Q: Jesus lived around 2 BC to 33 AD. Adi Shankaracharya (who founded the Govardhan Math) lived between 788 AD and 820 AD. In your website it is mentioned that Jesus lived in Govardhan Math. How can it be?
Quite simple. Shankaracharya lived sometime between 500 and 300 BC. So I was taught as a young monk by more than one sadhu of Joshi Matt, the “home base” for all members of the Giri branch of the Dasanami Order, and I have never had cause to doubt them.
A later dating for Shankara is simply without basis and is from the influence of Western “scholars” and those in India who are influenced by them. Like the fabricated “Aryan Invasion of India” such a dating is intended to both deny the ancient character of Sanatana Dharma and to imply that the wisdom of India is post-Christian and perhaps even influenced by Christianity.
During his world tour in 1958, Jagadguru Shankaracharya Bharati Krishna Tirtha stated to various people, including some of my acquaintances, that he possessed “historical proof positive” that Jesus had lived in the Govardhan Math. He told them that he had found evidence of this fact in the archives of the math, and had written a book on the subject which he intended to publish on his return to India.
Unhappily, when he returned to the math he was told that a servant had thrown away the manuscript thinking it was waste paper. That may or may not have been the situation, considering that in the nineteen thirties a Christian missionary had borrowed and destroyed the manuscript of a book by Swami Sri Yuketswar Giri, the guru of Paramhansa Yogananda, in which he proved the same thing: that Jesus had lived in Govardhan Matt and had been a student and teacher of Sanatana Dharma, a spiritual son of India.
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