It seems that it is not as easy as it once was to speak about all religions as if they are the exact same thing just dressed in different clothing for different people groups at different times in history. With the continuing high profile of Islamic terror activities, stark contrasts are being presented between Islam and the other world religions. Islam is not the same as Buddhism, and Buddhism is not the same as Christianity, and so on. It is very unlikely that all of them are leading to heaven, God, or nirvana. This is much easier to grasp than it used to be.
I remember learning a very old and famous fable in grade school as the teacher tried to demonstrate that all the religions are really, underneath the surface, one and the same. You’ve probably heard it at one point or another and it goes like this.
Several blind men are led into a rajah’s (that is a king’s) courtyard where they encounter an elephant. One feels a tusk and concludes that an elephant is like a spear. Another touches a leg and thinks an elephant is like a tree. Yet another bumps into the side of the beast and believes it is a wall, and so on. The blind men offer their opinions rather forcefully and even begin to fight over it. The rajah hears the mayhem down below and comes out on his balcony to assess the situation. After taking a moment to capture the scene, the rajah says, “You foolish blind men, don’t you know that you have all been in contact with the same thing? It’s an elephant and you have all been touching different parts of it.”
The lesson by analogy, of course, is that each of the different religious traditions of the world are bumping into only one particular aspect of ultimate reality and are blind to the total picture. But at the end of the day, all of the religious hands are touching the same essential truth.
It is easy to see the appeal of this fable in its attempt to show that at the core all religions are the same. But there is a more interesting feature of this fable that is not normally highlighted. How is it that the blind men finally know that they are all touching the same elephant? They hear a word from the rajah who stands above the situation, sees all, and can provide real knowledge to those below. Without a rajah the blind men would still be fighting.
In a day when humans are battling over religious issues like never before, we must not assume that all religions are the same. They are not. But we should redouble are efforts to find real knowledge about ultimate reality. And that can only come from a rajah, a king. One who stands above the human situation and can communicate clearly about where we came from, who we are, and where we’re going.
Where is our raja? Where is our king? Where is our voice from above?