Foundations of Religious Unity

Russell Perkins, the Editor of Sat Sandesh, discusses concepts common to all religions

 

DEAR FRIENDS:  Some of the most pleasurable moments of my life have been spent studying the scriptures and traditions of all religions.  Though I am a Christian by birth and bringing up and I love the Bible dearly, I have also love studying the lives and teachings of Milarepa, Ramakrishna, St. Francis of Assisi, Guru Nanak, Kabir, and many others too.  And there are certain things that do run through all of their teachings, even though there are outer differences; if it weren’t so, I don’t think it would be possible to read the writing and lives of all of them and get the same degree of inspiration.

 

There is one thing that is found in every religion and is basic to the religious way of looking at the universe; and that is, coming to grip with the fact of death.  Everyone dies; and yet life as it is set up in the world is predicated on the assumption that we will never die.  People work, take on connections, and treat each other as though they were going to live forever.  And if we look into our own actions and ways of life we will find that this is so.

 

Jesus told a story about a farmer whose harvest was in, and he was content within himself and very happy; and God came to him and said, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.” So suddenly all that he had done became irrelevant; it just didn’t matter any more.  If we go into the lives of these great saints and prophets, we find that what they did and said was relevant to the fact of death.  After all, the only thing that happens to everyone without exception is death; it seems that any way of looking at life, or any school of thought, that doesn’t take death into consideration is silly.

 

So that’s one thing that we find in every religion.  The other thing is this.  Everybody knows that when Jesus was asked what the two great commandments were, he said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind; and the second is like into it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But what a lot of people don’t know is that Jesus didn’t invent those commandments; they are found in the law of Moses, who gave them out 1500 years before Christ.  So when Christ gave out those commandments as the essence of his own teaching he was showing in a very beautiful way the continuity of God’s revelation.

 

A little later Peter and James and John witnessed Jesus’ transfigured, he wasn’t alone—Moses and Elijah were with him. You see? Two great saints who had come before.  And so, even though Jesus was manifesting the greatness of God working through his at that point, he was also showing that he was not doing anything new; that those who had come before were with him.

 

In the same way, when the Koran was revealed through the Prophet Mohammed, explicit references were made many times to Moses, Jesus, Abraham, and many others who came before him.  And when Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth, the scriptures of the Sikhs, he not only included the teachings of Guru Nanak and his successors, he also collected the writings of Sheikh Bikhan, who were Muslims, as well as those of Ravidas, Ramananda, Namdev, etc., who were Hindus.  And if he had known any Christian saints, he would have included them too.

 

Closer to our own time is the life of Ramakrishna, who demonstrated very dramatically the essential unity of religions by becoming, actually becoming, both a Christian and a Muslim at different times, as well as being a Hindu.  And everyone knows Mahatma Gandhi in his prayer meetings used to have read out the teachings of all traditions.

 

The point is that each of these great men has demonstrated graphically that he was not doing anything new, that the people who came before him are those from whom he derived what he had.  So all religions must be respected; as the great Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, said, “He who reveres his own sect and despises the

sects of others has failed to grasp the basic truth of religion.” How much trouble, even in the world today, is due to just this: the inability to grasp that God reveals Himself to different people in different ways.  The way we think He comes is not necessarily the only way or the best way; it may be the best way for us.  As Frederick the Great said, “In my state each man is free to be saved after his won fashion.”

 

The content of this continuing revelations, as we have noted, is the necessity of loving God and loving man.  This is a conference devoted to the idea of the unity of man, and I think that this unity is oneness—not a collecting  together, but a looking deeply and seeing that we are one.  In the parade yesterday we were all shouting, “All mankind is one.” And this is the point: the commandments, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” can be lived up to when we see that our neighbor is ourself.  When we hurt others we are hurting ourself; when we serve others we are serving ourself.  The Sermon on the Mount can be understood only when this is grasped, and the great Christian saints have understood this.  I have gone into the lives of St.Francis,  St.Anthony,  St. Theresa,  St. Ignatius, and they did understand this; but so can we understand it.

 

And it’s not even a matter of understanding in any abstract way.  Our neighbor is not all humanity spread out enmase; our neighbor is whoever we meet each day. If we are married and have a family, our neighbor is, to start with, our family; and who do we take for granted more? Whether we are married or not, our neighbor is anyone we meet at the moment we meet him, even if we don’t like him.  Liking has nothing to do with it.  We love him for his essence, for what he is.  The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that the Samaritans were despised by the Jews of that day; they were what we would call a minority group.

 

So loving God and our neighbor is something for each minute of the day; not just once a week on Sundays, or Fridays or Saturdays, or whenever we go to the temple. It is something to be done once each second,

I would say. Because it’s important that we never lose sight of the fact that we must respect and love each man’s way of being- his essential “is-ness”; as it is said, “There is a divine purpose behind the life of everyone who comes into the world; no one has been created for nothing. We have something to learn from everyone. This is the mystery of humility.” Thank you.