The Hidden Saviour Deep Within You

By Joaquim Huang

Can anyone make a truly valid claim that his religion offers the only way to salvation? Are the teachings of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, and Confucianism incompatible with one another? This book presents formidable evidence from the scriptures that all religions display a fundamental unity at their core.

Joaquim Huang argues convincingly for a paradigm shift in religious thinking to overcome the confrontational attitudes that divide humanity into competitive faiths. His book notes that without interfaith understanding, discord has flared into violence in many parts of the world. Pointing out that scriptures speak of a family affinity amongst all founders of religion, the author matches sacred verses drawn from six religions to demonstrate that the spiritual luminaries share one identity beyond their separate personalities. This unique identity is unveiled as the Hidden Saviour Deep Within You, and the hidden saviour is every person’s means of grace.

Refreshing in his use of practical analogies from contemporary settings, Joaquim Huang lays out steps that you can follow to develop an inclusivist mode of thinking based on observable universal axioms. Inclusivist thinking, he writes, is the cement for building relationships at all levels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joaquim Huang
• Release date: Nov 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311514776

Joaquim Huang

Joaquim Huang has acquired more than 45 years of research knowledge and experience in studying the world’s scriptures. With a heartfelt conviction that these scriptures are a limitless treasure-house for all humanity, he has ventured beyond the confines of any single religion to accept truth in a broadly inclusivist manner.His exploration of the world’s scriptures began in the 1960s as a teenager, and he soon discussed with conservative religious teachers the discovery that all religions teach an identical fundamental truth. As his insights and heartfelt convictions deepened, he penned a Sunday newspaper interfaith column in the 1980s that won him a Promotion of Unity award.Joaquim Huang has also delivered papers at international religious conferences held in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Assisi near Rome. A Master’s degree holder from the University of Hull, UK, he is also the recipient of an Ambassador For Peace award conferred by the Universal Peace Federation.

Book preview

The Hidden Saviour Deep Within You

Discover Life’s Greatest Truth Revealed in All Scriptures

By Joaquim Huang

Copyright 2013 Joaquim Huang

ISBN: 9781311514776

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: The Power in Us to Make or Break Lives

Chapter 2: Human Diversity as a Source of Enrichment

Chapter 3: A Vision of the Global Family of Religions

Chapter 4: Secret Ingredient in the Dragon Scroll

Chapter 5: Science and Scripture for New Grasp of Truth

Chapter 6: Family Affinity Amongst Founders of Religion

Afterword

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgements

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Preface

ONE silent night, I had gone to bed at my usual time. Then suddenly I awoke at dawn, with a string of words running through my mind. Vivid and inspirational, the words came like a revelation from my subconscious. Quickly I got up, took a pen and jotted down the sentence in a scrapbook before they disappeared from memory. For, inspiration that comes from the depths when you are on the verge of rising may stay just seconds in your consciousness before vanishing.

Here are those impactful words that flashed across my mind that dawn on 3 November 2009:

The means of grace are available everywhere and accessible to all.

Grace, in religious terms, is understood to mean a state of reconciliation with God or the Source of all life. Probably the most common thinking amongst religious adherents is that their particular religion possesses the means of grace exclusively. No other religion has it, or has it fully. In the face of such belief, you may feel awkward if friends who adhere to a different religion are equally convinced that their chosen faith is the one best way for all.

In this book, I have built up a case for subscribing to an alternative paradigm or conceptual framework to view the relationship between various religions. The fundamental message of this book is that there is a Hidden Saviour Deep Within You and the hidden saviour is every person’s means of grace.

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Chapter 1

THE POWER IN US TO MAKE OR BREAK LIVES

There is a universal identity that binds us all to one another, beyond our separate tribal identities based on ethnicity, religiosity or nationality.

WALK ALONG a busy downtown street and conduct a straw poll by asking a hundred persons to choose one of two options: whether they prefer to live safely or to live dangerously. The chances are 99 out of 100 will choose to live safely. As for the odd one out, he is probably someone who makes a living from crime and disorder.

Yet though it is almost everybody’s aspiration to live safely, we find to our consternation that danger seems to creep up on us – sometimes inflicted by people that we would ordinarily regard as normal law-abiding citizens. With the entire world crisscrossed by overlaying networks of frail personal, religious or ethnic relationships, the ground beneath us may suddenly give way – if we happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Even as a tourist, you may be impacted by localized communal tensions that unexpectedly explode into violence.

Do we ourselves fall sway to populist negative reactions? Some years ago in a fast-food outlet, a cook and a customer got into a heated argument over the abnormally slow service that day. The cook, who felt blamed, then punched the customer. The incident was captured on handphone camera and went viral over the Internet. Hundreds of web surfers who saw the video interpreted the fight as a racial incident because the cook was of one race and the customer another race. Commentators worked themselves into a rage and posted racist comments, insulting one another as if they were somehow personally involved.

Constantly we let our minds get embroiled in poisonous emotional flows: on one hand, we may feel victimized on racial or religious grounds and we nurse that aggrieved feeling for a never-ending time; on the other hand, we may greedily seize an opportunity to exploit a racial or religious situation to our unfair advantage. We take a strike and we strike back: we are both victim and victimiser.

Yet these pains, these hostilities, these suspicions are not even necessary in our lives. They have the potential to trap us in dungeons of fear, to spoil our relationships with others of different ethnicities or faiths, to cripple our own growth, and limit society’s forward movement. Take that big step towards releasing the pain in you. Feel a sense of peace as if a whirling mass of nicotine dust has left your body and mind.

Just as a large Banyan tree can trace its origin to a tiny seed, so can we trace the enmity between communities or between individuals to a state of mind. That is the utter simplicity of it: because it starts within each of us, we hold the power in ourselves to make or break communities and our own lives along with it.

What is this power within ourselves that can transform our lives and make or break communities? An easy way to relate to this inner power is to compare yourself to a motorcar: just as a car moves according to the direction set by the driver, so do our actions depend on our mind-state. To drive expertly, you need to develop a broad field of vision that sees far and wide. To live expertly, you need to develop a mental field of vision that also sees far and wide.

Why does a mother need to hold her child’s hand when crossing the road? It’s because the child has a narrow
vision. The child sees only the toy display
in a shop window across the road. However, the mother, with her wider vision, can see an approaching car and restrains her child from walking into danger. This easy example illustrates two diametrically contrasting mind-states: exclusivist thinking versus inclusivist thinking. Although these terms (exclusivist and inclusivist) may not have made an entry into the dictionary yet, they have become popular coinage in pluralist societies struggling to manage communal tensions.

The complete circle depicts inclusivist thinking. The triangle, with its

smaller area, depicts exclusivist thinking.

Exclusivist thinking sticks to a narrow field of vision: this is what we know and so we cling to it without exploring the unknown. Then we start attaching emotive labels — the known is safe, certain, assured; the unknown is dangerous and laden with falsehoods.

Once these emotive labels get stuck in our brains we will for the rest of our lives avoid the unknown. Clinging to the known makes you feel safe and certain but it cripples your mental outreach to a world infinitely bigger than our limited vision. In its close-mindedness, the exclusivist vision shuts out alternative viewpoints