A Vision for Hinduism: Beyond Hindu Nationalism 9780755624669, 9781845112738

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For George Harrison “All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn’t matter what you call Him, as long as you call.”

As a joke, a king sent seven blind men to feel an elephant and describe its nature. Each approached the elephant from a different direction, seized a different part, and, being blind, assumed that what he perceived was the whole elephant. One grasped the ear and declared, “Elephant is like a large fan.” Another grasped a leg and declared, “Elephant is like a great pillar.” Another found the trunk, and feeling it, proclaimed, “Elephant is like a snake.” Another grasped the tail and declared, “Elephant is like a rope hanging from the sky,” while another, grasping only the tuft of the tail, said, “Elephant is like a broom.” A sixth encountered the side of the elephant and maintained, “Elephant is like a wall.” The seventh insisted that the others were all wrong, for he had grasped the tusk. He proclaimed, “Elephant is not any of those; elephant is like a spear.” Each being certain of the truth of his own experience, they began to fight. A person who could see chanced to come by and found them quarrelling. After listening to their individual perceptions from their different points of view, he gently explained that there was no need for fighting over the issue, for each was partially right. But to have complete knowledge of the nature of the elephant, he said, one would have to be able to be aware of and combine all the different aspects of the creature. –Buddhist (and Jain) Parable– (Based on Ud›na 6.4:66-69) The seven blind men who gave seven different descriptions of the elephant were all right from their respective points of view, and wrong from the point of view of one another, and right and wrong from the point of view of the man who knew the elephant. I very much like this doctrine of the manyness of reality. It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Musalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his. Formerly I used to resent the ignorance of my opponents. Today I can love them because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa. –Mohandas K. Gandhi–

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is with great trepidation that I set out to thank everyone who has helped make this book possible, because I will certainly forget someone. If you know that you helped me in this process and you do not see your name in these acknowledgements, I humbly apologise! Let me know so I can include you in the acknowledgements to the next edition… A special note of thanks goes to Alex Wright at I.B. Tauris. Not one to shy away from controversy, he supported this project even when there were others who objected to it on ideological grounds. Such an editor is a true champion of academic freedom. I would like to thank all of the wonderful scholars in the community of process thought who have enriched my understanding of Whitehead and who encouraged my project of developing a Hindu process theology at every stage. Special thanks go to David Ray Griffin, Nick Gier, and Jay McDaniel, and to all of the participants in the 2003 workshop on Whiteheadian religious pluralism at the Center for Process Studies, especially John Cobb, Catherine Keller, and Steve Odin. I would also like to thank David for allowing me to include in this volume some of the material from my essay “Anek›nta Ved›nta: Towards a Deep Hindu Religious Pluralism,” from his edited volume from the 2003 workshop, Deep Religious Pluralism. On a similar note, I would like to thank Jay, too, as well as Donna Bowman, for their permission to include material from another essay of mine, “A Whiteheadian Ved›nta: Developing a Hindu Process Theology,” from their Handbook of Process Theology. Finally, with regard to the process community, I owe a special debt of thanks to Franklin I. “Chris” Gamwell, who first introduced me to Whitehead through his course at the University of Chicago, giving me a conceptual language with which to express my thoughts.

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Another fantastic and supportive community to which I am grateful is the Dharma Association of North America, or DANAM, an organisation that exists to support the kind of constructive scholarship that is represented in this book. A very special ‘thank you’ goes to Rita Sherma and Adarsh Deepak, who have helped to create a space in the academy for Hindu theology. I am also grateful to Rita and to Arvind Sharma for their permission to include material from my essay, “Truth, Diversity, and the Incomplete Project of Modern Hinduism” from their Hinduism and Hermeneutics volume. A lot of other wonderful people have supported my work over the years, helping me to find my place both in the academy and in life. Names that spring immediately to mind include Paul J. Griffiths, Wendy Doniger, David Tracy, Doug Allen, Rama Rao Pappu, Bart Gruzalski, Bob Forman, Chris Chapple, Ramdas Lamb, and Veena Howard. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College, and to the College itself for granting me a Junior Leave in order to complete this book. Other institutions which have assisted me in this work include the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and of course my alma mater, the University of Chicago. Special thanks go to Sean Melvin for making it possible for me to be involved with the Elizabethtown College Oxford Summer Programme that gave me access to the Indian Institute Library. I thank the Hindu community of the greater Harrisburg area for personal support and for making me an honorary Bengali. An extra special ‘thank you’ also goes to the sw›mıs and pravr›jikas of the Ramakrishna Order, particularly to my guru, without whose grace I am sure this project would not have come to fruition, and to my ally, friend, and Dharma Sister, Pravrajika Vrajaprana. A special word of thanks goes to my mother, Diana Long, who allowed and encouraged me to follow my own path. More thanks than I can possibly express in words go to my soul mate, best friend, and ±aktı–my wife, Mahua Bhattacharya, for enduring the absences, both physical and mental, that this project has entailed, and who has shared and contributed to its vision to such an extent that she should probably be listed as co-author. She has patiently read drafts of the entire manuscript and given freely of her time, her energy, and her suggestions. But with all of that being said, I claim responsibility for any faults with the final product!

Acknowledgements

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And of course I must thank Billy, the orange tabby cat from the streets of Chicago who has warmed my feet and been my constant companion throughout the writing of this book.

Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania 7 July, 2006

NOTE ON DIACRITICAL MARKS AND PRONUNCIATION OF SANSKRIT TERMS

In this book I have used the standard international system for transliterating Indic words into the Roman alphabet, with the exception of modern names with a common Roman spelling (e.g. Ramakrishna instead of R›mak¸s‹˚a, and Gandhi instead of G›˙dhı). Regarding the correct pronunciation of Sanskrit terms: a

This is pronounced ‘uh,’ as in ‘bud.’

›

This is pronounced ‘ah,’ as in ‘father.’

i

This is pronounced like the ‘i' in ‘bit.’

ı

This is pronounced like the ‘ee’ in ‘beet.’

u

This is pronounced like the ‘oo’ in ‘book.’

Ò

This is pronounced like the ‘oo’ in ‘pool.’

¸

This is pronounced like the ‘ri’ in ‘rig’ with a slight roll of the tongue, though not as hard a roll as in Spanish r.

e

This is pronounced like ‘ay’ in ‘say.’

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A Vision for Hinduism

ai

This is pronounced like ‘aye’ or ‘eye.’

o

This is pronounced ‘oh,’ as in ‘Ohio.’

au

This is pronounced like ‘ow’ in ‘how.’

Consonants are pronounced as in English, but consonants with a dot under them (e.g. ˜) are pronounced with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth. Consonants immediately followed by an ‘h’ (e.g. th, dh) include an exhalation–i.e. the ‘h’ is pronounced, producing somewhat of a softening of the consonant. s‹ and ± These sounds are almost indistinguishable (s‹ is pronounced with the tongue at the roof of the mouth, but ± is not). They sound like the ‘sh’ in ‘she.’

Introduction WHO AM I TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT HINDU IDENTITY? Confessions of an Irish American Hindu

Why an Autobiographical Introduction? If you are the kind of reader who is not interested in knowing about the deeper underlying agenda of the author whose book you are reading, or the experiences that have informed that agenda, but would prefer to get straight to the argument, then you may want to skip this introduction. If, after reading the book, you are intrigued about the experiences and the understanding of Hinduism that might have motivated one to pursue such a project, then you can come back to this introduction for at least some of the answers to your questions. I have chosen to write this introduction for a number of reasons. First, the subject matter of this book is potentially controversial, not least in the Hindu community, in which I am claiming membership. Hindu identity is a hot, politically charged topic. Because I am critical in this book of Hindu nationalism, Hindu nationalists will no doubt take issue with it. But my critique of Hindu nationalism is also a bit unusual. It is not uncommon for American and European scholars of religion to be critical of Hindu nationalism. It is practically an informal requirement of membership in the academy, for scholars of Hinduism at least, to take such a critical stance, at least implicitly. But I am offering a Hindu critique of Hindu nationalism, one that is explicitly theological and that draws upon the resources of the Hindu tradition to make its case.1 Mine is an internal critique. My hope is not simply to criticise Hindu nationalists, but ideally, to win them over.

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A Vision for Hinduism

Secondly, the fact that I claim membership in the Hindu community is also potentially controversial, both within the community and beyond it. In the minds of many, Hindu equals Indian. And in the minds of many Hindus, Western, American, and European, equal materialistic, imperialistic, and exploitative. For those for whom Hindu equals Indian, an Irish American Hindu–like me–is an oxymoron, like the horn of a hare, as ancient Sanskrit texts would say, or a barren woman’s son. And for those who see the West as a threat to Hindu values, especially given its colonial past, an Irish American Hindu is not only an oxymoron, but is inherently suspect–a cultural double agent, probably with a covert agenda of converting Hindus to Christianity or otherwise exploiting Hindu traditions for personal gain. Among non-Hindus–and here I particularly have in mind my fellow scholars of religion who do not identify with the tradition–the concern is the opposite. There is the fear of the scholar who has ‘gone native,’ who has become so enthralled with the object of his studies that he has lost his objectivity, his scholarship degenerating into advocacy, or worse, theology. But even for those who have no such worries, who are both open to the possibility of non-Indians converting to Hinduism and who also see no inherent conflict between doing serious scholarship and having a religious commitment, people like myself are still a curiosity. Why would a ‘white’ American want to call himself a Hindu? Finally, the definition of Hinduism is itself a contested and problematic subject in the academy, with some even claiming there is no such thing as Hinduism, or that Hinduism is a construct of Orientalist scholarship. So, in light of this discourse, what do I mean by Hindu when I call myself that? With which of the many possible Hinduisms do I identify myself? I am writing this introduction partly to address these concerns. To challenge the widespread notion–among both Hindus and non-Hindus– that Hindu equals Indian is one of the two central purposes of this book, the other being to advocate and re-articulate the Hindu vision of religious pluralism that was embodied in the lives and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Mahatma Gandhi, the two figures who have had the most profound influence on my understanding of Hinduism, and whose respective visions were decisive in my choice to identify with this tradition and to become a part of the global Hindu community. Both purposes are connected as elements of my broader agenda: to redefine Hinduism as a world religion in the true sense of the term, by which I mean a tradition with a universal message available, at least in principle, to all who wish to accept it, rather than a national or parochial tradition, open to only a few. This is the ‘vision for Hinduism’ to which the title of this book refers.

Introduction

3

Regarding the worry that I might be a covert operative of Western cultural imperialism, either a missionary out to ‘soften’ Hinduism to make it more vulnerable to Christian proselytizing efforts, or a secular scholar out to write a controversial exposé of Hinduism in order to sell books and secure my place in the academy, my purpose in this introduction is to demonstrate, to the extent possible, that I am sincere when I call myself a Hindu and when I claim the right to speak from a Hindu faith position as a lay theologian in the Ramakrishna Ved›nta sa˙prad›ya. Many would of course argue that faith and theology are Christian terms that are inappropriate when applied to the Hindu tradition, and that my use of these terms is itself proof that my claim to be Hindu and to speak for at least a part of the Hindu tradition is illegitimate. I shall take up this argument later, within the main body of the book itself, saying here only that these terms have, for better or for worse, acquired sufficient generality in common academic usage to be applicable across traditional boundaries without carrying inappropriate cultural baggage into the traditions in which they are deployed. Such use of terminology with a Christian pedigree clearly requires great care and an explicit self-awareness regarding its potential dangers, not least among these being an inaccurate projection of Christian realities into the Hindu tradition, such as when the Veda is misconceived when it is referred to as ‘scripture’ and is then assumed to play the same role in Hinduism as the Bible in Christianity. If asked to defend my use of these terms, I would first express the hope that my work speaks for itself in this regard–that my cross-cultural use of terminology is justified by the fact that I have, indeed, exercised the requisite care and self-awareness in its use. But I would also add that this cross-cultural use of terminology is itself a part of the point I am making in this book: that Hinduism is a universal tradition, not confined to the culture from which it has emerged, and that the translation of Hindu terms into non-Indic idioms, albeit with care and sensitivity both to their original Indic contexts and the new contexts into which they are being translated, is essential to the survival and the spread of Hinduism as a global, and not a merely local, tribal, or ethnic tradition. For the reader who has no concerns about either my sincerity or the appropriateness of my use of originally Christian terms such as faith and theology to talk about Hinduism, I am writing this introduction simply to explain, to the extent that it is relevant to the thesis and the argument of this book, why I, an Irish American raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, have chosen to identify myself as a Hindu, and the understanding of the Hindu tradition that this self-identification entails.

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A Vision for Hinduism

That this information is potentially useful and its presentation not a mere act of self-indulgence is something I take to be true on philosophical and methodological grounds. If the broad movement of philosophical and cultural critique covered under the blanket term post-modern has established anything, it is that the ideal of scholarly objectivity that underlies much of modern academia is both unattainable and untenable. Any enquiry, but especially any normative enquiry, such as that found in this book, into the realms of meaning and truth, inevitably proceeds from some particular, value-laden perspective. All of us carry pre-philosophical baggage, baggage that consists of interests and assumptions that do not so much hinder our enquiry as make it possible. Indeed, it is this very ‘baggage’ of our prior experience that gives rise to the philosophical quest. I do not begin asking questions in a vacuum, but as an interested agent in a specific context that is a necessary condition for my enquiry, and which shapes its character. A stance of objectivity that pretends such ‘baggage’ does not exist, or that it is irrelevant to the search for knowledge, actually serves to obscure these deeper interests and assumptions which underlie one’s work. There is no God’s-eye point of view to which human beings have incontestable access and from which we can presume to speak.2 We do, however, have access, imperfect though such access may be, to the contents of our own consciousness, as well as a responsibility to be as open and honest as possible about our interests, assumptions, and agenda. Such openness is, as I see it, the post-modern equivalent to the modern stance of objectivity, inasmuch as it does the same work that objectivity was intended to do, only better. For it empowers the reader to interrogate more readily the author’s interests and assumptions without as much need to engage in a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and dig for these interests and assumptions ‘between the lines.’3 Such a stance of openness does not, of course, altogether obviate the need for a hermeneutics of suspicion, for it still remains the case that the author is not fully self-aware, and that unconscious biases will still colour the presentation of the material at hand, and the structure of the argument. But at least this stance does not deliberately obscure these with a veil of scientific neutrality. I am therefore presenting my background and my assumptions in this introduction to you, the reader, in the name of honesty and clarity. I have read and heard enough critiques which seek to dig out the hidden agendas and assumptions underlying various scholarly works that I hope to spare any future critics of my own the time and effort!

Introduction

5

My Story: From Roman Catholicism to Ramakrishna Ved›nta Several years ago, Douglas Brooks, another American Hindu theologian, coined the term W.A.S.H. or White Anglo-Saxon Hindu to refer to people like himself who, despite not having an Indian ethnic or national origin, nevertheless hold Hindu beliefs and engage in Hindu religious practices.4 Such people, though not Hindu by ethnicity or nationality–for the term Hindu continues to have these connotations–are still religiously Hindu. They may do daily devotional readings from Hindu sacred texts; practice some form of yoga or meditation; believe in reincarnation; perform regular pÒja, or devotional worship, directed toward a Hindu deity or deities; follow a vegetarian diet; live by the teachings of a Hindu guru, or spiritual teacher; or some combination or other of these practices. Idiosyncratic though such persons may be, both in our society of origin and in the religious community we have adopted, we are, Brooks would say, Hindus nonetheless–religious Hindus. In fact, though I make no such claims for myself, such Hindus can sometimes be more devout and more knowledgeable of Hindu traditions than many who are born Hindu. Some even take vows of celibacy, becoming sanny›sıs or sanny›sinıs, monks or nuns, in Hindu sa˙prad›yas, or teaching lineages. One such American Hindu monk, the late Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı, of the ÷aiva Siddh›nta tradition, established the journal Hinduism Today, a publication noteworthy–interestingly, given its American pedigree–for its orthodox and relatively conservative approach to most issues relating to Hinduism. Though, being an Irish American, I am more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon, Brooks’s term W.A.S.H. probably describes me as well as any term could. I am not Hindu if this term is intended to refer to an ethnic or a national identity. And though I have adopted many aspects of Indic culture–due in part to my love for it, but also in part to the fact that I am married to a Bengali Brahman–I believe it would be fair to say that I am culturally more North American than Indian, although both cultures have enriched my life immeasurably. I feel that giving up either would make me less complete. Both are intrinsic to my sense of self. Like many diasporic Indian Hindus, I regard myself as a cultural hybrid, partaking of two cultural universes. I grew up in a small town in rural Missouri, the only child of middle class, Roman Catholic parents, and I had a relatively normal, middle class, rural Midwestern American upbringing. But my early life was punctuated by tragedy. When I was ten years old, my father was injured in an accident, which rendered him quadriplegic. A year and a half later, he took his own life. These events affected me–and my worldview–profoundly.

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A Vision for Hinduism

But apart from this tragic turn of events in my early life, nothing about my family or the community where we lived should, on the face of it, have predisposed me towards Hinduism. No one in my family was particularly interested in it. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in India for three years– in Orissa–working for an agricultural development program sponsored by the University of Missouri. But we did not become close until I was an adult–indeed, until I was about to travel to India. I did not even meet any practicing Hindus until the year before I graduated from high school–the Gujarati family who ran the local motel. I have since married a Hindu, but my interest in Hinduism was well established by the time we met. In fact, at the time we met, I was already a graduate student studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Chicago, and privately engaging in a Hindu form of s›dhana, or spiritual practice. No particular person drew me to Hinduism. On the contrary, it is my interest in Hinduism that has drawn me to particular people. My deep and abiding interest in Hinduism–an interest that gradually evolved into a full-fledged religious commitment–can be traced back to the events surrounding my father’s death. For me, this tragic period marked a transition from a relatively carefree, small-town childhood to a period of serious reflection on the meaning of life, death, and suffering. The year and a half between my father’s injury and his death, as well as the longer period of mourning and reflection that followed these events, constituted my ‘dark night of the soul.’ I have learned to look upon this period–as both the Roman Catholic faith of my upbringing and the Hindu faith of my choosing have taught me to do–as a divine gift, as an opportunity for profound learning and spiritual growth. I look at this period as a rupture in the fabric of my life through which grace has flowed, and without which I would not be the person that I am today. But although this period of my life proved instrumental in my discovery of the Hindu dharma, my formal affiliation to Hinduism, and eventually to the Ramakrishna tradition, was something which occurred only gradually. My conversion was not sudden. This is not to say there were no dramatic moments or turning points. A major one was my discovery of the Bhagavad Gıt› at a local flea market. This was in 1983. I had just turned fourteen. A few months earlier, I had seen and been profoundly moved by Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi. Gandhi quickly became one of my heroes–along with J.R.R. Tolkien and George Harrison of the Beatles–and I read everything I could find about him. There were many references to the Gıt› in my Gandhi readings, and I was thinking on that very day, “I need to find that book.” Gandhi spoke so highly of it that I thought it must be truly important.

Introduction

7

Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. There, at the flea market, on top of a pile of paperbacks and old magazines was a copy of Prabhup›da’s richly illustrated Bhagavad Gıt›: As It Is. I sometimes tell people that this was the moment I became a ‘born again Hindu.’ Gandhi saw the Bhagavad Gıt› as one of the primary inspirations for his philosophy of saty›graha and ahi˙s›–of non-violent resistance to evil through clinging to the power of truth, or, as he called it, ‘soul force.’ Gandhi’s view of the world resonated deeply with own views and, strange as this may seem to some, with my understanding of Catholicism as well. My Roman Catholicism was strongly influenced by the life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, who remains my favourite Catholic saint. With Gandhi and St. Francis as my chosen role models, I was clearly drawn to a spirituality characterized by non-violence and gentleness toward all living beings, but also by a firm willingness to stand up against evil, even if it involved eccentric behaviour or being marginalized by society. These remain my core values even today. In terms of my politics, I am a left wing, tree-hugging, registered member of the Green Party. But my leftism is a leftism rooted not in secularism, but in a Gandhian spirituality. But returning to the Bhagavad Gıt›, happening upon this text at such an unexpected time and place–at a flea market sponsored by the local Methodist church–had, for me, the feel of divine intervention, as if the book had been placed there just for me to find. Upon first opening it to a seemingly random page, my gaze fell upon an illustration of a man who had died, surrounded by his mourning family. I was struck by how appropriate this scene was to my own situation. The death of my father was still a dark cloud that continued to overshadow the life of my family. In the illustration, gazing dispassionately at this sorrowful scene from a distance stood a Hindu sage who could perceive Lord Krishna dwelling within the hearts of the dead man and his family members. At the bottom of the page read the caption, ‘The wise lament neither for the living nor the dead,’ and a page number was indicated. Wasting no time, I turned to that page and found the caption was taken from the eleventh verse of the second chapter of the text. Reading this verse, as well as the ones that followed it, I was presented with the Gıt›’s teaching on death, which I found profoundly comforting and compelling. ‘There was never a time when you and I did not exist, nor is there any future when we shall cease to be. Just as a person discards a set of old clothes and puts on a new set, in the same way the soul, passing from youth to old age, discards the body and takes on a new one. The wise are not deluded by these changes.’5

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But dramatic though this moment was, it would be far more accurate to say that my awakening to Hinduism was the result of years of reflection and study, rather than of a single dramatic moment of synchronicity. This process of reflection was accompanied by a simultaneous growing away from the Catholic Church, in which I long intended, at least until my first year in college, to join the priesthood and become a theologian. I was a devout, though clearly quite unconventional, Roman Catholic throughout my adolescent years. I identified myself as a Catholic until roughly halfway through my undergraduate career at the University of Notre Dame, where I studied theology, along with a major in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies. During this period, I gradually went from calling myself a Roman Catholic to a Catholic-Hindu, and then, finally, a Hindu. But I was still not formally affiliated to a Hindu tradition. I was simply trying to describe to others, as accurately as I could, my worldview, which I gradually came to realize could not be reconciled with the teachings of the Church. One might think this should have been blindingly obvious. But I sought for a long time a kind of Gnostic reconciliation of my worldview with that of the Church by taking Catholic teachings as true on a metaphorical plane, as a symbolic code for deeper truths such as karma, rebirth, and liberation. Why this gradual change? Why was I drawn away from Catholicism? And why to Hinduism in particular? Shortly after my father died I began exploring the world’s religions, especially their views on death and the afterlife, and I began assimilating elements from different belief systems into my own–primarily from Hinduism, but also from Buddhism, Jainism, New Age thought, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Islam, the Baha’i Faith, and secular worldviews, such as modern science and Marxism, as well as existentialism. Consequently, my worldview was transformed–a process which has not ended, even though my most basic beliefs have remained quite stable. As a characterization of this process, I think it would be more correct to say that my originally Catholic worldview gradually expanded until it became my Hindu worldview, rather than that I switched worldviews at some discernible point in time. My attitude toward the Catholic Church is one of gratitude for my early spiritual formation, which ultimately prepared me for Hinduism. I am not the stereotypical, angry ex-Catholic. But why do I describe myself as Hindu and not merely as religiously eclectic? If my approach was simply to assimilate those elements that I liked from the variety of views represented in the world’s religions and philosophies, why call this eclectic assemblage Hindu? Is Hinduism not just one element in my mix of influences? Could I not also call myself a Buddhist? Or even an eclectic Gnostic Roman Catholic?

Introduction

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Indeed, I know many other spiritual seekers, including some who are practitioners of paths I would identify as Hindu–paths like Transcendental Meditation and Siddha Yoga–who deliberately do not choose to identify themselves as Hindu because they do not wish to be constrained by the boundaries of any particular tradition. Enjoying the freedom of religious eclecticism, of being able to pick and choose those elements of many traditions that they find most appealing, they have a sense that to identify with any one tradition would be to cut themselves off from the resources available in the others. Some even continue to identify themselves by the labels with which they grew up, seeing these labels more as markers of their upbringing than of their actual beliefs, while others do away with traditional labels altogether.6 What’s in a name anyway? And why, they ask themselves, should I be limited to the resources of only one tradition? A quick response to this question, of course, is that Hinduism, as I understand it, does not disallow such religious eclecticism. As someone who is religiously eclectic by nature, part of what appeals to me about Hinduism is the fact that Hinduism is itself very eclectic. A Hindu is not limited to the resources of one particular tradition, but is able to claim the spiritual inheritance of all humanity as her own. Setting aside the openness of the more radical Hindu pluralists, like Gandhi, to non-Hindu traditions such as Christianity and Islam, the massive variety internal to the Hindu tradition is itself evidence of an eclectic attitude. A sceptic can argue that it might also be evidence that a unitary Hindu tradition did not exist until Hinduism was defined by nineteenth century British scholars.7 But the freedom with which I have observed Hindus drawing upon their varied inheritance would still make my point valid. Vai„˚avas pay their respects to Lord ÷iva. ÷aivas pay their respects to Lord Vi„˚u. Hindus celebrate Jain holy days, with the Jains repaying the compliment. And invocations of the thousand names of any given deity include the names of the other major deities as well. Contemporary Hinduism is certainly eclectic in practice. But this response still begs the question, ‘Why Hinduism?’ in another sense. Why identify any single tradition as one’s own, even an eclectic one? Why does one need to call oneself anything at all? This is a good point. Because identities–even Hindu identities–can lie at the root of exclusionary practices, one could argue, as I have argued elsewhere, that the very notion of identity is a problematic one, being a fundamental prerequisite for intercommunal violence.8 At the same time, though, it is also true that in order to function in a society one still needs to make use of pre-existing labels, however inadequate and problematic these labels may be, in order to make distinctions and to communicate clearly with others.

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When someone says to me, “I am a Christian,” for example, she signals with that one word that she embraces a variety of metaphysical and ethical doctrines that distinguish her worldview from others. The word ‘Christian’ certainly underdetermines the issue. What kind of a Christian is she? A Catholic? A Protestant? What are her political views? Are there parts of the tradition with which she feels discomfort? Similarly, I choose to say “I am a Hindu,” in part because this term, better than any other, encapsulates the beliefs that I hold and that characterise my worldview. There is much that it does not convey. And it can even obscure. (I do not, for example, believe in the caste system.) But it certainly distinguishes my beliefs from mainstream Christianity, for example, or Judaism, or Islam. What are these beliefs? And why would they lead me to part company with the tradition of my upbringing to adopt what would be considered, from the perspective of that upbringing, a foreign faith? Two issues led to my eventual shift from being a self-identified Roman Catholic to being a self-identified Hindu in the Ramakrishna tradition. The first of these issues was rebirth, or reincarnation. Over the course of my search, I have had numerous occasions to ask myself what my most fundamental beliefs are, which views I hold to be foundational to my worldview to such an extent that I take them to be non-negotiable. For me, these views consist of: (a) a belief in a principle of universal justice, or karma, accompanied by (b) a belief in a robust version of the doctrine of rebirth, (c) a belief in a benevolent divine force–in a God–directing the activities of karma and using karma to guide all beings to an ultimate end, and (d) a belief in that ultimate end itself: moks‹a, or liberation from the rebirth process, the culmination of our finite spatio-temporal existence. This view is distinctively Hindu, not only for its affirmation of karma, rebirth, and liberation, for these views are shared by Jains, Buddhists, and many New Agers. But it is also a theistic view, conceiving of karma not as an impersonal principle of cause and effect, but as the primary instrument for the education of the soul, by which the divine reality guides us to our ultimate end.9 In time, I found that my belief in rebirth had such a profound impact on how I perceived a variety of issues that continuing to be a part of a community that explicitly rejected this idea proved to be a very frustrating struggle–a struggle that I finally gave up. My belief in reincarnation, more than any other issue, is what eventually led me to part not only with the Roman Catholic Church, but with Christianity as a whole; for, despite the occasional heretical exceptions, like the ancient Gnostics, Christians have explicitly rejected this doctrine for roughly the last 1500 years.10

Introduction

11

Why has rebirth been so central both to my worldview and to my understanding of Hinduism? My commitment to this doctrine arises from my conviction that it reconciles two essential claims about the divine character–that God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful. I take God’s infinite justice to mean that what we do in this life matters, and that we experience the rewards of our good deeds and suffer from our mistakes in order that we may learn from them. I take God’s infinite mercy to mean that we have infinite second chances to learn our lessons, that there is no point at which God gives up on us–no hell, in other words, other than what we create for ourselves. And one lifetime is simply not enough time to work out all of our issues and reach divine perfection. But what if there is no afterlife? The materialist belief in no afterlife, I have always believed, makes a mockery of our highest moral and spiritual aspirations. It implies an absurd universe. As a human being, I need to experience my life as meaningful, as purposeful. It may, indeed, be that the universe is absurd. Let us say that it is. But then it does not matter if we create a pleasant illusion of meaning for ourselves. And if this sense of meaning is not an illusion, then by believing in it, we open ourselves to its transformative power in our lives. This is my version of Pascal’s wager.11 Because I conceive of karma theistically–that is, because I see karma as the divine coordination of events with our own actions in such a way as to optimise our potential for spiritual growth–it is the Hindu tradition that has always had the strongest attraction for me, out of all the religions I have studied. I see truth, beauty, and goodness in all traditions. But the most adequate tradition to my own worldview is the one that affirms all of these truths simultaneously–the reality of God, karma, rebirth, and mok„a. Besides rebirth, the second doctrinal issue that finally led to my selfidentification with Hinduism was religious pluralism. I often heard the claim as I was growing up that believers in faiths other than Christianity were doomed to eternal damnation. I also found that as a Roman Catholic in a heavily evangelical Protestant region, this charge of being damned was often levelled at me personally, as well as at my church. That the practitioners of all other religions were going to hell simply because they were practitioners of other religions, no matter how morally upright or even heroic their behaviour might be, was profoundly at odds with the loving nature of the God to which my Franciscan and Gandhian spirituality was oriented.12 I was deeply moved when I read such words of Gandhi as, ‘Religions are different roads converging upon the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal?’13

12

A Vision for Hinduism

The official stance of the Catholic Church on other religions, known as inclusivism, is the view that there is partial truth in many faiths, but that the truth to which they all point is the truth of Christ as revealed in the Roman Catholic Church. But this always struck me as being too much like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, in which the earth lay at the centre of the universe. Could not a Muslim make the very same claim about other religions leading to Islam, for example? Does it not make more sense to see the various religions as all pointing beyond themselves to a common truth in which they all participate, in varying ways and to varying degrees? When I first read John Hick in graduate school and found him using the same imagery, referring to religious pluralism as a ‘Copernican revolution’ in theology, I was immediately drawn to his way of thinking.14 I have always had a pluralistic temperament. When faced with multiple options, I prefer to incorporate, as much as possible, the best of all of them into my final choice. I prefer to think in terms of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or.’ In my childhood I was interested in the origins of life and the universe, finding explanations for these mysteries in my science books in the theories of evolution and the Big Bang. At the same time, I was being raised in a Catholic home and was exposed to the biblical doctrine of creation. This, I think, was the origin of my pluralistic approach to life’s big questions, and a sense that, true though the teachings of the church might be, they were not the whole truth. Rather than seeing the scientific and religious accounts as competing and mutually exclusive I preferred to see them as different parts of the same story. Fundamentally, my approach to plurality has not changed. All perspectives yield a piece of the truth. Hinduism, at least as presented in the books I read while growing up– books like K.M. Sen’s Hinduism and Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi– seemed to be far more attuned to my pluralistic inclinations than Roman Catholicism, even in its most open and inclusive modes of thinking, such as in the works of Thomas Merton. I now realise the view of Hinduism with which I was presented was heavily influenced by the Ramakrishna tradition and that not all Hindus are religious pluralists. There has been a history of polemic and debate in the Hindu tradition every bit as critical of other views as Christian writings about ‘heretics’ and ‘heathens.’ And there has been violence, particularly in recent decades, between the Hindu and Muslim communities. But the ideal of pluralism expressed by Gandhi and Ramakrishna, and that most Hindus whom I have subsequently met take to be definitive of their tradition, seemed to me most adequate to the God of infinite justice and mercy that I believed in, who would give all people a chance to know the truth and reach salvation.

Introduction

13

As I mentioned earlier, when I went to college, my intention was to pursue a career as a theologian in the Catholic tradition. I believed, up to that point, that my various unorthodox views could finally be reconciled with Church teaching by symbolic or metaphorical interpretation of these teachings to better fit my worldview. But as I studied theology with some of the best minds in the Church, it became increasingly clear to me that this was not the case. If I became a Catholic theologian, I would either be in constant conflict with the Church or be required to keep my real beliefs hidden. To be a theologian, I would need to find another tradition. I began to search for another spiritual home. It was one thing to be religiously eclectic–a ‘Catholic-Hindu.’ But I had a longing for community, a need connect with those who shared my views and values. Although I knew my worldview was closer to Hinduism than to any other tradition, I was not sure if this was enough to warrant calling myself a Hindu. My interaction with actual, practicing Hindus had been quite limited, both in Missouri and at Notre Dame, and it seemed that being Hindu was tied to being Indian. I explored both New Age and Baha’i beliefs, and I seriously contemplated joining the Baha’i Faith at one point.15 But as I studied many faiths, I kept returning to Hinduism, finding that it, more than any other religion, was the one with which I felt most at home. I was deeply drawn to and am still heavily influenced by Buddhism. But theism is a very central part of my worldview. My sense was that this was not so for most Buddhists–not for Therav›da Buddhists, certainly, but also not for Westerners who adopt Buddhism specifically because they are looking for a non-theistic spirituality. (Although classical Mah›y›na views on the nature of Buddha are not unlike certain Hindu views of God.16) Finally, during my senior year in college, I met a professor who was a practitioner of a particular type of yoga that was based on Hindu teachings. Attending weekly satsangs, or spiritual gatherings at his home with a few other students, faculty, and people from the local community, I felt I had at last found my spiritual niche. The core teachings of this group were in perfect harmony with my belief system, the atmosphere of its gatherings friendly and non-judgemental. I soon began practicing this Hindu form of s›dhana.

But did this make me Hindu? I felt that it did. But not all practitioners of this type of yoga identify themselves as Hindu. (In fact some are even Roman Catholic priests and nuns.) Its teachings, though, are based entirely upon Hindu traditions like Ved›nta and T›ntra. Taking up this practice and associating with this particular community made me feel more confident in identifying myself as Hindu.

14

A Vision for Hinduism

My confidence in my ‘Hindu-ness’ was tested, though, when I began my career as a graduate student at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Although I had left the Catholic Church, I had not given up my aspiration to be a theologian. My intention when I started graduate school was to become a Hindu theologian. But I was discouraged from this path by some on the basis of the claim that I could not be a member of the Hindu community, not having been born into the caste system, much less take up a career as one of its representative thinkers. I began to despair of ever finding a spiritual home. I also came to fear the academy of religion might not be the place for someone with my beliefs and inclinations. Yet I loved nothing better than the study of religion. I persevered in my studies. I should note, however, that the discouragement I felt came from other students more than from my professors, who, though they did not endorse my self-identification as a Hindu, nonetheless encouraged me to pursue my ideas with intellectual honesty and academic rigour. As with the Catholic Church, my attitude toward my teachers at the University of Chicago is one of gratitude. I cannot say I was treated with hostility by my teachers, but with kindness and encouragement. The peer pressure against my selfidentification as a Hindu, however, was considerable. I think it is worth noting that even at present, the only people who have expressed objections to my identifying myself as a Hindu have been non-Hindus. Hindus, in contrast, have welcomed me with open arms, even treating me as a special and privileged member of the community. But in my first year in graduate school this was not yet the case. I found that ‘coming out’ as a Hindu could quickly prejudice other scholars, giving them the impression that I was not academically serious. I was also discovering the widespread hostility to any sort of religious commitment that pervades much of the contemporary academy–including the academy of religion. I began to ‘go underground’ with my beliefs and my identification with Hinduism, which I had been given reason to doubt. As I developed my intellectual identity and the project that would become my doctoral dissertation, I presented my views not as Hindu views, based on a religious commitment, but as religiously neutral views based on Alfred North Whitehead’s theistic process philosophy. I found in Whitehead’s thought, which holds a position of prominence in this book, a conceptual vocabulary with which I could express my Hindu beliefs in an idiom more accessible to people with a cultural background rooted in Western, rather than Indic, modes of thinking and living. It seemed, and seems today, an excellent tool for communicating Hindu concepts to a global audience. I soon became a committed Whiteheadian, as well as a committed Hindu.

Introduction

15

I also discovered, while reading the late Bimal Krishna Matilal’s Logic, Language and Reality, the Jain doctrines of relativity, which seemed to be a perfect expression of the pluralistic methodology I had been following since my childhood, when I resolved, at least to my own satisfaction, the seeming incompatibilities between religion and science by seeing each as expressing a partial aspect of a larger reality. My dissertation project, part of which is reflected in this book, became the integration of the Jain methodology for resolving differences into the process metaphysic that I found so compelling, using this synthesis to ground religious pluralism. Near the end of my second year as a graduate student the single most momentous event of my life–and probably the one most relevant to my self-identification with Hinduism–occurred. I met and fell in love with the woman whom I would marry and who would become my best friend and confidant in all matters spiritual and mundane–and who also happened to be a Hindu. Less than a month after meeting, we decided to get married, which we did in India, in a ceremony performed by a priest of the Ärya Sam›j.17 A prerequisite for marrying through the Ärya Sam›j was conversion to Hinduism. Interestingly, both my fiancée and her father were initially opposed to this. As followers of the Ramakrishna tradition, both believed conversion was unnecessary, since all paths, sincerely practiced, lead to liberation. They suggested we try getting married elsewhere, since our reasons for wanting to be married in the Ärya Sam›j were, frankly, purely practical. Ärya Sam›j weddings are relatively simple and inexpensive (as Hindu weddings go). But I saw this as a chance to formally and publicly express my allegiance to Hinduism. I was formally received into the Hindu Dharma on the day that my wife and I were married, becoming a Hindu through the Vedic rituals of the Ärya Sam›j.18 In the eleven years and a half years (as of this writing) since my formal conversion, I have made pilgrimages to Vai„˚o Devı and to N›thdw›ra, and I have even been admitted into Padman›bhasw›my temple, in Kerala, where non-Hindus are not allowed entry. (I was admitted on the basis of my Ärya Sam›j certificate of conversion. I do not approve of the exclusion of non-Hindus and would have boycotted this temple, but I wanted to test the validity of my conversion with more orthodox Hindus.) Though my presence in Hindu settings evokes curiosity, and I frequently encounter the assumption, on meeting Hindus, that I am not Hindu, I have yet to find Hindus hostile to the notion of my being a member of their community. On the contrary, I consistently find the reactions of Hindus on discovering my religious self-identification to be very positive and welcoming.

16

A Vision for Hinduism

Upon returning to Chicago after two years in India, I remained fairly low-key, as mentioned above, about my religious beliefs, given the hostility I had encountered to the idea of my being Hindu. I did not lie about what I believed, but I did not present my beliefs as specifically Hindu. But since receiving my doctoral degree and moving to rural Pennsylvania, where my wife and I both teach at a small college (she teaches Japanese language, I teach Religious Studies, and we both teach Asian Studies), we have both become active members of the Hindu temple in Harrisburg, as well as the K›lı temple of the greater Washington DC region. I have also taught in the Sunday school at the Harrisburg temple and have been very warmly received in the community. My wife and I are both publicly identified with Hinduism, and we have even jointly performed public pÒjas for the small group of Hindu students at our college. The most recent and significant step we have undertaken with regard to our spiritual lives has been taking dık„a, or initiation, in the Ramakrishna tradition, under a guru whom we love and trust, and to whom we both felt spontaneously drawn on our first meeting with him. Being now formally affiliated to this lineage which has strongly shaped both of our perceptions of Hinduism for most of our lives–my wife’s because it was her father’s tradition, and mine because the presentation of Hinduism in the West has been so heavily shaped by the teachings of Ramakrishna and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda–we both feel more firmly established in our practice of Hinduism. We are now, as I like to say, ‘plugged in’ to a sa˙prad›ya, or teaching lineage, with all of the advantages for spiritual growth that such contact brings. Having grown up in the Roman Catholic faith, I have always had a strong sense of the importance of an apostolic succession, a lineage of living teachers going back to an original wellspring of inspiration–a great being like Jesus, the Buddha, or Ramakrishna. It is this sense of connection that I felt was lost when I could no longer identify myself as a Roman Catholic, but which I now feel I have regained. Simply being eclectic in my spirituality did not produce, for me, the same sense of connectedness to real spiritual depth. Such loss of connection seemed to be the price of freedom, and was a cause of deep spiritual anxiety. Now, however, this sense of connection is accompanied by an even greater sense of commitment and stability than I felt in the Church, given my comfort with the worldview of the tradition, as well as the tradition’s emphasis on rationality, intellectual independence and freedom of thought. With its theistic orientation, its approach to the ideas of karma, rebirth, and liberation, and its religious pluralism, this is the tradition that I feel I was born to inhabit.

Introduction

17

I have also found, through my various associations with the sw›mıs and pravr›jikas, the monks and nuns, of the Ramakrishna Order, that my ideas and approach to spirituality are welcome in this tradition. I am no longer in a tradition with which I feel at odds. At last, I have truly come home. My Hinduism: Ramakrishna Ved›nta The term Hinduism is notoriously vague. Its very meaning, and even the appropriateness of its continued usage, is a topic of ongoing contestation in the academy of religion. In fact, the only term that is more vague or contested in the academy of religion seems to be the term religion itself. 19 So what do I mean when I call myself Hindu? Hinduism encompasses many traditions, some of which share very little in terms of common beliefs or practices. But with the exception of only one of the ancient philosophical sects, the materialist Lok›yata or Carv›ka sect, the common thread that unites these traditions is a belief in karma, rebirth, and liberation–beliefs which, as I have already mentioned, are central to my own worldview. Because the term Hindu originally refers to the people and practices indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, I see it as encompassing all of the Indic traditions that affirm this common belief. It thus includes Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, as well as the Vedic and the popular theistic traditions with which Hinduism is more conventionally identified in scholarly literature. Because I share this common belief and am connected to a living Indic teaching lineage, I too am Hindu. The specific Hindu tradition to which I am affiliated, the Ramakrishna tradition, is a relatively young tradition, being traced to the great Bengali saint and mystic, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, whose short life stretched from only 1836 to 1886. But its influence on subsequent understandings of Hinduism, particularly in the West, has been enormous, due largely to the work of the monks and the nuns of the Ramakrishna Order–most prominently Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, who is widely credited with being the first Hindu teacher to bring Hinduism to Europe and America on a large scale (though he was preceded by members of the Br›hmo Sam›j, and Hindu texts had been available for some time when he made his first visit).20 The Ramakrishna tradition is now downplayed in much contemporary scholarly literature due to the disproportionate role it has played in shaping perceptions of Hinduism. And I share the view of those scholars who are seeking to revise these perceptions for the sake of presenting a richer and more adequate picture of the diversity of the Hindu traditions than a onesided presentation, through the eyes of only one tradition, can provide.

18

A Vision for Hinduism

At the same time, though, it was the picture of Hinduism shaped by this tradition that was the one to which I was drawn throughout my youth, and whose worldview I find reflects my own so well. It is still a tradition, in my opinion, with much to recommend it. The Ramakrishna tradition sees itself as a synthesis of all the previous forms of Hinduism–and ultimately of all religions–which it presents as so many varied paths to a common destination of liberation from the process of rebirth. This tradition is also known as Ramakrishna Ved›nta, and often simply as Ved›nta. I am going to try to avoid the latter usage because it is one of the usages that has led to the simplistic identification of all forms of Ved›nta with this particular tradition. Ved›nta is a philosophical theology which seeks to present the inner meaning–the ‘goal,’ ‘end,’ or anta–of the Veda, the sacred texts of the Brahmanical traditions constituting Hinduism as conventionally conceived. There are many schools of Ved›nta, each of which is associated with a great ›c›rya, or teacher, like the Advaita Ved›nta of ÷aºkar›c›rya, the Vi±i„˛›dvaita Ved›nta of R›m›nuj›c›rya, and the Dvaita Ved›nta of M›dhv›c›rya. Many other systems of Ved›nta exist as well. Ramakrishna Ved›nta is often identified with Advaita Ved›nta. But as a number of scholars–including, prominently, Anantanand Rambachan–have shown, there are important differences between these two traditions.21 In Ramakrishna Ved›nta, for example, the Veda is conceived as the record of the experiences of enlightened sages, or r‹s‹is, and its authority to have only a provisional nature, acting as a guide to the experience of ultimate reality. This guide is no longer necessary if one has the enlightenment experience of nirvikalpa sam›dhi by practicing one or more of the four yogas: karma yoga, jñ›na yoga, bhakti yoga, and r›j› yoga. This view is distinct from the traditional view that the Veda is an independent and sufficient pram›˚a, or basis for the knowledge, or jñ›na, that leads to–and indeed constitutes– liberation, at least according to an Advaitic understanding of moks‹a. For Ramakrishna Ved›nta, direct experience, or anubh›va, confirms the truth of the Veda, whereas for more traditional forms of Ved›nta, like Advaita, the Veda confirms the truth–the veridical nature–of experience. For this reason, Ramakrishna Ved›nta can also be referred to as modern Ved›nta–and sometimes as Neoved›nta–in contrast with more traditional, premodern varieties of Ved›nta. For what distinguishes modernity from tradition, or premodernity, is precisely a privileging of direct experience– and of the reasoning based on that experience–over the authority of a text, institution, teacher, or oral tradition. ‘Modern’ in this sense need not mean simply ‘new,’ for there are precedents in ancient Indic texts for the kind of privileging of experience that one finds in the Ramakrishna tradition.22

Introduction

19

From the perspective the Ramakrishna tradition, texts, teachers, and so forth are necessary guides to experience, and faith in them is a prerequisite for the direct knowledge that experience brings. But they ultimately exist to be superseded, for they point beyond themselves to a more profound knowledge that it is their purpose to convey. This is also a very Buddhist understanding of the nature of a spiritual teacher and tradition, illustrated by such examples as the Zen story of the finger pointing at the moon. The Buddha is the finger pointing at the moon, which is the direct experience of reality. If the moon is seen, then the finger is no longer needed. It is also an understanding with some precedent in the Hindu tradition, such as in the Bhagavad-Gıt›, in which the person with knowledge is compared to a flooded countryside. What need does such a person have to go to the well, which is the Veda?23 Beyond its spiritual methodology of direct experience, Ramakrishna Ved›nta is also distinct from Advaita and other forms of Ved›nta in terms of its worldview. Again, Ramakrishna Ved›nta conceives of itself as a synthesis of all previous forms of Ved›nta. The perspectives of the various traditional systems of Ved›nta are conceived in Ramakrishna Ved›nta not as contradictory and incompatible worldviews–as they have traditionally conceived of each other, in their many polemical writings–but as different, and equally valid, frames of reference for perceiving and for experiencing the same ultimate reality. And in keeping with its spiritual methodology of direct experience, this pluralistic claim is based on the direct experiences of the tradition’s founder, Sri Ramakrishna, who is said to have arrived at the same experience of enlightenment by practicing the s›dhanas associated with the major Hindu traditions, plus Christianity and Islam. The religious pluralism of Ramakrishna Ved›nta is based on these experiences, perceived as experimental proof of the validity of the world’s major religions. So when I identify myself as a Hindu, I am signalling, first of all, that I believe in the central teaching of karma, rebirth, and liberation that unites all the various ‘Hindu’–in the sense of ‘Indic’–traditions. I am not myself Indic, by ethnicity or nationality, but my religious worldview is. I am, in other words, to use Brooks’s terminology, religiously Hindu. My religious practice is also Hindu. I have taken dık„a under a guru in a teaching lineage, or sa˙prad›ya, that is traced back to an enlightened being. I meditate as I have been taught by my guru and I perform regular pÒja, or worship, devoted to forms of the one supreme divinity which are widely recognised as Hindu–Lord Ga˚e±a, Lord Vis‹˚u, Lord ÷iva, and of course the Goddesses, M› Saraswatı, M› Laks‹mı, M› Durg›, and M› K›lı. I see these deities, in keeping with my tradition, as aspects of one God.

20

A Vision for Hinduism

Most relevantly to this book, I also affirm religious pluralism, again, as taught by the gurus of my lineage. My daily devotions include not only the conventionally Hindu deities I have just mentioned, but also Ramakrishna, the Holy Mother Sharada Devi, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ, devotion to whom I have never abandoned, despite the fact that I no longer practice the Christian religion as it is conventionally understood. (However I do suspect that my beliefs and practices may not be much different than those of the early Gnostic Christians, a heritage later suppressed by the Church.) Finally, and also in keeping with the teaching of my tradition, I hold these beliefs and engage in these practices not out of blind faith–in other words, not because they are in keeping with the teaching of my tradition–but because they are in harmony with my reason and my own experience. And I hope to show in this book, through my use of the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, that the worldview that forms the basis of these beliefs is both rational–in at least the sense of being internally coherent– and universal, in the sense of being available to anyone, without regard for their cultural background or ethnicity. I find it striking that Whitehead, operating in a cultural matrix considerably different from that of ancient India, still developed a metaphysical system with a variety of substantive resemblances to the traditional theistic forms of Ved›nta (in particular, the Vi±i„˛›dvaita of R›m›nuj›c›rya, a resemblance noted by other scholars).24 The Ramakrishna tradition’s vision for Hinduism is a global vision, not limited to any particular culture, ethnicity, or nationality. It is this vision for Hinduism that I have found compelling and that I have adopted as my own. Conclusion: Why I Have Written this Book This is who I am and this is the perspective from which I will address the issues of Hindu identity and religious pluralism in this book. I am not a covert Christian theologian out to convert Hindus to Christianity. On the contrary, I grew away from Christianity due to a lengthy process of study, reflection, and argumentation that, to my mind, was conclusive. In spite of ‘u-turn’ theories or other doubts that some might try to raise about my loyalties, my non-identification with Christianity is irrevocable–though not incompatible with openness to what I take to be the Christian tradition’s important truths and insights, or awareness of the ways that my upbringing within it continues to influence and to enrich my worldview and modes of expression, through terms like faith, theology, etc. As I see it, Ramakrishna Ved›nta allows for openness to all traditions, including Christianity.

Introduction

21

Nor, on the other hand, am I a secular scholar of religion looking at Hinduism as an outsider–though I am aware that I occupy a kind of ‘third space’ as both an insider and an outsider to the tradition, having come to it from the outside and appreciating what it means to do so.25 I am neither culturally nor ethnically Indian. I am an Irish American, raised in the Catholic faith, but spiritually eclectic, with a worldview with a Hindu deep structure, who has formed intimate personal ties to the Hindu community–or at least to a particular segment of the community. For I am well aware of the internal diversity of Hinduism, and the fact that most of the Hindus with whom I have had interaction belong to an elite group, highly educated and heavily influenced by modern Western modes of life and thought. I see this cultural hybridity, though, as a strength rather than a weakness, as providing a vantage point from which the best elements of both traditions can be integrated into a perspective with the strengths of both. Finally, I am an initiate of the Ramakrishna tradition, speaking from within my tradition, but not claiming to speak for it, as a representative of the Ramakrishna Mission or Vedanta Society. The views expressed in this book do not represent any official stance of any religious organization or institution, though I have endeavoured to be true to what I take to be the essential teachings of the Ramakrishna tradition. I am a seeker carrying forward a lifelong process of thinking through the implications of who I am and what I believe, a process of which this book is simply the latest manifestation. This is why I mentioned earlier that I see myself as a lay theologian in the Ramakrishna tradition. I am not a sanny›sı and I am not operating in an official capacity on behalf of the tradition, and I am quite prepared for the possibility that not all in the tradition will agree with me. Why this book in particular? Why am I taking up the issues of religious pluralism and Hindu identity? Why am I making my private thoughts on these issues a matter for public scrutiny? Hinduism is a tradition in which I feel at home, odd though this may seem given my background and the culture of my upbringing. I may say I have adopted Hinduism. But it is equally true that Hinduism has adopted me. The Hindu community–or at least the segment of it with which I have been associated–has provided a very warm and welcoming environment in which I can pursue my spiritual aspirations, aspirations best described by the Hindu tradition itself, with its concepts of karma, sa˙s›ra, and moks‹a, its view of the nature of divinity as one-in-many, its multiple paths to realisation, and so on. I am moved by its vivid imagery, its devotional music, its artwork, and its architecture, all of which speak to my soul in ways that defy description.

22

A Vision for Hinduism

I am therefore profoundly disturbed when I see this tradition that has enriched my life in so many ways being exploited by political movements in India in ways that lead to mob violence and the cultivation of hatred and suspicion between communities. My objection is not to Hinduism being involved in politics. All religious belief systems have political implications. But what kind of politics should emerge from Hinduism? The politics of communal violence are certainly not in keeping with the Hinduism of Sri Ramakrishna and Mahatma Gandhi. It is true, as some Hindu nationalists might retort, that the Hindus have not been alone in fomenting communal violence. In fact, no community is innocent in this regard anywhere in the world, and India is no exception. Some might claim they are defending Hinduism. But what does it mean to defend a tradition by violating its central precepts of ahi˙s› and sarvadharma-sama-bh›va, non-violence and pluralism? How is Hinduism being ‘defended’ when it becomes identified in the minds of the rest of the world with bigotry and intolerance? The response to violence against the Hindu community should not be more violence against innocent members of the other community, but law and order, and recourse to democratic judicial and political processes, administered without regard for religious affiliation. A crime is a crime, regardless of the identity of either perpetrator or victim. Increasingly, one encounters the assumption in the academy of religion that if one identifies oneself as Hindu, then one is an advocate of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. One also finds a growing number of attacks on the idea of Hinduism as an intrinsically pluralistic tradition, attacks coming both from outside the community and from within. These are some of the poisonous fruits of the association of Hinduism with communal politics. The time is therefore ripe–indeed, I think it may be long overdue–for a reassertion of the pluralistic vision with which many Hindus still identify our tradition. In a world of ever increasing inter-religious violence, I have written this book in the conviction that the pluralistic vision for Hinduism expressed by the Ramakrishna tradition is an important one not only for the future of Hinduism, but for all traditions. In the Hebrew scriptures God tells the people of Israel, “I formed you and set you as a covenant for the people, a light for all the nations.”26 In our contemporary era, marked by intense and violent inter-religious conflict which, combined with our technologies of destruction, has the real possibility of ending life on earth, I believe it is Hinduism, with its teachings of non-violence and religious pluralism, that has the greatest potential to act as a light for all the nations, and a model of inter-religious harmony and unity in diversity. This is my vision for Hinduism.

