The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:4.1With the pass­ing of the cen­turies in In­dia, the pop­u­lace re­turned in mea­sure to the an­cient rit­u­als of the Vedas as they had been mod­i­fied by the teach­ings of the Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies and crys­tal­lized by the later Brah­man priest­hood. This, the old­est and most cos­mopoli­tan of the world’s re­li­gions, has un­der­gone fur­ther changes in re­sponse to Bud­dhism and Jain­ism and to the later ap­pear­ing in­flu­ences of Mo­hammedanism and Chris­tian­ity. But by the time the teach­ings of Je­sus ar­rived, they had al­ready be­come so Oc­ci­den­tal­ized as to be a “white man’s re­li­gion,” hence strange and for­eign to the Hindu mind.

94:4.2Hindu the­ol­ogy, at pres­ent, de­picts four de­scend­ing lev­els of de­ity and di­vin­ity:

94:4.31. The Brah­man, the Ab­so­lute, the In­fi­nite One, the IT IS.

94:4.42. The Trimurti, the su­preme trin­ity of Hin­duism. In this as­so­ci­a­tion Brahma, the first mem­ber, is con­ceived as be­ing self-cre­ated out of the Brah­man—in­fin­ity. Were it not for close iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the pan­the­is­tic In­fi­nite One, Brahma could con­sti­tute the foun­da­tion for a con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther. Brahma is also iden­ti­fied with fate.

94:4.5The wor­ship of the sec­ond and third mem­bers, Siva and Vishnu, arose in the first mil­len­nium af­ter Christ. Siva is lord of life and death, god of fer­til­ity, and mas­ter of de­struc­tion. Vishnu is ex­tremely pop­u­lar due to the be­lief that he pe­ri­od­i­cally in­car­nates in hu­man form. In this way, Vishnu be­comes real and liv­ing in the imag­i­na­tions of the In­di­ans. Siva and Vishnu are each re­garded by some as su­preme over all.

94:4.63. Vedic and post-Vedic de­i­ties. Many of the an­cient gods of the Aryans, such as Agni, In­dra, and Soma, have per­sisted as sec­ondary to the three mem­bers of the Trimurti. Nu­mer­ous ad­di­tional gods have arisen since the early days of Vedic In­dia, and these have also been in­cor­po­rated into the Hindu pan­theon.

94:4.74. The demigods: super­men, semigods, heroes, demons, ghosts, evil spir­its, sprites, mon­sters, gob­lins, and saints of the later-day cults.

94:4.8While Hin­duism has long failed to viv­ify the In­dian peo­ple, at the same time it has usu­ally been a tol­er­ant re­li­gion. Its great strength lies in the fact that it has proved to be the most adap­tive, amor­phic re­li­gion to ap­pear on Uran­tia. It is ca­pa­ble of al­most un­lim­ited change and pos­sesses an un­usual range of flex­i­ble ad­just­ment from the high and semi­monothe­is­tic spec­u­la­tions of the in­tel­lec­tual Brah­man to the ar­rant fet­ish­ism and prim­i­tive cult prac­tices of the de­based and de­pressed classes of ig­no­rant be­liev­ers.

94:4.9Hin­duism has sur­vived be­cause it is es­sen­tially an in­te­gral part of the ba­sic so­cial fab­ric of In­dia. It has no great hi­er­ar­chy which can be dis­turbed or de­stroyed; it is in­ter­wo­ven into the life pat­tern of the peo­ple. It has an adapt­abil­ity to chang­ing con­di­tions that ex­cels all other cults, and it dis­plays a tol­er­ant at­ti­tude of adop­tion to­ward many other re­li­gions, Gau­tama Bud­dha and even Christ him­self be­ing claimed as in­car­na­tions of Vishnu.

94:4.10To­day, in In­dia, the great need is for the por­trayal of the Je­su­so­nian gospel—the Fa­ther­hood of God and the son­ship and con­se­quent broth­er­hood of all men, which is per­son­ally re­al­ized in lov­ing min­istry and so­cial ser­vice. In In­dia the phil­o­soph­i­cal frame­work is ex­is­tent, the cult struc­ture is pres­ent; all that is needed is the vi­tal­iz­ing spark of the dy­namic love por­trayed in the orig­i­nal gospel of the Son of Man, di­vested of the Oc­ci­den­tal dog­mas and doc­trines which have tended to make Mi­chael’s life be­stowal a white man’s re­li­gion.