Video: Swami Medhananda, A Hindu Vision of Religious Cosmopolitanism: Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda

The Center’s “Hindu View of Life Annual Lecture” evokes the memory of Dr. Radhakrishnan’s book of that title, which is comprised of his well-known 1926 lectures on “Religious Experience,” “The Conflict of Religions,” and two lectures on “Hindu Dharma.” The HVL Lecture aims to address constructively and for our era urgent issues of our time, from a perspective informed by insights and values arising from the Hindu traditions of India and Hinduism globally. This year's speaker, Swami Medhananda delivered the following lecture on April 22, 2024.

The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) is perhaps most well known for having taught and practiced the dictum, “As many faiths, so many paths.” Far from affirming that all religions are the “same,” he held that various religions are different, but equally effective, paths to the common goal of the direct experiential knowledge of some aspect or form of one and the same impersonal-personal Infinite Divine. The talk concludes by addressing the disputed question of whether Ramakrishna really “practiced” Christianity or merely dabbled in it for three days as a Hindu.

Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and an academic philosopher, currently serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. 

Swami Medhananda: Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna & Swami Vivekananda

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Swami Medhananda, A Hindu Vision of Religious Cosmopolitanism-- Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. April 22, 2024.

CHARLES STANG: Good evening, everyone. I know that some of you are still getting food. Please help yourself and get settled. Good evening. My name is Charles Stang. I have the pleasure of serving as the director here at the Center for the Study of World Religions. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our annual lecture on the theme of the Hindu view of life.

This is a series inaugurated by my colleague and my predecessor here at the center, Professor Frank Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity. And Frank will say more about the lecture series in just a moment. Before I hand the mic over to Professor Clooney to introduce our guest speaker, I just wanted to call your attention to two upcoming events at the center.

I'll leave them there for you to ponder while I say how delighted we are to have Swami Medhananda here to give this year's lecture entitled "A Hindu vision of Religious Cosmopolitanism-- Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda." And now I'd like to invite Professor Clooney to the podium to give Swami a proper introduction.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Good evening, everyone. I give you my own warm welcome. Thank you for coming here tonight. So this series, the Hindu view of life lectures goes back maybe only as far as maybe 2015 or so. The first speakers were Professor Arvind Sharma and Vasudha Narayanan and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Anantanand Rambachan. So we've had a series of good speakers, wonderful speakers over the years, and we continue that tradition tonight.

In this room by the way, at the center, those of you who are new here may not realize that this center goes back to 1960. And the opening day speaker at the center in 1960 was Dr. Radhakrishnan from Oxford and from India, distinguished scholar, president of India, and so forth. So there's a long tradition of these kinds of events here, and we're happy to have another one tonight.

So let me introduce our speaker. Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order, currently a member of the monastic community of the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, one of the oldest in the United states. He serves too as the Hindu chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. He is also an academic philosopher and theologian, currently serving as a senior fellow in philosophy at the Hollywood Center.

He received his PhD in 2009 from the University of California in Berkeley, where he specialized in German aesthetics, not the typical background for a Hindu Swami. He was also a Fulbright scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin and a visiting student at Oxford University in 2001 and '02. From 2010 to '21, he was associate professor and head of the program in philosophy at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, the headquarters in West Bengal.

His research projects have been varied over the years, but currently focus on global philosophy of religion, the epistemology of mystical experience, cosmo Sikhism, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedantic philosophical traditions, especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.

He's the author thus far of three books, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency-- Reevaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno; the Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality-- Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion from Oxford in 2018; and Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, also from Oxford 2022.

He is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta 2020, and a co-editor of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought-- Cosmopolitan Interventions 2023. He has also published over 30 articles and academic journals. He is the section editor in the International Journal of Hindu Studies, overseeing submissions in Hinduism and cross-cultural philosophy of religion.

In that role, he edited two special issues of the International Journal, one on Swami Vivekananda as a cosmopolitan thinker and one on Vedantic theodicies. The same journal also hosted a discussion of scholars on his Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality book. I believe I was in that book. We nicely disagreed with each other, had a good time with the whole thing, so I was happy to be there.

Finally, I don't know how Swami's do this. He must have magical Swami powers. He's also working now on two more book projects, Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism from Cambridge University Press, and An All-Embracing Oneness-- Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna with Oxford University Press. So as Charles said, he'll be speaking tonight on "A Hindu View of Religious Cosmopolitanism-- Theologizing with Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda." Let us now welcome our speaker.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Thank you so much. I just turned it on. Will the slides magically begin, or what do I do?

SPEAKER 3: Press forward and it'll advance.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: There we go. All right. Thank you so much to Professor Charles Stang for inviting me today. Thank you to Professor Francis Clooney for the very generous introduction. We met in 2017 in person for the first time at the American Academy of Religion Conference in Denver. But I've been an admirer of his work for many years before that. Oh, Catherine, nice to see you. Thanks for coming. I'll be talking about both

Professor Clooney's and Professor Cornille's work actually in the course of the talk toward the end about multiple religious belonging. And thank you all for coming. One of the saddest ironies of religion is that on the one hand, there isn't a religion on Earth that doesn't teach love and compassion. And yet at the same time, some of the worst acts of bloodshed, violence, bigotry, fanaticism, racism have been committed in the name of religion.

So I think it's urgent now to think about ways of theorizing and practicing religious harmony. I think it's more urgent than ever. So it's in that context that I wanted to talk about this particular Hindu vision of religious cosmopolitanism, focused on the life and teachings of two Hindu figures, Sri Ramakrishna and his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda.

There will be three parts to the talk. In the first part, I'll be defending a new interpretation of Ramakrishna's doctrine of the harmony of all religions. In the second part of the talk, I'll be talking about how his disciple, Swami Vivekananda, further develops and deepens Sri Ramakrishna's views into a full-blown religious cosmopolitanism. And I'll talk about what I mean by that a bit later in the talk.

And finally, I want to argue that Sri Ramakrishna himself deserves to be considered a pioneer religious cosmopolitan and one of the first multiple religious belonging. And this will be a very controversial part of my talk. And that's deliberate. And I hope to at least initiate discussion with you guys here in the audience.

So Sri Ramakrishna, he was a 19th-century Hindu mystic, a Bengali mystic, who was born in 1836 and passed away in 1886. He's most famous for having practiced spiritual disciplines in a variety of religious traditions, including Tantra, Vaishnavism, Advaita Vedanta, Islam, and Christianity. And we have to put practice in scare quotes if we're talking in the context of Islam and Christianity. I don't want to beg the question.

I'll raise the question toward the end of the talk, did Sri Ramakrishna really practice Christianity? And if so, in what sense? Ramakrishna also claimed to have had numerous spiritual experiences on the basis of his varied spiritual practices in different traditions, and it was on the basis of his own varied spiritual practices and spiritual experiences that he taught famously, "As many faiths, so many paths," joto mot, toto poth. There are many formulations of it in the original Bengali, mot poth, ononto mot, ononto poth, infinite are the paths, infinite are the faiths.

But these are teachings which are kind of cliches, especially in Bengal. If you talk about Sri Ramakrishna, yeah, yeah, he's the one who taught joto mot, toto poth, as many faiths, so many paths. But his views on the harmony of religions are incredibly-- there's a kind of deceptive simplicity to them. And they have been interpreted in many different ways. So there's a big question, how exactly did Sri Ramakrishna harmonize the world religions? It's a good time for a water break.

So I think that there are two common misconceptions about his doctrine of the harmony of world religions. I'm pushing back against, or I'm challenging both of these common misconceptions. The first misconception is that he held the view that all religions are true. Frank Morales is an example of someone who makes this argument. But in a kind of polemic, he has a treatise called radical universalism, where he attacks Ramakrishna's views after strawmanning him, holding this view, basically.

But there's a second misconception, which is quite common, actually, even among some followers of our tradition. This is the view that he harmonized the world religions on the basis of Shankara's classical Advaita Vedanta philosophy, according to which the common goal of all religious paths is the realization of non-dual pure consciousness. One monk of our order, Swami Dhireshananda, wrote several articles in Bengali defending this interpretation of his doctrine of the harmony of all the religions.

One thing that's interesting about our monastic order is that monks in our tradition are encouraged to interpret Sri Ramakrishna in their own way. And so sometimes you find monks actually disagreeing with each other about how to interpret Sri Ramakrishna, how to interpret Swami Vivekananda. And today, I'm going to defend the line of interpretation first defended, as far as I'm aware, by Swami Turiyananda and Swami Vivekananda, of course, on my reading.

