The Forgotten September 11

and the Clasp of Civilizations
 

by Richard Hartz

(Part 1 of 2 parts)

    On September 11, 1893, a large public meeting of representatives of many of the world’s religions opened in Chicago. The Parliament of Religions, as it was called, was the first gathering of its kind. Held as part of the Columbian Exposition organized to celebrate the completion of four hundred years since Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic, it lasted for seventeen days and was attended by thousands.

    The inaugural ceremony is described in The Dawn of Religious Pluralism, a book on the Parliament published in its centennial year:

On the morning of 11 September 1893 the Columbian Liberty Bell in the Court of Honor of the World’s Columbian Exposition tolled ten times to honor what were a century ago considered the world’s ten great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At the same time, seven miles uptown in the Memorial Art Palace, more than sixty religious leaders from around the globe processed into the Hall of Columbus to gather in a solemn assembly.1

    The proposal to hold such a Parliament had been made by Charles Bonney, a lawyer and a Swedenborgian. In his words of welcome on the opening day, he spoke of the dream that had inspired him:

The importance of this event, its influence on the future relations of the various races of men, cannot be too highly esteemed.

            If this Congress shall faithfully execute the duties with which it has been charged, it will . . . stand in human history . . . marking the actual beginning of a new epoch of brotherhood and peace.

            For when the religious faiths of the world recognize each other as brothers, . . . then, and not till then, will the nations of the earth yield to the spirit of concord and learn war no more.2

    Bonney went on to lay down the principles of dialogue that were to be observed by all participants. With these words he proclaimed, in effect, the spirit of the interfaith movement that was initiated on that day:

at this hour, which promises to be a great moment in history . . . from the farthest isles of Asia; from India, mother of religions; from Europe, the great teacher of civilization; . . . and from all parts of this republic, which we love to contemplate as the land of earth’s brightest future, you have come here at our invitation in the expectation that the world’s first Parliament of Religions must prove an event of race-wide and perpetual significance.

    After further welcoming speeches, the responses of the delegates began. The audience was enthusiastic and would continue to be so throughout the Parliament. “Over and over again,” it was said, “the throng burst into tumultuous applause.”3

    But the high point came unexpectedly, late in the day, when an unknown young man from India, in “gorgeous red apparel, his bronze face surmounted with a turban of yellow,”4 rose to speak. Regarding his impromptu speech and the reaction to it, Swami Vivekananda himself wrote to a friend:

"They were all prepared and came with ready-made speeches. I was a fool and had none. . . . I addressed the assembly as “Sisters and Brothers of America”, a deafening applause of two minutes followed, and then I proceeded; and when it was finished, I sat down almost exhausted with emotion".5

    In his short speech, Vivekananda spoke of belonging to a religion that acknowledges all paths to God. Thanking the audience “in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people,” he declared: “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” He ended with an impassioned appeal for peace, harmony and mutual understanding among religions:

    What happened in Chicago in September 1893 can be described, in Vivekananda’s words, as a first breaking down of “the barriers of this little world of ours.”7 In its unprecedented—if largely symbolic—representation of human diversity and the conspicuous part played by the non-Western delegates, however few in number, it signalled an impending change in the interactions not only of religions, but of civilizations. Though the Parliament did not usher in the era of peace and brotherhood that Charles Bonney had hoped for, it heralded and contributed to the beginning of a transformation in the “relations of the various races of men” whose magnitude we can only now begin to grasp.

    Religion is often accused of dividing rather than uniting the human family. Yet the historic meeting of representatives of Western and Eastern cultures that took place in Chicago was held in the name of religion. The coming together of religions that occurred in 1893 was the starting-point of a dialogue that is still gaining momentum today. The spontaneous, enthusiastic response of a predominantly Christian gathering to an array of Hindu, Buddhist and other speakers was perhaps an early sign of the potential of religion and spirituality to bring about some day a deeper unity of the human race than could be achieved by any other means.

 From Columbus to Vivekananda

    As far back as the end of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, a Swami from India spoke of our “little world” as he addressed an audience in America on behalf of millions of people on the other side of the globe. Neither the Parliament itself nor the notion of “this little world” would have been conceivable when Christopher Columbus set out on the voyage that was to be celebrated four centuries later at the exposition in Chicago. But the shrinking of the earth that made the Parliament of Religions possible proceeded rapidly in the hundred years that followed it. By the late twentieth century, as a result, the issues raised in 1893 were becoming more urgent than ever.

    In 1993 a Parliament of the World’s Religions was convened again in Chicago. In the meantime hundreds of meetings, big and small, had taken place for interfaith dialogue. The revival of the original name reflected a recognition of the significance of the event that started it all. A Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions was set up to organize gatherings on a similar scale in different parts of the world every few years. Religious diversity is represented and honored at these meetings to a degree that could hardly have been imagined a century ago. Far from detracting from the value of the earlier Parliament, where Christian speakers predominated, the contrast between then and now suggests how much has been achieved by the process that began in 1893.

    Dialogue has been conducive to a wider outlook, counteracting religion’s paradoxical tendency to sanctify narrowness while mediating between the human soul and the Infinite. In the nineteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury declined to attend the Parliament in Chicago on the grounds that “the Christian religion is the one religion.” He added: “I do not understand how that religion can be regarded as a member of a Parliament of Religions without assuming the equality of the other intended members and the parity of their positions and claims.”8 No doubt a certain kind of equality was deliberately implied by the choice of the word “parliament” with its democratic connotations. The organizers of the Parliament were religious liberals, by the standards of the time, who had moved beyond the insularity of old-fashioned exclusivism to a more tolerant and inclusive view of other faiths. In the next century, partly thanks to the dialogue inaugurated in Chicago, such inclusivism and the beginnings of real pluralism would become more and more prevalent Christian attitudes.9

    But formal interreligious dialogue is only the most obvious legacy of the first Parliament of Religions. Some of the exponents of Asian traditions who came to Chicago, finding in the United States a receptive audience for their teachings, stayed on afterwards. They toured the country, and sometimes Europe as well, and established organizations to carry on their work. A long-term interaction was thus set in motion. On an intellectual level it had already begun with the influence of Eastern philosophies on Emerson, Thoreau and others earlier in the nineteenth century. Now it took a more visible form through the introduction of Westerners to Buddhist and Hindu psycho-spiritual disciplines as taught by living masters.

    A few decades later, the trickle of spiritual teachers from Asia that had begun in the 1890s swelled into a flood. We may regret the turbidity of some currents of this flood when compared with the pure stream of the earliest arrivals. Those who came for the Parliament included people like Anagarika Dharmapala, as illustrious a figure in the history of what is now Sri Lanka and in the revival of South Asian Buddhism as Vivekananda was in the awakening of India and the rediscovery of Vedanta. One might complain that the recent influx of gurus of all kinds has not brought many such exceptional individuals from the East. Nevertheless, it is part of a cultural phenomenon that is far from exhausting itself and may yet contribute to a profound change in the materialistic society of the modern West.

    What is often overlooked in discussing the claim of the 1893 Parliament to a place in history is that the effects of the East-West interaction initiated by it went both ways. This gave it a global scope unparalleled in its time. The news of America’s open-armed reception of Swami Vivekananda, especially, sent a thrill through the impoverished masses in India. The first stirrings of a national resurgence were felt in what is today the world’s largest democracy, but was then a vast population deprived of self-respect by subjection to foreign rule. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that when Vivekananda appeared on the platform in Chicago, India strode onto the stage of the modern world. Soon “the awakening of the torpid Colossus began,”10 as Romain Rolland wrote with reference to the impact of Vivekananda’s speeches on the huge crowds that greeted him when he, who had left his country as an unknown Sannyasi, returned to it as a national hero.

A Parliament of Civilizations

    The Parliament of Religions deserves to be looked at, then, not only from the point of view of its well-recognized standing in the interfaith movement, but in a larger historical perspective. It was not a political event, yet its organizers hoped it would influence the behavior of “the nations of the earth” and it had repercussions in distant lands with implications for the fate of empires.

    Whatever its direct historical consequences, the symbolism of this early cross-cultural meeting was enough to give it a far-reaching significance. The Parliament occurred at the point in time when a major change in the relations of civilizations was about to begin: the transition from the world of the past few centuries, dominated by the West, to one with greater equality among the peoples of the earth. It was a time when an essentially symbolic gesture could assume an importance out of proportion to its outward appearance.

    As part of the centennial celebration of the Parliament of Religions, a selection of the original speeches was made available to the general public in The Dawn of Religious Pluralism. The foreword to this book points out the relevance of its contents to the present:

The speeches of those delegates a century ago give us an opportunity to reflect both on how different is the fast-paced world of the 1990s and yet how persistent are the issues of interreligious relations. The understanding and interpretation of religious diversity, with all its cultural concomitants, is even more the pressing issue of our times than it was one hundred years ago. . . . All over the world, the politics of religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial identity has led to a new period of turbulence.11

    The last sentence could almost have been quoted from a much better-known publication of the same year. It was in 1993 that Samuel Huntington published his article entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” in the influential American journal, Foreign Affairs. The article was the genesis of his controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The provocative phrase “clash of civilizations”—which Huntington acknowledged having borrowed from Bernard Lewis12—has acquired a life of its own, frequently connected with Huntington’s name but often with little relation to his ideas. This has distracted attention from his positive concept of “the remaking of world order.”

    It is well known that Huntington emphasized the role of religious identity in present-day conflicts in many parts of the world. However, the fact that he made a compelling argument for dialogue among religions—and, more broadly, civilizations—has gone largely unnoticed.  After dwelling in most of his book on our immediate situation at the end of the Cold War, in the final pages he took a glance further into the future. Having repeatedly pointed out the religious factor in the kind of strife that is tending to replace the ideological struggles of the preceding few decades, he concluded that

 whatever the degree to which they divided humankind, the world’s major religions—Western Christianity, Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism—also share key values in common. If humans are ever to develop a universal civilization, it will emerge gradually through the exploration and expansion of these commonalities.

    The search for values common to the world’s religions corresponds to the last point in Huntington’s most general prescription for minimizing conflicts in a world of diverse but increasingly interdependent cultures:

 In a multicivilizational world, the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.13

    The movement of interfaith dialogue that started in Chicago in 1893 has been the most conscious and persistent effort to carry out a program of action along these lines. Long before the need for such an attempt had become glaringly obvious, at the height of the period when “civilization” was synonymous with European civilization and before the concept of a multicivilizational world was born, people from the East and the West assembled for a mutually respectful discussion of questions that had often in the past been argued with the sword. Much progress has been made since then and much more remains to be done. But at the first Parliament of Religions a momentous beginning was made.

Civilizations in a Converging World

    The human world has been “multicivilizational” in a certain sense since the dawn of civilization. But Huntington’s term brings out an aspect of our own time that distinguishes it from any other age. Today, not only do different civilizations coexist as they always did, but they are having to take cognizance of each other’s existence in a way they have never done before. Their interaction is becoming a more and more inescapable feature of our collective life.

    Civilizations, the largest cultural groupings of humankind, evolved under conditions quite unlike those of the twenty-first century. Until recently, the geographical barriers separating the earth’s peoples limited the contact between them so much that distant populations could be unaware of each other’s existence. At times there were intensive encounters between neighboring civilizations. But a wider diffusion of ideas, if it occurred at all, might take centuries.

    Under these conditions, each civilization was free to develop its own distinctive culture with a minimum of external influences. People outside its boundaries, if they were not too far away to take notice of, tended to be regarded as barbarians from a cultural point of view, or heathen from the standpoint of religion. For it was during this phase of history, when each civilization was almost a self-contained universe and had little need to relate itself to the rest of the world, that the major religions came into being. Circumstances were favorable for the growth of exclusive outlooks reinforcing spatial divisions.

    It might have seemed that things could go on indefinitely in this way. Without intruding violently upon the harmony of nature, human life flowed on from generation to generation in the streams of its great traditions with occasional concentrated outbursts of creative activity. Incompatibilities among the world’s dispersed cultures sometimes broke out in conflict, but in general were handled by the simple expedient of ignoring each other.

    Then, starting around 1500 A.D., this whole arrangement was disrupted. The young civilization of Europe began to expand in all directions. For about four hundred years, as Huntington says, “Western nations . . . conquered, colonized, or decisively influenced every other civilization.”14 During the same period, the West itself underwent a dramatic development leading to what we now call modernization, which it proceeded to impose on the world. In a short time compared with the preceding millenniums, everything changed.

    The relations among civilizations, according to Huntington, “have evolved through two phases and are now in a third.” The first phase was that in which independent civilizations, each with its own set of cultural characteristics holding together its internal diversity, existed side by side with relatively little interaction. This was the situation throughout most of history. Midway through the second millennium, a drastic change began to occur. Its overall effect is graphically depicted by Huntington:

Intermittent or limited multidirectional encounters among civilizations gave way to the sustained, overpowering, unidirectional impact of the West on all other civilizations. . . . For four hundred years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization.15 

    Conquest was nothing new, but never before had it encompassed the earth in its violent embrace. Driven by greed, justifying its exploitation of non-Europeans by a mixture of racism and bigotry, and owing its success to technology that enabled it to inflict death and destruction on all who opposed it, the period of European domination might well be called the rape of civilizations. Its methods and many of its results were deplorable enough. Yet despite all that, its net outcome has been to overcome the centrifugal forces that had kept humanity fragmented through the ages. A process of convergence was set in motion, whose course is no longer under the control of any one group of nations.

    Early in the last century it started to become apparent that Western imperialism was faltering. Exhausting themselves in two gigantic conflicts, the countries of Europe lost the will and the capacity to maintain their empires. By the middle of the century, decolonization was in full swing. But the principal effects of the phase of European expansion and modernization were irreversible. Writing in the 1990s, Huntington distinguished a third phase in intercivilizational relations, superseding that of Western supremacy:

In the twentieth century the relations among civilizations have thus moved from a phase dominated by the unidirectional impact of one civilization on all others to one of intense, sustained, and multidirectional interactions among all civilizations. . . . Intercivilizational relations in this third phase are far more frequent and intense than they were in the first phase and far more equal and reciprocal than they were in the second phase.16

The Might of Europe and the Light of Asia

    Coming back to the Parliament of Religions with this outline of history in mind, we are struck by how an event that occurred near the culmination of the second phase—the phase of Western expansion and “unidirectional impact”—already anticipated the next phase. The “more equal and reciprocal” relations among civilizations that define Huntington’s third phase would not become a political reality until well into the twentieth century. Yet such relations were foreshadowed by the interactions of people from all over the world who met in Chicago. Never before had representatives of the Occident and the Orient been invited to “come together in mutual confidence and respect,” as Charles Bonney insisted, for “a free and sincere interchange of views.” Though there was a numerical preponderance of Western Christians, this was compensated by the extraordinary response of the audience to some of the oriental delegates.

    The Parliament in 1893 was the first important public event to bring people from far-flung cultures together for this type of interchange. However, taking place as it did when Western pre-eminence was at its zenith, some amount of Christian triumphalism was inevitable. The authors of The Dawn of Religious Pluralism, introducing their selections from the closing session, point out that “for all that had been said and done over the course of the Parliament’s seventeen days, there is little question that in the minds of its main promoters the assembly was meant to mark a global triumph for Christianity.”17 This triumphalist mentality unconsciously drew much of its strength from the imbalances of power in an age of imperialism. It was under these unpromising circumstances that a historic breakthrough was made in attitudes toward religious and cultural diversity.

    During the planning stage of the Parliament of Religions, an American bishop had voiced a feeling that was shared by many of its supporters and some members of the organizing committee when he wrote:

One result will be to show that the Christian faith was never more widely or more intelligently believed in, or Jesus Christ more adoringly followed. Civilization, which is making the whole world one, is preparing the way for the reunion of all the world’s religions in their true center Jesus Christ.18 

    Many Christians who attended or approved of the Parliament had this kind of inclusive attitude, in contrast to the exclusivism of others who objected to it for reasons like those given by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Parliament of Religions could not have taken place if it had not appealed to this sentiment, whose power was due to its perfect agreement with the Zeitgeist.

