Sire's The Universe Next Door names the category; CCWV.LIFE

In 1976 James W. Sire publishes The Universe Next Door, a catalog of worldviews for Christian readers. Among its basic options stands eastern pantheistic monism, Sire's name for the position he draws from Advaita Vedanta, Zen, and their Western syntheses: one impersonal Reality, beyond distinction, with which the self is finally identical. The label, from this book, is the origin of the category name this dataset carries.

Tagged: Eastern Pantheistic Monism

The Event

Date: 1976 (exact)
Era: The Construction Named and Weighed; Periodization of the construction and its sources
Location: Downers Grove; today Downers Grove, Illinois
Traditions: Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Streams: Eastern Pantheistic Monism
Key figures: James W. Sire
Key texts: The Universe Next Door

How the Tradition Tells It

The category is a Western typological construction, as the worldview page itself states: no tradition calls itself by this name, and the dataset is the history of the construction and its materials, not of a self-identified community.

Connections

Illustration for Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy

History Event Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy 1945 names as one worldview the position the anthology assembled

Primary Sources

Sire, James W. The Universe Next Door. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1976.

Secondary Sources

Clarke, J. J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge, 1997.
Halbfass, Wilhelm. India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and 'the Mystic East'. London: Routledge, 1999.

Provenance: HIST-1383; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.