Abhishiktananda
An Interview with Odette Baumer-Despeigne
Page 1 of 4
Swami Abhishiktananda was living in India the last decades of his life. You, Odette, were in Switzerland. What brought about this meeting of East and West between you and Swamiji?
This is a long story! As regards non-Christian religions, my own inner journey began sixty years ago. At the time I was brought up in a convent in Belgium. Among the subjects taught was of course religion. At the end of one year’s lectures on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, given by a well-known theologian of the day, his concluding words were, “I have taught you all that can be known about God’s mystery.” My reaction was immediate: if at the age of seventeen I already knew all that one could know about God, what was I to do all my life? And I began to weep.
Fortunately the next year our teacher was a university professor from Louvain, a Jesuit who lectured on the then new science “Missiology”. He began with these words which pierced through the depths of my heart: “In missiology one has to begin with a study of the great world religions, so I am going to introduce you to those religions existing outside Christianity.” From that very second I knew what I was going to do all my life! He gave us the rudiments of Hinduism and Buddhism. Alas! The nuns found this way of teaching much too revolutionary and he stopped coming. The excuse: “He no longer had time.”
But for me it was enough; a direction had been given to me: inquiries about non-Christian Religions. So as soon as I left the boarding school I joined the School of Philosophy and Religion of Louvain University, for I felt the need to deepen my own Christian roots to begin with.
Ten years later I had the good luck to meet personally Abbe Jules Monchanin who was on the eve of his departure for India where he wanted to live out “in silence and complete poverty a contemplative life of study and prayer, while adopting the Hindu monastic way of life.” In 1956 I came across a book called A Benedictine Ashram written by him together with P. Henri Le Saux. I was thrilled!
A few years went by and in early 1965 (I was then living in Switzerland) I followed a series of lectures given by a learned Hindu monk. Thus discovering the Eastern way of thinking and the Upanishadic spirituality, I was confronted with many questions raised by my Christian faith. This was another milestone in my life.
Fortunately my guardian angel was keeping vigil, and made me successively discover Raimundo Panikkar’s book Essay in Dialogue Between World Religions and Henri Le Saux’s original French version of Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience.
At once I wrote to Father Le Saux, asking him to help me sort out the different challenges I was now facing. His answer came by return mail and was very encouraging. I corresponded with him for seven years, from 1966 until his death. I received 78 letters, all referring to spiritual matters. At long last I went to India in 1973, planning to meet him on the banks of Mother Ganges. But, alas!, his heart attack hindered me from seeing him in his beloved surroundings. So we met face to face and heart to heart in a hospital room. My presence here today is the consequence of that encounter, seven weeks before his “great departure”—his death.
Abhishiktananda arrived in India in 1948. Can you tell us about his life prior to and leading up to his going to India?—his early life and then, as a monk, what led to his decision to live in India?
Henri Le Saux was born in August, 1910 at Saint Briac in Brittany, France, as the eldest of a family of eight children. His parents had a grocery store. The family atmosphere was conservative middle class. He felt called to the priesthood at an early age; therefore his parents sent him to the Minor Seminary, from which he entered the Major Seminary. In 1924 his mother nearly died in giving birth to a sixth child. The next year, when another child was expected, Henri was anxious about the life of his mother. To his prayer he added a vow that, if everything went alright, he would dedicate himself wholly to the Lord and would accept “to go even to the most distant mission.”
Being recognized as a bright student, his superiors wanted to send him to Rome for further studies, but he refused because he felt called to the monastic life. At the age 19, in 1929 he entered the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Anne of Kergonan, where later he successfully filled the posts of librarian, professor of Church History and patristic studies. As a matter of fact as librarian he had ample opportunity for wide reading, and felt particularly drawn to the Greek Fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzen’s Hymn to God Beyond all names:
Meeting, so-to-say, “the Unnameable” marked a turning point in his spiritual journey. From then on he begins to read every author who spoke about the apophatic way of approaching God, and whatever he could find concerning India. That is why, in his first writing “Love and Wisdom”, a study of the dogma of the Trinity which dates from 1942 and is dedicated to his mother, he already uses quotations from Tagore’s poem “Gitanjali”.
