Raimon Panikkar was born on 2 November 1918 in Barcelona. A Catholic priest and theologian, he promoted interfaith dialogue and specialised in comparative religion. In 1946, he was ordained and became Professor of Philosophy at Complutense University of Madrid. After travelling to India to study philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, he became Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School in 1966. Appointed Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 1972, he moved to Catalonia in 1987 and founded the Raimon Panikkar Vivarium Foundation.
In 2005, he created Arbor for the relief of poverty in thousands of villages across India. Writing of his experiences, he shares, ‘I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian’. Notable works include The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (1973), Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha (1989), The Cosmotheandric Experience: Emerging Religious Consciousness (1993), Intrareligious Dialogue (1999), and The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery (2006).
