possible for you to have too many of them…

“Because we thought that religion was a kind of personal insight into the ultimate reality, we never laid much stress, exclusive stress, on any particular way of approaching the Supreme or calling the Supreme. The ways may twist and turn but once you reach the top the spiritual landscape which you discern is exactly the same. All those who by different routes have come up to the top are the people who belong to one family. We may belong to this particular denomination or other, but if we are truly religious we will not quarrel about names we give to the Supreme or the ways by which we reach the Supreme. This is the thing that came down to us from the early period. Ashoka cut into the rock and he said, “Do not quarrel about religions, concord is meritorious. Do not imagine that you have a complete hold on truth. You may not have it, no religion has a monopoly of truth, you must try to know the God above all Gods who is expressed in different ways and different individuals.”

The example of the Benaras Hindu University should only be used to learn where and why the things went wrong. Let the best brains be hired to impart education sans any prejudice. Let there be no reservation except for those who are academically brilliant, but too poor to pursue their studies. Acres of land that form parts of temple complexes can be put to socially productive use by opening centres of academic excellence. Let only the learned and the enlightened, and not just any illiterate pretender, be called a Brahmin.

Education is not a static concept. Nor can it be divorced from religion. Similarly religion cannot exist in a void. It must be dynamic enough to assimilate the new experiences. Tennyson’s Ulysses makes a pertinent observation, “Experience is an arch where through gleams the untravelled world.” In today’s India the need to marry religion with education is all the more great.

Mindless materialism is trampling all humane instincts. Science has become the extant, though highly misused, creed and Mammon the ruling deity. GW Shields cautions, “Science cultivated to the utter neglect of religion would produce a reign of impiety and sensuality.”

Religion is compared by some to Ozymandias  - hollowed by its own weaknesses and destroyed by scientific discoveries – it lies in ruins of once glorious past. But religion and science are compatible. Religious thought can evolve in a symbiotic relationship with scientific advance. As Goethe had observed, “ True religion teaches us to recognise humanity, poverty, suffering and death as things divine.”

This should indeed be our religion in the coming millennium, wherein tolerance supercedes all prejudice, where merit alone becomes the criteria to evaluate an individual and where places of worship shall promote constructive thought and action.

Will our society be able to take up this challenge?

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