North London Interfaith Events

The relevance of Hinduism in a multicultural society

Summary of talk by Jay Lakhani, Director, Hindu Academy on 19 Feb 2008

The first challenge we face in this century in a multifaith society is as follows.

For the first time we don’t have the luxury of living in isolation from people of other faiths. You can’t hide in any part of the world without meeting people of any religion or no religion as well. How can we make religions once again a cohesive force in our society? Traditionally. religion has always been a cohesive force. Look at Christianity. It helped to form a civilization and held people together. Individual civilizations with individual religions seem to work well. Yet now we find when we are faced with a situation in which people of many religions have to co-exist and rather than being a cohesive force suddenly religions have become a destructive force. The biggest challenge we face in modern times is strife in the name of religion.

The second challenge is even more serious and we ignore it at our peril. That is the challenge that comes from the rationalist and the scientist who say all religions are seriously in error. YOU are the problem. Because they see religion as the problem they’d rather have no religion at all than have too many religions which are at loggerheads with each other.

The first challenge is very visible. You open a newspaper or switch on a TV and see fighting in the name of religion. The second one is invisible but it hits society in an indirect manner. It persuades us to think that we are nothing more than the extension of the material kingdom but just matter that has wound up in a unique manner. There are no gods, souls, spirits – all that is nonsense. The scientific view is well supported by rationality so, they say, we should follow that approach. The scientific approach sees us all as material beings. If we believe it, our lifestyle will begin to become centred more and more around material objects and material achievements. This can become the whole of life. Leading a very frenzied lifestyle, chasing after what we eat, drink, possess. This very strong pressure we all face which comes from the materialistic lobby which tells us to acquire more and more things, work harder so you can buy a new car, not put up with last year’s model. This strongly materialistic culture in which we live needs to be addressed, but the solution does not lie, as some think, in the science-oriented world view but in a spiritual-oriented world view.

In this state of affairs we look at what Hinduism can contribute. All religions can contribute but Hinduism has a special feature which can help a great deal in addressing both issues. The first feature of Hinduism that is very endearing, is this. Despite appearances Hinduism is a grand, mature, pluralistic religion. There are not many gods but many ways to reach out to God. This is pluralism. Hinduism may appear to be a naïve, childish, polytheistic religion. If you dig deeper you find there is a grand, mature, pluralistic tradition. There are many ways of making spiritual progress. In Hinduism you can worship a particular deity, a particular form of God, or you can even make spiritual progress in a non-theistic mode. Esoteric Hinduism is non-theistic. Buddhism may be seen as a branch of non-theistic Hinduism which began as a reform movement in Hinduism and became a non-theistic religion. So we have this idea of making spiritual progress in a spiritual mode, in a theistic mode. Some people say that the idea of God comes with baggage and they would rather progress spiritually in a non-theistic mode, without reference to a god, as occurs in Buddhism and Jainism. Thus God is promoted, not as a personality, but as a principle.

The Hindu tradition says actually that if spirituality is the real underpinning of the world we live in, it should be possible to make progress spiritually, without reference to a religion. Hinduism allows for that. If spirituality is the underpinning of our world, every disciplined human endeavour will somehow discover a spiritual dimension at the heart of it. Art, music, science, if you dig deeper into any of these fields you will find a spiritual dimension underpinning it. The idea of discovering spirituality through music, or art, or drama, or dance, or poetry or literature is considered acceptable. So this is the breadth of the Hindu tradition, this idea of inclusivism, of liberalism, acceptance that there are many ways of spiritual progress. In the Indian subcontinent people worship many different deities, they make progress in different ways, but they feel comfortable with each other – this is your way, this is my way. This is allowed. This is a feature of pluralism.

In modern times we face the challenge from many religions. If for example, a Hindu sees that a Christian likes to think of God as a father in heaven, and you are a Bengali and think of God as your mother in Heaven, there is no problem. A Buddhist says there is no God; if a person wishes to make progress without reference to a theos that is a valid way of making spiritual progress. An atheist or a humanist may be a loving, kind, generous human being. How can we say because he doesn’t sign up to a religion that he is abandoned, not spiritual. Hinduism has no difficulty with a person making spiritual progress in their own way. This openness, this pluralism of the Hindu tradition is a marvellous prescription for the modern world. It allows many religions to coexist with each other in harmony without feeling compromised. This inclusivism of Hinduism is one of its most endearing features which needs to be invoked in modern times. It can help to resolve the issue of strife in the name of religion. The question of fighting one another does not arise.

I’ll tell you a story. Two boys are arguing. Each one says his mother is the best one in the world. Eventually they realise “My mother is the best – for me”.

Similarly, we should say, “My religion is the best – for me”. In this way I accept that my religion fits my requirements. Pluralism allows people of different religions to live together happily and allows me to make spiritual progress. In the intra religious field, this also applies, for instance, between Catholic and Anglican Christians, or between Sunni, Sufi and Shia Muslims, between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists. I put this idea across at every school, college, theological establishment that I go to. It sounds easy, but isn’t so easy in practice.

The second challenge we face is this. This is the idea that the religious oriented world view and the science oriented world view can never be reconciled. Wittengstein said that each has its own system, with its own truth claims within its own framework, and as long as each keeps its claims within its own truth framework, then they can coexist. In this way when you are in a lab, you switch off thinking about God and when you are in a religious space you switch off thinking about science. Such a schizophrenic world should not be allowed in this century. We need to reconcile the truth claims that come from science with the truth claims that come from religion. Again, this seems like a far-fetched enterprise but I thrive on it. I am able to see tremendous resonance between the findings of modern science and the teachings of religion and spirituality. I speak of world religions, not Hinduism alone. The vocabulary might be slightly different but they speak the same language. This is something I work on very hard. When you look at the findings at the heart of science and quantum mechanics, when you look at findings at the heart of biological science and neuroscience or consciousness itself, which allows us to make sense of the world, if we look at the definition of life itself, in all these areas we discover that modern science is now talking the language which can best be classed as non-material. It is saying that the foundation of the world we live in is non-material. We are not looking at the properties of matter but something that underpins matter which cannot be classed as material – not matter. We cannot classify it. Look at consciousness. Is there a slice of the brain that produces consciousness? If that is so, then we can link consciousness to matter. But neuroscience, as Dr. Susan Greenfield tells us, is something unique; you can’t discover it. It defies simplistic, reductionist interpretation and the science of today contains a very spiritual idea.

I feel that spirituality is not a matter of belief, or of intellectual acceptance, but of experience. It’s a very subjective phenomenon. Powerful spiritual personalities from around the world talk of their experience; all the world’s religions are experientially based. It is at the level of expression that religions differ. The problem, then, starts with interpretation. People want to protect what they believe in so they put up rigid doctrines and when different faiths come together this can become divisive.

The Hindu fold allows a wide variation. Vast numbers worship Siva. In UK there is one exclusivist Hindu movement, but the most ancient Hindu scripture (the Rig Veda) says “One Ultimate, many ways to view it”. (Mandala 1, Hymn 164, verse 46). To follow an exclusivist agenda is in fact to undermine the key feature of Hinduism.

When I present the idea of pluralism to children of any faith or none, it is received with openness and spirituality even among children who say they don’t believe in God. Yet the idea of essential nature or spiritual nature is always there.

God is smaller than the smallest and larger than the largest. God is your own inner or essential nature, not a God far away in heaven. There is no inner and outer; nothing that can be captured by intellectual gymnastics; nothing that can be captured in the scriptures; The Spirit must be experienced by yourself, not through another person. It is experiential. I should not impose my version of the interpretation of a spiritual event on another. What change does this spiritual experience produce in a person? If it is truly spiritual it will be a life transforming experience. By the fruit of an action, that is how I judge the depth of spirituality.