We are now posting on this website a most valuable–indeed invaluable–writing of the great Master Paramhansa Yogananda: The Second Coming of Christ, his commentary on passages from the four Gospels.
At his first speech given in America at the Congress of Religious Liberals in 1920, the Master announced that he would be giving weekly classes in Boston that would consist of three parts:
- a half-hour exposition of the Bhagavad Gita,
- a half-hour exposition of the Gospels, and
- a half-hour discourse demonstrating their fundamental unity. In the thirty-nine years after that first speech, he never deviated from his intention, and often stated that his purpose in coming to America was to present Original Yoga and Original Christianity.
After establishing a magazine, he began publishing a series of articles on the Gita and another series on the Gospels, which latter even then he called The Second Coming of Christ. Toward the end of his life he wanted them collected and printed in a book, but found that a tremendous amount of editing was needed, so that was not done.
Various editions
In 1979 the Amrita Foundation of Dallas Texas printed a three-volume set of the magazine articles that had been edited. That text is being posted here.
Much later, Self-Realization Fellowship published a two-volume edition of The Second Coming of Christ, that had been greatly augmented by the addition of much material on the Gospels that had been gathered from many of the Master’s other talks and writings. It was compiled and also extensively edited by Mrinalini Mata, the present President of SRF and has a value all its own.
We hope that interested readers will give this spiritual masterwork the careful study it certainly merits since it presents for the first time in the two-thousand-year history of Christianity the complete authentic teachings of Jesus.
In the introductory material of the Amrita printing the following is given:
A Sacred Remembrance
When Paramhansa Yogananda began writing his intuitively-perceived interpretations of the sayings of Jesus, he prayed for Christ to guide him in divining the true meaning in his words.
Paramhansaji was blessed with the presence and vision of Jesus Christ many times during his life. On one such occasion, in later years, he asked a question of Jesus pertaining to these writings.
It was a time of silent prayer and his room became filled with an opal- blue light, and Christ appeared–radiant and about him a glow of golden light. Looking into his wondrously beautiful eyes, he asked Christ if he had pleased him in the way he had interpreted his teachings.
At once a Chalice appeared at Christ’s lips, and then came over to touch his own, and Christ answered:
“Your lips have quaffed the same LIVING WATERS from which I drink.”
Words of matchless assurance! This holy response was sacredly cherished within his heart.
