religious revolution now 197facts of our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. Th e weight of
such a commitment is only increased by the insuffi ciency of the grounds
that we can ever hope to have for making it.
Th e concerns that lead us to take such a stand are lasting, and even
irresistible. Th ey form part of our circumstance. However, no way of
expressing this impulse can claim to be defi nitive. Our most compre-
hensive answers to existence remain perpetually open to contest and
revolution.
Th e contest and revolution have to do in the fi rst instance with the
content of the religion. Sooner or later, however, they also touch its
form: the character of the practices as well as of the beliefs that supply a
religion with its distinctive identity, the methods of innovation, evolu-
tion, and revolution in spiritual life, and the relation of religion to other
domains of experience.
Th e defi nition of religion early in the argument of this book did not
take as its premise the idea that there is a permanent part of our human
experience, with a stable essence, that we can label religion and sepa-
rate in certain ways from other aspects of existence. Instead, it recog-
nized the changing character, scope, and basis of religion. Th e point
was to conceive religion in a way that is inclusive enough to accommo-
date forms of belief and practice, like Buddhism and Confucianism,
that emerged in the long period from the rise of prophetic Judaism to
the foundation of Islam, but that are distant, in form as well as in sub-
stance, from the Semitic mono the isms.
In this way, we resist the temptation to reduce religion to the model
most familiar to contemporary Westerners while continuing to under-
stand it in ways that distinguish it from philosophy, science, art, and prac-
tical morality. Yet even this ample view of religion is in the end shaped by
a historical reference: the major spiritual orientations that resulted over
the last twenty- fi ve hundred years from past religious revolution.
Despite the im mense diff erences between them, the three orienta-
tions to existence that have been the subject of my argument represent
a moment in the spiritual history of humanity. Th ey emerged under
similar provocations. Th ey have remained enduring infl uences on the
societies and cultures that received them. Th ey share elements of a
common vision and program. Th e depth of the diff erences among them
only increases the signifi cance of what they share.