But more recently by Swami Tapasyananda, who is one of our past vice presidents. He's one of the great scholar of the monks of our order, head of Chennai Math in South India. So why do I think these are misconceptions? Contrary to the first misconception, the view that all religions are true, Ramakrishna held not that all religions are true, but that all religions are effective paths to the same goal of God realization.

And contrary to the second view, Sri Ramakrishna never held that devotees of the personal god, so theistic religious practitioners, must attain Advaitic realization of pure consciousness. So to help us in our discussion, I think it's useful to bring in some terminology from the field of theology. Alan Race popularized these terms in his book Christians and Religious Pluralism. Many of you are familiar with them-- exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.

I'm aware that these terms and this whole typology has been challenged on different fronts. I still think that they're useful. And that what's important for the scholar to do, if we're using the terms is to stipulate precise definitions. So that's what I'm doing. I'm just stipulating these definitions for the purpose of this presentation.

Exclusivism, and I'm not claiming that this corresponds to Race's understanding of the terms. This is just my definition of the terms. Exclusivism, only one religion leads to salvation, while all other religions fail to lead to salvation. So an example of a religious exclusivist in this sense is Karl Barth, the Protestant theologian.

Inclusivism is the view that only one religion leads directly to salvation, but other religions lead indirectly to salvation or afford lesser forms of salvation. So an example from the Catholic theological side would be Karl Rahner. And from the Indian side, I want to argue, classical Advaita Vedanta, the position first developed by Shankara.

And religious pluralism. This is the view that multiple religions are equally capable of leading to salvation. So they're placed on a salvific par. On the Christian side, there are prominent names like John Hick and Paul Knitter. On the Indian side, I want to argue in the course of the presentation, I've done so more extensively in my published work mentioned by Professor Clooney. I would argue that Sri Ramakrishna was a full-blown religious pluralist and in this precise sense.

So first, let me make a brief case as to why I think that classical Advaita Vedanta is a form of inclusivism rather than pluralism. We need a very kind of brief 101 crash course in Shankara's Advaita Vedanta. So fortunately, there's a formula in Sanskrit that encapsulates the entire philosophy in a nutshell, Brahma satyam jagat mithya jivo brahmaiva naparah. Brahman alone is real. The world is unreal. The individual is none other than Brahman.

So if we can distill his philosophy into five main doctrines. There are many more, but I just want to be brief here. One, the sole reality is Brahman, which is non-dual pure consciousness. Attributeless pure consciousness. Two, the world, jagat, the personal God, Ishvara, and individual souls, jivos, are empirically real, real from the vyavaharika standpoint, but not from the paramarthika standpoint, the ultimate standpoint.

Third, we attain liberation, moksha, by attaining knowledge of our true nature as Brahman, as non-dual pure consciousness. Four and five concerned spiritual practice. Jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, is the only direct path to liberation. I won't go into the details of what that involves. But fifth, bhakti yoga, the path of devotion toward a personal God, and karma yoga, the path of unselfish works, lead indirectly to liberation by purifying and concentrating the mind, thereby making us eligible to practice jnana yoga.

So bhakti yoga and karma yoga are preparatory disciplines, making one eligible to practice the higher spiritual practice of the path of knowledge, which alone leads to liberation. So there's clearly a hierarchy of yogas in Shankara's philosophy. So, of course, Shankara in the eighth century. Most likely he didn't show much awareness of non-Hindu religions other than Jainism, Buddhism.

But modern Advaita Vedantins, like Radhakrishnan, who has a connection with this Hindu annual view of life lecture, what they try to do is develop Shankara's-- or on the basis of Shankara's classical Advaitic metaphysics, they try to harmonize the world religions. And I've tried to make this illustrate in the form of a diagram.

On this interpretation, this is what I'm calling a classical Advaitic inclusivist harmonizing of the world religions. Christians through the practice of Christianity can realize the Christian God, but notice that's not the top of the mountain. Likewise for Muslims, the practice of Islam, they can realize God as Allah. And I'm just taking examples. There are many more.

Theistic Hindus, Hindus who believe in a personal God can realize some form of the personal God Ramakrishna, Kali, Shiva, and so on. None of these are reaching the pinnacle, the ultimate. These are all realization of different forms of the personal God, Saguna Brahman, which is not sufficient for moksha, for liberation from transmigratory existence. The problem is rebirth and suffering. We're not liberated from suffering by practicing any of these paths. What do we need to do?

Christians need to leave off their Christian practice eventually. Practice Advaitic Jñana Yoga, the path of knowledge, and only then can they realize the highest goal, which is realization of nondual pure consciousness, and that alone is tantamount to liberation. Likewise for Muslims, likewise for Theistic Hindus, you have to leave off your theistic religious practices, practice Jnana Yoga, the higher path of Jnana Yoga and then alone you can reach the top of the mountain.

I hope you can see pretty clearly the inclusivist structure of this modern advaitic harmonizing of the world of religions. What I want to argue is that Ramakrishna's harmonizing of the world of religions does not fall into this pattern, that it's more robustly pluralistic than this. That's what I'll be arguing in the first part of my talk. So his teachings on vijñana, a very special spiritual experience which he called vijñana, hold the key to understanding his pluralist doctrine of the harmony of religions.

He says as follows, he explains two different stages in spiritual experience, which he calls jñana and vijñana The jñani, the knower of nondual pure consciousness, Brahman, gives up his identification with worldly things, discriminating, 'Not this, not this.' Neti, neti. Only then can he realize Brahman.

It is like reaching the roof of a house by leaving the steps behind one by one, but the vijñani, who is more intimately acquainted with Brahman, realizes something more. He realizes that the steps are made of the same materials as the roof; bricks, lime and brick dust. That which is realized as Brahman through the illuminating process of, 'Not this, not this,' is then found to have become the universe and all its living beings.

The vijñani sees that the Reality which is impersonal, nirguna, is also personal, saguna. This is known as vijñana. So there's a lot to unpack here in terms of this metaphor. The jñani is the traditional Advaita Vedantin, a follower of Shankara, who attains spiritual realization of the impersonal, nondual Brahman pure consciousness through the practice of Jñana Yoga.

That's signified by reaching the roof in Ramakrishna's metaphor, but that's not the summit of spiritual experience. The vijñani, vijñani literally is the person who has an even deeper knowledge of the ultimate truth. The vijñani goes beyond the Advaita jñani by realizing that Brahman is not only impersonal, nirguna, but also personal, saguna.

So while the jñani dismisses the universe as a "framework of illusion," the dhokar tati, the vijñani embraces the universe as a "mansion of mirth," majar kuti, as a real manifestation of God. So if we were to characterize, very briefly, what I call Ramakrishna's Philosophy of Vijñana Vedanta. I give it this name because I think that his entire philosophical outlook is grounded in this very special spiritual experience of vijñana.

Three main doctrines that are relevant here; first, the soul reality is the infinite divine reality, which is the impersonal, nondual Brahman in one aspect, in its static aspect, and the personal God, Sakti in its dynamic aspect. One of his most common teachings is "Brahma o sakti abhed." Brahman nondual pure consciousness is inseparable from Sakti, the personal God.

Shankara would not accept this teaching because Shankara will say, Sakti, the personal God, is a lower reality, which is only true from the standpoint of ignorance, but when you realize the highest truth of your true essence is nondual pure consciousness, it turns out that the personal God was just a superimposition onto nondual Brahman.

Second, the world and all individual souls, so jagat and jiva, are real manifestations of divine Sakti. Here, again, Shankara wouldn't agree. Shankara says, from the ultimate standpoint, this entire world of names and forms, even the multiplicity of individual souls, all these people sitting here today, is an illusory appearance.

Third, in terms of spiritual practice, according to Ramakrishna, Jñana Yoga, the path of knowledge, Bhakti Yoga, the path of devotion toward a personal God, Karma Yoga, the path of selfless action, and Raja Yoga, the path of meditation, concentration, are all direct paths to the goal of God-realization, to the highest liberative goal.

By contrast, remember what Shankara's view is; Jñana Yoga, the path of knowledge alone leads directly to the highest goal. Other paths Bhakti, Yoga, Karma Yoga, are not hopeless. They're helpful as preparatory disciplines, to purify the mind, to make one eligible to practice the higher discipline of the path of knowledge.

So there's no hierarchy of Yogas in Ramakrishna's philosophy of Vijñani Vedanta. So in a nutshell, I would characterize Ramakrishna's philosophy of Vijñana Vedanta as a Sakti-affirming and life-affirming Advaita philosophy. It's Advaitic. It's just as Advaitic as shankara's philosophy, but it's a different kind of Advaita.

