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With these concerns in mind, I offer four areas of difference between Dharmic and Judeo-Christian traditions:
1. Embodied Knowing versus History-centrism
2. Integral Unity versus Synthetic Unity
3. Anxiety over Chaos versus Comfort with Complexity and Ambiguity
4. Cultural Digestion versus Sanskrit Non-Translatable
These areas of contrast are summarized below and discussed at length in the subsequent chapters.
Embodied Knowing versus History-centrism
Dharma and Judeo-Christian traditions differ fundamentally in their approaches to knowing the divine. The dharma family (including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism) has developed an extensive range of inner sciences and experiential technologies called "adhyatmavidya" to access divinity and higher states of consciousness. Adhyatmavidya is a body of wisdom and techniques culled from centuries of first-person empirical inquiry into the nature of consciousness and undertaken by advanced practitioners. These accounts and the individuals who have embarked on these quests are highly regarded, but they are not reified into canons, messiahs, or absolute statements of an exclusive nature. They are neither a code of laws nor a history of past revelations but guides for replicating and retransmitting the experience and its transformational powers. Their truth must be rediscovered and directly experienced by each person. I have coined the term "embodied knowing" to refer to inner sciences and adhyatmavidya.
The Judeo-Christian traditions, in contrast, depend on the historical revelations of prophets who speak of the collective destiny of whole peoples and of humankind. The human condition stems from an act of disobedience or "sin", beginning with the "original sin" of Adam and Eve, the forbears of all humanity. Every individual is born a sinner. For this reason, humans are unable to achieve union with the divine (at least not in the dharmic sense); the spiritual goal instead is salvation that can be achieved only through obedience to God's will as understood through a particular set of prophets and historical events. Hence the historical record of that intervention must be carefully maintained, and its truth must be taken forward and aggressively asserted. The goal of this record is to bring humans collectively to obey a specific "law". This history must be considered universal, however particular and fallible its agents (both individual and collective) may be. Humanity's collective destiny will be determined and judged at the End of Time.
Such an absolute status of history weakens the authority of individual spiritual explorations (hence, mystics have been regarded with suspicion in these traditions) and becomes the basis for competing claims to truth that cannot be reconciled. Furthermore, those without access to these historical revelations must remain, by definition, in the dark, lacking the most elementary means to make contact with God. I have coined the term "history-centrism" to refer to this fixation on specific and often incompatible claims to divine truth revealed in the course of history. I regard this historical fixation as the major difference between dharmic and Judeo-Christian paths and as a problem which can breed untold psychological, religious and social conflict.
(Rajiv Malhotra, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, pp. 11-12, HarperCollins India)