But moving on to comparative religion, I found that no faith was incomparably unique. In fact, our differences would disappear if we approached the world religions from the viewpoint of comparative religion.Therefore, when I addressed the Parliament of Religions at Calcutta in 1993, I urged that a central institute of comparative religion be set up in Delhi. This parliament was in session for three days to commemorate Swami Vivekananda's participation in the historic Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893. I chose to speak on comparative religion because I considered Vivekanandato be its first eloquent exponent, as a tool for the promotion of religious unity throughout the world.

Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819-1899), who succeeded H. H. Wilson as Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1860, says in his Religious Life and Thought in India (1883) that `Rammohun was the first earnest-minded investigator of the science of comparative religion that the world has produced.' Obviously, he said this in appreciation of Rammohun's liberal faith. But Rammohun did not urge a comparative study of religions. It was Vivekananda who first made a strong plea for it in his addresses.

In his lecture `Soul, God and Religion', Vivekananda says, `By the study of different religions we find that in essence they are one.' In a letter to Alasinga dated January 12, 1895, he speaks of his idea of a `college in Madras to teach comparative religion.' Vivekananda valued comparative religion as a firm step in the direction of his ideal of a Universal Religion.

Not being a theologian, I cannot suggest asyllabus for the institute I proposed five years ago. At the same time, I am more and more convinced of the necessity of comparative religion as the foundation of religious unity.R. C. Zeehner, who succeeded Radhakrishnan in the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford in 1953, once told me that there could never be an understanding between Vedanta and Christianity because Shankara's Advaita was a negation of religion in its denial of a relationship between God and man. Even as an idol-worshipping Hindu of Lower Bengal, I know that Advaita was not really a negation. It was the highest peak of spiritual experience.

In a song Ramprasad says, `it is not good to be sugar because I wish to relish sugar.' The 18th century Shakta poet's words are quoted in Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (1944) as an expression of the Hindu mind's reluctance to lose its identity in God. But the value of advaita remains.

I had my first lesson in comparative religion from Rudolf Otto, who discovered an affinitybetween the German mystic Meister Eckhart (1225-1327) and Shankaracharya (780-812). In his Mysticism East and West (1962) he says: `In Eckhart and Sankara we see clearly how types and combinations of spiritual mysticism, identical or very similar, have sprung to life in the Orient and the Occident. They reveal a spiritual kinship of the human soul which transcends race and climate and environment.'

Zeehner has shown a similar affinity in his Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (1962). And we must now worry about the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism: in an addresses at Chicago, he held that Buddhism was the fulfilment of Hinduism. It is affinities such as these which will finally hold us together, and hence the need for comparative religion, a discipline that specialises in robbing divisive forces of all credibility.