12.5 — The Sikh, Jain, Parsi and Bahá'í Traditions

Four traditions, none large, and each of them solved a problem the large ones did not.

Sikhism

Covered in 9.11 and worth restating here for what it does institutionally.

Around 26 million people, concentrated in Punjab and in a large global diaspora.

And the three things worth having.

No renunciation. There is no monastic option. The instruction is honest work, remembrance and sharing — and closing the escape route to withdrawal is a deliberate and unusual decision. Every other tradition in this volume has a renunciate path; this one refused to build one.

The scripture is the Guru. The line of human teachers was ended deliberately in 1708, and authority was transferred to a text that contains verses by Hindu and Muslim poets from outside the tradition, including several from the lowest castes.

And the langar. A free kitchen at every gurdwara, open to anybody, where everybody sits on the floor in rows and eats the same food.

It was designed in the sixteenth century to break the caste rules about who may eat with whom, and it has run continuously since, and the one at Amritsar serves tens of thousands of meals a day.

As a piece of applied ethics it is the most successful thing in this volume, and the reason is that it is a physical arrangement rather than a principle. You cannot hold the principle and fail to do it; the doing is the whole of it.

And a note on visibility. The Khalsa's outward markers — uncut hair, the turban, the steel bracelet, the small sword — were adopted partly so that a Sikh could not hide. In a period of persecution, a deliberately unconcealable identity is a strong commitment and it has costs that continue: Sikhs are regularly the targets of violence intended for others, because the turban is misread.

Jainism

Covered in 9.11. Around 4 to 5 million people, mostly in India.

What it contributes that nothing else does.

Non-harm taken all the way. Every tradition teaches it and this one did not stop — the diet, the swept path, the filtered water, the prohibited occupations. Whether you find it admirable or excessive, it is the only tradition that followed the principle to its conclusion and accepted the cost.

And anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness (9.11). Every statement captures one aspect of a complex reality, and the error is mistaking the aspect for the whole. The blind men and the elephant is a Jain teaching story.

Which produces the best intellectual posture in this volume, and it can be adopted independently of everything else Jainism holds: you do not say the other view is wrong; you say it has captured something and mistaken it for everything.

And the community's economic history is a case study in what a rule does over centuries. Occupations involving harm were prohibited, so Jains concentrated in trade, finance and later the professions, and became disproportionately prosperous and disproportionately literate — an entire community's shape determined by an ethical constraint.

The Parsis

Zoroastrians in India, and one of the smallest religious communities in the world — well under 200,000 globally, and declining.

And it is the oldest of the three great monotheistic-adjacent traditions, and it very probably influenced all of them.

Zoroaster

A prophet in the Iranian world, dated anywhere from 1500 to 600 BCE.

And his teaching is a sharp break from the polytheism around it.

One supreme God, Ahura Mazda — "wise lord" — the creator, wholly good.

And an opposing principle, Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit.

The universe is a battleground between them, and every human being is a participant. You choose, in each act, which side you are supporting.

**The formula: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Three items, and that is the ethical core.

And a final judgement, a resurrection, and the eventual complete defeat of evil and renovation of the world.

The influence

And this is why the tradition matters far beyond its size.

A cosmic struggle between good and evil. A final judgement of individuals. Resurrection. A future saviour figure. Angels and demons as an organised category. And an end of the world in which good wins definitively.

All of these appear in Jewish thought after the period of Persian rule, and from there in Christianity and Islam.

The scholarly position is that direct influence is probable and the details are debated, and this book will state it that way. What is not in doubt is that a very small tradition supplied a great deal of the furniture of the three largest ones.

The fire temples, incidentally, are frequently misunderstood: fire is a symbol of purity and of the divine presence and is not itself worshipped.

The Indian community

Zoroastrians fled Persia after the Islamic conquest and were received in Gujarat, and the founding story is worth having.

The local ruler sent a vessel of milk filled to the brim, meaning: my land is full.

The Zoroastrian priest added sugar to it and sent it back, meaning: we will dissolve into it and sweeten it without taking any space.

And the community's history in India is a remarkable one — small, prosperous, deeply integrated, and disproportionately significant in Indian industry, philanthropy and public life (Volume VIII).

And it is shrinking, because the community traditionally does not accept converts and because of intermarriage rules, which is a genuine and much-debated problem within it.

The Bahá'í Faith

The youngest world religion — founded in nineteenth-century Persia — with around 5 to 8 million adherents.

Its founder, Bahá'u'lláh, taught that all the major religions are successive revelations from the same source, appropriate to their time and place, and that the differences between them are matters of social teaching rather than of fundamental truth.

Which is an ambitious position and it has an obvious problem, and this book will state it.

The claim that all traditions are saying the same thing is itself a religious claim that most of those traditions reject. 11.12 and 12.4 established that they differ on creation, on the nature of God, on what happens after death and on how it ends. A framework that dissolves those differences by declaring them contingent is not neutral between the traditions; it is a further tradition making a claim about them.

And its social teaching is distinctive and was radical for its time and place: the equality of men and women stated explicitly, universal education, the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty, the independent investigation of truth rather than inherited belief, and the abolition of clergy.

Bahá'ís have been persecuted severely in Iran, including executions and systematic exclusion from education and employment, and this continues.

What these four have in common

And it is worth naming.

Each is small, each has been persecuted, and each contributed something out of proportion to its size.

The langar, which is the best working piece of applied ethics here.

Anekantavada, which is the best intellectual posture.

The Zoroastrian cosmology, which furnished three world religions.

And an explicit statement of the equality of men and women in nineteenth-century Persia.

Small traditions are frequently where the sharpest ideas are, because they have to be clear about what they are for in a way that a large tradition carrying everybody does not.

What to carry from this page

A physical arrangement beats a principle. The langar works because sitting on the floor and eating the same food cannot be held as an opinion.

Do not say the other view is wrong; say it has captured an aspect and mistaken it for the whole.

Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Three items, and it is the whole of one of the oldest ethical systems in existence.

And a claim that all religions say the same thing is itself a religious claim that most of them reject. 12.9 says what the actual overlap is.

Next: 12.6 — East Asia, where the question of what to do about the gods was largely set aside in favour of the question of how to behave.