The Perennial Tradition
Anyone who has studied different religious traditions has very likely come across teachings in multiple places that seem to reflect similar ideas. Many people like to then take the next step by saying that all religions are ultimately saying the same thing, which I’ve often seen summed up on the internet as some variation of “Don’t be an asshole.” The reality, however, is far more complex, though I do agree that many religions are pointing in the same direction.
The Buddha once said that his teachings (Dharma) were like a finger pointing towards the moon. He also warned against confusing the goal for the means. In other words, we shouldn’t confuse the finger for the moon. Unfortunately, I think this is a mistake we all too often find ourselves making. We replace God with the means for approaching God - we put rituals and traditions in God’s place, making idols out of them, rather than using them to actually connect with the divinity that hides behind them.
Putting these two ideas together - that different faiths are pointing in the same direction and that we often confuse religion for God - we start to see the beauty in something called “perennial philosophy”, and what I will be calling “the Perennial Tradition”. Perennialism is the philosophical belief that behind different religions lies a single, unified truth or spiritual core. And why wouldn’t this be the case? If there truly is one God and one truth, then why wouldn’t there be a unified core behind every religious tradition? The problem we face is that we get so caught up in the language we use and the traditions and rules and creeds that we lose sight of what is behind all of that. We start to confuse the finger for the moon.
That being said, I don’t want to fall into the trap that so many people do of simply boiling down different traditions into a vague and watery notion of “oneness”. Different traditions are not simply dressing the truth in different costumes. They understand the truth to be different things. I just believe these different things ultimately arrive at the same underlying reality, like many different windows opening into the same light. The windows may be tinted or warped or dirty or stained, and that will mean the light looks and behaves differently after passing through them, but if we could remove the window entirely, I believe we’d find the same sun outside.
As an example, it can be tempting to take the Christian notion of “oneness with Christ” and the Buddhist concept on no-self (anatman) and claim they are all saying the same thing. They are not. Yes, they both point toward mystical unity, but they travel divergent paths to arrive there and understand it differently. Christianity believes in a separate and eternal soul that must rejoin with God, and even then most mystical concepts of Christianity still maintain some kind of distinction within that unity. Meanwhile, Buddhism holds that there is no separate and eternal self. To achieve Nirvana, one must extinguish their desires and their ego to realize the ultimate reality that already exists. So, yes, they both point towards unity, but how the language through which they understand that unity and how they arrive at that unity is starkly different. If we erase or underscore that difference, we risk losing the unique insights that each of these traditions can provide.
This is the thing we must be careful about when engaging with religious syncretism and perennialism. We do not want to behave as spiritual colonizers who see other faiths as exotic raw material to be plugged haphazardly into the framework of Western Mysticism, or whatever other tradition we follow. The Perennial Tradition runs the risk of flattening and romanticizing, which are tendencies we must always be on guard for, and which I am not perfect at avoiding, but it also allows for us to see distinct faiths as not being irredeemably separate. Perennialism allows us to find unity and common ground where we may have previously thought impossible. The danger is real, but so is the longing at the heart of perennial philosophy - the desire to find unity.
Along the way we must remember a simple truth: God transcends our categories, our understanding, and our traditions. Religions are languages we use to discuss God, but everything we have to say is ultimately metaphor, and we must not lose sight of that. We are not practicing a science here. There is no “God equation” whose output is a perfect understanding of the divine. We are practicing the art of faith and the journey of discovery. We will take different paths and speak in different ways, but I believe we will end up in the same place.
Ultimately, the Perennial Tradition does not state that every religion is right, or that we cannot practice one over others. Nor does it say that every religion is wrong and should be done away with. The perennial truth is that reality is deeper than any religion can name and that God does not exist in the formulation of creeds, doctrines, and dogmas, but rather than God exists in the silence beyond them.
