Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2008 

Religious Tolerance in a Pluralistic World

A Hindu's Perspective

By V.V. Raman

Two centuries ago, when European enlightment thinkers articulated the principle of religious tolerance, they did not realize that they were echoing an ancient vision—a vision enshrined in the Vedic scripture of the Hindu world as a pithy phrase. For here it states explicitly and clearly that there is but one God (referred to as Truth), and that He is described by the learned in different ways: ekam sat, viprât bahudâ vadanti.

In Sanskrit the word sat (pronounced sutt) means truth, essence, and also God. In this vision God is none other than Ultimate Truth, the quintessence of the Cosmic Whole. Quintessential Truth, however, is infinite, and it can be grasped by finite human minds only as glimpses. So every description of the Divine, whether from revelation or through speculation, whether from reading or by reflection, can only be partial. So it is said that those who have pondered the Mystery proclaim it in different ways. One is not right and the other wrong in this matter; we all obtain an incomplete picture of the Ultimate. Truth about the Ultimate is like the glitter of a gem; it shines in different ways when viewed from different angles. For the enlightened heart and mind, therefore, God can be seen in the Star of David as in the Christian Cross, in the contemplation of the Buddha as in the Crescent of Islam, in the Adi Granth of the Sikhs as in the abstract sound of the sacred Om of the Hindus.

Every religious tradition has something unique, meaningful, and universal to offer to humanity. To me, this affirmation of multiple approaches to the Divine is the most significant contribution of Hindu thought. It is of greater relevance today than ever before. More than two centuries of the European Enlightenment seem to have had little effect on the minds of millions in our own times: they are still functioning in the framework of bygone eras which were characterized by interfaith hurt and anger, and swayed by passions motivated by religious bigotry. Some of the more extreme members of misguided groups, whose hearts have not been touched by the love and charity that all religions emphasize—or ought to—and whose minds have not awakened to nobler religious visions, are wallowing in a fanaticism that should be unconscionable and anachronistic in the age in which we live.

Economic lust has not been the only urge for militaristic expansionism through the ages. Conquests were not always undertaken by marauding horsemen to plunder other lands. Rather, they were often born of a deep-felt belief, indeed an inner certainty, that one's vision of God and the hereafter constitutes the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, and that all other systems were wrong and deserve to be destroyed. Echoes of that conviction, faint or harsh, still linger in the hearts and minds of many supposedly religious people.

We cannot deny that there are political misunderstandings to be resolved, economic injustices to be corrected, moral wrongs to be righted, and many more things to be done to make ours a fairer community of nations. But even in a Utopian world where all live in abundance, where arts flourish as much as sciences, there may not be peace and happy harmony as long as doctrinal intolerance persists.

From the Hindu spiritual perspective, it is important that we have reverence for the symbols and sounds of every religion in so far as they don't hurt anyone. That is why, no matter how some practitioners behave, I as a Hindu respect Judaism as an inspiration from a Covenant with a Higher Power, Buddhism as a call for compassion, Islam as a proclamation of peace and surrender to God, and Christianity as a pulpit for love and caring. I know that at its core every religion has something positive to teach.

In my view, this acknowledgment is what constitutes religious pluralism: not the abandonment of one's own faith, nor a naïve declaration that all religions say the same thing, nor an uncommitted lip service to all. Religious pluralism is rather the deep-felt conviction that there is wisdom in every tradition, magnificence in every spiritual aspiration, and a sublime core in every religion.

In the current context of religious confrontations, it is important to recall the ancient Hindu vision in our search for a religiously pluralistic world. The challenge for religious people is not faith and loyalty to the religion of one's affiliation, but tolerance of, and respect for other faiths and loyalties. Monotheism is a lofty vision, or would be if the term only implied belief in a single God. Sadly, it often includes a condescending corollary: that the One God is the God that I worship, and that there can be no prophet other than my own. It is this subtext, implicit or explicit, that has been responsible for many bloody confrontations among religions.

Leaders and practitioners of all religions, and that includes many Hindus in our changing world, would do well to consider Hinduism's core insight on this matter.

At the most basic level, we pray for our own well being, for recovery from disease, for success in an enterprise, or for experiencing spiritual ecstasy. But at a more sophisticated level, we seek guidance to go from asat or Untruth (the mono-vision of truth) to sat or Truth (recognition of its multiple appearances).

As long as we are constrained in the conviction that our own parochial vision of Truth is all there is, we are groping in darkness. We must therefore seek guidance for being led to jyoti or Light, which reveals the splendor of multiplicity from the tamas or darkness of ignorant narrowness.

As long as we are struggling in the dark dungeon of intolerance, we are mortals in spirit as well as in body. As long as we linger in our own rigid modes, unable to get out of it to see and feel with others, we are as good as dead for we are without profound perceptions. Immortality is not living forever, but getting a glimpse of the Infinite and the Eternal. We achieve this in the mortal frame when we emerge from narrowness, bigotry, intolerance, and the like. We therefore need to be guided from death to immortality.

So we have this trans-denominational prayer in the Hindu world:
  asatomâ sat gamaya: From Untruth lead us to Truth!
  tamasomâ jyotir gamaya: From Darkness lead us to Light!
  mrtyomâ amrtam gamaya: From Death lead us to Deathlessness!

As elsewhere, Hinduism has its local enrichments in music and mythology, in doctrines and dogmas, but many of its followers also betray shocking dissonance between theory and practice. But there is this nugget of insight in the Hindu world that is indispensable if we ever hope to have religious harmony in the world: that no matter how we picture the Un fathomable and no matter by what name or form worship It, all modes and forms of worship ultimately reach one and the same Principle. So, when a youth is spiritually initiated in the Hindu world, he is taught to repeat every day the following mantra: 

âkâshât patitam toyam        As waters falling from the skies
yatha gacchati sâgaram       Return to the self-same sea,
sarvadevanamaskârah          Prostrations to all the gods
shrî keshavam pratigachati.  Reach the same Divinity.

A very simple idea this certainly is, yet so difficult to practice when the mind is clouded by self-righteous doctrine and dogma. Until and unless this idea is internalized by practitioners of all faiths, the ugliness of religious intolerance and the pernicious behavior it provokes will never be erased from the list of problems confronting our poor species.

V.V. Raman, emeritus professor of physics and humanities at Rochester Institute of Technology and senior fellow of the Metanexus Institute, is an active participant in Science-Religion dialogues, acharyavidyasagar.wordpress.com.

Source Citation

Raman, V.V. 2008. Religious Tolerance in a Pluralistic World: A Hindu's Perspective. Tikkun 23(6): 60.