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WAYNE TEASDALE
W.T.: Regarding the history of Christian sannyasa, the first Christian sannyasi was Roberto De Nobili, who was one of the Jesuits in India, in the late 1700s. That was when the movement began, though it became dormant for a while. There was a lot of antagonism to the inculturation that De Nobili represented from the Portugese Catholic hierarchy in India, who were very conservative. And so, they had to subvert it.
L.M.: Did De Nobili take sannyasa initiation from a Hindu teacher or guru?
W.T.: I'm not sure of that, I don't think so. Though this innovation was approved by the Pope; the Jesuits are always way ahead in these things.
L.M.: As with Matteo Ricci in China, his attempts at integrating Chinese religion and philosophy with Christianity—which Rome eventually rejected.
W.T.: I suspect that there have been Christians taking sannyasa for hundreds of years before that. There is the mention of Saint Thomas, the apostle, going to India in the first century, in a letter of the Greek father Hippolytus. I think that so long as Christians have been going to India, there have been these spiritual geniuses who were ahead of their time, like Henri Le Saux or Abishiktananda.
L.M.: That's in the second half of the twentieth century. And Le Saux was from France?
W.T.: He was a French Benedictine monk. There are probably a lot of others too, brave pioneer souls who maybe lived a very hidden holiness within sannyasa, and are not known at all.
L.M.: Those who didn't write, or publish, about it. Abishiktananda apparently met Ramana Maharshi. Did he perhaps take initiation from the Hindu Swami Gayanananda?
W.T.: He may have taken initiation. There was also the priest Jules Mochanin, who was a very holy man and who co-founded Shantivanam ashram with Abishiktananda. The intent was to be totally Indian and totally Christian at the same time.
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