Raimon Panikkar: A Peripatetic Hindu Hermes

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Raimon Panikkar: A Peripatetic Hindu Hermes (/archive/111-

vol-2-no-3-2019/292-raimon-panikkar-a-peripatetic-hindu-
hermes)
Purushottama Bilimoria, Devasia Muruppath Antony
Purushottama Bilimoria
Ph.D., Distinguished Teaching & Fulbright Research Fellow, Graduate Theological Union & University of California
@ Berkeley, USA; School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Address: Center for Dharma Studies, 2400 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA.
E-mail: pbilimoria@gtu.edu (mailto:pbilimoria@gtu.edu), pb1@unimelb.edu.au (mailto:pb1@unimelb.edu.au)
Devasia Muruppath Antony
M.Phil., Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Hindu College, University of Delhi, India.
Address: Sudhir Bose Marg, Hindu College, University Enclave, Delhi, 110007, India.
E-mail: devasiamantony@hinducollege.ac.in (mailto:devasiamantony@hinducollege.ac.in)
Abstract: This paper is an attempt to map the philosophical and soteriological horizons of the thought-world of
Raimon Panikkar who ― we claim in this paper ― is quintessentially and uniquely a Hindu peripatetic
philosopher. In trying to locate the ‘Hindu’ character of Panikkar’s philosophical thinking, the focus is on the
civilizational matrix called ‘Hinduism’ which is at once metaphysical and mythico-logical, existential and ethical,
ecological and ecumenical. In a signi cant sense this is what prompted Panikkar to develop a hermeneutic of
dialogue between the Abrahamic and the Indic, more speci cally, the worldviews of the Christian, Buddhist, and
the Hindu. A phenomenological analysis of the ‘life-world ’of Christians in South India will attest to this. In this
philosophical and soteriological journey, Panikkar identi es various problems encountered in comparative
philosophy and religion. He argues for the case of what he calls imparative philosophy which employs diatopical
hermeneutics in etching the contours for a meaningful dialogue among the various civilizations, religions and
philosophies of the world.
Key words: Raimon Panikkar, Hindu Philosophy, Advaita, Shruti tradition, imparative philosophy, diatopical
hermeneutics, dialogue. used. More details… (/archive?id=204) 
Received at February 19, 2019.
How to cite: Bilimoria, Purushottama; Antony, Devasia Muruppath (2019). Raimon Panikkar: A Peripatetic Hindu
Hermes. Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 3 (2), 9–29.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1 (http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1)
Copyright © 2019 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
What thing I am I do not know.

