Swami Abhedananda
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This will be a short update, for now, and I will fill in more information, hopefully within the next few days or weeks. Swami Abhedananda (1866-1939) was a disciple of Swami Ramakrishna (1836-1886). There are critics, as you saw, who claim that Nicholas Notovitch never made the trip to the Hemis Monastery, never found any manuscripts, and that no one at the Hemis Monastery had ever heard of him.
Well, Swami Abhedananda read Notovitch's account, and in 1922 he decided to travel to the Hemis Monastery himself to attempt to verify whether or not documents actually existed that documented the sojourn of Jesus Christ in India before the crucifixion (there are some, such as Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who believe that Jesus was too young to have embarked on such an arduous trip alone as a young boy, and only came to India after the crucifixion). In 1929, the Swami published an account of his journey under title, Kashmir O Tibbate. The Swami claimed that he personally handled the ancient manuscripts, and, with the help of a lama that was attending to him, produced his own, independent translation of the documents.
The lama who was acting as the Swami's guide took a manuscript from the shelf and displayed it to the Swami. He told him that it was an exact translation of the original manuscript which was lying in the monastery of Marbour near Lhasa. The original manuscript, he explained, was in the Pali language, while the manuscript that was preserved at Hemis (the one Nicolas Notovitch claimed to have seen, and that the Swami had later been shown in 1922) was written in the Tibetan language. It is said to consist of fourteen chapters and two hundred twenty-four couplets called slokas.
Swami Abhedananda lived in North America for a about twenty-five yeras and made the acquaintance of such people as Thomas Edison, William James and Dr. Max Muller. It was interesting to note that the Swami was at first skeptical of Notovitch's findings. In fact, Swami Abhedananda was determined to find a copy of the Hemis manuscript to expose it as a fraud. But he discovered, instead, that the manuscript actually existed. The Swami then became convinced that the Notovitch discovery was genuine.
Swam Abhedananda's book, Kashmir O Tibbate, includes a Bengali translation of two hundred twenty-four verses that are essentially the same as the verses discovered and recorded by Nicolas. Whether or not Jesus went to India before the crucifixion, after the crucifixion, or both before and after the crucifixion, the real significance is that there is on record in the Hemis Monastery some kind of account that speaks of the presence of Jesus in India. The information for this short account.
This account comes from a document that I obtained from a visitor to the website, entitled, "Swami Abhedananda's Journey into Kashmir and Tibet," by Ansupati Dasgupta and Kunja Bihari Kundu, of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Math Publication Department, 19B, Raja Rajkrishna Street, Calcutta-700 006, India. You may purchase a copy of this in book from through Amazon.com.
