"Truth Is One"

Hinduism thrives, and begins to absorb Christianity, in SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers (see Religious Diversity II) and should also find fertile ground among the many planetary polytheisms and alternative monotheisms of Poul Anderson's Terran Empire. The Hindu approach, as in ancient India, would be to incorporate all local cults, however diverse or apparently contradictory, as aspects of a single infinite truth. After all, we can walk on water, the source of life, when it is solid, consume it and immerse ourselves in it when it is liquid and see it above us in the sky when it is gaseous and formless. Fr Axor's quest for evidence of the Universal Incarnation resembles Hindu recognition of many avatars while his acceptance that the Foredwellers might have gone beyond sounds Buddhist.

There was recent combox discussion of Hinduism which I now cannot find. The point was made that modern Hinduism is very different from the earliest Vedic religion. Similarly, modern Judaism and Christianity are very different from the epic sources of the Pentateuch. (Apparently, one such source celebrated the Davidic monarchy as the fulfillment of God's activity on Earth.) However, the aphorism:

"Truth is one; sages call it by various names,"

- is definitely quoted from the Rig Veda. See here.

"To what is one, sages give many a title: they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan."
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (Eds.), A Source Book In Indian Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey, 1973), CHAPTER I, THE VEDAS, p. 21.
(The Rig Vedic reference given for this verse is I. 164. 46)

The insight that a single reality has many aspects and appears in many forms is not limited to Hinduism and resonates in the Terran Empire. See "The Divine Is With Us."