Alan Richard Griffiths grew up in England, read literature at Oxford under C.S. Lewis, became a Roman Catholic and then a Benedictine monk, taking the name Bede. By his forties he had begun to feel that the European Christian tradition he had inherited was, as he put it, working only with the conscious mind. Something else, something his own tradition had partly lost, was alive in the East.
In 1955 he went to India, intending to stay for a year. He stayed for thirty-eight. He eventually settled at Shantivanam, a small Christian ashram on the Cauvery river in Tamil Nadu founded by the French Benedictines Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux. He took the Indian name Swami Dayananda, wore the saffron robe of a sannyasi, lived in a thatched hut, and led the ashram for the last twenty-four years of his life.
His project was integrative: to live the Christian contemplative life within an Indian ashram framework, to read the Christian scriptures alongside the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and to take seriously the possibility that the nondual recognition described by Advaita and the personal communion described by Christianity were two languages for one underlying truth. His major books, The Marriage of East and West (1982) and A New Vision of Reality (1989), develop this framework.
Bede’s writings are under copyright and held by the Bede Griffiths Sangha. We do not host text bodies here. To read him directly, the books named above are widely available through Templegate Publishers and Medio Media, and the Sangha at bedegriffithssangha.org.uk maintains a guide to his major works, recordings, and the ongoing life of the ashram he led.
