Comparing Religions

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Andrea R. Jain, Erin Prophet, Ata Anzali

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118281321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

Comparing Religions is a next-generation textbook which expertly guides, inspires, and challenges those who wish to think seriously about religious pluralism in the modern world.

• A unique book teaching the art and practice of comparing religions
• Draws on a wide range of religious traditions to demonstrate the complexity and power of comparative practices
• Provides both a history and understanding of comparative practice and a series of thematic chapters showing how responsible practice is done
• A three part structure provides readers with a map and effective process through which to grasp this challenging but fascinating approach
• The author is a leading academic, writer, and exponent of comparative practice
• Contains numerous learning features, including chapter outlines, summaries, toolkits, discussion questions, a glossary, and many images
• Supported by a companion website (available on publication) at www.wiley.com/go/kripal, which includes information on individual religious traditions, links of other sites, an interview with the author, learning features, and much more

PART I

Prehistory, Preparation, and Perspective

In these first three chapters we will be concerned about one and only one matter: locating and defining our own perspectives, that is, the “places” from which we are comparing religions.

In Chapter 1 we will sketch out a few of the innumerable comparative practices of the ancient world, since we do not want to leave the impression that comparison is somehow unique to the modern world. In Chapter 2 we will locate the professional study of religion itself: when it arose, where it came from, how it works or “thinks,” and what its most basic values are. In Chapter 3, after offering some working definitions and assumptions, we will ask you to think about your own most basic assumptions, define your present worldview, and “place yourself” in terms of the perennial questions that the religions attempt to answer: where we came from, where we are going, what we are, what the purpose of life is, and, finally, what happens to us when we die.

This is a very important exercise, because, as the textbook progresses into Part II, you will find yourself working with a whole host of stories, practices, and truth claims that you will no doubt compare to your own. You cannot do this, of course, unless you know at least something about your own beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world. It is perfectly fine, of course, not to know, or to be uncertain of these. If you are conscious and clear about your uncertainty or about not knowing, that too is a form of knowledge. Indeed, some would say that this is the best knowledge of all; that this kind of humility, uncertainty, and openness is the beginning of wisdom.

Introduction

Beginnings

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I started out my career thinking that people are basically people, and that their cultural and religious differences are minor or superficial. Now I think that people are mostly different, and that their similarities are minor or superficial.

A colleague in the study of Buddhism and the psychology of religion

There are no others.

Ramana Maharshi (twentieth-century Hindu spiritual teacher)

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The professional study of religion is a rare bird in most people’s lives. It is not often seen. Religion, for example, is almost never studied in high school in a country like the US. Religions may well be safely described there in, say, a world history course, but they are never critically compared or analyzed. As a consequence, few of the undergraduates who come to my particular university each fall consider majoring in the study of religion, and most of them think that our department is here to meet someone’s religious needs or affirm some very particular set of beliefs. They also assume that a religious studies major is “soft,” as opposed to the sciences, which are “hard.”

The truth is that the study of religion aligns itself with no particular religion and is in fact deeply suspicious of any and all absolute truth claims. This does not mean, however, that the field as a whole is against religion. The discipline is neither pro-religious nor anti-religious (although, as we shall repeatedly see, its comparative terms arose out of very particular religious contexts and its basic methods are clearly incompatible with particular types of religiosity). There is, moreover, nothing “easy” or “soft” about what we do. One of my former students put it best: she felt each day as she left class that her tennis shoes had just burst into flames, that she had just stepped onto some very dangerous, but very exciting ground. And why not? As Margaret M. Mitchell has captured it so well, when we are talking about religion deeply, we are essentially playing with fire. Scholars of religion play with this fire for a living, and we teach others how to do this too, hopefully without getting burnt.¹

Some of us get burnt anyway.

Which is all to say that scholars of religion are not here to justify or confirm anyone’s religious assumptions. We are here to interrogate them. We are here to think critically about religious systems the same way political scientists think about political institutions, sociologists think about social systems, anthropologists think about cultures, or literary critics think about literature. Indeed, we use all of these to do our own work, for religions are always and everywhere also political, social, cultural, and textual phenomena. You might say that we are radically interdisciplinary. I prefer to think of us as intellectually promiscuous.

I wrote this textbook together with my three co-authors for two reasons. I will, by the way, do my best to make it clear when I am writing strictly in my own voice; you will thus notice a common shift between “I” and “we” in the textbook.

The first conviction out of which I wrote this textbook is that the critical study of religion is the most relevant, the most exciting and dangerous (hence the flaming tennis shoes metaphor), and the most radical intellectual study presently pursued in the colleges and universities of the modern world. The so-called “hard” sciences in fact do the easy stuff: they study things that can be measured, that can be controlled, that can be predicted. We do the truly hard stuff: we study things that cannot be measured, that cannot be controlled, that are fiercely alive, and that are ultimately about the “hardest” of all humanistic and scientific problems: the nature of consciousness itself.

