duality, but a heart attack on 14 July 1973 brought all previous experiences to a powerful culmination. He described this as the greatest moment in his life. He wrote to his sister:
It was a marvellous spiritual experience. The discovery that the AWAKENING has nothing to do with any situation, even so-called life or so-called death; one is awake and that is all. While I was waiting on my sidewalk, on the frontier of the two worlds, I was magnificently calm, for I AM, no matter in what world! I have found the GRAIL! And this extra lease of life – for such it is – can only be used for living and sharing this discovery. (Stuart
His understanding of this coronary attack was that it was an essential aspect of an entire process of grace. In the remaining 5 months of his life, he was too weak to write any more articles or books, but continued to share his experience in his letters
If my message could really pass, it would be free from any ‘notion’ except just by the way of ‘excipient’. The Christ I might present will be simply the I AM of my [
The non-dualistic nature of his experiences is reflected in Abhishiktananda’s description of being dis-identified with his everyday self: ‘Disconnection. All that consciousness with which I usually moved was no longer mine, and yet I myself still continued to be …’ (Du Boulay
the shining out of the splendor – in splendor … a brilliance, a light, a glory that envelopes everything, transcends everything, that seizes one and takes one beyond everything. A Sense of ‘
It is nothing less than a punctiliar moment of stunning ecstasy and clear realisation of the
He was transformed. It was the moment when the lightning struck him, and he died to everything as never before. The mist fell from his eyes and he was able to answer the question he had asked nearly twenty-five years earlier, ‘Who am I?’. (Du Boulay
Abhishiktananda had reached the ‘Further Shore’, where ‘he discovered the aloneness of the Alone, and the aloneness of Being, and the joy of BEING, the peace of Being, the freedom of Being’ (Abhishiktananda
Abhishiktananda died 5 months later, on 07 December 1973. Abhishiktananda’s body was buried in the graveyard at the Society of the Divine Word, House of Studies, near Indore. In 1995, his remains were transferred from Indore to Shantivanam and placed next to Bede Griffiths:
Their unceremonious removal (there are no laws against grave digging in India), while understandable in terms of the wishes of the church and the ashram – indeed done with full agreement and participation of Shantivanam – is a source of sadness to his friends, who felt that the most suitable last home for him would have been the Ganges, the sacred river that was so important to him. (Du Boulay
Abhishiktananda, a pioneer in the way of interspirituality, writer of 12 books, several articles and thousands of letters, was a ‘God-intoxicated’ follower of Jesus. He broke through the barriers of triumphalist, colonial missionary endeavours, entered into the depths of God’s wisdom and found the riches of the Spirit in his encounter with Hinduism. As he tells us in his book the
there is no longer forest or town, clothes or nakedness, doing or not-doing. He has the freedom of the Spirit and through him the Spirit works as he wills in this world, using equally his silence and his speech, his solitude and his presence in society. (Du Boulay
Having passed beyond his ‘own’ self, Abhishiktananda found bliss and peace in the Self alone, the real Self, the
Therefore, the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this essay is an unequivocal ‘Yes’! Abhishiktananda is an interspiritual, mystical pioneer, contributing to the development of new hermeneutic frameworks and symbolism in his encounter with Hinduism, particularly with respect to the understanding of
The author declares that he or she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him or her in writing this article.
Clearly, this is not a universal phenomenon, as evidenced in even a cursory survey of the history of religious movements. It is not within the purview of this article to enter into discussion of opposing world views in this regard.
Refers to the Order (of) St Benedict.
This article aims to be an
Looking back on the history of Christianity’s relations with other religions, we now see how far Christianity has come. Historically, four phases have been discerned: the first phase asserted the truth of Christianity and considered other religions untrue; the second phase, from around the 18th century, acknowledged other religions as natural, whilst Christianity was considered supernatural; in the third phase, arising in the 19th century, Christianity viewed other religions as preparation for fulfilment in the Christian revelation, which was seen as the apex of God’s self-revelation; and in the fourth phase, religions are seen to converge, completing one another; each tradition has its particular perspective on ultimate reality, and each has its own contribution to the whole. Interpersonal openness and a willingness to learn from other traditions is a welcome change from a colonial and triumphalist approach (cf. Kourie
… given the centrality of conceptual frameworks in the determination of our experiences … to study the basic structures of a people’s language is to study, at the very least, that particular people’s ontology. (cf. Garside
Katz (
Cf. footnote 2 above.
See Du Boulay (
Although never seriously involved in the fighting, the memory of throwing his first grenade caused him anxiety. Captured in 1940, he was able to escape on a bicycle before names were taken (Du Boulay
Cf. Du Boulay (
His arrival came after India’s independence, the problems of the partition of India and Pakistan, and the assassination of Mahatma Ghandhi by a Hindu fanatic (Du Boulay
A pioneer of ‘inculturation’, which was not readily accepted by many ecclesiastics in 1948, Jules Monachin was a gifted intellectual, but chose to be a pastor for the Tamil people; however, he was dedicated to the idea of Christian contemplation in an Indian form (Du Boulay
Du Boulay (
Abhishiktananda visited Ramana twice, before the latter’s death in 1950. ‘Ramana Maharshi fitted the description of holiness bestowed on Teresa of Avila, for though his influence was far-reaching and profound, he was, in some inscrutable way, “extraordinarily ordinary”’ (Du Boulay
Abhishiktananda had already visited several Christian and Hindu ashrams before going to Tiruvannamalai. Visits to the latter had to be circumspect, given the suspicion regarding inter-spiritual exchange from many church quarters at the time.
See below,
Given the use of the masculine pronoun in spiritual writings of the time, no attempt to change Abhishiktananda’s lack of gender-inclusive language is made in this article.
In addition, he also came under suspicion from ecclesiastical authorities and found it impossible at times to get church permission to publish some of his works; consequently, much of his work was only published posthumously (Wiseman
Undoubtedly, C.G. Jung had considerable influence on Abhishiktananda’s thought. See in this connection Friesen (
See above footnote no. 7, with respect to Katz (
Language is ontologically impoverished and unable to capture the Reality, which is
‘From silence to silence, the “small voices of silence” as Gandhi called it. There comes a day when our silence proclaims more loudly than any words that God is Light, Love and Life’ (Lacout
Such silence in the
In particular to his friend, Murray Rogers, who was living in Jerusalem and unable to visit him (Du Boulay