Hinduism as a Missionary Religion

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Is Hinduism a missionary religion? Merely posing this question is a novel and provocative act. Popular and scholarly perception, both ancient and modern, puts Hinduism in the non missionary category. In this intriguing book, Arvind Sharma reopens the question. Examining the historical evidence from the major Hindu eras, the Vedic, classical, medieval, and modern periods, Sharma's investigation challenges the categories used in current scholarly discourse and finds them inadequate, emphasizing the need to distinguish between a missionary religion and a proselytizing one. A distinction rarely made, it is nevertheless an illuminating and fruitful one that resonates with insights from the comparative study of religion. Ultimately concluding that Hinduism is a missionary religion, but not a proselytizing one, Sharma's work provides us with insight both about Hinduism and about religion in general.

Arvind Sharma is Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. His many books include One Religion Too Many: The Religiously Comparative Reflections of a Comparatively Religious Hindu also published by Dev Publishers & Distributors.

The title of this book provides the reason for writing it. None of the three words in its title-Hinduism, missionary, and religion--are Hindu words, although all three have been invoked in a Hindu context. It is a basic feature of all discourse that a thing must be described in terms other than what it is. The moment an object is described as a table, a cognitive distance has already been established between the word and the object it denotes. This provides a preliminary vision of how large a gap such a cognitive distance might assume if the facts of one religion or culture are presented in terms of another religion or culture.

To describe Hinduism as a missionary religion further length ens the distance between the word and the reality. Three questions seem to be contained in this description: Is Hinduism an ism? Is it a religion? And is it a missionary religion?

This book is concerned with the exploration of the third dimen sion at a substantive level, although the issue has been posed as a nominal one. The question which is addressed is: In what ways and to what extent can Hinduism be described as a missionary religion in terms of available historical evidence?

The first of the three questions or propositions listed above has been under the lens of scholarly' investigation for some time now; so, also the second. The aim of this book is to subject the third issue to scholarly scrutiny in the same spirit.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages