Traversing the Heart
Studies in Religion and the Arts Editorial Board
James Najarian Boston College
Eric Ziolkowski Lafayette College
VOLUME 2
Traversing the Heart Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination
Edited by
Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010
Cover Photograph: Vishvakarma (Cave 10, in terior), c. 700 CE. Ex cavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Ander son. Āis book is published before as the journal 2008
Religion and the Arts Volume 12 (1–3)
Āis b ook is p rinted on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Traversing the heart : journeys of the inter-religious imagination / edited by Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron. p. cm. — (Studies in religion and the arts ; v. 2) Chiefly proceedings of a conference held in June 2007 in Bangalore, India. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18380-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religions—Relations—Congresses. I. Kearney, Richard. II. Rizo-Patron, Eileen. III. Title. IV. Series. BL410.T74 2010 201’ .5—dc22
2010006586
ISSN 1877-3192 ISBN 978 90 04 18380 3 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Āe N etherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to Āe C opyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix List of Color Plates ............................................................................. xi List of Black/White Illustrations ...................................................... xiii Introduction: A Pilgrimage to the Heart Richard Kearney .............................................................................. 1 TRAVERSALS (I): HINDU-CHRISTIAN 1. Āe Bangalore Conference Open-Source Hinduism ..................................................................... Siddhartha Yoga and the Wounded Heart ......................................................... Jyoti Sahi On Spirituality and Organized Religion: Conversations With .... Raghu Ananthanarayanan Empathy and Inter-Religious Imagination ..................................... Catherine Cornille Inclusive Imagination: A Comment on Religion and Culture in India ............................................................................................. Chandan Gowda My Adventure with Inter-Religious Dialogue ............................... Joseph A. Samarakone , O.M.I. A Monk’s Journey in Search of God ............................................... Simon Sleeman, O.S.B. Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty ............................................. James Morley Confessions of a Hindu-Catholic Artist ......................................... Caroline Mackenzie
35 43 81 107 123 127 141 147 167
vi contents 2. In the Wake of Bangalore Āe Heart Beyond Hearts .................................................................. Swami Tyagananda Childhood, Intuition, Vocation: Remembering Sara Grant ........ Fanny Howe Arunachala ........................................................................................... Shirley du Boulay Āe Lord of the Heart: Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics and Kashmir Śaivism ............................................................................. Bettina Bäumer Encountering the Divine Mother in Hindu and Christian Hymns .............................................................................................. Francis X. Clooney , S.J. Narratives of a Dialogue Pilgrim ..................................................... Albert Nambiaparambil, C.M.I. Pranayama: Breathing from the Heart ............................................ Richard Kearney Spiritual Improvisations: Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and the Freedom of Tradition .................................................................... Martin Cohen
193 197 203 219 235 249 273 283
COLOR PLATES TRAVERSALS (II): CHRISTIAN, ISLAMIC, BUDDHIST, JEWISH 1. Islamic Legacies Imaging Islam: Intellect and Imagination in Islamic Philosophy, Poetry, and Painting ................................................ 303 James W. Morris India: A Laboratory of Inter-Religious Experiment ..................... 329 Maqbool Ahmed Siraj The Paradox of Proximity to the Infinite: An Exploration of Sidrat Al-Muntaha, “Āe Lote Tree Beyond which None May Pass” ........................................................................................ 339 Hannah Bigelow Merriman
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Following .............................................................................................. 353 Steffen A. J. Stelzer 2. Buddhist Offerings Knowing Āe Heart Sūtra by Heart ................................................ 367 Joseph S. O’Leary Pure Perception and Equanimity of Heart .................................... 381 John Makransky On Seeing the Birth of the Heart ..................................................... 395 Mary M. Anderson 3. Jewish and Christian Transformations Healing Wounds: Reflections on Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interfaith Partnership in Poland .......................................... 425 Edward K. Kaplan Desire and the Desirable: Nicholas De Cusa’s Interfaith Imagination ..................................................................................... 433 Fred Dallmayr Promises of Advent: North and South ........................................... 447 Eileen Rizo-Patron Notes on Contributors ........................................................................ 471 Index of Terms/Topics ...................................................................... 481 Index of Names/Titles ........................................................................ 498
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to express our sincere thanks to James Najarian and Eric Ziolkowksi, founding editors of the new Brill Book Series on Studies in Religion and the Arts, for inviting us to publish one of its first volumes. Heartfelt gratitude goes as well to Dennis Taylor, emeritus editor of the Boston College journal Religion and the Arts , and to the Jesuit Institute of Boston College, for sponsoring the special issue (12.1–3: 2008) of which this book is an expanded and edited revision. Our project was made possible, in the first place, by the gracious hospitality of Siddhartha and the Fireflies Community in Bangalore, India, who hosted the conference that launched these conversations and inspired the subsequent journeys of the inter-religious imagination featured in this volume. Several friends and colleagues offered generous help at different stages of the process. We owe special thanks to Chad Stutz, managing editor of Religion and the Arts in 2007–2008, for his help in formatting the initial manuscript; to Jeffery Howe for his professional expertise as Art Editor of the journal; and to a talented team from Boston College—Kascha Semonovitch, Alex Yiannopoulos, Jessica Locke, Simone Kearney, Adam Fitzgerald, Sarah Kearney, and Sarit Larry—for their artistic, editorial, and logistical assistance along the way. We are also indebted to Joshua Oliver-Mason for solving some of the technical conundrums in the transition from journal to book editing. For his expert advice on the uses of Sanskrit and Mid-Eastern terms in English, we are grateful to Joseph O’Leary who drew our attention to the importance of allowing a plurality of terminological styles to reflect the diversity of approaches (methodological, philosophical, cultural, geo-historical) adopted by the contributors to this exploratory work. Finally, for the professional miracle of bringing this book to dock in timely fashion, our deep appreciation goes to the editorial staff at Brill Publishers—Maarten Frieswijk, Marjon Jekel, and most especially Wendy Shamier and Wilma de Weert. We dedicate this volume to the memory of Professor Richard Antoun, a kind and beloved colleague from Binghamton University, New York, whose scholarly interests focused on comparative religion, Islamic law, and ethics. Prof. Antoun’s lifetime dedication to
x acknowledgments sowing the seeds of inter-religious understanding in the heart of his local community, and abroad, now stands as a bright example to us all. Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron Co-editors
LIST OF COLOR PLATES Color Plate 1. Jyoti Sahi. Pentecost Harvest Dance, 2007. Oil on canvas. Bangalore, India. Private Collection. Photograph: Sarah Kearney. Color Plate 2. Jyoti Sahi. Season Wound, 2007. Oil on canvas, 24”× 30”. Collection of the artist. Color Plate 3. Jyoti Sahi. Cosmic Drum, 2000. Oil on canvas, 36” × 36”. Collection of the artist. Color Plate 4. Jyoti Sahi. Healing the Wounded Penitent , 2006. Oil on canvas, 48” × 60”. Collection of the artist. Color Plate 5. Jyoti Sahi. Fire Seed/Wound, 2002. Water color and collage, 15” × 21”. Collection of the artist. Color Plate 6. Jyoti Sahi. Traversing the Heart , 2007. Oil on canvas, 42” × 64”. Collection of Missio in Aachen, 2007. Color Plate 7. Trifold deity at Ellora (Cave 29), c. 700 CE. Stone carving. Photograph: James Morley, 2007. Color Plate 8. Tantric Buddhist Temple painting. Sangacholing Gompa, above the village of Pelling, West Sikkim. Photograph: James Morley, 1996. Color Plate 9. Caroline Mackenzie. Nailing down Redness , in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie. Color Plate 10. Caroline Mackenzie. Āe Healing , in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie. Color Plate 11. Caroline Mackenzie. Mysterium Coniunctionis , in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie. Color Plate 12. Caroline Mackenzie. Banquet Hall—Song of Songs 2:4 (“He has taken me into his banquet hall and the banner over my head is love”), in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie. Color Plates 13–16. “Ritual Masks” series, made and performed by Caroline Mackenzie, 2006. Clockwise from upper left: Earth Mask, Air Mask, Water Mask, Fire Mask. Photographs: C. Mackenzie. Color Plate 17. “Sultan Muhammad”, “Heavenly and Earthly Drunkenness” (painting, recto), folio from a Divan of Hafiz, c. 1526–1527. Harvard Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Cary Welch, Jr. Partially owned by the Metropolitan
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Museum of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, 1988 (1988.460.3). Photo: Allan Macintyre. © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Color Plate 18. “Abul Fazl ibn Mubarak presenting the Akbarnama to the Grand Magul Akbar. Mughal miniature.” Color Plate 19. “Muhammad près du Sidrat al-Muntaha,” from Le livre
de l’ascension du Prophète , c. 1436. Heart, Afghanistan. Manuscrits Orientaux Supplément Turc 190, folio 34. Reprinted with permission from Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Color Plate 20. “Muhammad se prosternant,” from Le livre de l’ascension du Prophète, c. 1436. Heart, Afghanistan. Manuscrits Orientaux Supplèment Turc 190, folio 36v. Reprinted with permission from Bibliothèque National de France.