I wander secluded, burdened by my mind.
When the Firstborn of Truth has come to Me
I receive a share in that selfsame Word[1].
Ŗg Veda I, 164, 37
The dilemma is not whether to choose the Monastery or the Ballroom, Hardwar (sic) or
Chanakyapuri (Vatican or Quirinal), Tradition or Progress, Politics or Academia, Church or
State, Justice or Truth. In a word reality is not matter of either-or, spirit or matter,
contemplation or action, written message or living people, East or West, theory or praxis
or, for that matter, the divine or the human. Indeed, perhaps the fundamental insight <...>
is that there is no essence without existence, no existence without an essence.
Raimundo Panikkar (2006 [1977], p. xxxvi)
Introduction
The aim of this paper[2] is to engage the ‘Hindu’ character of the philosophical thinking that has found its dwelling
place in the trajectories of the multifaceted intellectual life embodied by arguably one of twentieth century’s most
creative and challenging dārṥanik-parivrājaka or peripatetic hermes ― Raimon Panikkar. The word ‘Hindu’ is used
here in an ecumenical sense: having its roots in the ‘Sindhu’ river signifying the incessant ow of water ― one of
the ve primal elements of existence, pañca-mahābhūta ― criss-crossing in incessant mutual fecundation and
evocatively inviting the inquirer, the jijñāsu, the pilgrim-philosopher to drink deep from the wells of the
civilizational matrix called Hinduism. The use of epithet parivrājaka[3] is intended to qualify the uniquely itinerant,
wandering or peripatetic and the joyful ascetic monk that Raimon Panikkar as even as he found his habitat in the
locus philosophicus of what one might call the lῑlā[4] of the womb of generativity and blessed simplicity in a
radical philosophy. In his own words (Panikkar 1982, pp. 6, 10):
Since my early youth I have seen myself as a monk, but one without a monastery, or at least without walls other than those of
the entire planet. And even these, it seems to me, has to be transcended ― probably by immanence ― without a habit, or at
least without vestments other than those worn by the human family. Yet even these vestments had to be discarded because all
cultural clothes are only partial revelations of what they conceal; the pure nakedness of total transparency only visible to the
simple eye of the pure in heart. <...> By monk, monachos, I understand that person who aspires to reach the ultimate goal of life
used. More details… (/archive?id=204)
with all his being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it. 
These words of Raimundo Panikkar go a long way to enable the reader to make sense of an otherwise largely
incomprehensible narrative to many an outsider, the distinctively choreographed contours of a unique ‘life of
mind’ that Raimon Panikkar embodied. Born as a son to Ramunni Panikkar, hailing from an orthodox Hindu Nair
family at Mannarkkad, near Palaghat in Kerala, and Carmen, a Roman Catholic woman from Spain, earned three
doctorates: in Philosophy (1946) and in Chemistry (1958) from Madrid, and in Theology (1961) from the Ponti cal
Lateran University in Rome. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the Roman Catholic Religious
Congregation called ‘Opus Dei’ in 1946; arrived in India in 1954, and was the rst incardinated catholic priest of
the Roman Catholic Diocese of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh in north India situated on the banks of the river Gaṅgā
(Ganges). Later he left the religious congregation ‘Opus Dei’ to immerse himself completely in the Trisangam[5] of
Vedānta, especially of the Advaita variety, at the ghāṭs on the river Gaṅgā[6] in Banaras/ Varanasi/ Kashi as well as
signing up as a ‘research fellow’ at Banaras Hindu University (under the towering scholars T. R. V. Murti and
J. L. Mehta, a Vedāntic-Heideggerean).
He became an Indian citizen, but then left Banaras, his advaita-home, to become a professor in the United States,
rst at Harvard and then in University of California, Santa Barbara. After his retirement in 1987, he nally moved
to an ‘ashram’ ― the Raimon Panikkar Vivarium Foundation ― a centre for inter-cultural studies built on a hilltop
at Tavertet in Catalonia, Spain, an act indicative of his intimate living through the fourfold āśrama-stages of life
according to the classical Hindu imaginary: brahmacarya, gṛhastha, vānaprastha and sannyāsa. No mean
achiever, he had authored more than 50 books and 900 articles; and, nally, in his own words, he “was the rst
catalan, the rst spaniard, the rst Indian, and, with one exception from the Middle East, the rst Asian” to have
delivered the most celebrated Gi ord Lectures at Edinburgh in 1989 (Panikkar 2010, p. xxv).
The Immersion at the Trisangam of Advaita at Mā Gaṅgā and the Cloud of Knowing and Unknowing
The aforesaid remarks should help us locate, I believe, the trajectories of the ‘Hindu’ philosophical character of
Panikkar’s intellectual pilgrimage. This becomes very evident when he is reported to have exclaimed not long
after he had authored the magnum opus The Vedic Experience: Mantramañjari, “I then discovered my father’s
religion, Hinduism” (Carrara Pavan 2014, p. 18).
Here the emphasis would be to delineate the philosophical nuances of Panikkar’s thought-world, the parivrājaka,
stoical-peripatetic-hermes, upon having discovered Hinduism. We want to metaphorize such a unique discovery
made by Panikkar by terming it as his immersion at the Trisangam of Advaita at Mā Gaṅgā. Such an immersion,
we wish to argue, cannot but take the parivrājaka-philosopher to the very womb of the metaphysical,
epistemological and ethical vicāra-mārga that has been the very umbilical cord of Hinduism since antiquity. This
to our mind can be epitomized in the twofold philosophical inquiry that the Indic-Upaniṣadic mind has engaged in
perennially: Ko aham? ― who am I? which constitutes the primal ontological query ― and its logical corollary:
Kenesitam? ― by whom? These aphoristic interrogative inquiries are at once metaphysical and epistemological,
ethical and existential, soteriological and ecological in nature and they take us to the root of the problematic of
knowing from words ― śabda pramāṇa (more of which shortly) ― which we would like to characterize in the
Panikkarian fashion as ‘the cloud of knowing and unknowing’.
Underscoring the importance of Vedas, Upaniṣads, and Advaita for a global revisioning of philosophy, Panikkar
(2006 [1977], p. xxxv) in the Vedic Experience makes an attempt to render Śruti in a more contemporary light, as
when he ruminates:
What would you save from a blazing house? A precious, irreplaceable manuscript containing a message of salvation from
mankind, or a little group of people menaced by the same re? <...> if I am not ready to save the manuscript from the re, that is,
if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I
am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people
from a con agration <...> then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript.
Our contention is that if the much celebrated magnum opus of Panikkar, namely Vedic Experience:
Mantramañjari, could possibly be seen as a testament which echoes the thundering ‘cloud of knowing’ that grew
out of his engagement with the Hindu Śruti (directly received) as well as Smṛti (derivative) traditions during his
tapasya (contemplative ascetism) at the Ganges’ ghāts, then his much talked-about Gi ord lectures The Rhythm
of Being ― which is a product of his dialogical dialogue with the pulsating global spirit of ānvīkṣikī set in the
environs of Vivarium ― possibly incarnates the silent ‘cloud of unknowing’. And one gets an insight into this in his
Upaniṣadic epilogue to the book. Here it is signi cant to note that in the intertwining world of the Upaniṣads, ṛṣi
(‘seer’) Yājñavalkya is said to have given this instruction to his wife Maitreyi: ātmā vāre dṛṣṭavya, śrotavyo,
mantavyo nididhyāsitavyo, Maitreyi (“The Self, my dear Maitreyi, should be realised, should be heard of, re ected
on and meditated upon”).
The signi cant ‘Hindu’ character of Raimon Panikkar’s philosophic quest lies in his attempted life-long response to
the philosophical-cum-soteriological challenge advanced by the ṛṣi (seer) Yājñavalkya in the famous Upaniṣadic
dialogue. The axiomatic imperative posed by Yajñavalkya encompasses, to our understanding, the soulful
symphony of the two allegedly disparate classical philosophical traditions of India: the āstika and nāstika
darśanas with the solitary exception in a fundamental sense of the Cārvāka (materialist) school of thought. And
Panikkar’s word and world in an embryonic sense was a celebratory response to this philosophical challenge. He
wasn’t just another ‘Western kind of Rishi’ as J. L. Mehta had described Martin Heidegger; the true ṛṣi (seer), he
averred, has to be discovered; the task of discovering the ṛṣi is still incomplete (Panikkar 1993, p. xv). We may
need new ṛṣis-pravarājakas, and they may come from foreign lands, or even from the diaspora to boot.
Hinduism’s Enculturation of Indian Christianity: ‘the Un-known Christ of India’
I ‘left’ Europe [for India] as a christian,

‘found’ myself a hindu, and
‘returned’ a buddhist,
without ever having ceased to be a christian.
Raimundo Panikkar (1999, p. 42)
In this part of the article we wish to explore what the discovery of Hinduism ― whether his father’s or from within
his own tapasaya-vicāra (renunciant thought-process) ― meant in terms of the faith-tradition, i.e. Christianity, the
young Raimundo had grown up in the years prior to his arrival at the ashighāṭs (sacri cial banks) of Varanasi.
Panikkar was aware of the long-and-winding history of Christianity in the subcontinent, allegedly from the time St.
Thomas who is said to have brought Christianity to India, followed by Syriac-Coptics and the Portuguese, not to
mention St. Xavier in the early XVI century.
Christianity arrived and ourished in an ambience of a broad-based Hindu Indic culture with an antiquity dating
back a few millennia, in the same way as “one religion may shape, fecundate or in uence several cultures, [so]
one culture can host more than one religion” (Panikkar 1981, p. 41). And while “most cultures have a certain
trans-religious validity because they are not necessarily bound up with one particular religion” (Panikkar 1981, p.
41) in the case of India, with the ubiquity and permeation of Hinduism across Indian culture and all that emerged
or took shelter within its peripheries, Christianity also became imbued with numerous aspects of Hinduized
Indian culture along with certain distinctive tropes of sacredness, forms and places of worship and social
structuration. Conversely, the local culture is also to an extent shaped by Christianity (Panikkar 1981, p. 41).
Especially “[i]n the South Indian religious context”, both Christians and Hindus “draw from a shared religious
worldview, a shared indigenous religious epistemology, a shared ritual data bank, and a shared grammar” (Raj
2017, p. 137).
Through centuries of interactions, there has been a blending of traditions among Christians and Hindus, such
that, as the veteran advocate of Hindu-Christian interaction, Dom Bede Gri ths observed: “Christians often tend
[7]
to adopt Hindu customs and ways of doing things” (Gri ths 1984, p. 105) . At the same time Hindus have also
adapted certain Christian practices and devotions. For example, the image of Our Lady of Velankanni is often
found in Hindu homes in Tamil Nadu (Sébastia 2008, p. 47). In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Christian, especially
Catholic, practices re ect a mixture of unwitting assimilation of Hindu practices into a Christian context,
intentional adaptation of Hindu practices to convey Christian messages, incorporation of Hindu practices despite
their apparent contradiction to Christian messages, shared practices that convey polyvalent messages, and
uniquely Christian practices that are authentically Indian (Shinseki). Over the course of nearly a millennium, there
has been “spontaneous and natural incorporation by the Catholic laity of rituals, practices, and customs from
popular Hinduism and indigenous tribal heritage into their day-to-day religious life and practice” (Raj 2017, p. 34).
As a result, Catholic practice has assimilated “a series of rites that are either simply adopted from popular
Hinduism or patterned after Hindu rites, symbols, and practices” (Raj 2017, p. 41).The assimilative process is not a
result of a planned process of enculturation, but rather emerges “organically <…> from the lived experience,
existential concerns, and human needs of Catholic laity and their Hindu neighbours with whom they live in a daily
dialogical relationship” (Raj 2017, p. 41).
For example, while removal of footwear before entering a church or shrine, certain life-cycle customs, and
circum-perambulation may have originated in a Hindu context, “Christians continue such practices <…> [in an]
unconscious sharing in the customs of the land of their birth” (Collins 2007, p. 141). In this way, Hinduism
provides ample means to sacralize what would otherwise be mundane aspects of daily life and where equivalent
Christians means are lacking (Diehl 1965, p. 21). “Some Christians <…> go to astrologers and ask about the
astrological data and try to live accordingly” (Diehl 1965, p. 21). Such practices re ect “an inner urge towards
making use of all securities that life can o er” (Diehl 1965, p. 80). A good instance of this is among the Mukkuvars,
for whom “[w]hile the ‘pagan’ gods and goddesses are not worshiped, as powers of evil they can do harm and
so they need to be propitiated by various rituals, including the sacri ce of animals” (Amaladoss 2007, p. 24). In
Kerala, a Catholic priest will preside over a ceremony for “a baby’s rst feeding of a mixture of honey, the herb
vayambu, and powdered gold to ensure future prosperity” (Dempsey 2007, p. 197). A similar protection in sought
wearing amulets, or in “[h]ouse blessings for both Christians and Hindus commonly involve the pal kaccal, or ‘milk
boiling’”, as well use of vastu-shastra rites for setting out divination and ‘protective’ boundaries around the new
home (Dempsey 2007, p. 197).
Among Syro-Malabar Catholics, since Vatican II, “a number of Bhajans and Namajapas have been composed and
used in liturgical and paraliturgical services” (Nariculam 2007). More recently, in 2005, “newly composed hymns
for [Syro-Malabar] Baptism, Con rmation and Marriage [were introduced] in the format of ragas and talas of
Karnatic and Hindustani music” (Nariculam 2007). In another instance,
Catholic pilgrims import a series of Hindu rites and ritual idioms into their pilgrimage practices and direct them to the European
martyr-saint, investing in him certain indigenous religious ideas, powers, and meanings ― largely derived from village
Hinduism ― so that the European saints resemble, in personality, power, and function, the tutelary deities of their Hindu
counterparts (Raj 2007, p. 106).
Selva Raj (2007, p. 45) adroitly observes from his voluminous ethnographic work in South India:
A noteworthy feature of this popular Catholicism is that the usual distinctions between the Hindu, Muslim, primeval, and
Christian traditions, as well as the normative boundaries between o cial and popular religion, become signi cantly blurred. The
dynamic of Santal popular Catholic religious life, represented in its lifecycle ceremonies, life-crisis rituals, calendrical festivals, and
magico-religious practices, provides a textbook case for this phenomenon of blurred boundaries.
He takes the funerary tradition as one representative sample of the plethora of practices from the Hindu fold that
popular Catholicism has allowed itself to be immersed in and informed by.
Hence enculturation is an on-going process with a well-established trajectory as here the Hindu (and sparingly
also Indian Muslim or Mopla and tribal) symbols and artefacts, amulets and kapuram (camphor-lamp), rites and
practices, etc., as we have discussed, become vehicles for better transmitting the Christian message in the
particularized context; yet there is exchange and routes established also for ‘mutual fecundation’. For Indian
Christians, the Hinduized Indian cultural ambience “provides a particular lens for making sense of religious
experience” (Gaillardetz 2008, p. 228). As Panikkar observes, such a cultural lens is necessary for Christians in any
context, whether in South India or in North America, for “there is no religion without a culture nor, in one sense
or another, culture without religion ― nor can they be identi ed” (Panikkar 1981, p. 41).
So we would like to venture an insight into the ethnographic challenges that followed Panikkar’s encounter not
just with Hinduism but with Christianity in India (the ‘Unknown Christ of India’ to boot) and his patent
astonishment at how radically transformed Christianity had become within the Hindu cultural ambience, that
departed in many signi cant ways and forms from its European sources and Middle Eastern origins. Although the
later continued to echo profoundly in the subcontinent in view of the historical genesis of Christianity in India,
this may not have had the same resonances in the Catalonian Catholicism that Panikkar had been brought up in.
The known and unknown cloud of Hinduism of India is deeply embedded in Indian Christian culture; only that it
has lagged behind in the interactive and assimilative inclusivism at the doctrinal and ‘belief’ or creedal areas.
Comparative theology compares similarities and di erences without attempting to mould or in uence a re-
conceptualization of fundamental belief-structures in light of the emergent critique or di érence marked
between the traditions. There is no real ex-change. And indeed the Parivrājaka Panikkar would assume just this
need for intentional change as part of his mantle, and the decisive platform he initiates to champion a more
robust form of interreligious dialogical dialogue in the attempt to unearth ‘homeomorphic equivalences’ or
functional coordinates across the silent spaces between the respective traditions. It is with Panikkar ― and to an
extent his Santa Barbara colleague, Ninian Smart ― but also the Canadian theologian William Cantwell Smith ―
that we see a shift in comparative study of religions from the erstwhile typologies of ‘sacrament’, ‘sin’,
‘Incarnation’, ‘resurrection’, ‘salvation’ , and the ‘Word’ towards a more inclusive reference to Indian notions of
karma (law of action), jñāna (knowledge), Vāc (speech), bhakti (devotion), dharma (law/order), etc. Likewise,
the Buddha’s First Noble Truth on the existential facticity of su ering stands transformed into the axiomatic edict:
‘that there is Evil, only so compounded with Su ering’; this modi cation of the so-called Problem of Evil, born of
[8]
dialogic insight, warrants space for Providence, which nontheist and pantheist cosmologies do not allow for .
Hence too, his forays into philosophic Advaita and the trajectory to re-articulate the ultimate concerns of
Christianity, its foundational philosophical tenets and theological contours as well, particularly in respect of its
conception of the Trinity, bringing it closer to the metaphysical and eschatological lens of the Trisangam (tri-
con uence) non-dualism of Upaniṣadic nondualism, Śiva-Naṭarāja and the Buddhist pratītyasamutpāda or
[9]
interdependent origination (Panikkar 1989). As a few among his contemporaries and commentators have
observed, it is the infusion of Advaita into the ancient (going back to the Greeks) ideas of Trinity ― and not just
the creedal ideal of the Trinity in Christian patristic theo-centrism, though that to as a sophisticated, albeit
provocative, response to divergent e orts, such as that of Sabellianism: hence Cosmotheandric Trinitarianism ―
[10]
that sets Panikkar apart from many a theologian and Christian philosopher of our times . That is the calling of
a deeply indigenously Indic Catholic, not one among the run-of-the-mill comparative theologic-dialogist: if
anything, an ‘imparative dialogic-dialogist’, as we argue in the next section.
Hermeneutics of Śruti to ‘Imparative Dialogue’
In the beginning was the Word,

the Word was with Meaning,
used. More details… (/archive?id=204)  [11]
the Word was Meaning .
1. Śruti
While most researchers in the academy, especially when studying a culture, are encouraged to take an etic
(outsider-observer-objectivist) stance ― and feel more at home in this methodological approach ― Panikkar
never sighed away from and indeed implored his students to espouse a radically emic (insider-participant-
empathic) position. This was a well-thought-out hermeneutical strategy, for without being immersed fully in a
tradition ― from as it were ‘the inside’ ― one had little hope of fully understanding and appreciating the essential
elements moulding the life of the other. But he was already, as it were, half-way to being a Hindu; so in his own
terms he had a particular advantage over certain cut-and-dried social scientists and textualists approaching the
same subject matter. Not only that, he took recourse to the hermeneuticists who practiced their form of
Verstehen within the tradition to see how they went about understanding their own native tradition. Let me
illustrate this with reference to Panikkar’s desire to digest and comprehend ‘Śruti’, which stands as a rather
unique Hindu doctrine with a complex set of philosophical and linguistic presuppositions teased out in the
[12]
darśanic systems of Indian thought, and his close alignment with the Mīmāṃsā-hermeneuts in the tradition .
Śruti is freely rendered as ‘revelation,’ but better, ‘authorlessly revealed scripture.’ Panikkar discusses this issue at
length in the context of understanding Ṛgvedic mantras on ‘Vāc’, (Speech) and ‘Gāyatrī’ (Meter), that deal with the
speci c Indian theories of sound and meaning, and the relation between text and rites, where he demonstrated
his leanings towards transpersonal revelation.
Firstly, it was no longer adequate as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalists did for Indian texts, to simply
rede ne the Vedas through to the Bhagavad Gītā, as Śruti, i.e., as ‘Revelation’ (or ‘Revealed Word’), of Bhagavān,
Īśvara, or God. Nor was he much enamored of Indologists and historians who have aired doubts about the native
hermeneuticians’ (notably of the Mīmāṃsā school), attempt at a blank a-historicization of the Vedas ― a knee-jerk
amnesiac reaction (Pollock 1989, pp. 603–610) ― thereby rendering the Veda’s sacredness and revelatory status
as being somehow timeless, eternal, non-negotiable in temporal terms, which only helped to serve other
ideological ends (power as the de ned outcome). While cautious in his approach to scripture in either of these
directions, Panikkar found himself being more sympathetic to what he was beginning to understand as
‘transpersonal revelatory texts’.
Secondly, that there is still much that is salvageable in the idea of ‘Śruti’ as the ‘heard word’, the ‘primeval sound’,
and ‘the original meaning or intentionality’, based on a philosophical doctrine of an intimate and sui generis
relation between word, meaning, and knowledge as analysed in the preeminent thesis of śabda-pramāṇa ―
‘knowing from words’. This echoed my own heuristic reading of the doctrine in the hands or pens of the Mīmāṃsā
[13]
stalwarts . And yet the staunchest defenders of orthodoxy in respect to the inviolability of scriptural authenticity
reject the conjunct of God and scripture. Instead, they might consider the conjunction of text, ritual, and after-life
rewards (in the notion of apūrva ― the automated ‘unseen potency’ ― precursor to the doctrine of karma).
Why not therefore regard the pristine scriptures of each tradition as their version of, what Heidegger called, ‘the
House of Being’ ― as language speaking truths, rather than truths having to depend upon or supervening on a
[14]
speaker, even a cognitive agent or re-chronicler of truth? In other words, the relation to be properly explored is
the one between the cumulative truth-claims and sacred-making experiences (what Wilfred Cantwell Smith might
[15]
understand by ‘faith’ ) as re ected and transmitted in the speech of the community (their vācanas), rather than
with the ecclesiastical straight-jacket of a divine founder-revealer and the word dispensed to the community.
[16]
Panikkar never embraced the oft-mistaken generalization that ‘Scripture is the Word of God’ . God or Gods (in
the plural sense in which devas/devatās, ‘gods’ or better ‘light-beings’ are interminably invoked in the Vedas)
might be viewed as a derivation from the scripture that otherwise may claim to itself a sui generis epistemic
character, i.e. the scripture is a font (storehouse) of valid knowledge that actually embeds a “desire”. And so
Panikkar, referring to the traditional Mīmāṃsā notion of apauruṣeya (which he rendered as “non-authorship”) is
happy to pronounce that there is no author, human or divine, of the Word, in the sense that this seemingly
counter-intuitive conception actually embeds a “desire to purify our relationship with the text and to avoid any
kind of idolatry” (Panikkar 2006 [1977], p. 12). And furthermore (Panikkar 2006 [1977], pp. 12–13):
Any one of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray, and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words, <…>
[17]
and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression . What has no author, according to
the apauruṣeya insight, is the relation between word and its meaning or object. The relationship is not an arti cial or extrinsic
[18]
relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit this type of relationship which exists between word and its meaning .
To do this we would require another relationship and so on ad in nitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases
to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda, it does not convey real meaning or saving knowledge.
Panikkar believed indeed that Hindus in India lived in a signi cantly scriptural relation to their fellows and the
world around them, and to their personal destiny. More importantly, it is not the thesis that the “Ṛg-Veda is
[19]
sounding eternally and self-subsistently” (a phrase I borrow from Smith ) that captures the truth (though he did
[20]
not dismiss the philosophical merits of this imagery ), but that in the thesis of the primacy of the Vedas is the