    In the late nineteenth century, such inclusivism virtually translated into theological terms the state of relations among civilizations at a time when the industrialized West was “making the whole world one” by bringing it under its ever-expanding political, economic and cultural sway. Just as Western civilization claimed to be the fulfillment of less advanced civilizations, so Christianity saw itself as fulfilling the partial truth contained in other religions. At the Parliament a progressive missionary advocated an attempt “to approach the non-Christian religions in a spirit of love and not of antagonism, to understand and justly rate their value as expressions of the religious principle in man, to replace indiscriminate condemnation by reverential study.” But the ultimate aim was “to obtain conquest, not by crushing resistance, but by winning allegiance.”19

    This inclusive Christian universalism20 dreamed of human unity and proposed to achieve it by a perfectly logical method. For the West was steadily replacing the age-old variety of humankind with a single type of civilization. Many Christians naturally believed that religious divisions, like other differences, would fade away as the result of an increasing and eventually unanimous adoption of the creed at the heart of Western culture.

    Events in the last century or so have moved in another direction, however. Neither the Christian nor the secular version of Western civilization now looks likely to extinguish the indomitable diversity of the human race. Today this diversity, the product of thousands of years of cultural evolution, is vigorously reasserting itself under new conditions. Historically, the first striking evidence of its resurgence could be seen as far back as 1893 at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

    On 21 September 1893, the St. Louis Observer reported with alarm the impression made by Dharmapala, the young Buddhist monk from what was then Ceylon:

"With his black, curly locks thrown back from his broad brow, his keen, clear eyes fixed upon the audience, his long brown fingers emphasizing the utterances of his vibrant voice, ... one trembled to know that such a figure stood at the head of the movement to consolidate all the disciples of Buddha and to spread “the light of Asia” throughout the civilized world".21 

    Another newspaper reported about Dharmapala: “The Buddhist representative has created quite a furor in Chicago, . . . has a hypnotic influence over crowds and astounds his listeners with his frank criticism.”22

    Judging from this and other accounts of the effect that the Asian delegates to the Parliament had on the American public, it appears that the days of the “overpowering, unidirectional impact of the West” on every other culture were over. Some trembled. Others were delighted. 

The Delight of Difference

    The sensation created by some of the spokesmen for Buddhism at the Parliament of Religions was a sign of things to come. A notable figure besides Dharmapala was Soyen Shaku, representing Zen Buddhism. Soon after returning to Japan he sent a student of his by the name of D. T. Suzuki to America. Suzuki arrived in the U.S. in 1897. In the next few decades he would come to know many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the country, including personalities as diverse as Erich Fromm, Thomas Merton and John Cage. The results of his association with these people exemplify the effects of Eastern culture on the American mind in the twentieth century. They may be illustrated by a statement of the composer, John Cage. In an interview, he said:

  Since the forties and through study with D. T. Suzuki of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, I’ve thought of music as a means of changing the mind . . . an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves.23 

    Quoting from this interview with George Leonard, Jack Miles comments:

John Cage, in short, was one of the many American artists of his day who were deeply influenced by the daring Japanese émigré who, consciously modeling himself on St. Paul, made himself into Zen Buddhism’s apostle to the gentiles.24 

      This reversal of roles was an instance of the changes in cultural interactions that can be traced back to 1893. No longer were the peoples of the East merely recipients of the impact of the West.

    The propagation of Christianity by Western missionaries provided a model for Asians to imitate, once they had recovered sufficiently from the initial shock of the European assault on their cultures. One outcome of the Parliament of Religions was a first wave of movements spreading Eastern philosophical and spiritual teachings to America and Europe in somewhat the way that Christian missionaries operated in non-Western countries. This competition for converts made for a better intercultural balance than the previous one-way flow of influence from an aggressive West to a passive East.

    But the missionary spirit, even when modified to suit the changing times, is essentially a manifestation of the universalism that flourished in the age of Western expansion. Those affected by it, whatever the tolerance or intolerance of their beliefs, tend to be seized by a zeal to disseminate their particular faith throughout the world. The Parliament aroused or reinforced some such ambitions. More significant, though, was the stimulus it gave to a radically different outlook upon religious and other diversity.

    A perspective on Christianity that must have startled many people at the Parliament was offered by Pung Kwang Yu, the representative of Confucianism. In passing, he pointed out the need for a good Chinese translation of the Bible. But the reasons he gave for it were not those that usually motivate translators of the Scriptures. Mentioning the inadequacy of whatever translations then existed—due to which, he said, there is “no Chinese scholar, after reading a few lines of it, but lays it aside”—he explained why this situation ought to be remedied:

    Knowing well that the political and educational institutions, as well as the customs and manners of the people of Europe and America, are founded upon the principles of the Christian Religion, I recognize the importance of a knowledge of the principles of the Christian Religion to anyone who desires to make the customs and manners of the West a subject of study.25

    The Confucian delegate admitted that China, the home of one of humanity’s oldest, richest and most refined civilizations, could no longer isolate itself from the rest of the world. He suggested that the Chinese should study Christianity and try to understand Western thought and behavior, just as scholars in Europe and America had begun to study the “customs and manners” of societies other than their own. There was no question of the Chinese being converted to Christianity or of converting Christians to Confucianism. Clearly, each system of thought and way of life has its own validity for those who follow it.

    Underlying the remarks of Pung Kwang Yu and other Asiatics at the Parliament of Religions was a pluralistic attitude based on a deep appreciation of the value of diversity. At the convention in Chicago this was a minority viewpoint which turned out to have unexpected popular appeal. Today it is more and more widely recognized that a positive acceptance of diversity is the only viable foundation for peaceful relations among peoples, religions and cultures in a world of intensively interacting civilizations.

    As the forum where such pluralism first emerged into public view in a global context, the Parliament in 1893 can be seen as a turning point in history. Organized as a largely Christian event, it nevertheless provided a platform for a few delegates from the East who took the world by surprise with the force of their views and personalities. Saving the Parliament from being a spectacle of diversity with little of its substance, they projected a vision that looked beyond the disproportions of power in an imperialistic age to a more equitable and multicultural future that would begin to take shape in the next century.

    A recognition of what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has recently called “the dignity of difference”26 has been growing in the human consciousness ever since representatives of many religions and cultures assembled in Chicago one September morning over a hundred years ago. Later in the Parliament’s opening session, the chairman introduced a Swami from India. According to Dr. Barrows himself, “when Mr. Vivekananda addressed the audience as ‘Sisters and Brothers of America,’ there arose a peal of applause that lasted for several minutes.” At that moment, one woman afterwards recalled, thousands of people “rose to their feet as a tribute to something they knew not what.”27

    Accounts of the reaction to the first words spoken by the exotic Hindu suggest that it was even more than a sign of respect for what Swami Vivekananda represented. Few of those present are likely to have known much about the ancient civilization and profound spiritual tradition of India. But Vivekananda spoke from the heart (his brief, unplanned speech left him “almost exhausted with emotion”) and people responded from the heart. The surge of feeling that swept through the crowd seems to have had in it something of the passion of an embrace. We may call it the delight of difference.

Greasing the Wheels

    “Swami Vivekananda,” said Merwin-Marie Snell, the president of the “scientific section” of the Parliament of Religions, “was beyond question the most popular and influential man in the Parliament, . . . and on all occasions he was received with greater enthusiasm than any other speaker.”28 Yet the youthful Sannyasi had almost no experience in public speaking when he arrived uninvited in Chicago—where at first he was turned away, since no organization was sponsoring him and he had no “credentials” except a few years of wandering the length and breadth of India as a homeless ascetic.29

    The secret behind Vivekananda’s uncanny ability to bond with his audience can be glimpsed in a conversation he had with Robert Ingersoll, a well-known orator of the day and a champion of agnosticism. Ingersoll said, “I believe in making the most out of this world, in squeezing the orange dry, because this world is all we are sure of.” The Swami replied:

"I know a better way to squeeze the orange of this world than you do, and I get more out of it. I know I cannot die, so I am not in a hurry; I know there is no fear, so I enjoy the squeezing. I have no duty, no bondage of wife and children and property; I can love all men and women. Everyone is God to me. Think of the joy of loving man as God! Squeeze your orange this way and get ten thousandfold more out of it. Get every single drop." 

    In another context, Vivekananda explained what he meant by loving all as God:

"When you see a man going after a beautiful face, do you think that it is the handful of arranged material molecules which really attracts the man? Not at all. Behind those material particles there must be and is the play of divine influence and divine love. The ignorant man does not know it, but yet, consciously or unconsciously, he is attracted by it and it alone. So even the lowest forms of attraction derive their power from God Himself. . . . The Lord is the great magnet, and we are all like iron filings; we are being constantly attracted by Him, and all of us are struggling to reach Him. . . . All the tremendous struggling and fighting in life is intended to make us go to Him ultimately and be one with Him".

    Thus life is the field of an evolution of consciousness which must lead eventually to a spiritual transformation. The role of religions should be to infuse this process with an awareness of its real aim. As Vivekananda put it in his most substantial contribution to the Parliament, his “Paper on Hinduism” presented on September 19, 1893,

"all the religions . . . mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. . . . Unity in variety is the plan of nature, . . . the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols. . . . Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them."30

    Though there is some kind of unity underlying all religions, the forms it takes are and must be extremely varied. The inclusive idea of a universal religion was in the air when Vivekananda was in America. Instead of rejecting this notion, he reinterpreted it in a pluralistic spirit as referring to a hidden oneness that is compatible with an immense variety of manifestations. He explained:

"I see no two alike, yet we are all human beings. Where is this one humanity? . . . I may not find it when I try to grasp it, to sense it, and to actualise it, yet I know for certain that it is there. If I am sure of anything, it is of this humanity which is common to us all. . . . So it is with this universal religion, which runs through all the various religions of the world in the form of God."

    He went on to clarify his understanding of this concept, stating emphatically that

 "if by the idea of a universal religion it is meant that one set of doctrines should be believed in by all mankind it is wholly impossible. It can never be, there can never be a time when all faces will be the same . . . because variety is the first principle of life. What makes us formed beings? Differentiation".

    If it is nevertheless possible to speak of a universal religion in some meaningful sense, it is because unity is the other side of the same truth—unity, but not uniformity:

 "What then do I mean by the ideal of a universal religion? I do not mean any one universal philosophy, or any one universal mythology, or any one universal ritual held alike by all; for I know that this world must go on working, wheel within wheel, this intricate mass of machinery, most complex, most wonderful. What can we do then? We can make it run smoothly, we can lessen the friction, we can grease the wheels, as it were". How?

    In his answer to this question of how to “grease the wheels,” Vivekananda reconciled the need for universality with the equally imperative principle of pluralism, which he was one of the first to insist upon in the dialogue among religions that began at the Parliament in Chicago:

"By recognising the natural necessity of variation. Just as we have recognised unity by our very nature, so we must also recognise variation. We must learn that truth may be expressed in a hundred thousand ways, and that each of these ways is true as far as it goes. . . . every soul, every nation, every religion, consciously or unconsciously, is struggling upward, towards God; every vision of truth that man has, is a vision of Him and of none else."31

    This includes agnostic or atheistic visions such as those of Buddhism, Jainism or modern science, which may be pursued in the spirit of an authentic quest for truth that is sometimes lacking in conventional religiosity. Even the masculine pronoun “Him” cannot be imposed on everyone as the only way of referring to God. In the traditions of India, the supreme Reality is also designated impersonally by the neuter, “It.” Vivekananda himself, following his teacher, the great saint Sri Ramakrishna, privately saw the Divine as Her, the universal Mother.

(Continued in Part 2)