Who Were the Three Wise Men?
Excerpted from Swami Kriyananda's The New Path: My Life with
Paramhansa Yogananda, Chapter 20: "Twenty-Nine
Palms"
Master, more than any other teacher I have ever known, could stir people,
shake them with the unexpected, charm them suddenly with a funny story, or
startle them into alertness with some novel piece of information. Like Jesus,
the words he uttered had the ring of truth. The veriest newcomer found his
conviction irresistible.
No one else would have dared it, but for the first lesson of his correspondence
course Master dictated a passage in support of his claim that a close karmic
bond exists between our own direct line of gurus and the great master Jesus.
“Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Yukteswar,” he
dictated, “were the three wise men who came to visit the Christ child in
the manger. When Jesus became old enough, he returned their visit. The account
of his trip to India was removed from the New Testament centuries later by
sectarian prelates, who feared that its inclusion might lessen his stature
in the eyes of the world.”
Master often talked to us of our line of gurus, and their special mission
in this age. For he was the last in a direct line of spiritual succession.
What he taught represented no radical new theory, no Eastern counterpart
to our own interminable “scientific breakthroughs” in the West, but the purest,
highest, and indeed oldest spiritual tradition in the world.
Babaji is the first in this direct line of gurus. A master of great antiquity,
he still lives in the Badrinarayan section of the Himalayas, where he remains
accessible to a few highly advanced souls. In the latter half of the nineteenth
century, Babaji, feeling that in the present scientific age mankind was better
prepared to receive higher knowledge, directed his disciple, Shyama Charan
Lahiri, to reintroduce to the world the long-hidden, most central science
of yoga. Lahiri Mahasaya, as his disciples called him, named this exalted
science Kriya Yoga, which means simply, “divine union through a
certain technique, or spiritual act.” Other yoga techniques bear the same
name, but according to our own line of gurus the Kriya Yoga of Lahiri Mahasaya
is the most ancient and central of all yoga techniques.
Babaji explained that it was to this technique that Lord Krishna, India’s
greatest ancient prophet, was referring in the Bhagavad Gita when he said,
“I related this imperishable yoga to Bibaswat; Bibaswat taught it to Manu
[the ancient Hindu law-giver]; Manu gave it to Ikshvaku [the renowned founder
of the Solar dynasty]. In this way it was handed down in orderly succession
to great sages until, after long stretches of time, knowledge of that yoga
deteriorated in the world [because the generality of mankind had lost touch
with spiritual realities].”
Lahiri Mahasaya, like Babaji, was a great master
of yoga — a “yogavatar,” Master called him, or “incarnation of yoga”—though
at the same time a householder with worldly responsibilities. Of the many
disciples that he initiated, the chief was Swami Sri Yukteswar — modern India’s gyanavatar, or
“incarnation of wisdom,” as Yogananda designated him. Thus it was, through
Sri Yukteswar, that Paramhansa Yogananda was sent to America with the high
technique which, our Gurus said, would give wise direction to the hitherto
scattered, and potentially dangerous, development of modern Western civilization.
“In the divine plan,” Yogananda stated on another occasion, “Jesus Christ
was responsible for the evolution of the West, and Krishna (later, Babaji),
for that of the East. It was intended that the West specialize in developing
objectively, through logic and reason, and that the East specialize in inner,
intuitive development. Now, the time has come in the cosmic plan to combine
these two halves of a circle. East and West must unite.”
Footnotes
The fact that the Bible says nothing at
all about those missing eighteen years offers the strongest possible
evidence that the account of them was later deleted. For it is simply
not credible that all four of the apostles would have omitted all mention
of so large a segment of their Master’s brief life span on earth. Even
granting the possibility, which seems doubtful, that those eighteen
years were too uneventful to record, any conscientious biographer —
not to mention a disciple — would never on any account have
left out altogether even a bridging sentence. At the very least he
would have said something like, “And Jesus grew up, and worked in his
father’s carpentry shop.” The fact that nothing at all is said suggests
the later work of priests, whose religious convictions inspired them
to delete, but prevented them from being so brazen as to add words
of their own.
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Gyana (wisdom) is often spelled Jnana in
books. Master once commented to me on the problems of transliteration
from Sanskrit to Roman characters. He was going over some of his writings
with me at Twenty-Nine Palms, after I’d been with him about a year, when
we came upon this word, gyana. “Jnana is how scholars
like to spell it,” Master scoffed. “It isn’t pronounced J-nana.
And how else are you going to pronounce it if you find it spelled that
way? This is just an example of scholars’ pedantry. Gyana is
the correct pronunciation. The g-y in English doesn’t show it
exactly [pronounced rightly, there is a slight nasal touch to the sound],
but at least it’s much closer to the right way of saying it.
“Another transliteration that scholars prefer,” Master continued, “is v in
place of b. Instead of Bibaswat, they write Vivaswat.
Instead of Bishnu they write Vishnu. Why? The way v is
pronounced in English makes this Sanskrit pronunciation wrong. Again, b isn’t
exact, but it’s closer.”
In his native Bengali the sound is distinctly B. Pure Sanskrit
resembles the b in the Spanish word hablado, where
it is between a b and a v. (In Spanish, incidentally,
the d is more like the th in our word, the.)
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