A Comparison of Christ and Krishna – Separate but Equal?

All religions seek the same truth. They all try to help man understand his place in a confusing and often tragic world. Followers search for the answers to life’s questions in the comforts of faith in a particular religion, but how those religions provide for their followers differs greatly from one to another. Christianity and Hinduism come from vastly different traditions. Christianity began around 30 CE as an offshoot of Judaism that eventually gathered its own sacred literature and personality of deity. Hinduism is really a collection of other faiths that revolve around one of the major gods in the Hindu pantheon: Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. It is also the culmination of millennia of religious practices from works that include the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Lord’s Song, from the epic poem Mahabharata. One personifies the West, the other, the East. Despite their differences, however, these major world religions have several similarities, and this paper will consider those that involve an important figure in each religion: Jesus Christ in Christianity and Krishna in Hinduism.

Christianity is a monotheistic religion that has one God divided into three "persons" – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This doctrine of the Trinity is not found explicitly in the Christian Bible, and the Church declared it a true belief at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, three hundred years after the founding of the religion. The Son, or Jesus Christ, is certainly a lesser godhead than the Father. He prays to the Father near the time of his death, and he admits to the high priest that he will be "sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One" (Mark 14:62). Sitting at the right hand of God is a powerful position, but it shows definite deference to God himself. That they sit separately at all seems to indicate that they are separate beings, and the ambiguity of the Trinity can clearly be seen in this passage. Yet, as Widgery notes, Jesus often represents himself as being somehow one with the Father for all eternity, in ways that are often described as mysterious or unknowable (224). The nature of God is a matter of debate among Christians and the various groups or denominations. How the Father and the Son fit together as God, and how Jesus taught his followers to consider him are difficult matters, but they make for interesting study.

Hinduism is traditionally considered polytheistic because of its focus on multiple gods, each of whom might have several avatars (incarnations into a human body at birth that lasts until death, but retains the full power of the deity). There is room for interpretation of that tradition based on some statements that Krishna makes in the Bhagavad-Gita. Krishna is an avatar of the god Vishnu, the creator god. He is a charioteer whose purpose in the incarnation is to advise the war hero Arjuna on the proper actions he should make. Whether Krishna himself is a god or a man is not a settled matter in Hinduism. Some believe that he is a personal god who ministers to the individual, but together with the three main gods, rounds out the godhead into a complete "idea of the Divine" (Ray 41). Others argue that Krishna can only strive for perfection as an avatar, since he is a man and limited inside a man’s body. Still others believe in something in between these two points of view. They look upon Krishna as a perfect man, since to them, any incarnation of the divine must retain all of the divine powers, which includes perfection. For an avatar to be capable of error is blasphemous (Jordens 100-101).

These points on Jesus and Krishna are very similar. Is Jesus man or God? Is Krishna man or God? Is it possible for divinity and mortality to coexist within the same physical body, or indeed, for divinity to exist in a physical body at all? If they can, does the divine completely overwhelm the mortal, or does the mortal part retain the ability to exude some influence on the divine? These are serious theological questions in both Christianity and Hinduism that scholars have pondered for millennia. There is no easy answer to any of these questions, and there are thousands more that I cannot begin to ask, much less answer. The prevailing belief seems to be that yes, the divine and the mortal can exist simultaneously in a human body, and they can do so in such a way that the body can retain aspects of both without surrendering any important factor to allow such a thing to happen. It is often said that Christ is both fully human and fully divine. The same is also said of Krishna.

Both of these figures also claim to hold the entirety of the religion on themselves. Jesus tells his disciples, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him" (John 14:6-7). This is a bold statement asserts Jesus’s importance to God and to the way to salvation. He is both God’s gatekeeper and God himself. He is not unlike a Hindu avatar in this respect. Swami Akhilananda describes avatars as those who represent the full potential of humanity. They are fully human, but at the same time, the divine part of their being is not affected by the human part. They are always aware of their purpose, and they must spread the news of who they really are so that man might realize some good from their presence (42-43).

