IB World Religions 1.1.6. the Three Fundamental Questions and the World Map of Religions Notes

1.1.6. The Three Fundamental Questions and the World Map of Religions

The three fundamental questions

1. This course studies nine religions by asking each of them the same three questions. They are: what is the human condition, where are we going, and how do we get there?
2. The first asks what is wrong, or simply what is true, about human life as it stands. Answers range from separation from God through original sin, to entrapment in samsara, to a departure from the natural way of things.
3. The second asks about destination. It gathers what a tradition teaches about death, judgement, rebirth, liberation, paradise, or a world remade.
4. The third asks about method. It gathers belief, ritual, ethics and community together, because traditions answer it with things to do as well as things to hold.
5. The three lock together, which is why they are asked in this order. What a tradition says is wrong decides what would count as putting it right, and that decides in turn what the path has to contain.
6. The questions are a comparative tool rather than a claim about religion. They let a student set Jainism beside Christianity without assuming in advance that the two are answering the same thing in different words.

Families of answer

1. The nine fall into loose groups according to how they answer, and the groups cut across geography. Recognising them speeds comparison up without hiding the differences inside each group.
2. One family answers in terms of release from a cycle. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs describe beings held in samsara by karma, and name the goal as moksha, nibbana or union with God.
3. A second family answers in terms of one God who creates and judges. Jews, Christians, Muslims and Bahá'ís describe a humanity accountable to that God, with a destiny that turns on how this life is lived.
4. A third answer treats the problem as imbalance rather than sin or bondage. Taoists hold that nothing is evil, that humans departed from the Tao, and that the destination is a return already available.
5. The families overlap, and their members disagree internally. Sikhs speak of rebirth and of a personal God together, and Christians differ among themselves over purgatory, hell and who is finally saved.
6. The course therefore asks for at least two interpretations from different denominations or schools wherever they apply. One answer per religion would misdescribe all nine.
7. A further contrast cuts across all three families. Some traditions describe liberation as given, as in Christian grace or the Sikh nadar, and others describe it as achieved by effort, as in Jain asceticism, while most hold some of each.

The nine religions grouped

1. The syllabus arranges the nine in three columns, and a student studies at least one religion from each. Column A is Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism, column B is Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and column C is Taoism, Jainism and the Bahá'í Faith.
2. The columns roughly track origins. Column A began in South Asia, column B in West Asia, and column C combines a Chinese tradition with one Indian and one Persian in origin.
3. Scholars usually call column B the Abrahamic religions. Jews, Christians and Muslims trace their line to Abraham, share figures and narratives, and describe one God who creates, reveals and judges.
4. Column A shares a different vocabulary. Karma, samsara, dharma and liberation recur across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, though each tradition defines them in its own way.
5. Founders are not evenly distributed. Hindus recognise no single founder, while Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims and Bahá'ís each look back to a named figure whose life the tradition treats as decisive.
6. Column C is a grouping for study rather than a family. Taoism, Jainism and the Bahá'í Faith are not kin to one another, and none of the three is ever taken as an in-depth study.

Timelines and origins

1. The nine did not arrive together, and a rough chronology helps a student place them. Hinduism has the longest continuous history of the nine, and the Bahá'í Faith is the youngest.
2. Hindus trace practice to the Vedas, composed from roughly 1500 BCE, with earlier roots in Indus Valley and Dravidian traditions. There is no founding moment available to date.
3. Jewish tradition looks back to Abraham and to the Exodus, with the Torah taking written shape across a long stretch of the first millennium BCE.
4. The middle of that millennium produced three more. Mahavira for Jains and Siddhartha Gautama for Buddhists both taught in northern India, and Taoists traditionally date Laozi to the same period.
5. The remaining three are later and better dated. Christianity began with Jesus in first century Palestine, Islam with revelations given to the Prophet Muhammad from 610 CE, Sikhism with Guru Nanak, born in 1469, and the Bahá'í Faith with Bahá'u'lláh in nineteenth century Persia.
6. Dates need handling with care. Founding dates are debated, oral practice usually runs long before any written record, and no tradition treats its own age as evidence of its truth.

Adherents and distribution

1. Two religions hold most of the world's adherents. Christians number roughly 2.4 billion and Muslims roughly 1.9 billion, a little over half the world's population between them.
2. Hinduism and Buddhism follow at different scales. Hindus number around 1.2 billion, the great majority in India and Nepal, while Buddhists number several hundred million across South, Southeast and East Asia.
3. The remaining five are much smaller and no less studied. Sikhs number around 25 million, Jews around 15 million, Bahá'ís several million and Jains around 5 million, while Taoist practice resists counting altogether.
4. Migration has redrawn the map. Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish communities are long established across Europe, North America, East Africa and Australasia, and diaspora communities often practise differently from those in the country of origin.
5. Counting is not straightforward. Census categories, self-identification and actual practice diverge, Chinese traditions blend so that one person may draw on several at once, and some states do not ask the question.
6. The patterns keep moving. Conversion, birth rates, migration and the growth of people reporting no religion all shift the figures, so any percentage is a snapshot rather than a fact about a tradition.
7. Size does not track significance. Judaism and Jainism are small in number and central to this course, because the questions being asked are about teaching and practice rather than about scale.