Renu
Paul
Benaras
Hindu University
Paper
Title: “Towards
a Dharmic Vision for Religion and Ethics.”
Abstract
What is the sacred? What is
the secular? The answer lies in following the footpath of philosophy to two
signposts in the history of the Western intellectual tradition, namely, to the
discipline’s role as an interlocutor in the religious discourse of ancient
Greece where philosophy as sophia took
its birth. The problem of the sacred and the secular posited here is indicative
of the Euthyphro dilemma which demonstrates that ethical norms which govern an
individual and political unit is derived from and are thus distinct from the
independent realm outside the sanctions of sovereign gods who reside in the
divine realm. Another chasm between faith (sacred) and what later became the
engine of rationality in the polis,
liberal secularism (reason), reached its heyday during the Enlightenment when
the birth pangs of the nation-state were to be felt soon thereafter. With this
journey down the memory lanes of Western philosophy, one finds the source of
the present fork in the road dividing the two polities where faith and reason,
the secular and the sacred are seen as bi-polar and mutually exclusive of the other.
The second part of the paper critically analyses the notion of dharma, tying to its philosophic roots
as it is denoted in the Vedic literature and connoted in Tilak’s Gita Rahsya. The purpose of this paper
is therefore to unite the discordant strands of the sacred and the sacred
inherited from the West with the support of the unifying and universal dharmic
vision of the Indian seers.
Born in South India, raised and
reared in the United States, and presently a research scholar in the Department
of Religion and Philosophy at Banaras Hindu University, Renu majored in Psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania (Bachelor of Arts) and received her training in Philosophy
(Western) at the Michigan State University (Master of Arts). She subsequently matriculated
to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to expand her repertoire in Area Studies
with regards to South Asian languages, history, and cultures where she was
initiated into the formal study of Sanskrit and Malayalam. Renu later spent time
in Kerala learning the Indo-Semitic heritage of the ancient St. Thomas
Christians and their ritual language, Christian Aramaic (Syriac). Her
interests, among many, lie in the area of comparative and cross-cultural
philosophy, meta-philosophy, metaphysics, Vedic-Indian thought, and Syriac
Christianity. She worked at Alma College (Michigan, USA) for close to a decade as
the personal secretary to the late Dr. Thomas Mar Makarios, (the founding Metropolitan
of the North American Diocese of the Indian [Malankara] Syrian Orthodox Church)
who was a professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies.