A Message from the Editor
T
hirty years ago, my wife and I moved to Ukiah, California, a rural county seat in the redwood country, in order to study Buddhism. An eminent master, the Ven. Hsüan Hua, had just moved to town to turn a de-accessioned hospital into a Buddhist monastery and university. My wife and I soon found that religious experimenters like ourselves were by no means new to our adopted town. Followers of the Hindu avatar Krishna, disciples of the Sikh saint Kirpal Singh, and celebrants of a Wiccan coven—all of them, like us, part of the counterculture wave of urban exiles—had washed into Ukiah Valley ahead of us. Other dissenters from generations previous—Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, various lineages of evangelicals and Pentecostals—had long since planted themselves amid the grove of steeples along Pine and Spring Streets. Eastern Rite monks and Roman Catholic nuns had brought the monastic life to the valley before us. And hardly noticed in the background, in hamlets tucked here and there into the outskirts of the town, bands of Southern Pomo still kept their own counsel. Thirty years ago, American Buddhists like us were exotics, and Buddhist monasteries in the United States numbered less than a dozen. To find one, we had to leave Manhattan and move across the country. Nowadays, meditation classes are offered in every sizeable city, and American Buddhists number in the millions. As for Sikhs, immigration has planted their religion in the urban Midwest, while Hindus write software in every office complex in Silicon Valley. A Mormon is governor in Catholic Massachusetts, and there are mosques near his Statehouse. What was exotic thirty years ago is now commonplace. Once an anomaly, my town in the California Coast Range is today merely a paradigm, a small-scale replica of the religious landscape of much of America and much of the world. Religious diversity brings cultural and intellectual richness, but it also brings conflict and spiritual doubt. Religions are self-verifying systems that do not easily accommodate amendment and contradiction. Yet, of course, on many points they disagree. How, then, are we to know which religion is right? Ready answers to this question quickly give way to less yielding questions. Yes, I have faith in my religion’s scriptures, and I try to abide by them. But my neighbors do much the same in their religions. They are all quite sensible people, but on this point it seems I can only conclude they are misguided, because the integrity of my faith requires me to believe that their religions must be in error wherever they contradict my own. Such is the hallowed logic of religious loyalty. It is a logic that leads religious people to a position of truly embarrassing unreasonableness.
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How can any one of us maintain that we alone are right about a matter so central to so many, a matter which, after all, we all agree to be fundamentally mysterious? Is there any other topic on which we would stake out so confidently a claim so certain to be disputed? Our world has now become one street, and our crowded circumstances cry out more than ever for tolerance and accommodation. How is it, then, that we allow ourselves still to be trapped in this need to speak these fighting words, “My religion is right, and yours is wrong”? The axiom of this journal is that “Which religion is right?” is an unanswerable and a meaningless question. Contributors to this journal are devoted to asking questions that will set us going towards more peaceable and more sustainable investigations. As Wilson Van Dusen puts it in the pages that follow, “What are religious people trying to do? The question is not which religion is right, but how each one functions in our lives.” Here our efforts can be rewarded with answers. These answers tend to reveal religious commonalities and to dissolve contentious contradictions. For example, in his article in this year’s Religion East & West, Fr. Joseph Wong likens the Jesus Prayer—the “Prayer of the Heart”—to the Buddhist “Pure Land” practice of reciting the Buddha’s name. Fr. Francis Tiso, in his article, explores the possible influences of Indian cosmological and psychological writings on the meditation practices of the Christian Desert Fathers. Huston Smith, who for decades has been one of the most important voices in the study of the world’s religions, goes further, offering a summary of a “universal grammar” which underlies the propositions of religion itself. By giving voice to questions and answers like these, these pages join the prayer that human beings can cure the blindness of zealotry and see their way to respect and understanding. Uncomfortable and perilous as it is, the crowding of our world can at least serve to convince us of this: that spirituality, as Huston Smith suggests, is after all a human enterprise present in every culture. If we ask the right questions of our own religion and the religions of our neighbors, we can acknowledge that all cultures have developed conceptions of the divine and traditions of spiritual practice that are more like each other than they are unlike. Indeed, they could be nothing else than fundamentally similar, because each is a response to the same universal need of human beings to establish a relationship with the immensity of the universe. If so, then beneath the steepled edifices along Pine and Spring Streets in my adopted town, beneath the temples and sweat-lodges built against the hills, there must lie a single invisible spiritual foundation, an unseen universal church that encompasses the diverse religions of our divided world. —David Rounds ,
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