This flashing intuition—God is beyond all names—he made his own; it will accompany him all the way till his death: God is beyond all mental categories, beyond all conceptualization. From now on he has only one dream: to realize his vow and go to India. He had to wait 13 years before getting official permission to do it. To prepare himself he began to learn Sanskrit, Tamil and English and to read as much as available of Hindu Scriptures.
In 1945 the Abbot gave him permission to investigate the possibilities of realizing his project. He wrote many letters but without any result. At last he wrote to the Bishop of Tiruchiapalli in 1947, explaining that he would like to settle somewhere in his diocese in a hermitage where he could lead a contemplative life, in the absolute simplicity of early Christian monasticism and at the same time in the oldest possible conformity with the traditions of Indian sannyasa (monkhood).
As the letter was written in French the Bishop asked a French priest to translate it; it was Abbe Monchanin, who was working in his diocese and who himself had desired to adopt precisely this kind of life. The bishop agreed to receive Le Saux and have the two French priests live together in the modest presbytery of Kulittalai which Monchanin had named “Bhakti Ashram” (Bhakti means devotion).
All the formalities having been fulfilled, Le Saux left his Abbey, embarked at Marseille and reached India on August 15, 1948. The next day Monchanin reported to a friend: “The Benedictine Father has come! I can only praise God; . . . in essentials—the conception of our mission, understanding of Hinduism and the monastic life—he agrees more than I had ever hoped with what I have always desired.”
A few days later Monchanin added: “As days pass in his company, I wonder more and more at the most incredible convergence of the Father’s ideas and my own aspirations. And this is all the more striking, because at the human level . . . we are very different.” Le Saux, for his part, wrote to his father: “This correspondence in outlook and thought with Monchanin is extraordinary. A providential coming together.”
In 1950 they founded the Shantivanam Ashram Forest of Peace. Father Le Saux was never again to leave his adopted country; he became a naturalized citizen in 1960. A last and important remark: he kept constant contact with his monastery of which he remained a monk until his last day. In India he was and is known under his Indian name: Swami Abhishiktananda—Swamiji to his friends.
In your own account of Swamiji’s life you quote his reference in a letter to “the tensions resulting from the presence of the Upanishads and the Gospel in a single heart.” Can you expand on this struggle a little more for us?
With this question you touch the very heart of our subject: Swamiji’s interreligious dialogue on the existential level.
The phrase you quoted is from a letter written by Le Saux to his friend Joseph Le Marie, monk of Kergonan, at the time he was living as a hermit in a cave on Mount Arunachala in 1952. It describes the confrontation between his Christian experience and the specific Hindu experience on the level of the ground of one’s own being. Thus in Swamiji we witness the encounter of two mysticisms, Eastern and Western, and this not only on the intellectual level, the level of comparative studies, but more deeply on the experiential level—always effected without the least syncretism.
His disciple, Marc Chaduc, said in a poetical way: “Swamiji never ceased to contemplate the Mystery which has a Face even as the Gospel presents it in the person of Jesus, and at the same time the Mystery that has no face as it was revealed in the hearts of India’s Rishis, the Sages of yore,” an experience which “requires nothing less than the total surrender of the little ego–self to the inner Mystery.” Swamiji let these two modes of experience react upon one another in his soul while remaining all the time open to whatever might happen under the shock of their encounter. Therefore he wrote: “In all my writings all is biographical and nothing is! Everything comes from the experience of this tension, but everything has been rethought by the mind in the halo of a double culture.” (23.1.69)—That is why I want to answer your question, Pascaline, by quoting Swamiji’s words as much as possible. The first result of this confrontation was the realization that “it is to the extent that one leads a deep inner life that one will understand India, and be understood by India.”
Swamiji realized that he was embarking “on a journey to the unknown.” He was reassured when remembering St. Augustine’s words: “Go, not outside, return into yourself; the truth dwells in the inner man.” And St. Paul’s affirmation: “The Spirit of God is living in you” (Rom. 8).
