The Age of the Sages: The Axial Age in Asia and the Near East

Preface

PREFACE The Age of the Sages is unlike most other introductory books in the study of religion. Most foundational religious studies texts approach their subject in one of a few basic ways. Some works focus on a single tradition, such Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. Books of this sort usually unfold chronologically, starting from the tradition’s inauguration (or shortly before) and proceeding historically to the present. The advantage of this general method is that it permits the study of a single religious tradition in some depth. If the book’s approach is chronological, it adds the very important dimension of showing how a religion evolves over time. Without a historical perspective, one might be led to think that religious traditions are relatively static and that devotees of a particular religion believe and practice the same things. As someone whose job is to interpret religions, I am frequently asked questions such as “What do Hindus believe?” The truest answer one can give to a question like that is that Hindus believe-and have believed-many different things throughout their history. The same answer, of course, could be offered for all the world’s major religions. Thus, one of the dangers in not taking historical development into account is that the great diversity manifested in all religions gets neglected. Focusing on the evolution of a single tradition can avoid that pitfall. The disadvantage to the single-tradition approach, however, is that it rarely allows for comparisons with other religions. Without the comparative dimension, one might be misled into believing that a particular religious tradition is completely unique or that it develops independently of other domains of culture or other religions. The comparative method ensures that a religious tradition is interpreted against the larger background of human experience beyond the specific religion under study. Another kind of religious studies text takes the comparative approach seriously but in so doing sacrifices much of the depth one gains from studying the historical development of a single tradition. Many textbooks for ix introductory courses in world religions are structured in this manner. Such books are designed for courses in which one might spend the first two weeks on Hinduism, then two weeks on Buddhism, two days on Jainism, a week for the Sikhs, three weeks on Chinese religions, and so forth. The benefit of this method is the opportunity it affords to study traditions side by side to see how they differ and compare. It is difficult truly to understand any religion—including, and perhaps especially, one’s own—without such comparisons and contrasts. In the same way that studying another language enables one to recognize the taken-for-granted features of one’s native tongue, so too does the comparative study of religions bring to consciousness the dimensions of religious belief and practice that usually escape our notice. One might be tempted to think that all religions posit the existence of a creator god until one encounters a tradition like Buddhism, in which belief in god plays no role in accounting for the existence of the universe. Similarly, one could assume that Jesus originated the Golden Rule until one finds that Confucius uttered essentially the same principle five centuries earlier. In the words of Max Müller, one of the first comparativists of religion, “He who knows one, knows none.”1 But the problem with the comparative approach of most textbooks is that each religion receives such short shrift that its treatment is often shallow and its historical development is glossed over or insufficiently addressed. Furthermore, a religion’s evolution in the larger context of its culture can be easily neglected. Thus, one fails to see how traditions are related to other aspects of their social setting, such as art, economics, politics, and education. Because it lacks adequate attention to historical development, this two-weeks-per-religion approach can also disregard the ways in which religious traditions frequently influence and shape one another. This is also a hazard of the single-tradition method. In fact, one of the least appreciated aspects of the world’s religions is the extensive ways in which they interact. To cite some small examples: Prayer beads seem to have originated among the Hindus and later adopted by Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Muslims. Karma and rebirth are ideas shared by Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, who appropriated these concepts in very different ways relative to one another. The Roman Catholic Church canonized a Saint Josaphat, who was a fictionalized character based...