This paper formalizes religious epistemology through the mathematics of Variational Autoencoders. We model religious traditions as distinct generative mappings from a shared, low-dimensional latent space to the high-dimensional space of observable cultural forms, and define three competing generative configurations corresponding to exclusivism, universalism, and perennialism, alongside syncretism as direct mixing in observable space. Through abductive comparison, we argue that exclusivism cannot parsimoniously account for cross-traditional contemplative convergence, that syncretism fails because combining the outputs of distinct generative processes produces incoherent artifacts, and that universalism suffers from posterior collapse: stripping traditions to a common core discards the structural information necessary for inference. The perennialist configuration provides the best explanatory fit. Within this framework, strict orthodoxy emerges not as a cultural constraint but as a structural necessity: the contemplative practices that recover the latent source must be matched to the specific tradition whose forms they take as input. The unity of religions, if it exists, is real but inaccessible by shortcut: one must go deep rather than wide.

翻译：本文通过变分自编码器的数学框架形式化宗教认识论。我们将宗教传统建模为从共享的低维潜在空间到可观察文化形式的高维空间的不同生成映射，并定义了对应于排他主义、普遍主义与永恒主义的三种竞争性生成构型，同时将融合主义视为可观察空间中的直接混合。通过溯因比较，我们论证排他主义无法简约解释跨传统冥契实践的趋同现象，融合主义因混合不同生成过程的输出而产生不连贯产物而失效，普遍主义则遭受后验坍缩之困：将传统剥离至共同核心会丢失推理所需的结构信息。永恒主义构型提供了最佳解释契合度。在此框架内，严格正统性并非文化约束而是结构必然性：恢复潜在源头的冥契实践必须与其所输入形式对应的特定传统相匹配。宗教的统一性若存在，是真实却无法通过捷径触及的：必须深入而非泛求。