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A Funeral in Calcutta
By Peter L. Berger

IN INDIA, as in other Third World countries, funerals are a part of ordinary street life in a way they have not been in America for a long time. A few months ago, I practically ran into one in Calcutta. The procession was upon me suddenly, and I did not realize what it was until I saw the corpse lying openly on a litter covered with flowers. A small group of people were following it out to the ghat for the cremation. They were chanting, loudly and (it seemed) fervently. My encounter with the funeral procession was very brief, but it was a stark sight, which impressed itself on my memory (I saw other funerals later during my stay in India, but this one was my first). On this occasion, I was on my way to meet an individual concerned with dialogue between Hindus and Christians, and we talked for a while about funerals. He became very eloquent about what he thought was the beauty of Hindu funerals, and he started to recite (first in Sanskrit, then in English) a passage customarily chanted at funerals. He identified it as coming from the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, and he opined that this passage may well have been the one chanted by the people I had just run into.

Better hotels in India have not only a Gideon's Bible in the rooms but also an English version of the Gita. So, upon returning to my hotel, I looked up the passage. I had read it before, but had not previously known its Sitz im Leben in contemporary Hinduism. In Swami Nikhilananda's translation, it goes as follows: "Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others that are new, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new. Weapons cut It not, fire burns It not; water wets It not; the wind does not wither It. This Self cannot be cut nor burnt nor wetted nor withered. Eternal, all-pervading, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same for ever. This Self is said to be unmanifest, incomprehensible, and unchangeable. Therefore, knowing It to be so, you should not grieve."

The last line, of course, links the metaphysics of the true self with the consolation sought by those mourning this particular body that is about to be burnt. It contains within itself the central theodicy of Hindu faith: "Therefore, knowing It to be so, you should not grieve." Raimundo Panikkar, in his monumental work The Vedic Experience, translates the passage as: "Therefore, recognizing him as such, you should not be

Formerly on the faculty of Rutgers University, Peter L. Berger is now Professor of Sociology at Boston University. His book, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. was published last spring by Doubleday.

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distressed"; and he elaborates in a footnote: "You should not grieve, mourn, pain, feel sorrow." The fact that the true self is translated as "It" by Nikhilananda and as "he" by Panikkar is, needless to say, not without significance in the context of Hindu theodicy.

Were they consoled, the people walking behind the corpse on the streets of Calcutta? I cannot say; I hope so. But, after reading the passage in my hotel room, I concluded forcefully that I would not be consoled. More precisely, even if I gave credence to the metaphysics, I could not accept the "therefore" that is supposed to offer comfort. Why? As I was reflecting about this, one single word of New Testament Greek occurred to me: "Ephapax"-"once and for all." The word is used several times in the letter to the Hebrews, referring to the redemptive work of Christ. But it was not its Christological reference that I had in mind at that moment, but rather a much more general reference to what, I suppose, could be described as a specifically Judeo-Christian sense of life-a sense of the dramatic, decisive meaning of this body, this life, this world. And, of course, it was precisely this sense of life that impelled the Jewish religious tradition toward faith in the resurrection of the dead, a faith that celebrates both physical being and individual particularity.

If my Calcutta funeral experience simply verified the fact that I am a Westerner, with sensibilities formed by centuries of Judeo-Christian civilization, it would hardly be worth reflecting about. After all, if the modern disciplines of history and the social sciences have taught us anything, it is the relativity of worldviews. Discovering myself as a Westerner in a hotel room in Calcutta may have been an interesting personal experience, but it did not raise any theoretical problems of which I was not fully aware before. The matter becomes interesting in a very different way the moment one passes from (broadly speaking) the sociology of knowledge to questions of truth. Let it be stipulated that an individual shaped by a Judeo-Christian culture perceives the world differently from one brought up as a Hindu, and that these different perceptions reach down into the emotional core of personality that is aroused in any serious encounter with death. Let it be further stipulated that the historians and social scientists (and throw in philosophers and psychologists, if you will) can exhaustively explain why this is so, and how it came about. The question still remains: Who is right, as between these two ways of "being in the world"? What is the truth?

I

I traveled to India (my first time there, ever) just after finishing work on my last book, The Heretical Imperative. This was rather appropriate, since that book ends with the proposition that a great contest is on the way between the religious traditions emanating from western Asia and those with their roots on the Indian subcontinent. I also propose that this contest, which I describe as one between the symbolic centers of Jerusalem and Benares, should be very high on the

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agenda of Christian theology. Travel was once characterized by someone as a crutch for those deficient in imagination. This may be too harsh a statement, but I'm quite sure that jet-propelling one's organism over the surface of the planet, even with longish stopovers en route, is not a necessary condition for coming to grips with foreign worldviews and traditions. Yet the physical encounter with India seems to have a very specific quality for most people, especially those with religious obsessions. I have such obsessions, for better or for worse, and the encounter certainly had a specific quality for me-one of great intensity.

Many Westerners react to India with revulsion. In most cases, I daresay, this comes from the massive human misery that is all too readily visible in that country. I, too, was shocked by some of the things I saw (Calcutta, for one, is as shocking as its reputation), but I had seen equal misery in southeast Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America. And whatever one may believe to be the causes and the possible remedies for this misery (qua sociologist I have some ideas about both), it is not plausible to place the blame on the religious traditions of India. Other Westerners, of course, come to India with high expectations of religious and philosophical enlightenment, and even with the expectation of finding some decisively redemptive insight. That was not my case either; I do not expect salvific experiences in out-of-the-way places, and I'm not looking for a new faith to be converted to. But the physical encounter with India provided the most intense emotional, existential confirmation of what I had previously believed intellectually: Here is the most important alternative lo the sense of life, religious and otherwise, which has come down to use from the collective experiences of ancient Israel and ancient Greece. And this alternative is not only there as a theoretical possibility. It concerns me existentially, and vitally so. It must be taken with utmost seriousness.

I summed up this reaction in the first letter I wrote home after arriving in India; I wrote that I had the feeling as if, all along, India had been waiting for me. I would now add: India is waiting for all of us. But what does this mean?

II

It is, of course, fallacious to counter-pose the West and India (Jerusalem and Benares, if you will) in neat antithetical categories. In both cases we are dealing with immensely complex and variegated civilizations, and in the course of their long history they have often enough interpenetrated each other. Nevertheless, it is important not to fudge the profound differences in the sense of life, death, and human destiny that underlie the theodicies of the Gita and of the Judeo-Christian hope for resurrection. This is certainly not a new discovery. Over and over again, on both sides, it has occasioned what, in the context of the sociology of knowledge, one calls annihilation-that is, theoretical procedures by which an alternative definition of reality is liquidated, superseded, or declared to be null and void. As Hindus and Buddhists are

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fond of pointing out, the monotheistic religions, notably Christianity and Islam, have a long history of anathematizing alternative modes of religious experience and thought. But the religious traditions of India, Hinduism most of all, have their own strategies of annihilation, more subtle perhaps but thereby no less intolerant-as when Christian or Muslim piety is interpreted as a childish stage in religious evolution.

Annihilation is a fascinating topic for investigation by the historian, phenomenologist, or sociologist of religion. It is, I believe, a very sterile exercise for the theologian-and I will include in this designation anyone who seriously reflects on the question of religious truth. I find it very hard indeed to assume that millennia of human experience and thought can be subsumed under the category of error, no matter whether this is done in the harsh terms of Christian or Muslim dogma, or in the all-absorbing embrace of Hindu or Buddhist soteriology. As soon as the annihilating option is rejected, however, an enormously challenging question appears: If indeed there are highly discrepant experiences as between these two worlds, in what manner can both be understood as truth?

I hasten to add that the last possible answer I have in mind here is some variety of syncretism, a least common denominator, a "soft" theology in which all jagged edges are smoothed over. On the contrary, I'm persuaded that the hard clashes of religious sensibilities must be experienced and reflected upon as clearly as possible-but always in the anticipation of an as-yet-unimaginable transcendence. This anticipation, of course, is in itself an act of faith. It follows necessarily, I believe, from the conviction that the God we know is a God of truth. It was that same conviction that allowed Christian theology at least twice to risk the fullest possible vulnerability to the critical scrutiny of Greek philosophy, in the Patristic age and once again in medieval scholasticism. A comparable conviction made possible the encounter between Christian thought, especially in Protestantism, and the relativizing force of modern philosophical, historical, and social-scientific analysis. The contest with Benares holds risks as great, but also as great a promise.

In a contest such as this the outcome cannot be known. If it were, the contest would be fraudulent (like the so-called debates with Jews sometimes staged by Christian authorities in the Middle Ages, with the result firmly fixed in advance). I cannot say how it will be possible to answer the question of truth that is at issue between Jerusalem and Benares. But I do have some idea as to the forms this question will have to take.

III

The passage from the Gita mentioned before, of course, raises the question of reincarnation. Within Christian theology it has been pretty much shelved since Origen; lately, under the impact of his own encounter with India, it has been very seriously taken up again by John

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Hick. Is there any way in which the cosmology of samsara, be it in some of its Hindu or Buddhist versions, could be incorporated within the Judeo-Christian experience of creation and human destiny? Then there is once again the question of monotheism and of the particularity of revelation. Must the experience of the oneness of God-the experience of Moses on Sinai and, in its sharpest possible form, of Mohammed on Mount Hira-rigorously exclude all other hierophanies? Put differently, is there nothing to be said, from the standpoint of Jerusalem, about the three hundred thousand gods of Hinduism-except that they are idols? For Christians, the experience of the one God is inextricably intertwined with the figure of Jesus Christ, a figure of scandalous historical particularity. Will it ever be possible to say that God, who was in Jesus Christ, was also incarnate in other figures? Put differently, where are the boundaries of the Logos? This is the question that Raimundo Panikkar has passionately pursued since his early work, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism.