1 THE CONTESTED FUTURE OF HINDUISM Nationalism, Pluralism, and the Construction of a Hindu Identity

Reasserting Hindu Religious Pluralism: A Hindu Alternative to Hindutva Shortly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December, 1992 by Hindu nationalists–a mosque many Hindus believe to have been built on the remains of a Hindu temple commemorating the birthplace of Lord R›ma–Hindu author Shashi Tharoor gave a lecture at the Indian Consulate in New York City in which he presented a critical analysis of this event, an event which precipitated Hindu-Muslim riots across South Asia, resulting in hundreds of Hindu and Muslim deaths and the destruction of dozens of Hindu temples, in reprisal, in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This event is seen by many as marking a low point in Hindu-Muslim relations in India, and an indicator of the dangers of Hindu communal assertiveness. According to Tharoor’s account, “A number of Hindutva sympathisers turned up for the question-and-answer session that was to follow, prepared to denounce the ‘pseudo-secularism’ that would underlie my critique.” In other words, it was assumed that since Tharoor was going to critique the Babri Masjid demolition that he would be advancing a position antagonistic to Hinduism, and his audience came prepared for a debate. These Hindutva sympathizers, however, as well as the secularists in the audience, were in for a surprise, for Tharoor’s critique was not a secular one:

24

A Vision for Hinduism Instead I spoke as a believing Hindu–and I spoke passionately of my shame that this could have been done by people claiming to be acting in the name of my faith. I had prided myself on belonging to a religion of astonishing breadth and range of belief; a religion that acknowledged all ways of worshiping God as equally valid– indeed, the only major religion in the world that did not claim to be the only true religion. Hindu fundamentalism was a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare the goondas [ruffians, criminals] of Ayodhya reduce the soaring majesty of the Vedas and Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics? Why should any Hindu allow them to diminish Hinduism to the raucous self-glorification of the football hooligan, to take a religion of awe-inspiring tolerance and shrink it into a chauvinist slogan?1

Two radically different visions of Hinduism are in competition for the loyalty of Hindus today–the vision of the Hindutva sympathisers in Shashi Tharoor’s audience and that offered by Tharoor himself. This book is an extended argument for a version of Tharoor’s vision, a vision increasingly embattled both from within the Hindu community and from without. It is an argument presented from the point of view of a non-Indian convert to Hinduism–specifically, to the Ramakrishna tradition. It takes the form of a theological re-formulation of the ideal of religious pluralism which Hindus like Tharoor and myself take to be central to Hinduism. The Hindu nationalist vision, as expressed by such figures as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadhashiva Golwalkar, and promoted by such organizations as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Shiv Sena, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), typically conceives of Hinduness (or Hindutva) as co-extensive with Indian-ness.2 To be Hindu is to be Indian and to be Indian is in some sense to be Hindu. This conception of Hindu identity has faced a great deal of criticism, especially from those seeking to defend the secular character of the Indian nation-state.3 Because it questions the Indian-ness of non-Hindu Indians (like Indian Christians and Muslims), this view has been accused of fuelling communal tensions in the subcontinent, marginalising, as it does, a large part of the Indian populace; for if to be Indian is to be Hindu, then nonHindu Indians are rendered ‘foreign.’ But this view also disallows Hinduness to non-Indians–converts to Hinduism who are not Indian either by nationality or ethnicity. We are thus excluded from full participation in the Hindu tradition, being denied entry, for example, to certain temples.4

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There is also what I call a ‘soft’ version of Hindu nationalism that does allow for conversion to Hinduism by non-Indians, but which also requires a good deal of ‘Indianisation,’ such as the adoption of an Indian name.5 Tharoor’s vision, expressed by such figures of the contemporary Hindu tradition as Sri Ramakrishna and Mahatma Gandhi, conceives of Hinduism as an ‘eternal’ or ‘universal’ religion–the San›tana Dharma.6 This vision of Hinduism is pluralistic and all-inclusive. It conceives of all religions as paths to a common goal. On this understanding, Hinduism has nothing to fear from other religions or other ideologies, for all can find a place in its expansive worldview. On this understanding, we are all in a sense Hindus. This view of Hinduism has been criticised for the logical incoherence of its claim that ‘all religions are the same,’ as well as on political grounds. The Hindu nationalist camp has condemned it for ‘softening’ Hinduism when it is most in need of defence from the forces of secularism, militant Islam, and aggressively evangelizing Christianity. Sita Ram Goel, a Hindu nationalist author, has even derided Ramakrishna and Gandhi as ‘traitors’ to the cause of Hinduism.7 Even non-Indian converts to the tradition who disavow the title ‘Hindu nationalist’ have jumped on the anti-pluralist bandwagon. A prominent American voice for Hinduism, Frank Morales, has criticised what he calls ‘radical universalism,’ which he traces, rather bizarrely, to Christian influence on Ramakrishna and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda.8 Non-Hindus, on the other hand, have also rejected this view, seeing it as a subtle manifestation of Hindu imperialism, and even as an expression of Hindu triumphalism. For there are Hindu nationalists who have argued for the superiority of Hinduism on the grounds of its pluralistic vision and all-embracing tolerance of diverse views, and then claimed, paradoxically, that less tolerant traditions should not be tolerated in India. Golwalkar, for example, writes that, “The spirit of broad catholicism, generosity, toleration, truth, sacrifice and love for all life, which characterises the average Hindu mind not wholly vitiated by Western influence, bears eloquent testimony to the greatness of Hindu culture.” He follows this assertion with the claim that, “The non-Hindu peoples of Hindustan [India]…must stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment–not even citizens’ rights.”9 I have heard the same argument repeated by contemporary Hindu nationalists on many occasions, always with the same mixture of amusement and horror–amusement at the fact that the obvious contradiction it involves can remain invisible to its exponents, and horror at its real-life implications for religious minorities in India. This is the dark side of Hindu religious pluralism.10

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A Vision for Hinduism

But it is not at all clear that Hindu religious pluralism must necessarily be triumphalist, even if there are Hindus who put it to triumphalist rhetorical uses. It can also simply be a truth claim which many Hindus, like Tharoor, take to be constitutive of their Hinduism. There have been and continue to be Hindus whose pluralistic understanding of Hinduism has been sincere, and not connected with attempts to assert the superiority of Hinduism over other religions, as evidenced in their dealings with people of other communities. I can cite the example of my father-in-law in New Delhi, a devotee of Ramakrishna who regularly worships in a Catholic church, a mosque, and a gurdwara, as well as at a K›lı mandir and at numerous other Hindu temples. He is not, so far as I can tell, exhibiting Hindu triumphalism. In his own mind, he is exhibiting the truth that God is one but comes in many forms, and that we could all get along better if we understood this. Such is the sensibility that informs this book. Arguing that Hindu nationalism is not only destructive to communal relations, but that it also prevents Hinduism from emerging as a world religion in the true sense of the term, I shall present a vision of Hinduism as a tradition that can show the world a way out of the ‘clash of civilisations’ now characterising global inter-religious relations, toward a future in which the adherents of the world’s religions conceive of each other’s traditions, not simplistically as ‘saying the same thing’–a view that critics of religious pluralism quite rightly reject–but as ultimately complementary, harmonious visions of a larger reality in which they all, in various ways, participate. When I speak of Hinduism ‘emerging as a world religion in the true sense of the term,’ I mean the emergence of Hinduism as a universalist religion, not unlike Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam–a tradition to which anyone may belong, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity. When I use the term universalist I am referring to the aspiration of any tradition to be universally relevant, to speak to global concerns rather than restricting itself to the local concerns of a single national or ethnic group. I view the ability of Hinduism to appeal to people of all nations and ethnicities as essential to its survival. It must transcend its historical cultural boundaries. But the emergence of Hinduism as a world religion also means further developing its ethos of religious pluralism, by which I mean a way of envisioning religious diversity that allows for a plurality of approaches to and expressions of truth. In my judgment, its ideal of religious pluralism could yet be Hinduism’s greatest gift to the world, a way not only for Hindus, but for people of all religious traditions to conceive of their diversity not in terms of competition, but complementarity. It is ultimately in the service of this ideal that I have written this book.

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If every religion in the world could be reduced to a central concept— Christianity, for example, to the idea that God is love, or Buddhism to the idea of impermanence—I think the central Hindu ideal would be religious pluralism. I do not intend this as a chauvinistic statement, asserting that Hinduism in practice is uniquely or wholly pluralistic. It is not. For no tradition is ever perfect in practice. But the Hindu ideal of pluralism is an ideal from which all traditions could benefit. Why am I taking the approach to these issues that I am? One of my goals is to contest the Hindu nationalist claim of exclusive ownership of the term Hindu. All too often, when critiques of Hindutva have arisen either from outside of the Hindu community or from among secularised Hindus, they have inadvertently fuelled the very ideology that they aim to deconstruct by reinforcing, in the minds of the Hindu nationalists, a sense of Hinduism as a tradition under attack, and of themselves as its sole legitimate defenders. I would compare this to attacks upon Christianity by sceptics and secularists in my own country–attacks which reinforce the paranoia and the siege mentality of the Christian Right. Whenever anyone is attacked, the most natural inclination is to become defensive. My hope is to reclaim the term Hindu for the universalist and pluralist wing of the tradition, to advance a Hindu alternative to Hindutva in the form of the Hindu ethos of religious pluralism. If it can be shown that religious pluralism has a claim to legitimacy from a traditional Hindu perspective greater than that of Hindutva, then Hindu nationalist claims to exclusive ownership of Hinduism and its sacred symbols–the colour saffron, the lotus, Lord R›ma, and so on–can be exposed as the spiritually bankrupt forms of political manipulation that they truly are. To continue with the parallel from American religion and politics, my project can be compared to arguing on the basis of the Christian tradition that the agenda of the Christian Right–an agenda that includes war, capital punishment, and an unfettered free market–is anything but Christian. Hindutva, I am arguing here, is un-Hindu, religious pluralism being the more authentically Hindu position.11 If my argument is successful, instead of feeling defensive, the Hindu nationalist will renounce the aggression inherent in Hindu nationalism and embrace the more universal vision of the tradition proposed here, seeing it as in the best interests of Hinduism. Another reason I am taking this approach is because I believe in Hindu religious pluralism. I believe the Hindu claim that there are many paths to truth, many ways to the highest realisation, to be not only true, but to be an important truth, a truth with the potential to transform global civilisation for the better.

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But it is also a truth that has become subject to considerable criticism, both within and beyond the Hindu community. Moreover, many of these criticisms are legitimate, for often the expression of religious pluralism has been simplistic and so conducive to misinterpretation, such as when it is misidentified with the expression ‘all religions are the same.’ Because I believe in the truth of religious pluralism, as well as in its importance to the future of both Hinduism and humanity, I do not think the response to these criticisms should be to throw out the pluralistic baby with the bathwater of its imperfect expression. I take my chief task in this book to be not so much the demolition of Hindutva–Hindutva being a relatively easy target, intellectually and ethically speaking–but rather the reconstruction of religious pluralism as a Hindu alternative to Hindutva. In other words, I believe it is the duty of those of us who share Shashi Tharoor’s vision of Hinduism to articulate it with the greatest intellectual rigour and logical precision possible. Religious pluralism has become fairly easily dismissible in the minds of many because it is so often associated with a certain kind of intellectual laziness. ‘Why bother studying the texts and the teachings of the world’s religions if they’re all the same? What difference do differences make if all our paths ultimately lead to the same goal?’ One fair criticism that Morales and others have levelled against this view is that it leads quite easily to indifference to what is distinctive about the Hindu tradition, making Hindus more vulnerable to conversion. The model of religious pluralism that I shall articulate in this book does not claim that all religions are the same. It does claim that they all have the capacity to be conducive to the same ultimate goal–moks‹a, or liberation from sa˙s›ra, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. But even this sameness is qualified by distinctions between the types of liberation attained through various means–Advaitic absorption in nirgu˚a Brahman, for example, in contrast with an eternity spent in Vaikun˛ha, or heaven, with a personal God, or participating with God as one of many cocreators and co-sustainers of the universe, and so on. This is a model that I shall argue is consistent with a wide variety of philosophical and religious perspectives articulated within the Hindu tradition, broadly construed. At the same time, however, and in keeping with the idea of promoting Hinduism as a tradition with universal relevance, and in recognition of its increasingly multicultural and global character and context, this model will draw upon non-Indic resources as well as Indic traditions in articulating its pluralistic vision–namely, the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead and the intra-Christian theological conversation on religious pluralism, a conversation from which I believe the Hindu tradition can greatly benefit.

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At its most basic, my approach shall be to address the various valid objections to religious pluralism by developing a metaphysical worldview on the basis of which it can be defended. The fundamental objection to religious pluralism is that its claim that there are many true religions is quite difficult–its critics would say impossible–to reconcile with the plain empirical fact that the world’s religions make substantially different, and sometimes incompatible, claims. There are several ways to address this objection. The approach taken by liberal Christian pluralistic theologies, like that of John Hick, downplays incompatibilities in the name of a deeper harmony, arguing that what is important about religious doctrines is not their substantive, cognitive content, but rather their ability, as part of a total way of life, to positively transform the character of those who believe in them. This is an experientialexpressive approach to doctrine.12 Such an approach of course sets aside as irrelevant much of what religious people actually take to be most relevant in their belief systems–what these systems say about the character of ultimate reality, the meaning and purpose of existence, the nature of the afterlife, and so on. Inter-religious harmony is purchased at the expense of religious content when a purely experiential-expressive approach is taken. The alternative approach that I propose is to outline a metaphysical worldview in which the claims of the world’s religions can be seen to be true not in an absolute sense, as they are conceived traditionally, nor in a non-substantive, non-cognitive sense, as in experiential-expressivism, but as reflecting aspects or parts of a larger reality whose complexity is such as to allow for a plurality of true, yet non-identical, descriptions. It would not be wholly inaccurate to describe this as a religious equivalent of Einstein’s theory of relativity, with religious worldviews acting as alternative frames of reference.13 My approach to doctrine is realist, then, like traditional approaches, but it is also non-absolutist, like experiential-expressivism. I see it as a kind of ‘middle path’ between traditional absolutism, which takes doctrines at their face value, and experiential-expressivism, which only looks at their power to transform as part of a total way of life. My approach, though realist, is akin to experiential-expressivism, in its emphasis on the ability of a set of doctrines, as part of a total way of life, to be conducive to mok„a. In developing this worldview I draw upon both Whitehead’s process metaphysics, as a system particularly conducive to a pluralistic understanding of reality, and from the Jain doctrines of relativity–anek›ntav›da, nayav›da, and sy›dv›da–which serve to relativise seemingly incompatible doctrines in the way I have just described.

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It is my view that the resulting system, synthesising aspects of Jain and process thought, is more adequate to the vision of religious harmony taught in the Ramakrishna tradition than the simplistic ‘all religions are the same’ doctrine with which it has been associated in the minds of the wider Hindu public. It is this oversimplified doctrine that has rightly evoked the criticism of Hindu writers such as Morales, thus leaving the field of discourse open for the Hindu nationalists to dominate. It is to remedy this situation without throwing the baby out with the bathwater–as I believe Morales does–that I am pursuing this project. Three Possible Objections A variety of objections can of course be raised against a project such as mine, which I hope to address in the remainder of this chapter. The first, most basic objection has to do with the definition of Hinduism, which has been a contested topic in the academy of religion for a number of years now. There is a school of thought that objects to the very use of the term Hindu, seeing this term as a colonial construct. I am quite clearly in flagrant violation of this understanding, engaging consciously in a project of constructing a definition and understanding of Hinduism. A second possible objection regards the unapologetically non-secular, theological approach I am taking, claiming to speak to these issues as a Hindu from within my particular branch of the tradition, rather than as an ‘objective’ scholar. There are no doubt many in the academy who would find such a stance highly inappropriate for a professional scholar of religion, another understanding of which I am in flagrant violation. A third possible objection regards the fact that I draw upon ostensibly non-Hindu sources–Jain and process thought–in my formulation of Hindu religious pluralism. Does this not undercut my claim that religious pluralism is an authentically Hindu view, indeed more authentically Hindu than Hindu nationalism? I take Jainism, as will be seen shortly, to be a part of Hinduism, broadly construed, and so not really a non-Hindu source. And the strong resemblances between process thought and theistic forms of Ved›nta constitute evidence, I believe, for the universality of Hinduism. The fact that a thinker from another, very different culture, Alfred North Whitehead, independently arrived at similar conclusions suggests that the truths of Ved›nta are truly universal. Making use of Whitehead therefore strengthens my claim that Hinduism teaches universal truths. I shall turn now to a detailed consideration of each of these possible objections.

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On the Definition of Hinduism and the Construction of a Hindu Identity Hindu nationalism and Hindu religious pluralism, as these two positions are currently formulated, are both products of the encounter between Hinduism and modernity. More precisely, it could be said that these two views or trends represent different strategies for constructing a Hindu identity, a process which began as a consequence of the colonisation of India by Muslim powers, and then by Europeans, especially the British. I do not think this undercuts the legitimacy of either of these positions from a Hindu perspective, as might be expected. It is simply an historical fact. An entire literature has been developed in the academic study of Hinduism with regard to the constructed character of the Hindu tradition, the basic thrust of which is that, prior to the colonisation of India by imperial powers, there was no such thing as a Hindu tradition in the singular, and that to speak of the Hindu tradition is therefore to perpetuate a fiction–a fiction, moreover, designed specifically to aid in the domination and subjugation of the people of India, first by the British, and then by the forces of Hindu nationalism. A spectrum of views is represented in this literature. At one end can be found the affirmation that what is now called Hinduism has always been internally variegated, but that sufficient overlap and cohesion exists among the various Hindu traditions to allow one to speak of an entity called Hinduism, albeit with the understanding that this term is an anachronism when discussing the premodern period, and that the ground realities of this ‘tradition’ are always more complex than any generalisations that can be made about them. This is a view that affirms the relative unity of Hinduism. Examples of scholars who take this view include Wendy Doniger and Wilhelm Halbfass, whose scholarly works emphasise such unifying factors as adherence to Brahmanical authority, the Vedas, and the var˚a or ‘caste’ system in their understanding of what constitutes Hinduism.14 At the other end of the spectrum one finds the claim that Hinduism does not exist, and that Hinduism, rather than being a useful fiction, a generalisation helpful for talking about what are, in reality, many traditions, is in fact a pernicious one, not only obscuring the variegated realities of Indic religiosity, but doing so in the name of promoting an artificial unity that serves the nefarious political purposes of those who promote it, be they British colonial administrators or contemporary Hindutva activists. It should therefore be expunged from the scholarly lexicon.

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My own perspective on this issue rests somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum, though with a tendency to lean toward the relative unity side than toward the ‘Hinduism does not exist’ side. The latter perspective is a necessary corrective to the former, which can easily slide into a simplistic essentialism if one is not careful. One can easily start saying things such as, ‘Hindus believe this,’ ‘Hindus do that,’ ‘Hinduism teaches such-and-such,’ etc. when the reality is that many Hindus–perhaps a substantial portion of the community–do not believe this or do that, and may even adhere to a Hinduism that teaches exactly the opposite of such-andsuch. At the same time, although the postcolonial deconstructive approach that denies the existence of Hinduism in the name of emphasising its constructed character is taken in the name of liberating Hindus from an externally imposed and fictitious unity–a unity which is seen as detrimental to the diversity of Indic religious practice–it can also be used to silence those who choose to identify themselves with some particular understanding of Hinduism, thus preventing them from contributing to the scholarly conversation. What is intended to be a liberating approach to ‘Hinduism’ becomes, ironically, a means of silencing those within the tradition with whom one does not agree. The fact is that, for better or worse, there are now hundreds of millions of people–in India, but also in the Indian diaspora, as well as non-Indians like myself–who identify ourselves as Hindu and for whom constructing an understanding of Hinduism in terms of which we can live our lives and create meaning for ourselves is essential. If Hindu scholars try to speak from the perspective of a particular form of Hinduism and are then told patronisingly, “You do not know what you are talking about. Hinduism does not exist,” then the deconstructive approach ironically becomes a continuation of the colonial discourse it claims to reject, with secular–often North American or European–scholars telling self-identified Hindus how Hinduism should be understood and what they can or cannot say about it. Hinduism is a colonial term, but its deconstruction is a neo-colonial act.15 One possible way of addressing the legitimate issue of a fictitious unity being imposed on the variety of Hindu traditions by the term Hinduism while at the same time avoiding a neo-colonial, patronising discourse might be to dispense with the terms Hindu and Hinduism and replace them with more local self-identifications–to speak not as Hindus but as ÷rı Vai„˚avas, Gau˜ıya Vai„˚avas, ÷aiva Siddh›ntins, devotees of Ramakrishna, or of Sai Baba, and so on. Many Hindus of an orthodox or neo-orthodox variety already prefer such usages, rather than being lumped together as ‘Hindus.’

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The problem here, though, is ease of communication. For better or for worse, the term Hindu, it seems to me, is here to stay, and those scholars who seek to expunge it from the lexicon are swimming against the tide of history. It is a term with a definite meaning and a definite set of associations fixed in the minds of many, especially in the West–reincarnation, yoga, diverse forms of divinity, and so on. It conveys more to non-Hindus about what Hindus believe and practice than the more, to a Western ear, exotic terms such as Vai„˚ava, ÷aiva, and ÷›kta, despite the fact that these latter terms are actually far more precise, as well as more authentic to the realities they represent. It might be a construct and an abstraction with a dubious colonial pedigree, but Hindus, I think, are stuck with Hinduism. The question, then, is not whether Hinduism is a construct. It quite clearly is. The question is how it should be constructed. To what use shall it be put? My argument for claiming the term Hindu for the pluralistic wing of the tradition is a pragmatic one based on the desirability of the consequences of the adoption of a pluralistic understanding of Hinduism as opposed to a nationalist one. It is also a rationalist argument, inasmuch as I see religious pluralism as a more internally consistent position, at least as I reformulate it here, than Hindu nationalism. My basic thesis is that it is the pluralist and universalist vision that is preferable on the basis of its potential to positively transform inter-religious relations, as well as in terms of its fidelity to premodern Hindu traditions, reflecting in a conceptual form the plurality that the unifying label Hindu might otherwise obscure. My own approach to defining Hinduism is to return to the original meaning of Hindu as a reference to the traditions indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Again, given the variety characterising these traditions, this meaning has often been rejected as vague, for, it is argued, there is no single set of beliefs or practices shared by all of these traditions to give this term any substantive conceptual content. It is for this reason that the term Hindu was eventually restricted to refer to the Vedic traditions, excluding Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. The equation of Hinduism with Vedic religion thereby promoted the construction of Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh identities, as distinct from Hinduism–with similarly violent effects, felt by Sikhs in the 1980s and by Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka. The equation of Hindu and Vedic, however, is itself vague–although it does have the virtue of some indigenous precedent.16 But it has invited criticism from that branch of the academy which seeks to deconstruct the terms Hindu and Hinduism. For what does it mean to define Hinduism as ‘the Vedic tradition’ when the vast majority of Hindus have little or no knowledge of what is contained in the Vedic texts?

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A Vision for Hinduism

There is even ambiguity with regard to the meaning of the term Veda itself. Does it refer only to the first three Vedic Sa˙hit›s–the ¿g, Y›jur, and S›ma Vedas–since the earliest references mention only three Vedas, and not four? Or does it include the Ath›rva Veda? Does it refer only to the Sa˙hit›s, or does it include the commentarial literature, the Br›hma˚as, Ära˚yakas, and Upanis‹ads? What about the works on the Vedic sciences– grammar, mathematics, and astronomy–the Ved›ºgas? Does it include the Itih›sas–the Mah›bh›rata, sometimes referred to as the ‘fifth Veda,’ and the R›m›ya˚a? Does it also include the PÒr›˚as? If it includes the pÒr›˚ic literature, does this mean all the PÒr›˚as? As some Vai„˚avas assert, is the Bhagav›ta PÒr›˚a pre-eminent, containing the essence of the whole Veda? Does the Veda include controversial works like the Manusm¸ti?17 While there is, as scholars like Doniger and Halbfass have argued, a good case to be made for an underlying unity and cohesion among the various traditions that claim the title Vedic, it seems to me that drawing the line between the Vedic and the other traditions of Indic origin, such as Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, is ultimately arbitrary and does not finally reflect the ground realities of either the Vedic or the putatively non-Vedic traditions. Although Jainism and Buddhism explicitly reject Brahmanical authority–the ostensible basis for regarding them as independent, nonHindu traditions–they are, in many ways, thoroughly Vedic. They include Vedic deities in their respective literatures (in positions of subordination to Jinas and Buddhas, but not necessarily positions of dishonour) and Vedic assumptions, such as the doctrines of karma, rebirth, and liberation. The resemblances between Buddhism and the teachings of the Upanis‹ads, as well as between Jainism and the ‘orthodox’ S›˙khya and Yoga systems, are many.18 Indeed, on a number of issues, Advaita Ved›nta is much closer to Buddhism than it is to other ‘Hindu’ schools of thought. Early Advaita, in fact, draws approvingly upon Buddhist sources to advance its own views.19 Furthermore, Buddhism outside of India seems to have been part of a total Indic cultural package, inclusive of many ‘Hindu’ elements. The Mah›bh›rata and R›m›ya˚a are as much a part of the ‘Buddhist’ cultures of Southeast Asia as Buddhism. The famous Cambodian temple complex at Angkor Wat includes Vi„˚u and ÷iva temples as well as a temple to the Buddha. And depictions from Hindu literature are included in the artwork of the Buddhist monument at Borobudur, in Indonesia, as well as scenes from J›taka tales of the past lives of the Buddha. Even as far from India as Japan, Shinto deities, or k›mı, include Hindu-derived deities like Benten, the goddess of wisdom, clearly a Japan-ised version of the Hindu goddess of wisdom, Saraswatı.

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It may also be worth pointing out that, at an institutional level, His Holiness the Dalai Lama recently proclaimed the unity of Hinduism and Buddhism at the Kumbha Mela, before a large gathering of Hindu religious leaders, affirming the common culture that both traditions share. A sharp boundary between Buddhism and Hinduism, though not without indigenous precedent, does not stand up to close scrutiny, seeming to have been more of a matter of dispute between representative intellectuals of the two traditions than of lay self-identification; for a tendency among lay donors, such as kings, to support a plurality of traditions seems to have been fairly common in ancient times.20 But even the indigenous precedent of intellectual conflict just noted is between Buddhism and orthodox Vedic Brahmanism.21 However, if we construe Hinduism as a more encompassing term, not limiting the extent of its reference to the Vedic traditions, but expanding it to include ±r›ma˚ic traditions that share the cosmology and soteriology of karma, rebirth, and liberation, then the distinction between Hinduism and Buddhism vanishes by definitional fiat. The intellectual debates between the Brahmans and the Buddhists become debates internal to Hinduism, between two distinct branches or streams of Hindu tradition: the Vedic and the Buddhist. I would argue that the case for there being no common set of beliefs or practices to unify the various Indic traditions has been overstated. Even given the enormous variety one finds across the range of Indic traditions, a unifying set of concepts does cut across this variety in the form of the doctrines of karma, rebirth, and liberation. I therefore define Hinduism in terms of affirmation, in some form, of these doctrines, which only one premodern Indic school of thought–the Carv›ka or Lok›yata school of materialism–rejects. Hinduism, as I would define it, includes not only the Vedic traditions, but Jainism and Buddhism as well. In summary, my definition of Hinduism is the family of traditions of Indic origins which affirm some version of the doctrines of karma, rebirth, and liberation. Lest the objection be raised that this definition is idiosyncratic and as contrary to conventional usage as the non-use of the term Hindu advocated by postcolonial scholars, I would point out that this definition is used by the secular constitution of the Republic of India and the Indian Supreme Court, as well as by the Hindu University of America. I am therefore not completely alone in adopting such a usage. It also preserves the original sense of this word as referring to India, but without the same nationalist or ethnocentric implications. It refers to traditions of Indic origin, but those who adhere to these traditions may be of any origin (such as Japanese or Chinese Buddhists, or American Hare Krishna devotees, and so on).

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I distinguish this definition of Hinduism, however, from the definition of a Hindu. I take whether or not one is a Hindu to be a matter of selfidentification alone. There is no litmus test of belief or practice. So a Carv›ka materialist can be a Hindu as much as a Vai„˚ava or a ÷aiva. But such people are more likely to regard themselves as culturally or ethnically Hindu than religiously Hindu, and I am defining Hinduism as a religion–as a set of beliefs and the practices which accompany them.22 And in response to the possible concern that this definition of Hinduism as inclusive of such traditions as Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism might be construed as imperialist, incorporating into Hinduism people who may not want to be so identified–any Jains, Buddhists, or Sikhs who do not see themselves as Hindu–I would emphasise this distinction between Hinduism and a Hindu. A Hindu is a Hindu by self-identification alone. So if someone objects to my definition of Hinduism on the basis of the concern that it makes them Hindu when they do not regard themselves as such, I would say that as long as one does not regard oneself as Hindu, one is not a Hindu. If I say Hinduism includes Buddhism, for example, I am not saying all Buddhists are, by definition, Hindus. I am claiming, rather, that it is legitimate for self-identified Hindus to draw upon Buddhist thought as a resource, just as I draw upon Jainism in this book. I am claiming that Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism are part of the total inheritance that is designated by the term Hinduism. How individuals wish to identify themselves is up to them, and is a separate issue. I do not presume to impose upon anyone’s freedom of self-identification. Finally, I am not saying here that Hinduism is really what I describe here and that those who construct it in other ways are necessarily wrong. My construct is also a construct. The pie of reality can be sliced up in a variety of ways. Nor am I implying, by defining Hinduism as a set of beliefs and practices available in principle to anyone, that a denaturalised Hinduism, wholly divorced from the cultural context of its emergence, is possible or even desirable. Hinduism, I think, will always be inextricably tied to Indic culture–just as Islam will always be tied to Arabic culture and Christianity will always be tied to the hybrid Judaic/Greco-Roman culture of Europe. But just as Islam and Christianity–as religions–claim a wider, more universal relevance that gives them purchase in cultural spaces well beyond their points of origin, Hinduism also has the potential for such global relevance. But this potential will remain untapped to the degree that Hinduism is narrowly identified with an Indian ethnic and national identity. It is a family of traditions of Indic origin, but those traditions can be–and in fact have been–propagated far and wide, beyond their point of origin.

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A Theological as Opposed to a Secular Critique Critiques of Hindu nationalism are typically launched from a secular point of view, the opposite of Hindu nationalism being widely understood to be secularism. I would define secularism as the view that government should be neutral, as much as possible, towards religion and religious issues.23 But while I am myself a secularist in this sense, inasmuch as I endorse what in my country is referred to as the ‘separation of church and state’–a stance I endorse because I believe such an arrangement is most conducive to religious freedom–secular is also widely taken to refer to any perspective which self-consciously distances itself from a particular religious point of view. In this extended sense, secularism includes positions that explicitly reject religion–positions such as atheism and materialism–but it can also include positions that are simply non-committal with respect to the truth of religion. Scholars of religion often take this latter, non-committal type of secular stance in the interests of maintaining objectivity. But others quite explicitly endorse a perspective that is non-religious, or even anti-religious–which views religion, for example, as either a type of mystifying political ideology, or mass psychosis. When I refer to ‘secular scholars of religion,’ I am referring to any scholar whose stance is not explicitly religious, whether noncommittal or explicitly anti-religious. On this extended understanding of secular I am not a secular scholar of religion, at least not in this book, though there are other contexts in which I find a non-committal stance more appropriate, such as when I am giving a straightforward descriptive account of particular religious phenomena. In this book, I am operating in the role of a theologian in the Ramakrishna Ved›nta tradition of Hinduism. Far from being non-committal–and even further from being anti-religious–I am self-consciously taking what could be called an insider stance with respect to my particular sub-branch of the Hindu tradition. This does not mean I cannot critique my tradition or that it would not be possible for me to draw upon religiously neutral or even putatively anti-religious theorists, such as Marx or Freud, in developing my arguments. But these arguments would be in the service of the tradition. Theology, in contrast with secular scholarship on religion, explicitly locates itself within a particular religious tradition whose claims it takes to be normative, whose claims anchor its reflections and provide the groundwork of assumptions on which it bases its analyses of the materials that it examines. Though the term comes from Christianity, I see theology, as I am defining it, as a type of discourse that can occur in any tradition.

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Theology is a derogatory term in the minds of many, for it is widely presumed that, as a non-value-neutral enterprise, theology lacks the rigour of scholarship that claims to operate from an objective foundation.24 But as post-modern criticism has shown, there is ultimately no such thing as a truly objective, value-neutral stance. The difference between theology and putatively objective secular scholarship is not that theology assumes the truth of a particular set of values while secular scholarship does not. The difference is that theology is explicit and self-conscious with respect to the values informing it and their historical sources in a tradition, whereas a putative stance of objectivity has a tendency to veil and obscure the deeper assumptions, agenda, and ideology lying behind it. The very point of postmodern criticism is to turn the lens of ‘objective’ reason reflexively back upon itself in order to reveal its underlying biases. Theology is therefore the paradigmatic post-modern discourse. Moreover, it is also widely assumed that, because theology operates out of a set of explicitly acknowledged values, that it must be uncritical of those values. But in fact, the opposite is the case. Indeed, it is the primary responsibility of a theologian in a religious tradition to constantly critique, re-evaluate, and re-interpret that tradition in light of constantly changing historical circumstances. As a member of a certain religious community I claim to believe x. But what does x mean to us today? As new circumstances and arguments arise that call x into question, or that challenge x, how should x be reformulated to give it continuing significance both to ourselves and to the larger society of which we are a part? In my case, in this book, x is the pluralistic vision for Hinduism as it is expressed by my tradition–as taught by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda. My task here is to reformulate this view, and the new circumstances and arguments prompting this reformulation include the rise of Hindu nationalism, the emergence of a global Hinduism, and the recent criticisms levelled by both Hindus and non-Hindus against the pluralistic vision that my sub-tradition of Hinduism endorses. Theological projects like mine are undertaken in response to what Alasdair Macintyre refers to as an epistemological crisis, a crisis which occurs when a tradition has to cope with new ideas and circumstances that call one or more of its constitutive claims into question.25 On the understanding of theology I have just outlined, my task requires me to take full account of the various objections that have been raised against the religious pluralism endorsed by the Ramakrishna tradition, and to be willing to make revisions, perhaps even radical revisions, to the way this view is understood. It demands that I be critical.

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At the same time, theology requires a delicate balancing act, for if one reformulates the views of one’s tradition beyond recognition, it could be asked whether one really is still doing theology within that tradition, or if one has in fact abandoned one of its central and constitutive claims. The measure of the success of this book will be whether I have succeeded in maintaining this balance, addressing the legitimate objections raised against Hindu religious pluralism, reformulating it to the degree that is necessary, yet doing so in such a way that the final product is still recognisable to the tradition once I am done. That will be for the community to decide. I see my project as a Hindu analogue to the pluralistic theologies that have emerged in the Christian tradition in response to Christian religious exclusivism in the twentieth century, such as the pluralistic philosophical theology of John Hick, the theologies of interfaith dialogue of Raimundo Panikkar and John Cobb, and the pluralistic liberation theology of Paul Knitter. My project is undertaken in close dialogue with these theologies, seeking to learn from their mistakes and to perfect their arguments in ways appropriate to the Hindu tradition and its current historical situation—a situation that is increasingly global and multicultural. Hindus can benefit, I believe, from the work of these Christian religious pluralists, not with any implication of paternalism or out of any sense of Hindu inferiority, but because their ideas are good, and are quite in harmony with Hinduism as I understand it. There is no shame in borrowing useful ideas. A growing number of Christian theologians over the last two to three decades have become highly sensitized to the fact that Christian religious exclusivism—the doctrine that outside of the Christian faith there is no salvation, that all non-Christians are doomed to die and to spend eternity in hell—has fuelled, and continues to fuel, untold violence against the nonChristian world in the form of crusades, inquisitions, holocausts, and religiously sanctioned imperialism. Moreover, an awareness is dawning—though it is still being resisted by many—that an exclusivist and triumphalist understanding of Christianity is deeply inadequate to the message of love proclaimed in the teachings of Christ. So attempts have been made to develop pluralistic theologies that conceive of the world’s religions as many paths to a common destination, or expressions of different, yet complementary, facets of one truth. Indeed, one could argue that in being open to this dawning awareness, the liberal wing of Christian theology is in direct continuity with Hindu leaders such as Ram Mohan Roy, who pointed out long ago the disjuncture between the teachings of Christ and the exclusivism underlying Christian proselytising activity.

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Pluralistic Christian theologies, notably Hick’s Pluralistic Hypothesis, have taken much of their inspiration from Hinduism, with its pluralistic selfunderstanding, as found, for example, in the teachings of Ramakrishna and Gandhi. Hick, in particular, seems to owe a great deal to Ramakrishna with his understanding of the world’s religions as varied responses to a common transcendent reality. He has also attracted much criticism from a variety of theologians and philosophers of religion, some of it valid. But he has thereby done a great service to the Hindu tradition, I believe; for the weaknesses that have been pointed out in his hypothesis are also weaknesses shared by Hindu religious pluralism as widely construed. Systematic attempts to reformulate religious pluralism in response to these criticisms, such as those of process theologians, can therefore point the way for the re-formulation of a specifically Hindu religious pluralism. The irony of the current situation of Hinduism is that this tradition, which inspired the pluralistic turn in Christian theology, now stands in need of its own pluralistic turn—or rather, a return, a reassertion and a rearticulation of its pluralistic vision–due to the rise of Hindu nationalism and growing criticism and misunderstanding of religious pluralism within the Hindu community. Drawing strong connections between my project and that of Christian religious pluralists is, of course, bound to arouse suspicion among Hindus sensitive to insidious outside influences on the Hindu tradition. How truly Hindu is my project? Non-Indic Resources in the Service of Hinduism: Whitehead and Cobb Answering the question, ‘Is my reconstruction of religious pluralism adequate to the Hindu tradition?’ will involve a close comparison of my claims with those of Hinduism, particularly of Ved›nta and the Ramakrishna tradition that has shaped my own religious consciousness. My conclusion is that the pluralistic model of truth developed here is eminently compatible with Hinduism and that it does reflect an authentically Hindu self-understanding. But my readers will have to draw their own conclusions in this regard. Again, this is something the community will have to judge. My method shall first be to develop my systematic theological position, the heuristic I shall use for interpreting my tradition. Specifically, I shall be using Alfred North Whitehead’s system of process thought to interpret the basic claims of Ramakrishna Ved›nta, developing a Hindu process theology for the Ramakrishna tradition.

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Why Whitehead? As mentioned a moment ago, the Christian discourse on religious pluralism has been spearheaded by John Hick, whose thought owes a great deal to the Ramakrishna tradition. But it is the Whiteheadian tradition which has managed to re-configure religious pluralism in such a way as to address the legitimate criticisms to which Hick’s model–and so, implicitly, Ramakrishna’s model–have been subject. Assimilating Whitehead’s model will therefore strengthen the Ramakrishna tradition’s model of religious pluralism. If Ramakrishna can be read ‘Whiteheadianly,’ if his teaching of religious pluralism can be interpreted through the lens of process thought, it may be inoculated against the critiques it has received. A Hindu process theology is, in one very obvious sense, a novelty, process theology being a movement confined for the most part to the Christian tradition. But I hope to show, by bringing Whitehead’s thought into interaction with Ramakrishna Ved›nta, that process thought and Hinduism are actually a very good match–a better match, in my judgement, than process thought and Christianity. Although Whitehead’s thought emerged from the European tradition, out of the interactions of both Christian and modern secular philosophies, and even though process theologians have argued that this philosophy is a logical extension of biblical theism, the substantive claims it makes are actually much closer to those of theistic Ved›nta than they are to a mainstream understanding of Christianity.26 I shall then demonstrate how religious pluralism is deducible from the metaphysic I have developed by bringing process thought and Ramakrishna Ved›nta into a dialogue and synthesis with one another. This synthesis, however, does not address every possible objection to religious pluralism. It outlines the broad context in which it makes sense to see the various types of religious path as oriented toward facets of a common reality that correspond to the ultimate objects toward which these various paths are oriented–a personal deity, an impersonal cosmic principle, or the order of the cosmos itself. But it does not provide the logical tools for handling finer points of disagreement among the world’s religions. Such tools, however, are available from within the Hindu tradition, broadly construed, in the form of the Jain doctrines of relativity. Though religious pluralism is widely associated today with the Ramakrishna tradition and is a distinctive doctrine of contemporary Hinduism, among the premodern schools of Indic philosophy, it was the Jains, rather than the traditional Ved›ntic schools, who, in my judgement, developed the most rigorous and systematic philosophy of religious pluralism. By integrating these Jain doctrines into a Hindu process theology, I shall argue, one can articulate a coherent Hindu religious pluralism.

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Among the various Christian thinkers who have written on religious pluralism, the one with whose work mine has the greatest affinities would have to be John Cobb, one of the progressive Christian theologians that I mentioned above. Cobb has utilized the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead in the service of Christian theology–particularly in his development of a distinctively Whiteheadian Christian model of religious pluralism. I similarly intend to use Whiteheadian philosophy in the service of Ramakrishna Ved›nta in order to develop a pluralistic Hindu process theology that can address the objections to religious pluralism. Again, why Whitehead? Whiteheadian process thought possesses a number of characteristics that make it pre-eminently suitable to the formulation of a Hindu pluralistic theology and to the enterprise of cross-cultural philosophy in general. Although it was formulated in the idiom of modern Western (specifically twentieth-century Anglophone) thought, and as a response to philosophical concerns particular to Whitehead’s own context, process philosophy, as Whitehead himself recognised, “seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought.”27 Of particular relevance to the development of a pluralistic Hindu philosophical theology is the Whiteheadian doctrine of the ‘three ultimates,’ or three ultimate realities of God, Creativity, and the World. These three ultimate realities are analogous, as I hope to demonstrate, to the Ved›ntic Hindu concepts of sagu˚a and nirgu˚a Brahman and the jagat, the world-process or universe of individual souls. In fact, I see these concepts as referring to the same respective realities. The idea of three ultimate realities may seem odd, and indeed counterintuitive, if one is coming from a monotheistic context, in which ultimate reality is usually conceived as the One from which all other realities are derived and upon which they depend. In such contexts, this one ultimate reality is also typically identified as God, the one necessary being. But according to process thought, the idea of a single ultimate reality involves internal contradictions that render it untenable. Process theologians have created a considerable literature devoted to pointing out these contradictions and proposing a process-based model of reality as an alternative. These contradictions include some of the classic philosophical problems of theism, such as the problem of evil and the problem of free will.28 If God is the only ultimate reality, then all that occurs in the universe is ultimately God’s responsibility, which requires that God either allows or is actively involved in evil. This contradicts the idea of God as good. It also limits the free will of other beings so as to render that freedom meaningless.

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To overcome such contradictions in a way that makes a metaphysical explanation of our experience possible, process thought divides the various incompatible attributes of the God of classical theism among three necessary beings, or ultimate realities. There is God proper–that is, the supreme personal actuality who directs the universal process, but is not omnipotent. There is the set of eternal, metaphysical truths–what one might call the abstract nature of reality. And there is everything else, the universe made up of changing actual entities, constantly making choices and experiencing the consequences accordingly. These three can all be called ultimate realities because they are all necessary and irreducible to one another. And the ones that are agents–God and the beings making up the universe–are free, but this freedom is conditioned by the activities, the free choices, of the other existing agents. Regarding the first of these ultimates, God is conceived as a cosmic mind or world soul, not unlike the ›layavijñ›na or ‘storehouse consciousness’ of Yog›c›ra Buddhism. The God of process thought is not the eternal, unchanging God of classical Western theism, but exists in the temporal realm everlastingly as a necessary and integral part of the cosmic process. This God is also not unlike sagu˚a Brahman, or Brahman with attributes, of Ved›nta–the personal Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer and Re-creator of the universe, creation itself being conceived as an ongoing process that is without beginning or end. Importantly, God, as conceived in process thought, is the Supreme Being, but is still, nevertheless, a being, a temporal entity–albeit one without beginning or end. God is not the abstract, impersonal ground of Being, but the supreme manifestation of Being. In this way, too, Whitehead’s doctrine of God is at one with theistic forms of Ved›nta.29 Though not in every respect identical, God, as conceived in Whitehead’s theism, has a number of affinities with Lord Vi„˚u, as conceived in the Dvaita, or Dualistic, tradition of Ved›nta. Pre-eminent Dvaita scholar Deepak Sarma calls Dvaitic theism a ‘mitigated monotheism,’ pointing out that Vi„nu is not omnipotent and does not create the universe ex nihilo.30 The eternal, abstract, impersonal ground of all existence–called by Whitehead the ‘principle of creativity’–consists of the sum total of all the necessary metaphysical truths and possibilities. It corresponds closely with the Buddhist concept of the dharmak›ya, and the nirgu˚a Brahman of Advaita Ved›nta–Brahman without qualities, the atemporal, impersonal basis of both God and the cosmos, of which both are temporal manifestations. This is the second of the three ultimate realities that are postulated in process thought.

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The third ultimate reality is the cosmos, the universe of actual entities, which are conceived not in terms of vacuous materiality, but as centres of experience. Whitehead, in what I see to be his most radical departure from the dominant trends of Western thought, conceives of experience as integral to the very character of existence. On this panexperientialist view, an entity not only is, but is a centre of experience. Such a conception, however, is not far from the mainstream of traditional Hindu thought. I see Whitehead’s panexperientialism as being not unlike the Ved›ntic characterisation of existence, in its most basic essence, as sat-chit-›nanda, or being, conscious-ness, and bliss. As a centre of experience, an entity is essentially relational. To be, in process thought, is to be related. An actual entity is a nexus of prehensions, or participatory appetitive responses– positive and negative–to possibilities. All of these experiencing entities are organically interrelated to constitute the universe. God, the cosmic orderer, is not an exception to such fundamental metaphysical principles, but represents their primary exemplification; for God is also a relational entity, who both affects and is, in turn, affected by the entities that make up the universe. God is that entity by which the rest of the entities are brought into a harmony, creation being an ongoing process. The same basic ontological necessity–the eternal impersonal ultimate–governs and is exhibited in the activities of God and the universe. These three ultimate realities could be called the orderer (God), the order (Creativity), and the ordered (the Universe). The three ultimates answer a major critique of religious pluralism– namely, that it is inadequate to the diversity of human religious experience because it tends to reduce such experience to experience of one common ultimate reality. But this reality, usually conceived as an impersonal ground of being, is only one of the three ultimates in a process universe–the one which corresponds to the sum total of all metaphysical truths and possibilities underlying the activities of both God and the entities constituting the universe, the cosmic order.31 In a process universe, theistic experiences–the bhakti experiences of Hinduism, or of the Abrahamic religions of the West–and experiences of nature mysticism–such as those evoked in the so-called primal or cosmic religions of indigenous communities–need not be reduced to experiences of the impersonal absolute. The objects of all three types of experience are affirmed in a process worldview, thereby enabling a more adequate pluralism than is possible if one tries to reduce all the forms of religious experience to a single type.

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This is the kind of religious pluralism that John Cobb has developed on the basis of process thought over the course of his lifetime of dialogue, as a committed Christian, with Buddhists. Such a model has arisen out of Cobb’s conviction that what he is talking about, as a Christian, when he talks about the love of God in Christ is not the same thing that his Buddhist interlocutors are describing when they speak of their experiences of Emptiness. Cobb holds that neither of these experiences is reducible to the other, but that they are both, nevertheless, authentic experiences of different ultimate realities. Cobb’s pluralism, in other words, affirms a universe in which both the love of God in Christ and Buddhist Emptiness are real, even though distinct. This is in contrast with approaches in which the love of God in Christ and Buddhist Emptiness are manifestations of a single unknowable Reality beyond both, and to which both point beyond themselves. The relevance of Whitehead’s thought to Cobb’s model is that it makes it possible for Cobb to affirm the reality of the love of God in Christ and the reality of the Buddhist experience of Emptiness. In Cobb’s Whiteheadian, process worldview, there are realities that correspond in their essentials to these religious phenomena. Finally, Cobb’s model also makes possible the mutual enrichment of religions through dialogue; for on this view, Christians can teach Buddhists about Christ and Buddhists can teach Christians about Emptiness. Not unlike Cobb’s model, the pluralistic model that I will endorse could be called a complementary pluralism. A complementary pluralism is distinct, on the one hand, from the perennialist approach, which perceives a common thread of experiences running through the world’s religions. The complementary pluralist does not deny–and indeed, I would affirm–the idea of there being such a common thread. But what is common need not be the whole story. Difference also matters. This position is also distinct from John Hick’s religious pluralism, in which the world’s religions are understood as pointing to a common, but in itself ultimately unknowable, transcendent reality. For a complementary religious pluralism sees many diverse worldviews as expressing different, but complementary, truths that when integrated form a larger, more comprehensive perspective. It is not that the whole truth is ever known. But it is not wholly unknowable. The question that a complementary pluralism of this kind raises, and one which Hick has raised in response to Cobb’s criticisms, is the question of how one who holds such a view deals with the various incompatible truth claims that the world’s religions make.32 This model explains varied soteriological orientations, but what about incompatible truth claims?

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Hick neutralises such claims by asserting that none of them is true of the ultimate reality. They only operate on the phenomenal level, as cognitive filters mediating the ultimately unknowable reality of the transcendent to human consciousness. Religious claims are therefore not ‘true’ in the ways that religious people typically think they are–as literal descriptions of reality. Religious beliefs, rather, act primarily to orient those who hold them toward ultimate reality in a specific way, thereby producing the different kinds of experience attested to in the world’s religions. In what other way, one could ask a complementary pluralist, could one reconcile conflicting religious claims, such as Buddhist claims that there is no permanent, enduring self and Christian claims about the existence of an immortal soul? Or the Christian claim that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God and the Muslim claim that God does not beget and is not begotten? Or the conflicting claims of Jews, Christians, and Muslims regarding the religious significance of figures like Jesus and Abraham? Invoking the Whiteheadian worldview, as Cobb does, one approach to conflicting claims among the religions is to reconcile them by recourse to the doctrine of the three ultimates. Using this type of approach, Buddhist claims about the ultimately impersonal character of reality, for example, and theistic claims about the existence of God can be seen as simply talking past each other. Buddhist claims about Emptiness can be seen as fully compatible with a Whiteheadian account of the principle of creativity as non-actual and of the universe of actual entities as constantly changing. Theistic claims about God, on the other hand, can be seen as referring to the cosmic mind, the persuasive and loving intelligence that directs the creative process. Both sets of claims can be shown to express portions of the larger truth that encompasses them. This, we have seen, is how Cobb addresses the differences between Christianity and Buddhism. But this approach will not work for all, or even most, of the doctrinal incompatibilities among the world’s religions and philosophies, not to mention the many conflicting interpretations to which even a single religious or philosophical worldview is subject among those who share it. One can speak in shorthand about the claims of Buddhists and Christians and Muslims. But each of these groups is further subdivided into others. There are Therav›da, Mah›y›na, and Vajray›na Buddhists; Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians; Sunni and Shia Muslims; and these subdivisions are themselves further divisible. Finally one reaches the point where one begins to see the truth of Gandhi’s insight that, “In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.”33 And even a single individual holds different views at different times.

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The point is that much of the logical incompatibility among worldviews cannot be traced, at least not in any obvious way, to a religious orientation toward one or the other of the three ultimates affirmed in the process universe. Far more blood has been spilled over the divinity of Jesus, or whether it is appropriate to worship God using images–disputes internal to monotheism–than over whether reality is ultimately personal or impersonal. How does a complementary religious pluralist resolve these differences? I mentioned earlier that my pluralistic model of truth draws upon process thought and the doctrines of relativity developed by the Jain tradition. It is regarding this issue of doctrinal incompatibility beyond what can be explained in terms of the three ultimates that the Jain tradition becomes relevant to my project. In Jain philosophy there is a set of doctrines which, as I understand them, make possible the reconciliation and harmonization of prima facie incompatible claims in terms of a worldview that affirms the complexity and interdependence of all entities. The Jain ‘multidimensional doctrine,’ or doctrine of the complexity of reality (anek›ntav›da), in conjunction with the Jain doctrine of perspectives (nayav›da) and the doctrine of conditional predication (sy›dv›da), provides a way of interpreting seemingly incompatible claims that discloses a deeper harmony and complementarity underlying what, on this analysis, proves to be surface disagreement. Apart from questions about the coherence and applicability of the Jain doctrines themselves issues raised by my appropriation of these Jain doctrines of relativity, as I call them, include their compatibility with the worldviews articulated in both process thought and Ramakrishna Ved›nta. A glance at the basic worldview of process thought and that of Jainism reveals incompatibilities that appear to be more than merely prima facie, one of which is the Jain denial of theism, at least as this is ordinarily conceived.34 If these incompatibilities are truly insurmountable, they could undermine not only my attempt to incorporate Jain philosophy into a process worldview, but the very project of developing a complementary pluralism; for such a situation suggests that there is an incompatibility between two worldviews that cannot be overcome pluralistically. I shall argue, however, that, despite the significant differences between Jain and process cosmology, the doctrines of relativity arise out of a fundamental ontology that is not only compatible with, but ultimately identical to, that of process metaphysics. I shall also argue that the Jain doctrines of relativity are more compatible with the teachings of Ramakrishna than the Advaita Ved›nta with which these teachings are often associated.

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Towards a Global Hinduism Because I am Hindu not by birth, but by choice, the very legitimacy of this exercise could conceivably be called into question by Hindu nationalists or by others who would deny the very possibility of a Westerner–a mleccha or ‘barbarian’–such as myself doing Hindu theology. So another aspiration of this project is to begin carving out and claiming a space, in both the Hindu intellectual tradition and the modern academy, for constructive projects of this kind carried out by non-Indian Hindus. I say ‘to begin,’ but the work of creating this cross-cultural space has, in fact, already begun; for a number of non-Indians have joined Hindu religious orders and done constructive theological work that is recognized as authoritative both by Hindus and by non-Hindu scholars of the tradition. Names that spring immediately to mind are Sister Nivedita and Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mi, to mention just a couple of the more prominent ones. Douglas Brooks, Paul Müller-Ortega, and others have also begun the work, as both lay practitioners and Western scholars of Hinduism, of doing constructive theological writing rooted in their commitment to the branch of Hinduism represented by the Siddha Yoga tradition.35 Members, lay and monastic, of other Hindu organizations with large non-Indian followings have also done similar work. But this remains a relatively new field, whose legitimacy is yet to be fully embraced in the modern academy or in the Hindu tradition. The very notion of Hindu theology is challenged by those uncomfortable with originally Christian terminology, and non-Indian Hindus are often dismissed as ‘New Age.’36 One of the hopes underlying this project is to advance the cause of such work both by argument and example–to advance the development of a truly global Hinduism. Advancing the development of what I am calling a truly global Hinduism involves a delicate balancing act; for a truly global Hinduism must be both truly global and truly Hindu. The primary challenge to such a project is likely to come from those with a strong stake in identifying Hinduism exhaustively with India and Indic culture–that is, from Hindu nationalists. Again, my goal is not to sever Hinduism’s ties to its original sacred geography or culture of origin. To do so would be to damage it irreparably by cutting it off from the roots from which it can and must draw sustenance. The Hindu tradition will always reflect the culture of its origins. And the sacred literatures of Hinduism–both the vast ocean of Sanskrit literature and the many vernacular traditions–are too integral to the tradition to be replaced by any other source of primary inspiration.

