Tolerance and Diversity

　　by

　　Bhikkhu Bodhi

　　© 1998

　　Today all the major religions of the world must respond to a double challenge. On one side is the challenge of secularism, a trend which has swept across the globe, battering against the most ancient strongholds of the sacred and turning all man”s movements toward the Beyond into a forlorn gesture, poignant but devoid of sense. On the other side is the meeting of the great religions with each other. As the most far-flung nations and cultures merge into a single global community, the representatives of humankind”s spiritual quest have been brought together in an encounter of unprecedented intimacy, an encounter so close that it leaves no room for retreat. Thus at one and the same time each major religion faces, in the amphitheater of world opinion, all the other religions of the earth, as well as the vast numbers of people who regard all claims to possess the Great Answer with a skeptical frown or an indifferent yawn.

　　In this situation, any religion which is to emerge as more than a relic from humanity”s adolescence must be able to deal, in a convincing and meaningful manner, with both sides of the challenge. On the one hand it must contain the swelling tide of secularism, by keeping alive the intuition that no amount of technological mastery over external nature, no degree of proficiency in providing for humanity”s mundane needs, can bring complete repose to the human spirit, can still the thirst for a truth and value that transcends the boundaries of contingency. On the other hand, each religion must find some way of disentangling the conflicting claims that all religions make to understand our place in the grand scheme of things and to hold the key to our salvation. While remaining faithful to its own most fundamental principles, a religion must be able to address the striking differences between its own tenets and those of other creeds, doing so in a manner that is at once honest yet humble, perspicacious yet unimposing.

　　In this brief essay I wish to sketch the outline of an appropriate Buddhist response to the second challenge. Since Buddhism has always professed to offer a "middle way" in resolving the intellectual and ethical dilemmas of the spiritual life, we may find that the key to our present problematic also lies in discovering the response that best exemplifies the middle way. As has often been noted, the middle way is not a compromise between the extremes but a way that rises above them, avoiding the pitfalls into which they lead. Therefore, in seeking the proper Buddhist approach to the problem of the persity of creeds, we might begin by pinpointing the extremes which the middle way must avoid.

　　The first extreme is a retreat into fundamentalism, the adoption of an aggressive affirmation of one”s own beliefs coupled with a proselytizing zeal toward those who still stand outside the chosen circle of one”s co-religionists. While this response to the challenge of persity has assumed alarming proportions in the folds of the great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, it is not one toward which Buddhism has a ready affinity, for the ethical guidelines of the Dhamma naturally tend to foster an attitude of benign tolerance toward other religions and their followers. Though there is no guarantee against the rise of a militant fundamentalism from within Buddhism”s own ranks, the Buddha”s teachings can offer no sanctification, not even a remote one, for such a malignant development.

　　For Buddhists the more alluring alternative is the second extreme. This extreme, which purchases tolerance at the price of integrity, might be called the thesis of spiritual universalism: the view that all the great religions, at their core, espouse essentially the same truth, clot…

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