The Intrareligious Dialogue

A revised and expanded edition of a classic volume by one of the giants in his field, Raimon Panikkar, this significant volume discusses faith and belief in multireligious experience, with emphasis on understanding one's own religion and tradition before attempting to understand someone else's. Panikkar begins by pointing out the prevailing attitudes and critical models for attaining a pluralism standing "between unrelated plurality and a monolithic unity." For the author this is a pluralism which "takes our factual situation as real and affirms that in the actual polarities of our human experience we find our real being." He describes an intrareligious dialogue in which faith is not confused with belief, in which religious encounter must be a truly religious one, and in which the participants overcome temptation to defend themselves. The major religions of the world and particularly the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions are seen as the response to the human predicament, "that Man is a being not yet finished, a reality unachieved, growing, becoming, on the way, a pilgrim." It means for each person to "touch the shore of nothingness provided he does not rest in that non-existing place. It means to develop all the human potentialities, provided these are not artificially concocted dreams. It means finally to know and accept the human predicament and, at the same time, to recognize that this very human predicament carries with it the constant overcoming of all that Man is now."