There are actually many kinds of Advaita in the Indian landscape. There's Kashmir Shaivism. There's the Vishishtadvaita of ramanuja. I'm arguing that the integral Advaita, the Vijñana Vedanta of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo-- that's the new book I'm working on-- it's a new school of Advaita, which is more expansive than the traditional Advaita Vedanta of Shankara.

So if we were to characterize that in a succinct Sanskrit phrase, this is my own coinage, Brahma-Sakti satyam, jagat satyam. The ultimate reality is not just Brahma nondual pure consciousness, but it's equally Sakti, so I've hyphenated as Brahma-Sakti. Brahma-Sakti satyam means Brahma-Sakti alone is real. That's what makes it Advaita.

The only reality is Brahma-Sakti, but jagat satyam, this world is not an illusion. The world itself is a real manifestation of divine Sakti. All individual souls and all names and forms are real manifestations of the Sakti aspect of the ultimate reality.

So now, with this in the background, I want to argue that Ramakrishna's vijñana-based ontology of the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality-- so this very expansive spiritual experience of the divine as personal in one aspect and impersonal in another and much more besides-- serves as the basis of his religious pluralism, as stipulated in the previous slide.

God is infinite and the paths to God are infinite. This is my favorite formulation of his harmonizing of the world religions. The Bengali is tini ananta, patho ananta, and the reason I like it is because he explains why there are infinite paths to God. There are infinite paths to God because God himself, herself, itself is infinite.

So if God is infinite, it stands to reason that there are infinite paths to God. That's why I called my book on Ramakrishna Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality. And the epigraph to that book is this teaching of his, God is infinite and the paths to God are infinite. So how do I interpret this teaching?

I take it to mean the following; devotees of the personal God, theistic religious practitioners, bhaktas, through their respective theistic paths, realize some form or aspect of the personal that is the Sakti dimension, the dynamic dimension of the impersonal-personal Infinite Divine Reality.

Advaita Vedantins, by contrast, through the practice of the path of knowledge, Jñana Yoga, attained the nondual realization of pure consciousness, which is attributeless. That's the impersonal aspect of the same Divine Reality. Ramakrishna uses a number of metaphors to illustrate the harmony of religions. One very famous one, which is well known to a lot of people, is a blind man and the elephant, but the one I'm going to talk about today is a less well-known parable of the chameleon.

He says the following, "Once a man entered a forest and saw a small animal on a tree. He came back and told another man that he had seen a creature of a beautiful red color on a certain tree. The second man replied, 'When I went into the forest, I also saw that animal. But why do you call it red? It is green.' Another man who was present contradicted them both and insisted that it was yellow."

"Presently others arrived and contended that it was gray, violet, blue and so forth and so on. At last they started quarreling among themselves. To settle the dispute, they all went to the tree. They saw a man sitting under it. On being asked, he replied, 'Yes, I live under this tree and I know the animal very well. All of your descriptions are true. Sometimes it appears red, sometimes yellow, and at other times blue, violet, gray and so forth."

"It is a chameleon. And sometimes it has no color at all. Now it has a color, and now it has none." This is the lesson that Ramakrishna draws from the parable, "In like manner, one who constantly thinks of God can know God's real nature; he alone knows that God reveals himself to seekers in various forms and aspects."

"God is personal as well as impersonal. Only the man, the person who lives under the tree knows that the chameleon can appear in various colors, and he knows further that the animal at times has no color at all. It is the others who suffer from the agony of futile argument."

A lot to unpack here as well. I want to highlight four key features of the parable. First, the various colors of the chameleon, yellow, red, blue and so forth correspond to different forms of the personal God. Be it Christ or Krishna or Kali or Shiva and so on.

Second, the colorless chameleon corresponds to the impersonal nondual pure consciousness of classical Advaita Vedanta. No color at all. Sometimes the chameleon is no color at all. That's nirguna Brahman, nondual pure consciousness. Third, note that the thrust of the whole parable is that the colorless chameleon is in no way more true than the colored chameleon.

The chameleon has blue or yellow or red, which means that the theistic religious practitioners realization of the personal God has the same status and the same value and the same reality, the same validity as the jñani's, the Advaita Vedantin's realization of nondual pure consciousness. They're on a salvific par. And forth, the person, this very unusual person, the tree sitter who sits under the tree 24 hours a day. Who is that person?

He sees the chameleon in multiple colors and as colorless. That's the vijñani, the person who has attained this very special, unique, expansive, spiritual experience of vijñana. The vijñani is the one who has realized the divine in multiple forms and aspects, and so on the basis of his or her own spiritual experience can say, you guys are right.

You're right that God is Christ. You're right that God is Allah. You're right that God is Krishna. You're right that God is Kali. And yet your mistake is some people make the mistake of limiting God, limiting the divine to that aspect or form of God that they have realized or that they worship. Never put a limit to God. That was one of Ramakrishna's favorite teachings.

You can never put a limit to God. Never say that God can only be this and no more. So now let's revisit the same mountain. How does Ramakrishna's pluralistic harmonization of the world religions look, especially in contrast to Shankara's more inclusivist advaitic harmonizing?

I see it as follows; Christians, through the practice of Christianity, directly reached the top of the mountain, which I would characterize as realization of some aspect or form of the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality which is tantamount to liberation or salvation. Likewise for muslims, likewise for Hindus, meaning Theistic Hindus, in this context, likewise for Advaita Vedantins, non-theists, likewise for Buddhists.

They all reached the top of the top of the mountain through their respective religious paths, and there is no inclusivist structure because they all reached the top of the mountain without having to stop their theistic religious practices and practicing some allegedly higher practice. So I hope it's clear how this has a more robustly pluralistic structure than the classical advaitic inclusivist model.

Another important thing here is Ramakrishna's expansive conception of eschatology, the final state of liberation. Let's assume that I've realized God. I've attained liberation while in the physical body. What happens after I cast off this physical body? What does the final state of liberation, post-mortem liberation, look like?

According to Ramakrishna, there are two fundamentally different types of spiritual aspirants; bhaktas, devotionally oriented people who strive to cultivate a loving relationship with the personal God, and jñanis, intellectually oriented people like Advaita Vedanta and some Buddhists, who strive for Nirvana, a salvific state in which no sense of individuality remains.

In contrast to traditional schools of Vedanta, Ramakrishna grants equal value and equal reality to both the advaitic and the theistic ideals of liberation, I think this is very significant and important. The form of liberation we choose depends on our individual temperament and preference. So one of his famous teachings is bhaktas don't want to become sugar. They want to eat sugar.

These are the two contrasting paradigms, right? So theists want to dwell in a heaven, in a loving relationship with the personal God, whatever that heaven is. That's eating sugar. Nondualists will say that's not the highest salvation for us. That's silly. There's no coming and going. We don't even believe in eternal heavens. We believe in temporary heavens, but not eternal heavens. And why is that?

It sounds like it would be boring, something like that. So instead they say, no, I want to become sugar. I'll get cavities if I eat sugar for my entire life. So while some spiritual aspirants seek to merge their individuality and the impersonal nondual Brahman, devotees, bhaktas tend to prefer to retain a sense of individuality in order to enjoy the bliss of loving communion with the personal God. In order to eat sugar, you have to be a little bit separate from the sugar.

There's an eater and then there's the object that's being eaten, right? The food. And since there are various lokas-- loka in Hinduism, in Sanskrit, means realms-- transcendental realms, other than this one, super terrestrial realms. Because there are multiple lokas, there are also multiple theistic forms of salvation. So it's not the case that all theists, whether they're Christian or Muslims or Hindus, will all reach the same kind of heaven. No,

I like to think of Ramakrishna's view of eschatology as a many-roomed mansion, using a metaphor that Christ also used. There are many rooms in the mansion. Imagine there's a Christian room. Maybe within Christianity, there's a Catholic room or whatever, and there's also a Muslim room, Jannah. There are many different Hindu rooms, the Kali room for the shaktas, the Vaishnava room for the vaishnavas, and so on and so forth.

These are different theistic heavens, and every soul, every liberated soul gets the form of salvation that they want, that they're looking for. They'll eat sugar in the way that they want. So in light of this, I think that it's fair to say that Ramakrishna was not only a religious pluralist, who held that different religious paths are equally capable of leading to salvation, but he was also equally a salvific pluralist, in the sense that salvation or liberation itself takes a variety of forms, depending on the temperament and preferences of different liberated souls.

Some of you, who are familiar with theology, might be aware of S. Marc Heim's book called Salvations. It's an important book critiquing John Hicks' understanding of the Ultimate Reality, but also of eschatology. And one of Heim's main criticisms is that Hick adopts a monolithic conception of salvation that fails to do justice to the particularity and uniqueness of the different forms of salvation taught in the different world religions.

I think one of the virtues of Ramakrishna's, vijñana-based religious pluralism is that he fully embraces multiple forms of salvation, but without jettisoning pluralism altogether, which is actually what Heim ends up doing. Heim calls his position a pluralistic inclusivism, but Ramakrishna remains a robust religious pluralist, while also accepting, affirming, multiple forms of salvation. So I think that's a really unique feature of his view.

Now, second part of the talk, from religious pluralism to religious cosmopolitanism. Ramakrishna's chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda, many of you are familiar with him. Born in 1863, passed away in 1902. I see him as further developing and kind of clarifying that Ramakrishna's views on the harmony of world religions are extraordinarily radical and relevant even today. And that is not just a religious pluralism, but Vivekananda makes clear that Ramakrishna's views are actually a form of religious cosmopolitanism.

What do I mean by that? Again, this is just a stipulation. We can and should strive to learn from religions other than our own, and even to incorporate aspects of their traditions into our own spiritual practice. You might ask, how is this different from religious pluralism? Think about it. Religious pluralism is a view that multiple religious paths are equally capable of taking us to salvation.

Imagine I'm a Hindu. Somebody else's is a Christian, so I can fully accept that Christian can reach the same goal as mine through the practice of Christianity. That doesn't mean that I have to practice Christianity or that I even have to learn anything from Christianity. I can just say those Christians are great on their own. Muslims are also great, but there's nothing for me to learn here.

So religious cosmopolitanism is a view that I can enrich my own spiritual practice. I can have a deeper understanding of my own home religious tradition by exposing myself to and learning from religious traditions other than my own. That's a step forward from religious pluralism, and Vivekananda gives three rationales for moving toward or deepening religious pluralism into a religious cosmopolitanism.

First rationale, since different religions provide different but complementary accounts of one and the same Infinite Divine Reality, every religious practitioner can enrich and broaden her understanding of the divine by learning about other religions. I particularly like a statement of Fritjhof Schuon in his well-known book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions. He says, the truth is that every religious form is superior to the others in a particular respect.

Every religion gets something right in a way that's superior to the way that other religions articulate that same idea. I think it's very important, which means that we stand to learn a great deal by exposing ourselves to religions other than our own. Second rationale for religious cosmopolitanism, according to Vivekananda, every religion has what he calls a unique soul, which he defines as a particular excellence, and he then goes on to define what he takes to be the soul of some of the world religions.

He takes the soul of Islam to be a universal brotherhood, the soul of Hinduism to be God-realization, and the soul of Christianity to be purification of mind through social service. You can quibble with him or vehemently argue with him about, well, I think the soul of Christianity is very different from that. That's fine, but the main point here is each religion has a unique soul that we can learn from.

Now, the important thing here is that the different souls of the world religions are complementary, he uses the term supplementary, rather than contradictory. So we can enrich our own spiritual life by assimilating the unique soul of every religion. Third rationale for religious cosmopolitanism, each world religion corresponds to one or more of the four Yogas. The four yogas, as understood in Vedanta, Bhakti-Yoga, Karma-Yoga, Jñana-Yoga, and Karma-Yoga.

So we can best harmonize the four Yogas by being religious cosmopolitans. Here's his rationale. He says, "We want to become harmonious beings with the psychical, spiritual, intellectual and working, meaning active sides of our nature, equally developed. We must be as broad as the skies, as deep as the ocean."

"We must become many-sided, indeed we must become protean in character, so as not only to tolerate, but to do what is much more difficult, to sympathize, to enter into another's path, and feel with him in his aspirations and seeking after God." So I think this is a really beautiful statement of religious cosmopolitanism, and how it's not just about dabbling in other religious paths from our religious standpoint, but actually entering into the spirit and the worldview of the religious other.

And in another passage, he says, "Our watchword, then, will be acceptance and not exclusion. I accept all religions that were in the past, and worship with them all; I worship God with every one of them, in whatever form they worship him. I shall go to the Mosque of the Mohammedan, I shall enter the Christians church and kneel before the crucifix, I shall enter the Buddhistic temple, where I shall take refuge in Buddha and in his Law."

"I shall go into the forest and sit down in meditation with the Hindu, who is trying to see the Light which enlightens the heart of everyone. Not only shall I do all these, but I shall keep my heart open for all that may come in the future. We stand in the present, but open ourselves to the infinite future. We take in all that has been in the past, enjoy the light of the present, and open every window of the heart for all that will come in the future."

This is, I think, a very prescient statement of what's now called multiple religious belonging, and I'll get to that in Part 3 very, very soon, but I just want to mention briefly that I flew in from LA yesterday, and as soon as I got to hotel Veritas where I'm staying, I just really wanted to go to a Catholic Church, and so I looked up Harvard Square Catholic church, and what popped up was, I think, Saint John's Parish.

Saint Paul's parish. Thank you. And I've never been there, so I walk in. I missed the main area, but I just walked into this beautiful room dedicated to female Catholic mystics, which I'm sure you're aware of. There's a little side room and it's very beautiful, and I had a wonderful prayer there. And in the back of the room, there are quotations from Saint Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Hildegard Von Bingen, and so it was really nice.

So the third part of my talk, multiple religious belonging. As promised, I want to argue that Ramakrishna was a pioneer in the practice of what's now called multiple religious belonging, but what exactly is multiple religious belonging? All bets are off here, and different scholars have defined it in different ways.

Professor Cornille-- I'm honored that she's present here today-- has edited a volume called Many Mansions? multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, published in 2002, and Professor Clooney has contributed a chapter to it, which I think is very helpful and insightful, called God for us. So I'm drawing on Professor Cornell's introduction to that volume and Professor Clooney's chapter in the volume.

On my understanding, Professor Cornille defines religious multiple religious belonging as follows. She gives two criteria. "Religious belonging involves the recognition of one's religious identity by the tradition itself and the disposition to submit to the conditions for membership as delineated by that tradition." It's page four of her introduction, and Professor Clooney gives two criteria for multiple religious belonging in his chapter, on my understanding, again-- I might be misreading-- so they're here to clarify, thankfully.

The first criterion multiple religious belonging involves a practice of attentive reading. He says the following, "If a Christian reads a Hindu verse and ponders it according to traditions of Hindu learning," note that, according to traditions of Hindu learning, "This eventually has an effect-- salutary, I suggest-- on how he or she thinks and reads, contemplates and encounters Jesus of Nazareth, who even today wishes to encounter us."

"If in the end we bring to our spiritual understanding and practice images that belong to more than one tradition, we ourselves begin to belong to those multiple traditions in new and complex ways." So I think what's important here is that he's not suggesting that a Christian read a Hindu text through a Christian lens. He's saying something much more radical.

He's saying that the Christians should read a Hindu text on its own terms and, by doing so, on its own Hindu terms, you can become a better Christian and a deeper Christian and understand your own home religious tradition even more fully and deeply. At least that's how I understand it. Second criterion that he suggests for multiple religious belonging is the following; I think he takes it to mean a spiritual discernment of the same God working in different faith traditions and hence the title of his chapter.

I think it's a very telling and helpful title, God for us. He says the following, "Multiple religious belongings may at any early stage seem merely or uncomfortably multiple, until we-- who are Christian, who are Hindu-- notice that even when our imaginations have become religiously more complicated and diverse, it is still the same God who is seeking us out, accommodating us where we are."

I think this is very Ramakrishnan and spirit, actually, this kind of understanding of multiple religious belonging. So now I get to maybe the most controversial part of my talk. Did Ramakrishna really practice Christianity? There are two prevailing views on this issue. The first view, interestingly, is held by many followers of our tradition, whether their devotees, lay devotees or monks.

This is the view that Ramakrishna, yes, he faithfully practiced Christianity for how long? For three days in 1874, culminating in the direct, mystical experience of Jesus merging into his own body. Second view, also common, they find the first view to be absurd. What does it mean to practice a religion for three days?

So they say, no, Ramakrishna, as a Hindu, dabbled in Christian practice-- you can see the denigrating language here-- dabbled in Christian practice for three days in 1874. Parish met local, a good friend of mine in Germany, University of Münster. He makes this argument in the same book symposium on infinite paths that Professor Clooney has contributed to.

