Mahanambrata Bramhachari
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November 1, 1999
Mahanambrata Brahmachari, Hindu Scholar, Is Dead at 95
By GUSTAV NIEBUHR
Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a soft-spoken Hindu scholar who offered early
and important intellectual encouragement to the Roman Catholic monk and
writer Thomas Merton, died in Calcutta, India, on Oct. 18. He was 95.
Although Brahmachari lived most of his life in his native Bengal, he
enjoyed a remarkable sojourn in the Depression-era United States --
mainly in Chicago between 1933 and 1939. He arrived there penniless,
sent by his monastery to attend a conference of the World Fellowship of
Faiths.
But Brahmachari's intellectual gifts, his sense of spiritual assurance
("that heaven would have to take care of him," Merton later wrote) and
the interest that American scholars and religious figures took in him
gave him the scope to make an unusual impact during his six years in
this country.
Not only did he address the Chicago conference, but he also became the
fellowship's international secretary and traveled to London in 1936 for
its assembly there. He also delivered hundreds of lectures, often on
college campuses, on Hindu and other religious beliefs, aspects of
Indian society, and the work of Gandhi in the movement for Indian
independence.
He was already equipped with master's degrees in Sanskrit and Western
philosophy from the University of Calcutta, then gained admission to
the University of Chicago, earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1937.
That year, Charles Gilkey, the university's dean, described Brahmachari
in a letter as a "beloved figure on our quadrangles," who had impressed
people "through the winsomeness of his personality, the keenness of his
mind, the catholicity of his point of view, and not least through his
deeply religious spirit."
Brahmachari came from a religious tradition called neo-Vaisnavism,
focused on the worship of the god Vishnu and his incarnations.
Vaisnavism emphasizes religious devotion.
In a series of recollections of Brahmachari, gathered by William
Buchanan and published by the Vivekananda Monastery in Minnesota, the
poet Robert Lax wrote that Brahmachari possessed a quiet and calm that
drew people to him.
He would come unnoticed into a crowded room, Lax wrote, and soon people
would be sitting around him, "quietly asking him questions or listening
to him because it was just the natural thing to do in the presence of
someone who had that quality."
Rather than attempt to convert Americans to his own faith, Brahmachari
told those he met that they ought to look into their own religious
traditions.
Merton met Brahmachari in 1938, when Merton was 23 and studying at
Columbia University. He was taken by a friend to meet Brahmachari, who
was arriving at Grand Central Terminal in New York. At first, the two
were unable to locate Brahmachari, nor could they find anyone who had
seen him. Yet one would have thought, Merton later wrote in "The Seven
Story Mountain," that a man "in a turban and a white robe and a pair of
Keds would have been a memorable sight." Eventually, the three men
linked up.
Merton became friends with Brahmachari and would later credit him with
helping provide inspiration toward the spiritual path Merton would take
as a Trappist monk. In "The Seven Story Mountain," Merton recounts how
Brahmachari, who rarely gave direct advice, told him to read two
classics of Christian spirituality, St. Augustine's "Confessions" and
the late medieval mystical book, "The Imitation of Christ."
"Now that I look back on those days," Merton wrote in his book, "it
seems to me very probable that one of the reasons why God had brought
him all the way from India, was that he might say just that."
Mahanambrata Brahmachari was born on Dec. 25, 1904, into a religious,
middle-class family in a village in what is now Bangladesh. After he
returned to British-ruled India in early 1939, he continued to live as
a monk, and also wrote and lectured on religious subjects.
The area of Bengal in which he lived became part of East Pakistan after
Indian independence from Britain in 1948. He remained there, providing
spiritual support to the Hindu minority and working for peace, even
during Pakistan's attempt to suppress the drive to independence in what
became Bangladesh in 1971.
In a tribute included in the recollections published by Vivekananda
Monastery, Merton wrote of Brahmachari that the latter taught a lesson
with his life, "that one can and must entrust himself to a higher and
unseen Wisdom, and that if one can relax his frantic hold on the
illusory securities of everyday material existence and abandon himself
peacefully to a Supreme Will, he will himself find freedom and peace in
that Will."
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