Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Toward a Fusion of Horizons
by Rita Sherma Ph.D and Arvind Sharma Ph.D.
Hermeneutics is a big word but an extremely important one. It refers to the lens we use to see and understand the world. That lens is different for different persons and cultures. But no lens is fully accurate. Every lens is colored with diverse personal, cultural, linguistic, political, and religious shadings.
This leads to what is known as Cognitive Bias, which is simply the human tendency to make serious errors in judgment because we see things through distorted lenses.
Nowhere is this truer than in the case of religion. Just take a look at all the conflicts in the world today and you will see that the most serious ones all have a religious component. This has been true throughout history wherever the concept of “religion” has been in use.
The saving grace is that although ideas of the sacred, of the Divine, of the numinous, the Transcendent, are to be found in every human culture, the concept of “religion” is not universally present.
This book presents essays by well-known scholars that point to one major and “religiously” diverse civilization—that of India—where the notion of religion as conflict, was essentially unknown for much of its history before foreign invasions changed the lens used by Indian civilization for thousands of years.
The concept of religion has two central characteristics:
- Religion is exclusionary—you cannot belong to several religions.
- Religion is terminal—there is no possibility of new and different revelations in the future.
The Indic and other Asian traditions that were labeled “religions” by early colonialists, cannot be characterized by either of the above key characteristics. Their response to encountering other ways of living meaningfully in the world, was to integrate and adopt the new ways. There is much we can learn from this approach.
This book is significant in that it offers writings by noted scholars regarding a very different lens with which we can see and understand the ethos or path of a civilization which contains elements of the sacred, without labeling it as “religion.” It offers the Indic worldview as a case study of a very different prism for viewing wisdom traditions.
Publisher: Springer Publishing; 1st edition (June 3, 2008)
ISBN-10: 140208191X
ISBN-13: 978-1402081910
Dying, Death, and Afterlife in Dharma Traditions and Western Religions
by Rita Sherma Ph.D and Adarsh Deepak Ph.D
Fascinating studies of the ways in which diverse spiritual cultures face death and give it meaning.
Publisher: DHB Academic Publishing
ISBN-10: 0937194514
ISBN-13: 978-0937194515
