At face value, different religions teach wildly different things on a great many topics. Since their outward doctrines are far from entirely identical, how could all religions even potentially be true?
Broadly speaking, there are four possibilities regarding the relationship between religions and truth.
The first possibility is that all religions are false: people made them up, and later generations kept on upholding them out of a combination of mindless habit, ignorant superstition, and social convenience. Modern science or some other secular worldview is the definitive standard of truth.
The second possibility is that one religion is true and all the others are false. A softer version of this attitude says that only one religion is fully true, and that all other religions are partly true inasmuch as their outward teachings agree with the outward teachings of the religion that’s taken to be fully true. Everything else in those other religions, however, is still false.
Despite how opposed these first two views are in one sense, in another sense they have more in common than not. Both are based on the assumption that truth can be more or less straightforwardly expressed in human language, so the place to look for truth in a religion is in a literal interpretation of its outward doctrines. They further agree that at most one religion can really be true; all the others are basically or entirely false.
The third possibility is what most people have in mind when they speak of “relativism:” all possible beliefs, whether about religion or anything else, are so purely relative that none of them deserve to be considered “true” or “false” at all. There’s no underlying truth to mediate between different perspectives, so personal convenience and brute force are the only ways of differentiating “good” beliefs from “bad” ones.
But there’s also a fourth possibility, which rests on a careful distinction between absolute truth and relative truth. Absolute truth is a divine mystery that can’t be adequately expressed in human language or concepts at all, but human speech and thought can be relatively true to the degree that they echo something of that ineffable Absolute and point back to it. In this third view, religions are by far the truest of all relative truths. As philosopher of religion Marco Pallis puts it, “However widely separated their view-points, there resides, under what, at a superficial glance, seem like irreconcilable differences, an underlying metaphysical core, which is allowed to clothe itself at will in whatever guise best suits its immediate purposes, without yielding up one jot of its reality or one tittle of its authority.”[1] Or in the succinct words of the Rig Veda, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism, “Truth is one; sages call it by different names.”[2]
This article will be an argument for why that fourth view is the correct one, and thus an argument for why – and in what sense – all religions are true.
Spiritual Enlightenment and Absolute Truth
If religions are supposed to reflect absolute truth, how can we know that there is absolute truth in the first place? And what are the contents of that absolute truth?
Human reason isn’t capable of discovering absolute truth. By itself, all that reason can show us is the most nominal, mundane kind of relative truth: that which helps us to accomplish everyday tasks. For example, reason can tell you that if you want the lights in your apartment or house to come on, you have to flick the light switch by the door. Or if you want to estimate how long it will take something you’ve dropped to reach the ground, Isaac Newton’s “law of universal gravitation” will probably provide you with a rough guide to calculating that.
But if you want to go any deeper than that, reason quickly loses its ability to give you clear answers. That’s because of a problem that’s known in philosophy as “infinite regress.”
Any time you attempt to rationally prove something, that proof has to begin with an assumption. Newton’s “law of universal gravitation,” for example, rests on all kinds of assumptions about gravity, mass, time, etc. You can’t just say that because the equation works well enough in practice toward certain limited aims, the underlying assumptions behind that equation must be absolutely true. After all, Einstein’s physics and quantum physics both make numerous claims about the nature of reality that are impossible to square with the claims of Newtonian physics (or with each other’s claims), yet their equations also work in practice toward certain limited aims. Clearly they can’t all be absolutely true.[3]
So if you wanted to prove that Newton’s equation is absolutely true rather than merely relatively true, you’d have to come up with separate proofs for all of its assumptions. For example, how do you know that dropped objects fall to the ground because of the existence of an invisible phenomenon called “gravity?” There are all kinds of other ways of explaining the same effects, so how do you know that this supposed “gravity” is their absolutely true cause? However you might attempt to prove the existence of Newtonian gravity, that proof would have to begin with an assumption of its own, which would require a separate proof to prove it, and that proof would have to begin with an assumption of its own, and so on ad infinitum. That’s what infinite regress is.
So if we want to discover absolute truth, we can’t depend on reason to take us there. Nor, of course, can we rely on anything below reason, like egoistic sentiment. Instead, we have to look to something above human reason, and there’s only one thing that even potentially fits that bill: divine revelation, the epitome of which is the experience of spiritual enlightenment.
