Religious Harmony: The Harmony among the Differences

Abstract

As in many societies, people live their life among differences, such as religions, language, rituals, etc. More significantly, most of people live their life based on religious principles in which each of them belongs to different faiths and applies the religious teaching as they belong to for their daily life. In such this situation, there might be a conflict arisen by misunderstanding religious teachings and misinterpreting a fact of religions. To prevent these causes and bring them happiness, religious or spiritual leaders should come out to respond for these. With this, each spiritual leader should enhance mutual understanding among the leaders and share responsivity for solving the arisen conflict and bringing happiness and justice to the people. In this point, the spiritual leader should encourage the people to understand the fact of religions and intelligently approach the true reality of the things. By these strategies, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu has practically given the principle of “No religion” that people should understand the natural phenomenon (dhammas) rather than material phenomenon. Sri Ramakrishana has also given the idea of dharma-samanvaya (harmony of religions) that the absolute truth is only one; but there are various ways to approach the truth.