So Many Paths, So Many Ways

The lake has several ghats. You have to go in.

In 1886, the Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna claimed to have verified something extraordinary: that practising Islam, Christianity, and multiple Hindu paths each led him to the same luminous encounter with the divine. His conclusion -- যত মত, তত পথ, joto mot, toto path, as many opinions, so many paths -- is one of the most quietly radical statements in the history of comparative religion. It is also an empirical claim. He had run the experiment. He had the results.

This book is an attempt, honest about its limitations, to run it again.

Over fifteen years and across two continents, the author attended services, study circles, retreats, and gatherings spanning fourteen traditions: the Bahai faith at the Lotus Temple in Delhi, Islam through a Sufi dargah in the lanes of Nizamuddin, Jainism in a Manchester community hall where the badminton lines were still visible on the floor, Sikhism through the langar where everyone sits at the same level and eats from the same pot, Judaism through eight nights of Hanukkah candles placed by the door, Christianity across its full range from Pentecostal revival meeting to Jesuit silent retreat, ISKCON on a bus to the London Rath Yatra, Buddhism, the political left, and the unsettling figure of U.G. Krishnamurti, who denied that the building existed at all.

What he found was not what Ramakrishna found. The traditions do not converge at the level of doctrine -- the contradictions between them are real and matter. He did not experience overwhelming visions. What he found instead were genuine encounters with genuine paths, each capable of something the others could not do, and a question that the experiment made sharper rather than answering: what would it actually cost to stop being a seeker and become a practitioner?

So Many Paths, So Many Ways is not a book that claims all religions are secretly the same. It is not a work of academic theology. It is the record of one person's fifteen years of honest, imperfect, sometimes uncomfortable attention to traditions not his own -- and of what that attention revealed about the nature of the seeker who was paying it.

For the spiritually curious who go broad rather than deep. For anyone who has walked through the entrance of many buildings without yet choosing to live in any.