Hindu ‘asceticism’ is nothing more than a form of Epicureanism for Brahmins, a refined and selfish pursuit of a superior spiritual indifference to all desires, even good ones, and to all responsibilities; an indifference justified by considering all suffering as expiation for sins committed in a previous life, etc., etc. What good can Catholics learn from such a worldview? We would very much like to know.
FROM The Great Biblical Apostasy of the Vatican Council [Translated from Spanish by Google]:
“Article 18 of the decree Ad Gentes, on missionary activity, exhorts “religious institutes” in mission countries to, in addition to striving to adapt the “mystical riches with which they are entirely filled” to the “character and idiosyncrasies of each people,” “carefully consider how to apply to Christian religious life the ascetic and contemplative traditions whose seed God had frequently sown in ancient cultures [in general and, consequently, also in their religions] before the proclamation of the Gospel.” The council, on the other hand, now unduly revalues the “ancient cultures,” whose gods were “demons,” and whose sacrifices were offered “to demons and not to God” (1 Cor 10:20), claiming to recognize in them an irregular presence of the semina Verbi, the “seeds of revealed truth.” But this violates a truth always considered to belong to the deposit of faith. (The same concept is repeated in Lumen Gentium § 17 and Ad Gentes § 11, but applied to all contemporary non-Christian peoples, including pagans: missionaries must discover, “with joy and reverence, the seeds of the Word contained in them”; “in them,” that is, in the “national and religious traditions” of the mission countries whose evangelization is entrusted to them.)
“9.3 The false description of Hinduism, because it is written that in it “men investigate the divine mystery and express it through the inexhaustible fecundity of myths and with the penetrating efforts of philosophy, and seek liberation from the anxieties of our condition, either through the modalities of the ascetic life, or through deep meditation, or by seeking refuge in God with love and trust” (Nostra Aetate § 2 cit.).
“This description is false because it leads Catholics to consider Hindu mythology and philosophy valid, as if they actually “investigated” “the divine mystery,” and as if Hindu asceticism and meditation accomplished something similar to Christian asceticism. On the contrary, we know that the mixture of mythology, magic, and speculation that characterizes Indian spirituality since the time of the Vedas (16th-10th centuries BCE) is responsible for a completely monistic and pantheistic conception of divinity and the world. This is because, by conceiving of God as an impersonal cosmic force, it ignores the concept of creation and, consequently, fails to distinguish between sensible and supernatural reality, material and spiritual reality, between the whole and particular beings. It resolves all individual existence into the indistinction of the cosmic One, from which everything emanates and to which everything ceaselessly returns, while the individual self is nothing more than a mere appearance. This philosophy, which the conciliar text describes as ‘penetrating’, necessarily lacks the concept of the individual soul (well known to the Greeks, on the other hand) and of what we call will and free will.
“To this is added the doctrine of reincarnation, a particularly perverse concept (explicitly condemned in the schematic dogmatic constitution *De deposito fidei pure custodiendo*, prepared during the preparatory phase of the council, but which John XXIII and the progressives scuttled due to its less-than-ecumenical character) , and the fact that so-called Hindu ‘asceticism’ is nothing more than a form of Epicureanism for Brahmins, a refined and selfish pursuit of a superior spiritual indifference to all desires, even good ones, and to all responsibilities; an indifference justified by considering all suffering as expiation for sins committed in a previous life, etc., etc. What good can Catholics learn from such a worldview? We would very much like to know.
“9.4 The false description of Buddhism, an autonomous variant of Hinduism, purer in part. Indeed, the council writes that “in Buddhism, according to its various forms, the radical inadequacy of this changeable world is recognized, and the path is taught by which men, with a devout and trusting spirit, can acquire either the state of perfect liberation or supreme enlightenment, by their own efforts or with the help of a higher power” (Nostra Aetate § 2 cit.).
“Here is outlined the image of a Buddhism like that of the heretic de Lubac, revised and corrected so that it can enjoy the appreciation of ignorant Catholics, who do not know that “the radical insufficiency of this world” is framed by Buddhists in an authentic “metaphysics of nothingness”, according to which the world and the self are illusory and apparent existences (and not merely ephemeral and transient, but quite real, as for the Christian). For the Buddhist, everything “composes and decomposes” simultaneously; life is a continuous flow permeated from beginning to end by universal suffering. To overcome this suffering, one must be convinced that everything is vain, freed from all desire, and surrender to an intellectual initiation, a gnosis similar to that of the Hindus (to the point of permitting the use of so-called “sexual magic” in Tantric Buddhism). This initiation leads to complete indifference to everything, to nirvana (“disappearance,” “extinction”): a final condition of absolute deprivation, in which there is nothing but nothingness, emptiness, in which the self is totally extinguished to dissolve anonymously into the All and the One (whichever term one prefers). This is the “state of perfect liberation” or “supreme enlightenment” that Vatican II dared to propose for the attention and respect of Catholics!”
