Hindu Pluralism

I

Religious pluralism is in danger of becoming a buzzword in religious studies and in the dialogue of world’s religions. I am not unaware that I might be undervaluing the very enterprise I am about to embark on by saying so, thereby engaging in an act of egregious folly, celebrated in many a cautionary tale with the stock example of someone who proceeds to cut the very branch of the tree one is standing on! After all, a buzzword has been defined as “an important sounding, usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen.”¹ The same word is also more analytically defined as a “voguish word or phrase.”² And neither of these descriptions sounds complimentary.

My purpose, however, in dubbing religious pluralism potentially as a buzzword or phrase is not to discredit it but rather the opposite. It is to recognize the fact that the locution has gained such a measure of popularity and acceptance that it is fast approaching the status of a buzzword or a buzz phrase. This hints at a novel development within religious studies and in the dialogue of world’s religions. This point is best made by asking the question: Why the buzz around it?

It may not be too far-fetched to propose that sometimes a word or phrase creates a buzz because it, more than any other, captures a dimension of contemporary reality which might otherwise go unarticulated or remain underarticulated, or even slip away undetected. It seems to me that the locution has caught on because it captures a dimension of contemporary reality which, by virtue of its novelty, may have remained too elusive to be captured in terms of our more conventional verbal repertoire.

The expression “religious pluralism” captures a fact of our contemporary life which stares us in the face, but which we would not be able to recognize for what it is in the absence of this word. This is the fact that our age presents us with a wealth of options in terms of religions, ideologies, or lifestyles to choose from. This development is virtually unprecedented in the history of the West, with the possible exception of the first three centuries of the Christian Era, before Christianity gained predominance in the Roman Empire.³ Even for the East, more used as it is to a culturally and religiously plural environment, the range of pluralism now opened up by globalization and the spread of modernity also perhaps constitutes both a quantitative and a qualitative leap.

Perhaps an examination of the historical background of our present situation, as identified by John Hick, will deepen our appreciation of the present moment. He writes:

Until comparatively recently each of the different religions of the world had developed in substantial ignorance of the others. There have been, it is true, great movements of expansion which have brought two faiths into contact: above all, the expansion of Buddhism during the last three centuries B.C.E. and the early centuries of the Christian era, carrying its message throughout India and Southeast Asia and into China, Tibet, and Japan, and then, the resurgence of the Hindu religion at the expense of Buddhism, with the result that today Buddhism is rarely to be found on the Indian subcontinent; next, the first Christian expansion into the Roman Empire; then the expansion of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. into the Middle East, Europe, and later India; and finally, the second expansion of Christianity in the missionary movement of the nineteenth century. These interactions, however, in the cases of Christianity and Islam, were conflicts rather than dialogues; they did not engender any deep or sympathetic understanding of one faith by the adherents of another. It is only during the last hundred years or so that the scholarly study of world religions has made possible an accurate appreciation of the faiths of other people and so has brought home to an increasing number of us the problem of the conflicting truth claims made by different religious traditions. This issue now emerges as a major topic demanding a prominent place on the agenda of the philosopher of religion.⁴

II

The word “pluralism,” however, as used in this book, is not meant merely to capture this particular dimension of contemporary life. It is also meant to foreground it in a certain way. This becomes clear when we use the word “pluralism,” not merely as a lexical item conjured up from a dictionary but as a term which is a part of a set, which involves other terms such as exclusivism, inclusivism, along with pluralism. Such a contextualization of the word pluralism imparts to the expression a semantic personality of a distinct and definite kind, whose characteristics not only describe but also determine the lineaments of its semantic character. The essays of this volume have their origin in the efforts to capture the interstices of these characteristics.

These three words – exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism – are the stock in trade in the discussion of the religious diversity and plurality which surrounds us.⁵ The word “pluralism” has been used in the title of this book with the flavour it acquires in such a context. Since the context is so important, it might be useful to identify it with greater clarity.

Terms such as exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism are rooted in Christian theology. They refer to how Christian theology chose to accommodate religions other than Christianity within its framework. These terms are therefore the product of: