ABSTRACT
The often quoted autobiographical comment by Raimundo Panikkar according to which he ieft’ Europe as a Christian, ‘found’ himself as a Hindu and ‘returned’ as a Buddhist, without ever having ceased to be a Christian (1978, p. 2), is a striking illustration of the unique pilgrimage of this Catholic thinker who was born in Spain to a Spanish Roman Catholic mother and a Hindu father. Panikkar believes himself to have been placed at the confluence of the four rivers: Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and secular (1964, p. 30). After living in Europe and Asia – and having completed three doctorates and acquired a mastery of a number of languages – he did his major life work in California, regularly commuting between continents. One of the most creative intercultural and interreligious theologians of our time, Panikkar does not lend himself to easy exposition, let alone interpretation. 1 Again, I take the liberty of being very selective and focused regarding themes taken up for scrutiny in this most prolific writer’s corpus; only that which highlights and contributes to the role of the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to other religions is of interest here. In Panikkar’s case we are fortunate in having a theologian to whom Trinity serves as an interpretative key to reality and religions. He is the ‘exception that proves the rule, a pluralist who does invoke the Trinity and who believes it to be at the heart of all human religions’ (Vanhoozer, 1997, p. 58, italics in the original).
