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Vasyl Vernyhora
Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas in the context of samadhi meditation practice
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I became interested in the stories of Jesus' visit to India during the "lost years" – from the age of 14 to 28, and in 2004 translated Fida Hassnain's book "A Search for the Historical Jesus". In 2005 I also came to visit Fida Hassnain at his home in the Indian city of Srinagar.
Fida Hassnain is a professor and archaeologist who served as Director of the Kashmir State Archives (and the Kashmiri State Archaeological Survey) from 1954 to 1983. If you separate the Hollywood cliches from the Indiana Jones movie image, this is Fida Hassnain. Back in 1960, he first came across historical facts about Jesus' stay in India, and has been studying the topic ever since.
Being in India, Jesus in his "lost years" could not help but be interested in the yoga of Patanjali (for example, in Puri) and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism (for example, in Sarnath) with their common culmination – samadhi meditation. Yoga and Buddhism teach that the ability to perform miracles appears only as a result of achieving superconsciousness through the practice of samadhi/shamatha. Jesus demonstrated miracles, but references to the practice of meditation (as well as all the mentions of reincarnation found by the editors) were removed from his teaching.
I wrote a book 'Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas in the context of samadhi meditation practice' with attempts to demonstrate the presence of descriptions of samadhi meditation (and reincarnation) in the teaching of Jesus by analyzing the Gospel of Thomas and other Christian texts.
Christian theologians comment on the Gospel of Thomas exclusively from the standpoint of Christian theology. Not only do they not admit the idea that Jesus could preach anything from the Indian spiritual teachings (Dharmic religions), but they are not even familiar with these teachings well enough to understand their true essence, which, alas, is already covered with layers of later distortions and even cargo cults no less than the teachings of Jesus himself. Because of this, Christian theologians completely overlook even those meanings from the texts that have come down to us with the words of Jesus that are quite obvious to those who are also well acquainted with the teachings of yoga and Buddhism. Jesus spent his "lost years" (from 14 to 28 years) in the territory of Hindustan, where he became thoroughly familiar with the local teachings, and they could not help but appear in his sermons. A detailed comparative analysis of the teachings of the Dharmic religions and the Gospel of Thomas, even though it contains some inaccuracies that have accumulated in it due to oral retellings and translation from at least ancient Aramaic into Coptic (and then into Greek), allows us to get a more complete picture of the essence of Jesus' teaching.
I am a Ukrainian who lived in India for more than 7 years and received individual sannyasa diksha in 2004 from mahamandaleshwar (one of the chairmen) of Sri Panch Dashnam Juna Akhara in his main Himalayan ashram. I also studied Buddhism by living in Buddhist monasteries in Dharamsala, Bylakuppe and Ladakh.
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