Spiritual enlightenment is impossible to adequately put into words, but the great mystics of various religions tend to provisionally describe it as an experience of oneness with the divine and with all things, in which the separate “ego” (if you want to call it that) and its petty cravings vanish into something that transcends not only the everyday self, but the entire universe as well. Only from such a God’s-eye view could absolute truth be discerned.
The question now becomes: what are the grounds for believing that spiritual enlightenment is an encounter with absolute truth and absolute reality, rather than just another relative experience that ultimately begs the question just like all of our everyday, mundane perceptions and trains of thought do?
We can begin to answer that question by asking another question: in the domain of relative truth, what is it that makes some notions relatively truer than others? The truer notions consistently work better in practice. The statement “You have to flick the switch to get the lights to turn on” has more relative truth in it than the statement “You don’t have to flick the switch to get the lights to turn on,” because the former usually works in practice, whereas the latter usually doesn’t.
What does it mean for something to “work in practice?” It means that the thing enables us to fulfill some desire we have. What “works in practice” depends on what we want to practice in the first place. If you want lots of time to stay home and play with your cat, becoming a doctor or a lawyer probably won’t work in practice. But if you want to make lots of money, becoming a doctor or a lawyer probably will work in practice.
(This is something categorically different from wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is allowing sentiment to cloud your judgment; in this example, wishful thinking would be the belief that you can have an exceptionally demanding job and still have gobs of time to spend with your cat. Either the desired practical effect is successfully produced, or it isn’t, and it’s not possible to wish your way around that.)
Thus, if relative truth enables us to relatively fulfill desire, we should reasonably expect absolute truth to absolutely fulfill desire. Anything worthy of being called “absolute truth” would have to impart to us a state of perfect bliss in which we no longer want anything. After all, since everything we do is an attempt to fulfill desire, anything that could resound so thoroughly in the innermost depths of our being would evidently have an unparalleled grasp of the true nature of our being, and more generally, the true nature of being as a whole.
And that’s exactly the state of being that one experiences in spiritual enlightenment, as mystical literature from any and all religions attests. For example, the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, a sacred poem in Hinduism, puts it this way:
All your desires will be fulfilled in him
Who is One without a second.
Know him to be enshrined in your heart always.
Truly there is nothing more in life to know….
As a dusty mirror shines bright when cleansed,
So shine those who realize the Self,
Attain life’s goal, and pass beyond all sorrow.[4]
Or in the words of Buddhism’s Dhammapada:
Better than the sole rulership over the world,
Better than going to heaven,
Better than lordship over all the worlds,
Is the fruition of the streamwinner’s path.[5]
Attar, one of Islam’s great mystical poets, likewise says:
If the world’s sovereigns could taste
a sip from that boundless ocean,
they’d keen in grief and avoid
each other’s eyes from stinging pain.[6]
Or, from the Christian world, Saint Catherine of Genoa writes of her own experience of spiritual enlightenment (in Christian terms, “union with God”), “Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a Paradise.”[7] The anonymous medieval Christian mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing concurs: “It is God, and he alone, who can fully satisfy the hunger and longing of our spirit.”[8]
For this reason, Marco Pallis, the philosopher of religion we quoted earlier, writes, “the spiritual man… is the only true realist, the ‘practical man’ in the widest sense of the word.”[9] In the end, spiritual enlightenment is the only thing that works in practice, and what is encountered therein is the only thing with such an absolute command of truth that it can fulfill us absolutely. When religions claim that the pursuit of enlightenment is the meaning of life, they’re making the only thoroughly successful prediction that can be made. Even modern science’s impressive mathematical predictive abilities – the ability to predict when an eclipse will occur, or when a dropped thing will reach the ground, etc. – fall well short of this standard, because 1) the numbers never work out absolutely in practice, but only roughly at best,[10] and 2) predictive successes in such limited domains don’t eliminate the underlying sense of unsatisfactoriness in life that leads us to want to predict and control worldly outcomes in the first place.
