Raymon Panikkar by GERARD HALL

Australian Association for the Study of Religions

Annual Conference 4th - 6th July 2003

Multi-Faith Centre, Griffith University

Multi-Faith Dialogue in Conversation with Raimon Panikkar



GERARD HALL sm


Abstract

Raimon Panikkar (1918- ) has deliberated on principles and practices of multi-faith dialogue for over half a century. The presentation will focus on Panikkar’s experience of Christian-Hindu, Christian-Buddhist and Christian-Secularist dialogue. It will outline his “rules of the game” for interreligious dialogue and intercultural encounter. Attention will be drawn to his distinct levels of religious discourse identified as mythos, logos and symbol. Panikkar’s more adventurous proposal for the meeting of the world’s religious and cultural traditions will be introduced through elucidation of his “cosmotheandric vision” of reality—what he now calls “the radical trinity” of cosmic matter, human consciousness and divine freedom. The conversation will conclude with an overall assessment of Panikkar’s contribution to contemporary thinking on multi-faith dialogue and religious pluralism.


The Primacy of Experience: Introducing Panikkar

Born in Barcelona (1918) to a Catalan Catholic mother and an Indian Hindu father, Raimon Panikkar has dedicated his life to interfaith and intercultural dialogue. His approach is also interdisciplinary attested to by his three doctorates in philosophy, science (Madrid University) and theology (Lateran University). In the late forties, Panikkar was ordained a Catholic priest and in the early fifties first left for India where he undertook studies in Indian philosophy and religion (University of Mysore and Varanasi). For the next fifty years Panikkar's academic posts oscillated between professorships in European, Indian and North American universities. Panikkar is currently Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but lives in Tavertet, outside Barcelona, where he continues to study, pray and write. He has also married (at seventy), continues to minister as a Catholic priest, but conceives of himself as a monk.

Panikkar has published some forty books and four hundred academic articles in a variety of fields and languages. Among these, his works on The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, The Trinity and Religious Experience, Worship and Secular Man, The Vedic Experience, Myth Faith and Hermeneutics, The Intra-religious Dialogue and The Cosmotheandric Experience mark him out as a significant religious scholar. Anthologies of important essays include The Invisible Harmony and A Dwelling Place for Wisdom. What he calls his final word, The Rhythm of Being, based on his 1989 Gifford Lectures, is still in process. ......> More