Essence Of Religious Teachings

July 20, 2003

Answers by His Holiness Romapada Swami Maharaja - Digest 62

Q 1) If Jesus, Mohammed and Buddha were giving a message relevant to a particular time and place, why didn't they give the name Krishna as it would have meant the solution to a lot of problems of today? Just because they didn't, does it mean that their teachings are not valid?

A) Spiritual teachings are disseminated according to the particular needs of the people being preached to, based on their level of spiritual advancement.

Lord Buddha's mission was simply to dissuade the cruel animal killing practices that were being carried on in the name of Vedas. Similarly Sankaracharya also preached impersonalism, according to his own statement, in order to simply delude the atheists, and to bring people back to the fold of the Vedas from Buddhism and other deviated sects. In other words, their mission at that particular time was not the dissemination of Absolute Truth, because the people were not ready for it. Their purpose was to uplift the population from a course of abject degradation and pave way for progressive advancement in future. While their actions amount to incomplete revelation of the truth or even deception, their efforts accomplished a needed step away from total material absorption.

Similarly, Christ's and Mohammed's choice not to reveal the topmost understanding about the nature of the spiritual world and detailed descriptions of God and His topmost holy names, given their particular time and circumstances, was for very good reasons. They both declared the fact that they were not disclosing the complete Truth in its entirety.

This does not invalidate their teachings but they are to be accepted as appropriate to their time and circumstances.

Srila Prabhupada compared such apparent discrepancies between different systems of religion to that which is sometimes found between elementary and higher level mathematics. These 'seeming contradictions' were introduced purposefully; distinctions are indispensable because it is important at the elementary level to simplify concepts, thus leaving out higher understandings.

Quite often, and naturally so, beginners in spiritual life are unable to penetrate to the essence of their religious teachings and see the points of underlying unity with other systems. It may sometimes even be important for neophytes in spiritual life, therefore, to devoutly stick to their own particular principles as taught in their own faiths until they come to a higher level of spiritual realization and purity. Difficulties arise, however, when we accept the external aspects as all-in-all and fail to respect the differences in those systems laid out for others based on their own level of advancement. [Then there are those who tend to the other extreme of secularism and indiscriminately accept anything and everything as equally valid and finally adhere to none. The result is simply a complete loss of systematic spiritual cultivation.] The real solution is only the continued education within different groups to gradually come to a higher spiritual understanding where such apparent differences are eliminated, once again as in the example of understanding higher-level mathematics.

It has indeed been the prediction of the acaryas that there will be a golden age in this Kali when all the different religions of the world and their sub-sects will unite under the banner of Lord Caitanya's sankirtan movement and at that time all of their particular understandings and realizations will be synthesized in his philosophy of 'acintya-bhedabheda' or "simultaneous-oneness-and-difference."

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