Krishna is probably the most well-known avatar, simply because the Gita is a very important work in the library of Hindu religious texts. "Neither the multitude of gods, nor great sages know my origin, for I am the source of all the gods and great sages" (Gita 10:2) is just one of the passages where Krishna explains who he is and what his relationship to other figures is. He is very sure of himself and his purpose. However, unlike Jesus, Krishna always instructs his followers to fix their attention and thoughts on him alone. He does not tell them to focus on Shiva or Vishnu, but on him. Indeed, he says in 10:21-34 that he is Vishnu, Indra, Rama, and others. His consciousness is the same as theirs.

Jesus says to focus on him only in the Gospel of John. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), he is adamant that his followers should focus on the Father, instead. The disparity between the Gospels in this and other respects is a problem in Christianity. Jesus’s person and personality is quite different in John and in the Synoptic Gospels. The dogma of the Trinity nicely bundles the problem into a fundamental belief, but its description of the relationship between the Father and the Son as a mystery is not satisfactory for many people. Catholicism venerates saints, but it does not condone worshipping them. Regardless, many Catholics approach a devotion to a particular saint with such fervor that it could almost be called a form of worship (Küng 261). There is a need for people to understand how different individuals could bind together in a mysterious one-ness, and the veneration of saints allows followers of Christianity to place their worship on "gods" who are definitely not part of something like the Trinity, but who are separate beings with different personalities.

This approach is also the one taken by many followers of Hinduism. Von Stietencron describes several religions that are part of Hinduism but are not Hinduism itself. He says that the followers of each of the gods form a religion all by themselves that is distinct from others – Shivaism and Vishnuism are two of the largest groups, with sects that focus on Krishna being part of Vishnuism (223). Worshippers prefer to find a god they can believe in and praise as their individual, personal god, instead of trying to understand how all gods are really part of the same One.

Some scholars argue that certain aspects of Christianity and Hinduism are so similar, by some of the same issues I have discussed in this paper, that they indicate that all religions really do result from the same original truth. In the past 200 years, many Hindus, in their search for truth, have studied other faiths, including Christianity, and come to the conclusion that it is not fundamentally different from Hinduism because of its focus on individual salvation and a personal relationship with God (Coomaraswamy 71-72). Most Christians disagree. They see very little room for compromise with a religion that does not include the death and resurrection of Jesus at its center, no matter how much the Hindus claim Jesus is just another avatar of the Divine, come down to point humanity in the right direction.

The lack of tolerance Christianity holds for other faiths is in itself an interesting topic. I am not sure whether it displays merely the inability of most devout followers to admit that there might be another path, or if they are correct when they say that similarities between their religion and Hinduism are purely cosmetic or, at the very most, just tiny indications that Hinduism retains some measure of truth. Perhaps the similarities are superficial, but I must admit that the Bhagavad-Gita seems to have many of the same issues that the Gospel of John has. Krishna’s description of himself and what his relationship is to God and the people is very similar to that of Jesus. The mystery is the same in both religions. Even in Hinduism, which readily admits the existence of the universal soul and the ability of all things to come together, the doctrine is not easily understood or accepted in actual practice.

Modern religious study seeks to find ways in which the differences between religions can be reconciled by emphasizing the similarities. Christians are usually not comfortable with some of the foreign concepts introduced by Hinduism, like reincarnation, karma, and dharma. However, if they look deeper into their own religion and religious tradition, they might find that these are not so foreign after all. Origen, a church father from the 3^rd century, developed a theory that all human souls are reborn in a cycle that only ends when one is able to completely understand the nature of God, such that one can actually join with God in heaven after the last death. That looks very much like Krishna’s admonition that "men of great spirit do not undergo rebirth" (Gita 8:15). Only when one has found understanding and true refuge in Krishna through action (karma) can one stop the cycle and rest. That is echoed in Christianity when Jesus says "whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him" (John 14:21). The love of Christ is conditional only on someone obeying Christ’s commands, most of which have to do with loving God and loving men.

Books have been written comparing world religions, and researchers can find subtle differences in translations and very old sources when looking for similarities or differences. This paper has looked at only a few religious texts and reached a conclusion that there are some significant similarities between Christianity and Hinduism. With enough resources, I think it would be possible for a very complete comparison between the two to be written without bias or a conclusion that one religion is more correct than the other. I simply hope that the current interest in comparative theology stays in the mainstream, because I do not see how anything but good can happen from finding details in other traditions that help explain or clarify those in our own.

Works Cited