"But to understand the differences between hundreds of sects, one must immerse oneself in hundreds of years of scholarship"
Something like this has already been done by Adi Da, and will be published in the next year, I believe, under the title "THE BASKET OF TOLERANCE"
Over the span of some 30 years Adi Da examined more than
100 THOUSAND books, scriptures, audiotapes and religious images on Religion and Spirituality from ALL traditions, selecting from amongst them a CORE grouping of about 2,000 titles (of greatest merit), arranged in an orderly fashion based on content. He then wrote over 100 essays, explaining and linking the material. The whole content exists in the form of an annotated bibliography.
The manner in which he did this is interesting. He does NOT
read the books, for example. He just picks them up, leafs through them, and begins to comment on the author, his or her influences, the book content and its key points and the essential merit (or lack thereof). People who know the book by virtue of having read it are stunned by the in-depth
insight shown.
A smaller subset of the 2,000 (about 800 in number), spanning the entire Great Tradition of mankind are contained
in the Epitome List, which forms a section of the text.
If you read a book a day it would take you 5.47 years to read 2,000 books. But that is easier than 100,000 books, which would take 273.97 years!
Namaste!
Jim |