Barely six months after his arrival in India, in January 1949, Henri Le Saux went to Tiruvannamali with Jules Monchanin in order to meet one of the most authentic sages of modern India, Sri Ramana Maharshi, who was living at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. In spite of the fact that this meeting was to be a crucial moment in his spiritual journey, no word was exchanged between them.
In his diary he says of this meeting: “My mind was carried off as if to an unknown world. Even before I was able to recognize the fact and still less to express it, the invisible halo of this sage was received by something in me deeper than words. Unknown harmony awoke in my heart . . . it was as if the very soul of India penetrated to the very depths of my own soul and held mysterious communion with it. It was a call which pierced through everything, rent it to pieces and opened a mighty abyss . . . The Ashram of Ramana helps me to understand the Gospel; there is in the Gospel much more than Christian piety has ever discovered.”
Who was this Ramana Maharshi who impressed Swamiji so much? One could say: a man radiating the bliss of inner peace and freedom. His teaching was very simple. To every questioner he would say: First ask yourself—Who is asking the question? Who am I who ask the question? First know who is that “I”. And you will discover that your small ego is not the real Self, not the root of your being. It is important to underline that this teaching is not only Ramana’s personal teaching, but expresses the very core of Hindu spirituality, namely advaita, non-duality. There is no two. Being simply is and cannot be divided. From now on Swamiji’s spiritual itinerary is firmly established: at any cost, to live in accordance with the presence of the Upanishads and the Gospel in his own heart.
Between 1952 and 1958 he stayed for long periods in one or other of the caves at Arunachala, living a very strict ascetic life as a Christian hermit among Hindu solitaries. He was faithful to the daily celebration of the Eucharist and recitation of the Breviary besides long hours of silent meditation. In 1952 he spent five months in mauna (total silence). He plunged headlong into the Hindu spiritual experience of non-duality. Right from the beginning he was very well aware that this path would not be an easy one, that he would have to face much suffering in the exploration of the Mystery hidden in the depths of his own soul.
Please do not forget that Henri Le Saux undertook this exploration 15 years before the Second Vatican Council, and that his personal humanistic background acquired before coming to India was made up of the very classical and strict, narrow scholasticism which was the standard level of his time. Swamiji wants to undergo this experience “in the name of the Church”. His aim is to live his Christian faith together with the insights of the Upanishadic tradition.
At times the struggle made him state: “Alas, I have tasted too deeply of Advaita to be able to return to the Gregorian peace of the Christian monk. Alas, in the past I have drunk too deeply of that Gregorian peace not to feel a certain anguish in the midst of my advaita.” A few months later he wrote: “May the Lord have pity on me and end my life. I can’t stand it anymore.” His anguish attains its apex in 1956 when, referring to Ramana and Arunachala, he writes: “They have become part of my flesh, they are woven into the fibers of my heart” (XI??). Here in truth we touch the central depths of the interior drama that was played out in his soul as he was torn to pieces between his loyalty to Christ and his overwhelming Upanishadic experience. He writes to his friend Lemarie: “I am afraid, an ocean of anguish wherever I turn. I am afraid of risking eternity for a mirage . . . yet I have nothing to fear, Christ is my Sadguru, my true guru.”
So, for long years Le Saux, without allowing the slightest sign to appear outwardly, continued to be engulfed in torments—until at last the light of peace and the joy of spiritual awakening illuminated his whole being. In reading his diary, one can feel that the tension was especially intense until about 1960. From then on, without resolving the problems intellectually, the inner light of peace increasingly dawns upon him.
This is a long story! As regards non-Christian religions, my own inner journey began sixty years ago. At the time I was brought up in a convent in Belgium. Among the subjects taught was of course religion. At the end of one year’s lectures on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, given by a well-known theologian of the day, his concluding words were, “I have taught you all that can be known about God’s mystery.” My reaction was immediate: if at the age of seventeen I already knew all that one could know about God, what was I to do all my life? And I began to weep.
Fortunately the next year our teacher was a university professor from Louvain, a Jesuit who lectured on the then new science “Missiology”. He began with these words which pierced through the depths of my heart: “In missiology one has to begin with a study of the great world religions, so I am going to introduce you to those religions existing outside Christianity.” From that very second I knew what I was going to do all my life! He gave us the rudiments of Hinduism and Buddhism. Alas! The nuns found this way of teaching much too revolutionary and he stopped coming. The excuse: “He no longer had time.”
But for me it was enough; a direction had been given to me: inquiries about non-Christian Religions. So as soon as I left the boarding school I joined the School of Philosophy and Religion of Louvain University, for I felt the need to deepen my own Christian roots to begin with.
Ten years later I had the good luck to meet personally Abbe Jules Monchanin who was on the eve of his departure for India where he wanted to live out “in silence and complete poverty a contemplative life of study and prayer, while adopting the Hindu monastic way of life.” In 1956 I came across a book called A Benedictine Ashram written by him together with P. Henri Le Saux. I was thrilled!
A few years went by and in early 1965 (I was then living in Switzerland) I followed a series of lectures given by a learned Hindu monk. Thus discovering the Eastern way of thinking and the Upanishadic spirituality, I was confronted with many questions raised by my Christian faith. This was another milestone in my life.
Fortunately my guardian angel was keeping vigil, and made me successively discover Raimundo Panikkar’s book Essay in Dialogue Between World Religions and Henri Le Saux’s original French version of Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience.
At once I wrote to Father Le Saux, asking him to help me sort out the different challenges I was now facing. His answer came by return mail and was very encouraging. I corresponded with him for seven years, from 1966 until his death. I received 78 letters, all referring to spiritual matters. At long last I went to India in 1973, planning to meet him on the banks of Mother Ganges. But, alas!, his heart attack hindered me from seeing him in his beloved surroundings. So we met face to face and heart to heart in a hospital room. My presence here today is the consequence of that encounter, seven weeks before his “great departure”—his death.
Abhishiktananda arrived in India in 1948. Can you tell us about his life prior to and leading up to his going to India?—his early life and then, as a monk, what led to his decision to live in India?
Henri Le Saux was born in August, 1910 at Saint Briac in Brittany, France, as the eldest of a family of eight children. His parents had a grocery store. The family atmosphere was conservative middle class. He felt called to the priesthood at an early age; therefore his parents sent him to the Minor Seminary, from which he entered the Major Seminary. In 1924 his mother nearly died in giving birth to a sixth child. The next year, when another child was expected, Henri was anxious about the life of his mother. To his prayer he added a vow that, if everything went alright, he would dedicate himself wholly to the Lord and would accept “to go even to the most distant mission.”
Being recognized as a bright student, his superiors wanted to send him to Rome for further studies, but he refused because he felt called to the monastic life. At the age 19, in 1929 he entered the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Anne of Kergonan, where later he successfully filled the posts of librarian, professor of Church History and patristic studies. As a matter of fact as librarian he had ample opportunity for wide reading, and felt particularly drawn to the Greek Fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzen’s Hymn to God Beyond all names:
You who are beyond all, what other name befits you?
No words suffice to hymn you. Alone you are ineffable.
Of all beings you are the End, you are One, you are all, you are none.
Yet not one thing, nor all things. . . . You alone are the Unnameable.
Meeting, so-to-say, “the Unnameable” marked a turning point in his spiritual journey. From then on he begins to read every author who spoke about the apophatic way of approaching God, and whatever he could find concerning India. That is why, in his first writing “Love and Wisdom”, a study of the dogma of the Trinity which dates from 1942 and is dedicated to his mother, he already uses quotations from Tagore’s poem “Gitanjali”.
This flashing intuition—God is beyond all names—he made his own; it will accompany him all the way till his death: God is beyond all mental categories, beyond all conceptualization. From now on he has only one dream: to realize his vow and go to India. He had to wait 13 years before getting official permission to do it. To prepare himself he began to learn Sanskrit, Tamil and English and to read as much as available of Hindu Scriptures.
