Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, in his book Climate and Culture, divided the world into three cultural ecologies: Desert, monsoon and meadow climatic areas. For him, the Judaism-Christianity-Islam combine manifests the desert climate, while Hinduism hails from the monsoon culture.
Desert is a vast stretch of sand, symbolising monotony, uniformity, rigidity and even obstinacy. The sandy region, thus, has birthed a set of religions that has been Commandment/scripture-based, with one God and no scope for diversity and diversion. Uniformity is its obsession, and diversity and differences are both feared and abhorred.
Hinduism, on the other hand, came into existence along riverbanks, thus symbolising movement, evolution, diversity, and accommodation. Hindu society, thus, is innately liberal, accommodating different and diverse opinions, faiths, value systems and even Gods. It won’t be hyperbole to say that India is a well-oiled democracy today, with strong liberal and secular credentials, because this landmass has been so for millennia. Maybe that’s why External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in his latest book Why Bharat Matters, writes quite poignantly, “With each passing day it is becoming clearer that India matters because it is Bharat.”
Such stark differences between the desert and monsoon religions notwithstanding, there has been an all-pervasive myth about all religions being one and the same. This misconception about religions is primarily prevalent in Bharat, which, thanks to its Sanatana traditions, strongly believes in the phenomenon of “ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti” (God is one but wise people/sages speak of it variously). There is no notion of the other in the Indic scheme of things. And since there was no other, there was no need to identify itself with a particular name or identity. No wonder the name given to the people of this landmass, Hindus, has foreign origins; so has been the case with the religion, Hinduism.
Despite having no notion of the other, civilisational Bharat didn’t take long to comprehend the intrinsic value system of the desert religions. When King Harsha of Kashmir destroyed Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries, Kalhana in Rajatarangini criticised him for behaving like Turks, calling it a Turushka-like act. The Bharatiya understanding became fudged only under the influence of British coloniality that created a class of people “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”, as Lord Macaulay had envisioned at the launch of the English education system in 1835 AD. Things worsened further when the Gandhian idea of “Ishwar-Allah” gained ground in the early 20th century.
While the followers of the desert religions had no such identity misperception — mandatory prayers five times a day invariably remind them about the other —it became fashionable, especially after Independence, among Hindus to be mesmerised by the idea of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb even when there existed none except in the elitist, literary circles. Over the next seven decades, it not just became fashionable to see “all religions as the same” but also it helped foster the Hindu pretension to look ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’.
In this backdrop, Sanjay Dixit’s latest book, All Religions Are Not The Same, is a much-welcome addition. It seamlessly explains the many notable differences between religions in a rational, systematic manner. Avoiding the temptation of appearing generous, liberal and non-confrontationist, which often is the reason why the academic-political classes, especially, use such all-religions-are-the-same platitudes, Dixit, a well-known intellectual voice today, ensures his arguments in the book don’t fall into emotional/politically correct trappings. Instead, his approach is rational, factual and logical.
The author begins the book by explaining the different frameworks in which both the Sanatana and Abrahamic systems operate. He then traverses the vast dharmic literature from the Vedas onwards to explain the difference. The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, quoted in the third chapter of the book, for instance, shows the depth of open inquiry in a dharmic world. It begins with the following lines:
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heaven beyond it…
Then there was neither death nor immortality
Nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
The Sukta ends with the following lines:
Whence all creation had its origin,
The creator, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
The creator, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
He knows — or maybe even he does not know.
One would be amazed to find these lines so close to the latest of scientific discoveries about the universe. Or should we say multiverses, about which our Puranas referred to when they talked about multitudes of Brahmas, each heading a particular universe? The Puranic cosmic chronology would also baffle modern observers for being so accurate with numbers that only ‘modern’ minds with latest technologies could come up with.
A dharmic mind is thus a seeker of truth. An explorer who won’t be dictated by a book or a Commandment. It was at this mind that British-Indian scientist JBS Haldane was referring to in his 1959 article, ‘An Indian Perspective of Darwin’ (The Centennial Review; Vol 3, No. 4), when he wrote: “To Europeans and Americans, it inevitably seems that Darwin’s greatest achievement has been to convince educated men and women that biological evolution is a fact, that living plant and animal species are all descended from ancestral species very unlike themselves, and, in particular, that men are descended from animals… But in India and China, this distinction has not been made; and according to Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina ethics, animals have rights and duties. My wife has stated categorically that Darwin converted Europe to Hinduism. This is, I think, an exaggeration, but is nearer to the truth than it sounds.”
Europe needed a Darwin to become modern, scientific. The Arabic world is still in need of its own Darwin. The Sanatana Dharma was inherently Darwinian — and more. Even the avatara of Bhagwan Vishnu evolved from a fish and a tortoise to finally come in the form of Sri Ram and Sri Krishna.
Dixit, to his credit, doesn’t just stop at exploring the intellectual, scientific, philosophical and spiritual depth of the Sanantana Dharma. He also, in the book, analyses the worldview of the three desert religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam and then compares them with Hinduism to bring out the fundamental differences, as David Frawley writes in the blurb of the book, between them on “the inner and the outer, the individual and the collective, at the human and cosmic levels, much like a scientific discourse”.
The one thing that could have been improved is the cover of the book. It could have been far more imaginative. One may wonder what’s there in the covers. All that matters, and should matter, is the content. But then as Tim Kreider once wrote in The New Yorker in support of the book covers, “Even if you love your wife for who she is as a person, it’s still nice when she breaks out a sexy new outfit.” Covers, if done aesthetically, further adds to the book’s allure.
That said, All Religions Are Not The Same is a must-read and must-debated/deliberated book, especially among Hindus, many of whom are still under the thrall of coloniality, Western as well as West Asian. Just short of 200 pages, it’s definitely worth your time and attention.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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