Religious Truth: A Volume in the Comparative

The Comparative Religious Ideas Project is a groundbreaking three-year collaboration among well-known scholars of world religious traditions as well as philosophers, historians, sociologists of religion, and theologians who view religion in more general terms. These resulting three volumes offer an exciting look at important comparisons among major world religions and develop and test a theory of comparison employing the collaborative method.

This multifaceted study compares how six traditions interpret religious truth, and how it has come to be illustrated so diversely in the Chinese religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Philosophical essays integrate the comparisons, ask what religious truth might be in terms of a contemporary defensible theory, and reflect on what all this shows for the nature of religion and its study.

Foreword

xi

Jonathan Z. Smith

Preface

xiii

Robert Cummings Neville

Acknowledgments

xxv

Introduction

1

(6)

Robert Cummings Neville

Wesley J. Wildman

Truth in Chinese Religion

7

(36)

Livia Kohn

James Miller

General Perspectives

7

(4)

The Nature of Truth

11

(8)

Expressions of Truth

19

(9)

Cultivation and Embodiment of Truth

28

(10)

Conclusion

38

(5)

From Truth to Religious Truth in Hindu Philosophical Theology

43

(22)

Francis X. Clooney

Hugh Nicholson

How They Forged a Conversation on Religious Truth in Ancient India

43

(1)

Ordinary Truth

44

(1)

Ordinary Truth as Right Knowing: Pramana, Prameya, Prama

45

(1)

Religious Truth

46

(1)

Nyaya: God Is Like a Potmaker

47

(3)

Mimamsa: No Need for a World-Maker

50

(3)

Knowing the God of Scripture in Visistadvaita Vedanta

53

(2)

Advaita Vedanta and the Scriptural Origins of Empirical Truth

55

(2)

The Hindu Debate about Truth

57

(2)

Public Discourse and Its Sectarian Roots

59

(6)

``With Great Noise and Mighty Whirlpools the Ganges Flowed Backwards'': Buddhist Approaches to Truth

65

(18)

Malcolm David Eckel

John J. Thatamanil

Introduction

65

(1)

Embodied Truth-in-Practice

66

(3)

Epistemological Truth

69

(7)

Scriptural and Revelatory Truth

76

(7)

``To Practice Together Truth and Humility, Justice and Law, Love of Merciful Kindness and Modes Behavior''

83

(26)

Anthony J. Saldarini

Joseph Kanofsky

Introduction

83

(3)

The Biblical Tradition

86

(2)

The Dead Sea Scrolls

88

(5)

The Talmud

93

(1)

Saadia Gaon and Philosophical Truth

94

(3)

The Response to Modernity

97

(3)

Conclusions and Comparisons

100

(9)

Patristic Prama and Pramana: Augustine and the Quest for Truth

109

(18)

Paula Fredriksen

Introduction

109

(1)

The One, the Many, and the Problem of Evil

110

(1)

Mani and Plato

111

(4)

The Knower, Knowing, and the Known

115

(4)

Some Comparisons

119

(8)

The Taxonomy of Truth in the Islamic Religious Doctrine and Tradition

127

(18)

S. Nomanul Haq

Introduction

127

(1)

Explication of the Notion of Sidq

128

(3)

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Hierarchy of Sidq

131

(4)

The Ontological Equivalence of Truth and Reality: al-Haqq and al-Haqiqa

135

(2)

The Epistemological Question

137

(1)

The Functional Approach: Fiqh and Shara a Recalled

138

(1)

The Rational-Mystical Approach: The Ghazalian Synthesis

139

(1)

Essential Reality of the Truth

140

(5)

Religious Truth in the Six Traditions: A Summary

145

(26)

Robert Cummings Neville

Wesley J. Wildman

Religious Truth: Our Categories and Their Justification

145

(4)

Religious Truth as an Epistemological Problem

149

(5)

Religious Truth as Expressed in Sacred Texts and Objects

154

(5)

Religious Truth as Cultivation and Embodiment

159

(3)

Religious Truth as Opposed to Error, Deceit, and Failure

162

(9)

A Contemporary Understanding of Religious Truth

171

(32)

Robert Cummings Neville

Wesley J. Wildman

Truths in Religion

171

(5)

Truth in Interpretation

176

(6)

Truth in Reference

182

(5)

Truth in Achieved Meaning

187

(4)

Truth in Transformation

191

(12)

On the Nature of Religion: Lesson We Have Learned

203

(16)

Wesley J. Wildman

Robert Cummings Neville

Remarks on Our Experience of Studying Religion

204

(4)

Remarks on Our Construction of Theories of Aspects of Religion

208

(3)

Remarks on the Relation between Comparison and Theory Building

211

(2)

Conjectures on Comparison and Theories of Religion

213

(6)

Director's Conclusions

219

(8)

Robert Cummings Neville

Appendix A: On the Process of the Project During the Third Year

227

(10)

Wesley J. Wildman

Appendix B: Suggestions for Further Reading

237

(88)

List of Contributors

325

(2)

Index of Names

327

(4)

Index of Subjects

331

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Religious Truth: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project

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Table of Contents

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Religious Truth: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project

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Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

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