In 1945 the Abbot gave him permission to investigate the possibilities of realizing his project. He wrote many letters but without any result. At last he wrote to the Bishop of Tiruchiapalli in 1947, explaining that he would like to settle somewhere in his diocese in a hermitage where he could lead a contemplative life, in the absolute simplicity of early Christian monasticism and at the same time in the oldest possible conformity with the traditions of Indian sannyasa (monkhood).
As the letter was written in French the Bishop asked a French priest to translate it; it was Abbe Monchanin, who was working in his diocese and who himself had desired to adopt precisely this kind of life. The bishop agreed to receive Le Saux and have the two French priests live together in the modest presbytery of Kulittalai which Monchanin had named “Bhakti Ashram” (Bhakti means devotion).
All the formalities having been fulfilled, Le Saux left his Abbey, embarked at Marseille and reached India on August 15, 1948. The next day Monchanin reported to a friend: “The Benedictine Father has come! I can only praise God; . . . in essentials—the conception of our mission, understanding of Hinduism and the monastic life—he agrees more than I had ever hoped with what I have always desired.”
A few days later Monchanin added: “As days pass in his company, I wonder more and more at the most incredible convergence of the Father’s ideas and my own aspirations. And this is all the more striking, because at the human level . . . we are very different.” Le Saux, for his part, wrote to his father: “This correspondence in outlook and thought with Monchanin is extraordinary. A providential coming together.”
In 1950 they founded the Shantivanam Ashram Forest of Peace. Father Le Saux was never again to leave his adopted country; he became a naturalized citizen in 1960. A last and important remark: he kept constant contact with his monastery of which he remained a monk until his last day. In India he was and is known under his Indian name: Swami Abhishiktananda—Swamiji to his friends.
In your own account of Swamiji’s life you quote his reference in a letter to “the tensions resulting from the presence of the Upanishads and the Gospel in a single heart.” Can you expand on this struggle a little more for us?
With this question you touch the very heart of our subject: Swamiji’s interreligious dialogue on the existential level.
The phrase you quoted is from a letter written by Le Saux to his friend Joseph Le Marie, monk of Kergonan, at the time he was living as a hermit in a cave on Mount Arunachala in 1952. It describes the confrontation between his Christian experience and the specific Hindu experience on the level of the ground of one’s own being. Thus in Swamiji we witness the encounter of two mysticisms, Eastern and Western, and this not only on the intellectual level, the level of comparative studies, but more deeply on the experiential level—always effected without the least syncretism.
His disciple, Marc Chaduc, said in a poetical way: “Swamiji never ceased to contemplate the Mystery which has a Face even as the Gospel presents it in the person of Jesus, and at the same time the Mystery that has no face as it was revealed in the hearts of India’s Rishis, the Sages of yore,” an experience which “requires nothing less than the total surrender of the little ego–self to the inner Mystery.” Swamiji let these two modes of experience react upon one another in his soul while remaining all the time open to whatever might happen under the shock of their encounter. Therefore he wrote: “In all my writings all is biographical and nothing is! Everything comes from the experience of this tension, but everything has been rethought by the mind in the halo of a double culture.” (23.1.69)—That is why I want to answer your question, Pascaline, by quoting Swamiji’s words as much as possible. The first result of this confrontation was the realization that “it is to the extent that one leads a deep inner life that one will understand India, and be understood by India.”
Swamiji realized that he was embarking “on a journey to the unknown.” He was reassured when remembering St. Augustine’s words: “Go, not outside, return into yourself; the truth dwells in the inner man.” And St. Paul’s affirmation: “The Spirit of God is living in you” (Rom. 8).
Barely six months after his arrival in India, in January 1949, Henri Le Saux went to Tiruvannamali with Jules Monchanin in order to meet one of the most authentic sages of modern India, Sri Ramana Maharshi, who was living at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. In spite of the fact that this meeting was to be a crucial moment in his spiritual journey, no word was exchanged between them.