Furthermore, in the experience of enlightenment, one’s “ego” is absorbed by the divine “Self” of all things. It’s impossible to even formulate a doubt concerning the truth and reality of what you’re experiencing, let alone to seriously entertain and develop that doubt. All thinking is suspended. This isn’t a case of passionate conviction getting in the way of a clear perception of the truth, because the “ego,” the source of all passion and conviction, is out of commission. With no unfulfilled desire remaining, the “ego” has nothing left to grasp for or pursue, so it just “sits” there in awestruck silence and passivity. Intellectual errors of all kinds are impossible. Thus, Swami Vivekananda, one of the foremost expositors of Hinduism to the Western world, writes that absolute truth “stands on its own evidences. It does not require any other testimony to attest it. It is self-effulgent. It penetrates into the inmost recesses of our nature, and the whole universe stands up and says, ‘This is Truth.’”[11] This is another aspect of how spiritual enlightenment fulfills the aforementioned necessary criterion of coming from above reason rather than from below it.
Because of all of this, the only thing worthy of being called “absolute truth” is the ineffable Something that one experiences in spiritual enlightenment. The only way to encounter that absolute truth is through firsthand experience, because all human reason – and even all human language – bounces off of it and fails to do it justice. The best that words can do is to relatively reflect absolute truth.
Religions as Relative Reflections of Absolute Truth
Different religions call this ultimate experience and realization by different names. To mention just a few examples, Buddhism calls it bodhi, “awakening,”[12] or nirvana, “extinguishment” (of craving).[13] Hinduism calls it moksha, “liberation.”[14] Christianity calls it “union with God” or theosis (“deification”).[15] Islam calls it by a double name: fana’, “annihilation” (of the ego), and baqa’, “subsistence” (in God).[16]
Since religions hold that spiritual enlightenment is the meaning of life, and since they provide paths to that experience that have been remarkably successful in practice for countless numbers of people over countless generations, religions are the truest of all relative truths. They’re the closest that words can come to expressing absolute truth. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that religions are reflections of the Absolute itself in different relative forms. They have more or less exactly the character we would expect them to have if they were directly revealed by the Absolute in order to draw us inhabitants of this relative world back to it, which is a strong case that religions are at bottom the products of just such revelation. This quality makes religions categorically distinct from relative truths that don’t directly point back to absolute truth, such as the statement that you have to flip the light switch to turn your lights on, or that E=MC2. Religions, while still ultimately belonging to the realm of relative truth rather than absolute truth, provide a bridge between the two.
If the analysis so far here is correct, it means that the case for the truth of any one religion is necessarily also a case for the truth of any and all other religions in their own relative spheres. If any one religion is true, then all religions are true, and if any religion is false, then all religions are liable to be false. As philosopher of religion Frithjof Schuon writes in his masterpiece The Transcendent Unity of Religions,
There are, therefore, irrefutable proofs of the truth of a religion; but these proofs, which are of a purely spiritual order, while being the only possible proofs in support of a revealed truth, entail at the same time a denial of the pretensions to exclusiveness of the form. In other words, he who sets out to prove the truth of one religion either has no proofs, since such proofs do not exist, or else he has the proofs that affirm all religious truth without exception, whatever the form in which it may have clothed itself.[17]
At the same time, it must be emphasized that this does not mean that all religions are interchangeable. Even though the destination to which all religions point is the same, they take very, very different paths to get there. And that’s as it should be, because we’re all starting from very different points relative to that yearned-for destination. A Catholic in Spain, a Hindu in India, and a follower of Shinto in Japan approach the divine from such different cultural and geographical contexts that no single religion would work equally well for all of them. This of course applies to individuals with different temperaments and life experiences, too. And why should any of them have to settle for a spiritual path that’s a sub-par fit for them? All that would do is lessen the intensity of their spirituality. To quote Schuon again:
[E]very religious form is superior to the others in a particular respect, and it is this characteristic that in fact indicates the sufficient reason for the existence of that form… [T]he unity of the different religions is not only unrealizable on the external level, that of the forms themselves, but ought not to be realized at that level, even were this possible, for in that case the revealed forms would be deprived of their sufficient reason. The very fact that they are revealed shows that they are willed by the Divine Word. If the expression “transcendent unity” is used it means that the unity of the religious forms must be realized in a purely inward and spiritual way and without prejudice to any particular form.[18]
Or, as Schuon pithily summarizes elsewhere, “In other words, if the religions are true it is because each time it is God who has spoken, and if they are different, it is because God has spoken in different ‘languages’ in conformity with the diversity of the receptacles.”[19]
Attestations from Specific Religions
More than ample precedent for this view of why, and in what sense, all religions are true can be found in religions themselves. Granted, some religions have a much better historical track record of living up to this vision than others do, but none have completely rejected it, and none have embraced it perfectly. They’re all somewhere in the middle – just at different points within that large middle.
For example, here’s American Indian scholar and philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr.’s overview of thousands of years of American Indian inter-religious attitudes and practices:
Tribal elders did not worry if their version of creation was entirely different from the scenario held by a neighboring tribe. People believed that each tribe had its own special relationship to the superior spiritual forces which governed the universe and that the job of each set of tribal beliefs was to fulfill its own tasks without worrying about what others were doing. Tribal knowledge was therefore not fragmented and was valid within the historical and geographical scope of the people’s experience.[20]
The Qur’an, the definitive sacred book of Islam, articulates much the same view of the nature of religions across several passages. Surah (chapter) 10, verse 47 reads, “Every nation has its messenger” – that is, prophet.[21] Surah 14:4 adds, “We have sent no messenger save with the tongue of his people.”[22]
And what message have these countless messengers or prophets proclaimed in the tongues of their own peoples? Surah 21:25 gives the answer: “And We never sent a messenger before thee save that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me.'”[23] “There is no god but God” is the first part of the Shahadah, the basic profession of faith that makes someone a Muslim; the second part is “and Muhammad is his prophet.”
So the Qur’an is saying that the underlying message of Islam can be found amongst all peoples, not just in the specifically Islamic form that was revealed to Muhammad. The divine is the only thing worthy of worship and service, and that same divinity that revealed the religion of Islam to Muhammad revealed the world’s other religions to their respective prophets, whomever they may be.[24]
Turning to Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, one of the religion’s most revered sacred texts, has the god Krishna say to the human protagonist Arjuna:
Arjuna, all those who worship
other gods, with deep faith,
are really worshiping me,
even if they don’t know it.[25]
The Upanishads, a particularly important set of scriptural poems in Hinduism, teach the same message. For example, the Shvetashvatara Upanishad says of the god Shiva, “Know him to be the supreme source of all religions.”[26] Another, the Amritabindu Upanishad, pronounces that
The milk of cows of any hue is white.
The sages say that wisdom is the milk
And the sacred scriptures are the cows.[27]
Buddhism has always been particularly clear-eyed about the relationship between absolute truth and relative truth, certainly as it pertains to Buddhism itself, and by extension, as it pertains to other religions, too. An especially straightforward example comes from Ashvaghosha’s book The Awakening of Faith, which more or less has the status of scripture for many if not most Buddhists: Buddhas, Ashvaghosha writes, manifest “the absolute truth, which transcends the world where relative truth operates.”[28]
But the most celebrated example of this attitude in Buddhism is almost certainly the Buddha’s own famous parable of the raft. This incisive metaphor comes from the Pali canon, a vast collection of early Buddhist sacred texts. In it, the Buddha tells his earliest monks that his teachings are like a raft. He explains:
[S]suppose a man in the course of a journey saw a great expanse of water, whose near shore was dangerous and fearful and whose further shore was safe and free from fear, but there was no ferryboat or bridge going to the far shore. Then he thought: “There is this great expanse of water, whose near shore is dangerous and fearful and whose further shore is safe and free from fear, but there is no ferryboat or bridge going to the far shore. Suppose I collect grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bind them together into a raft, and supported by the raft and making an effort with my hands and feet, I got safely across to the far shore.” And then the man collected grass, twigs, branches, and leaves and bound them together into a raft, and supported by the raft and making an effort with his hands and feet, he got safely across to the far shore. Then, when he had got across and had arrived at the far shore, he might think thus: “This raft has been very helpful to me, since supported by it and making an effort with my hands and feet, I got safely across to the far shore. Suppose I were to hoist it on my head or load it on my shoulder, and then go wherever I want.”[29]
The Buddha then asks his monks if this hypothetical man’s attitude toward his raft makes sense. They of course reply that it doesn’t, and the Buddha goes on to point out what the man should have done with his raft instead:
[W]hen that man got across and had arrived at the far shore, he might think thus: “This raft has been very helpful to me, since supported by it and making an effort with my hands and feet, I got safely across to the far shore. Suppose I were to haul it onto the dry land or set it adrift in the water, and then go wherever I want.” Now, [monks], it is by so doing that that man would be doing what should be done with that raft. So I have shown you how the [teachings are] similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.[30]
The “far shore” is the absolute truth that one encounters in enlightenment experiences such as the Buddha’s, and the “raft” is the relative truth of the Buddha’s teachings, which exist in order to help people “get safely across to the far shore.” The Buddha directly reminds his disciples not to become unduly attached to the relative form, because it’s ultimately a means to the Absolute rather than the Absolute itself, even though the relative form is indispensable along the way.