More specifically, it is the methods of the humanities, and particularly those of historiography (the recovery, writing, and analysis of history), that ­represent the greatest challenge to religious claims.² Religious claims, after all, routinely claim to be exempt from history as such, that is, they claim that their scriptures and doctrines are eternal, when in fact good historical scholarship can always show that, whatever else they may or may not point toward, all religious expressions—including (and especially) scriptural texts—are also products of human labor, human agency, and human history. Religious texts and beliefs may or may not “fall from the sky,” as we say, but they always, always fall through human beings.

The second conviction out of which I wrote this textbook is that the future hinges largely on how future generations, including (and especially) your generation, critically compare across cultural, religious, and social divisions.

I am not exaggerating either point. You are about to be introduced to an intellectual practice and to a body of knowledge that leave few unmoved. What you encounter will almost certainly excite you, scare you, or infuriate you. It will also very likely change you and, with you, the world. If you are not ready to be changed and challenged to your very core, put down this textbook and read no further. As David Weddle once put it with respect to his own comparative study of miracles: “Like every serious book, this one is also out to get you.”³

Consider yourself forewarned.

•••

Before we begin, it is important that you understand the most basic nature of this textbook’s central focus: comparison. What is comparison anyway? Most simply, comparison is the intellectual act of negotiating sameness and difference in a set of observations. More complexly, this act of negotiating sameness and difference leads to the recognition of patterns and to a subsequent classification of what has been observed. Most complexly, these classifications in turn lead to a theory about the deep underlying structures that produce these particular patterns, that is, to a model of what might lie behind them. There are at least four stages, then, implied in that single word “comparison”: (1) the negotiation of sameness/difference in a set of observations; (2) the identifi­cation of patterns in that data set; (3) the construction of a classificatory scheme that organizes these patterns into some meaningful whole; and (4) a theory to explain the patterns one sees.

Comparison lies at the root of some of the simplest acts of perception and thinking. It also lies at the root of some of the most stunning and successful achievements of human thought.

Take Darwin’s idea of natural selection, for example, which has since morphed into the achievements of evolutionary biology, the discovery of DNA, and the mapping of the human genome. Darwin’s original discovery involved no complicated mathe­matical formulas or computers. Rather he used the exact same methods that the comparative study of religion employs. He traveled a great deal. He compared this wing in this place to that wing in that place, this limb to that limb, this beak to that bill, and so on, until he recognized patterns, classified them into larger wholes, speculatively mapped them through long stretches of time, and eventually arrived at his model of natural selection. Darwin, in short, was a comparativist through and through.

It is not just Darwin, though. Everyone compares. If you think, you compare. If tomorrow you somehow lost the ability to compare and classify, you would not be able to think or organize your world of experience. Go ahead. Look at some object in the immediate environment in which you are reading this book. If you can step back and watch how you instinctively classify and identify this object, you will notice that what you are really doing is comparing the object and its characteristics to other objects and their characteristics until you can give the object a reliable label within a particular scheme or worldview.

Something like this: “I see an object on a desk across the library reading room. It’s red, round, about the size of a fist. It looks like a rubber ball of some kind.” I get up from my chair and walk across the reading room, closer, closer. “No, no, I take that back. It has a stem coming out of one end, and it’s too shiny under this light to be rubber. It’s an apple.” I come closer still. I pick it up, feel it, smell it. “No, it’s not an apple after all. It’s a wax apple, perhaps for some kind of art project. I now see drawing tools on the table around it.”

There were mistakes made here, a few perceptual illusions to work through, but they were all eventually corrected until an accurate identification could be made through closer inspection and an understanding of the cultural context of the object, in this case a college art project. Simple stuff. Right?

But what if we are now comparing subjects instead of objects, worlds made of meaning instead of things made of matter? If you think about human beings, about the seeming infinity of human cultures they have created, and the common human nature that they all share (any infant can be raised in any human culture and successfully learn the language and customs as its own), you will end up comparing in an especially obvious—and especially fraught—way. For one thing, you are a human being (you were not a wax apple), so in some sense you are comparing yourself—a weird, paradoxical exercise from the start.

This “looking into the mirror” of humanity, however, is further fraught by a very specific tension or balance, which we might define most simply as a both–and. Let us refer to the two poles of this both–and with two of the terms of our opening definition of comparison above; let us refer to them as sameness and difference. We are all, after all, so very similar (the shared human nature of our universal infant). And we are all so very different (the virtual infinity of human cultures of our mature experience). There are religious traditions that emphasize this human sameness. Indeed, many of our most impressive and noble modern values—like human rights, civil liberties, and racial and gender equity—flow out of notions of sameness and equality. Sometimes sameness is justice.

There are also religious traditions, and whole bodies of contemporar...