Then there is the question of nature. We know how and why ancient Israel violently rejected the nature cults of the surrounding Near Eastern civilizations, and we may say that this rejection was an inner necessity of Israel's experience of God. But does that necessity still hold? Is it a timeless necessity? As one observes the pilgrims in Benares, streaming with songs and flowers toward the Ganges, one must raise this question: Can we, Jewish and Christian children of Israel, have no part in this experience of the holy river that unites us with the world, with the gods and with all beings? Must we simply say Nein? Or could it be that the issue between Elijah and the priests of Baal must somehow be reopened, all these many centuries after that violent day on Mount Carmel?

Not far from Benares is Sarnath, where the Buddha began his preaching mission. There is an ancient stupa, commemorating the event, and on the alleged site of the Deer Park mentioned in the Buddhist scriptures there are several monasteries inhabited by monks from different Asian countries. It is a place of great tranquility, all the more palpable after the crowded tumultuousness of Benares. For me, it is here that the contest takes its most pressing form, in a place that arguably expresses the apex of Indian spirituality. Wherever one looks there are Buddhas, in stone or in gold, sitting in the lotus position in timeless repose. The physical posture manifests the religious experience of interiority that, it seems, originated in the oldest civilizations of India-sculptures of men in the lotus position have been excavated at the pre-Aryan sites in the Indus Valley. And, with all due respect for the intermediary forms of religious experience, this interiority stands in sharp antithesis to the confrontational encounters of western Asia-Moses before the burning bush, Paul on the road to Damascus, Mohammed in the nigh of Qadr. The question could be put this way: As God spoke out of the burning bush, can we imagine Moses sitting in the lotus position? Or could the Lord Buddha, as he sat under the Bo tree,

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have received the Torah? And if both replies are negative, why is this so?

I do not claim necessary priority for this form of the question. It seems to me, however, that in the contest between interiority and confrontation are contained most of the problems that Judeo-Christian thought will have to deal with as it meets up with India. The field of comparative mysticism is of crucial importance in this connection and I find the recent work of William Johnston (as in his book, The Inner Eye of Love, with its provocative comparison of Buddhist shunyata and Christian kenosis) very helpful in this respect. But that field cannot tackle the problem by itself, because it is precisely the non-mystical forms of religious experience that force the contest. It is also very clear to me that no individual, however learned, can make much headway in this matter alone. What is required are groups of individuals, with different religious commitments and different types of scholarly expertise, coming together around these problems over long periods of time. I have been confirmed in this opinion through participation in just such a group, which has been working since last year under the auspices of the National Jewish Conference Center. But that is another story.

IV

The only time I attended a Protestant worship service during my stay in India was in Bangalore (where I visited the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, one of the most fruitful places for Hindu-Christian dialogue). The service was in an old Anglican church, now belonging to the Church of South India, close to the military cantonment and right across from a statue of Queen Victoria. All around the church building were plaques commemorating this or that event (mostly deaths) of British army days; I sat near one in memory of a very young army officer, who died (apparently of disease) in the 1920's. The service was in English, in the CSI modification of the Book of Common Prayer. The congregation worshipping in the monument to the British Raj, however, was almost entirely Indian. I was struck by the fact that many people left their shoes behind and walked up barefoot to receive communion, and I reflected that no Western penitential meaning was to be ascribed to this, but rather the more interesting meaning that Indians normally take their shoes off at home. This congregation of Indian Christians felt perfectly at home in this setting, which, to an outsider, seemed like a curious cultural transplant. The shock for me came with the reading of the Gospel. It was the story of Jesus' healing of the centurion's servant.

The shock was sociological rather than theological. It just occurred to me then that here indeed was a gathering of the centurion's servants, long after the centurion's departure, and that this was a poignant way of describing Protestantism in India (not at all, let me hasten to add, a pejorative one). But the same description, in an extended sense, applies to all of Christianity in Asia-offspring of Western imperialism, now

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surviving with more or less adaptation in the wake of the imperial era. Christianity has made a deep impact on the consciousness of Asia, both directly in religious form (one must only think of Gandhi here) and indirectly in the form of modernization (which, at its very Toots, is a Western and thus Christian phenomenon). What I see on the horizon now is Asia returning the compliment.

V

Richard Taylor, who is on the staff of the Bangalore Institute, has written a delightful little book entitled Jesus in Indian Paintings. I particularly like the pictures of the Moghul school, which testify to the surprising cultural and religious openness of this period in the history of Indian Islam. Here are all the familiar scenes of Christian hagiography-the Holy Family, the Last Supper, the Passion-and in every one of them Jesus looks at us in the figures of Muslim imagination. It is a startling experience of what Brecht called Verfremdung in the theater-the familiar made new by being presented in strange forms. What is happening now, perhaps, is a yet more startling manifestation of this process of cross-cultural transformation. The gods and the boddhisatvas of India have begun to appear in Western cities and on university campuses, unfamiliar to most of us. Will it be possible for us to recognize a familiar face "in, with, and under" these strange figures? Where are the boundaries of the Logos?