Comparing Religions

I have always resented being brought up a Christian. Even without being a catholic, the whole heaven and hell things is indelibly imprinted on your psyche whether you wanted it or not.

Even before the "Nottingham epiphany", I had started to look at alternative religions to see if there was something that actually matched my evolving view on "everything". I seem to remember having a book on comparative religion and working my way through the thumbnail outlines, generally dismissing them one-by-one.

The ones that came closest to my early viewpoint were Buddhism and Tao-ism. Buddhism for the peaceful "do no harm" nature of the belief and Taoism as a philosophy (rather than a religious belief). Light and dark, good and evil, Yin and Yang fitted into my personal view. There is a religious "string" to it, but basically it is all about Lao-tzu and The Way. The book most closely associated with him is the Tao-te Ching. A book that has been translated into English many times, but the classical reference work is the Richard Wilhelm version. This in turn leads to the I Ching - the book of pictograms that are used for divination in conjunction with casting of coins. (Quite an interesting exercise with some amazingly accurate predictions when we applied it).

Anyway, suffice it to say that using Buddhism and Taoism as an introduction to eastern philosophy was probably the best starting point and one which led me into a vast range of esoteric literature - usually published and purchased in Singapore then smuggled back into Brunei (and with a large collection of boarding-pass bookmarks - I´d forgotten how often I travelled that route).

... and just as Jesus was a Jew, then Buddha was a Hindu - so the web of interest started to incorporate Hinduism as well - with India as the starting point for Buddhism and Hinduism and China for Taoism (but with Tibet a key religious centre and lying in between them).