All Religions are One

A Protestant friend wondered why I, as a devout Catholic, had statues of Buddhas and paintings of Hindu gods in my home. He was under the impression that Hindus worship idols.

But Hindus do not worship idols. There is a simple test: does one Hindu god compete with another? They did, in the classical Greek conception. They did, among the Canaanites. If so, we are dealing with polytheism, and with multiple gods. But they do not, in Hinduism. Here we are not dealing with multiple gods. There is one supreme God, Brahman, which/who is expressed in many ways. Any Hindu well-educated in his faith will insist in this point. While Hinduism might once have been a polytheistic faith, it has not been so since at least the Puranic/Vedantic period, dating from Sankara and the revival of Hinduism in the early centuries AD.

Strikingly, Hinduism even recognizes the Trinity. Their Trimurti (“Three Forms”), the chief manifestations of Godhead, includes Brahma, the Creator—he is directly equivalent to the Christian God the Father; Vishnu, the Preserver, who notably incarnates in Creation, most famously as Krishna and Rama—very like the Christian Christ; and Siva, the Destroyer, who dances eternally amid flames—an energy principle, at least vaguely similar to the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, there is a similar trinity in Buddhism and in Taoism as well.

It seems to me that here we have a basis for dialogue.

It may be that Hinduism has been directly influenced in all this by Christianity. After all, Christians have been in India since the first or second century AD. And Sankara, the acknowledged founder of Vedantic Hinduism, was born in a heavily Christian area, Kerala, in the 8th century AD. Indeed, he was late enough to be influenced by Islam as well, brought to Kerala by Muslim traders.

Or it might be that God leaves no nation without light—for surely a merciful God would not. And so the outlines of the same message can be found in all major religions, accessible to all mankind. The same images are imbedded in all our imaginations; the same moral certainties are imbedded in all our consciences, the same unspoken cravings are engraved in all our hearts, and the same eternal principles govern all our reasonings. All lead to the same destination; for all are inscribed there by the same God.