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This is Sanskrit taken from the Vedas. It says:
"The Truth is One; people call it by various names"
Paths to Truth
Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here in this world?
These are the questions the Hindu asks. He thinks if a person
does not know the answers, there is something wrong with him.
Such ignorance is like blindness: unnatural or a kind of disease.
In a village of India were five blind men who lived together.
One day they happened to come near an animal which someone told
them was an elephant. "What is an elephant like?" they
asked. They were invited to feel its body. "Why, an elephant
is like a pillar," said the first. He had felt only its
leg. "No, no, it is like a barrel," said another, who
had felt only the belly. A third said, "It is like a rope,"
for he had felt the tail, and a fourth, "like a hose";
he had felt its trunk. "It is like a winnowing-fan,"
said the last man, who had felt only the ear. So they began to
argue among themselves. Each said that his description of the
elephant was the true one.
It is the same with Truth, says the Hindu, who loves telling
this story. His ancient books, the Vedas, say, "The Truth
is One; people call it by various names." All of us, like
the blind men, find a part of the truth and think we have grasped
it all. But truth itself must always be One and the same.
India, the homeland of the Hindus, is a land of many faiths.
Most Indians belong to the oldest one, and are called Hindus.
Really there is no such thing as "Hinduism", because
these people never used that word, and never thought of their
faith as being very different from other faiths. God, to the
Hindu, is like our elephant. He is Truth, understood by different
people in different ways. Hindus speak of religion, not "religions",
saying there is but one religion -- the religion of Man. It is
his search for Truth.
This search goes on in many ways, by different paths. Each great
world faith is a road by which men travel to the top of the mountain
called Truth. There are smaller paths, too, wending their way
to the summit. The Hindu believes that all men will reach this
Truth someday. What the Hindus themselves believe and practise
is also a "Way". And so we have called it The Way
of the Hindu.
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