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But if Hinduism is also to be a truly global tradition, it must put down new roots in new soils–not instead of, but in addition to those of India– from which it will draw yet another kind of sustenance. Its ability to remain relevant to current and future generations of diasporic Hindus growing up in cultural spaces very different from that of India depends on this, as does its ability to be relevant to non-Indians, whose affiliation to the tradition can enrich it even further, just as it has been enriched historically by the cultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent. Rita Sherma has written about how the Hindu community is adapting to its global situation, describing how Hindu temples in North America and Europe, for example, now have Sunday schools and shrines to many deities to accommodate the variety of Hindu traditions from which their members hail. “But,” Sherma writes: While these may seem to–and do–constitute major changes, these changes are mainly in terms of modalities of communal interactions and expanded interpretations of ritual space. They are not changes on the level of meaning and practice. There have yet to be systematic new expressions of Hindu theologies, ethically and teleologically recontextualized to their new environs.37 Sherma argues that such ‘systematic new expressions of Hindu theologies’ are necessary in order for the tradition to remain vital and relevant to its ever-changing circumstances, and for it to be an agent for change, rather than a museum relic in need of preservation. It is partly to help fill this lacuna that I am pursuing this project, drawing on the culture in which I was raised and the intellectual tradition in which I have been trained in order to give expression to my Hindu beliefs. A global Hinduism, like anything global, is, by necessity, a hybrid tradition, drawing upon the great variety of new cultural contexts in which it finds itself in order to express its ancient themes and pluralistic vision of reality. It is therefore a tradition that not only can teach, but that can also embody pluralism, with a hybrid approach to truth that can draw the best elements from many cultural sources. In this sense, the fact that my Hindu theology draws upon both Jain and process thought is not a weakness, suggesting that Hinduism is somehow lacking in resources that it needs to borrow from outside. It is, rather, a strength, a marker of its Hindu character, that it embraces difference and is willing to ‘go global,’ not sacrificing its essential vision, but using its new circumstances to re-articulate that vision, giving it ongoing relevance.

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‘A Relational Worldview for the Common Good’38 Another aspect of this project is its affirmation, through example, of the validity of hybrid approaches to truth, which are increasingly common in the pluralistic era of globalization that humanity has entered. I feel, or at least I hope, that such approaches will ultimately point the way to a religion of the future that will supersede the religious tribalism and warfare that has long characterised inter-religious relations. I see this supersession as one element in the transition of the human race from the modern condition–or rather, from a condition characterised by warfare between modern and premodern modes of life–to a post-modern condition, on the understanding of post-modernity expressed by David Griffin when he speaks of ‘constructive post-modern thought’: Advocates of this movement do not hold the naively utopian belief that the success of this movement would bring about a global society of universal and lasting peace, harmony, and happiness, in which all spiritual problems, social conflicts, ecological destruction, and hard choices would vanish. There is, after all, surely a deep truth in the testimony of the world’s religions to the presence of a transcultural proclivity to evil deep within the human heart, which no new paradigm, combined with a new economic order, new child-rearing practices, or any other social arrangements, will suddenly eliminate… No such appeal to “universal constants,” however, should reconcile us to the present order, as if it were thereby uniquely legitimated. The human proclivity to evil in general, and to conflictual competition and ecological destruction in particular, can be greatly exacerbated or greatly mitigated by a world order and its worldview. Modernity exacerbates it about as much as imaginable. We can therefore envision, without being naively utopian, a far better world order, with a far less dangerous trajectory, than the one we now have.39 In other words, it is not, as Griffin says, that by articulating an alternative view or model for inter-religious relations one can end all of the world’s problems. I would not say that, “if everyone becomes convinced of the truth of this position, then missionaries will pack their bags, Jews, Muslims, and Christians will stop fighting one another in the Middle East, Buddhists and Hindus will stop fighting one another in Sri Lanka, and the world will become a much happier and more habitable place.”40

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Obviously, things are not so simple. Even Hindus who sincerely believe in religious pluralism can be ‘seduced by the dark side’ and succumb to hateful and bigoted ideologies like Hindu nationalism. Writing books on religious pluralism, then, is not the ultimate solution, but it may be a good start. As Griffin says, a world order and its worldview can either mitigate or exacerbate the problems we face. To imagine a way of superseding the kinds of inter-religious conflict that poison human relations today can certainly be a first step in the direction of making this supersession a reality–the point of John Lennon’s wonderful song of the same name. If it is to happen, this supersession will certainly not occur, at least in any lasting way, through the imperialistic imposition of a worldview ‘from above,’ but through the gradual realisation ‘from below’ by religious persons of all persuasions that their lives and understandings of truth in general are far more enriched by the process of learning from and integrating the insights of a variety of traditions than by exclusive adherence to only one. Such, at least, has been my experience–an experience I hope to share by giving expression to its inner logic in this book. That pluralism cannot be imposed successfully should be abundantly evident by a simple look at the dominant secular order of modernity and the massive pent-up violence that has been unleashed in reaction to it. Modern secularism, in its origins, was driven by a vision not unlike that of the post-modern religious pluralism advocated here–a peaceful society in which religious differences would lead not to violence and hatred, but to a civil conversation that would enrich the entire society as each community contributed to it its own distinctive vision of the common good. What has actually happened, though, is that religion has been driven from public life and religious persons made to feel marginalised. By its internal logic, the conception of modernity that is dominant in the world today forces two, to my way of thinking, equally undesirable options upon human beings. The first is assimilation to the dominant culture of modernity, which involves the privatization of one’s religious beliefs (if one has such beliefs), as well as the implicit acceptance of consumerist values. This latter option is in fact all but inevitable if one participates–as one almost, as a matter of physical necessity, must–as a consumer in the global capitalist economy, even if one rejects the assumptions upon which it is based. What is most pernicious about this option is that it renders one’s deepest values finally irrelevant to one’s life in the larger society one inhabits. They become mere matters of taste, rather than of profound commitment.

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The second is the assertion of one’s beliefs on an anti-modern or neotraditionalist basis, such as on the authority of some particular sacred text, teacher, or institution–the phenomenon of fundamentalism. This neotraditionalism, which is really a reaction to modernity, often seems to be the only recourse that religious persons see themselves as having to resist assimilation to the consumerist values that tend to trivialise that which they hold most sacred. At its best, religious fundamentalism can, on occasion, issue in thoughtful critiques of the dominant modern condition.41 At its worst, however, it issues in catastrophic acts of violence. A middle path must be found between the extremes of secular modernity and religious fundamentalism. Mark Jüergensmeyer reaches the same conclusion in his study of religiously motivated violence, Terror in the Mind of God: Perhaps understandably…in the wake of secularism, and after years of waiting in history’s wings, religion has made its reappearance as an ideology of social order in a dramatic fashion: violently… Religion gives spirit to public life and provides a beacon for moral order. At the same time it needs the temper of rationality and fair play that Enlightenment values give to civil society. Thus religious violence cannot end until some accommodation can be forged between the two–some assertion of moderation in religion’s passion, and some acknowledgment of religion in elevating the spiritual and moral values of public life. In a curious way, then, the cure for religious violence may ultimately lie in a renewed appreciation for religion itself.42 I conceive of Hindu process theology–and by implication the pluralistic model of religion based upon it–as offering such a third way out of this contemporary situation, at least on a conceptual level. What I have in mind is adherence to a religiously informed worldview not on blind faith, but on the basis of the modern humanistic commitment to the autonomy of reason reflecting on experience, an approach perfectly in keeping with the emphasis of the Ramakrishna tradition on direct experience, rather than on a text or institution, as the ultimate religious authority.43 Reason and religion, contrary to the understandings dominant in the contemporary period–namely, modern secularism and religious fundamentalism–are not incompatible. Hindu process theology integrates both reason and religion, in contrast with the two dominant forms of life in modernity, which posit a sharp dichotomy between reason and faith (and draw battle lines accordingly).

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Griffin has provided a critique of these two dominant worldviews, to which he proposes process thought as a constructive post-modern alternative or third way. The two dominant worldviews are, on the one hand, an atheistic naturalism characterised by a sensationist epistemology and materialist ontology (Griffin calls it ‘naturalismsam’), which is dominant largely in the academy, and on the other, a supernaturalistic theism, which is more predominant in the wider culture. By naturalism broadly conceived, Griffin means a worldview according to which everything that occurs is the result of certain normal causal processes. Supernaturalism claims that these processes can be (and sometimes are) interrupted from time to time by divine agency. Both naturalismsam and supernaturalism share a belief in matter as a non-experiencing, vacuous actuality, with no value for itself. According to Griffin, the conflict between naturalismsam and supernaturalism leads to “the apparent conflict between science and religion.” 44 Arguing that both worldviews are neither tenable nor necessary for science or religion (with which they are respectively associated) and that both have jointly led humanity to the brink of extinction, Griffin proposes, paraphrasing Max Weber, a “re-enchantment” of the world “without supernaturalism.” Griffin’s proposal is to replace both naturalismsam and supernaturalism with naturalismppp, a naturalism that is prehensive, panentheistic, and panexperientialist–a process worldview which I hope to demonstrate is preeminently compatible with Hinduism.45 Constructive post-modern or process thought is modern in the sense of accepting the modern commitment to reason reflecting on experience and to naturalism. But it goes beyond and is therefore post-modern in rejecting the dominant modern consensus, along with its attendant scepticism and resulting antithesis–religious fundamentalism. A middle path therefore exists between the dominant atheistic form of secularism and religious fundamentalism. This middle path could be called a ‘reformed religious liberalism,’ and is analogous to the ‘reformed political liberalism’ advocated by Franklin I. Gamwell, also on the basis of process metaphysics.46 This reformed or post-modern religious liberalism, in contrast with its modern equivalent–religious liberalism, which is the ideological source of most Western forms of religious pluralism–does not embrace an exclusively experiential-expressive approach to religious doctrine, as many liberal theologies do, but affirms the literal truth, though on a humanistic basis, of certain basic religious claims–claims about the existence and metaphysical character of God.

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Such a liberalism is also pluralistic–but, again, unlike its predecessors, it bases its pluralism not on uncertainty–on the inability of a particular tradition, like Christianity, to assert its claims in the light of modernity–but on a positive worldview which is, in part, a critique of dominant modern views, but which yet stands on the same foundation of critical reason. Finally, this pluralism is also more profoundly pluralistic than most current versions of this position. Rather than reducing the world’s religions to the purely subjective minimum that the dominant modern consensus allows, it incorporates them in their full cognitive richness into its synthesis. How might a religiously pluralistic, post-modern world order eventually arise? Through a radical abandonment of religious commitment in its traditional sense? Or, as I would prefer to see, through a thorough reconception of each religious tradition from within along more global, pluralistic lines, resulting perhaps in a gradual convergence of all religions? The specifics of the process will vary from tradition to tradition, and indeed, from person to person. As John Cobb writes: Global theology in a pluralistic age need not cut its ties to the particularities of religious traditions… [T]here is no global strategy for developing global theology in a pluralistic age. The strategy is pluralistic. It will be quite different for Muslims, for Hindus, for Sikhs, for Jains, for Buddhists, for Jews, and for Christians.47 We all start on our pilgrimage toward a pluralistic ideal, if we do so at all, from our own unique starting points. Just like religions, there can potentially be as many religious pluralisms as there are people. But again, this is still very abstract. What is the relationship between a pluralistic model of truth, whatever its source, and actual inter-religious violence? On my analysis, a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for intentional violence against other human beings is a process of identity construction, of ‘selfing’ and ‘othering.’ This is a process by which one enhances the sense of empathy that one has for a particular group while simultaneously diminishing one’s sense of empathy with members of any group perceived as other. In Ved›ntic terms, this ‘selfing’ and ‘othering’ process is a form of avidy›–a false consciousness which is the basis of sa˙s›ra, the rebirth process. It is based ultimately upon our identification with our finite and limited physical bodies, giving rise to states of mind and activities contrived to protect and preserve that identification.

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All of the world’s religions teach, in some form or another, as does Whiteheadian process thought, the interdependence and organic unity of all beings. This is the metaphysical reality: whatever I do to another, I do to myself, and to God. In keeping with the mainstream of modern Hindu thought, as expressed by such thinkers as Vivek›nanda and Gandhi, I see this interdependence and organic unity as the metaphysical basis for an ethics of ahi˙s›, or non-violence in thought, word, and deed, and day›, or compassion. If I perceive only some beings as my own and others as ‘other,’ I am constructing and reinforcing a false self, an illusory wall or boundary between self and other where, in reality, there is interdependence and a deeper unity. The construction and the habitual reinforcement of this false self has the dual effect of creating the conditions for suffering, or du¯kha, and for further entrapment in the rebirth process–two effects which essentially amount to the same thing; for existence in sa˙s›ra, as the First Noble Truth of Buddhism proclaims, is, by its very nature, existence in du¯kha. It is by constructing identities for ourselves on the basis of a false sense of disconnection–of alienation–from other beings that we trap ourselves in the cycle of rebirth, of violence and suffering. One of the most powerful and pervasive factors in human identity formation is religion. Through our shared commitment to a common worldview and spiritual practice, we form close bonds of communion with others. But such bonds also exclude. If we can conceive of religious difference, however, in terms not of exclusion and conflict, but of harmony and organic unity, one of the roots of violence is undercut. If I can conceive of my neighbour’s religious practice and worldview as part of a larger, more comprehensive picture that includes my own as well, then the threat that my neighbour’s otherness might otherwise pose to my perceived identity is neutralised. Catholic and Protestant Christians have murdered one another for centuries in the name of religious differences. However, the ecumenical movement in Christianity has helped to create conditions in which these two types of Christians can say, “We are all Christians. We have important differences, but we also share certain fundamental values that make us part of a common Christian project.” Raimundo Panikkar has argued for what he calls a “wider ecumenism,” extending beyond Christianity, such that people of all religions can say, “We are all religious people. We have important differences, but we also share certain fundamental values that make us part of a common religious project.”48

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Perhaps an even wider ecumenism is possible, in terms of which we can affirm our common humanity and our commitment to a common human project–which would presumably include, at minimum, the survival of the species. Indeed, the ultimate goal, to my way of thinking, would be a cosmic ecumenism, finding the common cause we share with all beings, and with the process of the universe itself. This would be the cause, in Whiteheadian terms, of creative transformation, the ongoing production of novel ‘forms of definiteness’ for the enrichment of the divine experience, all experience ultimately being part of God’s subjectivity. In the words of the Gıt›, “Having known me as the enjoyer…the friend of all beings, one attains peace.”49 The idea here is not to emphasise similarity and dismiss difference, in the manner of standard, superficial readings of religious pluralism. The idea is to perceive the interdependence that underlies difference. Interdependence implies difference. Two identical entities are not interdependent. If they are identical, they are not two, but one. Dependence is a relation which, as such, can only occur between different entities. But to affirm a relation is to affirm a simultaneous sameness, as well as difference. Two entities are related only if they are, in different respects, both similar and different. Two identical entities are not related. They are one. But two utterly dissimilar entities, sharing no common attributes, would be wholly unrelated. According to both process thought and Buddhism, no such utterly dissimilar entities exist. To exist is to be related. Consequently, a wholly independent entity is a non-entity. If nothing else, two existent entities share the quality of existence. The fundamental fact of their being constitutes their relatedness, and vice versa–their relatedness constitutes their existence. According to Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, it is the existence that all entities share–their relationality–that constitutes the ultimate abstraction, the impersonal Brahman, or Being Itself. The Hindu affirmation that all beings are One, that, “All this, indeed, is Brahman,” on this understanding, is an affirmation not of a strict identity, in an Advaitic sense, but of a common being-ness or relationality, an organic unity. This, at least, is what I perceive in Ramakrishna Ved›nta–not an absorbing unity that denies the reality of the world of diversity, but, to use Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, an integral unity that affirms the reality of the world. A precedent for this organic way of thinking exists in Buddhism and Jainism, and also in non-Advaitic forms of Ved›nta and in the ÷aiva and T›ntric ÷›kta traditions.

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Religious pluralism then, is a natural outflow, a logical entailment, of a relational metaphysic, like that expressed, in varying ways and with varying degrees of emphasis, in Whiteheadian thought, Buddhism, Jain philosophy, and Ved›nta, both modern and traditional. The idea is not to lump all these varied systems of thought together indiscriminately. Each has its own distinctive take on reality, and there are many issues on which they disagree. But out of their common elements, a consistent philosophy can be discerned. And it is not only an abstract philosophy. It is a philosophy with very real, concrete implications for inter-religious relations, and for how we interact with other beings generally. If I see my identity as being rooted in anything less than the structure of existence itself–in dharma–and if I identify my community with anything less than the community of all beings, I not only commit a cognitive error. I also create and reinforce the necessary conditions for violence, suffering, death, and rebirth. Exclusionary ideologies such as Hindu nationalism arise from and reinforce an avidyic consciousness. They thereby work at cross-purposes to the very traditions they claim to be preserving and protecting. Peace on earth requires nothing less than a complete revolution in human consciousness and identity formation, a radical identification with the whole of reality, a radical identification translatable into a short but powerful English word: love. Conclusion: The Contested Future of Hinduism What is to be the future of Hinduism? What shape will this tradition take in the twenty-first century and beyond? Will it slide further into tribalism, becoming identified increasingly with a narrow ethnic and national identity, and belligerence toward other traditions? Will it be known as the tradition of Ramakrishna or the goondas of Ayodhya–and more recently, of Gujarat, Mahatma Gandhi’s home state, associated now with images of horrific mob violence? Will a Hindu be identified as a practitioner of an ancient tradition with a radically progressive vision for inter-communal relations, or negatively defined as simply an Indian who is not Muslim or Christian? Or with the incredible internal diversity to which a single word–Hindu– can hardly do justice, and the philosophies of pluralism and non-violence to which it has given rise, will Hinduism emerge as a beacon to the world, a model for how communities that have greatly varied worldviews can coexist as elements of a greater organic unity? Might Hinduism become the model for a new Humanism–not the current secular variety, but a spiritual humanism that draws upon the best of all religions and philosophies, looking beyond the narrow limits of ethnicity and nationality?

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It is to this second vision for Hinduism that this book is dedicated, a vision that even Hindu nationalists perceive, in their heart of hearts, as the authentic character of the Hindu tradition; for it is quite unexpectedly endorsed by V.D. Savarkar, the founding father of Hindu nationalism, in the concluding words of his essay on Hindu-ness, or Hindutva: A Hindu is most intensely so when he ceases to be a Hindu and with a Shankar claims the whole earth for a Benares…or with a Tukaram exclaims… ‘My country! Oh brothers, the limits of the Universe—there the frontiers of my country lie!’50 Hindu nationalists are not monsters. They are not demons. They are human beings who are fearful for the future of a rich and ancient tradition. And these fears are not altogether unwarranted. There are forces that are hostile to Hinduism, in the form of radical, militant Islam, the aggressively evangelising forms of missionary Christianity, and explicitly anti-religious forms of secularism. But it is also important to note that these ideologies do not represent the beliefs of all–or even of most–Muslims, Christians, or secularists. The answer to Hindu fears is not mob violence, or hatred for the other, or the hardening of the lines which separate ‘us’ from ‘them,’ ‘self’ from ‘other.’ Such impulses arise from our lower, avidyic consciousness. The answer, then, to Hindu nationalism is Hinduism. The salvation of Hinduism rests with Hinduism itself, a tradition with the ability to show a way to all human beings beyond fear, beyond hatred, and well beyond the politics of communal identity.

2 RAMAKRISHNA MEETS WHITEHEAD Outline of a Hindu Process Theology

Modern Ved›ntic Religious Pluralism and its Critics: The Need for Reconstruction One of the most distinctive doctrines of modern Ved›nta, expressed in the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, as well as by Mahatma Gandhi and in the writings of many representatives of the modern Hindu tradition, is its doctrine of religious pluralism, or sarvadharma-sama-bh›va.

Called by Gandhi, somewhat problematically, ‘the equality of all religions,’ a better translation for this term might be, ‘an attitude of impartiality toward all religions.’1 Pravrajika Vrajapr›˚a, in a phrase which is closer to the idea of a complementary religious pluralism developed in this book, refers to this concept as, ‘the harmony of religions.’2 As she writes: Truth is one, but it comes filtered through the limited human mind. That mind lives in a particular culture, has its own experience of the world and lives at a particular point in history. The infinite Reality is thus processed through the limitations of space, time, causation, and is further processed through the confines of human understanding and language. Manifestations of truth–scriptures, sages, and prophets–will necessarily vary from age to age and from culture to culture. Light, when put through a prism, appears in various colours when observed from different angles. But the light always remains the same pure light.3

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The metaphor of the one light of truth broken up by the prism of the human mind into the many colours of the world’s religions is not the only one employed to illustrate religious pluralism. The image is also frequently given of many paths to the top of one mountain or of many rivers flowing into one ocean. The metaphor of language is also used, the fact that there are many words for a thing illustrating the idea that the many concepts of ultimate reality nevertheless pertain to the same ultimate reality. This doctrine is so central to and so widely associated with modern Ved›nta, and modern Ved›nta, in turn, is so often the medium through which Hinduism is expressed, particularly to Western audiences, that religious pluralism has come to be held by many, both Hindu and non-Hindu, as the Hindu view of religious diversity, and even as the most distinctively Hindu of beliefs, serving to contrast Hinduism with proselytising traditions that often insist upon the exclusive truth and salvific efficacy of their own revelation. Recently, though, this view has come under considerable attack from within the Hindu tradition due to certain detrimental effects it is held to have had on the community over the course of the last century. Many of today’s Hindus, it is claimed, are unaware of the vast riches of their own tradition in part because the idea of ‘radical universalism’–as a prominent Hindu critic of religious pluralism, Frank Morales, has called it–has led to a ‘watering down’ of a sense of Hindu distinctiveness, leading to what Rajiv Malhotra calls the ‘myth of Hindu sameness,’ the idea that what Hinduism teaches is in no way distinct from the teachings of other religions.4 Moreover, this watering down, combined with a widespread ignorance within the community regarding the finer points of Hindu philosophy, is seen as making Hindus much more vulnerable to unscrupulous conversion efforts by communities far more conscious of their own distinctiveness, and far more aggressive in promoting their own ideals, than are Hindus– namely Christians and Muslims. Hindus, on the other hand, have generally adopted an attitude of ‘live and let live’ regarding religious differences, in large part due to the influence of the modern Ved›ntic doctrine of religious pluralism. But this tolerant attitude can backfire. As Morales writes: As I travel the nation [the US] delivering lectures on Hindu philosophy and spirituality, I frequently encounter a repeated scenario. Hindu parents will often approach me after I’ve finished my lecture and timidly ask if they can have some advice. The often-repeated story goes somewhat like this:

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“We raised our son/daughter to be a good Hindu. We took them to the temple for important holidays. We even sent him/her to a Hindu camp for a weekend when they were 13. Now at the age of 23, our child has left Hinduism and converted to the (fill in the blank) religion. When we ask how could they have left the religion of their family, the answer that they throw back in our face is ‘but mama/dada, you always taught us that all religions are the same, and that it doesn’t really matter how a person worships God. So what does it matter if we’ve followed your advice and switched to another religion?’”5 Because of the perceived vulnerability to conversion that ‘radical universalism’ is seen to create, there are critics who suggest that the proliferation of religious pluralism in the contemporary Hindu tradition is the result of a Christian missionary conspiracy to weaken Hinduism. Morales adopts this view, pointing to the influence of Unitarianism on Sw›mı Vivek›nanda (presumably via Vivek›nanda’s involvement, prior to meeting Ramakrishna, in the Br›hmo Sam›j, a heavily Unitarian-influenced institution). One response to such criticism, of course, is that it misses the mark. The claim of modern Ved›nta is not that ‘all religions are the same.’ To again cite Gandhi, “Religions are different roads converging upon the same point.” Difference is acknowledged in this vision of religious pluralism. As Vrajapr›˚a explains it: This is not to say that all religions are “pretty much the same.” That is an affront to the distinct beauty and individual greatness of each of the world’s spiritual traditions. Saying that every religion is equally true and authentic doesn’t mean that one can be substituted for the other like generic brands of aspirin.6 But the historical claim that modern Ved›ntic religious pluralism is the product of Unitarian influence bears scrutiny, especially to the degree that it undermines the project of claiming religious pluralism to be a more authentically Hindu position than is Hindu nationalism. While there is historical truth in the claim that Vivek›nanda probably was influenced by Unitarianism, three further facts need to be noted. First, Unitarianism is hardly an evangelical form of Christianity. Many would claim it is not even Christian, because of its rejection of the central doctrine of the Trinity. Furthermore, many Unitarians do not regard themselves as Christian, defining themselves as Neo-pagans, or even Buddhists.

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Secondly, by far the most influential Unitarian thinker of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was heavily influenced by Hinduism, an influence that led directly to the transcendentalist movement in America, which included such figures as Henry David Thoreau–who, in turn, influenced Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, Ramakrishna, the true fountainhead of modern Ved›nta is very unlikely to have been influenced much by the Unitarians at all. His interactions with the Br›hmo Sam›j, specifically Keshub Chunder Sen, occurred relatively late in his life, years after the famous period of his s›dhanas, during which he developed his ideas about pluralism on the basis of having experienced the same sam›dhi as a result of following the practices of a wide variety of Hindu traditions, plus Christianity and Islam. It is ultimately on the direct realisation experiences of Ramakrishna that modern tradition of Ved›nta bases its doctrine of religious pluralism. There is also something decidedly odd about seeing religious pluralism as an idea that Christian missionaries would want to promote. If Hindus include pictures of Jesus Christ and his mother in their home altars, is this an indication that they are becoming Christian? Or is it a distinctively Hindu kind of religious act that conservative Christians at least would find deeply offensive? If anything, religious pluralism would appear to stem the tide of conversion. In response to the evangelical Christian claim that the Hindu has not yet ‘found Jesus,’ the Hindu can reply, “Of course I have. He’s right here in my home altar with Lord Vi„˚u, Lord ÷iva, and M› K›lı. I have them all. Do you?” If anything, I am more inclined to see the spread of religious pluralism among liberal Christian intellectuals like John Hick and David Ray Griffin as a Hinduisation of Christianity, as conservative Christians have charged, rather than seeing its promulgation among Hindus as a Christianisation of Hinduism. If anything, the insistent sectarianism that can be found in some Hindu groups is more akin to Christianity than is religious pluralism. Clearly, influences can move in both directions. And if Hinduism is open to influences from other traditions, is this not a sign of strength rather than of weakness? A display of confidence rather than of fear? If the point of Morales’s criticism, however, is that religious pluralism has been misunderstood as saying that ‘all religions are the same,’ and that this view has had the detrimental effect that its critics charge, then I agree with him. But unlike the critics of religious pluralism, I take this to mean not that we must reject religious pluralism as a foreign growth within the body of Hinduism, but that we must very carefully re-articulate this idea in a way that will not produce such misunderstandings or negative effects.

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Somewhat surprisingly given the importance that modern Hindus place upon it, religious pluralism is not a position that has been extensively theorised or articulated in any very systematic way by the contemporary Hindu tradition. To be sure, the sermons, writings, and lectures of such important figures as Sri Ramakrishna, Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, Mahatma Gandhi, and others are rich with references to religious pluralism, and with a variety of vivid and memorable metaphors for it–many names for one God, many rivers flowing into one ocean, many paths to the top of the same mountain peak, and so on, as noted before. But one rarely finds, in modern Hindu writings, attempts to provide sustained and systematic philosophical or theological arguments for this position. In other words, one does not find essays by major Hindu writers dealing in depth with questions like, “How can the apparent doctrinal incompatibilities among the world’s religions be reconciled in keeping with religious pluralism?” or “What metaphysical assumptions are involved in religious pluralism?” or “What justifications exist, apart from a presumed conduciveness to improved inter-communal relations, for believing that a pluralistic account of religion is true?” It is not that the figures I have mentioned were not aware of these issues, or that an implicit philosophy cannot be gleaned from their scattered pronouncements on this topic. But explicit articulation of their views on religious pluralism in philosophical terms was not, it seems, very high on any of their agendas. 7 When one does find modern Hindu works devoted exclusively to the question of religious diversity, they tend to take two forms: works on other religions as interpreted from a Hindu perspective or perennialist expositions of the world’s religions. The former category includes Vivek›nanda’s lectures on Jesus, the Buddha, and Mohammed, and a considerable body of Hindu literature written exclusively on the figure of Jesus. The first modern Hindu author to write extensively about Jesus was the founder of modern Hinduism, Ram Mohan Roy, a figure who is especially relevant for Morales’s critique of religious pluralism. Roy’s best-known work on this topic, The Precepts of Jesus, is a Jeffersonian rewriting of the gospels that highlights Jesus’ ethical teachings and omits references to such things as miracles and Jesus’ divinity. It is not, in other words, a Christian text in anything resembling a traditional sense. The Unitarian flavour of this text is plainly evident–as is that of the Hindu reform organisation that Roy established, the Br›hmo Sam›j. Equally evident is its polemical intent– defending Hinduism against aggressive proselytising by evangelical Christian missionaries by articulating a highly rationalist, modern version of this tradition based on his interpretation of the Upanis‹ads.

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Roy’s work helps lay the foundation for later Hindu writing about Jesus. Keshub Chunder Sen devoted many of his lectures to a Hindu interpretation and appropriation of the life and teachings of Jesus, and Sw›mı Prabhav›nanda, a twentieth-century monk of the Ramakrishna Order, wrote a commentary on the gospels entitled The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta. Paramahamsa Yogananda claimed to have had visionary encounters with Jesus, as did Sri Ramakrishna; and the influence of the Sermon on the Mount on Gandhi is well known. More recently, there has been Ravi Ravendra’s work, Christ the Yogi, as well as a growing literature on the notion that Jesus actually visited India and studied yoga during the ‘lost years’ not described in the canonical gospels. The import of much of this literature is that the teachings of Jesus are not only compatible with Hinduism, but are far more compatible with Hinduism than they are with Christianity, at least as generally understood by Christians. What is typically singled out as the error of orthodox Christianity, the point at which it parts company with the more expansive and radical vision of its founder, is in its insistence upon faith in Jesus–that is, conversion to Christianity–as a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation. This is contrasted with Hindu religious pluralism, which is seen as more in keeping with Jesus’ proclamation that God is love. The second major category of Hindu writing on the topic of religious diversity consists of works that attempt to demonstrate the unity of the world’s religions. They typically do so by bringing together quotations from a variety of traditions with the aim of showing that they are all saying the same thing on topics of central importance–ethics, spiritual practices, the nature of ultimate reality, and so on. The best-known example of this genre is probably Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. This text shows the influence of Sw›mı Prabhav›nanda, of whom Huxley was a known associate.8 Even more extensive is Bhagavan Das’ massive tome, The Essential Unity of All Religions, a collection of over eight hundred pages of parallel sayings from the world’s religions–a text written, in Das’ words, to promote “Peace on Earth and Good Will among Men.”9 Perennialism, a label drawn from the title of Huxley’s book, is the view–I would call it a sub-variety of religious pluralism–that underlying the apparent diversity of the world’s religions is a common experiential core. This common core is expressed in terms of a shared ethos of renunciation, of the opening up of the ego to, and its eventual union with or dissolution in, a commonly experienced transcendent reality. This reality, in turn, is conceived of variously, in different religions and cultures, either as a personal deity or as an impersonal absolute.

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This is a popular Hindu position that fits very well with the various scattered references to religious pluralism that one can find in the Hindu scriptures and the writings of many modern Hindu reformers. The inner essence of all religions, on this understanding, is one. The differences among the world’s religions are merely superficial. There are, however, a number of difficulties with perennialism as thus described. The first difficulty is with regard to the evidence that is proposed in its support. Again, this typically takes the shape of a series of quotations from great representative figures of the world’s religions that seem to be saying the same thing on a variety of topics. In response to this approach, however, experts in various religious traditions will frequently object that the quotations in question are taken out of context and do not, in fact, mean what the perennialist quote-collector suggests–a serious, if not insurmountable, objection. One may concede–as I do–that, occasional misreadings of textual citations aside, the bulk of the evidence favours the cross-cultural existence of an ethos of renunciation and sacrifice, with a corresponding set of spiritual practices and illuminative experiences, just as perennialism describes. But the problem remains that perennialism ultimately issues in the conclusion that most religious people for most of history have been wrong about the true meanings of their beliefs and practices. This is because perennialism tends to regard religious differences as superficial, as mere ‘cultural accretions.’ What matters the most about religions, according to perennialism, is what they share–the insights of a relatively small handful of mystical virtuoso practitioners. The ‘common essence’ of all religions is a reality that seems to escape the awareness of all but a few religious people. Such religious elitism seems to undermine the basically charitable impulse that is its initial impetus–the impulse to see all religions as, in some sense, united in a common purpose, to say that everyone is, in some sense, on the right path. While I am, again, willing to go along with the perennialist approach to some degree–more so than its many critics–I am concerned that if one takes too hard a perennialist line, too elitist a position on what the world’s religions are really about, one cuts oneself off from the possibility of learning from difference. While I would be inclined to accept the perennialist view that there is a common set of truths affirmed by the mystics of the world’s religions–I call it a ‘set’ and not a ‘core,’ because it is not equally central to all traditions–I am also inclined to think there are truths that are distinctive to particular religions, that there are some truths, including some important ones, that are not part of the shared set– like reincarnation, for example.

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Finally, there is the question that perennialism raises, to which we shall return, with its claim that the same transcendent reality is experienced as a personal deity and an impersonal absolute. Might these two not be distinct realities? Perennialists typically assume–as do identist religious pluralists, like John Hick–that affirming that practitioners of different religious paths are all having authentic experiences requires that the object of those experiences be one and the same. But this does not necessarily follow. How do modern Hindu writers on religious diversity typically address issues of this kind? They do not. Even the perennialist religious pluralism of many is more or less implicit. It is rarely, if ever, worked out systematically. One finds the affirmation that the founders of various religions–such as Christ or the Buddha–are great beings, or even divine incarnations. But this is rarely accompanied by an analysis of their teachings. What one finds most frequently, the rule to which there is only the occasional exception, is a presumption in favour of religious pluralism, in either a generic or perennialist sense, as the Hindu position on diversity, and as a more adequate position to hold than religious exclusivism. Religious exclusivism is invariably identified with intolerance, bigotry, and inter-religious violence, its connection with these being taken as obvious. Such exclusivism, in turn, is also attributed, not invariably but not infrequently, to Christians and Muslims. Such an attribution–though not without justification, given the violent histories of both of these faiths– highlights the potentially double-edged character of Hindu religious pluralism. There are, to be sure, many Hindu writers, such as Das and Gandhi, whose pluralism is clearly motivated by a sincere desire to promote ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will among Men.’ Indeed, Das appears almost to go out of his way to incorporate a large number of citations from Christian and Muslim sources into his perennialist exposition, and Gandhi, of course, gave his life for his commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity. But there are others, no less sincere, whose agenda is the defence and promotion of Hinduism as opposed to, rather than in solidarity with, Christianity and Islam. My point here is simply that Hindu pluralism can have both polemical as well as peaceful uses. This is precisely the Hindu triumphalism that I mentioned earlier that I hope to avoid in my own work. ‘Hinduism is the most inclusive religion. It is therefore superior.’ Even more than the implicit elitism of perennialism, such triumphalism contradicts the fundamental charity that underlies religious pluralism–the sense that we are all, to some degree, on the right path, and that diverse religions and philosophies are, in some sense, true and can serve as sources of wisdom and enlightenment–a generally positive assessment of religion as such.

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To return, though, to the issue of the overall absence of systematic Hindu thought on the topic of religious pluralism, it seems that critical questions like those I have raised could be very easily addressed if Hindu thinkers cared to take them up. Why is there this apparent lacuna in the Hindu tradition? If religious pluralism is, indeed, a central tenet of Hinduism, as many Hindu self-expressions suggest, why has so little systematic argument been offered in its defence? Is there, in fact, a lacuna, or is the perception of a lacuna a mere matter of perspective, of coming from a context in which critical questioning of religious pluralism is commonplace–such as a predominantly Christian context? Or are critics correct in claiming this position is simply incoherent and inimical to critical thought? My tentative suggestion is that it is precisely the centrality of religious pluralism to Hinduism that is responsible for the apparent lack of systematic thinking in its defence. Theological arguments only occur in a tradition when there is a disagreement over some issue–when there is a point that needs defending–and the truth of religious pluralism is a pervasive assumption among Hindus. The preferability of religious pluralism to religious exclusivism is so widely assumed in Hinduism that, again, in polemical writings directed at Christianity and Islam, the Hindu ideal of religious pluralism is frequently held up as a sign of Hindu superiority. The tenability of religious pluralism as such is unquestioned, and is, indeed, taken as given when such a rhetorical strategy is followed. Critical issues such as I have been raising–about perennialism, and about the potentially double-edged, polemical character of Hindu religious pluralism–simply do not arise.10 In contrast with the Hindu tradition, where the truth of religious pluralism is so pervasively assumed that the very idea of giving it a systematic defence has hardly even arisen, in Christianity religious pluralism is still a relatively new and controversial idea. Though not without precedent in the premodern tradition, Christian religious pluralism is largely an effect of reflection by progressive Christian theologians on the relationship of faith and modernity in the aftermath of the violent colonization of most of the globe in the name of Christ. Christian religious pluralists have raised the same question raised by Hindu critics of Christianity: Is exclusivism adequate to the Gospel of Jesus Christ? This kind of critical questioning was raised in the nineteenth century by Unitarians, who were, in turn, influential upon such thinkers as Ram Mohan Roy, who in turn influenced Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, who has, in turn, influenced contemporary Christian religious pluralists.

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The pioneers of Christian religious pluralism include John Hick and Raimundo Panikkar, as well as Paul F. Knitter, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and others. The forms that their pluralistic views take vary, but all express the same rejection of religious absolutism and embrace, in some form or another, the idea of many true religions. All also display varying degrees of indebtedness to the modern Hindu tradition. The most influential–and controversial–of these thinkers has been John Hick. His pluralistic hypothesis, although it is expressed in the language of Kantian philosophy, has a number of striking affinities with the Advaita Ved›nta tradition of Hinduism. Advaita, which means ‘non-dual,’ is a philosophy frequently characterised as an extreme monism, according to which nothing real exists other than nirgu˚a Brahman, or Brahman with-out qualities. All experience of difference is an experience of m›y›–a term often translated as ‘illusion,’ but which also means, significantly, ‘creativity.’ One could say, in Kantian language, that nirgu˚a Brahman is the noumenal ground of existence and sagu˚a Brahman–Brahman with qualities–is the phenomenal realm of our experience. According to Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis, all authentic religious experiences are of the phenomenal realm–phenomenal experiences of the same divine noumenon, “the Real.”11 This is also not unlike Advaita Ved›nta, which teaches the validity of bhakti experiences as ways to purify the mind and prepare it for the highest realisation, but which sees these experiences as ultimately illusory. Hick, however, does not believe the Real itself can be experienced. In this way it is radically unlike nirgu˚a Brahman. Most religious pluralists typically follow some version of Hick’s model of unity. Smith, for example, emphasizes “faith” as a transcultural category, while Knitter, on the other hand, emphasizes ethical and socio-political praxis, claiming that what unites the world’s religions is the cause of human–and also, more recently, ecological–liberation.12 But these Christian expressions of religious pluralism have evoked serious objections from many Christian theologians and philosophers of religion. As a result, a vigorous theological debate has ensued on the topic of religious pluralism. If, therefore, one is looking for a serious conversation in which religious pluralism is being treated systematically, in which objections to this position are being raised and addressed, one needs to look to Christian theology; for it is in the ongoing debates among Christian religious pluralists and their critics that one typically finds questions raised like “Is religious pluralism a tenable position? What reasons are there for accepting it?”

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I suggested earlier that Christian religious pluralism is a position that owes a great deal to Hinduism, particularly those forms of this position that have become prominent in the Western academy. If Christian varieties of religious pluralism do bear the stamp of Hindu influence, then it should come as no surprise if conservative Christians find them objectionable. Indeed, one of the most frequently encountered objections to this position that one does find among Christian authors is that it is incompatible with constitutive Christian claims–namely, the necessity of faith in Christ as the condition for human salvation. Significantly, objections to religious pluralism have come not only from conservative Christians, but also from many who are sympathetic to the idea of religious pluralism as such–what could be called generic religious pluralism in the sense of sarva-dharma-sama-bh›va, a generally positive disposition toward all religions, as well as an impartiality, in the sense of recognising that all traditions have both faults and positive virtues. The chief objections of these critics–progressive Christians such as John Cobb and David Tracy–are not to religious pluralism as such, but to the specifics of particular pluralistic models, especially that of John Hick, who has been the pre-eminent spokesperson for this view in the field of Christian theology and philosophy of religion. Why are the criticisms raised by these thinkers especially significant? They are significant because Hick’s model is basically a Hindu model, and the objections to it carry sufficient weight, at least in my judgment, to merit its rethinking and reconstruction by scholars committed to a Hindu worldview. In addition to these more ‘friendly’ objections, still other objections have arisen over the course of this debate–objections raised by conservative Christians, but not on the basis of uniquely Christian concerns. These objections have raised questions about the internal logical coherence, the tenability, of religious pluralism as such. If the tenability of religious pluralism–a central Hindu doctrine–is in question, so, by implication, is the tenability of Hinduism (at least in its modern Ved›ntic incarnation). A Hindu rethinking of religious pluralism is therefore very much in order. Taking my lead from the intra-Christian conversation on religious pluralism, my proposal is to employ Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics in the service of the Ramakrishna tradition, developing a Hindu process theology analogous to the Christian process theologies that have been advanced not only to defend and re-articulate religious pluralism, but to rethink classical Western metaphysics and to address the issues raised by modern scientific scepticism.

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Process Metaphysics: Whitehead’s Radical Vision for Philosophy In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Whitehead defines speculative philosophy as, “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element in our experience can be interpreted.” By “interpretation,” he means, “that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme,” and by “coherent,” he means that, “it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth.” The method of speculative philosophy consists of “philosophical generalization,” that is, “the utilization of specific notions, applying to a restricted group of facts, for the divination of the generic notions which apply to all facts” a creative process governed by “unflinching pursuit of the two rationalistic ideals, coherence and logical perfection.”13 This rather ambitious definition of speculative philosophy is what Whitehead strives to fulfill in the development of his metaphysical system; although he immediately concedes that the articulation of a system of metaphysical first principles can never take place in any final way due to the limitations of language and the human imagination.14 The search for the goal of speculative philosophy, then, its approach to truth, must be ongoing, “asymptotic,”15 ever open to new experiential data and modes of philosophical expression. As Whitehead’s biographer, Victor Lowe, explains: When the system fails to accommodate some recurrent experience, the system must be revised. Whitehead made none of the claims to have proved the truth of his system that were made for the great metaphysical systems of the past. He offered a bold, complex hypothesis and said, “Take it from here.” The methodology of his “speculative philosophy,” as he called it, was cautious and sophisticated. The system he offered was original, and larger in scope than any that is actively entertained today…William James said, “Systems must be closed.” Whitehead’s position was that a system must be open to revision. It should be constructed as a speculative theory, not as a set of truths calling for vital commitment. Commitment should come later, as a result of comparing available philosophies.16

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If, as Whitehead affirms, a perfectly adequate conceptual system is impossible, one might, of course, ask, “What is the point?” Why attempt to develop a system of metaphysical first principles at all if it can never finally be done? Why pursue such an ultimately futile project, particularly given its difficulty? Rather than being seen, though, as an exercise in futility, or as grandiose or overly ambitious–as mainstream modern philosophers have tended to see it, dismissing it as essentially a continuation of the classical metaphysical project which they take Kant to have refuted–Whitehead’s method is better perceived as an attempt to recover the holistic character of premodern philosophy which he found to have been lost in modernity. The ancient conception of philosophy was not of an abstract, intellectual exercise, but of an activity concerned with exploring every facet of human existence–rather like traditional South Asian conceptions of darŸana. This is one way in which Whitehead envisions a postmodern world. After beginning his career as a mathematician and moving on to the philosophy of science, Whitehead found that modern science and the philosophy that accompanied it failed to incorporate the dimension of value into their conceptions of reality–a dimension he found integral to human experience. Whitehead found, in other words, that the realms of objective fact and subjective valuation had been sundered, with the second realm tending to be reduced to the first in the minds of many. The overwhelming success in modernity of the scientific method, of empirical investigation, in a wide variety of fields had led to the phenomenon of positivism, of the empirical methods of science becoming regarded as normative for all knowledge, with the non-empirical aspects of human existence, the aspects of value and meaning, becoming increasingly perceived as constituting a purely subjective and non-rational realm, and traditional religious and metaphysical claims being assessed, literally, as ‘nonsense’ by analytic philosophers, many of whom were Whitehead’s very own colleagues. The positivistic conception of reality was both materialistic and atheistic, reducing everything, ultimately, to ‘bits of matter.’ Whitehead, however, perceived a contradiction between the conception of reality as valueless and meaningless advanced by positivistic philosophers and scientists and the efforts that they made to defend this view. For if this view were true, why should they care if anyone agreed with it? He once observed dryly that, “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”17

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The philosophy–which would become process philosophy–which he began to develop after the death of one of his sons in the first world war was an attempt to reintegrate the dimensions of human experience that modernity had compartmentalised, to develop a total, non-reductionist philosophy of nature–a ‘pan-physics,’ he initially called it, though it was not a ‘physicalism’ or materialism 18–which would encompass every aspect of existence to the exclusion of none. This characteristic of process philosophy as integral is the one that David Ray Griffin defines as the first of what he calls ten “Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy,” namely, “The integration of moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions with the most general doctrines of the sciences into a self-consistent worldview as one of the central tasks of philosophy in our time.”19 Although such an attempt at a totalising–and therefore implicitly hegemonic–system of thought could be viewed initially with suspicion by postmodern thinkers (such as those who locate themselves in the Foucauldian tradition, with its power/knowledge equation and its inherent distrust of totalising systems), the radical and potentially liberatory character of such a system and its character as a critique of the dominant assumptions of modernity has not been lost on such critical theorists as Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt school: Whitehead’s propositions seem to describe the actual development of Reason as well as its failure. Or rather they seem to suggest that Reason is still to be discovered, recognized, and realised, for hitherto the historical function of Reason has also been to repress and even destroy the urge to live, to live well, and to live better [the urge, the fulfilment of which, according to Whitehead, is the function of reason20]–or to postpone and put an exorbitantly high price on the fulfilment of this urge.21 The single most compelling feature of process philosophy, on my assessment, is precisely its attempt to take every element of our experience, to the exclusion of none, as the data for its reflections–“its insistence,” which it shares with existentialism, “upon considering the whole experience of living.”22 This is one of the features of process thought that marks it off from the predominant trends in modern philosophy, which largely take the ‘objective’ (or more accurately, intersubjective) realm of empirical experience as primary, regarding ‘subjective’ reality, including ethical and aesthetic reality, as derivative–or even, in the case of positivism, delusory.

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Philosophical systems frequently elevate a single facet of experience–to use Whitehead’s terminology, an ultimate notion–at the expense of the rest: the permanent over the impermanent, as in philosophies which take some notion of substance as their ultimate category, the impermanent over the permanent, as in Buddhism, mind over matter, as in idealism, matter over mind, as in materialism, God over the world, as in classical theism, or the world over God, as in, again, materialism, or reductionistic, scientistic positivism–any philosophy which sees the world as nothing but the product of the random collisions of physical brute forces or bits of matter). But process metaphysics seeks to articulate the principles exhibited in all experience: both change and continuity, both materiality and the experience of the intrinsic beauty and value in the universe. As such, it seeks to disclose the principles involved in every element of experience, to the exclusion of none. This, for Whitehead, includes the category of divinity. “In the first place,” he writes, “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.”23 The inherent contradictions of traditional theism, according to Whitehead–its assertion that God is the absolutely perfect creator of an imperfect world, that the world is related to God but God is not related to it, and its failure to provide an account of why God created the world amounting to anything more satisfying than saying ‘because he wanted to’– are functions of its tendency to pay “metaphysical compliments” to God,24 to postulate God as a being so radically different in kind from every other entity in the universe as to betray the metaphysical project of developing a coherent, self-contained system of ideas in terms of which every element of experience can be interpreted. It is, in fact, the very tendency of philosophies not to integrate the various aspects of experience into a coherent whole that ultimately leads both to the classical conception of God as wholly necessary and immutable and to the relegation of some dimensions of experience to the level of illusion: The vicious separation of the flux from the permanence leads to the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality. But if the opposites, static and fluent, have once been so explained as separately to characterise diverse actualities, the interplay between the thing which is static and the things which are fluent involves contradiction at every step in its explanation. Such philosophies must include the notion of ‘illusion’ as a fundamental principle–the notion of ‘mere appearance.’ This is the final Platonic problem.25

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God is the subject of the seventh and eighth of Griffin’s Ten Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy: “The Whiteheadian version of naturalistic theism, according to which a Divine Actuality acts variably but never supernaturally in the world,” and “Doubly Dipolar Theism,” that is, the doctrine that God is both changing and unchanging and that God is both influencing and being influenced by the world.26 That in God which is unchanging is the primordial nature, corresponding to the Buddhist dharmak›ya and the Ved›ntic nirgu˚a Brahman. God, according to process thought, is, like the God of classical Western theism, a metaphysically necessary being upon whom the world depends for its existence. Unlike the classical account, and in resolution of its contradictions, process thought asserts that God, too, is dependent upon the world. The world, too, is necessary, not the mere result of the arbitrary whim of a deity with more of the character of a human tyrant than of the morally perfect being demanded by an ethically sensitive theistic religious faith. Process philosophy postulates a ‘primordial nature’ of God, which is the divine conceptualization of all possibilities–the ‘eternal objects,’ which play a role in process thought analogous to that of the forms in Plato’s philosophy. This primordial pole of the divine existence is the eternal, necessary being presupposed by each new moment of the existence of the world. This primordial nature of God, again, can be seen as analogous to the impersonal absolute posited as the ultimate reality in the acosmic religions of the world–the eternal Dao, or the Buddha Nature, or nirgu˚a Brahman. Each of these concepts is, of course, distinct, but, in terms of process thought, they can be seen as aspects of the same reality. But process philosophy also postulates a consequent nature of God which is conscious, feeling and experiencing along with the world and being concerned for its greater good, constituting the fulfillment of the world’s existence from moment to moment–the ‘kingdom of heaven’–the perpetual consummation or “objective immortality” in the divine life with which the life of the cosmos forms a new creative unity at each moment of its existence.27 This is the “creative advance” of the universe: “The many become one, and are increased by one.”28 This aspect of God can be seen to correspond to the personal notions of God that one finds in the world’s theistic religions–YHWH, Christ, Allah, Brahm›, Vi„˚u, ÷iva, Durg›, the sa˙bhogak›ya of Buddhism, and the Amida Buddha. Each of these beings, too, is distinct, but in terms of process thought, they can be seen as reflections of one being.

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The universe, according to Whitehead, consists of an infinite, beginningless and endless series of creative moments, “events,” or “actual occasions.”29 In this sense, process philosophy has affinities with classical Indian philosophy (particularly Buddhist, but also Jain and Brahmanical, thought). The actual occasions and their inter-relatedness and ultimate harmony are at the heart of the concerns of the cosmic religions. But process philosophy, like classical Western thought (and Hinduism), is, again, theistic as well. God, according to Whitehead, is the creator of the universe, not in the sense of having created it from nothing at a particular, arbitrarily defined beginning point in time, but in the sense of being the initiator of each new moment in the beginningless and neverending temporal stream, and, indeed, the co-creator of these moments with all of the elements– the “actual entities” or “occasions”30–that collectively constitute it. “In this aspect,” Whitehead writes, God, “is not before all creation, but with all creation.”31 Why is it necessary for White-head to postulate the existence of God? Some concept of order in the cosmos is a necessary presupposition of the experiential fact of knowledge. “Apart from a certain smoothness in the nature of things, there can be no knowledge.”32 Whitehead divides the ways in which this order, or ‘Law,’ has been conceptualized in various philosophical systems into four categories: “the doctrine of Law as immanent, the doctrine of Law as imposed, and the doctrine of Law as observed order of succession, in other words, Law as mere description, and lastly the doctrine of Law as conventional interpretation.”33 The doctrine of Law as immanent is expressed in atheistic (and pantheistic) systems like Buddhism, Jainism, the philosophy of Spinoza, and Marxism, according to which the order of the universe is one of its inherent features and requires no source of explanation beyond the system of the universe itself. The doctrine of Law as immanent is fully compatible with scientific naturalism as well. The doctrine of Law as imposed is characteristic of deism and more traditional forms of theism, as embodied at the popular level in religions such as Islam and Christianity as interpreted by much of contemporary supernaturalist thought. According to the doctrine of Law as imposed, the order of the universe is entirely the imposition of the will of an all-powerful God upon subordinate matter, which is created by God from nothing, and existing in a one-sided relationship of absolute dependence on God’s will. The doctrine of Law as imposed, in other words, presupposes an imposer, in the form of God.

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The doctrine of Law as observed order of succession, or as mere description, is expressed in the method of modern science, which presupposes the order of the universe as a necessary condition for its explanatory activity, but does not seek to explain the phenomenon of order itself, being confined, rather, to particular instances of this order as they are deducible from reproducible facts, and leaving metaphysics to the philosophers. The doctrine of Law as conventional interpretation is expressed by thinkers according to whom order is not “of the universe” at all, but merely a function of discourse–an inherently arbitrary, humanly constructed way of speaking and thinking. This is compatible with deconstructive forms of post-modern thought and also with the more radical, Pras›ºgika interpretation of N›g›rju˚a’s thought in Mah›y›na Buddhism, which sees universals, for example, as fictitious entities. In his attempt to frame a coherent metaphysical system, Whitehead finds the doctrine of Law as mere convention inadequate to “our direct intuitions that we enjoy prior to all verbalization.”34 That we enjoy such intuitions at all may be seen to be the fundamental issue upon which he disagrees with those who hold that order is a matter of mere convention. The doctrine of Law as mere description characteristic of modern science, on the other hand, does not even address itself to the character of Law as such, but merely presupposes its existence. Though it need not involve a denial of metaphysical questions, it simply does not concern itself with them. Whitehead opts for an intermediate doctrine, combining elements of the doctrine of Law as immanent and the doctrine of Law as imposed. The doctrine of Law as immanent has the quality of internal coherence that Whitehead requires for his metaphysical system. But: Apart from some notion of imposed Law, the doctrine of immanence provides absolutely no reason why the universe should not be steadily relapsing into lawless chaos. In fact, the Universe, as understood in accordance with the doctrine of Immanence, should exhibit itself as including a stable actuality whose mutual implication with the remainder of things secures an inevitable trend towards order.35 This “stable actuality” is what Whitehead calls God. According to Whitehead, this intermediate doctrine between that of Law as immanent and as imposed–of ‘persuasion’–is articulated in the philosophy of Plato, specifically in the ‘creation myth’ of the Timaeus:

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More than two thousand years ago, the wisest of men [Plato] proclaimed that the divine persuasion is the foundation of the order of the world, but that it could only produce such a measure of harmony as amid brute forces it was possible to accomplish.36 The production of harmony among “brute forces”–the actual entities which constitute the world conceived solely as free agents, in the absence of some ordering principle–in a perpetually new creative synthesis is the divine telos, the purpose for which God as ordering principle exists. This telos is all encompassing in the sense that every actual entity that constitutes the universe at any given moment forms an element in God’s harmonising activity. God “does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”37 In this role, God, for all other beings, is the ultimate good, the ideal, “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.”38 God establishes the ultimate of each creative act constituting the cosmos, each new moment in the life of the universal organism. As I have already pointed out in this brief summary of Whitehead’s metaphysical system, it shares a number of aspects of traditional Hindu thought, broadly conceived as including Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical schools, like Jainism and Buddhism. It claims that truth can be known, asserting that, “There is no first principle which is in itself unknowable, not to be captured by a flash of insight,” but that the expression of this truth in words is always, at best, relatively adequate.39 Rather than seeing creation as an event that occurs once and for all, as in the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, it sees the universe as a beginningless flow of events that passes through varied ‘cosmic epochs.’ It sees creation as an ongoing unfoldment of infinite potential. It sees God as the orderer and the enjoyer of this process, and also as radically present within all beings. Such a philosophy, it seems, is highly conducive to appropriation from within the Ramakrishna tradition as providing a vocabulary with which to convey its fundamental concepts to a global audience. Its conduciveness to the defense and re-articulation of religious pluralism, has already been noted by such process thinkers as Cobb and Griffin. The task that awaits us now is to make the connections clear between the concepts of process thought and those of the Ramakrishna tradition.