He makes this kind of argument. You can look at that symposium. I mentioned it at the end of toward the end of this presentation. So this is the second view that he never actually practiced Christianity. He remained a Hindu throughout and just wet his feet a little in or waded in the waters of Christianity while remaining a Hindu.

I want to challenge both of these, I think, misconceptions and I want to argue that Ramakrishna was a pioneering example of a Hindu-Christian multiple religious belonging. According to the criteria set by professors Cornille and Clooney, and that he practiced Christianity, not just for three days in 1874, but for fully 15 years from 1871 to the year he passed away in 1886.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the first to make this argument. So let me begin to make the case here. I might turn it into an article at some point in the future. We'll see. I'm just very busy. 1871 is where I date the beginning of his Christian practice. It begins with an intense Bible study with one of his devotees, Shambu Charan Mallick. He asked him to read out loud from the Bible, presumably in a Bengali translation.

He didn't know english, but there were Bengali translations available in British colonial India. And so he's listened carefully and he was especially taken by the life and teachings of Jesus, especially the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but he also read other parts of the New Testament, read, meaning heard out loud, and he had a very good memory. So he was familiar with the Corinthians and other texts by Paul.

So his Bible study begins in 1871. Of course, he's trying to the best of his ability to put into practice many of Christ's very rigorous teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Beatitudes. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, and so on. In 1874, three years later, there was a really unique three day period.

Ramakrishna is walking in the Garden of his devotee, Shambhu Charan Mallick, and then he sits in his parlor and he sees a picture of Baby Jesus in the arms of Mother Mary, and he just looks intently at the picture and then he says-- I'm just paraphrasing, he describes it himself. He says that I suddenly saw rays of light emanating from Baby Jesus entering my body, and we have to keep in mind that he's Ishtadevata.

His chosen form of God was Kali, Mother Kali, Divine Mother Kali. What happens is when those rays of light enter his body, he said it revolutionized his spiritual and religious attitude and it wiped out, it wiped out temporarily his Hindu samskaras, his the latent mental impressions of all of his worship of the different Hindu deities, gods and goddesses, and he became a Christian.

This is his own description, and he had tremendous reverence for Jesus. And he was practicing for those three days, very intensely, the practice of Christianity as he understood it, culminating in, at the end of this three day period, he's walking in a garden and he sees what he takes to be Jesus himself, Jesus telling him, I've died.

I've shed my heart's blood for the sake of humanity, and then Christ ends up merging into his body, and after that spiritual experience of Christ merging into his body, Ramakrishna accepted Christ and worshipped Christ as a divine incarnation. Notice "a" here, so obviously that's not going to gel well with official Christian orthodoxy, which takes Christ to be the sole begotten son.

He was Hindu, but still he fully accepted Jesus as one of the divine incarnations and worshiped him as such. So after that experience, he kept two pictures of Jesus in his own room and worshiped them with incense and fully accepted Christianity as a salvific path. Another really interesting incident, from 1874 all the way up to 1886 when he left his body, he reveres and worships Jesus as an incarnation of God.

He also, throughout his life, tried to practice Christ's teachings and emulate Christ in his saintly life. And another really interesting incident, which is recorded in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, October 31, 1885, there was a Quaker Christian monk, an Indian Quaker Christian monk-- it's already unusual-- who comes to visit Ramakrishna on this day.

And he's wearing plain clothes, but underneath his plain clothes he's wearing this girawa, the ochre robes of a Sannyasi, a renunciate, and he reveals his inner clothes in the course of the conversation. And he tells the people there, you have no idea who Ramakrishna is. I see him as Jesus, and I saw him in visions previously, says this Quaker Christian Mishra. And Ramakrishna blesses him, and he goes on his way.

So it's quite striking, that, and I'm reminded of Professor Cornille's, one of her two criteria, which is that this multiple religious belonger to be accepted by members of that other religious tradition, and this is a very strong example of that. A Quaker Christian fully accepting Ramakrishna, not just as a Christian, but as Christ himself. So Ramakrishna was, on my view, a 15-year multiple religious belonging, a Hindu and a Christian, as per both Cornille's and Clooney's, in total, four respective criteria.

Clooney talks about textual study, careful, reverential textual study, and I see the Bible study beginning in 1871 as fitting that criterion. Clooney's second criterion involving spiritual discernment of the same God in different religions, that's the keynote of his teachings and his practice, and Professor Cornille's other criterion. Now, can you remind me? Sorry. So the second one is being accepted by the other tradition.

AUDIENCE: The disposition to submit.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: That's right. The disposition to submit. Thank you. So when those rays of light entered his body, he underwent this mental transformation, this spiritual transformation, which made him-- Actually, the way he describes it, it was against his will because he was terrified, because he loved his Mother Kali, and suddenly she was disappearing from his practice and he was just worshipping Christ.

And so he's doing that, but even after the three day period, it's not that he stopped practicing Christianity. What happened was his understanding of the divine further expanded, and so he continued to worship Goddess Kali as his Mother, his Beloved Mother Kali, but also accepted Christ as another unique manifestation of the divine and worshiped him accordingly and as such.

So for a more in-depth discussion in defense of Ramakrishna's philosophy of religious pluralism, please see chapters 3 and 4 of my book, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality on Ramakrishna. As Professor Clooney mentioned, there is an extensive book symposium published on the book with 13 distinguished scholars contributing, among whom were Professor Clooney, Perry Schmidt-Leukel and many others. And it's worth checking out if you're interested in further details, in discussion and debate. Lots of interesting debate.

And for a discussion of Swami Vivekananda's views on religious pluralism and religious cosmopolitanism, please read chapter 3 of my newer book, Swami Vivekananda Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, published just two years ago. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Thank you very much, swami, for such a stimulating lecture. You have a wonderful style, both clear and profound at the same time.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Thank you.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: So our procedure now will be to have questions. We are recording this event, and so I'd ask you, when you want to ask a question, to wait until you have the microphone in your hand before proceeding with the question. I might start us off since I have the mic in my hand.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Please.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: I'm going to keep it for a half hour, actually. In many ways what you're talking about is a very interesting interpretation, particularly this last point about Ramakrishna, as in a sense a devotee of Christ, the last years of his life. How does that fit in with the stories about how intensely he was the child of the Mother Kali throughout his life?

Because it doesn't seem, even when he met Jesus in the garden, he didn't leave Kali behind, but--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Except for that three day period, right? There was a period when literally his colleagues, samskaras, his Hindu scriptures were wiped out for that three day--

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: When you say that his disposition as a child of Kali was to open up from her to the other traditions and so on, and he never ceased to be Kali's child, not to quote the book, and that therefore it was like a Christian was saying, I see Jesus in all people. He is saying, the Mother gives me all religions, all people, everything, and it's less advaitic than a simpler sense of the Mother gives me everything. Is that totally off?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: No, I don't think it's totally off, but it all depends on what you mean by Mother, and if we take it to mean the six-armed Kali and I think that becomes too narrow and I think that it becomes more exclusivistic, in a way.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: I think I'd have to whip out my copy of the master, but even in the later years of his life, singing the hymns of Ramprasad and something like that, and having people sing to him, that kind of Kali.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: I guess what I mean is I'm just thinking of your second criterion of multiple religious belonging, which is spiritual discernment of the same God in the different religious traditions. So I see him as expanding his view of the divine to include Jesus. Do you see what I mean?

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Yeah. He's an inclusivist.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Well, oh, I see. So now you caught me.

[LAUGH]

Expansion, expansion is life, as we were going to say. Yeah. Thank you.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Who would like to ask a question? Yes.

AUDIENCE: Swami Medhananda, Thank you for very interesting talk. I actually had a follow-up question to Professor Clooney's about what you presented about Ramakrishna's vision of eschatology and the different mansions--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Many-roomed mansion. Many-roomed mansion, one mansion, but yeah--

AUDIENCE: Yes, the many-roomed mansion of different kinds of liberation, and so if, for him, in that three day period, becoming the devotee of Christ, would you say it opened up another room in the mansion and does it mean that he could inhabit multiple mansions in that final state of liberation, like he could multiply himself and be in the Kali mansion and in the Christ mansion and the Krishna mansion?

Is that what his vision of--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: --liberation meant?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Yeah, so I think I would just question the language a little bit because I think I said, does that open up a Christian room for him? The room was always there, right? He discovers the room. That's how I would put it. But secondly, does he venture into different rooms of the same mansion?

What's important to keep in mind is I'm describing a post-mortem state of eschatology. So while he's in the body, he could maybe mystically enter the rooms. I'm not sure, but I don't think there's a direct evidence for that, but what he does do is worship Christ and experience Christ as one genuine and unique manifestation of the same infinite divine, and while continuing to worship that same divine as Kali and that same divine as Krishna and so on and so forth.

