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"The Root of All Religions Is One": Gandhi and the Imperative of Inter-Religious Dialogue
Dr. Anne M. Pearson, granddaughter of Lester B.
Pearson
Annual Banquet
October 2, 2002
I think that you might be expecting me to say something about my grandfather, Lester B. Pearson, so before I move on to the body of my talk, I had better do that. Pearson met Nehru several times, but he never met Gandhi.
I don’t think that my grandfather would want to be compared with Gandhi. Gandhiji holds a rank all to his own. But the two men did share some important common values and ways of doing things. Importantly, they both exhibited in their personal lives what they espoused publicly. There was little difference in behaviour between public and private persona.
Gandhi said: "I am not a visionary. I claim to be a practical idealist." Pearson also saw himself as a pragmatist, but a principled one with firm ideals — many of which were rooted in his Christian (Methodist) upbringing. I was a teenager when my grandfather died, and so I still retain many clear and fond memories of him. Like Gandhi, he liked children and was comfortable around them. I credit him (and my parents) with instilling in me an optimism about humanity’s future, the imperative of working for a more just and peaceful world, the dignity of human life, the significance of a moral compass, a sense of public service, and the importance of both humility and also humour. Let me illustrate:
Writing about his mother in his autobiography, Pearson said: "Her advice to me… all through the years might be summed up: ‘Be a good boy’ and ‘Keep your feet dry’." "Like my father," he wrote, "she was unimpressed with pomp and position. Once she advised me to be kind and understanding to the people I passed on my way up, since I would no doubt meet them again on my way down."
Of course, Gandhi was also quite unimpressed with pomp and position, and perhaps he too received this kind of sage advice from his mother!
Now, both Gandhi and Pearson were, as I mentioned, idealists, and both were criticized for it; or for failing sometimes to succeed in translating those ideals into workable solutions. Both men persisted in seeing what could be, even in the midst of terrible problems: wars, violence, hate, gross inequities and so forth facing humanity at the time. Both believed in humanity’s capacity to solve its problems, to find just solutions, to make the world a more equitable and peaceful place. Yet, as one observer has noted: "Idealism has both its strengths and weaknesses. It seems to fail in the immediate situation in view of the underlying complexities. This is its primary weakness. Yet it seems to guide humanity in the longer periods and therein lies its strength — to aim for higher things and to serve as an inspiration for the people. Likewise with Gandhi. Although he failed in his lifetime [in always preventing violence], he continued to inspire us with his ideals. And that is his main strength." ["Gandhi and Communal Harmony" A. A. Engineer, ed. 1997]
Communalism and Inter-religious violence
Now these words were written in reference to the horrific outbreaks of communal violence prior to and after partition. Communalism, as it is called in India (after Nehru coined the term), or acts of hatred and violence committed between religiously identified communities, has continued to rear its ugly head in India since 1947. When I was in India attending the Vaishali Sabha in February this year, another outbreak of this virulent disease took place. On the day that a large gathering of panchayat leaders, members of the ‘Women’s Peace Army’ (Shanti Sena) and others were gathered in Vaishali, Bihar, under the auspices of Gandhian Acharya Ramamurti (Shrambharati and the McMaster Centre for Peace Studies) to talk about promoting local democratization and peace-building, a mob of Muslims from Godhra in Gujarat attacked a train stopped at the station carrying a large number of Kar Sevaks or militant Hindu activists who had been visiting Ayodhya, the Indian pilgrimage town in Uttar Pradesh. The Kar Sevaks had been in Ayodhya in preparation for a mid-March plan to begin the rebuilding of a Rama temple on the site of the 16th mosque that had been demolished in 1991 by a crowd of Hindus from various parts of North and Central India. On the morning of February 27, three minutes after the train pulled out of the station, a crowd of Muslims (and Godhra has a population about half Muslim and half Hindu) stopped the train and started throwing stones inside. Soon the train cars were set afire with rags soaked in gasoline taken from nearby Muslim-owned auto-repair shops. Fifty-eight Hindus, many of them women and children, were burned alive. The cry for revenge set in immediately, especially in the state of Gujarat. According to a Human Rights Watch report, between "February 28 and March 2 the [Hindu] attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist — Hindutva — groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls…, sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. … [They carried detailed maps indicating the location of Muslim dwellings.] In many cases, the police led the charge…" [quoted in Pankaj Mishra, "Murder in India," NY Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2002].