In his diary he says of this meeting: “My mind was carried off as if to an unknown world. Even before I was able to recognize the fact and still less to express it, the invisible halo of this sage was received by something in me deeper than words. Unknown harmony awoke in my heart . . . it was as if the very soul of India penetrated to the very depths of my own soul and held mysterious communion with it. It was a call which pierced through everything, rent it to pieces and opened a mighty abyss . . . The Ashram of Ramana helps me to understand the Gospel; there is in the Gospel much more than Christian piety has ever discovered.”
Who was this Ramana Maharshi who impressed Swamiji so much? One could say: a man radiating the bliss of inner peace and freedom. His teaching was very simple. To every questioner he would say: First ask yourself—Who is asking the question? Who am I who ask the question? First know who is that “I”. And you will discover that your small ego is not the real Self, not the root of your being. It is important to underline that this teaching is not only Ramana’s personal teaching, but expresses the very core of Hindu spirituality, namely advaita, non-duality. There is no two. Being simply is and cannot be divided. From now on Swamiji’s spiritual itinerary is firmly established: at any cost, to live in accordance with the presence of the Upanishads and the Gospel in his own heart.
Between 1952 and 1958 he stayed for long periods in one or other of the caves at Arunachala, living a very strict ascetic life as a Christian hermit among Hindu solitaries. He was faithful to the daily celebration of the Eucharist and recitation of the Breviary besides long hours of silent meditation. In 1952 he spent five months in mauna (total silence). He plunged headlong into the Hindu spiritual experience of non-duality. Right from the beginning he was very well aware that this path would not be an easy one, that he would have to face much suffering in the exploration of the Mystery hidden in the depths of his own soul.
Please do not forget that Henri Le Saux undertook this exploration 15 years before the Second Vatican Council, and that his personal humanistic background acquired before coming to India was made up of the very classical and strict, narrow scholasticism which was the standard level of his time. Swamiji wants to undergo this experience “in the name of the Church”. His aim is to live his Christian faith together with the insights of the Upanishadic tradition.
At times the struggle made him state: “Alas, I have tasted too deeply of Advaita to be able to return to the Gregorian peace of the Christian monk. Alas, in the past I have drunk too deeply of that Gregorian peace not to feel a certain anguish in the midst of my advaita.” A few months later he wrote: “May the Lord have pity on me and end my life. I can’t stand it anymore.” His anguish attains its apex in 1956 when, referring to Ramana and Arunachala, he writes: “They have become part of my flesh, they are woven into the fibers of my heart” (XI??). Here in truth we touch the central depths of the interior drama that was played out in his soul as he was torn to pieces between his loyalty to Christ and his overwhelming Upanishadic experience. He writes to his friend Lemarie: “I am afraid, an ocean of anguish wherever I turn. I am afraid of risking eternity for a mirage . . . yet I have nothing to fear, Christ is my Sadguru, my true guru.”
So, for long years Le Saux, without allowing the slightest sign to appear outwardly, continued to be engulfed in torments—until at last the light of peace and the joy of spiritual awakening illuminated his whole being. In reading his diary, one can feel that the tension was especially intense until about 1960. From then on, without resolving the problems intellectually, the inner light of peace increasingly dawns upon him.
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Sr. Pascaline Coff, OSB, was one of the founding members of MID and has been one of its most loyal and dedicated supporters ever since. Among her many contributions to the board have been those of serving as executive secretary and as the first editor of the AIM/MID bulletin. She is the co-founder of Osage Monastery in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. She is a member of the Bede Griffiths International Literary Trust. Osage Monastery is one of the Bede Griffiths Centers that has a significant collection of his works.
Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973) is the Indian name of Dom Henri Le Saux, a Benedictine monk. He co-founded in 1950, with Father Jules Monchanin, Saccidananda Ashram, a monastic institution dedicated to integrating the monastic values of the Benedictine tradition with the values of the Indian monastic tradition.
Mme. Odette Baumer-Despeigne (1913-2002) was on the board of MID from the earliest days and involved in numerous activities promoting interreligious dialogue.