Christianity, too, has seen some of its most astute representatives articulate a similar view. For example, Saint Augustine writes that the essence of the Christian religion isn’t exclusive to the Christian form: “That which today is called the Christian religion existed also among the Ancients and has never ceased to exist from the origin of the human race until the time when Christ Himself assumed human form and men began to call Christian the true religion which already existed beforehand.”[31]
And Saint Dionysius calls the teachings of Christianity “sacred veils” that “clothe” “the Transcendent” so that it can reach us and we can reach it, thus using a different image to convey the same message as the Buddha’s raft parable:
We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the [spirit] with things derived from the realm of the senses. And so it is that the Transcendent is clothed in the terms of being, with shape and form on things which have neither, and numerous symbols are employed to convey the varied attributes of what is an imageless and supra-natural simplicity.[32]
What About John 14:6 and Qur’an 3:19?
But if all religions are different relative ways of approaching the same underlying absolute truth, what about passages in certain sacred texts that seem to claim that only one religion is true?
The most famous of such passages is probably John 14:6 in the Christian New Testament, so let’s start with that one. In this verse, Jesus says to his apostle Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”[33] Having grown up in the southeastern United States, I can remember numerous billboards by the side of highways with this verse loudly displayed on them – a way that Christian fundamentalists had of wagging their finger at any and all non-Christians (and often even any and all Christians who didn’t belong to one particular Protestant sect).
How could John 14:6 possibly be squared with the view of religious truth advocated in this article? There are two very simple rejoinders to the exclusivist interpretation of this verse (that is, the interpretation that it’s saying that only Christianity is true).
First, even if this verse is interpreted as a proclamation of the necessity of going through one particular symbol – Christ – to reach the divine, such a message is perfectly sound within the relative sphere of Christianity. If a Shaiva – a Hindu who worships Shiva as the supreme God – were to say to other Shaivas, “None of us can reach enlightenment except through Shiva,” that almost certainly wouldn’t mean that Shaivas have the uniquely true religion. Instead, it would just be a reminder that for Shaivas, worshiping Shiva is the way of reaching absolute truth. There’s nothing in the Gospel of Saint John that particularly suggests that John 14:6 should be interpreted any differently.
Second, there’s another, related shade of meaning in this verse. The adherents of non-Christian religions clearly do come to the divine – “the Father,” in terms of John 14:6 – through their own respective religions. Therefore, if “No one comes to the Father except through [Christ],” those other religions evidently contain what Christianity calls “Christ.” After all, the first chapter of John famously and beautifully proclaims that Christ is the incarnation of the “Word of God,”[34] and I challenge any Christian exclusivist to read, say, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, or the Tao Te Ching with an open mind and not eventually reach the conclusion that they, too, manifest the Word of God in their own relative spheres.
The Qur’an also contains certain passages that Muslim exclusivists have interpreted to mean that Islam is the only true religion. One, which is a good representation of the set, is surah 3, verse 19: “True Religion, in God’s eyes, is islam.”[35]
There are two possible interpretations of such verses. The first is the exclusivist interpretation. The second, however, is that the Arabic word islam in these passages doesn’t refer solely to the religion that goes by the name of “Islam” with a capital “I,” but rather to the more general meaning of the word islam in Arabic: submission to God. In the words of Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in these verses, “al-islam refers to that universal surrender to the One and that primordial religion contained in the heart of all heavenly inspired religions, not just to Islam in its more particular sense.”[36] In the context of the verses we explored earlier that say that the same God who revealed Islam revealed all other religions, too – and the Qur’an contains numerous other statements to the same effect throughout it – this verse and the others like it must be using islam in this broader sense of the word.
Conclusion: How This View of Religious Truth Furthers Spirituality
The thesis of this article – that all religions are reflections of the same absolute truth in different relative spheres – isn’t just beneficial for fostering healthy, respectful relations between the followers of different religions. It also facilitates the spiritual quest itself.