recognition that the ṛṣis, seers or sages, had penetrated to considerable depth certain mysteries and spiritual
verities, and this transcendental knowledge is then via verbal testimony placed within the reach of some at least
(Panikkar 2006 [1977], p. 5). And in acceding to this possibility, my claim in reading especially works such as the
Vedic Experience, Panikkar comes close to echoing the Heideggerian mantra of ‘Language as the House of Being’,
i.e. spiritual truths have made themselves audible, learnable, and can be appropriated. It is not for the traditional
Hindus that words ― certain words ― constitute the Veda, so much as that Veda is word (logos), constituted
primarily of meaning and the accompanying ‘vehicles’ (vāhanas, dhvanis), that purvey or convey them. That is why
Śruti is the Father of Hermes and the Mother of Hermeneutics (Bilimoria 2008). So in this sense it is the fount of
‘transcendental knowledge’. Panikkar arrives at a new and rather radical understanding of Śruti, within the
epistemological framework of truth-bearing ‘prāmāṇya’, aligned to the a sui generis linguistic structure that
enables objective-subjective referencing, rather than cloaked in the theological epistemé of a broader claim to
the necessary existence of a higher, transcendent being, that pronounces the words and thereby its authority,
too.
2. ‘Imparative Dialogue’
In his 1982 paper, ‘Aporias in the Comparative Philosophy of Religion’ (Bilimoria 2008), Panikkar raises a host of
issues that he believes bedevils the sub-discipline, precisely because of the ambiguities and indeed ‘aporias’ that
lurk within the very paradigm of ‘the comparative’, whether in comparative philosophy of religion or comparative
religion.
One of the key aporias he points out to is the presumed ‘common ground’ that is needed for comparison, for the
very practice of comparing runs into trouble “when the compared religions (with their underlying philosophies)
do not share the assumptions of the comparing philosophy” (Bilimoria 2008). In other words, if the scale and
standards of comparison are set by the religious or theological tradition against which the supposed parallel
ideas or beliefs of another tradition are being compared, this is taking more for granted than might be acceptable
to the compared tradition. One might be dredging in a pool of nothingness to nd ‘comparable corresponding
entities’ by reducing philosophical or religious facts or phenomena to some formalities, even quanti able ones
(as in sociology of religion).
We have become too complacent in the comparative linguists’ belief in the translatability of di erent
philosophical and religious languages. But this might be our problem ― the problematic of ‘translational
philosophy’ (Bilimoria 2008). So if to cite an instance Panikkar gives us, the concept expressed linguistically as
‘salvation’ or ‘eschatological liberation’ is thought to be indispensably the ultimate end in tradition A, but is found
to be absent in the teachings of tradition B, then there is no ‘common ground’ for comparison, no basis on which
translation from A to B could proceed, and the whole enterprise of ‘comparing’ collapses. Thus, taking another
example,
…we can compare Semitic religions from the common ground of the Abrahamic ‘faith’ (Monotheism, Reality of this World,
Obedience due to the Will of God, etc.). But this is not an adequate basis for including in the comparison, say, Hinduism,
Buddhism, or modern Humanism. They stand on another ground (Bilimoria 2008, p. 361).
Panikkar laments that unless some fundamental changes are made in our methods, we would end up with a
“shallow philosophy of religion” (Bilimoria 2008, p. 362). The alternative strategy he proposes is what he calls
‘imparative philosophy’. In his “What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?” (Panikkar 1988, pp. 116–136)
Panikkar further develops this methodology, in a more sophisticated and philosophically-nuanced way, wherein
he places emphasis on what he calls the ‘imparative hermeneutic’. ‘Imparative’ is derived from the nonclassical
Latin imparare (“I am ready, disposed”; from the verb in + parare, to prepare, furnish, provide (Panikkar 1988, p.
128, footnote 7). He explains that in this method a real space of mutual criticism and fecundation is opened up
for genuine encounters between di erent philosophical and religious traditions. One ‘enters’ into another’s
dimensions of intellectual or spiritual ‘meaning’, and allows that to speak to, and reappraise, one’s own
convictions in a dialogical situation. One then assumes a more nuanced vantage point from which assessment is
made of the comparative worth of the aspects investigated.
Not one for ‘global philosophy’, Panikkar views the larger objective of the Imparative-hermeneutic program to
draw into dialogue di erent perspectives from among the various traditions to address real-life and global issues
in such a way that dialogue can become relevant to the human condition, to the problems and crises that face
humankind regardless of whether religions are implicated or not. The broader horizons of ‘ecumenism’ are
sketched by Panikkar in similar terms. A point that needs to be remembered is that interest in other religions and
willingness to enter into dialogue with other religious traditions is very largely a Western and Christian thing.
[21]
Many non-Western religions see no point in ‘ecumenism’ and ‘dialogue’ .
But then for a peripatetic-ṛṣi? Why is there need for ‘imparative hermeneutics’? What is this project all about, and
what does it have to do Hinduism as such? (Ellis 2017). First, the motivation: because comparative philosophy is
problematic for the reason that the self-other encounter will never allow itself the luxury of comparison. As
philosophy pretends to the universal itself, it would appear that any neutral point from which to compare
philosophies is a fantasy. There is no context-free point of departure: “any e ort at comparing philosophies starts
consciously or unconsciously from a concrete philosophical position” (Panikkar 1988, p. 127). Panikkar suggests in
this regard that we forego the comparative project for the imparative one. Imparative philosophy proposes that
“we may learn by being ready to undergo the di erent philosophical experiences of other people” (Panikkar 1988,
p. 127). Associated with such imparative work is the recognition that nothing is nonnegotiable (Panikkar 1988, p.
128). Panikkar (1988, p. 130) suggests that imparative philosophy employs in this regard diatopical hermeneutics:
Diatopical hermeneutics is the required method of interpretation when the distance to overcome, needed for any understanding,
is not just a distance within one single culture (morphological hermeneutics), or a temporal one (diachronic hermeneutics), but
rather the distance between two (or more) cultures, which have independently developed di erent spaces (topoi) their own
methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories.
Thomas Ellis, picking up on a close analogue with J.L. Mehta’s postcolonial-Hindu hermeneutics, suggests,
Panikkar’s diatopical hermeneutics insists on the deconstructability of all traditions, for as Panikkar writes: “we
need, further, to be ready to contest our own conclusions” (Panikkar 1988, p. 135). Again, the encounter with
the other is not always edifying. From a colonialist’s perspective this may seem misconstrued; from a colonial
subject’s position, it is obvious.
In ‘What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing? (Panikkar 1988, pp. 125–126) Panikkar suggests that there is a
phenomenology implicit in this cross-cultural enterprise, and this calls upon the researcher’s conscious
engagement with empathy and a preparedness to bracket-out belief in the truth of one or the other position that
does not allow for a possible third position suggested in the imparare encounter which takes into account the
universal range of human experience in as much as it is possible to do so in any concrete situation. Imparative
philosophy as an alternative to comparative philosophy may be the antidote to overing parochialism (‘provincially
chauvinist views’), as well as to cultivating tolerance and understanding of the richness of human experience. And
here diatopical hermeneutics has a functional role of forging a common universe of discourse (not a common
ground through assumed equivalences) in the dialogical dialogue taking place in the very encounter.
So Panikkar basically argues that comparative philosophy should not parade itself as an independent,
autonomous, discipline but rather see itself as a “mature ontonomic activity of the human spirit, contrasting
everything, learning from everywhere, and radically criticizing the enterprise itself?” (Panikkar 1988, p. 136).
But for his time as a ‘Hindu’ in the ghāts of Varanasi, mingling with traditional Mīmāṃsaka and modern-day
hermeneuticians such as J. L. Mehta, Panikkar would have easily acquiesced to the temptations of what we would
now call classical comparative philosophy and comparative religion (even comparative theology), believing that
comparisons happen naturally as in comparative ethnology, without much concerns about methodological
niceties, such as of intranslatability across conceptual schemas and the spectre of value-judgments. That was not
to be, and he saved himself from himself.
Conclusion
Parivrājaka Panikkar-ji was as much a modern-day Hermes of Hinduism and especially so of the spare deities of
the Mīmāṃsa’s homologous svarga (heavenly third space), whose idea of the immanentist-transcendentalism he
brilliantly reworked into an Advaitic (non-dual) conception of Trinity. He further brought across for us the
message of a quite novel reading of the orthodox Brāhmanic idea of Śruti and how this provocatively suggestive
trope of ‘authorless revelation’ might impact on how we ‘listen to’ and understand the contents of scriptures, any
scripture. He found Hindu scriptures to be particularly challenging, so much so that he spent a good dozen years
if not more on a collaborative project on the banks of the Ganges translating segments of the ṚgVeda that
ensued in the massive tome: Mantramañjari: The Vedic Experience. In addition, he was keen to ask how we might
continue to place value on the scriptures’ authoritative valence were we even to doubt the veracity of the authors
hitherto ascribed as their source or cause, because the facticity of meaning, as the House of Being, might be
more important than grounding the word in a personal being, divine or human, or both. Let the Hindu Panikkar
speak on in the spirit of Vāc.
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[1] Na vi jānāmi yadivedamasmi niṇyaḥ saṁnadho manasā carāmi Yadā māgan prathamjā ṛtasyādid vāco aṥnuve bhāgamasyāḥ; Panikkar,
R. (Ed. & trans.) (2006 [1977]). The Vedic Experience, Mantramañjari: An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary
Celebration. Indian edition reprint, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited. First published in 1977, xxxviii. This opus was
compiled and translated with his colleagues in Benaras, Bettina Baumer, et al., from 1964–67, though it took another 10 years before it
appeared in print.
[2] The essay is collaboratively written, though we retain on occasions as is the usual practice the rst-person singular pronoun, ‘I’, ‘my’
when referencing our views or ndings in the main text.
[3] The Sanskrit word parivrājaka comes from the root word parivrāj and it means one who has embraced the life of a wandering,
itinerant, peripatetic religious mendicant who has abandoned the world in pursuit of something higher and nobler. Usually this word is
found signi cantly in the Indic nāstika dārsanika traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism. The homological parallel word used in
the āstika dārśanika traditions such as Vedānta, Mῑmāṃsā, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, etc., is sannyāsa ― see Monier-Williams, M. (1997). A Sanskrit-
English Dictionary. Indian edition reprint, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, Delhi, 602. First published 1889. In the Western
theologico-philosophic tradition, the word ‘monk’ (monachos) comes very close to the Indic term parivrājaka. Parivrājaka may also signify a
‘spiritual master’, as in the title of book by Prabhu, J. (2016). Raimon Panikkar as a Modern Spiritual Master. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis
Books.
[4] A Sanskrit word having various nuanced meanings in the Indic philosophical narratives. Here it is used in the sense of ‘sportive play’
that gives rise to non-instrumentally caused ānanda enveloping an aura of spontaneity. Parivrājaka may also signify a ‘spiritual master’, as
in the title of book by Prabhu, J. (2016). Raimon Panikkar as a Modern Spiritual Master. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
[5] See his ‘Trisangam: Jordan, Tiber, and Ganges’, in: Panikkar, R. (1993). A Dwelling Place for Wisdom. Westminster/John Knox Press,
Louisville, Kentucky, 109 .
[6] The name ‘Gaṅgā’ is used here symbolically. In Panikkar’s own words: “The Ganges has many sources, among them one that is invisible.
The Ganges disappears in a delta of countless riverbeds, and the Ganges has witnessed the birth of many religions along its banks. What
draws me to Mā Gaṅgā (apart from a personal a liation) is its multifaceted origin, the curious delta, and in particular this secret, heavenly
source. In Illāhabād <...>, the old city with its Islamic name, not only the waters of the Jamunā and of the Gaṅgā lead into the Prayāga but
also the invisible and divine Sarasvatī, both river and the Goddess of wisdom. For millennia, millions of people have been testifying to that
in the famous Kumbha-Mela by means of pilgrimages that are calculated every twelve years in astrological (and astronomical) fashion”
(Panikkar 1993, p. 110).
[7] It is interesting to note that Dom Bede, an Anglican convert to the Benedictine order, had similar experiences and intentions to
Panikkar in India, though without the deeply sophisticated grounding that Panikkar had in Hindu philosophy and theology. And the title of
work cited here bears a resemblance to Panikkar’s, but without the descriptors ‘Unknown’ and ‘of’; perhaps Dom Bede had ‘Hidden’ in
mind.
[8] The Paper on Su ering as the equivalence of Evil was presented in the late 1990s at a Symposium of the Problem of Evil organized at
the Satya Nilayam Research Institute, Chennai. See also Panikkar, R. (1980). Aporias of Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Man and the
World, no. 13, 357–383.
[9] See also Panikkar, R. (1970). The Trinity and World Religions: icon-person-mystery. Christian Literature Society (Bangalore), Madras: The
Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. This latter work is one of the best and yet understated foundational work that sets
down a model for pluralistic dialogue situated within the realm of spirituality rather in dogmatic speculation or metaphysical formulation.
[10] See Prabhu, J. (2017). The Encounter of Religions in a Globalized World: Provocations from Panikkar. In Raimon Panikkar: Intercultural
and Interreligious Dialogue (pp. 141–155). University of Girona; Panikkar, R. (1993). The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging religious
consciousness. Edited with introduction by Scott Eastham. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis.
[11] From Bilimoria, P. (1989). The Idea of Authorless Revelation (Apauruṣeya). In R. W. Perrett (Ed.). Indian Philosophy of Religion (pp. 143–
166). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijho /Kluwer Academic Publishers,
[12] For a more detailed coverage of this dialogic encounter (my personal exchanges with Panikkar on the same questions that I shared),
and from which part of the discussion here is drawn see Bilimoria, P. (2013). Śruti-prāmāṇya (scriptural testimony) and the ‘Imparative
Philosophy’ in Raimon Panikkar’s Thinking. In CIRPIT REVIEW, no. 5, November 2013, 57–68.
[13] Developed, for example, in Bilimoria, P. (2000). J. N. Mohanty’s Critique of Word as a Means of Knowing and ‘Authorless Tradition’. In
B. Gupta (Ed.). The Empirical and the Transcendental: A Fusion of Horizons (pp. 199–218). New York: Rowman & Little eld.
[14] See Bilimoria, P. (2008). Being and Text: Dialogic Fecundation of Western Hermeneutics and Hindu Mīmāṃsā in the Critical Era. In R.
Sherma, & A. Sharma (Eds.). Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought toward a Fusion of Horizons (pp. 45–80). Dordrecht: Springer.
[15] See Bilimoria, P. (2017). The Meaningful End of ‘God’ and ‘Scripture’. In E. B. Aitkin, A. Sharma (Ed.). The Legacy of Wilfred Cantwell
Smith (pp. 47–64). Albany: SUNY Press; also see Panikkar, R. (1968). Philosophy and Theology, Reason and Faith. In The Concept of
Philosophy (pp. 59–63).Varanasi: The Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy, Benaras Hindu University.
[16] Panikkar does not assume a one single (monotheistic) God being spoken of in the Vedic lore. Vedic Experience, op. cit., 11.
[17] Recall Heidegger’s ‘Language as the House of Being’.
[18] Panikkar here is alluding to the unique Mīmāṃsā theory of autpattika, ‘persistent relation’. See Bilimoria, P. (2004). Autpattika: The
Originary Signi er-Signi ed Relation in Mīmāṃsā and Deconstructive Semiology; Authorless Voice. In R. R. Diwedhi (Ed.). Mandan Mishra
Felicitation Volume (pp. 187–203). Delhi: L.B.S. Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapitha.
[19] See Bilimoria, P. The Meaningful End of ‘God’ and ‘Scripture’, loc. cit.
[20] By saying that the Veda as ‘Revelation’ (Śruti) is ‘a living document’ and a discourse whose depths still resound in the heart of modern
Man (Panikkar 2006 [1977], pp. 9–10).
[21] The brunt of the argument that is to be found in Panikkar’s ‘Aporias’ paper on which the ‘Comparative Philosophy’ paper is predicated.
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Raimon Panikkar: A Peripatetic Hindu Hermes (/archive/111-

E-mail: pbilimoria@gtu.edu (mailto:pbilimoria@gtu.edu), pb1@unimelb.edu.au (mailto:pb1@unimelb.edu.au)

Devasia Muruppath Antony

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1 (http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2019.2.3.1)

What thing I am I do not know.

Ŗg Veda I, 164, 37

Raimundo Panikkar (2006 [1977], p. xxxvi)

Hinduism’s Enculturation of Indian Christianity: ‘the Un-known Christ of India’

I ‘left’ Europe [for India] as a christian,

Raimundo Panikkar (1999, p. 42)

Hermeneutics of Śruti to ‘Imparative Dialogue’

In the beginning was the Word,

[17] Recall Heidegger’s ‘Language as the House of Being’.

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