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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 Magdalen College, Oxford 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 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.
(from Wikipedia)
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