Six Traditions, One Idea
When I was younger I assumed the world's religions were telling fundamentally different stories. Monotheisms, Hinduism, Buddhism — these were rival vendors, and the interesting question was which one was right.
I no longer think that.
The longer you read across traditions, the harder it becomes to ignore a strange pattern. Every major tradition that has spent serious time thinking about ultimate reality ends up describing the same thing. They use different vocabularies, different methods of access, and different cultural costumes. But the object they end up pointing at is recognizably the same object.
Monotheisms call it God — a single, transcendent source from which everything that exists comes. Hindus call it Brahman — the absolute, attribute-less ground beneath all appearances. Taoists call it the Tao — the originating principle through which the universe moves. Mahayana Buddhists call it the Dharmakaya — the unmanifest reality from which all phenomena arise. Neoplatonists called it the One — the source from which everything else emanates in descending degrees. Sufis call it God too, but they mean a God you dissolve into rather than worship from a distance.
The labels are different. The contents have a suspicious overlap. Each tradition says, more or less:
There is one ultimate reality. It is the source of everything that exists. It is beyond the reach of ordinary perception. And there is a way to come into closer contact with it.
This is a strange thing for six independent civilizations to converge on. They were not borrowing from each other. The early Vedic traditions had no contact with what became Christianity. The Tao Te Ching was written without consulting Plotinus. And yet they all keep ending up at the same intersection.
A useful way to think about this is triangulation. Imagine a mountain visible only from a great distance. Six tribes live in six valleys around it, and none of them can see the others. Each tribe describes the mountain from its own angle. One says it has a sharp peak; another says it has a gentle slope; a third says the eastern face is forested and the western face is bare. The descriptions look incompatible. But if you fly above the terrain you realize they are all describing the same mountain — they just see different sides.
That, I think, is roughly what is going on with the traditions. The differences are real, but they are differences of vantage and method, not of object.
The methods are where the traditions diverge most visibly. Monotheisms reach for the One through faith and revelation — the One is approached as a person, and the relationship is something like trust. Hinduism reaches through self-knowledge — the One is approached as the deepest layer of yourself. Buddhism reaches through meditation — the One is approached as what remains when ordinary mind stops moving. Taoism reaches through observation of nature and a kind of active non-action — the One is approached by getting out of the way. Neoplatonism reached through reasoning and contemplation — the One was approached as the conclusion of an argument carried far enough. Sufism reaches through love — the One is approached by collapsing the distance between you and it.
Six different climbing techniques. Same mountain.
This does not prove existenxe. People have converged on all kinds of things — they have also independently invented dragons, and rain dances, and astrology. But this convergence is worth noticing for a different reason. When deeply intelligent people, working over thousands of years, in cultures that did not communicate, repeatedly end up at the same description of ultimate reality, the cheapest explanation is not that they all made the same mistake. It is that they were all looking at something, maybe part of "human nature" (whatever that is).
What that something is, you will have to climb up and check.