Does that does that help?

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Swami, for such a great talk.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I have a few questions, but I'll ask one, but it is embedded with a couple. So I totally grasp what you're saying and about religious pluralism in the context of accepting different deities or conceptions of God as superimpositions onto the Infinite Reality or different--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: I didn't say that superimposition because that becomes classical advaita but there are real manifestations of the same divine, yeah.

AUDIENCE: But OK, valid, but I think that means something different for me to say that I'm a Hindu, but I see Allah as God or Jesus as divine. That's very different than me saying I'm a Muslim or I'm a Christian, and what happens when there's a conflict of doctrine?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Yeah, OK. That's a great question. It's one of the big thorny issues in theology and philosophy of religion, in discussions of religious pluralism, every theory of religious pluralism has to face the problem of what's called conflicting religious truth claims. Different religions make different claims. Did Christ die on the cross? Christians say Yes. Muslims say no. Is there karma and rebirth? Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism say yes. Orthodox Abrahamic religions say no.

So don't religious pluralists fall into contradiction by accepting all the world religions? The key is the way that I stipulated the definitions of exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism. I don't define them in terms of doctrinal truth. I define these terms, these positions, in terms of salvific efficacy. So what Ramakrishna claims is that different world religions, apart from their doctrines, are equally efficacious in leading us to the same goal of salvation.

Now, to be more precise in answering your question, I think it's helpful to bring in John Hicks classification of different types of conflicting religious truth claims; historical, transhistorical, and claims about ultimate reality. And I see Ramakrishna as adopting a particular stance toward the first two types, the conflicting historical and transhistorical truth claims.

Historical would be, did Christ die on the cross? Transhistorical would be more metaphysical issues. Karma and rebirth and so on. Ramakrishna's stance is different religions say conflicting things about these historical issues and transhistorical issues. That's just a fact. Nonetheless, he says, and which means that some religions get certain issues right-- if karma and rebirth is true-- Orthodox Abrahamic religions are wrong on that count. If Christ did die on the cross, Islam is wrong.

What he says, though, is that even if a religion is wrong about a particular doctrine, it doesn't handicap that religion from the standpoint of salvation in a significant way, because none of these historical and transhistorical truth claims are universally binding. Not everybody has to accept them, and they're not salvifically vital for everybody. That's the crucial stance on the first two types.

Now, with regard to Hick's third type of conflicting truth claim, its claims about the nature of ultimate reality, Ramakrishna adopts a very different take. The chameleon parable explains it very easily, which is that the different religious conceptions of the ultimate as Christ, as Allah, as Krishna, as Kali, as pure consciousness, are complementary rather than conflicting. And how do we know that?

On the basis of his own spiritual experience of vijñana, he realized that the same infinite divine actually manifests in different forms and aspects. So that's a short answer to the question. Thank you. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Swami, for the talk. On your interpretation, you say that Sri Ramakrishna says that not all religions are true, but that they are all effective paths. I'm just wondering, what is the precise difference between being true and being an effective path?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Great question. So all religions are true. It can be interpreted in different ways, but one way of interpreting is all the doctrines of Christianity and all the doctrines of Islam and all the doctrines of Buddhism and all the doctrines of Hinduism and so on are true. That lands in radical contradiction for the reasons I just said in answer to his question.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm wondering if there's any advantage, from Ramakrishna's point of view, in straddling the Brahman-Sakti line. That is to say, rather than hierarchically ordering them, is there an advantage to an aspirant, to use the chameleon metaphor? Is there an advantage to being able to have seen the chameleon colorless and to have seen it colored, or for that matter, to have seen the chameleon in different colors?

If they're all essentially equal-- I shouldn't say equal, they're not ranked hierarchically-- what benefit is it to the aspirant to move among the colors or from color to the colorless?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: That's a great question. I want to say that there is no unique benefit from the standpoint of salvation. He would use an example of the Ganga, the famous river in India. He would say to touch the Ganga, you don't have to run your finger through the whole river from beginning to end, from its source to where it goes into the ocean.

He says you can touch it at any point and you've touched the Ganga. He says, likewise, you can realize God in any form or aspect, and that's God-realization. That's enough. That's liberation for you. So what is the advantage? The advantage is the advantage of the epistemic vantage point, that expansive vantage point, of the person sitting under the tree, in the blind man of the elephant example, it's the person who can see the whole elephant.

These are people who are spiritually situated in such a way that they can adjudicate these debates and these conflicts among the world's religious practitioners and saying, wait, wait, wait, wait. You guys are all right, but you're all wrong. You're all right because you're touching real aspect. You've realized a genuine aspect of the divine, but never limit God to just that aspect of God that you've realized.

All of you are right because you're all realizing different aspects and forms that are just complementary aspects of one and the same Infinite Divine. So there's an epistemic advantage and specifically in helping to promote religious harmony and to explain in, I think, a pretty philosophically sophisticated way, how it is that different religions can be equally effective in leading to the same goal of salvation.

AUDIENCE: Can I just follow up very quickly, how comfortable would you be translating that epistemic advantage into the language of the Abrahamic traditions around the temptation of idolatry? Because it suggests, in some ways, that if you occupy one point of view where you see only the colorless or only one color, you can, I hear in your comment a worry about a kind of fixation, a certainty and fixation--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: And a limiting. Yeah,

AUDIENCE: Yeah, a limiting, which, again, in the Abrahamic traditions, this usually gets labeled as a conceptual idolatry.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I actually talk about it in a section of chapter 2 of this book, specifically in the context of the continental philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, and he distinguishes idol from icon, and I talk about how Ramakrishna's idea that you can never place a limit to God is a good example of the kind of conceptual idolatry that Jean-Luc Marion is criticizing. Thank you. It's a wonderful question. Professor Cornille?

PROFESSOR CORNILLE: Thank you, and, since you quoted me, I feel like I should respond.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Sorry if I butchered you.

PROFESSOR CORNILLE: Yeah, well, it made me think of that aspect of belonging where you have to be recognized by the tradition to which you claim to belong as or indeed belonging to that tradition, and that's one aspect of my question. The other aspect is the person sitting under the tree who sees all the chameleons in the different colors--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Or the one chameleon in different colors.

PROFESSOR CORNILLE: --stands above all religions. So I doubt that Christianity would recognize a figure outside of its tradition to stand above all religions and judge all religions--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: From on high or something.

PROFESSOR CORNILLE: --from beyond any particular religious tradition, so is there a problem there in terms of belonging to a religion beyond which you situate yourself? So that's one aspect of it, and then the question of who speaks for a religion. So you mentioned the Quaker who recognized Ramakrishna as Jesus, so would anyone who claims to belong to a particular religion have the authority to recognize somebody else as, oh, I saw Jesus in this person, even if much of what he says contradicts what the Orthodox tradition might say, for example?

Another aspect of the question is you try to dissociate the state of salvation from doctrines and so on, but that's not the way Christianity, I think, normative Christianity understands itself. So faith is part also of salvation or right. Faith plays an important part, so that also defines Christianity in its own self-understanding, and if Ramakrishna says that, that doesn't really matter, is he then really fully Christian?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Thank you so much. These are all deep questions. OK, regarding the first point, which is in this chameleon metaphor, we have the person sitting under the tree and you're asking-- I think, that's one of the three questions that I found a little bit hazy-- but on my understanding of what you said, I think the worry is that this person is occupying a kind of transcendental viewpoint above all the world religions and Is that a problem for the view?

Or maybe you're suggesting that it collapses into another form of inclusivism or that's not that's not the-- OK, in any case, I see it as in response to Professor Stein's question, it's similar, which is that it's a more expansive epistemic viewpoint. One thing I should add, which I discussed in my scholarly work, which I haven't talked about in the talk today, which is that Ramakrishna never claims that anybody is able to realize the whole of the divine.

And he gives the example of an ant, which goes to a giant hill of sugar, and with great difficulty, takes two or three grains of that sugar, gets puffed up with pride and says, next time I go to that hill, I'll take the whole hill with me. And he says, one should never speak like that. The vijñani, even the vijñani, has only taken two or three grains of that sugar, or four or five maybe, but the limitless divine can never be realized as a whole.

So if the concern is Ramakrishna is committed to the idea that there's one unique individual who can realize the whole of the divine. I don't see that as his position. So that's regarding the first question. The second one is about Mishra. This Quaker Christian, Indian Quaker Christian, who meets Ramakrishna, accepts him not only as Christian but as Jesus in a sense, and I think the question here that you're asking is, is he an authority?

I think that's a very important question. I wonder whether that's a question that you address in the book. That's something that I could look at, but it's complicated. The thing is if the criterion is super rigorous, it becomes every Christian has to accept John Hick or Paul Knitter as a Christian in order for John Hick Paul Knitter to count as a Christian.

That's way too stringent, I think, and so it needs to be a little looser. Now, how many Christians, what percent of Christians need to accept this so-called Christian as a Christian? It gets very complicated, I think, and does Mishra count as a Christian? I don't know him well. I never met the guy, but I'd have to know more about his life history to know.

It gets very complicated, but the point is, this is just a good example of at least one Christian who very much embraces Ramakrishna as not only a Christian, but as Jesus, but I think it's a very important question. Regarding your third point, I think it's a great question. I want to clarify my position.

It's the following; with respect to historical and transhistorical truth claims that conflict in different world religions, Ramakrishna's view is that these doctrines, did Christ die on the cross? Is karma and rebirth true? are not soteriologically vital for everyone. It's "for everyone" thing that I want to emphasize here. So he'll be happy to grant that the doctrine that Christ is the sole begotten son of God is absolutely soteriologically vital for Christians, but it's not soteriologically vital for Muslims to accept it or for Vaishnavas to accept it, or for Advaita Vedanta is to accept it.

It's "for everyone" qualification that's really important in answering your question, I think. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Swamiji. So I start thinking about this historical milieu of Bengal, and I get to the point of being a tantra scholar. I'm like, what about tantra in all of this?

And I'll leave aside the thorny issues of tantric ritual-- I don't think those need to come into play here-- but you have that Bengali world in which you have Swami Vivekananda was a Freemason, and you have the American theosophist being read there and then you have the Brahmo Samaj and you have all of these cosmopolitan ideas coming out of Bengal, that Ramakrishna was a part of, and Vivekananda was definitely a part of, and when you posit this Vijñana Vedanta, I so clearly hear the scholastic arguments of Abhinavagupta or Kshemaraja, and going back to this notion of the world is the transformation of the divine, just slowed down.

Instead of looking at the snake rope and seeing the rope, you see a rope and it's actually a snake-- as I tell my students all the time-- so where does tantra come into this and where does that historical Bengali milieu and then Vivekananda in a cosmopolitan understanding for a cosmopolitan man that was Vivekananda. Thank you.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Thank you. Great question. So regarding Kashmir Shaivism, in a word, what you're talking about is Kashmir Shaivism. It's a particular--

AUDIENCE: Well, I want to be careful, though. Kashmir Shaivism is not all of tantra.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: No, it's not.

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: So you want to talk about tantra more broadly. In any case, so I think it's just a fact that Ramakrishna's teachings come much closer to tantra than to classical Advaita Vedanta. This is not an original insight. Walter Nezval argued for this in a long article published in the 70s, I believe. So I agree with him on that.

Where I disagree with Nezval is that he ends up trying to label Ramakrishna as a tantric, and I think that's a mistake. And so in chapter one of my book, Infinite Paths, I argue that can't really pigeonhole Ramakrishna into any of these Indian philosophical traditions. Why? you might ask.

Well, because one thing that tantra tends to do is remain inclusivist in structure. Other religions are great and there are also real forms of God, but our Kali is the highest. If it's a Sakta Tantric tradition or our Shiva is the highest, if it's a Shiva-oriented form of tantra, whereas Ramakrishna doesn't do that. And so that's the kind of difference also, but deeply there are similarities, deep affinities, like, for instance, Brahman and Sakti are inseparable.

One of Cruz's key teachings, very tantric, the world is a real manifestation of the divine. Extremely tantric. So Arindam Chakrabarti is a well-known scholar of Indian philosophy. I'm sure you've met him, and Professor Clooney and others have met him. He likes to say-- because he knows Ramakrishna well, he knows classical Advaita well, he knows Kashmir Shaivism well-- he says, if you want to understand Ramakrishna's teachings in the gospel, better to study Kashmir Shaivism than to study classical Advaita Vedanta.

You'll be misled if you just are conditioned by classical Advaita and then filter Ramakrishna's teachings through that lens. Thank you. Oh, sorry. So the second question you had about cosmopolitanism. Read this book, which is Swami Vivekananda's Vedanta Cosmopolitanism, so it's 400 pages. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Swami, for your wonderful presentation, and I think the idea of multiple religious belonging is interesting. I just wonder when you're talking about this multiple religious belonging, it seems to me you're saying that Ramakrishna is actually open to the best part of other religions. So the possibility is, is it possible that he accepted some parts of Christian truths and then integrated it with his home tradition?

In other means, my question is, could he embracing the entirety of other religious belonging, to integrate it into a whole, is that possible or is it just what I say, an eclectic choice of the best part of other religions?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: I think that's a wonderful question, and I think that, in fact, if the criterion for being a genuine multiple religious belonging is that you have to embrace the entirety-- it's well put-- embrace the entirety of that other religion, you land in incoherence. You can't embrace the entirety of Hinduism, which accepts multiple incarnations and embrace the entirety of Christianity, which in its Orthodox forms holds that there's only one divine incarnation and at the same time remain sane.

And so, yeah, I think that you put it really well. I think that you say, he takes what he deems to be the best parts and the most helpful and enriching parts of the different religious traditions and incorporates them into his home religious practice, but I think that counts as a form of multiple religious belonging on Professor Cornille's and Professor Clooney's criteria. Thank you.

Can you put the mic-- Thank you. Oh, yeah. All right. That's a separate discussion.

AUDIENCE: Hi. So I have a question about discernment. So if I am seeking, in multiple religious traditions, to find a path, how do I discern, within a religion or within these multiple religions, what is good teaching? What is more relevant to my path? How do I how do I figure that out?

As I literally go to Buddhism, Christianity, and I'm looking for truth and I feel there is a way to find these multiple paths of truth, but there's also some sort of discernment needed.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Yeah, I think that's right. I think you have to be careful, but I think if you're just have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself what aspects of tradition x are helpful to me, as a religious practitioner, in understanding the nature of the divine?

What aspects of this other tradition help to enrich and expand the repertoire of my spiritual practices, help me to broaden my perspective and appreciate the perspectives of other religious practitioners and so on and so forth? It's a very good question, but it's a very practical question, and I can't give of one size fits all answer to it. It's almost like asking, how do I know which food I like most?

Well, try out the different dishes, and then it might turn out after trying 10 different kinds of food that you like lasagna the best, and then go with lasagna. Make that one of the foci of your cuisine. Thank you. And [INAUDIBLE] has a question in the back as well. So why don't we give-- Yeah, and then we can come back to [INAUDIBLE] in the end.

AUDIENCE: Thank you for the talk. I just wanted to ask that if we take this vedantic cosmopolitanism as a, say as a spiritual sadhana, as a spiritual path, the names you mentioned-- we can say Ramakrishna-- He had some type of realization before he went into Christianity. you could say the same thing about Swami Vivekananda too, before he dabbled in, I don't know, anyways, Christianity, but he also already had realization.

Would you say that if we were to even take this as a possible sadhana, possible spiritual practice, that may be one prerequisite is, like Ramakrishna said, don't dig too many holes. First, dig one hole. Go deep and then go to-- So would you say that first it's necessary to have realization in one specific path before going to others?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: That's a great question. I think that would be too stringent a standard because then religious cosmopolitanism, multiple religious, wouldn't really get off the ground for most people, just because God realization is a very high ideal. So I don't think that's necessary, and I think that part of what Swami Vivekananda helps to bring out is that it doesn't need to be that stringent.

You might be led to think just on the basis of Ramakrishna's teachings, that first realize God, dig deep in one place and then you can-- No, and digging deep, what is digging deep mean? I don't think that necessarily means realizing God. I think it means find a firm anchor in your home tradition and, on that basis, you can freely draw on other religious traditions.

So I think what Ramakrishna is cautioning against is spiritual dilettantism and it's common now. It's not cosmopolitan. It's like you're a Buddhist for 10 days-- and it's something that Professor Cornille talks about and criticizes in her introduction in Many Mansions and also what Professor Clooney talks about-- like jumping around from one tradition to another without any deep anchoring or understanding or sympathy with any of these traditions.

So I think you need a firm grounding in your home spiritual tradition-- that doesn't amount to necessarily God-realization-- on the basis of which, once that's firm, you can then freely draw on other traditions without creating mental confusions, cognitive dissonance and where you can still learn actively from other religions. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: My question is related to the last three questions. When you are picking the best parts of different religions and creating an amalgamation, are Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, in their cosmopolitanism, are they advocating for a kind of syncretism?

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: OK, you define it, so that we don't get in trouble. What is syncretism?

AUDIENCE: Maybe some kind of a different religion, for example, Santo Daime. They take different aspects of different religions and they put it together--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: And it becomes a new religion?

AUDIENCE: And it becomes a new religion.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: That's an interesting question. OK, let me mention this. This I discussed in this book, but I'll just mention it now. Swami Vivekananda makes some quite provocative statements. One of them, which I really like, is he says, no person is born into a religion. Each person has a religion in the depths of his or her soul, and the first step in spiritual life is discovering what that individualized religion is in the depths of our heart.

And the religion in your heart, even if, let's just say that we're all Hindu here. Each Hindu will have a different religion in that person's heart. That means there's a kind of customized, individualized, custom-made religion, which the soul has and believes in and which you need to tap into to understand your unique spiritual path.

And so I think there's some truth to this idea that you can-- I think Vivekananda as a religious cosmopolitan, actually encourages the development of a unique religious worldview and practice that incorporates aspects of other traditions. If you want to call it a new religion, go ahead. It doesn't have to be. Ramakrishna referred to his own tradition as a non-sectarian sect.

It's a very paradoxical and interesting phrase. It's a sect in the sense that, I guess, in the syncretistic sense of-- you argue that it is a new religious or spiritual worldview, but non-sectarian, which means it's expansive. It doesn't have higher and lower. It's not inclusivistic in structure. It doesn't look down on other religious paths, but both things can be equally true. Thank you. That's a great question.

There's a question over here.

AUDIENCE: That's a great quote, so thank you. And I'm sort of wondering how to relate it to the question about lasagna and also spiritual dilettantism and wanting to avoid that.

This idea that you're not born into a religion and then also, I think, especially in the modern day where people might have multiple religious traditions within their own families or communities, not necessarily feel at home in their religious tradition and be put in this position of seeking, which necessarily requires a degree of dilettantism for some time, as you're sampling everything, trying to find your lasagna, for really working this metaphor.

And yet I really appreciate the critique of dilettantism, so I'm just wondering, how do you thread that needle of discovering the religion that is in your heart and yet--

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: Avoiding dilettantism.

AUDIENCE: --finding a place for it to be rooted in.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: I think that's a great question. So look, I mean, I imagine it like this; let's say that for the first 10 years of my life I'm raised on just peas and baked potatoes, using the food metaphor. I don't know anything other than that, and then suddenly, at age 11, my friend takes me out to some kind of shopping mall, and then I see there's Japanese cuisine and then there's lasagna, and then there's this and that.

So it expands my repertoire. It just expands my knowledge of the different options out there. Now, you're asking, isn't that a kind of dilettantism? I want to say that's not necessarily. To me, it was when I first read the Bible, for instance, long back when I was an undergraduate, when I first read the teachings of the Dhammapada, the Buddhist scripture.

I'm not yet claiming to be a multiple religious belonger. I'm just trying to understand the religious other, expose myself and understand what that other religion teaches, so that, I don't think counts as dilettantism. It would be dilettantism if I claimed at that very premature and initial stage, that I'm already a Buddhist and a Christian and a Hindu, but if I use that as a kind of launching pad for then asking myself, maybe 10 years down the line or whatever or whatever--

But just now, I love that aspect of the Dhammapada when Buddha talks about compassion. Let me try to incorporate that into my practice. First of all, I need to understand my own home traditions, understanding of compassion and its role in spiritual life, and then I can freely draw on the Buddhist views on compassion without confusing myself and without becoming a dilettante.

She has her hand up again, but I don't--

AUDIENCE: But what if you don't have a home tradition to draw on in the first place? No peas at all.

SWAMI MEDHANANDA: You're fasting.

[LAUGHTER]

No, actually, I was planning on mentioning this, but I didn't, toward the beginning of my talk. More and more people are identifying as SBNR, spiritual but not religious. Now, religious nones is a new category, which I think 28% of Americans in the latest Pew study identify as religious nones. In a way, that's wonderful.

Honestly, I'll tell you, just autobiographically, even though I was raised Hindu, I was just deeply suspicious and skeptical of being born into a religion. I just never accepted that. And so starting in high school, more or less, I became an agnostic. And in college I was an agnostic spiritual seeker. That's how I would put it. And it was as an agnostic that I read the Bhagavad Gita and as an agnostic that I read the Bible and the Koran and the Dhammapada.

I'm a philosopher at heart, and so I found that epistemically advantageous because it meant that I didn't have preconceptions. I didn't rig the deck in advance, the cards in a certain way, in the way that I would if I said, well, at the end of the day, after all of my kind of spiritual exploring, of course I'm going to end up a Hindu again.

No, I was just open to different possibilities, and, in my own journey, I found that enormously helpful. And then ironically, I circled back to the Hinduism I was born into, but appreciated in a very different way. And with the doctrines of karma and rebirth, I can appreciate why I was born a Hindu, but without uncritically accepting what my parents taught me, which was to be honest--

I'm planning on giving a lecture sometime, but it'll be a bit polemical, called a tale of two Hinduism's, contrasting cultural Hinduism with spiritual Hinduism. And I would say that I was raised a cultural Hindu, being dragged to pujas, ritualistic worships without anybody explaining to me what the spiritual significance of what I was doing is. What are the deeper spiritual principles of Hinduism? Nobody taught me. Cultural Hinduism.

But it's only after learning about spiritual Hinduism through independent study, on my own, of the Bhagavad Gita especially, and then the teachings, the life and teachings of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, that I then came to appreciate the importance and spiritual significance and vitality of ritualistic pujas, so-called idol worship, which is actually image worship, actually invoking the divine in the image and so on and so forth. Thank you.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: I asked the first question, so I think I'll ask the last, and then we'll open it up. We have refreshments. You can hang around for a while and talk to Swami. One of the impressions I have over these years, and I'm wondering what you make of it, so for 40 years plus now, I've been reading on and off the Great Master, the Gospel of Ramakrishna.

Much of what you say to me makes sense in terms of Ramakrishna, but then when we turn to Vivekananda, it often seems like it's more of a Advaitic Vedantic philosophy that is trying very hard to reach everybody in the world. And it comes across very differently, as another theory, another theology, that seems to lack the-- it sounds pejorative-- but the depth of Ramakrishna, that Vivekananda is like a one remove from the experience that makes what you're saying impossible.

I realize that may be heretical in your tradition. Can you say anything about that before--

Yeah, and I think it's a great question and I'm happy to plug my book again. So chapter 2 of this book argues, well, the it raises the very question you're asking, which is it's just uncontroversial that Swami Vivekananda taught Advaita Vedanta. Absolutely. What exactly is the nature of that Advaita Vedanta that he taught that?

Is it aligned with Shankara's classical Advaita or is it more aligned with Ramakrishna's Vijñana Vedanta? Because remember, Vijñana Vedanta itself is Advaita. It's just a different form of nonduality, just as Kashmir Shaivism tantra are forms of nonduality, and my argument, in a very lengthy chapter 2, is that the Advaita Vedanta that Vivekananda taught was an integral Advaita philosophy that's in line with Ramakrishna's Vijñana Vedanta.

So it's just as expansive as Ramakrishna's philosophy, except with one caveat. Swami Vivekananda, up till the end of his life, maintained that there was a kind of hierarchy of Vedantic traditions, Dvaita Dualism leading to Vishishtadvaita, qualified nondualism, culminating in Advaita.

There there seems to be an inclusive structure, and he does teach it up till the end of his life, except in one context, and I think it's really important. I talk about it in Chapter three of my book. In the context of the harmony of religions, there was a brief period for about 1 and 1/2 years between 1894 and 1895, when Swami Vivekananda did try to harmonize the world religions on the basis of this Dvaitavisha, Dvaita-Advaita kind of hierarchy.

But by 1896 he gave up that inclusivist harmonizing of the world religions and instead argued pluralistically, in line with Ramakrishna, that each of the world religions corresponds to one of the four Yogas and each of the four Yogas is a direct path to liberation. Therefore, each of the world religions is equally effective in leading to liberation.

So that's a short answer to the question, but for details, please look at chapters 2 and 3 of this book. Thank you so much.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: I think we should end by, first of all, on behalf of the center and Professor Stang, thank everyone for coming, thank the staff for setting up such a wonderful reception in the room and so on, and let us end by thanking our speaker for a wonderful presentation.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.