Welcome, thoughtful viewers. Today, we will present the first of a 2-part-series featuring an interview with American monk, Zen priest, and author Dr. Steven Hairfield. Earlier in his life, Dr. Hairfield had served in the army and experienced the suffering of war.

As a soldier, he came to Âu Lạc (Vietnam). There, his search for inner peace and wisdom guided him to a Buddhist Zen Monastery in Quảng Ngãi province. The monks in this Zen monastery revealed that there are Buddhist scriptures which describe a prophet named Issa who came from the west to live in India.

Dr. Hairfield realized that this Issa must be the Jesus Christ. After Dr. Hairfield came back to the United States, he earned a degree in psychology, and later a masters degree in religion and theology and a doctorate in metaphysics. Afterwards, following his inner urge, Dr. Hairfield travelled to India, Nepal, and Tibet where he was guided by Buddhist lamas on his own spiritual journey – and a quest to understand the real Master Jesus.

When I found myself in northern India and encountered probably two of the finest people even to this day that I’ve ever met, my teachers, they told me I was in India for two reasons: One was to learn the Tibetan philosophy and ideas and then to share them with my part of the world. And the second reason why I was there is they wanted me to know about Issa.

Of course, at that moment in the time, I’d never heard that name before. But the interesting thing is, they are the same people. Issa is Jesus in Hindi, in the far eastern part of the world. The ironic thing is that name originated out of India, but it’s also, there is Lake Issa in Nepal, the name is known in Tibet. The name is also known in what we call Iran today, it was Persia back then. And it’s known also a good portion of the Orient.

I spent six years of my life studying with the Tibetans. They are meticulous record keepers. They have contiguous touching records of every great Master that has ever been in that part of the world. They literally have scribes, secretaries basically, that write down everything they say. No one can sit anywhere and tell me that Buddha wrote down the sutras. He didn’t, someone else did.

And the same is true with Christ. Now if you were to go into one of the monasteries I can tell you without hesitation that it is in – and it’s the first place I saw them, the documents – is the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh, which is one of the states of northern India.

If you were to walk in there and say, “I would like to see the scrolls about Issa,” they would look at you and say they don’t exist. But if you were to go there, and they trust in you and they like you and they understand that you are not there to dispel, they would walk up to you and say, “Your Issa was here.” And what Kiela did, who was my abbot, my lama, is he told the abbot of that monastery why I was there, that I was there to study Issa and what he was doing there; what he was learning; what he was being taught. And the abbot of that monastery scurried off, he brought several scrolls back with him. And Kiela got an interpreter, and the interpreter read the Sanskrit words to me.

In 1894, Russian journalist Nicolas Notovich was the first to publish a translation of the Buddhist manuscripts which describe Jesus’ life in India, in his book, “The Unkown Life of Jesus.” Another well-known personality who wrote about Jesus living in India was Swami Abhedananda, who was President of the Vedanta Society in New York. Dr. Hairfield is only the 18th person and the second American who has ever been allowed to read the precious documents.

And that’s how I made the connection because when they said to me, “Your Jesus was here, this was his name.” Now I was raised as Catholic, I was stunned. My first inclination was, “No way!”

Dr. Hairfield found that Jesus studied in India with teachers of the Jain faith as well as with Hindu Brahmins, and later with Buddhist teachers in North India and Nepal.

Doctor Hairfield, are there biblically recorded statements that can be compared to the Buddha?

Oh totally, there are over a thousand. “What you sow, so shall you reap” was something that the Christ was taught, that Buddha also taught. So there’s a direct correlation right there. But even when you look at the seven points of the Sermon on the Mount, all of them echo precisely what the Buddha himself said. There are so many that pre-date the Christ, that to me verify that he had to be in Buddha’s neighborhood, so to speak, to even learn them, without hesitation, without question.

How did you know that Jesus had dwelled in the land of elephants and tigers?

It's pretty obvious, once my teachers began showing me the documents, and what he was studying. And it’s interesting too, that he wasn't there by himself, by the way. It was Jesus, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, and Thomas. And Christianity on the East coast of India, they actually follow Thomas. They're Thomasians, not followers of Christ.

They were all four there, learning the same information.

When we return, we will hear more from Dr. Hairfield about Jesus’ secret life in India. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms, today with American author and Zen priest Dr. Steven Hairfield about Jesus’ life in India.

