Nostra Aetate - In Our Time

71 would like tobeginmy addresswith a prayer: AUM بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم Ik Oankar Satnam Waheguru. The Vedas proclaim “AUM” the most authentic name of Parmatma, the most Compassionate. The opening phrase in the Holy Koran – بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم – means: “In the name of Allah the most merciful, the most compassionate.” “Ik Oankar Satnam Waheguru” – One universal creator God – is the opening phrase in the Sikh religious scriptures, Gurugranth Sahib. Friends, because of paucity of time I am going to get straight to the point. It was my good fortune to listen to all of these eminent analysts this afternoon. I was won- dering how I am going to define Hinduism as a religion because Hinduism has never been a religion in the way that we understand any other religion. A religion means, among other things, an organised place of worship; institutionalised churches, mosques or temples; rituals; dogmas; scriptures; and prophets. Hinduism never had this. Hinduism is largely an amor- phous concept based on the universal spiritual values of the Vedas and the Upanishads and some other ancient writings. We believe that there is one Ishwar – God, one Parmatma – the universal soul which has many names. “Ekam Sat vipra bahuda vadanti” – God or truth is one and wise people call that by various names too. For me it’s no problem to call my God Allah. That’s why I say: بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم or God, or Waheguru, or compassion, as Buddha would like us to believe. Why enter unnecessarily into the debate of whether God is or is not there? Compassion and justice, those are the most important things, and this is what liberates me from all of the clichés, all that goes into the making of an organised religion. I was born into a very high caste, into a Brahmin family of south India, into a Hindu sort of a religion, and I used to practise all of those rituals and dogmas and also upheld the caste system including un-touchability. It is a long story, but what I want to say is that at the age of 17, when I went to Calcutta for my college edu- cation, I was introduced to the simple teachings of the Vedas and Upanishads and liberated myself from day one. I stopped all forms of idol worship, stopped believ- ing in the caste system, started teaching, realising that all women are equal to men and that there is no place for any caste system, high or low. And my view about other religions also changed because I came to believe that humanity is one family. We have a very profound concept in the Vedas: वसुधैव कुटुम् बकम् – the whole world is one family. The then president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, invited me to his World Bank office in Washington and asked: “Why are you so critical of our globalisation?” I said: “Look Mr. President, I find that your globalisation is a myth. You’ve commodified everything including human values. You’ve put a price tag on everything and have allowed market forces to dictate the price and, for private interests, to buy it all, including natural resources, for a profit. Now this is a globalisation which I don’t accept.” He asked: “What do you have to offer?” I replied: “Of course, वसुधैव कुटुम् बकम – the world is one family.” He asked: “What’s the difference?” I said: “ वसुधैव कुटुम् बकम means the whole of humanity is one family.” “Of course, no problems,” he said. “No,” I said, “there is a big problem. If you believe that we are one family, then who first gets food, love and affection in the family? The smallest child, the weakest in the family, gets his or her claim first. And the bread winner of the family gets his or her share last. And this works in spiritual spontaneity. You don’t have to organise the economics of input-output analysis and this and that. That is how a family sustains itself. Can you organise the whole world on these principles that those who are the weakest in our humanity, those who are the poorest, those who are the most marginalised, those who are the most voiceless and the most defenceless come first?” Inspired by the Vedas and by Mahatma Gandhi, I have been working for the last 48 years among the poor- est of the poor in India, the least among the last. And who inspired Gandhi? One of the European philoso- phers, John Ruskin. It is very strange that, when he was still in South Africa, Gandhi read Ruskin’s Unto This Last and was so completely thrilled that he took it up as his life’s mission. I BROADENING INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND COLLABORAT ION FOR OUR T IME

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