Question:

Greetings Swamiji. I have seen many videos of your lectures on youtube and they have helped me very much in my spiritual journey. As i have been raised as a muslim i know Islam very well, in the Quran prophet Muhammad has said that he is the best and last messenger of Allah. Buddha, Shankaracharya, all of them are enlightened. So what's the difference between them and the prophet? Why has God given such a statement in the Quran? Please Swamiji i will be really grateful if you can answer my question.

Answer:

All right. So this is a question from an Islamic perspective where it says that the prophet Muhammad is the last of the prophets. It's called the seal of the prophets. So, there are no more prophets after the prophet Muhammad. Now, what does that mean? A direct answer first then we'll explore a little more.

I actually met a gentleman who is very well versed in the Quran and is a great devotee of Sri Ramakrishna and in fact he's a monk of our order, he's a muslim from Iraq. So, he became a monk of our order and a great devotee of Sri Ramakrishna. So, I asked him, how do you reconcile your devotion to Sri Ramakrishna with what the Quran says that the prophet Muhammad is the last prophet? And his answer was: "That statement means the last of the abrahamic prophets". So, that was his answer. That does not mean that Sri Ramakrishna is not an avatara because other incarnations cannot come afterwards. They can come but that particular lineage of prophets, the final one is prophet Muhammad. That's the meaning. 

Later on i saw that's exactly the interpretation of the Quran itself. The Quran itself explains: Adam was the first and Muhammad is the last. So, the abrahamic prophets comes to an end, a particular lineage comes to an end. Yes, that's an interpretation, you have to find your own interpretation. 

Now, the best way of interpreting is first of all trying to interpret within the text itself. So, the Quran says this and what else does the Quran say and which by which you can understand this statement? The Quran says prophet Muhammad is the last prophet and then it says Adam was the first, Muhammad is the last. You put two and two together and say 'okay, in the abrahamic religions the prophet Muhammad is the last of that kind of teacher of prophet. So, this is the answer.

A little more: let's step back and take a more synoptic view in every religion. Since ancient times there have been extraordinary persons. Some religions like hinduism and christianity, they accept incarnation. Now, i'm not going to make draw fine distinctions between the avatar concept in mainstream hinduism and the incarnation of god concept in christianity, there are many many theological differences. Here we are taking the big picture the wide-angle view of everything. So some religions say that god incarnates. There are many many avatars in hinduism: the 10 avatars of Vishnu and many many others, endless avatars. Sri Krishna takes Arjuna to this vast and ancient blackberry tree, he asks Arjuna: look what do you see at first it seems to be these bunches of blackberries hanging in the tree; just look closely. And Arjuna says: oh they are all Krishnas! Every little berry is a creature, there are thousands and thousands of Krishnas! What it means, there are asankheya avatara - innumerable avatars in the past and they there are many many more to come in the future. And in every every cycle of creation. This is the hindu view. 

In Christianity also the incarnation of god is accepted: Jesus is not just a rabbi, is not just another prophet, is actually the Son of God and he says 'I and my father are one' in the sense of the incarnation. 

But Islam does not at all accept that God can ever be incarnated. Judaism does not accept god can be incarnated. There can be a messiah but it's not literally god who comes. In Buddhism you don't have a god at all, there's no question of the incarnation of god. 

But the point is, in all these religions there are special and unique personalities. That's the most general form of the question we can find in Islam: prophet Muhammad is regarded as a human being. Though a prophet and a messenger of Allah, he is a human being, certainly not an incarnation of god. And yet, even in Islam, in the most orthodox Islam you will find the prophet Muhammad is regarded as a uniquely perfect human being, specially commissioned by the Lord, not just like everybody else. There is a uniqueness about the prophets.

The prophets of Judaism. They were not only very devout, every devout jew is not a prophet. They were uniquely inspired by God. 

So, whether it is the avatara of hinduism or the incarnation in christianity, or the prophets of the other abrahamic religions, or the buddha concept in buddhism, there is a very unique in a human being. 

Everybody can ultimately become a Buddha. Actually, depending on the theravada or the mahayana. In the theravada ultimately everybody can become enlightened, achieve bodhi, enlightenment and nirvana, freedom - that's called 'arhat' the enlightened. In the mahayana that's only on the way. Ultimately everybody is a bodhisattva who is like a Buddha in in a seed form, and ultimately in the long run everybody can actually become a Buddha. So, there can be many Buddhas, but the Buddha is unique. 

This is the point i'm trying to make. There are unique personalities, avataras, prophets, great masters or Buddhas in every religion. There must be, these are the founders of religion, the great spiritual leaders of humanity. The rest of us, we can aspire and we should aspire to become enlightened. So, the language that he [questioner] has used is that 'Ramakrishna and Buddha they were enlightened beings'..., no, all of us can be and we should be, we should try to become enlightened. God realization is the goal of human life, everybody's goal, but everybody cannot be an avatara, everybody cannot be a prophet nor should we aspire to be that. It would be madness. 

All right, now, as i said the textual interpretation is that the last prophet and the seal of the prophets is prophet Muhammad in the abrahamic line that's one way of looking at it.

There are other ways. I'll give you some options of looking at it and see what appeals to you. After each such unique advent when a prophet comes or Buddha comes, there is generally a circle of imitators, immediately afterwards. And that happens a lot in India too. Avatar is rare, but in India there's a profusion of avataras. So some of them may be genuinely spiritual people whose devotees want them to be avataras: i want my guru to be an avatar. Maybe the guru never claimed that but the devotees. Some, however, are not at all genuine, some might be fraudulent. So, to prevent that a clear message has been given that this is the last prophet. Those will come out afterwards they may be very pious people, very spiritual people, mystics, but don't regard them as prophets. So that might be one interpretation. 

In Christianity for example Jesus says 'none comes to god except through me', none comes to the father except through the son. So what does that mean? In a narrow way it's interpreted 'as only through Jesus and in no other way'. But actually if you look at it carefully, it could mean 'Jesus as identified with with Brahman, with the ultimate reality, God'. So, none comes to enlightenment, none comes to salvation, none comes to freedom except through God; by no worldly means, by no other means except through God. That is true. 

Or in other very practical narrow sense: you see when Jesus is teaching, when the prophet Muhammad is teaching, to the narrow circle of devotees in those days, 1400 years ago for the prophet Muhammad and more than two thousand years ago for Jesus. In that area in that period of time in history and that conjunction of time and space there is no other genuine teacher, there's none like that and they know very well who they are. 

So that's expressed as 'only here, only through this'. Sri Krishna says the same thing in the Bhagavad Gita and today in late 19th century Sri Ramakrishna, if you look very carefully, he says the same thing. He says: 'go where you will, but you will find no genuine religion except what is here'. 

What does it mean? In this conjunction of time and space, at this time the most powerful, the easiest access to God is through the current avatar or incarnation. 

That's what it means.