The Indian Government has acknowledged that more than 850 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Other sources put the figure at around 2,000. About 230 mosques and shrines were razed to the ground and close to 100,000 Muslims displaced and are now living in relief camps. Retaliatory attacks by Muslim mobs across Gujarat have left 10,000 Hindus homeless. New attacks broke out just last week when a crowd of Hindus at a temple in Gandhinagar were gunned down by Muslim extremists.
The brutality and planning of the killings remind one not just of other incidents in India in recent years (I was also in India when Indira Gandhi was murdered, and witnessed some of the revenge rampage that left 5,000 Sikhs dead), but also of other recent planned mass murders undertaken in the name of religion, or under the banner of some sort of religious identity: NYC, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ireland, Sri Lanka and many other incidents in Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan.
With the worldwide rise of nationalist ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries, there has been a concomitant rise in religious extremism, fundamentalism and nationalism. The reasons for this are many and complicated, and certainly related, in much of the world, to the effects of European colonialism: its economic exploitation, but even more, its promotion of the very idea of nationalism; its divide and rule policies (which, among other things, partitioned Bengal along religious lines in 1905) and so forth. I don’t wish to go into the causes here, but simply wish to make the point that the mis-use, indeed, perversion of religion by both religious and political leaders (and the two are sometimes the same) has escalated dramatically in India too in recent decades and the phenomenon represents, I would argue, one of the gravest dangers facing humanity at this time. The consequences of this misuse have been in the past and can be in the future devastating to countless millions of people planet-wide.
Purpose and Perversion of religion
The very purpose of religion is the education and promotion of the well-being of humankind. It has served throughout history as the ultimate authority in giving meaning to life. In reaching to the roots of motivation, religion has awakened in peoples the capacities to love, to forgive, to create, to dare greatly, to sacrifice for the common good, and to discipline the impulses of our baser instincts. It has and continues to represent a unique power in humanity’s collective life. But, this power, when twisted for their own ends by leaders, whether political or religious, can be a source of evil as much as it has been a source of good. In particular, when the banner of religion is used to foster rather than overcome prejudice, its effects can be devastating. Blind forces of sectarian dogmatism, claims to superiority, exclusivity or finality, and so forth, often fanned by religious leaders, have led to the promotion of harmful attitudes of hatred, prejudice and acts of extreme violence against those of other faiths. [see Bahá'í Universal House of Justice "Letter to Religious Leaders," May 2002]
Even while other forms of prejudice, such as racism and sexism, are gradually losing ground, where their exponents must look for support on the margins of responsible opinion, religious prejudice continues to flourish. There are countless examples, beyond the Godhra incident, which one could cite. Close to home, last year, following "9-11" my community witnessed the burning down by religious bigots of its only Hindu mandir.
The Interfaith Movement
Some years ago, the famous Catholic theologian Hans Kung said: "There can be no peace between the nations until there is peace between the religions. There can be no peace between the religions until there is dialogue between the religions;” a statement I believe Gandhi would have readily agreed with. The good news is that the interfaith movement, as it is called, is growing by the day around the world. The not so good news is that it may not be growing fast or coherently enough, and that religious leaders need to signal a move beyond mere calls for "tolerance." Let me first say a little about the history of this movement.
Historians would generally agree that the movement began in 1893, at the first Parliament of World’s Religions that took place during the large Chicago Exposition that was intended to showcase American technology. It was here, at the smaller ‘parliament’ of about 400 mostly Christian delegates, that Swami Vivekananda made a significant impact through his eloquent and passionate discourses on the nature of Hinduism and the need for the materialist West to look to the Spiritual East for guidance. Vivekananda challenged the view of many of the delegates that Christianity would eventually be accepted as the superior religion by all the peoples, since, according to their evolutionary thinking, it was the “highest” religion. Despite this kind of thinking, which still exists!, the ideals of the parliament expressed in its literature, were revolutionary and are worth recalling:
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"There is a coming unity of mankind in the service of God and man.
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There is an influx from God into the mind of every man, teaching that there is a God and that he should be worshipped and obeyed; and that as the light of the sun is differently received by different objects, so the light of divine revelation is differently received by different minds, and hence arise varieties in the forms of religion.
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Those who believe in these things may work together for the welfare of mankind, notwithstanding, they may differ in the opinions they hold respecting God, His revelation and manifestation, and that such fraternity does not require the surrender of the points of difference."
As Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham has noted, the ideas expressed in these statements continue to be enduring principles of the inter-faith movement. "Its fundamental vision is that of human unity, the desire among many religious adherents to build a new global community through spiritual means. It has a simple theoretical or doctrinal foundation that envisages the different religions of the world as simply different expressions of belief in the same God. And it celebrates the differences among religions, holding these differences to be of positive value…" (Mansions of the Spirit, 29).