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A Hindu Process Theology Translation, even between languages, is never simply a matter of making one-to-one correspondences between terms; for perfect correspondence never exists. Translation always involves a reconstruction and creative transformation of the original term in the idiom of the new language. A Whiteheadian, or process, Hindu theology is therefore not simply a re-statement of Ramakrishna Ved›nta using the terminology of process thought. It is something new—an addition to the diversity of the already diverse Hindu tradition, a new interpretation of Ved›nta for a new age. It is also, simultaneously, a new process hermeneutics, a new application of process thought to a new context, and ultimately a new kind of process thought. The consciousness of a Hindu process theologian is the locus of the convergence of two cultures, systems of thought, and methods of metaphysical inquiry, and a Hindu process theology a hybrid of these. A Hindu process theology is a conceptual statement and a reflection of the new global Hinduism seeking to have relevance beyond the local concerns of the Indian subcontinent. It does not supersede or try to replace these local concerns, or the more ancient formulations that have traditionally reflected them. In fact, it draws upon these more traditional formulations as resources and guides for its own new reflections. But it also tries to go beyond the existing tradition and speak to the new trans-national and multicultural situation of the Hindu tradition and community. Which Ved›ntic concepts does a Hindu process theology seek to translate and to understand using the terminology of process thought? A close examination of Ved›nta reveals several concepts with which a Hindu process theology needs to be concerned: Brahman, in both its nirgu˚a and its sagu˚a aspects, IΩ±vara, or God, and the relationship of God to the myriad entities that constitute the universe, m›y›—which means illusion, but also creativity, and corresponds in the T›ntric ÷aiva and the ÷›kta traditions to ÷akti, or creative power—karma, sa˙s›ra, the cycle of death and rebirth— and moks‹a —liberation from this cycle. Any Ved›ntic theology–certainly one located in Ramakrishna’s tradition–must deploy these basic concepts. Similarly, process thought has core concepts that a process thinker of any religious tradition will inevitably need to deploy, and which will need to be brought into harmony with the concepts of the religious tradition in question. It is the deployment of these concepts that defines a process thinker as such. The proper deployment of these concepts, as developed in the writings of such major process thinkers as Whitehead and Hartshorne, constitute the rules of the game of process thought.

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To again use the metaphor of translation, fidelity to the meanings of the terms of both systems—in my case, Ved›nta and process thought—as understood by native speakers, is a prerequisite to a successful correlation of concepts. And yet, as with translation, the meanings of the terms of both systems will inevitably be transformed and stretched beyond their normal native usage in the attempt to correlate them. Both Ved›nta and process thought will be transformed by this act of translation. Yet this transformation must be governed by the essential rules of both systems. In other words, the final product needs to be comprehensible from the perspective of both in order for the project of translation to be a success. The fundamental concepts of process thought, as outlined by Whitehead in the foundational text of the process tradition, Process and Reality, are creativity, the many, and the one. Another central, but derivative, notion in process thought (and surprisingly so for those accustomed to more conventional forms of theism), is the concept of God, and of God’s two natures: the primordial and the consequent. Creativity “is the universal of universals characterising ultimate matter of fact.”40 It is the absolute of Whitehead’s system, the unchanging ultimate reality that underlies all things, connecting the many and the one. “It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.”41 The unity to which Whitehead refers, “the one” of which he speaks, is not the totality of all existence, but the unity of a particular actual entity—another central process concept. The universe is made up of innumerable actual entities, each of which is a unification, in a unique moment of experience, of the relations of that entity to the rest of the entities that make up the universe—“the many,” or “the universe disjunctively.” In a Whiteheadian worldview, every entity participates in every other, through relations. The role of God in process thought is to act as that entity through which the abstract principle of creativity becomes actual for the actual entities that make up the universe. According to Whitehead, an actual entity can only be related to another actual entity. So how, then, does the principle of creativity, which is not itself an entity, become available to actual entities in order to make possible their interrelation and mutual participation? Why, to put the question in more conventional terms, is the universe not simply a chaos of unrelated, un-coordinated entities? What holds this universe together, making it a universe, a coherent unity? This is the role of what Whitehead calls “God.”

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God, in a Whiteheadian worldview, is not the creator of the universe— at least not in the conventional sense of a creator ex nihilo that one finds in classical Christian theism. God, rather, is the coordinator of the universe. God envisions all possibilities—called by Whitehead “eternal objects”— and organises them through a “conceptual valuation,” bringing order to what would otherwise be a chaos of potentials. God’s “unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects” is called, by Whitehead, the “primordial nature” of God.42 Through the relations that the entities have to God, the possibilities that God has envisioned become available to them for actualization. This is the sense in which God “creates” the universe in process thought: by making possibilities available to entities for actualization in an ordered fashion that makes a universe possible. But the entities are free to determine how they will actualize the possibilities available to them. God, though supremely powerful, is not omnipotent in process thought. If God can be said to exert creative power over the entities through the conceptual valuation of possibilities, the entities, too exert creative power over God. Through their choices, they collectively foreclose certain possibilities, and open up others. God’s choice of actions in attaining the divine end of maximal harmony is therefore also affected by the actual entities making up the universe. God both acts and is acted upon. This is what process thinkers mean when they say God is relative. God as acted upon, as affected by the universe, is called the “consequent nature of God.”43 So how, precisely, do the categories of Ramakrishna Ved›nta and process thought translate into one another? My preliminary explorations of both systems of thought suggest the following correlations: Brahman is an overarching unity that encompasses all the categories of process thought for which process thought has no precise equivalent concept. Nirgu˚a Brahman corresponds to creativity inasmuch as it is abstract and nonactual—the absolute—whereas m›y› would correspond to creativity as it is actualized in the activities of God and the entities constituting the universe, which corresponds to the Hindu concept of ‘world’ or jagat–the ‘flow’ of events (which is the literal meaning of jagat). As actualized creativity, m›y› both reveals and conceals the true nature of reality. In the former mode, m›y› can be referred to, as Ramakrishna often did, as vidy›m›y›, or the m›y› of wisdom. In the latter mode, m›y› can be referred to as avidyam›y›, another term of Ramakrishna’s, which refers to the more conventional Advaitic view of m›y› as ‘illusion.’ The positive valuation of m›y› implied in the concept of vidy›m›y› shows the influence of his T›ntric ÷›kta background on Ramakrishna’s Ved›nta.

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Sagu˚a Brahman corresponds to the complex consisting of God and the universe together, for which I have coined the term theocosm. Karma is the collective influence of the past—the many—upon the emergent actual entity—the ‘one’ of process thought. Sa˙s›ra is the journey of a personally ordered society of actual entities—a jıva or individual soul—through time. Moks‹a, or liberation, represents a radical transformation of the way a soul experiences its temporal journey. No longer bound by the collective influence of the past, the soul is radically free, experiencing the bliss that is the essential character of existence, a bliss that is normally obscured by the past’s influence. This transformation can be effected by a variety of means which issue in a corresponding variety of modes of existence. All spiritual paths, sincerely practiced, can lead to an experience of moks‹a, but not all experiences of moks‹a are identical. They include such experiences as loving union with a personal form of divinity and absorption into Nirgu˚a Brahman–both of which were experienced directly by Sri Ramakrishna according to the modern Ved›nta tradition. The forms which mok„a takes vary with the paths that are taken to it. It is this latter claim which constitutes Ved›ntic religious pluralism as understood through the categories of process thought. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I shall unpack the thought process that has led me to these preliminary conclusions.

“Sarva˙ khalvida˙ Brahman” What is reality? What is the ultimate character of existence? Brahman, the foundational concept of Ramakrishna Ved›nta, is the answer to both of these questions. Reality is Brahman. In Ramakrishna Ved›nta–just as in Advaita Ved›nta and the T›ntric systems, both of which have influenced this tradition–the whole of reality, encompassing all actuality and possibility, is designated by the term Brahman. Brahman—“the Real” (sat)—is coextensive with reality as such. It is that which is real pre-eminently, and from which the existence of all other entities is derivative and in which they participate. It is that, by knowing which, all things are known.44 It is also the ultimate object of religious aspiration, of the ancient Upanis‹adic prayer, “Lead me from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.”45 It is eternal. “It is immortal; it is Brahman; it is the Whole.”46 So central is this concept that it is probably not an exaggeration to say that to under-stand Hindu metaphysics is to come to grips with the idea of Brahman, the ultimate unity underlying all of existence.

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How else is Brahman characterised? Brahman is a Sanskrit term that can be translated as “the expansive” or “that which makes things great.” It is described in the Upani„ads as the sweet essence of all that is, the “honey of all beings.”47 It is Brahman which has become all things. It is that in which they live, move, and have their being. It is from Brahman that all have emerged and to which all shall inevitably return. And it is Brahman that all things are, in their essence, throughout the course of their existence. This is possibly the central Ved›ntic doctrine, at least from a non-dualistic perspective: Brahman is our very self. Tat tvam asi, according to one of the most celebrated of the great formulations, or mah›v›kyas, of the Chandogya Upanis‹ad. “You are That.” There is nothing that is not Brahman. As the Upani„ads, Sarva˙ khalvida˙ Brahman. “All this is indeed Brahman.” Of all the Ved›ntic traditions, the one that gives the most emphasis to the unity of all things in Brahman is the Advaita tradition; but Brahman is a central concept in all of the Ved›ntic systems. In the Dvaita tradition, Brahman is identified with God (Lord Vi„˚u) and the non-dualist claim that Brahman is the material as well as the efficient cause of the universe is rejected. The other systems of Ved›nta, such as R›m›˚uja’s Vi±i„˛›dvaita, Caitanya’s Acintya Bhed›beda, and Ramakrishna’s Ved›nta, seek a kind of middle path between the hard-core non-dualism and the hard-core dualism of Advaita and Dvaita, respectively. Brahman as the One Infinite Being, Consciousness, and Bliss Brahman is a universal, all-pervading substance that has become all things. An image used in contemporary Ved›nta to explain this is of Brahman as a vibrating energy field. The vibrations of Brahman correspond to the whole range of existing entities—from solid to liquid to gas to energy to conscious-ness—conceived as quantum realities vibrating at different frequencies, as modifications of the same basic ‘stuff’ of reality. In premodern Hindu texts, these modifications of Brahman are referred to as, respectively, earth, water, air, fire, and ›k›s´a (translatable variously as space or ether, the medium of sound, but conceived in the contemporary tradition as the medium of consciousness). But Brahman is also beyond all such specific forms. It has become all things, but all things do not exhaust it. In the Purus‹a Sukta, a text from the ¿g Veda which describes the One becoming all things through a cosmic act of sacrifice, it is said that one fourth of this Being became the world, with the rest remaining unmanifest. Ramakrishna speaks of Brahman as, “the Infinite, without form or shape and beyond mind and words.”48

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The essential characteristics of Brahman, according to Ved›nta, include, first and foremost, unity. Brahman is “one alone, without a second,”49 and is referred to in the singular as “that” (tat) or “that one” (tadekam). But Brahman–or ›tman, the Self, with which it is ultimately identical–is also described frequently as infinite being, consciousness, and bliss (anantaram sat-chit-›nandam).50 This set of characteristics raises complex philosophical questions. If Brahman is the totality of all that exists—if there is nothing that is not Brahman—then how can consciousness and bliss characterise it? Is Brahman identical to its qualities, if there is nothing that is not Brahman? Moreover, regarding these qualities themselves, consciousness and bliss, as generally understood, are types of experience. As types of experience, they must necessarily involve a subject and an object–that is, the experiencer and that which is experienced. Consciousness, or awareness, thus involves a knower and a thing that is known, and bliss an enjoyer and a thing that is enjoyed. But Brahman is “one alone, without a second.” What is there outside Brahman for Brahman to know or enjoy? If Brahman is all that exists then the answer must be “Nothing.” “Nothing exists except the One,” as Ramakrishna says, “That One is the Supreme Brahman.”51 But then how can Brahman be characterised by consciousness and bliss? In order to maintain these essential predications, an internal diversity must be introduced into the concept of Brahman. Because there is nothing else for Brahman to know or to enjoy, the inescapable conclusion is that Brahman must know and enjoy itself. This is the Hindu answer to the question of creation: Why does the universe exist? This is not the same as Heidegger’s metaphysical question, “Why is there anything at all?” The answer to this question is that it is in the very nature of reality to exist; for existence, as well as consciousness and bliss, is one of the essential characteristics of Brahman. The real cannot not be. But why this universe? Why a universe of infinite variety, of manifold entities–human beings, plants, animals, stars, planets, galaxies, atoms, and quarks? The nature of Brahman is being, consciousness, and bliss. For Brahman, therefore, to be fully what it is—for it to be being, consciousness, and bliss—it must become many. That One, by its very nature, by its own internal necessity, must manifest as a plurality—indeed an infinity—of conscious, enjoying, existing beings—or, to use the terminology of process thought, actual entities. The One is the many. And, as we have already seen, in process thought the many become the one—though by ‘the one’ is meant not the totality of existence, but each unitary actual entity.

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Is the diversity internal to Brahman essential to it? Is it a real diversity? Or is it illusory? This is the chief question that divides the traditional schools of Ved›nta. The Advaita tradition insists on the essential unity of Brahman, relegating diversity to a realm of illusion and affirming that Brahman is essentially without qualities (nirgu˚a); for, as we have seen, it is the predication of qualities to Brahman, such as being, consciousness, and bliss, that logically necessitates the emergence of the world process as the self-manifestation of Brahman. The theistic schools see diversity as reality, there being a true difference between God and the entities making up the world. Ramakrishna sees both as merely alternative perspectives. He does not consistently privilege one over the other. Nirgu˚a Brahman: Formless Creativity Sagu˚a Brahman: Informed Theocosm

Seeing Brahman from an eternal perspective, the perspective of its own nature, it is a unitary state of infinite being, consciousness, and bliss. This is the perspective of Advaita Ved›nta. But the nature of these essential characteristics necessitates the manifestation of Brahman in—or rather as—the space-time continuum and the multitude of varied beings therein. From the perspective of time and space, then—from our finite temporal perspective, that is—Brahman can be seen as a kind of inner necessity or dynamism in all things, which sustains them in their existence and gives them a trajectory in the direction of the realisation of infinite bliss and infinite consciousness. The Hindu tradition calls this internal dynamism within all things m›y›. M›y› is Brahman as perceived from the perspective of time and space, as well as that in Brahman which necessitates its manifestation as time and space. This inner dynamism and trajectory towards the intensification of experience that characterises all things, a trajectory that involves the evolution of increasingly complex types of experience (like consciousness) and a drive towards beauty (the experience of which one could call “bliss”) is called, in process thought, the principle of creativity. This is also another meaning of the Hindu term m›y›. The principle of creativity is the principle that, according to process thought, underlies all existence, potential and actual. In this function, therefore, as a metaphysical absolute, it would seem to correspond not only to m›y›, but also to Brahman itself. The first contribution of a Hindu process hermeneutics to the Hindu tradition is the insight that Brahman is creativity, an insight already implicit in Advaita Ved›nta and T›ntric thought, but made explicit here.52

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But creativity in process thought is not, as Brahman is in Advaita Ved›nta, the sum total of existence. Creativity is an abstract, eternal princi-

ple that informs all things. It is the fundamental principle of existence that underlies form but is, itself, formless. It is not an actual entity. In contrast with the entities that make up the universe of time and space, creativity, “can be called the formless ultimate,” the “ultimate behind all forms.”53 A process theologian, then, would not say creativity is, like Brahman, all things. Brahman is creativity, but is not exhausted by it. A process Hindu theologian, it seems, would need to say that the sum total of reality—or Brahman—contains within itself a formless aspect, corresponding to the process concept of creativity in the abstract, but that Brahman also possesses an aspect with form, corresponding to the universe of actual entities, Brahman’s manifestation as the space-time continuum and all the entities therein. But is such a postulation of a dual nature of Brahman warranted in the Hindu tradition? In fact, Brahman, according to Advaita Ved›nta, does have a dual nature, a nirgu˚a and a sagu˚a aspect, corresponding to the aspects of reality in question. Nirgu˚a literally means ‘without qualities’—Brahman unqualified and unconditioned by any form or limitation. Sagu˚a, in contrast, means ‘with qualities’—Brahman qualified by the limitations of time and space as the sum total of all actual entities. Nirgu˚a Brahman corresponds to Whitehead’s understanding of creativity as non-actual and formless. Sagu˚a Brahman corresponds to the two realities which Whitehead calls “the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast”—namely, God and the World, or, to return to my own earlier language, God and the universe.54 Because God and the universe are conceived in Ved›nta and in process thought as realities that necessitate one another, realities which, in Whitehead’s terms, “stand to each other in mutual requirement,” I suggest, as a term for referring to the joint entity that they together constitute, the word theocosm—the God-World complex; for no such term currently exists in Western thought (at least not to my knowledge). This Western, Greek term would correspond to the Ved›ntic concept of Sagu˚a Brahman, and allow for easier translation between Ved›nta and Western philosophy. Sagu˚a Brahman is the theocosm. But apart from being dependent, in some respect, on the world, what precisely is God in process thought? This was briefly summarized earlier, and shall now be discussed in greater detail.

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IΩ±vara as Param›tman: God, the Soul of All Beings

The central doctrine of process thought is its doctrine of God. God is also central to most forms of Hinduism. But God, or IΩ±vara, and Brahman, at least according to most systems of Ved›nta (the chief exception being dualism, or Dvaita, as noted earlier), are not identical. Like creativity, God is a subset of Brahman, the sum total of reality, the Whole. Brahman is often conceived as ultimately impersonal—or, more accurately, as beyond or as encompassing both personal and impersonal qualities. Brahman is Being Itself. IΩ±vara, on the other hand, though the Supreme Being, is nevertheless a being, an inhabitant of the spatio-temporal realm—albeit the most important one, and the only metaphysically necessary one, without whom no possible world could exist. God, or IΩ±vara, is therefore dependent, ultimately, upon Brahman. God is a derivative reality relative to Brahman. The same is true of God in process thought. God is the pre-eminent exemplar of the principle of creativity, the one who makes creativity available to the other beings that make up the universe, mediating between the realms of form and formlessness. It is through God that unmanifest creativity—what I have identified with nirgu˚a Brahman—becomes manifest creativity, or m›y›. M›y› and Brahman are one. As Ramakrishna says, “K›lı,” who is m›y› personified, “is verily Brahman, and Brahman is verily K›lı. It is one and the same Reality. When we think of It as inactive…we call It Brahman.”55 But God did not create creativity. God, in both Hinduism and process thought, is not a creator ex nihilo, as mentioned earlier. The inner logic of creativity, rather, has necessitates God. This is why Whitehead, in terms strikingly reminiscent of an Advaitic understanding of divinity, calls God a “derivative notion.”56 This apparent reduction, from the perspective of classical Christian theology, of the role of God—a conception that makes God subject to, and indeed dependent upon, a logical necessity beyond the control of the divine will—is one of the primary reasons Christian theologians have given for rejecting process theology as incompatible with the Christian tradition. Even modern Christian theologians usually make God ultimate in all respects.57 But this same formulation places process thought squarely in the mainstream of Hindu thought, and gives Hindu thinkers all the more reason to be comfortable with process theology and with a process hermeneutics as a vehicle for the expression of an authentic Hindu self-understanding. Process thought, as I hope I am demonstrating, is already very ‘Hindu.’

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But why is God necessary either to process thought or to Ved›nta? As Whitehead explains, the universe, as a closed system, a self-contained whole, without a creator or an imposition of order from outside—a conception of the universe which Whitehead calls “the doctrine of Immanence”–necessitates some internal principle of order that guarantees the universe will not slide into chaos and that creates the conditions for the very possibility of a universe: In fact, the Universe, as understood in accordance with the doctrine of Immanence, should exhibit itself as including a stable actuality whose mutual implication with the remainder of things secures an inevitable trend towards order.58 This “stable actuality” is what God means in process theology. It is important to point out that God, in both process thought and in Hinduism, is a being that is internal to all things, and is yet, at the same time, distinct from them.59 Both systems could be called panentheistic. Panentheism is, of course, the belief, not that God is all beings (which is called pantheism), but that God is in all beings, and all beings, at the same time, are in God. All beings are Brahman, but all beings are not God. God is in all beings, at their deepest core, as their deepest, most authentic self, or ›tman. This view is expressed by Hindu thinkers such as Sw›mı Mukt›nanda, known for his expression, “God dwells in you as you,” meaning not the ego, but the supreme self within. Sw›mı Vivek›nanda refers to God as “the soul of our souls,”60 and another Ved›ntic term for God is param›tman, or the Supreme Self, the Self or soul of all beings. And this is not only an insight of contemporary Hinduism. The very same panentheistic understanding is expressed in the Bhagavad Gıt› when Bhagav›n Sri Krishna says, “He who sees Me everywhere and sees all in Me, to him I am not lost, nor is he lost to Me.”61 It is from the Gıt› that the often heard Hindu injunction is derived to “see God in all beings.” Though Hindus will often use language that sounds more literally pantheistic than panentheistic, this observation should be balanced with the equally valid observation that the distinction between deity and worshipper is absolutely vital to popular Hindu practice, such as the performance of pÒj›, or devotional worship addressed to a personal manifestation of God in a particular form, or mÒrti—a practice decried for centuries by Muslims and Christians as idolatry. The God-World distinction is especially central to Vais‹n‹ava traditions, and underlies the Dvaita response to Advaita.

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It might be accurate to say that Hinduism as a whole, if one may so generalise, sees God and the World as neither wholly distinct nor wholly identical, but as existing in symbiotic continuity. My invented term theocosm again comes to mind. The concept of the relationship between the individual self and God in Hinduism, dating to the Upanis‹ads, is neither one of simplistic identification, nor absolute separation. It is a relationship of immanence, of God dwelling in the World like a soul dwelling in a body. As noted earlier, working out this relationship of unity-in-diversity has been a major preoccupation of the systems of Ved›nta, with their varied solutions ranging from an emphasis on unity, found in Advaita, to the emphasis on diversity found in Dvaita, with most seeking to keep both in a synthesis. Living beings are depicted in such texts as the Taittirıya Upanis‹ad as being made up of multiple layers or levels—the kos´as—with the outermost, physical layer being the most changeable, the most superficial, and the inner layers being, as one progresses inward, successively more and more permanent, more and more real.62 Even deeper than the physical self, for example, is the personality we have developed over the course of our experiences in this life—our habits, memories, predispositions, etc., known as our sa˙sk›ras. But even deeper than this personality are the traces of the personalities and memories we carry in our subconscious minds—in our souls—from our previous lives. Going beyond even this level—and others, still more profound—God exists within and experiences through us from our fundamental core or centre. A well-known metaphor for this divine indwelling is given in the Bhagavad Gıt›: a string of pearls, with God dwelling within and connecting all beings just as the string connects the pearls that rest upon it.63 This image of God dwelling within all beings is perfectly compatible with a process understanding of God influencing actual entities from within by providing them with their subjective aim at the initial phase of their concrescence. Infinite Beings Seeking Infinite Consciousness and Bliss Turning now from the vast, cosmic scale of God and Being to the more modest scale of human existence, what is the meaning and purpose of life in the universe as conceived by a Hindu process theology? To summarize briefly what we have seen thus far, the sum total of reality is conceived as Brahman. Unmanifest creativity corresponds to nirgu˚a, or formless, Brahman. But manifest creativity, the manifestation of creativity as the propelling force underlying all things, corresponds to the concept of m›y›, or ÷akti in the ÷aiva and ÷›kta traditions.

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Finally, the totality of actual entities, including God—the theocosm— corresponds to sagu˚a Brahman. In both Hindu and process thought, God is postulated as a necessary element of sagu˚a Brahman, a kind of bridge between the nirgu˚a and the sagu˚a realms of form and formlessness, respectively. God makes available to all beings the creative potentials that we have the ability to embody. According to process thought, as mentioned earlier, an actual entity can only be related to another actual entity. In order for a universe to exist for more than a mere instant—and that by sheer chance—in order for it to have stability and continuity, an actual entity is necessary that is able to embody and present to the rest of the actual entities making up the universe the sum total of future possibilities that they are capable of actualizing. This necessary being is a necessary condition for the existence of any possible future. This necessary being is God. God’s envisioning of possibilities at any given moment is called, in process thought, God’s primordial nature. But what is our role—we, the actual beings who make up the universe? Our role is to make Brahman, in actuality, what it is capable of becoming as a pure potentiality. Our role is to manifest the unmanifest: infinite being, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss. In process terminology, our role is to evolve forms of experience capable of the potentially limitless enjoyment of potentially limitless beauty. God, in turn, by means of the divine relativity, or consequent nature, experiences all of this through us. God’s role in this cosmic process is to act as a centre of universal consciousness, to coordinate the experiences of the many beings making up the universe such that they constitute a unity—a universe—to bring unity and order from the chaos of the multitude of individual decisions made by the actual entities at each new moment of the creative advance in response to the possibilities disclosed to them through the divine primordial nature. God already embodies infinite being, consciousness, and bliss, and by so doing lures us to do the same, and is the surest route, at any given moment, to our achievement of it. This is what Whitehead calls the ‘divine persuasion,’ and our harmonisation with it would correspond to the Hindu concept of bhakti.64 Bhakti, often translated very simply as ‘devotion,’ is actually a mutual participation of being between God and the individual. According to theistic Ved›nta, bhakti, not jñ›na, constitutes liberation for the individual soul, or jıva. More precisely, bhakti is jñ›na. Not just an emotion, bhakti is a state of God realisation. “Bhakti is the one essential thing,” according to Ramakrishna. “To be sure, God exists in all beings. Who, then, is a devotee [bhakta]? He whose mind dwells on God.”65

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The situation from which we begin, however, as human beings, makes our role in the actualisation, the ongoing creation and self-expression, of the universe far from self-evident. We do not always feel that the fundamental basis of our existence is a potential for infinite being, consciousness, and bliss. We do not always feel bhakti. We do not always feel like beings in whom God perpetually dwells, and whom God is perpetually calling, from the depths of our pre-conscious experience, to higher and higher levels of awareness and enjoyment. We feel, to use a term from Heidegger, “thrown” into this world, with little or no sense of our purpose or our connectedness, through God, with all other beings, save what our culture and our society give to us. We arrive into this world in a state of avidy›, ignorance of our true nature and potential. This primal ignorance characterises the existential condition of most human beings. From this ignorance arises suffering—the fear of death, of losing oneself, which gives rise to the fear of losing one’s loved ones, and one’s property, whatever one sees as an extension of oneself, and so to fear, and eventually hatred, of the Other, whom one views as a threat. This is possible because we are unaware that God dwells in all beings, including ourselves. Ignorance is the basis of ego, which, in turn, reinforces ignorance in a vicious cycle. Ramakrishna says: ‘I’ and ‘mine’–that is ignorance. True knowledge makes one feel: ‘O God, You alone do everything. You alone are my own. And to You alone belong houses, buildings, family, relatives, friends, the whole world. All is Yours.’ But ignorance makes one feel: ‘I am doing everything. I am the doer. House, buildings, family, children, friends, and property are all mine.’66 But what is the cause of this ignorance? How does a Hindu process theology respond to the problem of evil? The fact of primordial spiritual ignorance, of avidy›, is a necessary side effect of the process by which Brahman is actualized, by which creative potential is transformed, through us and through God, through the beings making up the universe, into a spatio-temporal field of experience. Recall the earlier discussion of the problem raised by the nature of Brahman as both one and as infinite being, consciousness, and bliss. In order for the One to become fully—actually—what it already is in it eternity—in potential—in order for it to manifest its nature in time, it is necessary for the One to become the many, to take on the limitation of being a finite subject experiencing the finite objects of the spatio-temporal universe.67

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Put another way, there can be no consciousness or bliss—much less infinite consciousness and bliss—without the experience of finitude. The purpose of our limited existence as finite beings is to move from our current state of avidy›, ignorance, to vidy›, or wisdom, from the finite to the in-finite—or, to again invoke the ancient prayer of the Upanis‹adic sages, from the unreal to the real, darkness to light, death to immortality. The fact that the nature of the creative process necessitates the state of “original ignorance” in which we find ourselves is expressed through the ambiguity of the term M›y›. M›y›, as we have already seen, is translatable as “creative power.” But it is also translatable as “illusion.” M›y› is the creativity that makes all of our strivings possible, but it is also, paradoxically, that which we are striving to overcome. The basic concept of M›y› is that the creative process by which God—IΩ±vara—coordinates the experiences of the entities constituting the world and guides them to the realisation of their potential—the realisation of Brahman—is also the process by which ignorance and darkness arise; for this process necessarily veils from us the true nature of reality. It is precisely by overcoming and learning to see through and beyond this veil that our true potential can be realised, our realisation of the ultimate aim of all creativity, the actualisation of infinite being, consciousness, and bliss. A metaphor may be useful for grasping this concept. Imagine that Brahman is an invisible man. It is only be wearing a mask and clothes that he can be seen. The mask and the clothes are not the man. They hide his true nature. But without them, he would remain invisible. The mask and clothes of Brahman are M›y›. The invisibility of the man—Brahman’s non-actuality in time and space as not ‘a being’ but the ground of all being, its Nirgu˚a nature, its formless form—is what necessitates the clothes—or M›y›—that make his shape manifest. The clothes, however, do not create the man’s form. This invisible form is ontologically prior to the clothes that make it manifest. But in our experience, both are mutually dependent. As far as our eyes are concerned, there would be no form of the man if the clothes were not there to make it evident to us. In the same way, we can only reach Brahman through m›y›—a conclusion which places a Hindu process theology close to the T›ntric tradition, as does its emphasis on the immanence and non-omnipotence of divinity. These are also themes of theistic schools of Ved›nta, like Dvaita, with its “mitigated monotheism.”68 The Ramakrishna tradition conceives of itself as a synthesis of these earlier schools of thought, a perception reinforced by a Hindu process theology.

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M›y›, as creative power, has a purpose—the coordination of the experiences of the entities making up the world such that they can eventually realise their true nature and experience the infinite consciousness and bliss that is their ultimate destiny. This, of course, is the function of God, and it is through m›y› that God performs this function. M›y› is God’s creative power—a common theme found throughout the Hindu scriptures, across a wide array of sectarian boundaries. Through the divine m›y›, God manifests a world of regularities–universal law or dharma–including the laws of physics and the laws of morality. The fundamental principle of regularity on which m›y› operates is the principle of action, or karma. Karma can be understood as the sum total of the effects of all of the previous actions undertaken by the entities that constitute the universe—including our own past selves, both immediate and distant—and the future effects we are currently creating with our present choices, our present actions. Karma, one could say, is an extension of creativity—the creativity in which we, ourselves, with our decisions, have a share. The idea that one sometimes finds in the Hindu tradition–especially in the Jain and Buddhist traditions–that karma is an inexorable law which even God must respect, fits well with the process doctrine of the non-omnipotence of God—that God coordinates and persuades, but the power of decision of the actual entities is inviolable. God is not able to force beings to take a particular course of action, but can only present them with varied alternatives. To be sure, this is not an inconsiderable power, and God is, even if not omnipotent, nonetheless supremely powerful in process thought. The inexorably retributive nature of karma affirmed in Jainism and Buddhism is compatible with God’s coordinative activity operating in such a way as to aid us maximally in our efforts toward self-realisation. The vision here is of life as a classroom in which we learn from our various experiences, which in turn guide us gradually toward our ultimate goal. By engaging in activity, by making choices, by exercising our freedom, we gradually learn, through trial and error, the deep truths of existence. The ethical dimensions of dharma which give rise to karma’s retributive nature should not be seen as incompatible with divine grace, with a sense of God operating behind the scenes of karma in order to draw us toward our highest destiny. It is not that divine grace capriciously frees us from karma. Karma is divine grace. God’s coordinating activities and our free will cooperate to produce the optimal result. A similar concept can be found in the ÷aiva Ägama literature, in its doctrine of divine grace, or karu˚›, as summarized by S.N. Dasgupta:

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Ordinarily the idea of grace or karu˚› would simply imply the extension of kindness or favour to one in distress. But in the ÷aiv›gamas there is a distinct line of thought where karu˚› or grace is interpreted as a divine creative movement for supplying all souls with fields of experience in which they may enjoy pleasures and suffer painful experiences. The karu˚› of God reveals the world to us in just the manner as we ought to experience it. Grace, therefore, is not a work of favour in a general sense, but it is a movement in favour of our getting the right desires in accordance with our karma. Creative action of the world takes place in consonance with our good and bad deeds, in accordance with which the various types of experience unfold themselves to us. In this sense, grace may be compared to the Yoga philosophy, which admits a permanent will of God operating in the orderliness of the evolutionary creation…for the protection of the world, and supplying it as the basis of human experience in accordance with their individual karmas.69 There is no conflict, then, between divine judgement and divine grace. According to Hindu thought, the process of spiritual evolution can take an entity many lifetimes. The compatibility of this doctrine of rebirth, or punarjanma, with process thought is something that Griffin has affirmed.70 But this doctrine has not been explored to a very great extent by process thinkers, given that most process theologians have been operating out of the Christian tradition, which typically denies this teaching. Griffin, however, has taken a very honest look at the empirical evidence for rebirth, in the form of alleged past life memories, for example, and has concluded that the possibility of rebirth cannot be indisputably refuted. He has also discussed the compatibility of rebirth with a process account of the soul as a personally ordered society of actual entities. In process thought, the soul is a serially or personally ordered society or sequence of actual entities that inherit experiences from one another in succession–a sequence that is capable of non-corporeal existence. The process understanding of the self is essentially identical to a traditional Buddhist conception of the soul as consisting of a beginningless series of momentary consciousness events giving rise to the sense of ‘self.’ The sense of ‘self’ is ultimately illusory, according to Buddhism, given that the soul is a perpetually perishing and re-arising series of distinct, interdependent events, finally indistinguishable from the continuum of existence from which it has arisen. But there is rebirth.

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The process of rebirth by means of which the soul gradually realises its true nature and purpose is called sa˙s›ra –literally ‘wandering about.’ The soul, according to Hinduism, is on a pilgrimage toward its ultimate destination, the realisation of its true nature: its foundation in creativity, and its interdependence with all beings, divine and non-divine. Moks◊a: Liberation

The ultimate goal of Hindu religious practice is moks◊a, or liberation from sa˙s›ra, the process of wandering from rebirth to rebirth in search of one’s true self. This naturally raises the question frequently asked by students, namely, “What happens next?” What is the fate of an entity who has escaped the process of rebirth? The answer to this question varies a great deal within the Hindu tradition, depending on which system of belief and practice one consults. On the pluralistic understanding that I see as fitting best with Hindu process theology, not only the answer, but the experience itself will vary depending upon how it is approached. In Advaita Ved›nta, which emphasises the ‘illusion’ part of the concept of m›y› and claims that nirgu˚a Brahman is ultimately all there is, liberation from rebirth involves a loss of personal identity—or rather, a realisation that one never had a separate personal identity to begin with (which is also a central theme of Buddhism). From the perspective of time and space— which is, from the point of view of Advaita, a deluded perspective—the liberated soul, in effect, ceases to exist. The individual self is compared to the ‘tenth man’ of a famous Advaitic parable. A group of ten men swam across a river. Before continuing on their journey, they wanted to be sure they had all made it across. Their leader counted them and kept coming up with the number nine. Becoming distressed and worried that the tenth man had drowned, he counted again and again. But eventually he realised that he had been forgetting to count himself. He was the tenth man. There was no other. The more dualistic, theistic, and devotional schools, however, such as those that are part of the Vais‹n‹ava tradition, envision liberation as a loving union with divinity, rather than an ontological dissolution or an awakening from a false dream. They even speak of a heavenly after world—called Vaikun˛ha—in which the liberated soul lives forever enjoying the infinite beauty of God, not unlike the Heaven of Christianity or the Paradise of Islam. The soul thus liberated even has a divine body with which to enjoy the wonders of the celestial realm.

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From a process perspective, I would postulate that liberation could mean all these things. It could also mean taking part with God, as a fully conscious participant, in the never-ending creative process of the actualisation of infinite being, consciousness, and bliss in the universe. Much as in Mah›y›na Buddhism, especially as articulated in the writings of N›g›rjuna, as well as the T›ntric tradition, the distinction between sa˙s›ra and liberation, on this understanding, is not so much an ontological difference between two different realms, but a revolution in the consciousness of the liberated being. When one is liberated from sa˙s›ra, we could say, one does not ‘go’ anywhere. One is transformed within the realm of sa˙s›ra, which, for the liberated being, becomes a qualitatively different kind of realm, a realm of limitless creativity, unbound by the influence of the past. A being ‘in sa˙s›ra’ is subject to karma—which on a process understanding means such a being is minimally free with regard to the collective influences of the past. Such a being, unaware of its interconnections with all other beings, or perhaps only dimly so, can be looked on as a perpetual victim, as an object of experience, not participating in existence with a full consciousness of the karmic factors involved. Life happens to such a being. But a liberated being, having attained a higher degree of cognisance of the causal relations between past and present—and the future potentials existing in the present—becomes a master of the karmic process. What does this mean? Rather than drowning again and again in the ocean of sa˙s›ra, such a being learns to surf the waves of cosmic consciousness. In tune with the divine will—perhaps through meditation, or some other yogic or devotional practice—as well as with her fellow beings, the liberated master becomes a conscious co-participant with God in the unfolding of the divine vision of creative potential, an instrument of God in the world. God acts through such a being. For such a liberated being, God becomes, as the Gıt› says, the only true doer of action, and the ultimate enjoyer of its results. Such a being has, in effect, merged with God— not ontologically, but their wills are now one. This is a conception of liberation, again, very much in harmony with the theistic forms of Ved›nta, which emphasise the idea of the will of the devotee merging with that of God, and giving a metaphorical twist to Advaitic absorption. Such a conception of liberated beings as still active within the universe allows for a robust sense of polytheism in a Hindu process theology. The numerous devat›s of Hinduism are conceivable as liberated souls, going about the work of the Supreme, not unlike the celestial Bodhisattvas and cosmic Buddhas of Mah›y›na Buddhism, who work spontaneously for the welfare of all beings.

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Religious Pluralism A pluralistic approach to religious practice and expressions of truth can be seen to be a natural corollary of the Hindu process worldview as I have outlined it here. I have already had occasion to mention the great internal diversity of Hinduism—the variety of approaches to and conceptions of ultimate reality present in the Hindu tradition. A process Hindu theology confirms the validity of this diversity. Rather than being, as postcolonial, deconstructive approaches to the term Hinduism suggest, a mere effect of the construction of the term Hinduism by British colonial scholarship and its imposition on what was in fact a variety of traditions with no essential unity, the internal diversity of Hinduism becomes, on a process interpretation, rooted in the fundamental nature of reality. The postcolonial view and the process view are not incompatible. One may grant that as a matter of historical fact the term Hinduism emerged precisely in the ways postcolonial scholarship indicates. But the resulting constructed tradition is one that fortuitously reflects, from a process perspective, the true nature of existence. As discussed in the previous chapter, rather than reject the use of the term Hinduism, which has become so fixed in the shared lexicon of both India and the West, on the basis of its dubious colonial pedigree, one can make a virtue of necessity and celebrate the emergence of a tradition that can ground and justify a pluralism in which a variety of spiritual paths can co-exist in peace and mutual support. This, indeed, is the understanding of Hinduism that informs the consciousness of many Hindus today. If variety is acceptable in Hinduism, both in theory and in practice—if all the paths that exist within the tradition are viewed as equally ‘Hindu,’ despite their theological differences—then it does not take much of a leap to conclude that religious variety in general is acceptable, that a variety of approaches to ultimate reality may be possible. Such variety is affirmed in the doctrine of the four yogas, or spiritual disciplines, of action (karma), wisdom (jñ›na), and devotion (bhakti), with Pat›ñjali’s eight-limbed, or a„˛›ºga yoga, also known as the royal or r›j› yoga, as the fourth. Specific to a process Hindu theology is its conception of a variety of ultimate realities—the impersonal principle of creativity, the personal deity, and the universe of actual entities. These could be seen to correspond to the ultimate realities of different types of religion without reducing them to one: the impersonal principle to that of the contemplative jñ›na paths like Advaita Ved›nta and Therav›da Buddhism, God to the Gods of the theistic religions of the world, and the universe composed of actual entities to the sacred cosmos of indigenous nature-oriented religions.

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Hinduism, on such an understanding, is a microcosm of the religious diversity of the world, just as an actual entity, on a Whiteheadian understanding, is the ‘one’ in whose nature is reflected ‘the many.’ Can such a grounding of Hindu religious pluralism in a Hindu process theology address the objections raised by critics such as Frank Morales? If one recalls, the chief objection Morales has raised to this doctrine is a sideeffect of its acceptance. If all religions are paths to mok„a, one can ask, then why be a Hindu? Why not convert to another religious tradition, like Christianity or Islam? Because there are Hindus who have left the Hindu tradition on such grounds, converting to traditions which proselytise more aggressively than Hinduism–which typically does not proselytise at all–the concern has been raised that religious pluralism might be something that is being promoted as part of Hindu identity precisely in order to weaken the tradition and make its adherents more susceptible to conversion. But to say that many paths are conducive to mok„a is not necessarily to say all such paths are equal in every respect. This is why I find Gandhi’s translation of sarva-dharma-sama-bh›va as ‘equality of religions’ somewhat problematic, preferring ‘an attitude of impartiality toward all religions.’ In order to achieve a theocosmic state of consciousness and thereby reach mok„a, one must purify the mind of egotism. This purification process involves moral practice, the study of scripture, devotion, and meditation–the four yogas mentioned a moment ago. If one examines the moral teachings of the world’s religions, one finds a great deal of shared wisdom– as adherents of the perennial philosophy perspective have pointed out– such as the famous ‘Golden Rule’ that we should treat others only as we wish to be treated. In the theistic religions, devotion to God is commended, just as it is in the theistic traditions of Hinduism. In all the world’s religions, one finds the cultivation of meditation practices which direct one’s consciousness beyond the mundane realm to a state of transcendence. And in the scriptures and the theologies of the world’s religions, one finds elements that are shared with Hinduism, though it is in this cognitive realm that one finds the greatest disagreement as well. So it is clear how it may be possible, from a Hindu perspective, for many religious paths to be conducive to mok„a without necessarily sharing the more comprehensive and pluralistic picture of reality presented by the Hindu tradition. A Muslim or a Christian, for example, may not believe in rebirth, so the idea of mok„a, of liberation from rebirth, may be meaningless to them. But from a Hindu perspective, it is nevertheless possible that such a person may make a great deal of progress toward liberation through a life devoted to the sincere practice of Christianity or Islam, even without believing in rebirth.

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To be a religious pluralist is not incompatible with being committed to one’s own tradition. A Hindu may believe that it is in the scriptures and the theological and philosophical systems of Hinduism that the profound truths of existence are most fully revealed, and that it is in terms of their logical compatibility with these truths that the relative truth or falsehood of the claims of other traditions is to be judged. Hindus believe in rebirth, for example, and there are some traditions that reject this belief. So to this degree, Hinduism can be seen to present a more comprehensive vision of the truth. A good many other examples could be cited as well. But this does not mean all Hindus, simply by virtue of being Hindus, are at a higher level of spiritual evolution than the practitioners of other religions, or that Hindus may not have a good deal to learn from the more enlightened voices from other traditions. Being Hindu, and so receiving the more comprehensive picture of reality presented in the Hindu tradition, and the benefits of the practices of Hinduism, may in principle place one in a better position to evolve spiritually than adhering to another tradition with a less full picture of the truth. But if a practitioner of another tradition is sincere and practices with great devotion, then that practitioner may be vastly more spiritually evolved than a Hindu who does not take advantage of the resources the Hindu tradition offers. One cannot judge the spiritual level of a person based on their religion–or even on whether or not they are religious. One must be open to truth wherever one finds it–in Hinduism, or in the teachings of other religions and philosophies. And there is much that is true in other views: which is a good summary of Hindu religious pluralism. When Gandhi says, “All religions are equal,” he is not claiming that they all say the same thing, or even that they are all equally true in the abstract, but that you are as likely to find a saint or a sinner in one tradition as another–and that includes Hinduism. In their concrete, lived reality, one religion is as good as another in the sense that the human beings who practice one religion are as likely as those who practice another to be spiritually evolved (or not, as the case may be).71 And who is to say that God has not revealed different profound truths to all the religions of the world, so that, in order for humanity to evolve spiritually, we would have to learn from one another? Would this not be a wonderful way for God to teach us the fundamental unity of all humanity, and of all beings? If this is the case, then the answer to the question, ‘Why be Hindu?’ is that Hinduism, because of its pluralism, is open to the absorption of truths and helpful spiritual practices from other traditions, as its history demonstrates. This is not a weakness of Hinduism, but its greatest strength.

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But to this response one could object–and Morales raises this issue as well–that I have essentially presented a picture not of religious pluralism, but of religious inclusivism, conducive to Hindu triumphalism, to a sense of Hindu supremacy and superiority over other traditions. For even if I have argued that in practice, as a concrete, lived reality, Hinduism is no better than any other tradition, and that all traditions are, as Gandhi says, equal in this regard, I have also argued that Hindu pluralism gives Hinduism a more comprehensive picture of reality, and so, in principle, if not in practice, the Hindu tradition is an advantageous location spiritually for one striving to achieve the highest realisation. My reply to this legitimate concern, on which I shall elaborate further in the next chapter, is that, if one wishes to avoid complete relativism, then it is inevitable that one’s perspective, however pluralistic it may be, will also exhibit the logical structure of religious inclusivism, placing the perspective of one’s own tradition in an advantageous position relative to others, even if the others are nevertheless very positively evaluated. If I did not believe the Hindu tradition had any epistemic advantages over other traditions, I should not be a Hindu. One of these advantages is its religious pluralism. One could, of course, locate oneself outside of any tradition and draw the best elements from all, thereby being a true religious pluralist and not an inclusivist, and being truly impartial. But then one’s own perspective, made up of elements from the many–one’s own worldview–would take the place of a tradition and one would still be an inclusivist in relation to other perspectives. Inclusivism is simply an inevitable logical effect of having a point of view at all. The key is to take a cue from the Buddhist tradition–I have in mind especially N›g›rjuna–and hold one’s perspective ‘skilfully,’ being ever mindful of the limitations of one’s own point of view, and ever open to the truths in the views of others. My own preference for Hinduism, as I discussed in my introduction, rests precisely in the fact that this tradition is conducive to such openness. To see one’s point of view as true is inevitable, or it would no longer be one’s point of view. But to twist this into an attitude of supremacy over others–of triumphalism–can be avoided if we maintain the awareness that even if what we believe is true, and even if, through past openness, we have achieved a comprehensive vision that is not necessarily held by others, this does not mean that our learning process is over, or that we have nothing to gain from humbly listening to others, aware that God dwells within all beings and that every being we encounter has the capacity to be our guru, our spiritual guide, as we progress on our own path to enlightenment. The problem is not in believing our tradition is true, but in believing it alone is true and has nothing to learn from others.

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Conclusion In a Hindu process theology, Nirgu˚a Brahman is unmanifest creativity. Sagu˚a Brahman is both God and the entities making up the world—what I have called the theocosm. IΩ±vara, or God, is essentially God as conceived in process thought—the bridge between unmanifest creative potential and the world. M›y› is manifest creativity, creativity in its role as a limiting factor, giving rise to limited, finite beings precisely so the infinite can thereby be realised. Karma is the regularity, the “inevitable trend towards order” that the divinely coordinated universe exhibits by the divine power of m›y›. Sa˙s›ra is the process of rebirth, of wandering through the karmically ordered universe and learning from one’s experiences until one reaches moks◊a, which is a state characterised by a true understanding of the interdependence of all beings, including their mutual implication with divine existence, a conscious participation in the divine creative process. In the state of moks◊a, one becomes, consciously and joyfully, what one has always been unconsciously (and not so joyfully)—a co-creator, with God, in the ongoing unfoldment of the universe, with unlimited creativity. One can submerge oneself in the infinite bliss of nirgu˚a Brahman, enjoy eternity in heaven with God, or return to help others. This, of course, is all highly experimental and preliminary. But through such an experiment, and further, future elaborations thereupon, it is hoped that the Hindu tradition can begin to articulate its vision of reality with a greater clarity to the wider world, and to draw out its implications of respect for both the diversity and the interdependence, as well as the potential divinity—the divine, cosmic, or theocosmic consciousness—of all beings.

3 HINDU PROCESS THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM Grounding Hindu Religious Pluralism

A Hindu Process Approach to Religious Pluralism In this chapter I shall continue to reformulate Hindu religious pluralism on the basis of the Hindu process theology developed in the preceding chapter by posing the question of how adequate this reformulated position is to the historical Hindu tradition. What distinguishes a process-based religious pluralism from other forms of this position? Griffin defines religious pluralism, in a generic sense, as consisting of two affirmations, one negative, and one positive: The negative affirmation is the rejection of religious absolutism, which means rejecting the a priori assumption that [one’s] own religion is the only one that provides saving truths and values to its adherents, that it alone is divinely inspired, that it has been divinely established as the only legitimate religion, intended to replace all others. The positive affirmation, which is more than simply the reverse side of the negative, is the acceptance of the idea that there are religions other than one’s own that provide saving truths and values to their adherents.1 This is essentially the understanding of religious pluralism with which I am operating in this book, an understanding I take to be in agreement with the Ramakrishna tradition: that no single religion alone provides saving truths and values to humanity, but that many do, and that no single religion has a divine inspiration or endorsement, but that many could.

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There is an ongoing debate in the contemporary academy over the meaning of religious pluralism and what religious pluralism should be. Because this position allows for sub-varieties, several distinct forms of it have arisen. The debate is over which of these is the best, the most adequate to the reality of religious diversity. My own understanding is that a model of religious pluralism is adequate to the degree that it reflects the real diversity of the religions that actually exist without either reducing that diversity to a single common idea or set of principles (which is different from discerning common themes that might actually unite all religions) or vitiating that diversity by devolving into a debilitating relativism. The problem with many existing forms of religious pluralism, like that proposed by John Hick, is an identist tendency to presume that if many religions are true, then they must necessarily express the same truths and/or be “oriented toward the same religious object…and promote essentially the same end (the same type of ‘salvation’).”2 But might there not be, as differential pluralists affirm, many aspects of the one larger truth that the religions express, many legitimate religious objects and ends?3 An identist religious pluralism lacks adequacy because attention to the particulars of the world’s religions reveals at least three basic types of religion, distinguishable in terms of their religious objects, their salvific goals, and the corresponding worldviews they affirm. Following Griffin, I define these three types of religion in the following manner: (1) Theistic Religions are oriented towards a Supreme Being, a personal God, and are productive of salvation, or a right relationship between God and the practitioner, which is conceived in various ways, such as loving union or eternal life with God in Heaven, and typically have a strong ethical emphasis. Examples include Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Shin Buddhism, and the Vai„˚ava, ÷aiva, and ÷›kta traditions of Hinduism. (2) Acosmic Religions are oriented towards an impersonal Absolute, or Ground of Being, and are productive of realisation or enlightenment. Such religions are typically contemplative in nature, with a strong emphasis on wisdom and on gaining insight and transforming consciousness through meditation or reflection. Examples include Jainism, Therav›da Buddhism, philosophical Daoism, Zen, and the Advaita Ved›nta tradition of Hinduism.

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(3) Cosmic Religions are oriented towards the cosmos itself, toward the cosmic order and the spiritual beings that inhabit it, and are productive of harmony within this cosmos and right relations amongst these beings. Examples include the so-called ‘animist,’ indigenous traditions of the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia, and of Europe (such as Wicca and the related Druidic and Neo-pagan faiths, and the ancient Norse and Greco-Roman faiths), as well as Shinto, popular Daoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. The caveat, of course, must also be entered here that no religion fits exclusively into any one of these categories. Rather, these categories mark the dominant trends within the religions included under them. In fact, some element of each category is present in nearly every world religion–preeminently, as we shall see, in Hinduism. As it relates to these three types of religion, the main problem with identist religious pluralism is that it tends to reduce these three to one– most often to an acosmic impersonalism–and to privilege a realisation experience over experiences of loving union with divinity or cosmic harmony. So although Hick’s position, for example, is that “the Real”–the one transcendent object toward which he claims all religions are oriented–is beyond the categories of personal and impersonal, he describes It in ways strikingly reminiscent of acosmic forms of Buddhism and Advaita Ved›nta: [I]t cannot be said to be one or many, person or thing, substance or process, good or evil, purposive or non-purposive. None of the concrete descriptions that apply within the realm of human experience can apply literally to the unexperienceable ground of that realm [i.e. the realm of the Real, the spiritual realm].4 Hick could here be talking about the Advaitic Nirgu˚a Brahman. Similarly, his account of the salvific process–as a process of self-transformation from an “ego-centred” to a “Reality-centred” state–is strongly reminiscent of acosmic religions. The implication that devotion to the “personae” of the Real, the personal deities of the theistic religions, is “really” a way of overcoming our state of ego-centeredness, rather than a real relationship with an actually existing personal deity, is not unlike Advaitic claims about the function of bhakti, or devotion to a personal God. The chief difference between Hick’s account of the Real and the Advaitic conception of Brahman is his Kantian insistence that the Real cannot be experienced. But the idea that all religious experience is ultimately of the same object is the same.

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However, the phenomenological evidence, if we take it seriously (and process thought allows us to do so), suggests that experiences of a personal God and of an impersonal Absolute are not reducible to one another, but are distinct and produce distinct–albeit overlapping–results in the lives of those who have them. To privilege one kind of experience and reduce the others to it is a failure of pluralism. A unified, non-relativist worldview is needed in which these types of experience can retain their distinctiveness if a more adequate, differential religious pluralism is to be developed. Whiteheadian process thought is just such a worldview. It allows for a differential or deep religious pluralism in which all three types of religious object and the salvific experiences corresponding to them can be accepted, and in terms of which the varied worldviews of many religious traditions can be interpreted not as incompatible but complementary. The legitimate worry that underlies identist religious pluralism is the concern to avoid “debilitating relativism,” meaning affirmation of diversity that results in an inability to affirm needed distinctions between truth and falsity, good and evil. Outlining an internally coherent worldview in terms of which the world’s religions can be shown to be mutually compatible is a central task of the philosophy of religion. As Griffin writes: [T]he problem of the intellectual conflicts among the various religions has provided one of the major objections to the truth of religious beliefs, especially because the claim that religious beliefs reflect genuine religious experience is arguably undermined by the existence of radically different ideas of ultimate reality.5 Many religious pluralists–including, but not limited to, Hick–have therefore taken it to be imperative to demonstrate, in their pluralistic models, a convergence of religions. This has met with, at best, mixed success, because convergence has more often than not taken the shape of either perennialism–emphasising only those aspects of the religions which they share–or the reduction of several religious types to one–as in Hick’s acosmic conception of the Real. This leads to the marginalisation or subordination of other types of religious experience, as mentioned previously. These thinkers have neglected Whiteheadian process thought to the detriment of their own positions. As seen in the previous chapter, process thought postulates the existence of a personal God, an impersonal Absolute, and an eternal cosmos of actual entities. All three religious objects and ends, corresponding to the objects and ends of the three main types of religion, can obtain in this internally coherent worldview.

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But the fact that process thought can account for the differences among the three types of religion does not make it able to account for all of the apparent incompatibilities among the world’s religions. As Griffin points out, Christianity’s “relations to Hinduism and Buddhism involve very different issues from those involved in its relations to Judaism and Islam.”6 Can process thought also be used to address the differences among religions of the same type, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? I would argue that it can. As I shall argue in the next chapter, process thought shares a number of basic metaphysical affinities with traditional Jain philosophy.7 On the basis of their relational ontology, Jain thinkers developed, over the course of several centuries, a complex and logically rigorous method for demonstrating the deep compatibilities of seemingly incompatible metaphysical doctrines, using this method to resolve classical Indian philosophical disputes between Brahmins and Buddhists regarding the fundamental character of existence. It seems a Whiteheadian could use the same logical model, which is what I propose to do. Taking Whiteheadian process thought as the basis for a pluralistic model of truth also addresses a number of the other major concerns that have been raised as criticisms of the dominant forms of religious pluralism in contemporary Western academic discussion. Prominent among these is the concern that pluralistic models of truth frequently tend to be presented as religiously and philosophically neutral “meta-views” or as value-neutral theories of religion with a “neutral universality.”8 What emerges from such an approach, as Mark Heim points out, is a modern Western intellectual imperialism, an imposition of the standards of a particular culture–that of Western modernity–on the world’s religions. This is an imposition arguably no less destructive in its potential to distort the religions than are the traditional religious absolutisms of which it is a critique.9 This destructive potential is highlighted even further in an article by Kenneth Surin, in which he points out the affinities between this identist style of religious pluralism and the homogenisation of culture under global capitalism.10 Another concern is that, in the writings of many religious pluralists, the desirability of pluralism is more often than not simply assumed, due to a perception of its conduciveness to more positive inter-religious relations and dialogue. But the urgency of the issues of inter-religious violence and cross-cultural misunderstanding seems to be all the more reason to produce nuanced philosophical arguments that can answer potential criticisms of logical incoherence–arguments currently lacking in the writings of many contemporary religious pluralists.

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If one holds a Whiteheadian process metaphysic, one can expect there to be the very kind of religious plurality that we actually find–because the universe, as conceived in process thought, lends itself to just such a plurality of interpretations. A Whiteheadian does not embrace religious pluralism as an ad hoc political stance because it is conducive to better interreligious relations (although an imperative to pursue this goal does emerge from process thought). Religious pluralism is a logical entailment of process thought. The fact that religious pluralism is a logical extension of a process worldview helps Whiteheadian religious pluralists avoid a debilitating form of relativism. Because they are already committed to certain propositions about the nature of reality, they are able to engage substantively with the world’s religions. They are thus enabled to coordinate and synthesise insights from these diverse traditions into the Whiteheadian worldview, which is itself enriched by the encounter–as are, ideally, the religions themselves. This is one variety of the “mutual transformation” of which John Cobb speaks.11 This point addresses another criticism of religious pluralism: the charge, levelled by Paul J. Griffiths, that most pluralist conceptions of interreligious dialogue omit the substantive issues that make such dialogue at all interesting or intellectually engaging. Because they typically tend to emphasise inter-religious agreement and unity at the expense of the very real diversity and substantive differences that characterise the world’s religions, such conceptions of dialogue tend to produce “a discourse that is pallid, platitudinous, and degutted.”12 In other words, they leave the adherents of the world’s religions very little to talk about. What is there to discuss? If your religion is working for you and mine is working for me, we need not attack or seek to convert one another, but there also seems to be little motivation for us to interact at all. As we each go through the process of transformation from an ‘ego-centred’ to a ‘Reality-centred’ state, we may be more inclined to feel compassion for one another and to work for peace and social justice–as many pluralists, like Paul F. Knitter, argue. But can we learn from each other? Or as its critics charge, is pluralism inherently antagonistic to critical intellectual activity? A Whiteheadian perspective, because it makes substantive claims, is able to engage with the world’s religions in the intellectually interesting fashion that Griffiths says can occur only through inter-religious apologetics, in which both sides are committed to a worldview, but are, at the same time, open to learning something from one another. It creates a space for a respectful, open, non-polemical religious apologetics.

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Religious pluralists fear that all apologetic exercises are likely to degenerate into polemics, which can further degenerate into justifications for inter-religious violence and oppression. One might argue that even process thought is susceptible to the same misuse. In fact, given human frailty, this seems almost certain to be the case. Mention has already been made of the ways in which adherents of Hindutva use the liberality and pluralism of the Hindu tradition as an argument for Hindu superiority. But given the hypothetical, open-ended nature of process thought, Whiteheadian religious pluralism is not an absolutist worldview, assumed to have all the answers already and hence open to other views only inasmuch as they reinforce beliefs already held. Process thought is open to the claims of the religions themselves, as vast repositories of human wisdom and experience. It does not see itself as offering the final answers to any of the ultimate questions; for though process thinkers do, indeed, have definite views about the nature of reality, they are also open to new experiences, insights, and expressions of truth. For while process thought aspires, as its ideal, to the articulation of “a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted,”13 it also recognises that: Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilised as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.14 Process thought encourages a keen awareness of the limits of language. “In philosophical discussion,” Whitehead writes, “the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.” 15 The assumption “that we are capable of producing notions which are adequately defined in respect to the complexity of relationship required for their illustration in the real world” he calls the “Dogmatic Fallacy.”16 Because of the character of Whiteheadian thought as a “middle path” between the extremes of absolute certainty and absolute scepticism, the Whiteheadian is in a position both to teach and be taught by the world’s religions and philosophies. Cobb describes the open and open-ended character proper to a Whiteheadian pluralistic approach to truth when he speaks of “the self-relativisation of metaphysics”:

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It is the nature of process thought to understand itself as in process. There is no certain or irreformable core, however strongly one may be convinced of some formulations. Everything is always open for reconsideration. The expectation is that all of its ideas will some day be superseded, although it expects also that this supersession of ideas will still include the pre-linguistic discernments expressed in particular and imperfect ways in current formulations.17 My conclusion is that a religious pluralism expressed in terms of Whiteheadian process thought is not only an adequate, but an excellent model for religious pluralism. It does not reduce the diversity of the many religious interpretations and experiences of reality to one single type. Nor does it refrain from seeking to situate and to coordinate and synthesise these various interpretations and experiences within a larger internally coherent worldview, thus avoiding the potential charge of relativism. At the same time, this worldview is sufficiently open-ended and expansive that it is open to transformation by the religions and philosophies with which it comes into contact. Issues Specific to a Whiteheadian Hin du Religious Pluralism What issues does a Hindu process theologian face in developing a religious pluralism that is both authentically Whiteheadian and authentically Hindu? On my analysis, there are two such issues. The first is the pervasiveness of expressions of Hindu religious pluralism that have an identist character. The hard truth that must be faced by a Hindu process theologian is that Hick’s identist religious pluralism that has been subject to so much critique in the Western academy is essentially a Ved›ntic Hindu position expressed in the guise of Kantian philosophical terminology. Identist religious pluralists have essentially been echoing–and in some cases repeating almost verbatim–the claims of major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hindu religious pluralists like Ramakrishna and Mahatma Gandhi. This fact accounts, in part, for the objection raised in Christian theological circles against identist religious pluralism that it does not reflect an authentically Christian position. It does not–for it is a Hindu position (Frank Morales’ objections notwithstanding). Does this mean Hinduism necessarily entails an identist position–in which case a Whiteheadian Hindu religious pluralism is impossible? Or is an alternative Hindu view possible? I shall argue that such a view not only is possible, but that it already exists, implicitly, in the pluralistic self-understanding of contemporary Hinduism.

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The second major issue a Hindu process theologian must face is inclusivism. Many Hindu assertions often taken to express Hindu openness to other religions, and hence religious pluralism, are actually expressions of religious inclusivism. The seemingly inclusivist, as opposed to genuinely pluralistic, character of many Hindu assertions gives rise to the question: Is a truly Whiteheadian Hindu religious pluralism possible? The History and Character of Hindu Religious Pluralism Though still controversial among Christians, religious pluralism is a point of pride for many Hindus. Though associated pre-eminently with the Ramakrishna tradition, it has come to be held by many Hindus as a mainstream tenet of the tradition, to the chagrin of its critics. “One of the [the] Hindu religion’s greatest gifts to mankind,” writes Bansi Pandit, “Is the attitude of religious tolerance and universal harmony.”18 Indeed, two of the seven points in the definition of Hinduism used by the Indian Supreme Court are: “A spirit of tolerance, and willingness to understand and appreciate others’ points of view, recognizing that truth has many sides” and the “Recognition that paths to truth and salvation are many.”19 A list of central Hindu beliefs collected by Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı includes a statement that closely echoes Griffin’s definition of generic religious pluralism, “I believe that no particular religion teaches the only way to salvation above all others, but that all genuine religious paths are facets of God’s Pure Love and Light, deserving tolerance and understanding.”20 This idea is expressed in the most ancient of Hindu scriptures–the ¿g Veda: “Reality is one, though the wise speak of it variously.”21 It is also expressed in the well-known subh›„ita, or proverb: “Truth is one, paths are many.” A theistic version of this pluralistic approach is expressed in the Bhagavad Gıt› when Bhagav›n ÷ri Krishna proclaims the validity of many paths to salvation, or liberation: “Just as human beings approach me, so I receive them. All paths, P›rtha, lead to me.”22 But is Hindu religious pluralism simply a laid back attitude of tolerance towards religious diversity? Precision is important here, for a variety of reasons. One reason is the confusion created by the identification of this view with the idea that ‘all religions are the same,’ or indifferentism, criticised by Morales and others. But it is also important because Hindu approaches to religious pluralism could be mistaken for Western liberal ideas about religious tolerance. Though superficially similar, the worldviews from which these two models of tolerance emerge could not be more different.

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If these two become conflated, it very easy for a discussion of Hindu religious pluralism to slide into a discussion of relativism and secularism, with which liberal conceptions of tolerance are widely associated in the West. It should be borne in mind, however, that Hindu religious pluralism is a religious position, involving a positive claim about the nature of divinity: that it is approachable by a variety of more or less equally valid means. But even though this idea fits quite comfortably with liberalism and secularism, acting, paradoxically, as a theological justification for what is generally regarded as an a-theological position, it is nevertheless distinct from secularism in both its character and its content. It is distinct from secularism in character inasmuch as it is, again, a religious position, a position operating from out of an avowedly religious worldview, rather than one that claims, as secularism does, to be religiously neutral. It is distinct, moreover, in content for the same basic reason. It is not a prescriptive claim about human behaviour, as secularism is: that people should not interfere with one another’s religious beliefs, at least not at a state level, except inasmuch as these lead to destructive behaviour. It is a claim about divinity in relation to humanity, and vice versa: that divinity is approachable through a variety of more or less equally valid means. To be sure, it does entail secularism’s prescriptive claim–hence the possibility for confusion. It emerges, though, from the distinctive worldview of Hinduism, as found in Hindu sacred texts and the teaching of the living gurus of the tradition. Although it issues in the same basic prescriptive claim as secularism– that people should not interfere with each other’s religious beliefs, and that freedom of conscience is to be held inviolable–Hindu religious pluralism bases this claim on a very different foundation than Western secularism. Secularism historically tends to be connected with scepticism. A variety of diverse religious beliefs are to be tolerated, according to most Western secular thought, because, it is presumed, no one really knows the answers to the big religious questions. This, arguably, is one reason why secularism has evoked such profound disdain and has aroused such fear in traditionally religious societies. The scepticism on which it is based is seen to be at odds with religious faith. “Tolerance” is taken to involve a debilitating relativism which is the polar opposite of serious religious commitment. But religious pluralism in the Hindu sense is based on a religious claim: on the assertion of the Hindu scriptures and the Hindu sages that although truth is one, paths are many; that truth is one, though the wise speak of it in various ways. Tolerance is enjoined not out of scepticism, but out of a profound belief in the sanctity of the beliefs and practices of the other.

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The need for precision also arises from the fact that to speak of “the” Hindu view on any topic creates an illusion of uniformity that is far from adequate to the richness and the complexity of Hindu reality. What I am calling Hindu religious pluralism, it should be stipulated from the beginning, is a claim abstracted from a wide variety of Hindu texts and traditions that are not identical in their claims. There is no single statement of this position to be found in any text or tradition that can claim universal assent from all Hindus, though there are some which I have already cited that can claim widespread assent. I should also clarify that it is not my intention to buy into or promote widespread misconceptions and stereotypes of Hinduism, even the positive ones, such as the notion that Hinduism is and always has been uniformly and uniquely tolerant or accepting of religious diversity. There have been, throughout the history of Hinduism, sects that have rejected what I claim to be the dominant trajectory of the tradition toward pluralism. Some have even held positions that would be identified as exclusivist. There are teaching lineages in the Vais‹n‹ava and the ÷aiva traditions that hold that they alone show the way to liberation for human beings. In the past, there have even been occasions of persecution, like that inflicted on the Jains of Tamil Nadu by ÷aivas in the medieval period. And in the modern era, of course, there have been the sometimes quite intense bursts of violence that have poisoned relations between the Hindu and Muslim communities, as well as the violence between the Hindu and Sikh communities of the mid-1980’s. But these examples of sectarian exclusivism and communal violence must be seen against a background of tolerance and civility, and sometimes genuine pluralism, which makes their occurrence all the more dramatic and striking. If the polemics levelled by various schools of thought against one another in classical Indian philosophical and theological texts are any guide, the common stance of Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists toward one another has been one of inclusivism–the view that one’s own tradition is the closest to the truth, but that others are not necessarily beyond the pale of validity. A common strategy for the representation of this view is the hierarchical ranking of traditions in terms of their relative distance from the truth represented by one’s own school of thought. M›dhava’s “Summary of All Views,” is a classic example of a text that employs this strategy. M›dhava begins his text with a presentation of the philosophy of the Materialists, whose view he holds to be the least adequate. He then presents the views of a wide variety of sects, each of which he finds progressively more agreeable, until he reaches his own school of thought, Advaita Ved›nta, which he sees as representing the highest stage of truth.

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Such hierarchical inclusivism presents one’s own perspective as the view toward which all other views, once their various inconsistencies are perceived and corrected for, inevitably lead. It is especially common in the Advaita tradition, where it is called avirodhav›da, the view that there is, in the end, no conflict between one’s own view and those of others, for when others’ views are understood correctly, they entail one’s own.23 In practice, such an inclusivist understanding has led to the ‘tolerance’ that has become a prominent positive stereotype of Hinduism–observing one’s own traditions, but respecting others’ observances as well in the confidence that all are somewhere on the path toward the same ultimate goal: liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Indeed, the widespread belief in rebirth, amongst all of the indigenous traditions of India (excluding the Materialists) has likely been a contributing factor toward the ‘live and let live’ attitude that tends to characterise Hindu perceptions of religious difference. Because we all have many lifetimes in which to ‘get it right,’ there is not as much pressure to proselytise. One’s neighbours may be further down the ladder of truth than oneself. But if they practice their current path assiduously, they may be reborn further on up the ladder next time. Also, the fact that all of the indigenous sects– Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain–shared a common religious goal in the form of liberation from rebirth very likely made the idea of a shared religious end–the idea that all paths led ultimately to the same goal–quite plausible; for, despite interesting differences, this goal generally tended to be described in the same terms by all the various traditions, as a state free from sorrow and limitation. As the Jain philosopher HaribhadrasÒri writes: The ultimate truth transcending all states of worldly existence and called nirv›˚a is essentially and necessarily one even if designated by different names. This very entity is designated by words like Sad›±iva, Parabrahman, Siddh›tman, Tathat›, etc.–words that have the same meaning. For there is no dispute about the definition of the ultimate truth inasmuch as it is unanimously said to be free from all disturbance, free from all ailment, free from all activity, and that on account of its undergoing no birth, etc.24 As this passage from HaribhadrasÒri demonstrates, a charitable inclusivism is not only a product of modernity, but existed in ancient India as well.

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In the medieval period, one again finds a trend toward pluralism. In the case of bhakti saints, like Kabir and Guru Nanak, who lived on the margins between Hinduism and Islam, the pluralism is even more radical, consisting not of an inclusivism that regards one’s own tradition as finally superior, but affirming that which tradition one inhabits ultimately makes no difference at all, in terms of one’s chances of salvation. This is the doctrine mentioned in the previous chapter of sarva-dharma-sama-bh›va, or an attitude of impartiality toward the practitioners of all religions. Kabir, claimed by both the Hindu and Muslim communities as a saint, makes the famous affirmation that it matters not whether one refers to the divine as Allah or R›ma, as long as one’s heart is filled with sincere devotion. And Guru Nanak, another boundary figure who would become the founder of Sikhism, expresses his religious pluralism in the still-revolutionary phrase, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” It is in the modern period, though, with Ramakrishna and Gandhi, that one begins to encounter a consistent affirmation of religious pluralism and eclecticism as distinguishing marks of Hindu spirituality. It is, of course, the modern period that also sees the rise of what can properly be called a ‘Hindu’ identity. Prior to this time, of course, there really was no clearly defined tradition called ‘Hinduism,’ but a family of traditions. Some were theistic, such as the Vai„˚ava, ÷aiva, and T›ntric paths, while others were non-theistic, like Buddhism and Jainism, or theistic in a qualified sense, like Advaita Ved›nta. Some professed strong adherence to Vedic tradition, while others gave this tradition only nominal adherence, while others still openly rejected it (again, Jainism and Buddhism, which, for this very reason, tend to be regarded as constituting traditions distinct from Hinduism, although as pointed out earlier they share the same basic cosmological assumptions and religious practices as most Hindu traditions). One reason Hinduism has been so widely associated with pluralism and eclecticism may be the fact that it is, in a sense, an artificial tradition, pieced together out of many pre-existing traditions, albeit traditions sharing wide overlaps in belief and practice. The rise of Hindu religious pluralism in the modern period could be seen as an effect of Hindus suddenly finding themselves sharing a common religious identity with those who had previously been regarded as the other. Vai„˚avas, ÷aivas and ÷›ktas were now all Hindus, so Hinduism came to be seen as defined by internal diversity, and by a breadth of vision that could accommodate the range of paths and practices represented by its various constituent traditions. This seems especially true for diasporic Hinduism, in which the local ties that reinforced internal difference were attenuated.

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Ramakrishna and Gandhi extended this vision even further to encompass all the world’s religious traditions: Christianity and Islam, as well as the paths represented by the Vais‹˚ ava, ÷aiva, and ÷›kta traditions. Both were pragmatic visionaries (if that is not an oxymoron). Ramakrishna’s faith in the harmony of all religions was based on his direct mystical experiences: I have practiced all religions–Hinduism, Islam, Christianity–and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God toward whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths. He who is called Krishna is also called Shiva, and bears the name of the Primal Energy, Jesus, and Allah as well–the same Rama with a thousand names.25 God can be realised through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up a bamboo pole…Each religion is only a path leading to God, as rivers come from different directions and ultimately become one in the one ocean… All religions and all paths call upon their followers to pray to one and the same God. Therefore one should not show disrespect to any religion or religious opinion.26 The practice of non-violent social justice, inspired by all faiths, led Gandhi to very much the same conclusion. Religions are different roads converging upon the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal? In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals. I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world. I believe that they are all God-given, and I believe that they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that, if only we could all of us read the scriptures of different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of those faiths we should find that they were at bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.27 In these and similar pronouncements by these two giants of the modern Hindu tradition, the pluralistic trajectory of pre-modern traditions of India emerges as a full-blown acceptance of religious pluralism in Griffin’s sense.

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Hindus, especially in the modern period, have tended increasingly to conceive of Hinduism as something like a pluralistic model of truth along the lines of what many Western philosophers of religion have also been trying to develop. Indeed, Hinduism has been the inspiration and source for many Western pluralistic models–like those of John Hick and Aldous Huxley–as well as the imagery in which these are expressed: many names for one God, many rivers flowing into one ocean, and many paths to a common destination. With the pronouncements of many Western perennialists and religious pluralists containing echoes of the views of such prominent Hindu figures as Ramakrishna and Gandhi, one can see why a Hindu could conceivably look at Whiteheadian religious pluralism and say, “Aren’t we already there? What need does Hinduism have for the Whiteheadian worldview?” The Whiteheadian answers this question with another: Hinduism may indeed be pluralistic in a generic sense, denying that there is only one true religion and affirming that there are many. But is its pluralism adequate? Or does it suffer from the defects of the perennialist and identist views which it has inspired? Is it a differential pluralism, which preserves the distinctive views and values of each tradition, or does it reduce these to a ‘highest common denominator,’ to borrow a phrase from Huxley, or conceive of them as in the end coalescing into an experience of a common object, as in Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis? Some Hindus would say that Hindu pluralism is adequate. They can argue that Hinduism already is something like a Whiteheadian religious pluralism by virtue of the fact that Hinduism is not so much ‘a religion’ in the conventional sense–a sect or sa˙prad›ya–as an architectonic structure incorporating the actual variety of religious paths that exist. This is a claim, we shall see, based on both the empirical realities and Hinduism and on a problem relating to the translation of ‘religion’ into an Indic idiom. Empirically speaking, Hinduism is a vast family of faiths that contains many religions that cut across the spectrum of religious types described earlier. There are theistic religions, like the Vai„˚ava traditions and some forms of ÷aivism. There are acosmic paths that emphasise the impersonal dimensions of ultimate reality–Nirgu˚a Brahman or pure consciousness–as found in Advaita Ved›nta as well as in other forms of ÷aivism. There is also cosmic religion, of which possibly the most ancient form of Hinduism–that described in the ritualistic Vedic Sa˙hit›s, or hymns–seems to have been an example, as well as the practices and worldviews incorporated into Hinduism over the millennia of the Ädiv›sıs, the various aboriginal tribal peoples of India.

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Hinduism has self-consciously theorised this internal diversity in terms of the four yogas, which are all conceived as valid paths to the common ultimate goal of liberation, or moks‹a, from sa˙s›ra, the beginningless–and potentially endless–cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The basic division of these yogas has striking affinities with the division of religions into three types, based on religious object and salvific goal, presented earlier. There is the karma yoga, or spiritual discipline of good works, which encompasses the ancient Vedic ritual practices, as well as personal morality, or dharma. This is close to the concept of cosmic religion. There is the jñ›na yoga, or way of realisation, the path of acosmic impersonalism. There is bhakti yoga, or theistic devotionalism. Finally, there is the r›j› yoga, or royal yoga, the classical path of meditation as outlined in Pat›ñjali’s Yoga SÒtra, which has been adopted into numerous traditions, including some usually regarded as distinct from Hinduism, like Buddhism and Jainism, and even into some non-Indic traditions, such as Sufi Islam and liberal forms of Christianity. As the reference to these traditions suggests, Hinduism has been not only tolerant of, but also productive of, diversity. Three major world religions have emerged from it: Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. According the definition of Hinduism utilized by the Indian Supreme Court, these three religions are forms or ‘branches’ of Hinduism. Many regard them as n›stika, or heterodox, Hindu sects. I, too, see them as part of Hinduism. Even the perceived ‘heterodoxy’ of these three traditions is very often downplayed in current practice. I have observed, at least in the Indian diaspora, that Hindus and Jains frequently make use of the same temples. I have visited two ‘Hindu-Jain’ temples in Pennsylvania, and am a member of one of them. These temples celebrate Jain holidays with no less fanfare than they do Hindu festivals and pÒjas, and they include images of the Jain Tırthaºkaras alongside those of Hindu deities like R›ma and ÷iva. Finally, in the minds of many Hindus, even Buddhism is part of the Hindu tradition. ‘Bhagav›n Buddha’ is widely regarded as an avat›r of Vi„˚u, a divine incarnation. Although historically an anti-Buddhist doctrine, the original polemical intent of this claim seems largely forgotten.28 In light of these relationships, many Hindus regard Hinduism as the ‘trunk’ of the ‘tree’ of the world’s religions and philosophies, the historical, cultural, and conceptual centre from which its many varied branches have emerged. Many see this internally variegated ‘tree’ as a unity, with which Hinduism is to be identified. And this of course brings us back to the issue of inclusivism. In the Hinduism instalment of the world religions video series entitled The Long Search, the following dialogue occurs between the narrator, Ronald Eyre, and a Hindu pa˚˜it:

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Eyre: Do you mean that we’re all Hindus really, going various ways? Pandit: I think at the highest stage there is nobody beyond Hinduism. Everybody is a Hindu. “Everybody is a Hindu.” Is this religious pluralism, or is it the most radical conceivable form of inclusivism? This is a question that a pluralistic Hindu process theology must address. Religious inclusivism is a position of which Western religious pluralists have long been critical. Seeing it as a paternalistic view–an exclusivist wolf in a pluralistic sheep’s clothing–they have sought to distinguish it from pluralism. Inclusivism, like pluralism, is a position that has many possible sub-varieties, some being more open to other religions than others. In general, though, it can be said that religious inclusivists, like pluralists, regard the world’s religions in a positive light–as, in accordance with the definition of religious pluralism given earlier, providing “saving truths and values to their adherents.” What is problematic from a pluralist perspective is that religious inclusivists are not inclined to view the world’s religions in such a positive light on their own terms. Inclusivists take their own religion to be definitive of truth and salvation for all human beings, and then judge the adequacy of other religions in terms of the resulting standard. This, again, is a strategy pursued in many of the philosophical texts of ancient India, mentioned previously, which value other traditions not on their own terms, but as stepping stones toward the full truth embodied in themselves. In these terms, the difference between inclusivism and exclusivism– which rejects the legitimacy of all religions but one’s own–is that while exclusivists evaluate other religions in terms of the standards of their own tradition and find the other religions wanting, inclusivists do the same thing but with considerably greater interpretive charity. For exclusivists, one could say, the glass is half empty; for inclusivists, it is half full. From a process-based pluralist perspective, the problem with both inclusivism and exclusivism is that neither takes with sufficient seriousness the possibility that the other religions may teach important truths not already contained within their own traditions. They therefore do not allow for the kind of open-ended growth towards truth toward which a process perspective aspires. They are also not incompatible with a denial of the ultimate legitimacy of all other religions–with their right to exist as other religions–such as when some Christian inclusivists refer to other religions as ‘preparations for the Gospel.’

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The question here is: Is this account descriptive of Hindu attitudes toward other religions? Is Hindu inclusiveness necessarily an assertion of Hindu superiority, a claim that Hinduism already includes all the truths of the other religions? Or is it a genuine openness–a pluralism that is willing to learn from other paths? Before exploring these questions further, it is necessary to mention a distinction between two positions that the critics of religious inclusivism frequently conflate: epistemic and soteriological inclusivism.29 Soteriological inclusivism, I would argue, is rightly found objectionable. But epistemic inclusivism is an inevitable outcome of holding any non-relativist position. Virtually all of us are inclusivists in this sense. By epistemic inclusivism, what I mean is that one inevitably believes that one’s own view is true, or else one would not hold it. I made reference to this near the end of the previous chapter in response to Morales’ objection to religious pluralism that it leads to one being unable to answer the question, ‘Why be a Hindu?’ One is a member of whatever religious community one is a member of because one believes that its teachings are true (in addition, of course, to non-cognitive reasons such as geographic location and upbringing). One problem in the way religious pluralism is frequently articulated is that it seems to involve a denial of this inevitable fact. But what pluralism denies is that one’s own view is the only one that is true, and that one cannot learn from others. Griffin summarises the Christian version of soteriological inclusivism as follows: It asserts that Christianity is the only religion in full possession of saving truth, so whatever religious truths are found in other religions are already included in Christianity. And it asserts that although all salvation comes through Jesus Christ, people in other religions can be included in this salvation.30 This doctrine is well illustrated by the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s concept of the ‘anonymous Christian.’ Like the pa˚˜it who claims that “Everybody is a Hindu,” Rahner claims that all people of good faith, regardless of explicit religious affiliation, are oriented salvifically towards Christ–even if only implicitly.31 Rahner makes this claim because faith in Christ, in some form, is constitutive of human salvation according to his tradition.32 Through this ingenious, albeit paternalistic, formulation, Rahner reconciles the Christian insistence on the necessity of Christ for human salvation with the equally central proclamation of God’s universal love.

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Is Hindu inclusivism of this soteriological variety, which asserts the superiority of Hinduism as the only legitimate way to salvation? Is it the inevitable epistemic variety? Or is it something else? A classic statement of Hindu inclusivism says that: A characteristic of Hindu religion is its receptivity and all-comprehensiveness. It claims to be the one religion of humanity, of human nature, of the entire world. It cares not to oppose the progress of any other system…it has no difficulty in including all other religions within its all-embracing arms and ever-widening fold.33 This position seems not so much to affirm religious diversity as to obliterate it. Hinduism is not just the one true religion, but the only religion! This is an odd claim, since Hindus clearly know of the existence of other religions. So what does it mean to call Hinduism “the one religion of humanity”? I shall argue that what is at issue here is ultimately a matter of semantics, albeit one that is of great importance to the self-understanding of Hindus. But first I shall turn to the issue of the identist character of Hindu pluralism. Addressing the Monistic or Identist Orientation of Hindu Pluralism There is a sense in which a Hindu religious pluralism of any kind, process or not, will inevitably be identist, although I would argue that this is an identism that is not finally incompatible with a Whiteheadian religious pluralism. Identism in this sense can be called minimalist identism. This minimalist identism is not identist with respect to the ultimate religious object, for it is fully compatible with process thought’s three ultimate realities. It is also not an identism with respect to religious ends, inasmuch as it still recognizes the distinct ends of loving union with the Supreme Being, realisation of the Absolute, and harmony in the Cosmos– the ends of bhakti yoga, jñ›na and r›j› yoga, and karma yoga, respectively. The identism to which I am referring is identist only with respect to a particular consequence that the Hindu tradition takes to arise from the attainment of any of these three ends, and to which all three are believed to lead. I referred above to the fact that the common soteriological goal of all of the four yogas is moks‹a, or liberation from sa˙s›ra, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This is a view that, in my judgement, is so pervasive within and so central to the Hindu tradition as to be non-negotiable. It is indeed part of the definition of Hinduism that I am deploying in this book.

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But does this not contradict Cobb’s understanding of self-relativisation as a characteristic of a process approach to religious pluralism, his assertion that “There is no certain or irreformable core” of beliefs “However strongly one may be convinced of some formulations” and that “Everything is always open for reconsideration”? Does it not reflect an essentialist view of religion that is ultimately incompatible with a Whiteheadian differential religious pluralism?34 My affirmation of the centrality to Hinduism of the doctrine of rebirth and of liberation from rebirth as the primary Hindu soteriological goal is problematic if it is meant to suggest that these doctrines are immune to interrogation and reformulation. But this is not what I intend to suggest. I share the concern of contemporary critics of religion, such as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, that one of the great dangers of religious belief is its tendency to insulate certain ideas from critical inquiry, to make them offlimits to questioning.35 When I characterise rebirth and liberation as ‘nonnegotiable,’ this is not my intent. One should always be open to inquiry and to new formulations of one’s insights and understandings of truth. Nor do I intend to set up an essentialist definition of Hinduism. What I mean, in keeping with the ‘family resemblance’ understanding of religions that is involved in a Whiteheadian approach, is that if one is going to play the ‘language game’ called Hinduism–particularly in the role I have set for myself as a Hindu theologian–then one’s representation of the tradition has to be recognisable to those who inhabit it. And for a Hindu conception of reality, on the current understanding of the meaning of the term Hindu, the ideas of rebirth and liberation are–if I may use the word in a stipulative and not an ontological sense–essential. A Hindu religious pluralism will tend to be identist in the sense that a Hindu will most likely conceive of the soteriological goals toward which all religions point as involving some kind of liberation from the rebirth process. But on the other hand, this identism is mitigated in part by the fact that the ideal of liberation is broad enough to allow for considerable diversity in terms of what might constitute it. Answers to the question, “Of what does such a liberation consist?” can and do vary enormously among the numerous schools of thought in Hinduism, and so allow for considerable internal diversity in terms of Hindu conceptions of salvation. For Advaitins, liberation is an effect of the obliteration of personal identity in the realisation of one’s unity with the impersonal Brahman–indeed, not an obliteration so much as an awareness that there never really was a separate identity to obliterate in the first place.

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For Vai„˚avas, however, liberation is eternal life in Heaven with Lord Vi„˚u, a life accompanied by retention of personal identity and memory, and even a quasi-physical form not unlike the glorified resurrection body in the Christian tradition. For Mım›˙saka karma yogıs, liberation is not yet a goal, life in sa˙s›ra being preferable. But for those who are weary of the world and desirous of liberation, the instructions for attaining it are available in the Upani„ads. The Mım›˙sakas are an interesting and important case, demonstrating that one can believe in liberation without aspiring for it. This means that other kinds of salvific goal may be possible from a Hindu perspective–despite the fact that for most of the tradition liberation is indeed the ultimate end–so long as these other goals are logically compatible with the existence of rebirth and the possibility of liberation. This does not undermine the centrality or ‘non-negotiability’ of a cosmology of karma, rebirth, and liberation to Hinduism. But it is another factor which mitigates the identism implicit in liberation being conceived as the ultimate fruit of all salvific paths. Traditions like PÒrva Mım›˙s› which affirm what could be called a ‘this-worldly’ soteriology, emphasising right behaviour in this life–such as Confucianism and Judaism–are not logically in conflict with Hinduism, which affirms the validity of goals short of mok„a, like dharma, artha, and k›ma.36 For a variety of reasons an Advaitic understanding has dominated English-language Hindu discourse, as well as discourse about Hinduism by non-Hindus, hence the tendency of Hindu-inspired Western writers like Hick to develop identist models with a strong resemblance to Advaita. Because of the influence and predominance of Advaita in modern Hinduism, expressions of Hindu religious pluralism, tend to take an identist form, tending to assume that all religions lead to Advaitic realisation. Advaita Ved›nta, however, does not reflect the dominant historical consensus, or even the contemporary consensus, of the Hindu tradition with regard to the ultimate nature of reality, a point that Griffin and others have made.37 As Griffin explains, “Most Hindu piety is theistic, being bhakti (devotion) to a personal deity.”38 Nor is traditional Advaita pluralistic.39 Indeed, the practice of Hinduism is overwhelmingly theistic in nature. The kind of acosmic practice and understanding that Advaita expresses– that ultimate reality is not finally a Supreme Person to whom one should be devoted, but rather an impersonal Absolute to be realised as the true nature of one’s self–is typically to be found either among the members of the original Advaita community–the Da±an›mı order of monks founded by ÷aºkara (c. 788-820 CE) and their lay supporters–or modern Western or Westernised Hindus (prominently in my own Ramakrishna tradition).

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Theistic practice, of course, is not incompatible with Advaita Ved›nta. Indeed, ÷aºkara recommended the path of bhakti, the path of devotion to a personal deity, for householders, instituting the practice of pañcay›tana pÒja, or devotion to the five deities, Vi„˚u, ÷iva, SÒrya, Ga˚e±a, and ÷aktı. All five of these deities are regarded in this tradition “as equal reflections of the one sagu˚a Brahman, rather than as distinct beings.” It is this practice that laid the foundation for the modern practice, mentioned earlier, “in which Hindus freely add Jesus, mother Mary, Mohammed, Buddha or any other holy personage to their altars,” a practice clearly indicative of Hindu religious pluralism.40 But according to ÷aºkara, as Griffin points out, sagu˚a Brahman– Brahman with attributes, the Supreme Being or personal God–is derivative from nirgu˚a Brahman, the formless Brahman that, according to this school of thought, is finally the only reality. All else, including the personal God, is a projection of m›y› (cosmic illusion) and an effect of avidy› (ignorance). “Brahman is the reality–the one existence, absolutely independent of human thought or idea. Because of the ignorance of our human minds, the universe seems to be composed of diverse forms. It is Brahman alone…It can never be anything else but Brahman. Apart from Brahman, it does not exist.”41 Even the Supreme Being, God (Bhagav›n or IΩ±vara) is derivative from this impersonal Ground. “Devotion to a personal God, therefore, would involve an inferior relation to ultimate reality.”42 To be sure, such devotion can purify the mind in preparation for the highest realisation–its purpose in the Advaitic tradition–helping one overcome the selfish, desiring ego (as in Hick’s idea of moving from ego- to Reality-centeredness). But ultimately, according to Advaita Ved›nta one renounces such practices when realisation dawns. Of course, God is derivative from nirgu˚a Brahman in the Ramakrishna tradition and the Hindu process theology developed earlier as well, God being, according to Whitehead’s account of his metaphysical system, “a derivative notion.”43 But the metaphysically derivative nature of God from nirgu˚a Brahman–or Creativity–does not imply inferiority or subordination. The essential worldviews of the Ramakrishna tradition and Advaita are not in conflict on this issue so much as the relative valuation Advaita gives to Brahman without form in relation to Brahman with form. For a Hindu process theology rooted in the Ramakrishna tradition, both nirgu˚a and sagu˚a Brahman are real and both play a role in the creative salvific process. This is the basis of its religious pluralism. Many followers of Ramakrishna give preference to an Advaitic approach; but there is freedom within the tradition in this regard, this being the essence of its pluralism.

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The Bhagavad Gıt›, the most popular Hindu scripture in the modern period, regarded by many as having an authority on a par with the Vedas, acknowledges the legitimacy and the effectiveness of both practices, the theistic and the acosmic. But it actually recommends bhakti, or theistic devotionalism, as more appropriate for most people, due to the difficulty of acosmic practice, which is essentially a monastic practice that requires the renunciation of physical pleasures and most human social relations: “The difficulty of the search for the Unmanifest is greater [than that of bhakti]. Embodied beings can only attain it by constant striving, the suffering of their repressed senses, self-discipline, and anguish.”44 This is of course not logically incompatible with Advaita Ved›nta. ÷aºkara, takes it to support his view that the jñ›na yoga, the impersonal path, is superior because it is more difficult, and hence suited to persons of greater spiritual capacity. But this view is not universally held in the Hindu tradition, and also seems contrary to the plain sense of the text, a point often made in the theistically oriented traditions like Gau˜iya Vai„navism and Dvaita Ved›nta, for which the Gıt› is central. This brings us to the next point, which is that Ved›nta, the larger stream of Hindu thought of which Advaita is a portion, is more internally diverse than contemporary Western privileging of Advaita Ved›nta might suggest. Amongst the ten schools of Ved›nta (only three of which are typically mentioned in textbooks on Hinduism or Indian philosophy), most are not, in fact, monistic in the same radical sense that Advaita is. R›m›˚uja’s Vi±i„˛›dvaita, for example, seeks to coordinate the phenomena of identity and difference, unity and diversity, into a coherent whole. This is not unlike Whiteheadian process thought, which coordinates unity and plurality, the one enduring reality and the many passing moments, and sees both as integral to human experience. In fact, among the premodern forms of Ved›nta, Vi±i„˛›dvaita has been pointed out by other scholars as bearing the strongest resemblance to process thought, with its affirmation of the unity of Brahman as an organic unity which allows for internal difference, its distinction between God and this ultimate unity, and its conception of the relation between God and the world as analogous to the relation of soul and body.45 Other schools of Ved›nta include the Bhed›bheda of Bhart¸prapañca, Bh›skara, and Y›davaprak›±a; the Dvait›dvaita of Nimb›rka and ÷rıpati; the Acintya Bhed›bheda of B›ladeva and Caitanya, and the Advaita IΩ±varav›da, or ‘monistic theism’ of the ÷aiva Siddh›nta school, described by Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı, in terms strikingly reminiscent of Whiteheadian thought, as “dipolar panentheism.”46

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Clearly, the simplistic identification of Vedanta with ÷aºkara’s Advaitic monism that has been such a prominent feature of contemporary Western understandings of Hinduism is grossly inadequate to the very real internal diversity of this tradition. Ved›nta, in its totality, is far closer to process thought than one might otherwise guess to be the case; for, like process thought, most forms of Ved›nta seek to affirm the reality of both the personal and impersonal, temporal and eternal, ultimate realities. Alhough most of these schools of thought regard God, Being, and World as aspects of a larger, all-comprehensive Reality or Whole–Brahman, as elaborated in the previous chapter–a real ontological pluralism with an organic unity is what is ultimately affirmed. This is also true of the Vedic and Ved›ntic thought of the modern period. Sw›mı Day›nanda Saraswatı (1824-1883), the founder of the Ärya Sam›j, makes the following affirmation, not unlike a Whiteheadian affirmation of a plurality of ultimate realities: There are three things beginningless: namely, God, Souls, and Prakriti or the material cause of the universe. As they are eternal, their attributes, works and nature are also eternal.47 A Whiteheadian would, of course, reject the ontological dualism this quotation suggests between the soul and matter, regarding soul as a personally ordered series of experiencing actual entities and Prakriti as an aggregate of such entities experienced as an object. Process thought, in a basic ontological sense, is monistic, but dualistic with respect to the kinds of structures that actual entities can constitute.48 But Sw›mi Day›nanda Saraswatı’s basic ontological pluralism and his rejection of the Advaitic monism of many Neoved›ntins places him closer to Whitehead than to ÷aºkara, as indicated by his statement: “The Neo-Vedantists look upon God as the efficient as well as the material cause of the universe, but they are absolutely in the wrong.”49 Day›nanda is here aligning himself with the theistic Dvaita tradition of M›dhva as against the Advaita of ÷aºkara, for M›dhva, too, rejects the idea of Brahman as a material substrate of reality, identifying Brahman instead with God–the supreme personal divinity, who is identified in M›dhva’s tradition with Lord Vi„˚u. Though Sw›mı Day›nanda Saraswatı did not identify himself as a Vai„˚ava, seeing the rise of devotional sects as a deviation from what he saw as the original, ‘pure’ Vedic revelation, his interpretation of the Vedas is, like that of the devotional sects, thoroughly theistic. God, for Day›nanda, as for Whitehead, is distinct from, though involved in, the process of creation.

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Sri Ramakrishna also makes a distinction between the personal deity– his favoured divinity being K›lı, the Divine Mother–and the impersonal Absolute, in spite of the identist flavour of his many famous pronouncements about the unity of the world’s religions. Unlike Day›nanda, however, and more in keeping with Advaita, Ramakrishna sees this distinction as a matter of our perspective. But he does not hierarchise the two. For his devotees, Sri Ramakrishna is definitive of the virtuoso religious practitioner. In the course of his many famous s›dhanas (spiritual practices), Ramakrishna is said to have experienced forms of both acosmic realisation and loving union with divinity. In contrast with Advaita, Ramakrishna recommended both as salvific and liberating experiences, reducing neither one to the other. For his own part, Ramakrishna preferred to remain in bh›vamukha, a state in which he is said to have been aware simultaneously of both the one eternal substance at the foundation of existence and the ongoing personal presence of divinity.50 Another Bengali sage of the modern period, Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950), is also known to have experienced all three kinds of ultimate religious object. He developed a system of “Integral Yoga,” with affinities to process thought, intended to incorporate all three, without privileging one over the rest.51 Finally, Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) also affirmed the validity of both theistic and nontheistic religious experiences and ends, despite the identist implications of many of his pronouncements on religious pluralism. What is especially interesting about Gandhi’s perspective is the fact that he explicitly draws upon the Jain doctrines of relativity, mentioned earlier, in the formulation of his view. If, as I shall argue in the next chapter, these doctrines arise from a relational ontology essentially identical to that affirmed by Whitehead, then Gandhi’s willingness to draw upon these ideas suggests a logical compatibility between his own ideas and process thought. I see my project as a systematisation of Gandhi’s view.52 While Gandhi embraced Advaita in many of his writings, he also spoke and wrote frequently of a personal God and the importance of discerning and behaving in accordance with God’s will–theistic concepts more in line with Dvaitic Vai„˚ava thought, or Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism, than with the impersonal, formless Brahman of Advaita Ved›nta. This apparent inconsistency was pointed out by a reader of Gandhi’s newspaper, Young India, in a letter to the editor. His response is revealing and useful in discerning a consistent philosophy underlying his seemingly disconnected pronouncements on religion:

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I am an advaitist and yet I can support Dvaitism (dualism). The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal, it has no permanent existence. But though it is constantly changing, it has a something about it which persists and it is therefore to that extent real. I have therefore no objection to calling it real and unreal, and thus being called an Anekantavadi or a Syadvadi. But my Syadvada is not the syadvada of the learned, it is peculiarly my own. I cannot engage in a debate with them. It has been my experience that I am always true from my point of view, and am often wrong from the point of view of my honest critics. I know that we are both right from our respective points of view. And this knowledge saves me from attributing motives to my opponents or critics. The seven blind men who gave seven different descriptions of the elephant were all right from their respective points of view, and wrong from the point of view of one another, and right and wrong from the point of view of the man who knew the elephant. I very much like this doctrine of the manyness of reality. It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Musalman [a Muslim] from his own standpoint and a Christian from his. Formerly I used to resent the ignorance of my opponents. Today I can love them because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa. I want to take the whole world in the embrace of my love. My anekantavad is the result of the twin doctrine of Satya and Ahimsa [truth and nonviolence].53 More can be said on this topic; but this brief survey of the tradition should suggest that Hindu religious pluralism, despite the identist shorthand Hindu thinkers often use to express it, is far more Whiteheadian than is generally recognised. The Hindu process theology developed in the preceding chapter is therefore not so out of tune with mainstream Hindu thought as might be suspected were one to presume, with much of the modern literature on Hinduism, that Advaita Ved›nta represents its dominant metaphysical consensus. This is clearly not the case, even for Ramakrishna himself. Rather than affirming only the nitya, or eternal, nirgu˚a Brahman, the Absolute, he also affirms the relative universe of the divine play, or lıl›: “I accept both the Nitya and the Lıl›, both the Absolute and the Relative.”54 The widely presumed identist nature of Hindu religious pluralism is an effect of a onesidedly Advaitic view of Hinduism which presumes a radical devaluation of the relative world on the part of the tradition.

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Addressing Hindu Religious Inclusivism: I s Everybody a Hindu? But how should a Whiteheadian religious pluralist respond to Hindu assertions to the effect that Hinduism is not merely the only true religion, but the only religion? Is it truly pluralistic for a Hindu to see religions like Christianity and Islam as forms of bhakti yoga, or Jainism and Buddhism as variants of the jñ›na yoga? Or is this a ‘Hinduisation’ that is masquerading as religious pluralism, turning everyone into an ‘anonymous Hindu’? One could argue that this Hindu position does not so much celebrate diversity as obliterate it. Other religions are not accepted as much as their very ‘otherness’ is denied. ‘Other’ religions, in a certain sense, do not even exist. A Whiteheadian Hindu religious pluralist needs to ask whether this inclusivist Hindu stance can be reconciled with a true religious pluralism. This means asking: When Hindus say, “Everybody is a Hindu” or “All religions are forms of Hinduism,” is this actually a version of Hindu triumphalism, the ‘bad’ kind of closed inclusivism that contemporary Western religious pluralists accuse Christian inclusivists like Rahner of perpetuating? Or is it something else? This is an important issue to resolve, for if our goal is indeed to go beyond Hindu nationalism and triumphalist assertions of supremacy over other traditions, it needs to be established that such attitudes have no foundation in an authentically Hindu worldview–beyond, as mentioned before, the inevitable valuation of one’s perspective that is part of holding it in the first place. I shall argue that this is ultimately a semantic issue which hinges on the meanings of two key terms which are originally foreign to the Hindu tradition–Hinduism and religion. As Wilhelm Halbfass observes, “It has often been stated that Hinduism is not a well-defined, clearly identifiable religion in the sense of Christianity or Islam, but rather a loosely coordinated and somewhat amorphous conglomeration of ‘sects’ or similar formations.”55 Hindus have historically used not the term Hindu, but more specific sectarian labels. The same is the case with the term religion. This term, with all of its various implications, was foreign to the South Asian cultural context prior to extensive contact with the West. Two Sanskrit words come close to meeting the definition of religion as generally understood in the West. There is dharma, which is often translated–confusingly, I shall argue–as religion, but which actually carries a semantic range that encompasses ‘personal duty,’ ‘way of life’ and ‘cosmic order,’ the latter meaning a kind of architectonic structure of reality that encompasses the realms of both fact and value.

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Hinduism is really an artificial creation, a construct developed first by Muslim and then by European Christian conquerors in order to facilitate their dominion over the Indian subcontinent.56 The power to define a thing is a power that imperialist forces have utilized throughout history in order to shape the world according to their own ends, as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Ronald Inden’s Imagining India have shown. The concept of Hinduism has helped enable Westerners, for centuries, to divest the people of India of agency by teaching them that they are benighted victims of an inescapable prison of superstition and otherworldly spirituality. Hinduism is presented as “‘a mysterious amorphous entity,’ one that is palpable yet lacks something.” What does it lack? “[A] ‘world-ordering rationality,’” which the West provides.57 One modern Hindu response to this characterisation of Hinduism as amorphous, and not ‘a religion’ but a collection of sects, has been to accept it. However: [T]he weakness or deficiency [this characterisation] suggests has been turned into an element of self-affirmation. In this view, the fact that Hinduism is not a religion in the ordinary sense does not imply a defect; rather, it means that it is located at a different and higher level. It is something much more comprehensive, much less divisive and sectarian than the ‘ordinary’ religions…Instead, it is– according to this view–a framework, a concordance and unifying totality of sects. The ‘ordinary’ religions, such as Christianity and Islam, should not be compared and juxtaposed to Hinduism itself, but to the sects, that is, ‘religions’ that are contained within Hinduism. Hinduism as the san›tanadharma is not a religion among religions; it is said to be the ‘eternal religion,’ [the] religion in or behind all religions, a kind of ‘metareligion,’ a structure potentially ready to comprise and reconcile within itself all the religions of the world, just as it contains and reconciles the so-called Hindu sects, such as ÷aivism or Vai„˚avism and their subordinate ‘sectarian’ formations.58 As Halbfass characterises it, the Hindu affirmation of the all-inclusiveness of Hinduism is a form of Hindu triumphalism, a reply to those who define Hinduism as amorphous and then denigrate it for being so, a counterassertion that the cohesiveness of other religions is bought at the price of a limited and exclusive vision of truth.

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But although this triumphalist dimension of Hindu inclusivism exists and is every bit as un-pluralistic as its Christian or Islamic equivalents, is it the entire story? Or is there a deeper, pluralistic truth that underlies Hindu inclusivism? When Hindus call Hinduism ‘an all-inclusive religion,’ what is meant by these words, which are, in their origins, foreign to a Hindu self-understanding? Might it be that these terms are being stretched beyond their ordinary English meanings in order to refer to indigenous Sanskritic Hindu concepts? How else could one make sense of the claim that Hinduism is the only religion, when Hindus are well aware that other faiths exist? What does Hindu mean to Hindus? First of all, one is not simply a ‘Hindu’ any more than one is simply a ‘Christian.’ A Christian is, except in idiosyncratic cases, a Roman Catholic, a Protestant, or a member of one of the Eastern Orthodox churches. Similarly, most Hindus, at least those who are Hindu by birth, are connected to a sub-sect of one of the four major Hindu traditions–the orthodox Vedic Sm›rta tradition or one of the mainstream theistic traditions–Vai„˚ava, ÷aiva, or ÷›kta. Again, in premodern times, these religions or ‘sub-religions’ within Hinduism were the primary means by which Hindus identified themselves in what a modern Westerner would recognize as religious terms–such as devotees of Vi„˚u or ÷iva or Devı, and so on, with appropriate sectarian beliefs and practices. The more comprehensive term, dharma, means, at its broadest, the totality of the cosmic order. In its narrowest meaning, it refers to one’s own personal duties within that order–one’s svadharma–as an individual member of a society born within a particular species, with a specific role in a specific family, in a specific caste, in a specific community, and in a specific religious sect. Dharma, though it manifests as many svadharmas that participate in it, is ultimately one. Dharma is san›tana, or eternal. It is the universal law, the foundation of actual existence. Its literal meaning is ‘that which gives support.’ If it must be identified with the term ‘religion,’ it would mean something like ‘religion as such,’ the eternal ideal or Platonic form of religion, in which all particular instances of religion participate, rather than any one actual religion, although it has gradually come to take on the latter usage in more recent times. My own preference, however, would be to make a sharp distinction between dharma and religion, despite current usage. In contrast with the unity of dharma, the sectarian varieties of the yogas, or ways to moks‹a, are numerous. ‘Sa˙prad›ya,’ like religion or denomination, is a genus with species. Dharma, however, is not a genus with species, but is the basic structure of reality.

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It therefore makes no more sense to talk about ‘a dharma,’ on the premodern meaning of this term, than it does to talk about ‘a number four’ (contrary to contemporary usage, in which one hears terms like ‘Hindu Dharma,’ ‘Jain Dharma,’ ‘Sikh Dharma,’ and so on). When it is said that Hinduism includes all religions, the Western term religion is essentially being equated with the Hindu term sa˙prad›ya, with the Western term ‘Hinduism’ similarly being equated with dharma. This is logically distinct from Christian inclusivism, which amounts to saying: “Religion C–a particular member of the genus ‘religion’–includes all religious truth.” Hindu inclusivism, on the understanding I am suggesting, amounts to a tautology: “Religion as such includes all religious truth.” In fact, a better formulation would be: “The basic structure of reality includes all religious truth.” This suggests a revision is in order with respect to contemporary Hindu terminological usage regarding religion. The formulation sarva-dharmasama-bh›va, or ‘attitude of impartiality to all religions,’ mentioned earlier, would be better rendered sarva-sa˙prad›ya-sama-bh›va. At least one Hindu thinker besides myself has suggested such a revision.59 Articulating something like the san›tana dharma–the ‘eternal religion’ in the sense of the all-inclusive worldview of general truths that encompasses all of the world’s religions and philosophies–is arguably the ideal of all pluralistic interpretations of religion: to give expression to the larger vision and deeper structure of reality that underlies all religious and philosophical diversity. But, as we have already seen, one central insight of Whiteheadian thought is that, with regard to the expression of this larger worldview in some historically particular linguistic and conceptual form, there will never be finality. A question thus arises: Can the historical Hindu tradition, a tradition particular to a specific time and place, be identified with the san›tana dharma, the eternal truth, the structure of reality as such? Is using the term Hinduism to refer to this truth not like the false claim to universal neutrality asserted by identist forms of religious pluralism? It seems it is necessary to make a distinction between dharma as it is manifested in various paths and dharma as such–san›tana dharma. The ambiguity of the term Hinduism is a function of the fact that the very notion of Hinduism is a foreign import, an outside imposition. The word Hindu is a geographic term, a Persian mispronunciation of the word ‘Sindhu,’ the river beyond which, from a Persian perspective, lay ‘Hindustan,’ the land of the Hindus. In other words, Hindu simply meant, in its origins, ‘Indian.’

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If Hindu, is simply an ethno-geographic term meaning ‘Indian,’ it is arguably not very useful for the purpose of pointing out a coherent tradition. There are quite a few common assumptions and issues that give some cohesiveness to what one might call the ‘Indic tradition’–such as karma, moks‹a, and sa˙s›ra. My own preference for this definition is due to the fact that it allows for a fairly tight conceptual definition of Hinduism– acceptance of the three doctrines just mentioned–but which nonetheless casts a fairly wide net, in terms of allowing one to inhabit a tradition whose vast diversity does not exclude Jainism, Buddhism, or Sikhism. But this definition has been largely abandoned by scholars of religion, who primarily employ a definition of Hinduism as a collective term referring specifically to the Vedic family of Indic traditions. This is a Brahmanical understanding of what is now called Hinduism. On this understanding, one is a Hindu if one recognizes, in some sense, the authority and sanctity of the Vedas (which typically, though not necessarily, implies membership by birth in the var˚a or ‘caste’ system as well). This is, in one sense, a restrictive definition of Hinduism; but it is also a strikingly liberal and inclusive one. Historically, it has allowed for an enormous variety of internal diversity within the Hindu, or Brahmanical, tradition. This inclusiveness is a function of the fact that Vedic literature does not present a single coherent worldview, at least prima facie. Of course, the great Vedic and Ved›ntic commentators have sought to show an underlying unity grounding the Vedic literature. But an examination of their work shows that views as divergent as monistic idealism and ontological pluralism have been able to claim Vedic authority. And the Ramakrishna tradition claims to encompass all of these. It is also the case that, as the Hindu tradition developed historically, the actual Vedic texts became increasingly remote from the tradition’s central concerns. Allegiance to the Vedas eventually became more of a political statement–a way of locating oneself within the Brahmanical hierarchy of views and not as a n›stika–than a substantive indicator of one’s philosophical position. Allegiance to the Vedas, in other words, was part of the ancient process of Sanskritisation, by which various groups have assimilated themselves to the Brahmanical tradition. Over the course of time, the term Veda came to refer to an unspecified, widely revered primordial wisdom. Authors claiming allegiance to the Vedas could, and still do, articulate positions with little or no relation to the views laid out in any actual Vedic text. Or alternatively they define the term Veda in such a way as to include their own sectarian literature within it, seeing it as the summary or culmination of the earlier works.

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The religious paths and systems of philosophy in the Vedic tradition include, at the most orthodox end of the spectrum, the explicitly Vedabased PÒrva Mım›˙s› and Ved›nta dar±anas. Then, within the broad mainstream of the Vedic tradition, there are the various Hindu theistic paths, which nominally acknowledge the Vedas, but which give far greater emphasis, in practice, to their own sectarian literatures. But this tradition also includes S›˙khya and Yoga, which can hardly be called even nominally Vedic. Although these two systems do not deny the authority of the Vedas they are based on the enlightenment experiences of their sage-founders, K›pila and Pat›ñjali. It is not obvious from examining their root texts, or sÒtras, that the Vedas historically had any relevance to them whatsoever, with respect to their origins (though they do share some ideas and vocabulary with the Upanis‹ads, especially the ÷vet›±vat›ra Upanis‹ad, and a great deal with the Bhagavad Gıt›). Perhaps they were incorporated in the Vedic fold be-cause of their widespread followings, an incorporation made possible because they were not explicitly opposed to the Vedas. Some speculate that they are remnants of a pre-Vedic culture. In what sense, then, is the equation of Hinduism with Brahmanism a restrictive understanding? This has to do with the premodern, authoritybased, and supernaturalist character of Brahmanical epistemology. If a path explicitly rejects Vedic authority, then even if it is substantially identical with a Vedic path, orthodox Brahmins regard it as beyond the pale of legitimate practice and belief. Jainism and Buddhism are thus regarded by orthodox Brahmins as on the same level as the Lok›yata, or Materialist system, and are designated by the same term of opprobrium–n›stika, or ‘denier,’ often translated today as ‘atheist,’ and the closest Hindu term that there is to ‘heretic.’ Therefore Brahmanism, because it bases itself not on common human experience and reason but on the authority of a set of texts, is basically a pre-modern understanding of Hinduism. It is also an exclusivist understanding, for rejection of the Vedas removes even those with substantively Vedic views from the pale of religious legitimacy. In terms of its logic, this is not different from Christian exclusivism, which regards even religions with essentially the same worldviews and ethical norms as Christianity to be beyond the pale of salvation if they do not accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour. According to orthodox Brahmins, those who reject the authority of the Vedas are beyond the pale of eligibility for the saving knowledge that alone can lead to mok„a. N›stikas can aspire to liberation only if they accept the authority of the Vedas or if they are fortunate enough to be reborn in a Brahmanical household.

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Orthodox Brahmanism is therefore not an understanding of Hinduism that is conducive to religious pluralism, or even to religious inclusivism in its wider sense, as including traditions from beyond the Vedic fold. We are not yet in the realm of, “Everybody is a Hindu.” Modern Hindu thinkers, on the other hand, base their claims, in keeping with the modern epistemic shift, on the authority of experience and reason. They reconcile their commitment to the Vedas with their modern epistemology through an interpretation of the Vedas as records of the experiences of enlightened sages, or ¸„is, who discerned the san›tana dharma, the fundamental structure of reality, while deep in meditation. Experiences like those of the ¸„is are conceived as being available, in principle, to all who undertake the requisite yogic practices. Hinduism is, in its modern form, extolled as a supremely rational religion that has an empirical basis in meditative experience, its scriptures being regarded as firsthand accounts of the fundamental structures of existence. Eknath Easwaran gives a fairly typical quote in this regard: “[T]he sages…in concentrating on consciousness itself…found they could separate strata of the mind and observe its workings as objectively as a botanist observes a flower. Brahmavidya…is, in a sense, lab science.”60 This is the Hindu version of the shift Griffin describes among Western thinkers from a supernaturalist to a naturalist worldview.61 The Vedas are seen by the orthodox Hindu tradition, as “eternal,” existing outside time and space and not subject to analysis by human reason. The Vedas are, on this premodern view, basically “supernatural.” But with the modern shift they become repositories of a wisdom conceived as available, in principle, to everyone–“natural” wisdom, not unlike scientific knowledge. Veda, in modern Hinduism, is a universal wisdom. This is where Hinduism as the all-inclusive meta-religion, comes into play. If the Vedas express a worldview available, at least in principle, to human beings of all cultures and at all times, then that worldview becomes discernible, in principle, in the sayings of great wise people and mystics of all religions, not just Vedic religions. On this understanding, “Everybody is a Hindu” because everybody has access to the same truths that are recorded in the Vedas. Vedic Brahmanism is universalised, becoming Hindu pluralism. It is thus in the modern period that one begins to find prominent Hindu thinkers such as Ram Mohan Roy, Ramakrishna, Vivek›nanda, and Gandhi extolling the virtues of figures like Jesus and the Buddha. The Hindu tradition now becomes a universal tradition, including the wisdom of all of the world’s religions.

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To what extent this universalism amounts to a closed inclusivism of the kind that Halbfass describes (that finds Vedic ideas latent in the teachings of the world’s other religions) or is an open pluralism (incorporating new understandings and insights from other religions into Hinduism) varies from author to author, and even from text to text by the same author. The precise boundary between inclusivism and pluralism is difficult to draw, obscured as it can be by the degree to which a given thinker expresses a strong allegiance to a particular tradition in conjunction with openness to others. But it is clearly in the modern period that something like a Hindu religious pluralism in the fullest sense becomes conceivable: Hinduism as an open-ended worldview, potentially inclusive of all traditions, open to incorporating their insights and useful practices into itself. But the question still remains: Why use the word Hinduism? Why identify the historical Vedic tradition with the universal truth to which it points and in which it participates–the san›tana dharma–if, as so many modern Hindus claim, all traditions point to and participate in this truth? Is such a usage at all legitimate from a pluralistic perspective? In a world where, in the minds of most people, the word Hinduism refers to a religion alongside others, a particular way of life and worldview, this usage sounds absolutist and imperialist, and is no less problematic, from the perspective of a religious pluralist, than are Christian or Islamic identifications of Christianity or Islam with the ultimate, absolute truth, the one true religion. On the other hand, if one thinks not in English, but Sanskrit, and bears in mind the distinction between dharma and sa˙prad›ya discussed above, then the picture changes. It is not only not incompatible with religious pluralism, but is precisely the point of religious pluralism, to affirm a more profound structure of reality or cosmic order, aspects of which are manifested by the worldviews and practices of the various religions. But what is the relationship of this cosmic order, or san›tana dharma, to Hinduism? If Hindus, even pluralistic Hindus, have a prior commitment to an understanding of the Vedic tradition as disclosing fundamental truths and as a reliable guide to truth, then, when they encounter the insights of other traditions, they will of course attempt to incorporate those insights in a way that will be coherent with what they already hold to be true from the Hindu tradition. This is the sense, mentioned earlier, in which an epistemic inclusivism is inevitable for anyone who is open to other views and yet is not a relativist. It is compatible with pluralism to evaluate other traditions in terms of one’s own, provided one is also open to new truths that, though they may need to be logically compatible with what one already holds, will not necessarily be identical to it.

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Significantly, not all Hindu thinkers automatically make the move from epistemic inclusivism to an inclusivist deployment of the term “Hinduism” as referring to the eternal dharma. Gandhi, not unlike Whitehead, expresses a post-modern understanding of truth as transcending its historically or linguistically particular formulations, including Hinduism: “The one Religion [san›tana dharma] is beyond all speech. It is not less real because it is unseen. This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It harmonises them and gives them reality.”62 Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, rather than saying, “Everybody is a Hindu,” articulates a position that anticipates Cobb’s idea of the mutual transformation of religions through dialogue: “The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth.”63 I, for one, would certainly prefer to think of myself as an adherent of san›tana dharma, the eternal religion–as living an authentic existence based on the universal structure of reality–than as Hindu, as long as this term has exclusive geographical and ethnic connotations, as it is understood by Hindu nationalists. Even many Indian Hindus share this sentiment, hence the widespread tendency to rebel against the word, with its connotations both of boundedness and foreign domination. But as discussed in an earlier chapter, the word Hindu, despite its many ambiguities and historically problematic pedigree, still communicates more about our beliefs and practices than any other term in widespread current usage. Hindus, it seems, are stuck with Hinduism. I believe it is perfectly legitimate for a Hindu to refer to the san›tana dharma as Hinduism, albeit with the self-relativising understanding that a Christian can, with equal legitimacy, call it Christianity–as St. Augustine does when he writes, “For what is now called the Christian religion existed of old and was never absent from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh.”64 For all religions participate in the sum total of universal truths. Similarly, if by Islam a Muslim means obedience to the will of God and holds that all human beings who follow the will of God inasmuch as it is known to them are thereby ‘anonymous Muslims,’ I have no objection. I am willing to say, with Mah›tma Gandhi, “I am a Muslim, and a Christian, and Jew.” But such a usage of course presupposes an understanding of these terms quite different from that which is conventionally the case. Ideally, it seems to me, we would be able to dispense with all of these identity labels and simply call the truth the truth. Such labels now enable us to say, “I believe in this piece of the truth.” But they also divide us.

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Conclusion In conclusion, the interpretation of Hindu inclusivism along truly pluralistic lines is a possibility, if one takes the term Hinduism in proclamations about all religions being parts of Hinduism to refer to an eternal truth beyond all ‘religions,’ to the basic architectonic structure of reality pointed out by the Sanskrit term dharma. The term Hindu, however, is unfortunate, inasmuch as it is bound up with a history and with ethnic and religious traditions that are not universal, but are highly particular and localised in scope. It is also problematic because of its ambiguity. It is natural for Hindus to use the term Hinduism to refer to the cosmic order, for it is through Hinduism, with its amazing breadth of thought and practice, that this order or dharma is mediated to our consciousness. Even the word dharma, with its Sanskrit provenance, is inescapably ‘Hindu’ as it aspires for universality. But if, in the minds of others, this term refers to a specific religion, then one’s proclamations sound like Hindu triumphalism, and may even slip into a deliberate triumphalism, if one ends up simply identifying an historical tradition or ism with ultimate truth. Hinduism, then, is probably best replaced, when one is speaking of the universal truth, with a more specific indigenous term having less political and socio-cultural baggage, like san›tana dharma, or truth, which was Mah›tma Gandhi’s preferred term. Indeed, even san›tana dharma is problematic to the degree that it has been used internally to the Indic traditions to privilege the Vedic tradition over others. The privileging of Brahmanism, perpetuated in Western definitions of Hinduism as Vedic, also promotes notions like caste and exclusivism. Hinduism, as I understand it, entails a position that is fundamentally identical to that derived from the Hindu process theology I developed in the preceding chapter. On this understanding, if one is a Hindu, then one is also a religious pluralist; for Hinduism entails many paths to and forms of liberation. One is a religious pluralist because one is a Hindu. It is not, however, a perfect tradition–for there is no such thing. As Cobb says of process thought, the Hindu tradition is–and will always be– “in process.” The identification of Hinduism with the san›tana dharma runs the danger of slipping into an absolutism no less closed to the truths of others than the most rigid forms of religious exclusivism; and the identist understanding of Hindu pluralism that arises from Advaitic interpretations has the same problems as identist Western models. But there are also strong affinities, as we have seen, between process thought and the dominant Hindu worldview, and there is also a way of interpreting Hindu inclusivism as truly pluralistic.

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A pluralistic Hindu process theology, however, as I have outlined it thus far, does not yet address all the various objections that can be levelled at a pluralistic system, for there remains a vast array of inter-religious disagreements which it does not yet address. As mentioned previously, such a theology shows how a multiplicity of religious objects can co-exist in a coherent metaphysical worldview–the impersonal absolute of Advaita and kindred traditions whose ultimate goal is an experience of enlightenment or realisation, the personal deity of theistic religions whose goal is loving union with the divine, and the cosmos of actual entities which is ultimate for traditions that emphasise harmony with the natural world. It thereby also gives coherence to the idea of multiple paths, or yogas, that correspond to each of these religious objects–jñ›na yoga, the goal of which is realisation of the absolute, bhakti yoga, the goal of which is union with the divine, karma yoga, which emphasises living dharmically in the world, and r›j› yoga, which can supplement all of these. But much of the religious dispute that actually occurs is internal to each of the three types of religion. Most of the cultures that have centred upon the worship of nature have been exterminated, being regarded by others as ‘primitive,’ their worldviews hardly being taken seriously at all. Paths of realisation have survived, and indeed thrive in modernity, often by divesting themselves of the term religion, presenting themselves as philosophies of mind, or as therapeutic paths more akin to modern psychology than to religion, their non-theism being precisely their point of appeal for those seekers who find themselves disenchant-ed with theism. The nontheistic traditions of ancient India, which tended to dominate classical Indic philosophy–Jainism, Buddhism, and early Vedic and Ved›ntic schools such as Mım›˙s› and Advaita–engaged in extensive polemics against one another, though little or no actual violence. And then there are the theistic religions, which have tended to dominate religious discourse, and which, indeed, are definitive of religion in the minds of those who regard religion as something to do with God. Much of history’s religious violence has been among these traditions and their sub-sects. A Hindu process theology may be able to address the three basic religious types and say, in effect, ‘You are all correct, because reality has impersonal, personal, and cosmic dimensions.’ But how can it address the disagreements internal to each of these types? How can it address philosophical disputes, for example, between Buddhists and Advaitins on the nature of ultimate reality as either changing or static? Or between Jews, Christians, and Muslims on the significance of Jesus Christ, the nature of God, and sacred scripture?

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For this purpose, another step is needed in the reformulation of religious pluralism that can transform it into a methodology for interpreting the seemingly incompatible truth claims of various traditions and showing them to be, in reality, complementary. This step, which shall be the topic of the next chapter, involves the incorporation into Hindu process theology of the Jain doctrines of relativity, a step that has already been alluded to at several points in this book thus far. My goal shall be to show the compatibility of Jain and process metaphysics, and thereby to facilitate the incorporation of the Jain pluralistic method into a Hindu process theology. This demonstration of compatibility, furthermore, will itself be an example of the pluralistic method in action. The pluralistic method is essentially to interpret religious claims as relatively true, by which I mean true relative to the system of the universe as revealed in a Hindu process theology. This is, to be sure, a form of inclusivism, but it is an epistemic inclusivism of the kind mentioned earlier, rather than a soteriological inclusivism. It is open to truths in other traditions that may not already be articulated in the Hindu tradition. But it avoids relativism by interpreting these truths in terms of those truths the tradition already knows. I claim it is pluralistic because its fundamental assumption is that truth is, indeed, present in the other traditions, even if it is expressed in ways not immediately recognisable to us. In contrast with a hermeneutics of suspicion, I call this method a hermeneutics of charity, based on the universal, ever-revealing, and ever-unfolding nature of reality as disclosed both in Ramakrishna Ved›nta and in the infinite, awe-inspiring beauty of the world around us.

4 A RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY Hindu Religious Pluralism and the Convergence of Jain and Process Metaphysics

Jainism: Candidate for a Traditional Indic Systematic Defence of Pluralism I have had occasion at several points in this book to mention the philosophical polemics among the Indic schools of thought of the classical period. It is sometimes surprising to students of Indian thought, whose first exposure to Hinduism is likely to be in the form of the pluralistic Ved›nta of the modern period, to find that ancient Indian philosophers were every bit as polemical as their counterparts in the West, refuting one another’s positions. When ancient Buddhist and Brahmanical authors do display charity toward one another, it takes the form, mentioned in the last chapter, of an inclusivism, or avirodhav›da, which, whatever charity it might display, is still quite clear with regard to the superiority of the tradition of the author. But a systematic argument for a pluralistic worldview is not altogether lacking in the traditional Indic dar±anas. There were attempts to discern a deeper harmony in the clamour of divergent views. It is my contention that the closest thing to the modern Ved›ntic form of religious pluralism to be found in the pre-modern Indic tradition–and the best candidate among the Indic traditions for a systematic worldview that can ground modern Ved›ntic religious pluralism–is the Jain doctrine of multiplicity, or anek›ntav›da, with its corollaries, the doctrine of perspectives, or nayav›da, and the doctrine of conditional predication, or sy›dv›da.

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According to anek›ntav›da, reality is complex and multi-dimensional. It has many facets characterised by qualities of a seemingly contrary nature. There is that in reality which persists and is continuous over time. It is this which aspect of reality that gives rise to notions such as identity and substance. There is also that in reality which is impermanent and changeable, giving rise to such notions as time and process. From the Jain perspective, an adequate account of reality is one which dismisses neither one of these aspects as illusory, but which integrates both into a holistic worldview. The most obvious objects of critique here are Advaita Ved›nta, which affirms that the unchanging nirgu˚a Brahman alone is real and that all else– all that is subject to change–is an illusion, and Buddhism, which affirms that impermanence is the ultimate nature of reality and that all sense of self or personal identity over time is an illusion. From a Jain perspective, these views both exhibit the same fundamental fallacy of ek›ntat›–one-sidedness or one-dimensionality–by failing to take into account the contrary point of view. The truth of any claim, according to Jainism, is dependent upon the perspective, or naya, from which one makes that claim. So Advaitins are correct sy›t–that is, in a certain sense, or from a certain point of view– when they affirm the reality of the changeless and eternal sat-chit-›nanda. Buddhists are also correct sy›t–in a certain sense, or from a certain point of view–when they affirm the reality of impermanence. A fundamental truth about the universe undergirds both perspectives and the spiritual practices based upon them. Apart from their one-sidedness, they are not, at bottom, false. They are not fundamentally misguided. They are only false to the extent that each excludes the other. Their basic insights can be included in a more comprehensive perspective. This Jain approach to the multiplicity of religious and philosophical perspectives is strikingly similar to, and in harmony with, claims that one finds in numerous places in the teachings of Ramakrishna that the relative universe of change, in which the difference between devotee and devat› obtains and bhakti yoga is the surest path to liberation, and the absolute of the Advaitic path of the Brahmajñ›nı, are both equally real. According to Ramakrishna, the relative and the absolute are different, yet equally valid, ways of conceiving of reality. This makes the spiritual practices based upon them equally valid paths to realisation. To be sure, there are tendencies in the teachings of Ramakrishna–and more so in the writings of Sw›mı Vivek›nanda–to subordinate the Dvaitic perspective to the Advaitic, the relative to the absolute. But Ramakrishna is not always consistent about this, and his devotion to the Divine Mother is such that it is hard to think of him as a pure Advaitin.

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I am not saying that Ramakrishna was influenced by Jainism. I suspect that the direct influence of Jainism on Ramakrishna’s thought was minimal, and probably non-existent. But I believe that if one were to translate Ramakrishna’s understanding of reality as it bears on religious pluralism into a systematic philosophy in a traditional Indic idiom, then one would come up with something very much like anek›ntav›da. One difficulty which modern Ved›nta faces with regard to any attempt to include this elegant Jain system of logic into its worldview in defence of its doctrine of religious pluralism is the fact that the more traditional forms of Ved›nta were not only not always pluralistic, but that the ›c›ryas of all the major schools explicitly rejected the Jain view in their commentaries on Badar›ya˚a's Brahm› SÒtra, a foundational text for all forms of Ved›nta. If, however, one examines their reasons for doing so, one finds that they have consistently mischaracterised the Jain view as being that contrary predications can be made of an entity in the same sense and at the same time, in violation of the law of non-contradiction. This, however, is not what the Jains say. The Jains, rather, are quite explicit in claiming that a condition for affirming the truth of contrary predications is specification with regard to time, location, etc. with regard to the quality in question. The traditional Ved›ntic rejections of anek›ntav›da suffer from the defect of missing the mark. Having already argued for the strong compatibilities between Ramakrishna Ved›nta and process thought in the development of my Hindu process theology, my approach in this chapter shall be to argue for the compatibility of Jain and process metaphysics. If it is the case that the worldview of process thought is compatible with Ramakrishna Ved›nta, and that Jain and process metaphysics are also compatible at the level of their fundamental ontologies, then one can deduce that the Jain methodology of resolving incompatibilities among the claims of various traditions can be assimilated into the Ramakrishna tradition and be used to sharpen its pluralistic claims. My goal here is to transform modern Hindu claims about the unity of all religions from platitudes and clichés, easily dismissible by critics, into a logically rigorous and systematic method for the interpretation and assimilation of the insights of all religions and philosophies into the expansive worldview of Ramakrishna Ved›nta. The outlines of the worldview involved in such an approach have already been delineated. My goal in this chapter will be to articulate the approach itself, as rooted in the relational ontology common to both Jain and process metaphysics, as well as Ramakrishna Ved›nta itself.

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Different Cosmologies with a Shared Ontology The similarities between Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy are many and well known. Both are ‘event ontologies’ which claim that the fundamental unit of reality is the impermanent moment–arising in dependence on the concrete actualities of the immediate past, existing briefly, then passing away, only to give rise to the next moment, and so on. One might presume that Whitehead’s theism is the chief point of divergence between his philosophy and Buddhism; but Whitehead’s theism is distinctive in Western thought for its claim that God is a dynamic process that changes with the universe, rather than a wholly transcendent, changeless, eternal entity. This is a concept of divinity not unlike the Yog›c›ra Buddhist doctrine of universal mind (›layavijñ›na, or ‘storehouse consciousness’) that is the basis of the tath›gatagarbha doctrine, and ultimately, the Zen concept of Buddha Nature. The similarities between Whitehead’s philosophy and Jain metaphysics, however, are less well known and less obvious. Indeed, at first glance, these two philosophies seem far more radically unlike than alike. This is particularly the case given Jainism’s dualism between spirit (jıva ) and matter (ajıva), its nontheistic stance, and what Nicholas F. Gier calls its ‘spiritual titanism’ (a radical humanism that contrasts with the distinction process thought maintains between human beings and God).1 But I shall argue here that Jain and process metaphysics are, on a deeper level, fundamentally compatible–that the, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, ‘fundamental ontology,’ or concept of the essential nature of reality operative in these two philosophies is one and the same. More specifically, I shall argue that both of these philosophies articulate the view that a real thing, or actual entity, is, in its essential nature, a nexus of positive and negative relations to possibilities–or, to use Whitehead’s terminology, positive and negative ‘prehensions.’ I shall argue, furthermore, that this fundamental conception of reality is in tension with certain other aspects of Jainism, both as a religious practice and as a system of philosophy–namely, those aspects listed above as contrasts with White-head’s philosophy. But I also maintain that a reading of Jainism in light of this conception can also lead to a reinterpretation of these more problematic aspects in such a way as to render them more compatible with the fundamental ontology from which they operate–as well as with the Jain tradition’s strong commitments to ahi˙s› (nonviolence) and to an ethic of global ecological responsibility.

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My arguments shall be based largely on Samantabhadra’s Äptamım›˙s›. This fifth century CE Jain philosophical text, composed in Sanskrit, proved, historically, to be tremendously influential upon the subsequent development of the complex of doctrines mentioned earlier that I call the Jain doctrines of relativity: anek›nta-, naya-, and sy›dv›da. These doctrines are claimed by many scholars to articulate an attitude of tolerance, or ‘intellectual ahi˙s›.’ Whether or not this is the case, these doctrines disclose the fundamental ontology operative in Jain philosophy which constitutes its point of contact with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The Basic Jain Worldview The basic Jain worldview, or cosmology, has, as already mentioned, a number of features that would make it seem, at first glance, deeply incompatible with process metaphysics as developed by Whitehead. Unlike process philosophy and Buddhist metaphysics, which posit only one fundamental type of entity (and Advaita Ved›nta, which posits only one entity period–the eternal and unchanging nirgu˚a Brahman), Jainism is a radical dualism, positing two fundamental kinds of entity–jıva, or spirit, and ajıva, or matter. Jıva and ajıva, on a traditional Jain account, are radically different. Jıva, in its essence, consists of infinite knowledge (jñ›na), bliss (sukha) and radiant energy (vırya). But this fundamental essence has been obscured due to a beginningless association of jıva with ajıva, or unconscious matter. More specifically, the jıvas, or souls of all living beings, are bound by their karma, which, on a Jain account, is a subtle form of matter that adheres to the soul when the soul experiences certain passions, the most basic of which are attraction (r›ga) and aversion (dve±a). Attraction and aversion arise as responses to experiences which are, themselves, the result of the fruition of previously accumulated karma–which, itself, was drawn to the soul by previous experiences of attraction and aversion, etc. This beginningless association of jıva and ajıva–the karmic bondage of the soul–is the cause of the suffering of all living beings, and of the beginningless and ongoing process of birth, death and rebirth (sa˙s›ra). Release from suffering, however, is possible through a process of karmic purification–the Jain path–whereby one eliminates the karma that has adhered to one’s soul (through ascetic practices such as fasting) and prevents the further influx of karmic matter by calming the passions of attraction and aversion through the practice of meditation and the strict observance of non-violence (ahi˙s›) and non-attachment (aparigraha).

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One who accomplishes the goal of this path and purges one’s soul completely and decisively from karmic defilements attains moks‹a, becoming a Jina, or ‘Victor’ over the process of karmic bondage, death, and rebirth. The Jinas, after their physical deaths, reside in the siddhaloka, or ‘realm of the perfected ones,’ at the top of the universe, above the highest heavens. This includes those Jinas who have taught the Jain path in the past–a series of tırthaºkaras, or ‘crossing-builders,’ of whom Mah›vıra, the ‘Great Hero,’ a contemporary of the Buddha and the historical founder of Jainism as it is known today, was the most recent. Twenty-four such crossing-builders are believed to appear in every cosmic cycle. The Jinas are not ‘gods’ in the traditional sense of the term. There is no ‘god’ in Jainism, in the sense of a creator of the universe. The universe simply has always been and will always be, according to traditional Jain cosmology; and the beginningless story of the association of jıva and ajıva recounted above provides an exhaustive account of the life of the universe. Though the Jinas are the primary objects of Jain worship, this worship is not transactional, in the manner of Hindu worship–that is, the Jain worshipper does not typically expect anything from the Jinas in return for her prayers and devotion. Such prayer and devotion, at least on an orthodox account, is purely a form of meditation on the goal that all Jains hope, someday, to achieve–nirv›˚a, or liberation from the cycle of karmic bondage–which the Jinas have achieved and which they embody. The Jinas are quite beyond any concern for human worship or human worshippers. They exist in perpetual omniscient bliss, experiencing the pure nature of their own liberated souls. They are utterly transcendent.2 The Basic Whiteheadian Worldview Again, at first glance, one would be hard-pressed to think of two worldviews more unalike, in a number of important respects, than Jainism and process metaphysics. Like Jainism, and other Asian traditions, Whitehead’s worldview also involves a beginningless and endless cosmic process, undergoing a series of cycles or ‘cosmic epochs.’ The universe, according to Whitehead, consists of one kind of thing–an infinite, beginningless and endless series of creative moments, “events,” or “actual occasions.”3 This metaphysical monism is in contrast with the Jain dualism of jıva and ajıva. This difference is somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that jıvas are ubiquitous, residing even in entities that other traditions regard as inanimate, such as stones, water, and fire. Jainism, in this sense, is, like process thought, panexperientialist.

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Unlike Jainism, Whitehead’s process philosophy posits the existence of God. God, however, for Whitehead, is not the utterly transcendent creator of an utterly dependent universe. God and the world of actual entities, according to Whitehead, are mutually dependent. God serves the function for the world of “a stable actuality whose mutual implication with the remainder of things secures an inevitable trend towards order.”4 On the other hand, as the reader may recall–and this is where Whitehead parts company with classical theism–the world also has an impact upon God. God has a vision for the world that the entities that make up the world are free to accept or to reject. Through God’s solidarity with the world, the world experiences the divine vision as a trend towards harmony and order. But this trend is not the imposition of the will of a divine tyrant. Beings can act against this trend as well. Whitehead writes of this trend, which he calls the “divine persuasion” that it “is the foundation of the order of the world,” but it “can only produce such a measure of harmony as amid brute forces [is] possible to accomplish.”5 God, according to Whitehead, “does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”6 “In this aspect,” Whitehead writes, God, “is not before all creation, but with all creation.”7 In other words, it is precisely through God’s relations with the world–rather than in God’s eternal, transcendent nature–that God’s role as necessary foundation for the order of the world occurs. God is part of, not outside, the cosmic process. God values the world as the place where the divine vision of truth, beauty, and goodness can find actualisation. Prima Facie Incompatibilities In summary, then, the prima facie incompatibilities between Jainism and process thought are the following: (1) Monism and Dualism: Jainism posits a universe made up of two fundamental kinds of entity–jıva and ajıva. According to Whitehead, all actual entities have essentially the same character. (2) Theism and Atheism: Jainism does not posit an orderer of the world, whose mutual implication with the world secures the cosmic order. This order simply is and has always been, according to Jainism. Its cause or continued stability is not questioned.

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(3) The Character of Divinity: Inasmuch as the Jinas do serve, functionally, as gods, they are more like the detached God of classical theism, than Whitehead’s God. Whitehead’s God is involved, from moment to moment, in the ordering of the world, the harmonisation of the choices of actual entities into a coherent universe. The Jinas are utterly detached from and unconcerned with the universe, from which they have permanently escaped. The ultimate goal of observant Jains, moreover, through the practice of non-violence and non-attachment, is the attainment of this very state of cosmic detachment. Process metaphysics, however, at least as interpreted by subsequent thinkers in the tradition of Whitehead, sees itself as a philosophy of solidarity with all beings, and of harmony within, rather than escape from, the universal process. Fundamental Compatibility: The Doctrines of Relativity Because of the Jain tradition’s strong emphasis on non-violence and the espousal by contemporary Jains of an ethos of environmentalism and global ecological responsibility, Jainism and process thought appear to be natural allies in arguing for universal solidarity and international, interracial, inter-religious and inter-species harmony. But do the conceptual resources exist in the Jain tradition to argue coherently for such a worldview? Or, as critics like Gier–and before him, Gandhi–argue, is Jainism a tradition at odds with itself? Does its emphasis on a liberation consisting of an otherworldly transcendence of the cosmic process undermine its attempts to improve life within that process? Or is there a deep structural logic underlying the Jain tradition that overrides these prima facie incompatibilities? I would like to advance the last of these views. Anek›ntav›da makes the ontological claim that reality is complex (literally ‘multi-dimensional’ or ‘non-one-sided’). Nayav›da, the ‘doctrine of perspectives,’ is an epistemological corollary of anek›ntav›da. That is, given the complex nature of reality, any given thing may be known from a variety of perspectives corresponding to the aspect of reality under consideration. This implies sy›dv›da, the doctrine of conditional predication, according to which the truth of any claim one makes about a particular topic is dependent upon the perspective from which the claim is made. A claim can be true, in one sense or from one perspective, false from another perspective, both true and false from another, have an inexpressible truthvalue from yet another, etc. A claim is not simply true or false.

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The gist of these doctrines is expressed in the famous story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, first told by the Buddha in response to his disciples who asked him about divergent views.8 Some blind men are brought to a king and asked to describe an elephant. None of the men has ever seen an elephant, but an elephant is brought to them and they proceed to feel it with their hands. One of the men, grasping the elephant’s trunk, claims an elephant is like a snake. Another, grasping a leg, claims it is like a tree. Yet another grasps the tail and says it is like a rope. Another, feeling the elephant’s side, claims it is like a wall. The blind men then proceed to argue amongst themselves about the true nature of the elephant. The moral of the story, of course, is that all of the blind men are partially correct–for an elephant does, indeed, possess all of the qualities that the blind men predicate of it–and partially incorrect, inasmuch as each denies the claims of the others. Only someone who can see the whole elephant– like a Jina–is in a position to say, unequivocally, what its true nature is. The rest of us, with respect to the true nature of reality, are like the blind men. We can only say with certainty what we can apprehend from our limited perspectives–and be open to the equally valid insights of others. That these Jain doctrines of relativity do not constitute a form of what is called, in contemporary western thought, relativism–the view either that there is no truth or that ‘truth’ is solely a matter of convention–is evidenced, again, from this story. There really is an elephant there and it really does have particular characteristics, and not others. A sighted person–again, for the Jains, this would represent an omniscient Jina–is capable of apprehending its true nature. There is an ultimate truth in terms of which the claims of the blind men can be evaluated and placed in their proper perspective–one is describing the trunk, one a leg, one the tail, etc. The origin of the doctrines of relativity indeed seems to have been the claim to omniscience made by Mah›vıra (or on his behalf by his followers) in the earliest Jain scriptures. In these texts, Mah›vıra is depicted as answering profound metaphysical questions (regarded as ‘unanswerable,’ or avy›kata in the Buddhist tradition) with both a ‘yes’ and a ‘no,’ depending upon the perspective of the questioner. Another rationale for these doctrines is to be found in the complex nature of the soul posited by Jainism–a nature extrapolated to apply to all entities. Like God in process thought, the soul has an unchanging, intrinsic nature; but, like Whitehead’s God, it experiences karmically conditioned states that come into being, exist for a while, and then pass away. As it is summarised in Tattv›rtha SÒtra, 5:29, utp›davy›yadhrauvyayukta˙ sat– “Emergence, perishing and endurance characterise [all] entities.”

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In other words, there is a sense in which all things come to be, perish and endure. In later Jain philosophical texts, this understanding of reality came to be applied to the topic–endlessly debated between the Buddhists and the Brahmins–of the nature of reality as either permanent or impermanent. Contrasting themselves with the Buddhists, who upheld a doctrine of radical impermanence, and the Brahmins, who–particularly in the Advaita tradition–upheld a doctrine of permanence, the Jains claimed that entities were both permanent and impermanent, in different senses and from different perspectives. The potential use of the doctrines of relativity in resolving disputes between seemingly incompatible philosophical views has led to the view, held by many scholars and Jain laypersons, that these doctrines are an extension of the Jain commitment to ahi˙s›–or nonviolence in thought, word and deed–to the realm of intellectual discourse. Though a historically dubious characterisation–because in actuality these doctrines evolved directly out of the Jain conception of the jıva rather than out of a desire to bring about philosophical harmony and were used to show the superiority of Jainism as a more comprehensive position9–it renders these doctrines attractive as a means for addressing the pressing question of remaining, on the one hand, committed to a set of religious and philosophical claims, while at the same time remaining open to variety, to learning from the perspectives of others. Put in another way, they allow one to affirm relativity without slipping into relativism, which is the central logical issue facing any form of religious pluralism. This issue arose in the preceding two chapters with regard to the question of the extent to which Hindu religious pluralism is really a form of inclusivism, even the processbased version which I have sought to develop in this book. Does it maintain the balance between the extremes of absolutism and relativism? More to the point at hand, the conceptual core of the Jain doctrines of relativity is a conception of reality as consisting, on a fundamental level, of a nexus of positive and negative relations to possibilities–what Whitehead would call ‘prehensions.’ To take an example used in traditional Jain texts, a jar can be said to exist inasmuch as it actualises certain qualities (i.e. the qualities that, when present in a particular location in time and space, lead us to say, ‘This is a jar’–a particular shape, function, etc.). The same jar, however, at the same time, can also be said not to exist inasmuch as it does not actualise other qualities (i.e. non-jar qualities, such as the qualities proper to a pen or to a necklace). What a ‘jar’ is, fundamentally–its dravya–is the locus of a series of positive and negative actualisations of more basic qualities, or gu˚as–shapes, colours, functions, etc.– that make it what it is from moment to moment.

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This is the same fundamental conception of reality operative in Whitehead’s philosophy. An entity is what it is because it positively prehends– that is, actualises–specific possibilities contained eternally in the mind of God, the cosmic memory, and negatively prehends others. The doctrine of God is, again, not spelled out in classical Jain philosophy; but, applying sy›dv›da to the question of the permanence or the impermanence of the qualities in a substance, Samantabhadra’s Äptamım›˙s› claims that these qualities must, in some sense, be eternal (nitya), (i.e. must have some eternal locus), or else their repeated instantiation in different substances could not be explained.10 It is by this same logic that Yog›c›ra Buddhists developed their doctrine of universal mind, an entity functionally–and in many ways substantively–identical to Whitehead’s God. Jainism as a Process Metaphysics If the fundamental ontology at the heart of Jain philosophy is compatible– indeed, substantially identical–with that of process metaphysics, what does this imply for Jain philosophy as a whole? It might suggest that the prima facie incompatibilities between Jain and process thought indicate contradictions within Jainism itself–that it is at odds with its own fundamental ontology. This is the view taken by Whiteheadian critics of Jainism, such as Nicholas F. Gier. If, however, the affinities between Jainism and process thought exist on such a deep level, perhaps this suggests that the traditional Jain cosmology can be interpreted in such a way as to negate these incompatibilities. I shall argue below that the traditional Jain worldview can, indeed, be situated in a process context so that its incompatibilities with Whiteheadian thought are shown not to be as severe as they appear to be at first glance. The Question of God The chief difficulty, it seems, is the theistic character of process metaphysics. The Jain tradition is not theistic, at least not explicitly so; and many of its representatives have presented strong arguments against the existence of at least some forms of divinity. Is this a serious incompatibility with process metaphysics, sufficient to undermine the project of synthesising these two systems of thought to form a pluralistic method for interpreting religious claims? Or is Whitehead’s conception of God immune to traditional Jain critiques, and so compatible with Jainism? Can this prima facie incompatibility between Jain and process thought be resolved satisfactorily?

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What is God, according to Whitehead? Given what could be called the fundamentally Platonic character of Whitehead’s metaphysics–its conception of actual entities as participating in eternal forms, or possibilities, which give them a particular character of definiteness–it is possible to see the importance of God in his system as providing the necessary grounding for the ingression of possibilities into the actual world. Specifically, God, for Whitehead, at least God’s eternal, conceptual nature, is the locus of the eternal objects, of the possibilities in which the actual world participates: Everything must be somewhere; and here ‘somewhere’ means ‘some actual entity.’ Accordingly the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere; since it retains its proximate relevance to actual entities for which it is unrealised. This ‘proximate relevance’ reappears in subsequent concrescence as final causation regulative of the emergence of novelty. This ‘somewhere’ is the non-temporal actual entity. Thus ‘proximate relevance’ means ‘relevance as in the primordial mind of God.’…It is a contradiction in terms to assume that some explanatory fact can float into the actual world out of nonentity. Nonentity is nothingness. Every explanatory fact refers to the decision and to the efficacy of an actual thing. The notion of ‘subsistence’ is merely the notion of how eternal objects can be components of the primordial nature of God. …But eternal objects, as in God’s primordial nature, constitute the Platonic world of ideas.11 As discussed earlier, however, the conceptual or eternal ‘pole’ of the reality of God–the divine envisioning of possibilities–is only the abstract part of the divine reality: its nirgu˚a in contrast with its sagu˚a aspect. God is also, according to Whitehead, an actual entity (or a personally ordered society of such entities)12 and so has a concrete, temporal pole as well. In fact, it is only as an actual entity, containing within Itself the conceptual valuation of all possibilities, that God can make those possibilities available to the actual entities which constitute the world, and so enable the world to continue in its existence. As Whitehead says, “The only alternative to this admission, is to deny the reality of actual occasions.”13 The concrete, or consequent, nature of God is the aspect of the divine reality that is related to the world, and, in a sense, dependent upon the world–for, in God’s supreme relativity to all actuality, in God’s knowledge of the actual world, God undergoes change as the world undergoes change, as in Lord ÷iva’s cosmic dance, or Lord Vi„˚u’s lıla, or divine play.

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It is the consequent nature of God which pursues the divine telos of maximising the harmony and beauty of actual existence, of pursuing the fulfilment of the possibilities of perfect harmony and beauty which are envisioned in the eternal nature of God. Just as God, in God’s eternal aspect, is the necessary condition for the existence of the actual world–the world constituted from moment to moment by actual entities–the world, for the consequent, or supremely relative nature of God, is the necessary condition for the fulfilment of the divine telos, for God’s experience as actuality, rather than mere possibility, the infinite possibilities of existence. God, as temporal, experiences through us. We therefore have an ultimate responsibility to pursue the good, to optimise our creative potentialities and the possibilities for all beings to contribute their own parts to the divine play. All entities, as we have seen, are constituted by their relations to all actuality and possibility. But God is completely relative to all actuality and possibility–knowing us, to paraphrase St. Augustine, better than we know ourselves–and, in a sense, depending upon us to actualise the infinite possibilities envisioned in the divine mind. As Whitehead writes of the relations of mutuality between God and the world, in a kind of litany highly reminiscent of sy›dv›da: It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently. It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the world, as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.14

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The question is: Is this conception of God compatible with the worldview of Jainism? If we focus upon the basic function of God in process metaphysics as the necessary foundation for any possible cosmic order, I believe an argument can be made that this conception is fully compatible with–is, indeed, implied by–traditional Jain cosmology. Though apparently unfamiliar with Jainism, Whitehead, indeed, affirmed of the function of God as the foundation for cosmic order that, “This function of God is analogous to the remorseless working of things in Greek and in Buddhist thought.”15 I believe a similar claim can be made with regard to Jainism, this claim being that the traditional Jain understanding of the universe implies the Whiteheadian conception of God, even though the representative intellectuals of this community never chose to pursue this particular entailment of their belief system. God, in other words, is an answer to a question which the Jains have simply never chosen to ask–though, as I hope to show, there are hints that even this is not necessarily the whole story. Returning briefly to Samantabhadra’s unspecified sense in which universals must be eternal–if this sense must logically refer to their existence as possibilities, and if, as Whitehead insists, “everything must be somewhere,” “somewhere” being, in the case of possibilities, the primordial mind of God, then we have at least the foundations for an argument that Samantabhadra’s conception of the eternality of universals implies the existence of God, as conceived by Whitehead. This is not to say that Samantabhadra was an “anonymous theist,” but that his thought has theistic implications that he did not pursue, God not being a category of traditional Jain philosophy. The problem with this interpretation is that the Jain tradition rejects the existence of God–at least God conceived as a wholly transcendent creator and moral orderer, preferring instead a version of what Whitehead calls the doctrine of ‘Law as Immanent,’ seeing the process of karma as a selfsufficient and adequate explanation for the cosmic order. But is the God that the Jains reject the same as Whitehead’s God, as just described? I believe that it is not. I would, in fact, suggest, that it is essentially the same classical theistic God rejected by Whitehead as well. The traditional Jain arguments against theism are to be found, among other places, in Malli„e˚asÒri’s Sy›dv›damañjarı.16 These arguments are directed exclusively against a conception of God as the absolutely perfect creator of the universe. Such a conception is rejected by the Jains, first of all, because they maintain that the universe, or world, is eternal, that it has always existed and therefore does not stand in need of a creator.

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Process metaphysics, however, also maintains the beginninglessness of the cosmic process. God, in process thought, is not a creator in the sense of bringing a universe into being at a particular time prior to which there was nothing–creatio ex nihilo. God is conceived, rather, as directing–or, more appropriately, influencing–the ongoing process of the universe by the divine persuasion: the presentation from moment to moment of possibilities to entities for actualization. God, in this sense, is a creator, if “creation” is understood as a beginningless and endless process, and if the actual entities are seen as participating in this process, rather than merely being acted upon by an external force–the idea of ‘law as imposed order’ which, we saw in an earlier chapter, Whitehead rejects. For example, according to Whitehead, God, “does not create eternal objects; for his nature requires them in the same degree that they require him. This is an exemplification of the coherence of the categoreal types of existence.”17 God works with two other distinct ultimate realities–the sum total of all possibilities and the pre-existing universe of already actual entities, the two other ultimates that are the basis of a Whiteheadian religious pluralism. God is a participant in the cosmos. To be sure, God can be seen in process thought as the creator of particular cosmic epochs–a notion that is not unlike the kalpas, or cosmic epochs, affirmed in Jainism, as well as in the Vedic traditions and Buddhism. But process thought firmly rejects the notion of the cosmos as such in time, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or creation from nothing, an idea which is not only un-Hindu, but, according to Christian process theologians, un-Biblical as well. The Jains also reject the notion of God as creator because, in the words of P. S. Jaini, “Creation is not possible without a desire to create, and this implies imperfection on the part of the alleged creator.”18 This is an attempt to show an incoherence in the theistic position; for it is traditionally claimed by theists, both Western and South Asian, that God is not only the creator of the world, but that God is also perfect. Such perfection is typically taken to include a complete indifference to what occurs in the world, a lack of desire or affect toward what goes on in the creation. This, however, would seem to contradict the act of creation, which implies, as the Jains point out, a desire or need to create. For the Jains, this incoherence in the traditional theistic position is a basis for rejecting theism itself as incoherent. Process thought, however, responds to this situation by dropping the classical notion of perfection. Inasmuch as God is perfect in the traditional sense, God is “deficiently actual.”19 To the degree that perfection implies a state of non-relationality, it implies non-existence. To be is to be related.

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The divine perfection, on a process understanding, consists precisely of God’s being deeply involved with what goes on in the universe from moment to moment (without being thereby diminished in any way), and, indeed, “desiring” the maximisation of harmony, of truth, beauty and goodness–a desire which is the foundation of the divine salvific will, which, in turn, is arguably a basis for the truth of religious pluralism (that God wills the salvation of all beings and so makes the means for it available). Clearly, there is a disagreement between the Jain and process traditions on the meaning of perfection, with the Jains holding a view closer to that of the classical Western conception of perfection as involving indifference to the affairs of the world, a complete lack of desire. But because the process tradition drops this notion of perfection, the Jain argument against theism on the basis of the imperfection implied by the divine creative act does not apply to the process conception of God. Process theists do not claim a perfection for God that precludes divine involvement with the world, as classical theism does. The Jain argument therefore points to a contradiction in classical theism that the process tradition also finds problematic, and for which it rejects the classical theistic notion of God in favour of a revised, neo-classical theism (to use Charles Hartshorne’s terminology). Finally, the Jains reject the notion of God as wholly transcendent of the order of the world–specifically the moral order expressed in the doctrine of karma. As Jaini again elaborates, “If karma is relevant in the destinies of human beings, then God is irrelevant; if he rules regardless of the karma of beings, then he is cruel and capricious.”20 Again, however, this objection reflects an objection also raised by Whitehead against the classical conception of God as a divine monarch. Whitehead’s God is not an arbitrary, immoral tyrant, whimsically intervening in the affairs of the world, but is foundational to the world’s order, including the moral order. In Jain terms, Whitehead’s God could be seen as the transcendental foundation of the law of karma. Again: This function of God [as foundation for order in the world] is analogous to the remorseless working of things in Greek and in Buddhist thought. The initial aim [of each entity, which God provides] is the best for that impasse. But if the best be bad, then the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Até, the goddess of mischief. The chaff is burnt. What is inexorable in God, is valuation as an aim towards ‘order’; and ‘order’ means ‘society permissive of actualities with patterned intensity of feeling arising from adjusted contrasts.’21

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It seems, then, that we can conclude that traditional Jain arguments against the existence of God do not apply to God as conceived in process metaphysics, and that it may be possible to move forward with the conclusion that such a God is, in fact, logically compatible with the claims of the Jain tradition, such as Samantabhadra’s conception of the eternality of universals (taken to imply the mind of God as a locus for such universals), the conception of a morally ordered universe expressed in the doctrine of karma (taken also to imply the existence of God as its necessary foundation), and finally, as we saw in the previous chapter, the entailment of the Jain philosophy of relativity, when applied consistently to itself, of the existence of an absolute perspective which both synthesizes and transcends all other, partial perspectives.22 This absolute corresponds, in Jainism, to the experience of the liberated Jina, and in process thought, to the experience of God as related to actuality and possibility. In this last connection, it is worth mentioning that there is an analogue to theism in the Jain tradition, in the form of the liberated Jina who has realised the true, omniscient nature of the soul, or jıva, which is itself conceived in what could broadly be called theistic terms. As Paul Dundas writes: One of the most common terms used in Jainism to describe the self in its purest, unconditioned and karmicly free state as sole object of contemplation is param›tman, the ‘supreme soul’ [a term also used by Hindus to designate the divine Brahman in its role as dwelling in all beings, the ‘soul of our souls,’ to again use Sw›mı Vivek›nanda’s phrase]. The liberated jıvas have reached their culminating state by a realisation of the param›tman and it is therefore an object of reverence for all Jains. While Jainism is, as we have seen, atheist in the limited sense of rejection of both the existence of a creator god and the possibility of the intervention of such a being in human affairs [due to the violation of karma that a whimsical intervention would imply], it nonetheless must be regarded as a theist religion in the more profound sense that it accepts the existence of a divine principle, the param›tman, often in fact referred to as ‘god’… existing in potential state within all beings. Jain devotional worship of the fordmakers [Tırthaºkaras], who are frequently also referred to by the designation ‘god,’ should be interpreted as being directed towards this and as an acknowledgement of the spiritual principle within every individual.23

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It could, of course, be objected that jıvas are conceived as being many in Jainism, rather than one, and so this analogy with God cannot be pushed too far. Samantabhadra, however, claims, using sy›dv›da, that jıvas, in a sense, are many, but in another sense–that of possessing common traits– they are one.24 Haribhadra takes this a step further and claims that the experience of liberation–the experience of the pure nature of the jıva–as conceived in different traditions is also essentially one, because of being described in similar terms.25 He even uses theistic terminology to refer to this state, like Sad›±iva and Parabrahman. Finally, we have also seen Whitehead claim that, “It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.”26 It is most likely, though, that the “manyness” of God for Whitehead would be a reference to the changes that God undergoes over time, as an actual entity, rather than a simultaneous existence of many “gods.” This makes particular sense on a Hartshornean account of process thought, according to which God, like other individuals, is made up of a temporal series of distinct actual entities. But Hinduism allows other possibilities. Also noteworthy in connection with the possibility of identifying God with the pure nature of the jıva is the fact that a popular etymology among Jains for the Sanskrit word for the world–loka–derives it from the verbal root lok, or “see,” explaining it as referring to “that which is seen by the omniscient ones.”27 This is a rather speculative interpretation, but could this etymology possibly be seen as an articulation of the insight that the existence of the world requires an absolute, unifying perspective, provided in process thought by God, but in the Jain tradition by those who have realised the pure nature of the jıva? It is also interesting in this regard that there is a Jain tradition according to which there must always, somewhere in the universe, be at least one liberated soul teaching the Jain path.28 The omniscient perspective is a necessary ingredient of the Jain universe. If the jıva, then, in its intrinsic nature as blissful and omniscient, or the liberated being who has realised this intrinsic nature, can be conceived as ultimately referring to the same God described in process metaphysics–or to the actual entity that has become transparent to the divine nature–then, in process terms, the Jain path of purification could be seen as a process of learning to positively prehend God in a complete and perfect way, to actualise a divine consciousness within a concrete human existence–not, to be sure, to be identical with God, an impossibility in process terms, but to achieve such harmony between one’s own will and God’s as to become, in effect, an extension of the divine will in the universe. Such a conception can then ground the Hindu concept of the avat›r, or divine incarnation.

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Other religious traditions–particularly, but not limited to, South Asian traditions–which prescribe a process of attaining to a state of union with a divine reality or realities, or realising a pre-existing state of unity of which one has previously been unaware, could, it seems, be similarly conceived in terms of process metaphysics. The entire Jain cosmology could then be conceived in process terms. Karma would then become identified with the totality of the antecedent actualities that condition the character of the emergence of a particular entity at a given point in time. As in the doctrine of karma–in its Hindu and Buddhist, as well as its Jain, forms–an actual entity, in process thought, is free to decide its own final character, but this freedom is conditioned by its relations to the totality of the past which it inherits. This is like the freedom an entity has to choose among its karmically determined options, themselves a product of past karmically determined choices. Purifying oneself of karma in terms of process metaphysics would then become the process of making choices in such a way as to enhance and increase one’s positive prehension of divinely offered possibilities so that one would be less conditioned by, and therefore relatively less bound by, the conditioning effects of the past. This could be seen as essentially the same process conceived in more conventionally theistic traditions as learning to discern the will of God for oneself and seeking to conform one’s own will perfectly to the divine will. If one were able to take this process to a conclusion, to fully prehend God, then one would have, in effect, though not ontologically, become divine; for the fundamental characteristic of divinity is “complete relativity to all actuality and possibility.”29 This would be the meaning of the Jina’s victory conceived in terms of process metaphysics. It seems, then, that the theistic affirmation of process metaphysics need not be regarded as a point of major incompatibility between this system of philosophy and the Jain tradition. On the contrary, it seems that bringing these two systems of thought into conversation with one another could lead to an enriched understanding of both–which is, of course, the whole point of inter-religious dialogue. Going beyond this conversation, though, and bringing these two philosophies of relativity into a synthesis that will become a participant in more such dialogues is also a logical possibility. But despite their logical compatibility, there are still many differences between Jain and process metaphysics. Compatibility, in other words, is not the same as identity. This, of course, is the essential claim of the version of religious pluralism I am advocating in this book–that many substantially different, yet ultimately logically compatible, worldviews are possible, and are represented by the world’s religious and philosophical traditions.

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Examples from the Jain tradition of what I mean by differences that are not necessarily incompatibilities between Jainism and process thought– which can provide an example of the method I have in mind to apply to other traditions of thought as well–take the form of its basic cosmology: a cosmology of souls, karmic matter, and rebirth. There is no reason, in principle, that a Whiteheadian account could not be given of the phenomena described in these terms by the Jain tradition. Souls could be explained in terms of personally ordered societies of actual occasions. Karma could be explained in terms of an entity’s inheritance from its past. The phenomenon of rebirth could be explained in terms of ‘objective immortality’ and the prehension by future personally ordered societies, though not necessarily on a conscious level, of the lifetimes of those who have gone before, preserved in the ‘cosmic memory’ constituted by the conesquent nature of God. Or perhaps, as David Griffin has argued, an even more robust sense of reincarnation, in keeping with the phenomenological accounts of this process given in the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions, can be given.30 The senses in which Jainism could be said to be true relative to process metaphysics could thus be specified, and process metaphysics itself thereby enriched by the incorporation of the experiential data of the Jain tradition. This is an example of what I mean by a coherent pluralistic interpretation of religious claims–and ultimately, of all claims– using an interpretive principle of relativity. Relative to the system of the universe revealed in metaphysical reflection the claims of a wide variety of belief systems, conceived of as vast repositories of human experience and divine revelation, can be integrated. In this way, process thought becomes a conceptual matrix in terms of which all claims can be interpreted. This is an approach to religious pluralism quite different from the ‘all religions are the same’ idea decried by anti-pluralist critics, a systematisation of Hinduism’s famous ability to assimilate and incorporate new ideas and insights from other traditions. But questions remain. Does this system indeed manage to maintain the balance between absolutism and relativism? Is it sufficiently open to other views to validly retain the label ‘pluralistic’? Or is it really another form of religious inclusivism? Pushing in the other direction, does this system also manage to avoid sliding into a debilitating relativism? Is it so open and allinclusive that it fails to make important distinctions, particularly ethical distinctions? In its openness, does it enable one to distinguish between dharma and adharma, between authentic and inauthentic expressions of the human impulse toward religiosity, between a sincere and spiritual piety and violent fanaticism? I shall now turn my attention to this set of questions.

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Harder Questions: The Limits of Language, Falsity, and the Problem of Evil That this is an open and not a closed system is partly due to its abstraction, its potential applicability the enormous range of diverse experiences and interpretations of experience that are capable of being accommodated within it. The total view that it constitutes is thereby transformed and enriched. Process metaphysics, applied in this way to the claims of the Jain tradition and brought into a logical synthesis with them, comes away a very different system, inclusive of ideas like the jıva, karma, and sa˙s›ra. These ideas themselves, in turn, interpreted within the matrix of process thought, take on new forms and meanings that they would not have had within a Jain conceptual system alone. They are creatively transformed in the process of their mutual integration. The open-endedness of the synthesis of insights pursued by a reconceived religious pluralism taking a synthesis of Jain and process metaphysics as its basis is necessitated by the limits of language–limits of which both traditions are keenly aware. As I mentioned earlier, process philosophy contains considerable internal warrants for its own self-relativisation. That this need not undermine, but only qualify, the claim of process philosophy, to be true–that a realisation of the limits of language need not compel one to ring the death-knell of metaphysical speculation–is what prevents this philosophy of relativity from becoming a relativism. Whitehead does not deny the possibility of any metaphysical knowledge. “There is no first principle,” he writes, “which is in itself unknowable, not to be captured by a flash of insight.”31 What he denies is that any particular verbal or conceptual expression can ever finally or definitively exhaust such knowledge. Whitehead is quite insistent on this score. “In philosophical discussion,” he writes, “the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.” 32 The best way to understand our attainment of metaphysical knowledge, then, is as, to use Whitehead’s term, “asymptotic.”33 In other words, we forever approach it, refining our concepts and broadening and deepening our initial intuitive awareness, but there ever remains scope for further creative speculation, further penetration of philosophic insight. Just as we must always be dubious of claims about the “end of history,” similarly, we can realistically expect no conclusive “end of philosophy.” This asymptotic approach to truth, with the understanding of human linguistic and conceptual capacities that it expresses, constitutes a “middle path” between a positivistic overconfidence and a deconstructive post-modern despair.

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The Jain tradition expresses a sophisticated awareness of the limits of language, combined with a method for overcoming these limits–at least provisionally–in order to make some soteriologically necessary claims about the true nature of reality. The whole point of sy›dv›da, as we have already seen, is to give greater specificity to language, greater capacity to express the complex nature of reality than it ordinarily possesses–such as when, in ordinary speech, we tend to characterise particular claims as simply ‘true’ or ‘false,’ rather than specifying the ontological conditions for their truth or falsity. In ordinary speech, for example, we typically make claims such as “It’s raining,” or “It’s hot,” on the assumption that our interlocutors understand that what we really mean is “It’s raining here right now,” or “It’s hot here right now.” But the specification of ontological conditions can have a considerable effect on the truth of our claims. It may or may not be true that “It’s raining in Chicago right now.” But if I say, “It’s raining on the Sun,” or “It’s hot on the planet Pluto,” the specification of these ontological conditions will very likely falsify my claim. Or one can specify further. ‘Hot’ is a relative term. It may, indeed, be ‘hot’ on Pluto compared to some place where the temperature is absolute zero. Or some parts of Pluto may be ‘hotter’ than others. The point is that the specification of ontological conditions which characterises sy›dv›da as a method has the effect–again, never completely, but rather, ‘asymptotically’–of disambiguating language–a great advantage when one seeks to express, however imperfectly, metaphysical first principles. According to Samantabhadra, the specificity of expression–and thus of knowledge–that sy›dv›da enables one to achieve is not too far removed from that of the kevalin–the omniscient being whose teaching, like the divine knowledge in process metaphysics, forms the absolute perspective from which the Jain conception of universal relativity draws its logical justification. In his words: [Both] sy›dv›da and kevalajñ›na [absolute knowledge, or omniscience] illuminate the nature of all entities. The difference between these two is due to immediacy and non-immediacy [that is, sy›dv›da operates through the medium of linguistically-based concepts, whereas kevalajñ›na is conceived as an immediate form of awareness]; but this difference should be [regarded as] immaterial.34 But should such an assertion about a system of philosophy–that it conveys knowledge tantamount to omniscience–not give us pause?

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In this matter, the Jain tradition is not monolithic. According to the teachings of a mystical school of Digambara Jainism attributed to the ›c›rya, or teacher, Kundakunda, the totality of the knowledge attainable through sy›dv›da, through the mediation of linguistically-based concepts, collectively constitutes the vyavah›ranaya, or mundane perspective, which the aspirant on the Jain path hopes eventually to overcome in order to attain the ni±cayanaya, or ultimate perspective of the enlightened Jina, which is beyond the capacity of language or thought to comprehend. This ‘two truths’ doctrine, like those employed by N›g›rjuna and ÷aºkar›c›rya, necessitates a certain humility when dealing in the realm of language. The sense that this understanding of the absolute perspective of Jainism conveys–as existing beyond the limits of language and ordinary human comprehension–is more compatible with a Whiteheadian view of philosophy as asymptotically approaching, rather than actually apprehending, its speculative ideal, than is Samantabhadra’s almost positivistic reading of sy›dv›da. Historically, however, Kundakunda’s ‘two truths’ approach to nayav›da never became predominant in the mainstream Jain intellectual tradition. But it is a better logical fit with a Hindu process theology. The importance of emphasising an open-ended approach to the philosophical interpretation and synthesis of a plurality of perspectives is not only connected with a sense of the limits of language and the fallibility of ordinary human cognitive capacities. The importance of developing a pluralistic interpretive method that is open-ended is also connected with the capacity for any totalising system of thought to become oppressive, or to rule out options a priori which, upon further experience and reflection, could be seen to express valuable insights. On my understanding, therefore, the absolute or divine perspective upon which the principle of the universal relativity of truth-claims is based ought to be conceived as a necessary postulate of the logic of this principle, rather than being identified with any specific, rigidly defined worldview. Yet, like Whitehead and the mainstream Jain tradition, I resist absolute scepticism no less than absolute positivism. I therefore conceive of this absolute perspective–in its mode as a conceptual basis for an interpretive method, rather than in and of itself–not as a wholly empty set with regard to definite metaphysical propositions, but rather, as an open set of such claims, capable of modification in light of further speculative and interpretive activity, and always characterised, like Kundakunda’s vyavah›ranaya, by a degree of tentativeness, a quality of provisionality. This is why in the last chapter I say that no one tradition is identical to the san›tana dharma, though all participate in it.

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At this point, however, it might be objected that some claims ought to be excluded from such an ‘open’ interpretive system, that some kind of absolute exclusionary standard is demanded by morality. To assert, for example, that the racist beliefs of Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan are ‘in some sense true’ seems, at least prima facie, monstrous. It could thus be charged that such an interpretive system ends up unwittingly justifying despicable evils in a misguided attempt to avoid making imperialistic negative judgments on the beliefs of others. “Take a stand!” this objection seems to say. If one does not resist evil, then one risks becoming complicit with it, even in the abstract realm of metaphysics; for philosophy can be and has been used to justify imperialism, totalitarianism, global capitalism, and environmental degradation. Philosophers are not simply toiling away in our ivory towers, our work having no relevance to the larger world. The concern that pluralistic views inevitably issue in a debilitating relativism must be addressed. In reply to this objection, I would first of all highlight the fact that, according to sy›dv›da, all claims, as I have been emphasising, are, in some sense, true; but they are also, in some sense, false. Contrary to perceptions that sy›dv›da expresses ‘intellectual ahi˙s›,’ its primary function in the Jain tradition has actually been to demonstrate the incompleteness, the partiality, of the truths expressed in non-Jain philosophies, which are in turn contrasted with the more comprehensive Jain perspective. The disambiguating character of sy›dv›da has enabled traditional Jain philosophers to deploy it as “a fiercesome [sic] weapon of philosophical polemic with which the doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism could be pared down to their ideological basics of simple permanence and impermanence respectively and thus be shown to be one-pointed and inadequate as the overall interpretations of reality which they purported to be.”35 So bearing in mind the negating capacities of this doctrine and its historical uses by representatives of the Jain tradition, one can see that, though a pluralistic interpretive system employing sy›dv›da could take its primary mandate to be to show the senses in which various philosophical and religious perspectives are true, sy›dv›da is nevertheless a double-edged (logical) sword. Like the gentle Mother P›rvatı, wife of Lord ÷iva, transforming herself into the fierce M› K›lı to slay demons, such a pluralistic system has the capacity, I believe, to become a powerful intellectual tool for the critical analysis of religious and philosophical propositions as much as for their charitable reading as expressions of a multi-faceted truth. This contrasts sharply, I think, with contemporary understandings of Hindu religious pluralism as a bland assertion that ‘all religions are the same.’

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In order to address this question–the question of the ability of sy›dv›da to act as a philosophy of resistance to evil–one must have recourse to the larger metaphysical and ethical context from which this doctrine emerges– the context of Jainism. The central ethical principle of Jainism, entailed by its overall worldview, is ahi˙s›, which is often translated as ‘non-violence,’ but which in fact literally means ‘the absence of even the desire to do harm.’ Ethically, I believe, this is the principle that can give sy›dv›da its critical edge. The point of sy›dv›da is to disambiguate linguistically expressed claims, to ‘pare them down’–as the Jains have traditionally ‘pared down’ the claims of their philosophical opponents–‘to their ideological basics,’ and then to specify the senses in which these claims express (partial) truth in terms of the more encompassing or comprehensive perspective provided by the Jain dar±ana, or worldview, conceived as an internally coherent system. Assuming a relation of logical entailment between the ethical principle of ahi˙s› and the method of sy›dv›da as components of such an internally coherent system, if one follows the traditional Jain approach, taking the cardinal sin of philosophy to be durnaya–the one-sided (ek›nta) taking of a relative perspective as exclusively true–then, if one analyzes claims which issue in the advocacy of violence, one will presumably find, at their basis, a durnaya–an illicitly absolute affirmation of a relative truth. Let us take, as our example, what is considered, by widespread consensus, to be the classic case of evil in the twentieth century–arguably the most violent century in human history, although the twenty-first is working hard to catch up–namely, Nazism. Nazism is, of course, a highly complex network of ideas, attitudes, symbols (such as the sw›stika–a symbol with very positive meanings in the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions), and practices, each of which, presumably, could be individually analysed in terms of sy›dv›da in order to determine the relative degree of truth or falsity it could be seen to express. But taking Nazism as a whole, let us presume that its fundamental affirmation is that certain groups of people– Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and anyone who rejects this fundamental affirmation–are inferior to members of the ‘pure Aryan nation’ and ought to be exterminated. The objector to sy›dv›da asks (presumably with some exasperation), “In what sense could this demonic affirmation possibly be true?” The reply is the following: The “truth” which the Nazi perceives and expresses is the rather banal truth that there exist groups of people called “Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, etc.” who are in some way different from himself; and this is certainly the case.

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This truth, however, as it is expressed in the Nazi’s affirmation, is onesided because it fails to take into account the extent to which it is conditioned by its contrary: that there is another sense–the sense in which they share a common humanity–in which these people who are different from him are also like him. In affirming that these people are inferior to himself and merit extermination the Nazi fails to recognize the truth of his commonalities with his would-be victims, being blinded by his one-sided insistence on the differences that separate them from him. A recognition of the common humanity shared by all of these groups of people with himself would complete his one-sided perspective, thereby logically negating the violence inherent in it (and also thereby, one could hope, converting him). The “selfing” and “othering” process must be undone. In this sense, then, sy›dv›da functions as a philosophy of non-violence. If one can presume, a priori, that all claims which could entail injury to others must necessarily contain a one-sided affirmation–in all likelihood an affirmation of some unbridgeable distance between the speaker and the object of his intended violence–and then correct this one-sidedness with an affirmation of its contrary–the common humanity, or ‘being-ness,’ of the speaker and the object of his intended violence–then one should be able to avoid the problem of one’s pluralistic interpretive method inadvertently justifying claims that advocate or approve of violent acts. The underlying interdependence and relationality of all beings must be the final factor in all our decisions. This is the conceptual antidote to Hindu triumphalism. Such an approach, in fact, could be seen to lead to the deduction, from the logic of sy›dv›da, of the ‘Golden Rule’ as an ethical principle–the principle that one ought to treat others as one wishes for oneself to be treated; for we are all, in a sense, one, inasmuch as we share a wide range of similarities based upon our common humanity. Indeed, Indic traditions do not stop at our common humanity in finding a basis for affirming such an ethical principle. In Ramakrishna Ved›nta one is enjoined to follow the Golden Rule because all beings–and not only humans–ultimately constitute one Being, one Oversoul–or Brahman. Similarly, in more conventionally theistic forms of Hinduism, as in the theistic traditions of the West, all beings are affirmed to be children of God. In Buddhism, universal compassion or empathy (karu˚›) is enjoined because all beings are dependently co-originated and ultimately no different from one‘self’–a separate ‘self’ finally distinct from the rest of the universal process being a mere conceptual construct. And in Jainism, ahi˙s›–nonviolence in thought, word, and deed–toward all beings is enjoined in part because all beings possess a soul and are capable of feeling pain.

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Such an ethical principle of reciprocity is “non-one-sided” (anek›nta) inasmuch as it is based on the similarities uniting and the differences separating all beings. Just as a one-sided affirmation of the differences separating one from others can issue in fear, hatred, and violence, similarly, an exclusive affirmation of resemblances and unities can blind one to the distinctions between self and other–distinctions that make one’s experience so rich and rewarding. Such an emphasis could also lead to the violence of an instrumental attitude toward others–a selfish, infantile perspective which would see others as mere extensions of oneself, rather than as distinct beings–as ‘ends in themselves,’ as Kant says–with their own wills and destinies. It could also blind one–as has been charged against forms of religious pluralism that emphasise unity at the expense of diversity–to other kinds of difference between oneself and others, like economic and social inequalities perpetuated, in part, by being ideologically concealed. The a priori application of the ethical principle of ahi˙s› in a reconceived pluralistic interpretation of religion which takes a synthesis of Jain and process metaphysics as its logical basis cannot, of course, be a mere arbitrary imposition. It must find a warrant in both worldviews. Process philosophers are not all of one mind on the issue of non-violence, though the consensus does seem to be in favour of it.36 I believe, however, that an affirmation of ahi˙s› is quite logically deducible from one of the central affirmations of process thought–that God, as the supremely relative being, feels and experiences everything that is felt and experienced in the cosmos. If this is the case, then whenever we inflict injury of any kind on our fellow beings, we, in a very real sense, do injury to God, who experiences all injury as “His” own. God is not thereby diminished. God’s abstract nature being eternal, God cannot be destroyed. But God experiences the sensations of all beings as they experience them. The ethical principle implied by such an understanding of God must, it seems, go beyond ahi˙s›, conceived as the avoidance of injury to others, though it would certainly include ahi˙s› as a central element. Besides enjoining one to avoid evil, it would also logically include a positive injunction to do good, to be universally compassionate, to work for peace and social justice and the welfare of all beings. The Golden Rule–to treat others as one wishes for oneself to be treated–which this conception of God and sy›dv›da together entail does not only mean to avoid evil thoughts, words, or deeds toward others. It also means, positively, to do good for others. The metaphysical understanding of God as supremely relative gives a very literal twist to the interpretation of sayings of Jesus like, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”

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Along the same lines, Ramakrishna narrates the following tale: Kartikeya (Son of ÷iva) one day happened to scratch a cat with his nail. On going home, he saw that there was the mark of a scratch on the cheek of his Divine Mother, Parvati. Seeing this he asked her, ‘Mother, how did you get this ugly scratch on your cheek?’ The mother of the universe replied, ‘This is the work of your own hand; it is the scratch of your nail.’ Kartikeya asked in wonder: ‘How is it, Mother? I do not remember to have scratched you at any time. The Mother replied, ‘Darling, have you forgotten the fact of your having scratched a cat this morning?’ Kartikeya said, ‘Yes, I did scratch a cat, but how did your cheek get the scar?’ The Mother replied, ‘Dear child, nothing exists in this world but Myself. The whole creation is Myself; whomsoever you may hurt, you only hurt me.’37 A pluralistic interpretation of religion which includes such an understanding of the nature of God, as experiencing the joys and sorrows of all beings, in its logical basis thereby not only avoids being complicit with evil by inadvertently justifying claims which enjoin violence, but also entails a positive injunction to work for the good of all beings–a concern which has long been a central one for religious pluralists. An approach to conceptual plurality which takes a synthesis of Jain and process metaphysics–with their shared principle of universal relativity–as its logical basis would seek to be both internally coherent and open; to be, where appropriate, both charitable and critical–aware of the limits of language, the possibility of falsity, and the problem of evil, yet in terms of a consistent worldview, rather than through ad hoc exclusionary criteria. It would seek, in short, to overcome the problems that currently plague religious pluralism. These issues–the limits of language, falsity, and the problem of evil–are logically intertwined in complex ways. Addressing this nexus of issues is also vitally important to the development of a coherent pluralistic interpretation of religion. It is in their treatment of these very issues that contemporary versions of religious pluralism tend to be most vulnerable to criticism. Any position, like religious pluralism, which is based on the idea of tolerance and openness to the views of others and which holds such openness as a central value runs the risk of becoming indistinguishable from a nihilistic relativism. In the name of avoiding absolutism, it is easy to slip into the opposite extreme.

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In resisting intolerant absolutisms, religious pluralists must also resist affirming such a relativism; for our commitment to openness is itself based on certain absolute ethical values and moral imperatives which would be undermined by such an affirmation. At the same time, a candid recognition of both the limits of language and of the capacity of human beings to pervert even very good ideas into oppressive ideologies requires one to be watchful of the possibility of one’s own absolute commitments becoming intolerant absolutisms of the kind these very commitments require one to oppose. Commitment to religious pluralism requires one to walk the proverbial razor’s edge between, on the one hand, a nihilistic relativism which would ultimately negate one’s very pluralistic commitment, and on the other, an intolerant absolutism arising as a consequence of overzealous commitment to a position which consists precisely of a rejection of such absolutist attitudes–Hindu nationalism being an example of the latter. If the concern I have expressed here, that a pluralistic interpretation of religion can slip into the extremes of either absolutism or relativism seems un-realistic, one only needs to look to the recent history of Hinduism. The overall lack of systematic thought on the topic of religious pluralism, a view central to a contemporary Hindu worldview, has led to a situation in which Hindus like myself who would argue against the co-opting of Hinduism by Hindu nationalist political parties have been rendered mute. The organic unity of all religions taught by the Hindu tradition has become a mere platitude–‘all religions are the same’–rather than the basis for a program of promoting better inter-religious relations. Anti-Christian and anti-Muslim polemicists have even picked up this doctrine as an argument for Hindu superiority–an absolutist usage that undermines and negates the fundamental interpretive charity that underlies this position. The relativism and absolutism latent in religious pluralism need to be balanced by one another, the relativism softening absolutism’s polemical bite, the absolutism giving the relativism the critical edge to resist evil. Examples of the Application of a Pluralistic Hermeneutics How does this pluralistic approach to seemingly incompatible religious claims actually work in practice? An example already given has been the interpretation of Jain claims in such a way that these can be shown to be compatible with, rather than contrary to, theism as presented in process thought. But let us take a more controversial example: the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and the Jewish claim that he is not the Messiah (since, according to Judaism, the Messiah has not yet come).

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On the surface, this major and historically divisive doctrinal disagreement between Jews and Christians–a disagreement which is arguably the distinguishing feature, in terms of doctrine, between the two faith communities–appears to be a simple either/or, A or not-A kind of disagreement. Either Jesus Christ is the Messiah or he is not. He cannot both be the Messiah and not be the Messiah at the same time, nor can he neither be nor not be the Messiah. One or the other of these must be true. Either Jews or Christians are right about this issue. Such runs the conventional, either/or way of thinking. In terms of absolutism and relativism, either the Jews or the Christians are in the right, as an absolutist would have it; or, as a relativist would have it, there is no way of saying who is right, since both groups seem to have their reasons, so there is no way to judge, no way to know who is telling the truth. Though their conclusions differ, both the absolutist and the relativist clearly presuppose the same either/or way of thinking. On a closer analysis, however, we find that Christians mean things when they use the term ‘Messiah’ that Jews do not, and vice versa. The Jewish concept of the Messiah, for instance, seems to have clear connotations of political kingship that Jesus did not fulfil–except, a Christian might argue, on the basis of the Gospel of Matthew, by being a descendant of King David. But he still did not hold, according to any account, a political office in his lifetime. The Christian concept of the Messiah, on the other hand, at least in its developed form, involves ideas like divine incarnation that are not part of the Jewish concept at all, at least not on conventional Jewish understandings of this term.38 If Jews and Christians are simply deploying the term ‘Messiah’ in very different ways, using the same word to refer to two very different things, then the actual disagreement between Jews and Christians is not about whether or not Jesus is really the Messiah, but over the proper use of the word ‘Messiah.’ And a verbal disagreement is much less momentous than one of fact. A Jew or a Christian can always stipulate, “I am using the term ‘Messiah’ in its Jewish sense, as meaning X” (and thus exclude Jesus Christ from consideration), or “I am using the term ‘Messiah’ in its Christian sense, as meaning Y” (and thus refer exclusively and specifically to Jesus). With such a more refined and more specific understanding of the term ‘Messiah’ in mind, Jews and Christians can proceed to speak to one another, realising they probably have far more in common, and can learn far more from one another, than was previously perceived to be the case due to disagreement over Jesus. Their basic premises no longer form the barrier that they once did to a mutual integration of one another’s ideas.

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To be sure, there may be, and probably are, much deeper disagreements between Jews and Christians, and among these and other religious communities as well, that are not quite so easily dissolved, or that are the underlying reasons for such things as why ‘Messiah’ is used in the ways that it is by both communities. Such disagreements might include views on the nature of divinity that might have a strong bearing, for example, on the very possibility of there being such a thing as a divine incarnation. But these disagreements, too, might be capable of being broken down even further into merely verbal differences. This method could conceivably be applied up to a point at which Jewish and Christian doctrinal statements would be pared down as much as humanly possible in a natural language to their most basic metaphysical assumptions; and these basic metaphysical assumptions may be, if not identical, at least capable of being integrated into a single internally coherent and more comprehensive worldview–more comprehensive, that is, than either Christianity or Judaism were prior to this interpretive exercise. This is how traditions expand through interfaith dialogue, their worldviews coming ever closer and closer to the horizon of truth, asymptotically approaching the ideal of san›tana dharma. It is far from obvious, even if one is presented with an apparently straightforward contradiction between two different worldviews, that truly insurmountable differences really do obtain. The question, “What does this term mean here?” is the key to pluralism, to showing that, where there may appear to be a profound disagreement, there may, in fact, be a far more profound harmony. To continue with the example of Jesus, the deeper metaphysical issue separating Judaism from Christianity which underlies the Jewish rejection of the Christian definition of ‘Messiah’ as involving divine incarnation has to do with the very notion of divine incarnation, which is blasphemous not only from a Jewish but from an Islamic perspective as well. Islam is quite explicit on this issue, directly repudiating the Christian claim that Christ is ‘begotten, not made, one in being with the Father,’ by saying ‘God does not beget and is not begotten.’ How can these differences be reconciled? If one thinks in terms of a process rather than a substance ontology, it may be possible to see Christ’s unity with the Father as–as mentioned in the earlier discussion about enlightenment–a unity of will, such that Christ is a being whose perfect submission to the will of the Father (which is the literal meaning of Islam) is such that, in effect, one who has seen Christ has seen the Father. The difference between a divine incarnation and a being more acceptable to Judaic and Islamic sensibilities, such as a prophet, may be merely a matter of degree rather than of kind.

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One could also apply this method to eschatological matters, one of the greatest points of divergence between the Indic and Abrahamic families of religions. Though there are Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who accept the idea of rebirth (which already suggests that this notion is not incompatible with the worldviews of these traditions), most Christians and Muslims have not accepted this view, in favour of an idea of one afterlife of either eternal reward or eternal punishment, and most Jews, like Hindu Mım›˙sakas have chosen to focus on living the Torah, the Judaic equivalent of dharma, in this life, rather than focusing on the next life. But the Christian and Islamic ideas of eternal reward or eternal punishment could be seen as corresponding, respectively, to the Indic concept of liberation from rebirth and a state in which liberation never occurs, where the soul continues to be reborn again and again forever, never leaving the realm of sa˙s›ra to experience the infinite bliss of sat-chit-›nanda. Indeed, the Vai„˚ava conception of the liberated state as residence in Vaiku˚˛ha or Heaven with Lord Vi„˚u seems substantively identical to the Christian and Islamic conceptions of Paradise. In this way, in the spirit of a differential, complementary pluralism, each religion can be seen to lead to the end that it conceives for itself, rather than being subordinated to some other end, like Advaitic realisation. And of course Advaitic realisation occurs as well on this understanding–for those who follow the path of Advaita. As the Gıt› states, by whatever path we worship, that end do we attain.39 Conclusion Ultimately, whether this system ‘works,’ is a matter to be decided by the authority of neither the Jain tradition nor Whitehead, but that of reason reflecting on experience. In the words of HaribhadrasÒri, “I do not have any partiality for Mah›vıra [the founder of his own Jain system], nor do I revile people such as K›pila [the founder of the rival S›˙khya dar±ana]. One should instead have confidence in one whose statements are in accord with reason.”40 As Whitehead says, “Ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness.”41 This of course is also in keeping with the Ramakrishna tradition’s commitment to the final authority of one’s direct experience over sacred scripture or the testimony of another. But it is my view that such a rational system that can enable the Hindu tradition to overcome the tendency toward triumphalism that is exhibited in Hindutva, to fully manifest its pluralistic potential, and move, at last, beyond Hindu nationalism to become a world religion in the truest sense of the term.

5 BEYOND HINDU NATIONALISM A Vision for the Future of Hinduism

Hindu Nationalism: First and Foremost a Political Movement The vision for Hinduism that I am advocating in this book is in clear and deliberate contrast with the restrictive Hindu nationalist conceptions of Hinduism that identify being a Hindu with being Indian. To use more conventional language, it is offered as a critique and an alternative to contructions of Hindu identity that are sometimes labelled fundamentalist. To be sure, this label is not altogether accurate. It can be misleading, due in part to its association in other religious traditions with scriptural literalism and soteriological exclusivism, both of which are largely absent from the Hindu tradition–though this, unfortunately, has recently begun to change. Adherents of Hindutva do not typically claim, for example, that non-Hindus must convert to Hinduism or suffer eternal damnation after death. They are far more likely to criticise other traditions for making such triumphalist claims and then assert the superiority of Hinduism based on the fact that it does not assert its own superiority. However, the Hindu nationalist insistence on the building of a R›ma temple in Ayodhya on the former site of the Babri masjid, based on the belief that that particular site marks R›ma’s historical birthplace, is a noteworthy exception, presupposing as it does a literalist reading of the R›m›ya˚a. It is a sign that, in spite of its professed anti-Islamic, anti-Christian stance, Hindutva is more influenced by the scriptural literalism of the Abrahamic traditions than by the more fluid understandings of sacred text more typical of traditional Hinduism. This raises the question of how truly Hindu Hindutva is.

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But while the label fundamentalist is not altogether accurate, it does point to an elective affinity between Hindutva ideology and analogous exclusivist movements within Christianity and Islam. As Wendy Doniger has written: Whatever ‘fundamentalism’ implies (and there is much debate about this), it tends to include pejorative implications of intolerance–both within the Fundamentalists’ own tradition (a kind of orthodoxy, or conservatism, narrowing the tradition and curtailing deviation and diversity) and toward other peoples’ traditions (bigotry, or hatred of other traditions that disagree with them, such as science, to take a case at random). Increasingly, it is also associated with ethnicity and nationalism.1 Hindu nationalism is also fundamentalist inasmuch as it seems to be an example of the global trend of religious reaction to modernity–in the Hindu case, to secularism as a political arrangement that is perceived by many Hindus to be disenfranchising. Hindu nationalism is therefore more blatantly political and less theological in nature than are other religious fundamentalisms, its rallying cry being ‘India for Hindus!’ All fundamentalisms are of course political in nature. But if one were to establish a spectrum with Christian and Islamic fundamentalist movements at one end–arguing from their respective sacred texts and traditions that there is a particular socio-political order that is divinely mandated, deducing, as it were, their politics from their basic religious claims–Hindu nationalism would be at the other end of this spectrum, for the specific teachings of Hinduism are largely irrelevant to the demand of the movement for political supremacy for a particular community. This is why a Hindu fundamentalism, which seems like such an oxymoron to those who are familiar with the tradition, can exist. Because it is primarily a political movement, it is possible for one to rise in its ranks without being particularly well versed in the Hindu tradition. How else could violence be so casually endorsed by adherents of a tradition that teaches ahi˙s›? Hindutva is more of a spontaneous reaction to a sense of the Hindu community and its traditions being under attack than a reflective and well thought out philosophy based on those traditions. The ideology of Hindutva runs counter to universalism in the obvious sense that it identifies being Hindu with being Indian, thus limiting the relevance of Hinduism to the Indian subcontinent. Because it also tends to cultivate and nurture hostility towards non-Hindus, it is also difficult to reconcile with religious pluralism.

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But it is not, strictly speaking, exclusivist in a theological sense—as Christian and Islamic exclusivisms tend to be—because it does not involve denying to practitioners of other religions ultimate religious goals. Its claim is not that non-Hindus are going to hell. Hindu exclusivism is, again, of a more political than a theological nature, its goal being to relegate nonHindus in India to a second-class status as a protest against what is at least perceived to be preferential treatment of these minorities. Hindu Nationalism and Religious Pluralism as Responses to Modernity As we have already seen, for centuries, the collection of traditions now called Hinduism consisted of many divergent schools of thought, a core of which were very loosely held together by a common commitment to the Brahmanical or Vedic tradition. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Hindu intellectuals began to conceive of Hinduism as the san›tana dharma, the ‘eternal’ or ‘universal religion’ or ‘perennial philosophy’ held to underlie all religions. The Vedic tradition, and Ved›nta in particular, came to be seen as universal. An illustration of this view of Hinduism is Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s statement in The Hindu View of Life that “Ved›nta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance.”2 Ved›nta is not, for Radhakrishnan, merely a type of Indian philosophy, but the basis of all human religious experience. The emergence and the eventual predominance of this conception of Hinduism, at least among Western-educated Hindus, was due largely to the influence of such figures of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ as Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Ramakrishna, and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, as well as Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mah›tma Gandhi, Paramahamsa Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, and Radhakrishnan. Western aficionados of Hinduism such as the Transcendentalists and the Theosophists also played a prominent role in this development, seeing India as the repository of an ancient universal wisdom from which all religions had ultimately sprung. Significantly, many of these thinkers–including some Western Theosophists, such as Annie Besant–also played key roles in the development of the idea of the Indian nation state. Hinduism, conceived as the national religion of the people of India, and therefore as a unifying force, played a prominent role in the emergence of the concept of India. It also led to the eventual partition of India and Pakistan, as minority communities who did not identify themselves as Hindu–most prominently many Muslims–felt alienated by the idea of a Hindu India.

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Hindu nationalism also arose during the period of the independence movement, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were thinkers who saw Hinduism as pluralistic and universal, and so not tied to any one nation, and thinkers who saw it as pluralistic and universal and yet distinctively Indian. But there were also thinkers for whom Hinduism was definitively Indian and India definitively Hindu. These thinkers worked not for a secular independent state, but for an independent Hindu r›s‹t‹ra. The clash between an open-ended and pluralistic Hinduism and Hindu nationalism is most dramatically illustrated by the assassination of Mah›tma Gandhi. Gandhi, one of the most consistently pluralistic Hindu thinkers of the modern era, was an Indian nationalist but not a Hindu nationalist, not wishing to identify India in any exclusive way with Hinduism. In his efforts to alleviate Muslim alienation and stop the partition of India, he alienated Hindu nationalists who wished to see India made a Hindu, and not a secular, state. This is why he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a member of the nationalist Hindu Mah›sabh›. A tension exists in the writings of many modern Hindu figures, as well as in the minds of many contemporary Hindus, between these conflicting visions of Hinduism, between a sense of Hinduism as something universal, eternal, and all-embracing, while being, at the same time, something that is distinctively and definitively Indian. This is why Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, for example, is viewed by some as emblematic of Hindu religious pluralism and by others as a Hindu nationalist.3 Both understandings can be found in his collected writings and lectures. This is likely due to the dual mission he was engaged in: presenting the pluralistic, universal philosophy of his guru, Ramakrishna, and instilling within Indians pride in their cultural traditions. In his essay, Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founding father of Hindu nationalism, defines a Hindu as a person who is Indian by ethnicity, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. In order for one to be a Hindu, all three of these criteria must be met. Consequently, Indians practicing religions of non-Indian origin and practitioners of Hinduism who are not Indian are excluded. At best, non-Indian Hindus, like the Irish Sister Nivedita, are the exception rather than the rule.4 Essentially, Savarkar resolves the conflict between an open-ended and pluralistic understanding of Hinduism and a nationalistic one by opting for the latter—to be a Hindu is to have a threefold relationship with India: a relation-ship of blood ties, of national allegiance, and of affiliation to a faith that claims India as its pu˚ya bhÒmı, or ‘holy land.’ This approach has the advantage of removing the notorious ambiguity of the term Hindu, but at the cost of Hindu universalism and pluralism.

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I propose that the conflict between a universalist Hindu pluralism and Hindu nationalism be resolved, though—and I would also claim that the weight of the modern and premodern Hindu tradition would have us resolve it—in favour of a universalist and pluralist conception of Hinduism. I find the impulse of the Hindu tradition toward the articulation of universal truths, particularly in the modern period, to be too basic to the tradition–and too important to the future survival of humanity–to be dispensed with so easily. One could, of course, ask why this conflict needs to be resolved at all. Why force the issue? For all religions, if one may generalise, possess, to varying degrees, an impulse toward the universal, toward the articulation of general metaphysical truths, in creative tension with a sacralisation of particular local realities: a particular sacred land or book or person. As Alfred North Whitehead describes it: Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents. Religion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity… Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone.5 Religion, on Whitehead’s understanding, always involves some degree of tension between the universal and the particular. Religion is more than a set of propositions–or, in Hindu terms, a dharma, a way of life, is not reducible to a dars´ana, a philosophy or worldview, although it may include or imply one. In Whitehead’s words, “non-temporal generality…primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone.” If promoting universalist Hindu religious pluralism means divesting Hinduism of its distinctive cultural particularity, then this is not a desirable goal at all. My intent is not to reduce Hinduism to an abstract philosophy. But holding the universal and the particular in tension does not mean dispensing with the universal either. For, as Whitehead also says, religion “is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its selfdefeating particularity.” Particularity is self-defeating to the degree that it renders itself irrelevant to the concerns of the larger world. An exclusively local Hinduism cannot address global issues. It is, in this sense, impotent.

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But this is not the only reason to opt for a more universalist understanding of the Hindu tradition as opposed to a more restrictive one. A restrictive definition of Hinduism is also divisive, and so is not unlike the exclusivist theologies that exist within Christianity and Islam, with which it is often lumped as a type of fundamentalism. Exclusivism fuels a sense of otherness—an ‘us and them’ mentality—rather than a sense of solidarity among human beings. As Whitehead asks rhetorically, “Must ‘religion’ always remain as a synonym for ‘hatred’? The great social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity of civilisation.”6 If the utter denaturalisation of Hinduism, its reduction to a mere abstract philosophy, represents one extreme approach to the question of the relation of Hinduism’s universalistic impulse to its cultural particularity, Hindutva, I would suggest, represents the opposite extreme. If the one renders Hinduism bereft of emotional appeal, the other invests it with too much emotion— emotion of the most destructive variety. It is an ideology, again, of division rather than solidarity. The problematic nature of Hindutva is highlighted by the experiences of those religious minorities within the Indian nationstate who have faced violence fomented in the name of Hindu nationalist exclusivism. The emergence, at least as a widespread understanding, of the more universalist self-conception of Hinduism coincides with a shift within Hinduism from a premodern, tradition-based episteme, an episteme based on the authority of the Vedic scriptures, to a modern episteme, based on a conception of these scriptures as a record of the experiences of the r‹s‹is, or Vedic sages, who composed them—experiences available, in principle, to anyone willing to undertake the requisite yogic disciplines.7 This is analogous to the historical shift in Western thought from premodernity—in which what counts as knowledge is that which is sanctioned by the authority of either scripture or church tradition—to modernity—in which what counts as knowledge is that which is redeemable in terms of common human experience and reason. Western modernity has been critiqued by post-modern writers for assuming the universality of rational principles and experiences that are in actuality merely local to European culture, and as, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, “an incomplete project” that has failed to deliver fully on its promises of human emancipation. Similarly, modern Hinduism fails to live up to its self-conception as a universal dharma inasmuch as it remains bound to the concepts of the Indian nation-state and an Indian ethnic identity—to the idea of Hindutva.8

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On the other hand, though, the possibility for the emergence of a truly universal Hinduism of the kind envisioned in the Ramakrishna movement—the completion of the incomplete project of modern Hinduism, and its emancipation from such problematically restrictive notions as race and nation—is highlighted by the existence of growing numbers of converts to Hinduism who are neither culturally nor ethnically Indian, but who are drawn to what we take to be the wisdom and beauty of this tradition and its ability to enrich and give greater depth and meaning to our lives. The philosopher William James once wisely observed that it only takes one white crow to prove that not all crows are black. If it is fundamental to Hindutva that a Hindu is necessarily a person of Indian ethnic and national origin, then the existence of people who are recognised as Hindu but do not fit one or both of these criteria should be sufficient to refute Hindutva as a definition of a Hindu. To insist on Indian nationality of course ‘de-Hinduises’ diasporic Hindus–some of whom, ironically, are Hindu nationalists. But I would like to draw attention to a group whose Hindu-ness is more difficult for Hindutva to assimilate: Western Hindus. The Emergence of a Western Hinduism: A Refutation of Hindutva For the purpose of refuting Hindutva and promoting a global Hinduism, I would like to defend the idea of an emerging Western Hinduism. By a ‘Western Hinduism’ I mean a religious belief and practice that, on the one hand, has clear and explicitly acknowledged historical and cultural continuities with the ancient traditions of India, but on the other, is held and practiced by people who are ethnically and culturally ‘Western.’ Given the cultural heritage of its adherents, this Western Hinduism is expressed by these adherents in terms of and borrows freely from what one could call the ‘Western cultural tradition’–by which I mean, broadly, the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic traditions of Europe, as well as the contemporary incarnations of these traditions in modern and post-modern philosophies, institutions, and cultural forms. A Western Hindu, for example, may, like many more traditional Hindus, have a guru, or spiritual master. But such Hindus may also, in keeping with Western individualism, have a more self-directed practice. Yet just as European Christianity retains the marks of its ancient Near Eastern origins, and East Asian Islam the marks of its origins in the culture of the Arabian Peninsula, Western Hinduism, though ‘Western’ in certain aspects of its form and expression, remains indelibly linked with the Indian culture of its origin as well.

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This Western Hinduism is distinct from, although it overlaps with, diasporic Hinduism–that is, the Hinduism of Hindus who are ethnically Indian but who are living or were even raised in culturally Western societies, like Europe, Canada, Australia, Latin America, or the United States. I am defining Western Hinduism, in other words, as the Hinduism of those who were specifically not born into the Hindu tradition–regardless of whether they were born or live in India, but who have chosen to adopt it. Of course, as these people have children and raise them in accordance with their Western Hindu beliefs and practices, generations of born Western Hindus will also start to emerge. This has already happened, as members of ISKCON, for example, have raised their children in the Hare Krishna tradition, a Vai„˚ava tradition that I would categorise as a form of Western Hinduism, given its relatively large proportion of Western adherents (by which I mean ethnically European). There are also those children of mixed heritage who have been raised with Hindu beliefs and practices outside of India, and who have chosen to retain these beliefs and practices in adulthood. I would define these people as Western Hindus as well. Clearly, however, this last case–‘Western Hindus’ of mixed Indian and Western ethnicity–is one place where the boundary line between Western Hinduism and diasporic Hinduism breaks down. And indeed, eventually, what I am calling ‘Western Hinduism’ and diasporic Hinduism–and even traditional Indian Hinduism–might merge and become indistinguishable from one another, just as the distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians eventually vanished. My definition of Western Hinduism as the Hinduism of those who have adopted the tradition, in other words, may be superseded over time, as Western Hinduism matures and becomes simply ‘Hinduism as it happens to be practiced by people in the West.’ On that happy day, ethnicity and nationality will not be factors distinguishing one kind of Hindu from another, or one as either more or less ‘authentically’ Hindu than another. Just as proselytising, missionary religions, like Christianity and Islam, though retaining elements of their cultures of origin, have managed, more or less, to transcend their cultural particularity and find homes in other cultures as well–sometimes ones very different from their cultures of origin–similarly, Hinduism, too, will perhaps emerge as a world religion in the fullest sense of the term. This, indeed, is the direction in which I think Hinduism is heading, and in which I believe it should head if it is to remain a vital and living tradition, engaged with the world around it, and not an exclusive, parochial tradition, limited only to people of a certain ethnicity and nationality.

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This is an issue that matters, first of all, because of the marginalising effect of the Hindu nationalist definition of Hinduism on both non-Hindu Indians and non-Indian Hindus–non-Indians who adopt the beliefs and practices of Hinduism. It also places, to my way of thinking, an unnecessary constraint on the ability of the Hindu tradition to interact creatively with other cultures. I am not attempting to promote an essentialist definition of Hinduism. My thesis here is that, although it is certainly possible to stipulate the meaning of a term–such that Hindu can mean someone who is ethnically and nationally, as well as religiously, Indian–the Hindu nationalist definition of Hindu is unrealistic and limiting when one takes into consideration the great variety of people who actually do profess some form of Hindu religiosity in the world today. More importantly, from my perspective, it marginalises those of us with Hindu beliefs who are not of Indian ethnicity or national origin. Even more importantly, the Hindu nationalist understanding of the term Hindu operates with a notion of race that is deeply problematic and that marginalises, sometimes with catastrophically violent results, those Indians, mainly Muslims and Christians, who choose not to identify themselves as Hindu. What, after all, is an ‘Indian ethnicity’ when the DNA of human beings of all groups is fundamentally identical, with very little actually separating one so-called ‘race’ from another. Talk of a Hindu ‘race’ not only lacks a scientific basis, but it easily slides into the kind of racialist and racist thinking that has plagued humanity for the last few centuries. The Hindu nationalist conception of Hinduism is therefore a doubleedged sword, problematising both the Indian-ness of non-Hindus and the Hindu-ness of non-Indians. It provides Hindu nationalist groups with a justification for questioning the patriotism of Indian citizens who do not claim a Hindu identity–Muslims and Christians–and for the kind of fascist scapegoating of these minorities that one associates with Nazism and its treatment of the Jews. Such scapegoating can be seen in the Gujarat riots of 2002, or in the infamous demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.9 It would, of course, be simplistic to leap from something so abstract as a definition of Hinduism to the atrocities committed against real human beings; but the ideology this definition fuels is one factor in creating the conditions that make it possible for such atrocities to occur. But moreover, and this will be my main concern here, it excludes from Hinduism many, including many Westerners, who cherish the teachings and the values of the Hindu tradition and who would like to incorporate these teachings and values into our lives.

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Although I take the marginalisation of and subsequent violence against the non-Hindu communities of India that can be seen to arise from the Hindu nationalist equation of Hinduism with Indian-ness to be the more urgent social issue–because of the violence connected with it–I think that any problematisation of this equation can only advance the cause of transforming Hinduism, of wresting it from the nationalists and claiming it for a wider humanism and universalism that represents the best impulses of its classic texts–the teachings of texts like the ¿g Veda and the Bhagavad Gıt›– and of many of its greatest teachers–like Ramakrishna and Gandhi, who perceive Hinduism as manifesting the san›tana dharma, the universal religion, capable of embracing many peoples and cultures. My argument here shall have two main parts. In the first part, I shall examine a few of the Westerners who have been inspired by and participated in the Hindu tradition, some of whom have even been accepted as spiritual authorities by ‘real’–that is, born–Hindus. The earliest Westerners, at least of the modern period, consciously inspired by Hinduism were the founding figures of the American transcendentalist movement–Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau–followed by the Theosophists. Thoreau and the Theosophists, in turn, inspired Gandhi, and so had a profound, although indirect, impact on modern Hinduism, and even on the foundation of independent India. The next wave of Western interest in Hinduism was among the countercultural youth of the 1960’s and 70’s. Though a great deal of this interest proved both superficial and ephemeral, not all of it was, and it is out of this movement that many of today’s ‘real’ Western Hindus–Westerners who are not only inspired by, but self-consciously adopt a Hindu way of life and worldview–have emerged. The gist of the argument at this point will be that, if Hindus themselves have already accepted into their fold Western adherents such as the ones I will describe as their co-religionists, as bona fide Hindus, then there is a precedent within the tradition itself for rejecting, at least implicitly, the simplistic Hindu nationalist identification of Hindu-ness with Indian-ness. There are already Western Hindus. In this sense, nothing new or radical is being affirmed here. In the second part, I shall turn to the premodern tradition–to the Hindu scriptures–for support of the notion that one’s birth caste–and, by implication, one’s nationality–is irrelevant to one’s prospects for spiritual attainment, one’s ability to achieve spiritual goals and one’s eligibility for receiving, and even for teaching, the sacred wisdom that is a prerequisite for achieving such goals.

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Genuine Sincerity vs. Spiritual Consumerism: The Bona Fid e Western Hindu Might it not be, one could argue, that Hindus–Indian Hindus–have every right to defend their tradition from the encroachment of Westerners who would claim it as their own? Might Western attempts to appropriate Hinduism be seen as a continuation of the story of Western domination of India? Against the backdrop of the history of the unequal relations between India and the West, and the continuing inequalities between these two, perhaps Hindu nationalist identifications of Hinduism with Indianness can be seen as a kind of cultural protectionism, a religious version of the swadeshi movement. Much has been written, and much more can and should be written, on the history of the domination and exploitation of India by the West, as well as India’s struggle, in the aftermath of colonization and in the face of ongoing Western domination, for sustainable economic development. But there is an-other story to be told as well: one of Westerners who have approached India and Indian culture with profound reverence and respect, as students eager for knowledge, and as spiritual seekers craving enlightenment. To be sure, such Western seekers are often regarded with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment by many contemporary Indians. Their antics are parodied in popular Hindi cinema, in such songs as “Dum Maro Dum,” and are nicely lampooned in works like the hilarious and tragic Karma Cola, by Gita Mehta. The lampooning the Western seeker receives in India is not altogether undeserved. Sometimes naïve, sometimes with only the most superficial understanding of the ancient tradition in which he is trying to participate and that he is trying to appropriate into his life, the seeker can exhibit some of the worst characteristics of the “ugly American,” of which he is a subspecies. Arguably, the stereotype of India as fundamentally a spiritual or a mystical place has played a role in its continued exploitation and domination by the West; for it is a stereotype that fuels what we could call the commodification of Indian culture. The ‘instant enlightenment’ mentality that accompanies this basically consumerist approach to spirituality assumes a Westerner can experience the benefits of Indian culture without any serious critique or modification of the modern Western consumerist lifestyle. The ancient and dignified culture of India becomes a fad, a pose, a resource to be exploited for its spiritual riches, a product to be consumed. As Ron Inden writes of such a seeker:

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No major changes in his or her social circumstances are required. A person can somehow look into his or herself and step mentally outside his or her social world (while at the same time appearing to conform to its strictures) in order to create for themselves a new person. India here becomes a living museum (and keen marketplace) of religious humanism, of New Age psychic phenomena, yogic health practices, and ultimate experiences.10 At the same time, however, it is also true that there are Westerners who do not fit into this category who have approached Indian culture, as I stated at the outset, with deep and sincere reverence and respect, with a genuine desire to incorporate into their lives the wisdom that they see in Indian religious traditions. The commitment of serious seekers is evidenced, for example, in their willingness to undertake monastic vows, to learn difficult and ancient languages like Sanskrit and P›lı, or modern Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, or Tamil, or to give up the comforts of life in the West to make India their home, literally and metaphorically, or spiritually. Probably the first Westerners to take Hinduism seriously as presenting a religious and philosophical option, an alternative to, or at least a critique of, the dominant Western modes of life and understanding were the American transcendentalists. To be sure, the translations of the Indian scriptures that were available to them were certainly not the most accurate, and their grasp of actual Indian ideas was sometimes tenuous, but their attempt at understanding produced a cross-cultural synthesis that creatively transformed American literature and philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his poem “Brahma,” for example, is not far from either the letter or the spirit of the Bhagavad Gıt›, a major Hindu scripture that has been particularly influential in the tradition in the modern period. Henry David Thoreau, too, was inspired by the Gıt›, referring to its message as “a sublime conservatism; as wide as the world, and as unwearied as time…The end is an immense consolation, eternal absorption in Brahma.”11 In his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau became something like an American sannyası, a Hindu ascetic who had renounced the world, engaging in what Gandhi would have called an ‘experiment with truth.’ Interestingly, Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” would prove heavily influential on the young Gandhi, who first read the Bhavagad Gıt› through an English translation–Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial–that was given to him by a Westerner, a member of the Theosophical Society.12

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After transcendentalism, the Theosophical Society represents the next wave, or perhaps the cresting of the first, of Western interest in Indian culture and religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Established in 1875 in New York by two adherents of the then-waning spiritualist movement, the highly eccentric and controversial Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steele Olcott, this society would develop into a worldwide organization, with headquarters at Adyar, Madras (now Chennai), India. Its membership would include A. O. Hume–a founding member of the Indian National Congress, which would later be headed by Gandhi (unofficially) and play a major role in the winning of Indian independence from the British Empire–and Annie Besant–who would also serve a term as president of the Congress, as well as being an early teacher of the renowned Jiddu Krishnamurti, who would later leave the Society and go on to be a respected Indian philosopher in his own right. From this same period one finds such Westerners as Margaret E. Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita, joining the Ramakrishna Order of monks, and Hindu religious figures such as Sw›mı Vivek›nanda and Paramahamsa Yogananda reaching out as Hindu missionaries to Western audiences. Why do this if Westerners cannot become Hindu? If Sw›mı Vivek›nanda were truly a Hindu nationalist he would never have left India. The next big wave of Western fascination with Hinduism occurred in the 1960’s, and involved the Beatles and their interest in the Transcendental Meditation technique of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In 1965, George Harrison was introduced to Indian thought and culture through a fortuitous encounter with a Hindu holy man–one Sw›mı Vi„˚u Dev›nanda, to be specific–on the set of the film Help! (a parody, ironically, of Hinduism). The more or less casual interest in Hinduism on Harrison’s part that this encounter sparked would develop, over the course of the next couple of years, into a deep and abiding devotion. It was an interest that began, really, as an interest in Indian music, prompting Harrison to study the sitar in India under the renowned pa˚˜it, Ravi Shankar, who would become not only his teacher and spiritual advisor, but also one of his closest friends.13 Because of his position as a member of the world’s most popular rock and roll band, Harrison’s involvement with the Hindu tradition would eventually serve as one among several catalysts for a wave of popular interest among the youth of America and Europe in Hinduism and in Indian culture. The sounds of India began to infiltrate the Beatles’ music as early as 1965, but lyrical content that reflected the influence of Hindu thought thoroughly permeated Harrison’s solo work until his recent death in November of 2001.

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Like the vast majority of Westerners with an interest in Hinduism, Harrison’s approach to this tradition was eclectic. Though associated most famously, while he was with the Beatles, with the Transcendental Meditation of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Harrison’s more enduring connection was with ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. But he is also known to have studied the works of Mahatma Gandhi and Paramahamsa Yogananda–the latter of whom is depicted, along with his guru (Shri Yukteshwar Giri), his guru’s guru (Lahiri Mahasaya), and his guru’s guru’s guru (the mysterious and elusive “Babaji”), on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Yet eclectic though his Hinduism was, it could not be said to have been insincere. Of course, many of those inspired by Harrison and the Beatles have been of the superficial, spiritual consumerist variety described earlier. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to paint all Western Indophiles with the same brush. Beyond the many more superficial seekers, there have also been a number of Westerners who have gone so far as to take ascetic vows and to join Hindu religious orders, becoming sannyasıs, or renouncers, like the aforementioned Sister Nivedita (Margaret E. Noble), Sw›mı Ambik›nanda Saraswatı, founder of the Traditional Yoga Association of Britain, Rajarshi Janak›nanda (James J. Lynn) of Self-Realization Fellowship, R›md›s Lamb, and numerous Sw›mıs of the Shaiva Siddhanta Church, SYDA Foundation, Ramakrishna Mission or Ved›nta Society, and fully initiated members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Some Westerners have not simply been received as pupils of Hindu gurus, or teachers, and initiated into their ascetic orders. Some have even been designated their gurus’ successors, like Sri Daya Mata, who succeeded Paramahamsa Yogananda as president of Self-Realization Fellowship, which Yogananda founded, on the instructions of his guru specifically for the benefit of Westerners, and Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı, who inherited the mantle of the Kailasa Parampara, or teacher-disciple lineage, of the Nandin›tha Sa˙prad›ya from his guru, Shiva Yogaswami.14 It seems, therefore, that Westerners can and do become Hindu, and can even hold positions of distinction in the Hindu community, as teachers and ascetics who embody the highest ideals of the tradition–the search for wisdom, and for liberation from the cycle of sa˙s›ra, of birth, death, and rebirth. This is an empirical fact: there are Western Hindu practitioners, and even authoritative Western Hindu voices of tradition. Subramuniyasw›mı, for example, is best known for his having established the quarterly journal, Hinduism Today, and he even wrote a book on the specifics of conversion to Hinduism entitled, appropriately, How to Become a Hindu.15

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Of course the audiences of most Western Hindu gurus also tend to be Western as well. But can more traditional Hindus, particularly those who believe in the caste system, also accept these gurus as legitimate spiritual authorities? How Hindu are Western Hindus really? What About Ca ste? In other words, can the Hindu nationalist identification of Hinduism with Indian-ness be so easily refuted? Is a list of sincere Western practitioners, and the unconventional–and arguably unorthodox–sw›mıs and gurus who initiated them, enough? One could conceivably argue that, however sincere these various Western Hindus may have been, they still, by definition, cannot be Hindus. This is because, in addition to the identification of Hinduism with Indianness, there is a further prerequisite for being considered a Hindu–the basis of the identification of Hinduism with Indian-ness–namely, membership in the var˚›±rama dharma, or ‘caste system,’ of Hinduism. This form of social organisation employs the notion of hereditary occupational strata hierarchically organised into an organic system of duties and obligations in which every member of the society plays a particular role for the good of the whole. It is a system that finds sanction, again, in Hindu religious texts, particular legal literature, or dharma±›stras, like the infamous Manusm¸ti, or Laws of Manu. Its cosmological justification is in terms of the law of karma, or action, which entails that the current conditions of one’s life, including one’s station in society, are determined by one’s previous actions. Because the caste system is traditionally conceived as hereditary, the actions that lead to one’s being born in a particular caste, a particular occupational stratum of society, must have been committed in a previous life. And since one cannot change one’s heredity, one’s only hope of social advancement must come in the form of rebirth, in a future life, in a higher caste, which can be achieved by good actions here and now. Good action means obeying the rules particular to the caste into which one was born, one’s svadharma or “own duty.” Bad action, on the other hand, can mean– though it is by no means limited to–the performance of duties proper to a different station in life. The story of Ekalavya, in the Mah›bh›rata, illustrates this last point. An aspiring young warrior, Ekalavya, who is from the lowest caste, the ±Òdra var˚a, wants to train under the illustrious Dro˚a, a renowned martial expert. A ±Òdra, or servant, wants to do the work of a ks‹atriya, a member of the warrior caste.

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Tragically, despite his great ability–his competence–Dro˚a rejects Ekalavya as a student on the basis of his caste, and renders him, furthermore, incapable of pursuing his dream by requiring him to cut off his own thumb as guru daks‹ina, as payment for the fact that he has been learning from Dro˚a without his consent–like a poor student without financial aid who has been sitting in on a college course without paying tuition.16 The moral of this tragic tale, of course, is that caste is not a question of ability, of one’s personal qualities or characteristics. It is a question of birth, pure and simple. If Ekalavya wanted to be a warrior, he should have worked as a very good ±Òdra in the hope of being reborn as a ks‹atriya. The great–and I think deliberate–irony of this story, of course, is that Dro˚a, too, is in grave violation of traditional caste rules. As a Brahmin, Dro˚a is technically forbidden even to handle weapons–and he is the most famous of warriors! He is the greatest trainer of ks‹atriya princes by profession! Dro˚a, the upholder of traditional Hindu orthodoxy in this story, is a hypocrite. Though he later pays for his own transgressions of the var˚a system, the sympathetic character here is most definitely Ekalavya. A subversion of the orthodox stance, it seems, is going on. This subversion of the ‘orthodox’ concept of caste in the Hindu scriptures–which raises, in my view, questions about its very orthodoxy–is an issue to which we shall return shortly. The view that I have been presenting is, of course, a conservative and orthodox interpretation of caste. But it is one that has been challenged repeatedly, both in ancient times and in modernity (by prominent Hindu reformers like Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar, who was also the author of India’s constitution). The logical connections of this conservative Hindu emphasis on birth caste with the notion of Hinduism as an ethnicity should be fairly clear. Mlecchas, or “barbarians,” those who are born beyond the pale of the caste system, are therefore not ›rya, or Hindu. Such persons have no caste. Like persons of low caste, we can hope for a better rebirth by doing whatever kinds of good action are available to us–practicing the various kinds of virtues that are regarded as being of universal relevance, such as nonviolence. But we are excluded from Hindu religious life, if a Hindu is, by definition, one who is born into the caste system. One can therefore deny the Hindu-ness of such people as Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı and Sister Nivedita. Of course, as renouncers, such people are seen as having left behind their caste (or in these cases, their lack thereof). But in those Hindu traditions which emphasise caste most strictly, the question of the eligibility of such people to renounce would still be raised.

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But what if even ‘real’ Hindus–born Hindus, Indian Hindus–are found to accept Westerners as bona fide Hindus, and even to elevate them to the status of Brahmins, in clear violation of the ancient notion of birth caste? This is, in fact, the case. In a study entitled The Hare Krishnas in India, the anthropologist Charles Brooks found, in the course of his fieldwork at Vrindaban, that: [I]n religious settings, caste identity, which is normally essential in social interaction, could be subordinated to evaluations of the sincerity of a person’s devotion. The acceptance of foreigners as Hindus and even Brahmins highlights the complexity of Indian culture and demonstrates its flexibility–its ability to deal with novel and contradictory situations…The fact that foreigners can be considered Brahmins in India shows that our understanding of caste may be incomplete and even incorrect–that Brahmin status, for example, may be achieved as well as acquired by birth.17 This assessment by Brooks certainly rings true with my experiences in the Hindu community, both in India and in the United States–far more true than one might expect if one’s knowledge of Hinduism were limited to writings that defined a Hindu as a person born into the caste system, and therefore, by definition, Indian by ethnicity and national origin. As I discussed in the introduction to this book, my interest in Hinduism began in my childhood, when I was about thirteen years old. A confluence of events led me to adopt a Hindu worldview and way of life as most appropriate to my personal philosophy and general understanding of the world. I have since become a scholar and teacher of Asian religions and philosophies by profession–receiving my doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in the year 2000 and becoming a professor of Religious Studies in the same year. I also married into the tradition in 1995, in a Hindu ceremony performed in India by a priest of the Ärya Sam›j. But does all of this make me a proper Hindu? In fact, I think it is noteworthy to point out that, to date, it has only been Western scholars of Hinduism who have insisted to me personally that I cannot be a Hindu. The Hindu response to my interest in the tradition and my desire to participate in it has been overwhelmingly positive. I have found only love and acceptance within the Hindu community. Western scholarly thinking on this issue seems to affirm a Hindu ‘orthodoxy’ that is largely inoperative in practice, probably due to its excessive dependence upon texts rather than the living Hindu community for its understanding of Hinduism.

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I have frequently been told by my fellow Hindus–that is, by those who were born into the tradition–that I know more about Hinduism than they do. I have even been asked by some to teach their children about the tradition, and to give informal talks on the subject to groups of interested adults. My wife and I are both active and accepted members of our local Hindu temple community. I even have an informal teaching authority, and am treated as a well-informed layperson. Along with a couple of the other men in the community (who are Indian), I am frequently asked questions about Hindu history, philosophy, texts, and the deeper meanings behind particular stories and practices. Sometimes I know the answers, and sometimes I don’t. I am not saying this to be immodest, but to show that nonIndian Hindus like myself are accepted in the community. And rationalisations are available from within the worldview of the tradition for the existence of persons such as myself. In this connection I was once told by an elderly lady at our local temple that she believed Hindu souls, like me, were being reincarnated in Western bodies so that, by the fact of these ‘Western Hindu’ souls being drawn back to their original religion, and feeling the kind of religious fervour and devotion that only a convert–one who has had to work to join the community–can feel, the Hindu community as a whole would experience a renewal of faith and appreciation for its ancient traditions. The more conventional understanding of Hinduism as a tradition into which one is born is certainly the norm. Conversations with friends who have converted to Judaism–which, like Hinduism, does not generally seek converts–reveal that many of the same issues of legitimation are involved. In my case, the overriding considerations–those which seem to have overridden my birth status as a mleccha, beyond the pale of the caste system– have been, first of all, the level of commitment evidenced in the effort involved in my gaining whatever knowledge of Hinduism I have–the effort involved, for example, in learning Sanskrit, in studying Hindu texts and the various schools of Indian philosophy, in living in India for almost two years, in practicing yoga under the tutelage of a guru, etc. This, of course, is all in keeping with Brooks’ analysis, cited above, that religious competence and commitment can supersede birth caste. Secondly, but perhaps more importantly in the eyes of some, there is the fact that I have married into the tradition after having first received the n›ma-kara˚a sa˙sk›ra, or sacrament of naming, and the upan›yana, or investiture with the sacred thread of a Brahmin in a Vedic ceremony. I therefore have a formal, ritual legitimacy, as well as an informal legitimacy based on personal qualities.

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In the eyes, at least, of those Hindus with whom I have become well acquainted, both in India and in the United States, I am a Hindu. Some would cite the formal, ritual conversion that I underwent at the time of my marriage, while others–more, actually–cite the simple fact that I love and feel drawn to the tradition in a deep and obvious way. My wife insists that you are a Hindu if you consider yourself to be one, as does my father-inlaw, both of whom are devotees of Ramakrishna. But is this understanding a purely modern innovation, an adaptation to new circumstances? Or is there justification in the premodern Hindu tradition for such views? A precedent exists, as I hope to show, in the very core of the orthodox tradition–in the Veda–for the valuation of personal qualities, or gu˚as, over j›ti, or birth. Premodern Justifications for Valuing Personal Qualities Over Birth Caste The Buddha is attributed with the assertion that, “One is not a Brahmin by birth, nor by birth a non-Brahmin. By action is one a Brahmin, by action is one a non-Brahmin.”18 In other words, it is one’s personal attributes, one’s individual character, not parentage, which ultimately determines caste status. But a voice within the Hindu tradition that rejects the notion of birth caste, or at least problematises it in favour of a notion of caste as a function of personal attributes, regardless of heredity, is not a purely modern innovation. To be sure, such an egalitarian understanding has become vastly more widespread in the modern period, under the influence of prominent Hindu reformers like Sw›mı Day›nanda Saraswatı and Mah›tma Gandhi–not to mention, B. R. Ambedkar, who embraced Buddhism largely because of its rejection of a divine sanction for the caste system, but also because, unlike Christianity or Islam, it was still an Indic tradition. Part of the character of modern Hinduism, as of modernity as such, is an emphasis on human equality. The justification given for this equality is different from that typically offered in the West, but it is nevertheless affirmed. But this voice of dissent is discernible even at the core of Hinduism: the Upanis‹ads. In the Chandogya Upanis‹ad, one finds the famous story of Satyak›ma Jab›la, one of the great sages of the Upanis‹ads, and widely regarded in the tradition as a major Vedic teacher of ancient times. Satyak›ma approaches his mother, Jab›l›, whose name indicates her low birth caste status, with the desire to study the Vedas. But a student of the Vedas must be a Brahmin, a member of the highest caste of Hindu society.

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In ancient times–and even today, in some of the more conservative Hindu traditions–the prospective student had to prove his identity as a Brahmin by birth by reciting his family lineage to the guru. Satyak›ma therefore wants to know his lineage. His mother replies that she has known many men and is really not sure of his lineage. So Satyak›ma is not only of low birth caste, he is also illegitimate–either one of which would be sufficient, according to the standard criteria of Brahmanical orthodoxy, to render him ineligible for the study of the Vedas. But Satyak›ma fearlessly approaches his prospective guru, the great Haridrumata Gautama, and expresses his desire to study the Vedas. Haridrumata, in accordance with tradition, asks Satyak›ma his lineage, which Satyak›ma truthfully reveals. Upon hearing of Satyak›ma’s illegitimacy and the low-caste status of his mother, Haridrumata, who, on a conventional understanding of the Brahmanical tradition might be expected to command Satyak›ma to leave at this point, and perhaps even, upon his departure, to perform an expiatory ritual to purify himself of the polluting effects of Satyak›ma’s impure, “untouchable” presence, says: “Who but a Brahmin could speak like that! Fetch some firewood, son. I will perform your initiation. You have not strayed from the truth.”19 The moral of this story is exactly the opposite of that of the Mah›bh›rata’s story of Ekalavya (unless that of the latter is to reveal Dro˚a’s high-caste hypocrisy): that individual qualities and competencies are what actually determine caste, and not the other way around. The born Hindus of Vrindaban, then, who accepted Hare Krishna devotees as Brahmins on the basis of their devotion, were acting in a perfectly orthodox fashion. Another voice from the orthodox centre of the tradition who speaks on this issue is ÷aºkar›c›rya, the renowned propagator of Advaita Ved›nta. In a recent work on ÷aºkara, Roger Marcaurelle argues that the renunciation ÷aºkara held to be a necessary pre-requisite for moks‹a, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, was an inner renunciation available in principle to all people, including lay householders, women, non-Brahmins, and even mlecchas–non-Indian ‘barbarians.’ This is a sharp contrast with the more conventional interpretations of ÷aºkara, according to which only a male Brahmin sanny›sı, or renouncer, has the necessary eligibility for the knowledge that leads to such liberation.20 And of course if one moves outside the orthodox centre of the tradition, into the various bhakti movements and the T›ntric sects, one finds a disregard for and sometimes even a deliberate inversion of the notion of caste as a marker of spiritual development, of progress in one’s realisation of the truth of non-duality, which renders caste distinctions illusory.

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Hinduism Is Not Genetic Given the willingness of Hindus to accept those of low caste and even noncaste birth status as Brahmins–from Satyak›ma Jab›la in the Upanis‹ads to the American and European Hare Krishna devotees of contemporary Vrindaban–based on such individual characteristics as sincerity and devotion, given the profusion of non-Indian sanny›sıs in Hindu organizations, given the willingness of Brahmins to teach Westerners Sanskrit and to introduce them to Hindu texts–including the Vedas themselves–over the course of the last two centuries–and, finally, given the existence of a book entitled How to Become a Hindu by Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı, an American-born guru acknowledged as a legitimate Hindu teacher by no less of a representative of Hindu orthodoxy than the ÷aºkar›c›rya of Puri, the claim that a Westerner cannot be a Hindu–and with it Hindu nationalism– is, I think, decisively refuted. Hinduism is not genetic. There is, to be sure, Hindu ethnicity and Hindu cultural and national identity, and these are all perfectly legitimate meanings of the term Hindu. But so is Hindu religious identity, which, as a religious identity, is distinct from, even if historically tied to, ethnicity, culture, etc. Just as there are non-Arab Muslims and non-German Lutherans, there are non-Indian Hindus–spiritually tied to India, yet not Indian. I agree with the assessment of Douglas Brooks on this issue: Hinduism has always been a multicultural religion. Anyone who has witnessed its many expressions in South Asia knows that its diversity, even within this limited geographical setting, has created the practical equivalent of a “world religion”… One can nowadays be “religiously Hindu” from any number of cultural or ethnic backgrounds, much to the chagrin of those who might prefer it otherwise… There are now European and New World Hindus whose ancestors were Christian by religion and whose Hinduism was taught to them in ways decidedly unfamiliar to South Asian Hindus… That such Hindus of non-Asian origins may be disavowed or poorly regarded by other Hindus is simply another fact to consider.21 I might add that Hindus of non-Asian origin may also not be regarded as Hindus by the academy, so long as an academic understanding of Hinduism is dominated by an identification of Hinduism with the caste system.

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‘Soft’ Hindu Nationalism: How ‘Indian’ Must a Hindu Be? Because Hindutva is not a philosophically consistent position based on reflection on the Hindu tradition, but more of a political reflex on the part of Hindus who feel that Hinduism is threatened or under attack, the refutation I have just given of the identification of Hindu-ness with Indian-ness may ultimately have little or no impact upon it. Indeed, as I mentioned in my first chapter, there is a ‘soft’ version of Hindu nationalism that has no problem with non-Indians becoming Hindu. In fact, it welcomes converts, particularly Western converts, whom it views as giving legitimacy to claims of Hindu supremacy. If Hinduism appeals to individuals from what was regarded in the colonial past as a ‘superior’ culture, then maybe that culture is not so superior after all. To be completely honest, I know some of my fellow Hindus who have so kindly welcomed me into their community– though not all, and certainly not a majority–have done so on such a Hindu nationalist understanding. As my wife tells me of such people when we encounter them, “They like you for the wrong reasons.” I would also have to say that I share with the Hindu nationalists, and with other Western Hindus who have spoken out on these issues, a sense that Hinduism is, indeed, a tradition that is under attack from several places simultaneously: militant forms of Islam, aggressively evangelising forms of Christianity, and the more overtly anti-religious secular philosophies. But I do not share–and indeed reject in the strongest terms–the solutions to this situation that Hindu nationalism has proposed: demolishing mosques, riots, and intimidation. Western sympathisers of Hindu nationalism have argued that its fundamental philosophy, being Hindu, is not fascist.22 Whatever the case may be in this regard, Hindu nationalism certainly becomes fascist if it takes on the methods of fascism, and is no less reprehensible. The answer to the threats facing Hinduism, in my judgement, is Hinduism. Hindu teachings should be presented and argued for rationally, as I have sought to do in this book, and their intrinsic appeal should speak for itself. Hindu religious pluralism, rather than being simply asserted as a sign of Hindu superiority, should be practiced. When we show an appreciation for what is good in all traditions, engaging in friendly and cooperative dialogue with those who are willing, we not only become better Hindus, but we also fulfil Gandhi’s vision, helping Christians to be better Christians, Muslims to be better Muslims, and so on. And when actual violence is fomented against Hindus in India, or anywhere, then this is what laws and the political process are for. The community is not protected by mob viollence and provocative gestures which only bring about more violence.23

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With regard to ‘soft’ Hindu nationalism, I see this as a species of Hindu nationalism because it shares the Hindutva equation of Hindu-ness with Indian-ness. But whereas Hindutva, on a hard-core reading based on V.D. Savarkar’s definition, requires a Hindu to be both ethnically and religiously Indian, what I am calling ‘soft’ Hindu nationalism is open to non-Indians, but requires a complete cultural makeover of non-Indian converts. This can involve the adoption of Indian styles of clothing, an Indian diet, and a ‘Hindu’ (that is, Sanskrit) name.24 I see contemporary Hinduism as being in a situation analogous to that of the Christian community during the first few decades of its existence. At its inception, Christianity was a movement within Judaism. The first Christians were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah. Many such prospective Messiahs have come and gone in the history of Judaism, all with followings of varying sizes. What was distinctive about the ‘Jesus movement’ is that it eventually split off from the mother religion, Judaism, and became a separate religion in its own right: Christianity. So the first Christians were Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah and who had some of their own peculiar rituals, but were otherwise good, observant Jews, praying in the temple, observing the holy days and dietary laws, and so on. But then Paul began preaching to non-Jews who began to convert to Christianity, and this provoked a crisis which pitted Paul against the Jerusalem church. The question was: How Jewish does one have to be to be a Christian? On the ‘conservative’ side were those who said such people should first convert to Judaism and then be baptized into the Christian community. In the middle were those who argued for a compromise, requiring that certain minimal, essential laws be followed, but that one need not necessarily observe the whole Torah to be a Christian. And on the radical side was Paul, who saw spiritual renewal in Christ (being ‘born again’ and baptized) as sufficient. This side eventually won out, since Christians today do not observe Jewish dietary laws or require circumcision of males, though the basic Ten Commandments and the general ethical tenor of Judaism has been adopted, as well as the mythology and general sanctity surrounding the Hebrew scriptures (which were incorporated into the Christian Bible as the Old Testament). What does all of this have to do with Hinduism? The question is: ‘How Indian does one have to be to be a Hindu?’ On the ‘conservative’ side there is Hindutva, which essentially identifies being Indian with being Hindu, and so does not allow for conversion in this life, which is analogous to the insistence that all Christians must practice Judaism.

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In the middle I see Vedic neo-orthodoxies of various kinds–like Shaiva Siddhanta and ISKCON–which allow conversion, but which also promote the adoption of Hindu names, Indian modes of dress, vegetarianism, etc. On the radical, ‘Pauline’ side, I would locate traditions like the Ved›nta Society/Ramakrishna Mission, which allow non-ordained devotees to keep our Western names (like ‘Jeffery D. Long’), Western modes of dress, and basic lifestyles as long as these are ethical and conducive to the spiritual life. Some such traditions even have no problem with their devotees continuing to worship and define themselves as Christians, Jews, etc. alongside their Hindu s›dhana. (Transcendental Meditation and Siddha Yoga both come to mind.) The ‘Hindu Paul’ would be Sw›mı Vivek›nanda as the one who began the globalisation of Hinduism by coming to North America and Europe and taking on Western followers, and even allowing for the ordination of people like Margaret Noble/Sister Nivedita. The question, “How ‘Indian’ must one be in order to be a Hindu?” is a thorny one, because it raises the issue of what is ‘essential’ or intrinsic to Hinduism. What is fundamental to Hinduism and what are merely cultural trappings, or expressions? This is not an easy question to answer. Those who have defended what I am calling ‘soft’ Hindu nationalism, insisting on their followers fully adopting Indian culture, like Subramuniyasw›mı, have argued very articulately that nothing in Indic culture is an accident, and that even the sounds of Sanskrit words have a spiritual effect on those who hear and use them. It is an ancient and highly sophisticated and developed culture that is not to be jettisoned or experimented with lightly. At the same time, Hinduism has always been highly diverse. There is no single Indian culture any more than there is a single European culture or American culture. Should the expansion of Hinduism via diverse cultural expressions be artificially curtailed, stopping at the borders of India? Or, if Hinduism is to be a world religion in the true sense of the term, will it have to be something that those of us from non-Indic cultures can adopt and express and make our own in ways that are natural to us, from our own cultural perspectives? I have in mind someone like George Harrison, who, through a music that was shaped by such diverse influences as the blues, soul, rockabilly, and Bob Dylan, conveyed a profoundly Hindu spirituality and worldview to his listeners. And if my analogy between contemporary Hinduism and early Christianity holds, it was the more culturally flexible Christianity of Paul, which did not insist that its followers adopt Judaic culture in its every aspect, which has gone on to become the most widely practiced religion in the world. Indic culture must remain the wellspring of inspiration for Hinduism. But it should unleash, not restrain, creativity.

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An Ancient Vision for the Future This book has been written in the conviction that Hinduism’s pluralistic vision may be its greatest gift to the world: a vision of unity in diversity that can provide a model for how the world’s religions and various other ideologies might learn to co-exist. If groups as diverse as Vai„˚avas, ÷aivas, and Advaita Ved›ntins can co-exist as ‘Hindus,’ is it not conceivable that the followers of all religions could learn to co-exist as co-participants in the common stream of human spirituality? Hinduism arguably contains within itself variety rivalling that of the rest of the world’s religions combined. The coalescence of Hindu identity, though it was the result of colonisation and scholarly objectification by the West, could emerge as the model for a new human identity, and Hinduism, in turn, as the model for a new humanism: spiritually eclectic and without boundaries. What are the alternatives to humanity adopting such a model? An ongoing clash of civilisations in which one finally emerges victorious, over the corpses of the rest? A watered-down secularism, in which all cultural distinctiveness and spiritual depth is lost? Or a withdrawal into secluded enclaves, in which we only have to interact with those who think and believe as we do? It is my personal view that God has given humanity many religions for a purpose. If we want to know the truth in its totality, we need to talk to and learn from one another. Hindu religious pluralism, in my judgment, provides a model for spiritual eclecticism that can enable this conversation to move forward in peace, a model rooted in the hope of the Vedic sages: “United your resolve, united your hearts, may your spirits be at one, that you may long together dwell in unity and concord!”25

END NOTES

Introduction I shall make numerous references in this book, likely to be maddening to many scholars of religion, to ‘the’ Hindu tradition in the singular. The likely objection to this will of course be that Hinduism consists of a plurality of traditions and that such a usage obscures this fact. I am not unaware of this internal diversity, in fact seeing it as a strength of Hinduism. The lynchpin of my thesis is that Hinduism is a model for unity-in-diversity. References to ‘the tradition’ in the singular, which emphasise the ‘unity’ half of this balance, are a convenient shorthand. I could also have said ‘Hindu traditions’ wherever I have said ‘the Hindu tradition,’ but felt that such a formulation might be grammatically awkward in certain places. And such a usage would also be susceptible to the opposite objection of emphasising diversity at the expense of unity–an objection more likely to be raised from within the Hindu community than by scholars of religion. There is also, I must admit, an ideological element to this choice, given my sense that the non-unity of Hinduism has been over-emphasised in recent scholarship on Hinduism. As Julius Lipner points out, other religions are also internally diverse. (Lipner, in Llewellyn) But no one raises repeated, vociferous objections to references to Christianity in the singular, or Judaism, or Islam. I also find that the strong scholarly emphasis on the constructed nature of Hinduism undermines efforts by self-identified Hindus to speak as such. All religions are constructs. It is not obvious that Hinduism needs to be singled out in this regard, though its case is admittedly unusual. Having no single founding figure or authoritative institution to define it for itself, it has consequently been defined by others, making its constructed nature perhaps more obvious than that of ‘self-constructed’ traditions like Christianity. 2 As a member of the Ramakrishna tradition, I do believe in liberation, and in the perfected perspective of the enlightened sage, which is something like a ‘God’s-eye point of view.’ But I would say that even such a perspective is not incontestable 1

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from the point of view of those of us who do not yet share it. All claims to enlightenment or omniscience can, and I believe should, be subject to doubt and rigorous critique, and some set of criteria for verification. And I am at one with my tradition in making this assertion. One does not follow even one’s guru blindly. 3 A ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is an approach to a text that presumes the text’s surface meaning conceals a deeper agenda of which even the author may be unaware. Most frequently such approaches operate either from a political or a psychoanalytic perspective, seeing the underlying agenda either in ideological terms or in terms of repressed psychological impulses that the critical hermeneutical approach discloses. Marx and Freud are the respective pioneers of these two versions of the hermeneutics of suspicion. 4 Brooks 2000 5

Prabhup›da

Shankarananda This now widely held view in the academy of religion has been challenged by David Lorenzen in his article “Who Invented Hinduism,” in Llewellyn, pp. 52-80. 8 Long forthcoming (a) 9 As shall be seen later, my own definition of Hinduism actually includes Jainism and Buddhism; for I do not insist on theism as intrinsic to all forms of Hinduism, defining it therefore in terms only of acceptance of the ideas of karma, rebirth, and liberation. But I am speaking here of Hinduism as conventionally conceived, as including not only the ideas of karma and rebirth, but a strong theistic component as well, which distinguishes it from Jain and Buddhist worldviews, which are widely regarded as non-theistic. Characterisations of Jainism and Buddhism as nontheistic, though, are not without their problems. There are different ways of conceiving of theism, some of which are quite compatible with Jainism and Buddhism. The Whiteheadian conception of theism for which I argue in this book is, I think, one such conception. And similarly, there are degrees of emphasis on theism in Hinduism. S›˙khya is non-theistic, and classical Advaita is theistic in a somewhat attenuated sense, relative to Dvaita and Vi±i„˛›dvaita. 10 Macgregor, Griffin 1997 11 Pascal’s wager is a famous argument for religious belief developed by the Christian philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal. Pascal argues, essentially, that if religion is false, then if one believes, one has simply deluded oneself. But if religion is true, and one does not believe, then one could potentially deprive oneself of eternal salvation. Given the potential costs and benefits, Pascal argues that it is a more rational choice to place one’s bets on the truth of religion than on its falsehood. This is his ‘wager.’ William James has a version of this argument which is closer to my own view, which is that, with respect to certain questions that are not resolvable on the basis of empirical data (e.g. the existence of God or a soul), 6 7

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one is justified in believing according to one’s desires, particularly if the issue is one that is of great consequence to oneself. Does my life have a higher purpose? Is there an afterlife? In the absence of compelling evidence either way, I am justified in choosing to believe (or not) based on my own inclinations. 12 I recall once seeing the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart on television preaching to an adoring stadium crowd (this was before his very public and humiliating fall from grace) that Gandhi and Mother Theresa were going to hell because they had not been ‘born again,’ as he understood it. This struck me as pure lunacy, given not only the moral heroism of these two people, but also the loving nature of the God in whom I believed. And given my emergent belief in reincarnation, and that God does not punish us so much as give us needed learning experiences (my understanding of karma), I found this view both utterly incredible and utterly offensive. 13 Gandhi 1982, 75 14 Hick 1989 15 The Baha’is shared my belief in religious pluralism, which is what drew me to them. But we differed on the issue of rebirth, which, as I have just indicated, is central to my worldview. 16 Griffiths 1992 17 The Ärya Sam›j is a Hindu reform organisation started in the nineteenth century by Sw›mı Day›nanda Saraswatı. 18 When the n›makara˚a sa˙sk›ra, or naming sacrament was performed I was given the Hindu name Vivek›nanda at the suggestion of my father-in-law, who is a great devotee and admirer of Ramakrishna and Sw›mı Vivek›nanda. In 2004, when I presented a paper at the Parliament of World Religions in Barcelona, my father-inlaw was ecstatic, Sw›mı Vivek›nanda of course being famous for his address to the Chicago Parliament of World Religions in 1893. My association with the University of Chicago was one of the reasons my father-in-law felt my being named after Sw›mı Vivek›nanda was appropriate. 19 Both terms, religion and Hinduism, emerged from out of the same early modern European discourse. 20 Most prominent among these was a Pratap Majumdar. But although Majumdar preceded Sw›mı Vivek›nanda, he did not create anything like the movement which Vivek›nanda inspired. In fact, his relative unpopularity in comparison with Vivek›nanda caused Majumdar considerable consternation. (Vrajaprana, personal communication) 21 Rambachan 1991, 1994 22 A good Ved›ntic example is Bhagavad Gıt› 2:46. Y›v›n artha udap›ne sarvata¯ sa˙plut ‘odake t›v›n sarve„u vede„u br›hma˚asya vij›nata¯. “Just as a well is of little use when the whole countryside is flooded, similarly are all the Vedas of little use to the enlightened Brahman.” There are also the ±r›ma˚a traditions, like Jainism and

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Buddhism, which base their claims on the enlightenment experiences of their respective founders, Lord Mah›vıra and Lord Buddha. Both this verse from the Gıt› and the orientation of Jainism and Buddhism are distinctively modern in their privileging of experience over scriptural authority (±abda). Indeed, modern Ved›nta could be said to follow Jainism and Buddhism in making the authoritative nature of scripture depend upon being the word of an enlightened being, a being who has had a direct experience of the true nature of reality. 23 Bhagavad Gıt› 2:46 See previous footnote. 24 Griffin 2001, Hartshorne 1983 (Whiteheadian resemblances to Ramanuja). 25 I draw my use of the term ‘third space’ to delineate cultural hybridity from the work of Homi Bhabha. 26 Isaiah 42:6 Chapter One Tharoor, ‘Identity Politics,’ The Hindu, Sunday, December 22, 2002. 2 The BJP’s predecessor, the Jana Sangh, apparently formally distanced itself from such an identification of Indian-ness and Hindu-ness, endorsing instead what it calls ‘genuine secularism’ which does not give preferential protective treatment to minority communities but treats all communities impartially. (Koenraad Elst, personal communication). My own observation, however, is that it is not uncommon for rank and file BJP members and supporters to persist in making this equation, even if relatively un-self-consciously. 3 The most recent such critique has been offered by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, in a book-length essay entitled The Argumentative Indian. 4 There have been numerous instances of non-Indian Hindus, including members of Hindu ascetic orders, who have been denied entry to such temples as Vi±van›th temple in Banaras and Jagann›th at Puri. Most recently, an especially disturbing case involved not only denial of temple entry, but police brutality against the Indian Hindu husband of a non-Indian Hindu woman when the couple approached the police to protest the fact that they had not been admitted. 5 Hindu organisations that require such ‘Indianisation’ from their non-Indian converts include the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and the Shaiva Siddhanta Church of Satguru ÷iv›ya Subramuniyasw›mı. See Subramuniyasw›mı. (How to Become a Hindu) 6 Historically, the term san›tana dharma originally seems to have referred specifically to the sm›rta or Vedic tradition, regarded as apaurus‹eya–authorless, and so eternal. This was in deliberate contrast with the non-Vedic ±r›ma˚a traditions, such as Jainism, Buddhism, and possibly S›˙khya, which traced themselves to historical founders, sages such as Mah›vıra, the Buddha, and K›pila, respectively. To call the Vedic tradition san›tana is therefore an assertion of Brahmanical superiority, which 1

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contrasts the eternal Vedic tradition with traditions of mere human manufacture (paurus‹eya). But, as will be discussed later, in the modern period, when such figures as Sw›mı Vivek›nanda reconceive veda as a universal wisdom that is not limited to a set of ancient Sanskrit texts, san›tana dharma, too, comes to mean, by extension, a truth that is present in all traditions and at all times. This is the usage that I also adopt in this book. 7 Goel 8 Morales. I say ‘bizarrely’ because more conservative Christian theologians have been strongly resistant to religious pluralism as it has arisen in their midst, among more liberal theologians whom I would argue have been influenced by Hinduism, rather than vice versa. Morales is on solid historical ground when he speaks of the Unitarian influence on Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, and Vivek›nanda. But from a traditional Christian perspective, Unitarians are not even Christians because they deny the central doctrine of the trinity (hence their name). Unitarians today include people who describe themselves as pagans, non-theists, and even Buddhists. By far the most influential Unitarian thinker of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was heavily influenced by Hinduism, giving rise to the transcendentalist movement in New England. Morales’ attempt to see a Christian plot to weaken Hinduism in the Ramakrishna tradition is based on a profound misunderstanding of both Ramakrishna and Unitarianism. At the same time, I agree with Morales that the destructive effects of the oversimplified form of religious pluralism that he attacks under the title ‘radical universalism’ are quite real, and that his criticisms in this regard are on the mark. This is one reason I believe religious pluralism needs a radical reformulation such as I am hoping to provide in this book. 9 Quoted in Doniger 2005. 10 Or rather, a deeply misguided misuse of it. 11 In making this claim I am echoing Julius Lipner, who makes a similar assertion in his article in Llewellyn 2005. 12 Lindbeck 13 The Ramakrishna tradition’s concept of the relativity of perspectives has been compared to Einsteinian relativity before. See Tapasyananda 1990. 14 See for example Doniger, Smith, and Halbfass 1988, 1991. 15 I recently witnessed an example of this sort of thing on the Religion in South Asia or RISA e-mail chat group sponsored by the American Academy of Religion, in which a prominent and respected Hindu scholar was rebuked by a European scholar for promoting his own ‘pet’ brand of Hinduism. The European scholar later apologized, but the exchange was striking for the patronizing tone–highly evocative of the colonial period–that the European scholar took toward the Hindu scholar, ironically in the name of demolishing a colonial construct.

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See Halbfass 1991. Some have argued that the Manusm¸ti should either be edited or expunged from the Hindu canon due to the violent bigotry against women and members of the lower castes that some of its passages endorse. 18 Ranganathananda, Gier 2000 19 Richard King. King’s study presents a detailed account of the ways in which the author(s) of the Gaudap›dıya Ma˚dukyopani„ad Karik›s draw upon Mah›y›na Buddhist arguments and concepts (albeit not always in ways with which all Buddhists would necessarily agree) in order to advance the doctrine of aj›tiv›da, the existence of a single, non-originated, eternal entity, the nirgu˚a Brahman of Advaita Ved›nta. 20 Even if such support was undertaken for purely laukika, or this-worldly, reasons, because kings needed to maintain the good will of a variety of communities, the fact that the common worldview of the era allowed for such pluralism (in contrast with, for example, Protestant and Catholic Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods), is significant. 21 Brahmanism being a term used to describe the specifically Vedic tradition of Hinduism in contrast with theistic traditions such as Vai„˚avism and ÷aivism. 22 Religion of course means much more than this. But it includes this. My point here is only to distinguish Hinduism from Indic culture and ethnicity as involving assent to some minimal set of propositions: namely, some version or other of the cosmology and soteriology of karma, rebirth, and liberation, there being of course many variations on these themes in the Indic traditions. 23 Clearly, the secular ideal of governmental neutrality with respect to religion is an ideal that can in fact be only imperfectly realised. Unless we expect politicians to be schizophrenic, we must acknowledge that they will inevitably bring their personal values, religious and otherwise, to bear upon the issues on which they must make decisions, although they clearly have a duty to ensure that their decisions reflect the values of the society as a whole, rather than what might be idiosyncratic religious convictions. Even social values that are widely shared, though, such as the conviction that murder is wrong and should therefore be illegal, historically have an originally religious basis. And when the beliefs and practices of a particular religious community are found to be in conflict with the dominant values of the society, secular governments have not hesitated to use force in order to stop practices regarded as inimical to the common good (such as child abuse, drug abuse, or the storage of large amounts of weaponry). Secular religious neutrality remains an ideal or limit concept–albeit an essential one–rather than a practicable reality. 24 To take an example at random, see Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies, a work that is highly critical of what its author takes to be covert theological 16 17

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assumptions operating within the academy of religion. While I am in agreement with his critique of covert theologising, preferring the overt variety, Fitzgerald’s clear preference is for ‘value-neutral’ scholarship. Theology, as he uses the term, often seems to become a code word for poor scholarship. His preference for ‘value neutrality’ is ironic, though, given the clear preference for a specific set of (secular and liberal) political values that comes through when he describes his work on the Ambedkarite Buddhists in India. It is not that I disagree with those values–I do not–only with their ‘covert’ role in his work. I have no animus against Fitzgerald by the way, whom I have never met. I am picking on him as a random example of a scholar who exhibits a widespread trend in the academy of religion. 25 Macintyre 26 Griffin 2001 27 Whitehead 1978, 7 28 Examples of this literature include Charles Hartshorne’s The Divine Relativity and The Logic of Perfection, various works by John Cobb, David Griffin, etc. 29 See Sarma and Tapasyananda 1990. 30 Sarma, 70-71. 31 This tendency, found in Hick, for example, is likely a consequence of the indirect influence of Advaita Ved›nta, via the Ramakrishna tradition, on much of pluralistic thought. The tendency to identify the Ramakrishna tradition with Advaita was mentioned earlier, in the introduction. 32 Hick 1997 33 Richards, 156 34 Gier 2000 35 Brooks 1997 36 Francis X. Clooney has argued eloquently for the legitimacy and the desirability of the category of Hindu theology, though he has not, to my knowledge, explicitly engaged with the issue of whether non-Indians are eligible to pursue Hindu theology properly speaking, as Hindus. I suspect that he would be favourable to such a possibility, however, given his understanding of adhik›ra, or eligibility, as something that a person can cultivate. Clooney. 37 Sherma 38 The phrase “A Relational Worldview for the Common Good” is drawn from the logo of the Centre for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology, a preeminent institution for the study and promotion of Whiteheadian process thought. 39 Griffin 2000, xxv-xxvi 40 Griffiths 1991, 48 41 I am thinking, for example, of my neighbours in the Amish community and their principled rejection of modern conveniences in the name of a simpler, more ecologically sustainable mode of life.

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Jüergensmeyer, 243 See Rambachan and Halbfass. 44 Griffin 2001, 23 45 Ibid, 171 46 Gamwell, 194 47 Cobb 1999, 59 48 Panikkar. 49 Bhagavad-Gıt› 5:29 50 Savarkar, 141 42 43

Chapter Two I am taking the final member of the compound, bh›va, or ‘state of being,’ to refer not to the religions themselves (as Gandhi’s translation suggests), but to refer to a state or disposition (another possible meaning of bh›va) that we human beings should have toward all religions: a state characterised by sama, meaning equality, or impartiality. On this construal, sarva-dharma-sama-bh›va does not mean ‘the state of all religions as equal’–a description of the religions themselves–but ‘a disposition that is equal toward all religions’–a description of how we ought to treat all religions. Why is this distinction important? Presumably, if all religions are equal, then it would follow that we should also treat them that way. But it is the former claim that gives rise to many of the thorny issues surrounding religious pluralism. What do we mean by ‘equal’? Equally true? How can this be if they make incompatible claims? Equally conducive to salvation? The latter claim, however, that we should treat all religions as equal, can be justified without invoking a claim that all religions are equal. A variety of grounds for such a moral injunction could be invoked, including purely pragmatic ones about maintaining peaceful communal relations. Grammatically, either translation is possible. I believe mine is stronger on philosophical grounds and gets at what Gandhi really cared about: how real human beings treat one another, rather than ‘religions’ as abstract entities. 2 Vrajaprana. When I say ‘modern Ved›nta’ I am referring specifically to the tradition that traces itself to the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and that is carried forward by the order of monks, nuns, and lay supporters making up the organization known in India as the Ramakrishna Mission and in the West as the Ved›nta Society. But more broadly, I would also take it as legitimate to include within this expression thinkers who have been demonstrably influenced by this tradition, such as Mahatma Gandhi and S. Radhakrishnan in India and Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith in the West. 3 Vrajaprana, 55 4 Morales, Malhotra 5 Morales 1

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Vrajaprana, 56 A compilation of lectures by Sw›mı Vivek›nanda relevant to the issue of religious pluralism, gathered with the aim of giving his views on this topic a more systematic presentation than has previously been the case, has recently been collected by Sw›mı Brahmavidy›nanda under the title View from the Centre. 8 Vrajaprana, personal communication 9 Das, xvii 10 If my claim seems odd that the lack of systematic argument for religious pluralism in the Hindu tradition is an indicator of its centrality to the tradition, I can point to a similar lacuna in the cases of karma and rebirth, which are largely taken for granted. The great inter-systematic debates amongst the various schools of thought in classical Indian philosophy–Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain–did not typically touch on these issues because there was such widespread agreement upon them. There was debate over the particulars of various traditions’ claims. The no self doctrine of Buddhism, for example, evoked criticism from Brahmans and Jains for its seeming incompatibility with the rebirth doctrine, which the Buddhists also affirmed. The Jain doctrine of the materiality of karma similarly evoked criticism from Brahmans and Buddhists. And Brahmanical theism evoked criticism from Jains and Buddhists who held that a coordinator of the activities of karma was an unnecessary postulate. But all three groups largely took the reality of karma and rebirth for granted as axiomatic, however much they differed on the details of the process. I am claiming that religious pluralism is similarly taken for granted in modern Hinduism. 11 Hick 1989, 233-251 12 Smith, Knitter 1985, 1986, and 1995 13 Whitehead 1978, 3-6 14 Ibid, 4 15 Ibid 16 Lowe 1985, 4; 1990: 266 17 Whitehead 1929, 16 18 Lowe 1990, 110-118 19 Griffin 2001, 5 20 Whitehead 1929, 4-8 21 Marcuse 1964, 228 22 Lowe 1985, 6 23 Whitehead 1978, 343 24 Whitehead 1925, 179 25 Whitehead 1978, 346-347 26 Griffin 2001, 6-7 27 Whitehead 1978, 342-351 6 7

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Ibid, 21 Ibid, 73 30 Ibid, 18 31 Ibid, 343 32 Whitehead 1967, 109 33 Ibid, 111 34 Ibid, 139 35 Ibid, 115 36 Ibid, 160 37 Whitehead 1978, 346 38 Ibid, 344 39 Ibid, 4 40 Ibid, 21 41 Ibid 42 Ibid, 31 43 Ibid 44 Chandogya Upanis‹ad 6:1 28 29

45

Asato m› sad gamaya, tamaso m› jyotir gamaya, m¸tyor m›-am¸tam gamaya.

46

B¸hadara˚yaka Upanis‹ad 2:5

Ibid Nikhilananda, 218 49 Chandogya Upanis‹ad 6:2 50 Vrajaprana, 2 51 Nikhilananda, 242 52 In classical Advaita, m›y› is regarded as a ‘superimposition’ on the true, nirgu˚a character of Brahman. But critics of Advaita point out that this seems to involve an inconsistency with the Advaitic claim that Brahman is all that exists. My process interpretation resolves this problem with its claim that m›y› is Brahman, perceived from the relative perspective of time and space. Both Sri Ramakrishna and Sw›mı Vivek›nanada make this claim in numerous places, thus showing the compatibility of modern, Ramakrishna Ved›nta and process thought. T›ntra, too, asserts the nondifference of nirgu˚a Brahman and m›y›. Given the prevalence of T›ntric thought and practice in Bengal, and Ramakrishna’s immersion in the ÷›kta tradition, it is not surprising that Ramakrishna’s Ved›nta would incorporate this T›ntric insight. 53 Griffin, 261 and Whitehead 1978, 20 54 Whitehead 1978, 348 It is important to note that Whitehead conceives of creativity in terms of the resolution of multiplicity into unity, within the being of a single actual entity—which is what he means when he says ‘the one’—whereas the Hindu tradition tends to come from the opposite direction—beginning with an original metaphysical unity and moving from there to the universe of perceived 47 48

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multiplicity. The idea that the East begins from within, with the essence of a thing, and moves from there to the empirical reality, from the abstract to the particular, and that the West begins with the perceived reality and moves from there to a generalized ultimate unity, from the particular to the abstract, is one way of characterising the difference in philosophical styles between the West and India. To the degree that this is a valid observation (albeit all such generalizations have important exceptions—e.g. Plato—and run the risk of becoming stereotypical), the correspondences between Hindu and process thought that I am outlining in this essay support a case, I think, for the Hindu idea that many paths can lead to the same truth, and that the path one takes, the path that is most appropriate for one, depends upon one’s starting point—that, regardless of our starting points, we can still end up reaching the same conclusion. 55 Nikhilananda, 134 56 Whitehead 1978, 31 57 Paul Tillich, for example, famously identifies God with Being Itself—a role reserved in process thought for creativity, God being, instead, the Supreme Being. The trend of much recent non-process Christian theology, such as the work of Bishop John Shelby Spong, has accordingly been towards a depersonalisation of God, which is arguably even less orthodox, from a traditional Christian perspective, than process thought! 58 Whitehead 1967, 115 The importance of what Whitehead calls the “doctrine of Immanence,” in contrast with classical Christian and Islamic notions of the universe as wholly dependent upon an external reality for it existence, is that only such a doctrine of can guarantee the coherence of a metaphysical system. As Whitehead says elsewhere, “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.” Whitehead 1978, p. 343 59 It is significant that the name of one of the most important Hindu deities, Vishnu, means, literally, “the pervader,” “the one who pervades all things.” 60 This phrase is Sw›mı Vivek›nanda’s gloss on Kena Upanis‹ad v. 4. 61 Bhagavad Gıt› 6:30, translation of Sri Aurobindo 62 Taittirıya Upanis‹ad 2:1-5 63 Bhagavad Gıt› 7:7, translation of Sri Aurobindo 64 Whitehead 1967, 160 65 Nikhilananda, 111 66 Ibid, 609 67 The language of ‘becoming’ and ‘taking on’ of finitude does not imply a temporal process—that there was a beginning when there was only the One, after which the One became the many. Though the tradition utilizes anthropomorphic—and so

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necessarily temporal—language and imagery to describe it, this process of divine unfoldment occurs at each and every moment. See Panikkar. 68 Sarma, 70-71 69 Dasgupta, 4 70 Griffin 1997 71 This is the ‘rough parity’ of religions of which John Hick speaks, with regard to their experiential-expressive, transformative power, and their capacity to produce persons of a universally recognised saintly character. Chapter Three Griffin 2003, 1 2 Ibid, 30 3 The contrast between a differential and an identist pluralism being that there may be different types of salvation, derived from practices oriented toward distinct religious objects. 4 Hick 1989, 246 5 Griffin 2001, 247 6 Ibid, 248 7 Long 2000, 2001 8 Griffin 2003, 39-40 9 Heim, 141-142 10 Surin 11 Cobb 1982 12 Griffiths 1990, xii 13 Whitehead 1978, 3 14 Ibid, 4 15 Ibid, xiv 16 Whitehead 1967, 145 17 Cobb 1995, 56-57 18 Pandit, 353 19 Fisher, 126, 127 20 Subramuniyaswami, Dancing with Shiva, 532 21 Rig Veda 1.164: 46c 22 Bhagavad-Gıt› 4:11 23 The development of this view in early Advaita Ved›nta is presented in King 1995. 24 Haribhadrasuri, Yogad¸s€t€isamucc›ya, 129-131 25 Nikhilananda, 60 26 Richards, 65 27 Ibid, 156, 157 1

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For a brief account of Swami Vivekananda’s role in the contemporary Hindu appropriation of the Buddha see Long. 29 Griffin 2003, 47-48 30 Ibid, 47 31 Rahner. 32 Process Christian theologian Schubert Ogden contrasts this constitutive Christology with a representative Christology which allows for the possibility of an authentic Christian religious pluralism. 33 Pandit, 30 34 This objection to my approach was brought to my attention by Matt Lopresti (personal communication). 35 Dennett, Harris. 36 I owe this discussion to Matt Lopresti as well, who has suggested that salvific goals limited to this life, and so not incompatible with rebirth, are logically possible under my model, thus allowing it to be more fully pluralistic by accommodating such goals in other religions without necessarily subordinating them to the pursuit of liberation. He also specifically mentions the jıvan mukta, or person liberated in this life, an important doctrine of the Advaita tradition (personal communication). 37 Griffin 2001, 278-279 38 Ibid 39 As Anantanand Rambachan has argued in Rambachan 1991. 40 Subramuniyaswami, Dancing with Shiva, 779 41 Nikhilananda, “Introduction to Shankara’s Philosophy,” 70 42 Griffin 2001, 278 43 Whitehead 1978, 31 44 Bhagavad-Gita 12:5 45 Hartshorne, Langbauer, Griffin 2001 46 Subramuniyaswami, 1186 47 Richards, 55 48 Griffin 2001 49 Ibid 50 Tapasyananda, 1985 51 Griffin 2001, 279 52 For examples of process thinkers who have engaged with and analysed Gandhi’s thought, see McDaniel and Gier. 53 Gandhi, Young India: 1919-1931, 30 54 Nikhilananda, 480 55 Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, 51 56 Inden, 85-130 57 Ibid, 86 28

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Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, 51, 52-53 Ajay Sachdeva (personal communication) 60 Olivelle, 16 61 Griffin 2003, 14-27 62 Richards, 156 63 Ibid, 89 64 Ogden, 1-2 58 59

Chapter Four Gier 2000 2 Babb 3 Whitehead 1978, 73 4 Whitehead 1967, 115 5 Ibid 160 6 Whitehead 1978, 346 7 Ibid 343 8 Udana 9 John Cort’s article 10 Äptamım›˙s› 10 11 Whitehead 1978, 46 12 Charles Hartshorne makes this important refinement of Whitehead’s conception of God, which resolves a number of difficulties to which Whitehead’s original concept gives rise. 13 Whitehead 1925, 178 14 Whitehead 1978, 348 15 Ibid, 244 16 Thomas, trans. 29-36 17 Whitehead 1978, 257 18 Jaini, 89 19 Whitehead 1978, 34 20 Jaini, 89 21 Whitehead 1978, 244 22 Mah›prajñ› 1996, 30-31 23 Dundas, 94 On a personal note, I was quite surprised, during my own pilgrimage to Shravana Belgola, a prominent Jain holy place in the state of Karnataka, near the city of Mysore in southern India, to be frequently greeted by Jains with the phrase, “God bless you.” I had understood Jainism to be a nontheistic religion. I was even more surprised to hear a Jain tour guide explaining the concept of the fordmaker, or Tırthaºkara, to a group of Western tourists in terms strongly reminiscent of the Vai„˚ava concept of the avat›r, claiming that “God” had appeared on earth twenty1

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four times to show people the way to liberation. This suggests, to me, a strong theistic bent in the interpretation of the Jain tradition, at least among some contemporary Jain laypersons. I frequently heard similar comments among Jains in New Delhi, where I lived for over a year and a half. Such comments can, of course, also be taken simply as an attempt by Jains to ‘translate’ their tradition to a predominantly theistic audience. But the fact that they do take it to be translatable in theistic terms may be suggestive of more than merely surface-level similarities between the concept of the Jina and the concept of God. 24 Äptamım›˙s› 29 25 Yogad¸s€˛isamucc›ya 129 26 Whitehead 1978, 348 27 Dundas, 77 28 Ibid, 78 29 Gamwell, 171 30 Griffin 1997, 184-208 31 Ibid 32 Ibid, xiv 33 Ibid, 4 34 Äptamım›˙s› 105 35 Dundas, 199 36 For a counter-example, see Hartshorne, 154. For further exploration of this question, see Morris. 37 Ramakrishna, 43-44 38 A similar understanding is outlined by Klinghoffer. 39 Bhagavad Gıt› 9:25 40 Dundas, 196 41 Whitehead 1978, 39 Chapter Five Doniger 2005 2 Radhakrishnan 3 Morales 4 Savarkar, 83-131 5 Whitehead 1978, 15 6 Whitehead 1967, 172 7 Though the premodern tradition, as Marcaurelle argues, would accept the idea of yogic experience, and the liberation arising therefrom, as available to all who would be willing to undertake the requisite disciplines, the conception of Vedic scripture as the product of such experiences, rather than as the ultimate norm in terms of which all such experience is to be evaluated, is thoroughly modern. 1

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Habermas, in Foster, ed. Fisher, 124 10 Inden, 81 11 Miller, 157 12 Gandhi 1958 13 Beatles, 171 14 Yogananda, Subramuniyaswami 1999. 15 Subramuniyaswami 2000. 16 Van Buitenen, 270-272. 17 Nanda and Warms, 59 18 Nanamoli & Bodhi, 806 19 Olivelle, 130 20 Marcaurelle 21 Brooks, 822-823 22 Koenraad Elst (personal communication), Frawley, 170-179. 23 As the demolition of the Babri masjid did, when it provoked the destruction of dozens of Hindu temples across South Asia. 24 Subramuniyaswami’s How to Become a Hindu is a case in point. 25 Panikkar, 863 8 9

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