Bede Griffiths

Alan Richard "Bede" Griffiths (17 December 1906 – 13 May 1993), also known as Swami Dayananda (Bliss of Compassion), was a British-born Benedictine monk and missionary who lived in ashrams in South India. He was born at Walton-on-Thames, England and studied literature at Oxford University under professor and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who became a lifelong friend. Griffiths recounts the story of his conversion in 1931 to Catholicism while a student at Oxford in his autobiography The Golden String.

In December, 1932, Griffiths joined the Benedictine monastery of Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester, where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1940. Griffiths spent some time in the sister abbey in Scotland but, after two decades of community life, he moved to Kengeri, Bangalore, India in 1955 with the goal of building a monastery there. That project was unsuccessful, but in 1958 he helped Francis Acharya to establish Kristiya Sanyasa Samaj,Kurisumala Ashram (Mountain of the Cross), a Syriac rite monastery of Syro-Malankara Catholic Church in Kerala. In college Bede had originally studied the Classics, "Latin," "Greek," and "Hebrew." When he found himself in India awaiting orders from the hierachy, he decided that he could spend his time and learn Sanskrit. The local teachers only had texts from the Upanishads in Sanskrit, so this was Fr. Bede's first exposure to the ancient texts.

Once he read these texts in the original language, he started delivering the High Mass translated in Sanskrit instead of Latin as it was delivered at the time.

In 1968 he moved to the Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) Ashram in Tamil Nadu, the ashram had been founded by the French Benedictine monk Abhishiktananda in 1950.

Although he remained a Catholic monk he adopted the trappings of Hindu monastic life and entered into dialogue with Hinduism. Griffiths wrote twelve books on Hindu-Christian dialogue. Griffiths' form of Vedanta-inspired Christianity is called Wisdom Christianity.

Fr. Bede Griffiths was a proponent of integral thought, which attempts to harmonize scientific and spiritual world views. In a 1983 interview he stated,

"We're now being challenged to create a theology which would use the findings of modern science and eastern mysticism which, as you know, coincide so much, and to evolve from that a new theology which would be much more adequate."

Griffiths died at Shantivanam in 1993. The archives of the Bede Griffiths Trust are located at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.