Color Plate 21. Angelos of Crete. Āe Virgin Glykophilousa (“Āe Kardiotissa” ), icon on wooden panel, second half of the fifteenth century. Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens (T1582). Photograph: Y. Yiannelos, courtesy of Chrysanthe Baltoyianni’s Icons: Mother of God. Color Plate 22. Nicario Jiménez Quispe. “Divina Pastora” (Spinning Cosmic Yarn). Portable altarpiece. Painted wood and clay. Fig. 5 in Popular Art and Social Change in the Retablos of Nicario Jiménez Quispe, ed. Carol Damian and Steve Stein (Lewiston NY: Āe Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). Photograph: Carol Damian. Color Plate 23. Jane Rizo-Patrón. “Zumbayllu” (Embryo of the Sun), 1979. Spinning sculpture based on the Inkarrí myth. Made in Orcopampa, Perú. Photograph: Luz Osgood, 2005.
LIST OF BLACK/WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS Cover Photograph: Vishvakarma (Cave 10, interior), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson. Introduction (Richard Kearney) Figure 1. Re-Awakening. Batik design by Jyoti Sahi (one of a series of works on the Jaina monk image), c. 1972. Given to Fr. Francis Acharya, Kurisumala Ashram, India. Photo: Sarah Kearney, 2007. Figures 2–3. Shiva’s Birthplace . Guha cave, Gokorna, India. Photos: James Morley, 2007. Yoga and the Wounded Heart (Jyoti Sahi) Figure 1. Seeking Forgiveness from the Suffering Tree (from the tribal myth called the Karam Kahani in Chotanagpur), 1998. Oil on canvas, 35” × 71”. Author’s collection. Figure 2. Surya Namashkar , 1994. Linocut design representing the different gestures of the “Salutations to the Sun” in the form of a mandala. 17” × 20”. Author’s collection. Figure 3. Halasana or “Jesus Nailed to the Cross” (from the Sanskrit Hal = plough). Charcoal drawing. 10.5” x 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 4. Bhujanga asana or “Rising Serpent”, Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 5. Vriksha asana (the tree posture), or “Self-Offering,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 6. Vira-asana or “Jesus Falls” (Sanskrit Vira = “hero who offers himself ”), 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 7. Nidrasana or “Āe Seed Dies,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 8. Āe Sun of Justice at the Āreshold of Night and Day , 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 9. Samadhi or “Risen Lord,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection. Figure 10. Birth in the Cave, 2007. Acrylic on handmade paper, 18” × 26”. Author’s collection.
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Figure 11. Dalit Madonna, 1978. Black ink drawing, 6” × 8”. Author’s collection. Figure 12. Sorrowful Mary (meditating on the sign of Jonah, with the whale in her womb), 1987. Sketch for a picture in the series on the Song of Songs. Chinese ink on paper, 7” × 9.5”. My Adventure with Inter-Religious Dialogue (Joseph A. Samarakone, O.M.I.) Figure 1. Interfaith symbols. Pen and ink drawings by SimoneKearney, 2007. Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau Ponty (James Morley) Figure 1. Shiva Lakulisha Figure (Cave 29), c. 700 CE. Stone carving, Ellora, India. Photograph: James Morley. Figure 2. Gokorna Naga Devi, c. 1990–2007. Oil painting. Small Sea Temple, Gokorna, Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley. Figure 3. Cave Temple (interior altar). Gokorna, Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley. Figure 4. Yakshi Siddhayika, Jain Mother Goddess (Jain Cave 32), c. 1000–1300 C.E. Stone carving. Ellora, India. Photograph: James Morley. Confessions of a Hindu-Catholic Artist (Caroline Mackenzie) Figure 1. Caroline Mackenzie (design) and Judith Perry (production). Āe Five Elements . Altar Frontal at St. Helen’s, Caerphilly, Wales, UK. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Figure 2. Caroline Mackenzie (design) and Dawson Stone (production). Tabernacle at St. Helen’s Church, Forest of Dean Sandstone, 9’ tall. Caerphilly, Wales, UK. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Figure 3. Caroline Mackenzie (design) and Mr. Vasudevan (production). From Darkness into Light (tabernacle door with risen Lord in a blaze of light). Detail of the Tabernacle, brass repoussée. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Figure 4. Caroline Mackenzie. Yoga Narasimba (Āe Man-Lion Incarnation of Vishnu), 2007. Watercolor inspired by brass repoussée image in hill temple at Melkote. Photograph: Antony Sleeman, O.S.B., Ireland.
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Figure 5. Caroline Mackenzie (design), carved in collaboration with T. N. Muniyandi, E. P. Mohan, and Elumalai. Lion Lady , 2004– 2005. Granite sculpture, 3’6” × 3’ × 3”. Fireflies Intercultural Centre, Bangalore, India. Photograph: Anugraha John. Figure 6. Caroline Mackenzie. Āe Good Samaritan . Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Figure 7. Caroline Mackenzie. Āe Grievers . Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Figure 8. Caroline Mackenzie. Āree Women and an Angel inside the Empty Tomb. Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie. Narratives of a Dialogue Pilgrim (Albert Nambiaparambil, C.M.I.) Figure 1. Inter-religious meditation mat. Jesuit Ashram, Kalady, Kerala, India. Photograph: Simone Kearney. The Paradox of Proximity to the Infinite (Hannah B. Merriman) Figure 1. “Divine Emanation and Return from Primordial Unity.” Reprinted with permission from Laleh Bakhtiar. Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (London: Āames and Hudson, 1987), 6. Pure Perception and Equanimity of Heart (John Makransky) Figure 1. Douglas Goodman, “Circle of Communion,” 2007. Illustration created for John Makransky’s book, Awakening through Love (Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2007). Collection of the Dzogchen Center, Cambridge MA. On Seeing the Birth of the Heart (Mary M. Anderson) Figure1. Angelos of Crete. Āe Virgin Glykophilousa (“ Āe Kardiotissa”) second half of the fifteenth century. Detail, icon on wood panel. Byzantine Museum, Athens. Photograph: Y. Yiannelos. Figure 2. Vishvakarma (Cave 10, interior with triforium), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson. Figure 3. Vishvakarma (stone rafter ceiling), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson. Figure 4. Vishvakarma (view of composite stupa), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson.