The first parliament of world’s religions did elicit its detractors, of course, and many people then as now do not hold that, as Vivekananda said, "all religions are true." Nevertheless, this beginning in inter-faith dialogue was followed, slowly at first and now growing in momentum, by numerous other international gatherings of leaders and members of the world’s community of religions, and by the creation of many new organizations intended to bring together in discussion people of different faith commitments. Examples include: the World Congress of Faiths, established in London 1934, whose purpose was to develop a "fellowship of faiths." At its 1986 meeting, Anglican Archbishop Robert Runcie said, "Dialogue can help us recognize that other faiths than our own are genuine mansions of the spirit with many rooms to be discovered, rather than solitary fortresses to be attacked" [quoted in Ingham, 33].
There is the International Association for Religious Freedom, begun in 1900, and which today focuses on securing freedom of religious belief and worship in the member states of the United Nations. There is The World Conference on Religion and Peace began under the inspiration of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1914 which "has been highly critical of religious participation in war and violence, and has severely castigated the indifference shown by many believers to human suffering and environmental abuse" [Ingham, 39]. There is the Temple of Understanding, started in 1960 by the efforts of two American women, who sought amidst the devastation caused by the WWII, to bring together secular and religious leaders and scholars from around the world in "spiritual summit meetings" to encourage knowledge and understanding among the world’s faiths. It has since spawned the North American Interfaith Network [NAIN], one of the largest such networks in existence, its main purpose being to link the hundreds of smaller community interfaith organizations through a newsletter and bi-annual conferences. Here in Edmonton there is an active Inter-faith group that has been working to promote knowledge about other religions and interfaith cooperation for some years.
The second Parliament of World’s religions took place again in Chicago on the hundredth anniversary of the first. This time there were several thousand delegates, including many more women and a much wider representation of faiths. One of its major achievements was the publication of the Declaration Towards a Global Ethic, a common statement about the moral obligations of the various religions towards the well-being of humanity and the environment. Again, I believe that Gandhi would have been very pleased with this document, especially as it underscores what the religions have in common, in particular, their ethical precepts.
Gandhi and ‘other’ religions
Gandhi welcomed contact with people of other faiths throughout his life. He took an avid interest in the teachings of other religions as he sought to deepen his understanding of the faith of his birth: Vaishnavism in particular, Hinduism in general. His voluminous letters and writings articulate the following principles that shaped and informed his attitude towards the world’s religions and their adherents, and which may serve as a model for us:
The first principle is that God is truth; even more than love. Truth or in Sanskrit sat, meaning in the Vedas both truth and being or existence, is embedded in the very nature of the universe. Later Gandhi said that Truth is God, for it is harder to deny the existence of truth than God
The second principle is the search for truth. For Gandhi this search, or the independent investigation of truth, was a lifelong passion, and he felt an obligation of every human being. This is why we have the capacity to reason and to have a conscience. Truth must be weighed by reason and tested in practice.
The third principle is that every world religion has truth in it. A study of the world’s religious scriptures will show this to be the case as their teachings contain much that is in common. For example, all religions teach that we are essentially spiritual beings; that there is a divine intelligence at the heart of the universe to which we are intimately related; that love is the primary expression of spirituality (love of the divine, of oneself, of others). Further, all religions teach about ethics, how we should conduct ourselves, and they inculcate many of the same precepts, such as: humility, compassion, kindness, self-control, truthfulness, not taking what does not belong to oneself, and, Gandhi would wish to say, ahimsa (non-violence).
The fourth principle is that no one religion can legitimately claim to be the exclusive bearer of truth. As early as 1905 Gandhi declared that "the time had passed when the followers of one religion could stand and say, ‘ours is the only true religion and all others are false’." He said, "God, Allah, Rama, Narayan, Ishwar, Khuda were descriptions of the same Being;" and in another place, "God’s grace and revelation were not the monopoly of any race or nation." For Gandhi, Truth is a reality larger than any one religion, but in which all are ultimately grounded.
Further, all religions are imperfect because they are transmitted, interpreted and practiced through imperfect vehicles. Thus, error enters into the religious beliefs and practices of all religions. "I came to the conclusion," Gandhi wrote in 1927, "that all religions were right but everyone of them was imperfect, imperfect naturally and necessarily, because they were interpreted with our poor intellects, sometimes with our poor hearts, and more often misinterpreted." And in another place he said: "We have not realized religion in its perfection, even as we have not realized God. Religion of our conception, being thus imperfect, is always subject to a process of evolution and reinterpretation. Progress towards Truth, towards God, is possible only because of such evolution. And if all faiths outlined by men are imperfect, the question of comparative merit does not arise. All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth… Reverence for other faiths does not blind us to their faults. We must be keenly alive to the defects of our own faiths also, yet not leave it on that account, but try to overcome those defects."
Fifth, the study of other religions can deepen one’s own faith and lead to sarva-dharma-samanvata, or, "having equal regard for all faiths and creeds." "I hold that it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world," Gandhi said wrote in 1927. "If we are to respect others’ religions as we would have them to respect our own, a friendly study of the world’s religions is a sacred duty. … For myself, I regard my study of and reverence for the Bible, the Koran, and the other scriptures to be wholly consistent with my claim to be a staunch Sanatani Hindu. [Young India, Sept. 2, 1927]
"My position," Gandhi wrote in the Harijan in 1936, "is that all the great religions are fundamentally equal. We must have the innate respect for other religions as we have for our own. Mind you, not mutual toleration, but equal respect" [Nov. 28, ‘36]. It is through the cultivation of such attitudes and practices, Gandhi seemed to say, that we would be freed to live and work together in greater peace and harmony for the well-being of all. "Warring creeds," Gandhi said, "is a blasphemous expression."
Gandhi and communal violence
Returning briefly to the Godhra incident and the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri Masjid controvery, I think it is clear that Gandhi would have been horrified by this controversy and the bloodshed that has ensued because of it. He said, in regards to Ram, in whose name the kar sevaks destroyed the Brabri mosque: "It is ignorance to say that I coupled Rama, a mere man, with God. I have repeatedly made it clear that my Rama is the same as God. My Rama was before, is present now, and will be for all time. He is Unborn and Uncreated. Therefore you should tolerate and respect the different faiths. I am myself an iconoclast, but I have equal regard for the so-called idolaters. Those who worship idols also worship the same God who is everywhere, even in a clod of earth…"
In 1924, in Young India, he wrote: "The law of retaliation we have been trying since the day of Adam and we know from experience that it has hopelessly failed. We are groaning under its poisonous effect. Above all, the Hindus may not break mosques against temples. That way lies slavery and worse. Even though a thousand temples may be reduced to bits, I would not touch a single mosque and expect thus to prove the superiority of my faith to the so-called faith of fanatics… Hindus will not defend their religion or their temples by seeking to destroy mosques, and thus proving themselves as fanatical as the fanatics who have been desecrating temples." [28 August 1924]
Sadly he was wrong on the latter point. But what he understood was that India cannot stay together unless its two principal religious communities, namely the Hindus and the Muslims, coexist in harmony.
["Indian culture," he believed, "stands for synthesis of the different cultures that have come to stay in India, that have influenced Indian life, and that, in their turn, have themselves been influenced by the spirit of the soil." [quoted in Engineer, 6]
Many Indians today would I think agree with that and so must struggle with the dark forces of communalism. We must all struggle against the forces of sectarianism, religious extremism and prejudice wherever it rears its ugly head, as we must reject the misuse of religion by those who would mobilize its power for their own political or personal ends to the detriment of all.
Conclusion
In a letter sent to the world’s religious leaders in May of this year, the international governing body of the Bahá'í community took it upon itself to warn its fellow religious leaders that: "With every day that passes, danger grows that the rising fires of religious prejudice will ignite a worldwide conflagration the consequences of which are unthinkable. Such as danger civil government, unaided, cannot overcome. Nor should we delude ourselves that appeals for mutual tolerance can alone hope to extinguish animosities that claim to possess Divine sanction. The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation."
There can be no peace in the world until there is peace between the religions, Hans Kung said. It is incumbent on all of us, I believe, to work to rid the world of the corrosion of religious prejudice by focusing on our commonalities, through dialogue and service to one another, and by keeping in mind Gandhi’s words that:
"In Nature, there is a fundamental unity running through all the diversity we see about us. Religions are no exception to the natural law. They are given to mankind so as to accelerate the process of realization of fundamental unity.” [Young India, Aug. 20, 1925]
We are one people, one family.
And "the root of all religions is one."
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References:
Robert Ellsberg. Ed. Gandhi on Christianity. Orbis Books, 1991.
Asghar Ali Engineer. Ed. Gandhi and communal harmony. Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi, 1997.
Michael Ingham. Mansions of the Spirit: the Gospel in a Multi-Faith World. Anglican book Centre, Toronto, 1997.
Raghavan Iyer, ed. The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford, 1991.
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