Thought For The Day
“The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting.”
- Swami Satchidananda
I have often posited that the great religions of the world are all contextual cultural expressions of the same God who revealed him/her self to different peoples in different ways in different places at different times. One of my reasons for making this assertion is the core principles held in common by these belief systems; in essence, a variation of the “golden rule” found in Christianity.
In her book, “The Great Transformation”, Karen Armstrong traces the root of these common set of core beliefs to what she calls “the axial age”, a period beginning around the 9th century BCE where the peoples of four distinct regions of the world created the religious and philosophical traditions that continue to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered offshoots of the original Israelite vision.
Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. These two principles underly all of these religious traditions.
What would our world look like if we focused on the God-given universal call for compassion that transcends faiths rather than on the superficial differences in religious practices?
No comments:
Post a Comment