According to Dr. Hairfield, the three wise men from the East which are mentioned in the Gospels, the Biblical books about Jesus, were actually sages who came in search of a new-born enlightened soul in Palestine. This was similar to the way in which nowadays Buddhist monks search for the incarnations of previous lamas.

The reason they showed up – by the way, following a wandering star. We have a star defying the laws of physics? No, what they were following was an astrological prediction; a Vedic astrological prediction. Vedic astrology comes out of India. They came from the East. Why? To confirm whether this was the great soul that they were to teach. The three gifts were gifts of wisdom, compassion and love.

So they’re symbolic gifts.

Yes ma’am. Once they confirmed that the Christ was who he was, they left specific instructions to Joseph and Mary that there were certain things that they had to do as he grew. One was to go to the mystery schools in Heliopolis in Egypt, so that when he came out of Egypt it met that prophecy, that this person would be coming out of Egypt; he did.

When Christ was 13, they had to meet the third criteria of the instructions that were left, that Christ was to go to into India.

So there’s a direct correlation with fulfilling these prophecies and… (Yes, ma’am.) Is it true that you retraced Saint Issa’s steps, his path?

Parts of it, absolutely. I actually sat in a cave in Nepal, on the shores of Lake Issa, where the Christ supposedly had spent over a month doing nothing but meditating.

Well, what was Jesus’ purpose? What was his mission here?

In the world? Well it’s totally different from what we’ve been taught. He was a great Master, extremely accomplished. But that level of knowledge was only located in that part of the world. If you think about it, the Tibetans still follow a similar tradition today. They seek out the reincarnated Dalai Lama, and when they locate him, they test him. He passes the test, they begin grooming him to be the next Dalai Lama. The 14th Dalai Lama is the one that we know today, and he had to go through all of that. They did the same thing with the Christ. So he was taught what he knew.

While staying in monasteries in India, Tibet, and Nepal, Dr. Hairfield had the opportunity to study the same ancient Indian scriptures which Jesus had studied 2,000 years before, and to compare their message with Jesus’ teachings as conveyed by the Gospels of the Bible.

If you study the principles of karma, the 12 principles, he actually says the same thing in the four Gospels. He just changes the wording of it, like he says it exactly in this matter: Whatever you “metae” returns to you 10 fold. “Metae” meaning whatever you put forth, and something that confirms totally, because this statement is written in the Vedas, and he quotes it exactly: “What you sow, so shall you reap.” That’s the prime, or great, law of karma, that’s the very first law to go by. And then he begins to explain the other ones, and then quotes different parabolic phrases that he states, but he goes through literally all 12 of them in the New Testament.

You’ll find the Vedic texts in the four Gospels, you’ll find the Jain texts, you’ll find the Brahmin text, and you’ll find the Buddhist text. And I actually sat down with all of those texts, one beside the other, and began mixing and matching and finding the same exact ideas, so I know where he got them; I know where they came from. Absolutely. It’s open to anybody if they open their mind. You see, we’re taught that we can’t do any of this; we’re taught that we are not worthy to do it. You never heard Christ say that himself. You’ve never heard, even in the Bible, God say that. The biggest key in any of that is just simply accepting yourself for who you already are, and then, like it says in Nag Hammadi, when you make the two into one, you can say, “Mountain move from here to there,” and it will be given you.

The question is, what does that mean? It means actually several things. “Two” means duality, there is no duality in the world, there is no duality in life, there is no duality in consciousness, there is only one consciousness, and we are living points in that, so there is “one.” The second is by allowing our souls to have a say in our lives, in other words we live through our soul, not just our body. So now, it’s removing duality, and having the soul and the body as one operating principle. And then, you can do anything he did, he said so himself.

Thank you, open-minded viewers, for your company today on A Journey through Aesthetic Realms. Please join us again next Sunday, September 5 for the 2nd and final part of our interview as Dr. Steven Hairfield will reveal more fascinating information about the unknown life of Jesus Christ in India and his teachings. Now, please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Our Noble Lineage, right after Noteworthy News. May peace be with you.

Dr. Steven Hairfield’s book discussing today’s topics, titled “A Metaphysical Interpretation of the Bible,” is available at