Arthur Osborne - Adventures on the Path #5

[Guest guest]

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Early in 1939 news came that two of our group, who had

been travelling about in India for some time, had at last found

a guru. It is easy to remember the date, because it was less than

a fortnight after the birth of our son that my summer vacation

started, and my wife, knowing how much it meant to me, raised

no objection to my going.

 

As soon as I reached India I had the peculiar feeling of

being at home for the first time in my life. I had never felt

really at home in England but had always intended to make my

living abroad. Neither had I felt at home in Poland or Siam. It

was not that I preferred the Indians — indeed, the gay

cheerfulness of the Chinese shopkeepers in Bangkok was

something I missed in the Indian shops. Nor were the parts of

India I then visited particularly beautiful — dusty, sun-bleached

plains, dilapidated villages, bleak, white-washed houses. There

was simply the indefinable feeling that I belonged here, that

this was home.

 

I stayed in a middle-class hotel in a hot, white-walled, dusty

town through the worst of the summer heat. A single-storey

hotel, no fans, very cheap by European standards. I shared a

room with my two friends — I had not met them before but

they immediately became friends, companions on the quest.

There is a hadith, a saying of the Prophet: “There is no friendship

but only companionship-in-Islam.” At night we and our

neighbours in the hotel took our beds out into the courtyard to

sleep — the Indian charpoy, a light wooden framework with

cord criss-crossed between it and a mattress only about an inch

thick thrown over.

 

I adapted myself easily, and here again I appreciated the

atmosphere: mostly business and professional men — no women

as far as I could see — many of the men devotional, most of

them imbued with pride of Islam. They never doubted that it

was the finest of all religions. Naïve? But does a Christian

professor of comparative religion or a Buddhist abbot ever doubt

that his is the finest religion? And is this not equally naïve?

However, on the contingent level of dogma and social

application the religions necessarily differ, like the sides of a

mountain. Each represents a different viewpoint, and therefore

each must seem best when seen from its own viewpoint and from

this viewpoint every other must seem either wrong or at best

inferior.

 

On the purely spiritual level all religions are unanimous.

They cannot be otherwise, since Truth is One. It is like a

mountain approached from different sides; the nature of the

terrain differs on every side, and the paths run in different and

even opposite directions, but the peak is one and they all

converge on it. This is beginning to be widely appreciated

nowadays and there have been a number of books either

expounding it or illustrating it by means of comparative

quotations culled from the mystics of the various religions.

 

What is needed is simply to attend to one’s own religion

or to see each from its own viewpoint. Throughout most of

history the former has been the preferable attitude: so long as

one sincerely followed one’s own religion it was quite

unnecessary to know about any other. The average Christian,

for example, hardly knew that there was a religion called

Buddhism, so why should he study it? Today however, with the

expansion of a uniform modernism over all the religions and

over the previously diverse civilizations which they sponsored,

such an attitude is rarely possible for the intelligent and

enquiring. Too much is known about the existence and surface

disagreements of other religions. Therefore the second attitude

becomes necessary for many people: to understand and explain

each from its own viewpoint. Those who claim to be authorities

on religion should facilitate this process, not obstruct it, as they

so often do. Because if it is not done, the observer is faced with

the dilemma that all the millions of followers of another religion

affirm what his own denies and deny what it affirms. Simply to

brush the problem aside by saying: “We are right and all the

others are wrong” is too superficial an attitude to hold the

intelligent student.

 

As an example of what I mean by viewpoint, there is an

able and learned book by F.H.Hilliard called The Buddha, the

Prophet and the Christ (Allen & Unwin) which examines the

views of their followers on the divinity of these three founders

of religions. It is more fair-minded and impartial than most

such books; nevertheless it must inevitably suggest the superiority

of that religion which is based on belief in the divinity of the

Personal Saviour, that is to say Christianity. From the Islamic

viewpoint the essential comparison would be between the

Quran, the Gospels and the Pali Canon, and the scales would

come down in favour of the only one of the three religions

which is based on a divinely revealed scripture, that is Islam.

From a Buddhist viewpoint it might be a comparison between

the Noble Eightfold Path, Christ’s injunctions to his followers

and the Islamic shariah, and Buddhism would come first as the

only one of the three religions whose founder had himself laid

down a clearly formulated path from suffering to Beatitude,

from ignorance to Light, from samsara to Nirvana. Obviously,

then, a really useful and instructive comparison would be one

which showed the equivalence of personal saviour, revealed

scripture and clearly demarcated path; and such a study would

not need to grade the religions but to simply indicate the

different modes of approach.

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from Arthur Osborne's MY LIFE & QUEST