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Figure 5. Vishvakarma (detail of the stupa, anda, and harmika), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson. Promises of Advent: North and South (Eileen Rizo-Patron) Figure 1. Gerard David. Āe Angel of the Annunciation , 1506. Panel of a polyptych. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950). Image © Āe Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 2. Gerard David. Āe Annunciation , 1506. Panel of a polyptych. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950). Image © Āe Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 3. Robert Campin, Annunciation, c. 1425. Central panel of the Mérode Altarpiece . Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters. Image © Āe Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 4. Ana Zegarra (Peruvian artist). Anunciación, 1985. Oil on canvas, 62” × 50”. Private collection, Lima, Peru. Photograph: Melissa Cárdenas, 2007. Figure 5. Nicario Jiménez Quispe (Ayacucho, Peru). Entre las calandrias, wall altarpiece (retablo de pared). Created for the book cover of Entre las calandrias (1990) by Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. Photograph: Enrique Moncloa.
INTRODUCTION: A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HEART Richard Kearney Boston College Āis volume on the inter-religious imagination represents the interactive work of a number of scholars over several years—an exploratory effort which crystallized in a conversation between Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims in Bangalore in June of 2007. Most of the proceedings of that gathering are published here, along with contributions by other scholars who, for one reason or another, could not make the journey to Bangalore but were there in mind and spirit. All share a determination to chart new spaces where a genuine “traversing of hearts” may occur across religious divides—divides which have all too often been the occasion of violent conflict, misunderstanding, and war. If religions have been at the cause of so much hostility in human history, they can also be a source of hospitality and healing. Āe most effective remedy to perverted spirit is often found at the root of the poison, the hair of the dog that bit you. Āe spirit answers death with life, or it is not genuinely spirit. Several of those present at the Bangalore conference participated in a journey afterwards. This took the form of a pilgrimage from the holy town of Kalady (birth place of the Hindu sage, Sankara) in southern Kerala up to the caves of Ajanta and Ellora northeast of Mumbai. Āe final destination was significant insofar as these ancient caves—some two thousand years old—mark a site of inter-religious sharing between Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. One image in particular struck us as we entered Cave 29 of Ellora: a tri-partite figure of Shiva, the Hindu God, sculpted into the rock face with Jain earrings and a Buddhist hand salute (see Morley fig. 1). It was the last day of our travels and this icon of cross-religious hospitality seemed to epitomize for us, weary pilgrims, a fitting culmination of our odyssey into the “cave of the heart” (guha). Another cave which provoked a keen response from one of our group, Mary Anderson, was the Vishvakarma Buddha-shrine at near-by Ajanta, which she writes about and illustrates below (Anderson figs. 3–7). The theme of descending into underground caverns in
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order to encounter the sacred is, as we shall see, a recurring motif in the writings and testimonies featured throughout this volume. Guha is a Sanskrit term referring to a hidden space—in both earth and heart—where the human and divine host each other as “guests.” The figures painted and sculpted in the subterranean passages of Ajanta and Ellora gave a new and vital resonance to the images of the sacred heart of Christ and the immaculate heart of Mary, which several Christians in our group were familiar with since childhood. Crossing these thresholds back and forth, in space and time, embodied a mutual traversal of wisdom traditions. While a number of contributors to this volume come to the interreligious dialogue from a Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim background, most participants at the Bangalore meeting (co-sponsored by the Jesuit Institute of Boston College and Fireflies Intercultural Ashram) speak from a Christian perspective. It is also important to acknowledge at the outset that most of the essays featured in this volume respond to the specifically Indian-Asian context in which our Bangalore conversations took place. Āe idea of the Indian subcontinent as a laboratory of spiritual experimentation and accommodation is a leitmotif of this issue. We signal this right off by way of identifying the hermeneutic “situatedness” of our discourse, thereby admitting its limits and parameters. Our discussion makes no claim to global coverage. In what follows I attempt to record some pivotal figures, images, and events encountered during our Bangalore meeting and subsequent pilgrimage. Āey serve as vignettes rather than arguments, soundings rather than statements, musings rather than manifestos. Āey trace a path of diverse orientations, detours and traversals which, however various, share at least one common goal: inter-confessional hospitality. I I begin with Swami Joseph Samarakone. A Shaivite Catholic and Acharya of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, he ambled into the ashram hall, his hoary-headed, big-boned figure looming larger than life as he prepared to speak. He prefaced and ended his Bangalore address with a sacred chant in Tamil, one of the oldest languages in the world, sung in a cavernous bass voice. It was the same chant to the Sacred
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Mother which his own guru—the Benedictine monk, Bede Griffiths— had him recite each time he visited the Christian-Hindu ashram at Shantivanam in Tamil Nadu in the Seventies. Swami Sam, as he is known, began by challenging the old doctrine that “outside the Church there is no salvation.” On the contrary, he insisted, Christ is an “inter-religious person par excellence.” Āe key point I recall from his talk, reproduced below, was that when Christ asks us not to worship with ostentatious rituals and offerings but to “go into one’s inner room” (Matt. 6:5–12), he is not referring to some spare chamber in a spacious house—Palestinians did not have extra rooms!—but to the inner “cave of the heart”: the guha which Eastern wisdom traditions have recognized for millennia as the special meeting place with the divine. Swami Samarakone linked this, in turn, to his belief that when Jesus invokes “Abba,” he is invoking the “Father of all religions,” not just the Father of Abrahamic revelation. And when he announces to the Samaritan woman at the well that a time will come when we will worship the Lord not in temples or on mountains but “in spirit and truth,” Jesus was, once again, proclaiming the freedom to go beyond exclusivist or partisan denominations to a spirituality that includes everyone, even “the least of these.” Salvation is assured to every genuine seeker. Āese “inter-religious” teachings of Jesus become more pronounced after his experience in the desert when he renounces the great demonic temptations to become an object of proprietal worship and power. In his descent into the cave of the heart—in the desert and again in the empty tomb—Jesus signals a “way” which is open to many ways. And this, according to Samarakone, implies for us today the need to renounce the temptation of a “Theology of Fulfillment” which, while recognizing a portion of truth in all religions, still clings to the supersessionist claim that they all converge on Christ. In other words, if we are to engage in genuine inter-religious dialogue we must overcome the tendency to claim Jesus (against his own teachings) as Last Word or Total Solution. We find here, Samarakone gently confesses, one of the greatest dangers for Christians, namely, to think that one’s own religion is, at the end of the day, the only really true one . Resisting such a temptation does not mean embracing the relativist doctrine that all religions are the same. (Each religion retains its own unique set of faith claims.) It simply means attending to Jesus’ clear message that he was the Way not the End—“I must go so that the Paraclete can come” (John 16:7).
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I personally will never forget Swami Sam’s deep, booming voice as he concluded his talk with the ancient Tamil hymn to the divine Mother who cares for everyone, or the time afterwards when, sharing a meal with the other participants, he scooped little mounds of dhal and rice with his enormous fingers and swallowed them one after another, all the while regaling us with mischievous stories about his past life as seeker, priest, and teacher. One could not but be moved by the sheer humanity and humor of this Tamil pilgrim. If Christ is man fully alive, then this inter-religious traveler was a real Christian—or as he himself would say, a Hindu-Christian. Other Hindu-Christians at the conference were the artists Jyoti Sahi and Caroline Mackenzie. While Jyoti was born of both Christian and Hindu parents, and spent many years in Bede Griffiths’ Ashram at Shantivanam, Caroline had made her way from Catholicism to Hinduism and back, finally espousing a hybrid form of Hindu-Catholicism, combining what she saw as the best aspects of both traditions. Each artist speaks of this rich form of “double belonging,” which prompts me to signal here one or two salient motifs relevant to our issue. Especially suggestive, I find, are Jyoti’s startling analogies between Jesus and integral yoga (Jyoti figs. 3–9); between the Christian Trinity and the three-faced Hindu trimurti (Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva; Morley color plate 7); between the sun salutation (the Surya Namashkar of the yoga sutras) and the Canticle to the Sun of St. Francis; between the Hindu Sun goddess, Savitri, and the bride of the Song of Songs; between the Lord who “stands at the door knocking” (Rev. 3:20) and the divine “guest” celebrated by the Hindu-Muslim poet, Kabir. “Āere is one thing in the world that satisfies,” says Kabir, “and that is meeting with the Guest.” Jyoti’s portrait of the Madonna cradling the mystical swan (hamsa) in her womb, surrounded by a Pentecostal dance of Dalit harvesters (color plate 1), as well as his Fire Seed painting (color plate 5), are additional reminders that images of living flame are central to both the Vedic and Biblical imaginations. Also of note here are Mackenzie’s innovative images of double belonging to the compassionate heart of Jesus and the healing Man-Lion, Narasimha. Both images manifest the creative power of the sacred healing-wound. Combining Vedantic imagery with Catholic iconography, Mackenzie displays an innovative audacity to crisscross religious boundaries in an affirmative way (Mackenzie figs. 1–8, color plates 9–16). Other testaments to the art of multiple religious belonging were delivered by Siddartha—our host at Fireflies Ashram—Simon Sleeman,
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and Mary Anderson, yet another scholar-artist at our meeting. Here we find symbols of the poet Kabir consorting with narratives by the French novelist, Michel Tournier; Greek Orthodox icons (the Kardiotissa Mother and Child) juxtaposed with images of the Vishvakarma Buddha-cave. And once again we are reminded of how dramatically the mystical imagination, evinced by these figures, can provide us with a language and liturgy which translates across confessional divides—a point also powerfully illustrated by James Morley and Raghu in their reflections on the inter-religious import of the Yoga sutras and by Catherine Cornille in her exploration of interfaith empathy. As Cornille puts it: “Whereas the religious imagination is usually shaped by a particular religious tradition, encounter with other religions may allow the imagination to stretch beyond its established religious boundaries and to conceive of symbolic universes hitherto unimagined.” To which she adds this crucial note on the importance of our exposure to the other: “It is through the imaginary insights and experiences of other religious traditions that one may come to a new awareness of distinct aspects of one’s own religious tradition. Āe very ‘exotopy’[Bakhtin] or alterity of the perspective of the other thus constitutes an important factor in the process of self-understanding and growth.” In other words, just as a Buddhist reading of Christian texts may shed fresh light on them, so too a Christian reading of Buddhist texts may in turn reveal unsuspected dimensions of that tradition. It is in focusing on the “experience of the other that one’s own religious imagination may be expanded and deepened, and put to the service of genuine dialogue between religions.” II To illustrate the power of such trans-religious imagination consider some of the breakthrough events of the great wisdom narratives: Kabir welcoming the “uninvited guest”; Abraham and Sarah receiving the three strangers under the mamre tree; Moses taking an African spouse; Solomon embracing the Shulammite woman (in fact, three of the earliest books of the Hebrew bible are about strangers—Job, Ruth, and the Song of Songs!); Jesus greeting the Samaritan woman at the well and knocking like a stranger at the door of our hearts (Rev. 3:20); Buddha welcoming all outcasts and aliens from the caste elites; or in the Greek tradition, the famous instance of Baucis and Philomen receiving Zeus and Hermes as disguised “strangers.”
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In our more modern history, we witness the momentous impact of inter-religious exchanges such as the Assisi gathering of all the wisdom traditions in 1986; the pilgrimages of Pope John Paul II to India and to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in the 1990s; the visit of Bartholomew, Patriarch of Constantinople, to the Mufti of Sarajevo in the midst of the Bosnian war; the revolutionary addresses by Eastern spiritual leaders like Vivekananda, Āich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama to western religious gatherings such as the World Parliament of Religions or the World Council of Churches; not to mention the ordinary healing encounters across sectarian divides witnessed in recent decades in places like Northern Ireland, the Balkans, or Warsaw (see Edward Kaplan’s essay in this volume). 1 One of the main lessons learnt at Bangalore was that “cross-reading” is a precious key to an inter-religious hermeneutics of the heart. By cross-reading I mean an endless and reversible process of translation between one religion and the next. I mean a process of mutual disclosure where imagination and spirit go hand in glove. What happens, for instance, when we read the text about Shiva’s pillars of fire alongside Biblical passages on the Burning Bush (Exod. 3:15) or the Christian account of Pentecostal fire? What new sparks of understanding and compassion fly up when we read Hindu texts on the guha alongside the Buddhist invocation of the “void” (in the Heart Sutra) or Biblical references to Elijah in his cave, Joseph in the well, Jonah in the whale, Jesus in the tomb? What novel possibilities of semantic and symbolic resonance are generated by juxtaposing Sanskrit invocations of the sacred bird ( hamsa) alongside the dove of Noah’s ark or of the Pentecost? Not to mention the ways in which the Islamic invocation of the Lote Tree (in Mohammed’s mi’raj of nocturnal ascent through the seven heavens) inter-animates with the tree of paradise, the thorn bush of Exodus 3:15, Jesus’ crown of thorns, or the famous axis mundi tree of Vedantin cosmogonies and Buddhist mandalas. In the case of 1 Other examples of symbolic gestures, words, or acts taking on a spiritual importance whose fallout extended way beyond the initial event include the famous handshake between John Hume and Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland, Carol Woytila seeking pardon of Jews in Jerusalem, Willy Brandt asking forgiveness of the victims of Nazi Germany in Poland, and Vaclav Havel reconciling with Sudetan Germans, not to mention the historic meetings between sworn adversaries like Mandela and de Klerk, Begin and Sadat, Paisley and McGuinness. Āese were historical moments when the “impossible became possible”—spiritual breakthroughs translating into political miracles and confirming the maxim that “thoughts which come on doves’ wings guide the world.”
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our own pilgrim experience, it was remarkable how sculpted images of the Hindu trimurti keenly reinvigorated our understanding of Abraham’s three strangers or the three persons of the Christian Trinity. It was as if Andrei Rublev of Zagorsk was consorting with the sculptors of Ellora! Several of these traversal points are evoked in the essays below (Jyoti, Anderson, Merriman, Rizo-Patron, Samarakone). An initial hypothesis arising from such symbolic crossovers is that semantic inter-animation is at the heart of religious dialogue. Something new arises from bilateral translations between the ancient imaginaries of the great wisdom traditions. Out of the silent dark of the heart-cave— from which many religions originate—emerges a chorus of sounds, images, symbols, and gestures inviting endless translation into different religious liturgies. Āis very “translatability” fosters the transversality of religions. It makes inter-spiritual conversation into a fertile crossroads where diverse paths converge, traverse, and intersect—a nexus of inter-confessional hospitality, in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase. Such conversing does not lead to some spiritual Super Highway which bypasses the multiple roads. On the contrary, the traversals proliferate in the very semantic diversity engendered by the confluence (without conflation) of multiple sources. Just as fish flourish where sea-tides meet with fresh water streams, so too a hermeneutics of the heart finds its best hatching grounds in the living cross-currents between different spiritual rivers. The wager of this volume is that it is precisely at the level of imagination—prior to and after theory, doctrine, ideology, or dogma—that the aboriginal signs of the heart-cave are first sounded and received. This space is called darshan in Sanskrit, meaning sacred manifestation, the becoming visible and audible of the divine in image, sound, or liturgy. It invites us to attend to the primal scenes and stages of embodying the ultimate, so finely celebrated by Mahayana Buddhism, Hindu puja, or the great religious imaginings of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic art. In other words, we are wagering here on the possibility of a spiritual acoustics capable of re-interpreting the oldest cries of the religious heart. III Some who could not make it to Bangalore agreed to meet us on our journey afterwards from Kerala to Ellora. The first of these scholars was Albert Nambiaparambil. He traveled ninety miles to speak with
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us at the inter-religious ashram of Kalady run by the Jesuits under the directorship of Fr. Painadath. Nambiaparambil arrived in a motorbike rickshaw just as the first monsoons were breaking. He brimmed with energy and wore an irrepressible smile. We met in a small meditation hall on the banks of the Poorna river just yards from where the famous Hindu sage, Sri Sankara, was born in the eighth century. Āis location had a special resonance for several of us already familiar with Francis Clooney’s “comparative” account of Sankara’s mystical hymn to the Goddess Devi (included in this volume). Āe rain bucketed down as Albert peppered his talk with spiritual chants and poems—including several of his own—and rehearsed some of the key breakthroughs of inter-faith exchanges in India in recent decades. He mentioned five main “meeting points” where different religions can converge without collapsing into each other. Āese points chart a middle way between the claims that religion unites while religions divide. Āey include the use of common images, the creation of a shared liturgy, appreciation of “unknowable” mystery, accommodation of multiple belonging, and the priority of orthopraxis (acts of love, justice, compassion) over orthodoxy (theological dogma and doctrine). Here are some citations illustrating these points: 1. On inter-religious imagery: “As I got more involved with people of other faiths . . . I picked up an atomic or star-like picture, with a light placed at the center. Āis picture brought home to me the experience of us all being equal, as fellow pilgrims. My Hindu friends often draw pictures of different paths leading to the same mountain top, of different rivers flowing and merging in the same ocean, of the same moon seen as many moons in the same pond, with the waves reflecting the One . . .” 2. On inter-religious liturgy: “In-depth interfaith confluence may take new expressions. One such expression is that of an interfaith procession with symbols of different religious and spiritual traditions held or raised in different spots, with the prayer said for each tradition by one or other from a different religion, with the Talisman of Gandhi or the Prayer of Assisi as a banner held in front. Converging in a circle, the participants gave expression to their deep experiences in songs, prayers, with lighted candles in their hands.” 3. On the question of a shared awe before the unknowable ( mysterium tremendum et fascinans ), Nambiaparambil described fellow travelers on the interfaith pilgrimage thus: “the partners engaged in new
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forms of communication from which words returned unable to reach the word . . . Āe focus was the mysterium, the unknown, with the pilgrims giving expression in total surrender, sranam gacchami’. It is of note that even for Āomas Aquinas the end of all our intellectual and spiritual questing is to become united with the sacred ‘as with something completely unknown’ ” (qtd. in Grant 59). 4. On the fourth possible meeting-point between religions—that of “dual or multiple belonging”—Nambiaparambil spoke of those who, “while rooted in one particular tradition, can also be experientially inserted in another tradition,” indeed sometimes even in three or more traditions. He cited instances of Buddhist-Baptists and Shaivite-Catholics, of Hindu-Sufis and Jewish-Yogis. And we recalled how Siddhartha, his friend and director of Fireflies Ashram, had changed his name early in his school years so as to declare his belonging to the four main cultures of his native Kerala—Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim! Such a gesture epitomizes the notion of India as a “laboratory of spiritual experiments,” as exemplified in the great religious mixings of wisdom traditions represented by Jains, Sikhs, and later by the spirituality of Ramakrishna and the Vedanta movement. Even Sri Ramana Maharshi—holy sage of modern India—saw it as entirely possible to respect the truth of several religions without compromising any. He taught that “the one point where all religions meet is the realization that God is everything and everything is God.” 2 Āis basic insight corresponds 2 Osborne 104. Āe full citation, as reported by Ramana’s close disciple, F. H. Humphreys, is as follows: “Religion, whether it be Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Āeosophy, or any other kind of ‘ism’ or ‘sophy’ or system, can only take us to the one point where all religions meet and no further . . . the realisation of the fact that God is everything” (qtd. in Osborne 103–104). Once Humphreys himself, already a Catholic, thus recognized the “essential unanimity of all the religions,” he saw “no need to change but returned to England, where he entered a monastery” (qtd. in Osborne 106). Ramana’s profoundly inter-religious vision is borne out by the belief that his preferred path of spiritual wisdom, vichara (self-inquiry), should in no way be confined to Hindus but should be available to those of all faiths. This was born out by the fact that Ramana’s visitors included Parsees, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, as well as Hindus. (Indeed, one of his most devoted disciples was a French woman who worshipped at Le Sacré Coeur and considered Buddha, Shiva, and Ramana as her gurus in addition to Jesus!) Ramana’s biographer, Arthur Osborne, sums up his guru’s inter-religioius attitude thus: “Āe teaching of Sri Bhagavan is the essence of all religions, proclaiming openly that which was hidden. Advaita is the central postulate of Taoism and Buddhism; the doctrine of the Inner Guru is the doctrine of the ‘Christ in you’ restored to the plenitude of its meaning; the vichara penetrates to the ultimate truth of the Islamic creed or shahada, that there is no god but God—that
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very much to what Siddhartha calls below the unique genius of “open-source Hinduism.” Few other traditions, he observes, “have creatively interacted with others, developed new perspectives, and responded to the challenges of the modern era as much as Hinduism” (though he admits that this is still “a minority current” set against the rising tide of Hindutva cultural nationalism). For his own part, Nambiaparambil, one of the most intrepid Christian pioneers of interfaith dialogue of Indian provenance, declares it possible to go deeper into one’s own faith while simultaneously drawing “nearer” to those of other faiths. This curious “affinity” is, he says, a precious “fruit and flowering of interfaith dialogue”—a fruition that has little to do with “relativism” or the claim that all religions are the “same” ( samabhavana). 5. Finally, we learn from Nambiaparambil that interfaith dialogue is in vain if it does not go beyond words to actions—or to use more technical language, beyond ortho-doxy to ortho-praxis. Hence the concluding call of the World Conference of Religions held in Kochi, Kerala in November 1981: “Let our words be matched by deeds.” Āe traversing of faiths across historic religious divides can only there is no self but the Self. Sri Bhagavan was beyond the differences between religions. Hindu books were available to him, so he read them and expounded according to their terms, but he was also prepared to expound in the terms of other religions when asked. Āe sadhana he enjoined was not dependent on any religion. Not only Hindus came to him but Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Parsis, and he never expected any to change his religion. Devotion to the Guru and the flow of his Grace leads to the deeper reality of every religion, and Self-enquiry to the ultimate Truth beyond all religions” (160). Hederman shows how mystical thinkers and artists of the Christian tradition reach a similar conclusion in his book Symbolism. In particular, he cites Van Gogh’s favorite quote that ‘les religions passent mais Dieu demeure’ and notes that ‘When Sunday came, van Gogh would go to church three times, either to the Roman Catholic Church, or to the Protestant or Old Episcopal Church, which was commonly called the Jansenist Church. When once [asked], ‘How is it possible to go to three different churches of such divergent creeds?’ he said: ‘Well, in every church I see God, and it’s all the same to me whether a Protestant pastor or a Roman Catholic priest preaches; it is not really a matter of dogma, but of the spirit of the Gospel, and I find the spirit in all churches’ ” (qtd. in Hederman 83). Here was an inclusive mysticism of everyday epiphany which excluded nothing or no one. Van Gogh’s famous painting of potato eaters is, for Hederman, a mystical eucharist in its own right (86–7). “Vincent’s symbolic art became the expression of the infinite in the mundane and the numinous in day-to-day existence . . . Il s’agit de saisir ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe, he quotes Gavarni. Āis is a theology of . . . panentheism where God is seen in and through nature” (nature being, in this sense, symbolically and sacramentally incarnate). Hederman concludes accordingly that Van Gogh’s “paintings are liturgies” (87). In relation to the spiritual role of images and imagining in the specifically Indian context, see Eck.
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bear visible fruit in common action in everyday life. Āe acid-test lies in the questions: Does it give life? Does it alleviate conflict? Does it reach out to the downtrodden and oppressed? Does it foster care for the environment, for the living elements of our earth? Does it bring peace rather than war? Āis last question is crucial and was returned to again and again throughout the conference. Interfaith dialogue that remains wellwishing talk is specious. Especially in the face of damning historical evidence of religious perversion, bigotry, and violence (rehearsed in the recent spate of anti-religious tracts by thinkers like Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, Michel Onfray, and Christopher Hitchens). In the specifically Indian context we might cite here the rise of religious nationalism witnessed in the destruction of the Babri Mosque and subsequent riots in 1992, the brutally sectarian rhetoric of the BJP elected to power in 1998, or the internecine slaughter between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Āis disturbing alliance between reactionary politics and religion in India cannot be countered by words alone, but only, as Gandhi taught, by a praxis of compassionate, nonviolent constraint ( satyagraha-swaraj).3 When it comes to answering the worst perversions of religious fanaticism, far more effective than high-sounding theories are living testimonies to acts of real compassion shown by those of different faiths on the ground. One thinks of the example of those who worked tirelessly to dig children from the rubble of the Pakistan earthquake or Tsunami wreckage. In such dramatic calls by the “least of these,” confessional certificates pale into insignificance. Abstract rhetorics are undercut by the actual giving of bread and water. New Age spiritualism bows to the reality of suffering, as does the cruelest form of sectarian dogma. Here we see how doctrine untested by action and suffering is both empty and blind. Āe urgency to translate spiritual texts into action—ethical, social, and environmental—is powerfully stressed in several of the contributions to this volume (Makransky, Kaplan, Dallmayr, Raghu, Gowda, and Siddhartha). Āe vita contemplativa, they remind us, always needs to be incarnated in the vita activa . And if it is indeed sadly true that modern (not to mention ancient) history attests to countless instances
3 See Nussbaum. She is especially insightful on the dangers of the rising Hindutva movement.
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of religious violence, it also attests to counter-examples where a conversion of hearts led to a conversion of acts. One thinks of the huge impact on our world of religious visionaries like Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Gustavo Gutiérrez in the West, or like Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama in the East, not to mention more recent instances of inter-spiritual transformation such as Jean Vanier’s L’Arche, Āich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, or Frère Roger’s Taizé. All these began as tiny seeds, but they steadily grew into flowering movements whose circumference is now as global as their original genesis was local and unique. Our group had some sense of witnessing such a potential seed for wide-spread healing in the little meditation chapel at Kalady, a space where persons of different faiths sat around a prayer mat sectioned into the different religious traditions, all converging on a central lamp of fire (Nambiaparambil fig. 1). This simple liturgical image spoke volumes. IV After our exchange with Nambiaparambil at Kalady we traveled north to Kurisumala, a Cistercian Ashram high in the Kerala mountains. Āis special place of pilgrimage was founded by Fr. Francis Acharya and was frequented by both Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths (who stayed for several years) as they prepared to found their own inter-religious ashram, Shantivanam, in the neighboring province of Tamil Nadu. Still riding the monsoon, we arrived at the summit of Kurisumala just after a rain burst as hill tops reared their heads again and mists sank and billowed through the valleys. We were met by Francis Acharya’s successor (Francis died in 2001), Yeshudas Āelliyil, O.C.S.O. He invited us to visit Francis’s study, a small sanctuary brimming with inter-religious symbols and texts. Here Buddhist and Hindu emblems flanked classic Christian and Biblical icons. Particularly striking was the painted Lord rising up from an embryonic seed in the earth surrounded by holy sages and seekers from diverse wisdom paths (fig. 1). There was a deep quietude about this frontier post of the spirit where both prayer and meals are conducted in silence. After meditation and food, we were especially fortunate to share some of the thoughts of Francis Acharya, passed onto us by Yeshudas. Of particular interest to us was what this pioneer of Hindu-Christian conversation had to say about the Book of the Heart . Citing the Sec-
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Figure 1. Jyoti Sahi. Re-Awakening. Batik design (one of a series on the Jaina monk). Kurisumala Ashram, India, c. 1972. Photo: Sarah Kearney.
ond Vatican Council’s “Declaration on the Relationship of the Church with Other Religions” (1965) as a radical opening to the truths of other religions—e.g., Hinduism’s practice of “contemplating the divine mystery,” or Buddhism’s ability to attain “a state of inner freedom” or “supreme enlightenment”—Francis claims that all living faiths of the world bear witness to “the inner world of spiritual realisation” which we have access to through “meditation” (Francis 11). He does not hesitate to compare the primordial Word of John’s Gospel with the Om
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of Vedantin meditation celebrated in the Upanishads. And he goes on to say that it is the same creative Word which resounds through all the great spiritual literatures, sculptures, and liturgies of the world. It is, as he puts it, the same “charism” at work in the different religions, as evidenced in the Āird Book of meditation: the Book of the Heart . The first two are the Book of the Word (Revelation) and the Book of Creation (the natural universe). Āe Book of the Heart reflects the other two books and translates into the diverse wisdom traditions: It is ultimately through the heart that we enter into communion or identify with others, that we become one with God. Āe heart is the seat of all inner activity. It is in the heart that we feel attuned to nature. Āe word of God must be received in the heart and can be understood and made to bear fruit only in the heart. In the Bible the heart rejoices, exults in the Lord. Āe heart is the seat of holy desires and of divine longing. Wisdom, discernment and knowledge are seated in the heart. (Francis 10)
Noting how it is the hearts of the disciples which burn as Jesus reveals himself to them on the way to Emmaus, Francis concludes that this is the most privileged meeting-point for the different religions to converge and converse. “Both traditions, Christian and Hindu,” he writes, see the heart as the innermost spring of the human personality, of the inner self. It is the place of the experience of the self and as such it is directly open to God. God dwells in the heart, his light is seen in the cave-guha of the heart. Āe heart is the place of God, the point of contact with God. His presence in the heart is experienced as if the coming of rain from heaven. To heaven his rain returns, after watering the very earth of our lives, and making it bear fruit, with crops which provide food for all whose hearts hunger and thirst. (Francis 10)
Rehearsing a number of passages from both Hindu and Christian scriptures, Francis concludes that it is from this inner heart-space of spiritual meditation and self-realization that the waters of eternal life well up and nourish the ground of our being, both spiritual and material. For this, he says, is what millions of seekers come to “Āird World countries of Asia” to seek: the reuniĀcation of matter and spirit in a world which suffers terribly from their separation. (The heart is, of course, an equally central symbol for other wisdom traditions as evidenced in the articles on Buddhism and Islam below. It is also, as Kaplan reminds us, central to the Jewish thinker Heschel’s understanding of “depth theology” based on a “pre-conceptual apprehen-
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sion of the divine, preceding formulations of creed and belief ”—an understanding which Heschel himself believes is deeply conducive to religious pluralism.) As director of one of the numerous inter-religious ashrams throughout India which receive pilgrims each year, Francis Acharya spoke from direct experience. Here was someone who recognized that behind the common charge of New Age relativism and spiritual tourism there is often a much deeper instinct at work. Most seekers who come to India are, he recognized, hungering “for a dimension of life of which they find a seed in their hearts (James 14)”; but they do not know how to grow this seed for lack of a favorable environment. It is just such an environment which inter-religious ashrams like Kurisumala, Kalady, and Shantivanam provide. For such places—in this instance incorporating the ancient arts of yoga and pranayama (breathing) with contemplative Christian prayer—acknowledge that “human destiny needs to include not only spiritual perfection but also that of the body and the cosmos.” We must, concludes Francis, reawaken to the ancient wisdom that matter and spirit, prakrti and purusha, flesh and word, are “essentially related to each other,” and that “meditation is the most articulated agent to animate this relationship” (Francis 53). For in meditation we discover that the divine is not just “above” but also “through” all things, transcendent and immanent (Eph. 1:23). Āis discovery is ultimately made in the cave of the heart where the freedom of eternal life rises up, here and now. For it is in the depths of the guha that we discover our “innermost life principle,” a life where fearless and calm meditation leads “to a reconciliation of matter and spirit, closer and closer until they become one.” Āe guha is that sacred existential space where the divine comes to realization in our being. 4 So it is no wonder that Jesus was born in a cave—as were Shiva and Hermes—and that so many saints and prophets had their deepest insights in underground caverns and grottoes—Elijah (Horeb), Mohammed (Hira), Vashista (Rishikesh), Milarepa (Tibet), Jerome (Jerusalem), Benedict (Subacio), Ignatius (Mont Serrat), John the Evangelist (Patmos), John of the Cross (Toledo), Anthony (Egypt), Bernadette (Lourdes), and so on. 4
Francis 54. It is telling that Francis ends his reflections on meditation with the inter-religious observation that when Pope Paul VI (the first Primate to visit India) made his historic trip to Bombay in 1964, he recalled and recommended the ancient Upanishadic prayer, “from the unreal lead me to the unreal” ( Asato ma sat gamaya ).
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Figures 2 and 3 . “Shiva’s Birthplace.” Guha cave, Gokorna, India. Photos: James Morley, 2007.
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Āis image of the guha was to accompany us throughout our Indian journey, from our discussions at Bangalore, Kalady, and Kurisumala to our actual descent into the legendary cave of Shiva’s birthplace at Gokorna (meaning “Cow’s Ear,” the holy Hindu pilgrimage town south of Goa). It was in this cave-womb of Gokorna (figs. 2 and 3) that we witnessed how the combined spirits of Shiva and Shakti— male and female faces of the divine—are generated from the darkest abyss within the earth, life returning again and again from death, as the lingam rises from the yoni, as light reemerges from subterranean night. Indeed, one of the most memorable moments of our pilgrimage was climbing down into this guha and, having traversed several winding thresholds and passageways in pitch dark, arriving at the innermost pit where, seemingly from nowhere, a spear of light traversed the roof of the cave to illuminate a tiny point of ground at the center of the chamber. Sitting there in quiet meditation, we felt as though we were resting at the still point of a moving world. Axis mundi. Lumen Christi. Om namah Shivaya . Āe guha opened its gates to us again, of course, one last marvelous time on our final visit to Ajanta and Ellora: an experience eloquently witnessed to in the essays by Anderson and Morley below. And I should also mention that the guha as privileged space of the “heart of Shiva” is central to Bäumer’s essay on Kashmir Shaivite mystical poetry—though our pilgrim path did not, alas, extend as far north as Kashmir. Nor should we forget that the heart is a privileged Hindu symbol for both Lord Krishna and the monkey-God, Hunaman, who carries the sacred lovers, Rama and Sita, in the sanctuary of his open chest. V As will be already clear to the reader, our journey was not just geographical but spiritual. Āis enabled us to engage with some other significant guides who mapped and signposted our way. I would like to say something about two in particular—Abhishiktananda and Sara Grant—whose spirits were particularly present to us thanks to the testimonies of fellow-travelers, Fanny Howe and Shirley du Boulay (see their essays below). Abhishiktananda was an inter-religious pioneer and contemporary of Francis. A Breton Benedictine by the original name of Henri Le
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Saux, he traveled through the ashrams of India in the late 1950s and 60s on his way to the sanctum of Arunachala. Here, some fifty-five years before our own little pilgrimage, he had discovered the chiasmus of Christ and Shiva. Āis momentous epiphany occurred during his encounter with Ramana Maharshi in the cave of the holy Tamil mountain. In her essay below, Shirley du Boulay recounts how Abhishiktananda first registered the holy presence of Sri Ramana, the “unique Sage of eternal India,” deep in his being. “Unknown harmonics awoke in my heart,” he wrote. “A melody made itself felt and especially an all-embracing bass . . .” Āe meeting of Hindu and Christian, in other words, took place beyond and beneath confessional doctrines, taking the form of a mystical liturgy of music and silence. Some time after his visit, Abhishiktananda returned to the sacred mountain of Arunachala and lived for months in silence in one of its guhas. He dwelt there as a “Hindu-Christian monk,” expressing his double belonging in morning Eucharists on the mountain of Shiva. Āis is how Du Boulay describes his early morning worship: “While it was still dark, he would say Mass in his cave, deep in the heart of the mountain. Āen he would sit in front of what he called his ‘sacred space’ (or sacro speco as St. Benedict’s cave at Subiaco was known), and wait for the sun to rise. As the dawn broke, blazing with the warm redness that gives the mountain its name, he would greet it in the Indian way, hands together about his head, and, making a full prostration, sing the Lumen Christi and the Gloria as they are sung at dawn in the Syrian Church. He sang Lauds, saying the Lord’s Prayer with his arms stretched out facing Tiruvannamalai, the town at the foot of Arunachala.” It was during his time in this holy guha of Shiva’s mountain that Abhishiktananda accepted the Hindu life of renunciation, sannyasa, as an end in itself rather than merely as a means of proclaiming the Christian Gospel (as the conventional Theology of Fulfillment held). But this did not mean that he converted to Hinduism. Abhishiktananda was adamant about retaining his role as a Christian sannyasi , that is, as a Christian-Hindu hermit. Āe hyphen retained the fertile tension between the two religions. It resisted collapsing the difference, or subsuming one into the other in some appropriative, triumphal, or supersessionist gesture. And while he came to agree with Ramana’s insight that the “essence” of Hinduism and Christianity, indeed of all genuine religions, is a common source or well-spring of the Spirit, this was, he believed, only accessible (if at all) in the mystical, ineffable space of the inner heart. It lay beyond words, thoughts, and dogmas. Āe closest
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one could get—apart from silence—was in breathing, music, liturgy, and chant, that is, through the agency of religious imagination. But as soon as one translates the Source—symbolized by the well-spring at the center of the mountain cave—into any specific religious form, one must accept the inevitability of creedal, cultural, and doctrinal differences. Hence the need for the hyphen of double belonging which points to a communion without disowning the necessity of human difference embodied by every historical religion. Āus Abhishiktananda could indeed say of Ramana that “You are ‘I’ ” and realize that when Ramana says “I am this heart” ( hrid-aham), this “I Am” ( Aham) designates a space where both Hindu and Christian are one. He could end his famous poem to Arunachala with the ringing apostrophe to “Jesus Brahman!” He could enter the holy of Hindu holies in the inner sanctum of Arunachala temple (usually confined to Hindus) and contemplate the Shiva-Lingam for hours on end in silence and darkness. But he never renounced his role as a Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order. He remained faithful to this double allegiance until the end. He did, however, renounce his initial task as a missionary sent to bring salvation to the idolatrous “heathens of India,” finally preferring the model of conversation to that of conversion. As he wrote to his sister: “I am just a poor Christian monk in the midst of Hindu monks . . . Āe Indo-Christian monastic way of life is an end in itself not a means [of conversion]” (see Du Boulay). One of the most important lessons that Abhishiktananda learned from his inter-religious immersion in Indian spirituality was, ultimately, that the old dualisms between spirit and flesh, immanence and transcendence, mind and body, which so bedeviled Western Christianity for millennia, could and should be overcome. And he believed that this could happen not by repudiating Christ or replacing him with an alternative Guru or Savior but in becoming more faithful to Christ’s own liberating message of Incarnation: “Āe human is spirit and flesh at the same time . . . incarnate spirit .” Āe famous ascent to the depths of the heart, which Abhishiktananda charted in his account of his stay at Arunachala, led him to an inner space beyond opposites where every aspect of material life became sacred. In other words, to the space of advaita, where all is one without a second. When one enters the cave of the heart, the center in the center where Jesus and Shiva sit side by side, one eventually realizes that this center is “as truly everywhere as it is in ‘myself ’ ” (see Du Boulay). Āe everyday material world is therefore not jettisoned but rather hallowed as a sacrament
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of ordinary things. Āe one who reaches awareness ( satori) does not abandon this universe. On the contrary, he “continues to see grass as green and the sky as blue, to consider rice as something to eat and cloth as something to wear . . . What he is liberated from is the relationship to ‘himself ’ that until then he projected onto these things. Āings are seen in themselves and no longer in dependence on ‘himself.’ Dear ones are no less dear, but there is no longer the least attachment, the least turning back on ‘himself.’ ”5 In far away Hindu India, Abhishiktananda came home to his Christian self. VI A final Hindu-Christian pioneer who inspired and oriented our Indian pilgrimage was Sara Grant. A close associate of Abhishiktananda, this intrepid Sacred Heart Sister spent most of her life practicing inter-faith dialogue in Mumbai and Pune. In this volume, Fanny Howe, a constant presence on our odyssey, writes beautifully of how this Scottish sadhu sought to align certain forgotten spiritual wisdoms of her own Christianity with the teachings and practices of Vedanta and advaita. As our pilgrim troupe passed by Sophia College in Mumbai where Grant first taught on her arrival in India in 1956, her spirit was almost palpable. Several of her bold observations came to mind, sketched out in ground-breaking works such as Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian . For her the most important shared insight of advaita Vedanta and Christian incarnation is the great paradox that divinity is immanent transcendence .
5 See the counsel given by Ramana’s disciple, Harilal, to Abhishiktananda in The Secret of Arunachala : “As soon as advaita is presented as a religion, it ceases to be advaita. Āe Truth has no ‘Church.’ Āe Truth is the Truth, and it cannot be passed on to others by anyone at all. Āe Truth has no need of anyone’s help for its propagation. Āe Truth shines with its own light. He who claims to possess the Truth or else says that he has received it or that he can hand it on, is either stupid or a charlatan . . . Leave off your prayers, your worship, your contemplation of this or that. Realize that you are that—tat tvam asi . . . For anyone who has seen the Real, there is neither Christian, Hindu, Buddhist nor Muslim . . . Stop talking about differences. There are no differences anywhere. There is only the atman. God is the atman, the Self of all that is” (84–5). Or again: “Enter into the guha, the cave of your heart, and there realize that you are! . . . It is you who fill your cave with that peace (shanti) and joy (ananda) which you yourself essentially are, in the cave of your heart . . . You are this bliss (ananda) and this ananda cannot even be called ananda any longer, for it cannot either be seen, or conceived, or named. It simply is” (86–7).
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Sara Grant’s insight is, simply, this: when Christ announced that all things are one he was confirming the Vedantic message that truth is “one without a second.” With this basic conviction—and the theological thesis that the Hindu Sankara and the Christian Aquinas could be intellectually reconciled in their respective views of the cosmos as sacrament—Grant became one of the great pioneers of “inculturation” in India after Vatican II, culminating in her role as director of the inter-religious center at the Christa Prema Seva Ashram in Pune in 1975. Āe aim of this community was to recognize “in daily contact with our brothers and sisters from other religions . . . the striking resonances of the same ineffable Mystery which Jesus Christ revealed to us beyond all adequate expression” (Grant 25). Grant’s first face-to-face meeting with the non-dualist vision of the Upanishads took the form of an encounter with a Ramakrishna monk who stayed for ten days during Easter 1975. Of this deep sharing in silence and prayer she wrote: “ ‘Deep calleth on Deep’ and what becomes of outward differences? They are simply transcended and yet we each remained what we were—Hindu and Christian” (26). For her, this trans-religious epiphany testified to three basic disclosures: (1) the whole of existence is permeated by a fundamental unity; (2) this unity is realized not by eliminating differences but by transcending them (or sinking beneath them); and (3) this oneness is experienced not just intellectually but at the level of what she calls a deeper “gut-level instinct,” and is epitomized both by a sense of desolation at its apparent absence and joy in its presence—a presence in which, she says, “one’s whole being is brought at least temporarily into harmony with all that is or ever can be” (27). Whether one is Christian or Hindu, once one taps the well-spring in the cave of the heart, this hidden Source continues after in the background of one’s being “like the muted roar of some great river in spate” (53). This opening was further confirmed by Grant’s meeting with her fellow-pilgrim of the heart, Abhishiktananda. In the depths of their common immersion in the “boundless ocean of Being”—which Advaita signals beyond all names and forms—each came to recognize that “truth cannot contradict truth” and that accordingly Christian revelation and Advaita are both valid (Grant 30–31). Āis led to the realization of the inadequacy of the traditional presentation of Christ as the only way to salvation, the intolerable view of God the Father in the “satisfaction” theory of redemption (the death of the son as sacrificial expiation), and the almost idolatrous fixation on Christ as
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an end in himself (contrary to Jesus’ noli me tangere and his repeated insistence that he must depart so that the Spirit can come). But it was, interestingly, once again around an event of shared interfaith liturgy that Grant experienced the greatest breakthrough. It was Easter Week 1972 when her community at Pune celebrated the Eucharist in an especially meaningful way. It was significant for Grant that both Abhishiktananda and a Hindu Panditji were present on that occasion. Āis was a vibrant time for liturgical renewal in the Indian Church and Grant’s CPS community had been recognized as a center for “experimentation” in what was then called the inter-religious “universe of discourse.” Indian ways of worship and use of certain non-biblical scriptures were permitted. Āe aim was to seek out some common resonances for “complimentary readings”—texts in the Gospels that might “resonate,” for example, with the Upanishads and vice versa. Āis was not to underplay the way in which key words like “God,” “Creator,” or “heaven” could mean different things for Hindus and Christians, or to ignore the different historical claims made for the Gospels and texts like the Bhagavad-Gita (where Krishna and Arjuna, for example, are not intended as literal persons). Āe main purpose was to see how differing religious texts might inter-signify in liberating ways. 6 6 Grant believed that the Vatican Council document on the Church in the Modern World had opened a door of real promise with its historic admission that “since Christ died for all men, and the vocation of man is in fact one and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit, in ways known only to God, offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery” (No. 22); and she held that this opening was widened further by the subsequent affirmation that the “liturgical celebration is the setting par excellence for reflection on the mystery of Christ in the light of both biblical and non-biblical scripture” (Proceedings of the National Biblical Catechetical and Liturgical Centre, Bangalore, December, 1974, qtd. in Grant 68). Āis kind of inter-religious overture is not, as Dallmayr writes in his essay below on Cusanus (the fifteenth-century ecumenical thinker), an invitation to relativism but to “relationism,” namely, “the conviction that truth or true knowledge cannot be seized or monopolized by a dogmatic authority but is best promoted through the interrelation between distinction perspectives (with each sincerely searching for the truth). Āe upshot of this conviction is an unorthodox and innovative conception of the relation between the ‘one’ and the ‘many,’ where the ‘one’ serves only as a common loadstar but not as the domineering master of the ‘many.’ ” Here, inter-religious relationality is not a finite means towards an end but an infinite good in itself—the gift and kenosis of divinity in and through the flesh of humanity. See also here the dialectic between “faith” as infinite relational openness to others and “religion” as an institutional limit and consolidation in the works of thinkers like Bonhoeffer, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Caputo. See in this respect my book, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (2010), and the proceedings of the three Villanova Conferences on “Religion and Postmodernism”
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But for Grant herself it was in the Easter Saturday Vigil celebrated at their Pune ashram in 1972 that a really new sense of “trans-cultural celebration” was witnessed. In the presence of Jews, