ABSTRACT
For Raimon Panikkar, one of the most prolific and controversial religious thinkers of our age, it is through the paradoxical embrace and acceptance of difference that one learns how to find the elusive One in the Many. To explore something of his unique experience of dual religious belonging, this chapter concentrates on two contrasting texts, the allusive The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man, which provides the kernel of Panikkar’s deeply Christian intuition about the relationship of religions and spirituality, and his monumental commentary on early Brahmanical Hinduism, The Vedic Experience, with its evocative subtitle Mantramañjari – a garland of verses. Summarising Panikkar is always a risky endeavour, but if there is one idea that holds together the “cosmotheandric mystery” sketched in the first little book and the “Vedic epiphany” that occupies him in the second, it is his delight in the sheer diversity of human, and inter-human experience, that underpins all manner of pluralism.
