The purpose of the historical quest
The evolution of religious ideas As I return to this theme of svakīyā-parakīyā and the research work I did while doing my doctoral dissertation in connection with the current work on Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha , some thoughts have been coming to me about the general thrust of my own thought about the history of religions and what I see as being the purpose of my own intellectual quest in this regard. Krishna consciousness, like any other thought system, is based in positive principles that are universal and should be exportable to other religions and ideologies. In other words, they are translatable. Now in order to translate religious experience from one linguistic and symbolic conversation, often one that has been going on for thousands of years, first one must discover what that experience is, not just by looking at the entire complex in isolation, but also by looking at the universal experience of humanity. This is the logic behind the study of comparative religion, just as it is wi...