The Panel Conference

Foundations of Religious Unity

Russell Perkins, the Editor of Sat Sandesh, USA, 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, I love Bible dearly, I have also loved studying the lives and teachings of Milarepa, Ramakrishna, St Francis of Assisi, Guru Nanak, Kabir, and many others too. And there are certain things, even though 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 grips with the fact of death. Everyone dies; yet life as it is set up in the world is predicated on the assumptions 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 we find in every religion. The other thing is this. Everybody knows that when Jesus was asked what the 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 unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour 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 very beautiful way the continuity of God’s revelation.

A little later Peter and James and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration; but when they saw Him 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 Him 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 writing of Sheikh Farid, of Kabir, of Sheikh Bikhan, Who were Muslims, as well as those of Ravi Das, Ramananda, Namdev, etc., who were Hindus. And if he had known any Christian Saints, He would have included Them too.

Closer to our own times 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 teaching 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 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 sect 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 own fashion.

The content of this continuing revelation, as we have noted, is the necessity of loving God and loving 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 command can be lived up to when we see that our neighbour is our self. When we serve others we are serving our self. 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 we can understand this but.

And it’s not even a matter of understanding in any abstract way. Our neighbour is not all humanity spread out en masses; our neighbour is whoever we meet each day. If we are married and have a family, our neighbour is to start with our family; and who do we take for granted more? Whether we are married or not, our neighbour 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 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 neighbour is something for each minute of the day; not just once a week on Sunday’s or Friday’s, or Saturday’s 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.