This point is already implicit in the Buddha’s parable of the raft, which we explored earlier. Those who mistake the outward teachings of their religion for literal, absolute truth, such that all religions that outwardly contradict their own are thought to be false, are carrying the raft around on land rather than using it to cross to the far shore like it’s intended. To confuse the divine itself with a particular symbol of the divine is to worship a domesticated, almost trivialized simulacrum of the divine rather than the divine itself. As philosopher of religion Rene Guenon puts it,
[T]o mistake the symbol itself for what it represents… is the fundamental confusion to be found at the root of all ‘idolatry,’ giving to this word its strictest sense such as is brought out with especial clarity by Islam. When nothing of a symbol remains but its outward form, both its justification and its actual virtue have alike disappeared; the symbol has then become nothing but an ‘idol,’ that is to say a vain image, and its preservation amounts to mere ‘superstition’ – so long, that is, as no one appears who is endowed with an understanding capable of effectively restoring to it, either partially or wholly, whatever it had lost, or at least those elements which it no longer contains save in a state of latent possibility.[37]
The Japanese Zen Buddhist master Dogen tells the story of a monk who carried a wooden box with a golden image and relics of the Buddha with him wherever he went, thinking that this made him exceptionally spiritual and devout. One day, his master reprimanded him for being so attached to outward symbols of the Buddha rather than the Buddha-nature that dwells in all things. The monk was hurt and protested his superior’s judgment. But the master was insistent. “Open your box and look inside!” he commanded. The monk lifted the lid, and with a jolt of amazement and fear, he found that the image and relics had been transformed into a venomous snake, coiled and ready to strike.[38]
That snake strikes whenever someone believes his or her religion to be the only true one, and, in its name, venomously persecutes someone of another religion. But the snake also strikes the persecutor and prevents him or her from “crossing to the far shore.” We’re at our best spiritually when we act like the master in Dogen’s story, and not like the bewildered monk.
References:
[1] Pallis, Marco. 1946. Peaks and Lamas. Cassel and Company. p. 145.
[2] Smith, Huston. 1991. The World’s Religions. HarperOne. p. 73.
[3] See Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Larry Laudan’s essay “A Confutation of Convergent Realism” for first-rate discussions of this issue in philosophy and history of science more generally.
[4] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 161-164.
[5] Maitreya, Balangoda Ananda (transl.). 1995. The Dhammapada: The Path of Truth. Parallax Press. p. 49.
[6] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 279.
[7] Otto, Rudolf. 1958. The Idea of the Holy. Transl. John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press. p. 38.
[8] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 41.
[9] Pallis, Marco. 2008. The Way and the Mountain: Tibet, Buddhism, and Tradition. World Wisdom. p. 200.
[10] Giere, Ronald N. 1999. Science Without Laws. University of Chicago Press. p. 90-91.
[11] Vivekananda. 1987. Vedanta: Voice of Freedom. Advaita Ashrama. p. 197-198.
[12] Samuel, Geoffrey. 2012. Introducing Tibetan Buddhism. Routledge. p. 45.
[13] Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press. p. 78.
[14] Rodrigues, Hillary P. 2017. Introducing Hinduism. Routledge. p. 65-66.
[15] Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 9-10.
[16] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 179.
[17] Schuon, Frithjof. 2005. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Quest Books. p. 18.
[18] Ibid. p. 35-36, xxxiv.
[19] Schuon, Frithjof. 1998. Understanding Islam. World Wisdom. p. 36.
[20] Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1995. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Scribner. p. 51-52.
[21] Chittick, William C. 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 124.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Mitchell, Stephen (transl.) 2000. Bhagavad Gita. Harmony Books. p. 118.
[26] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Shvetashvatara Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 172.
[27] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Amritabindu Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 289.
[28] Ashvaghosha. 2006. The Awakening of Faith. Transl. Yoshito S. Hakeda. Columbia University Press. p. 69.
[29] Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 1995. The Middle-Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 228-229.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Sherrard, Philip. 1998. Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition. Holy Cross Orthodox Press. p. 29.
[32] Dionysius. 1987. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Transl. Colm Luibheid. Paulist Press. p. 52.
[33] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1545.
[34] Ibid. p. 1522.
[35] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 35.
[36] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2004. The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity. HarperOne. p. 17.
[37] Guénon, René. 1945. Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines. Transl. Marco Pallis. Luzac & Co. p. 133.
[38] Dumoulin, Henrich. 2005. Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume Two: Japan. Transl. James W. Heisig & Paul Knitter. World Wisdom. p. 99.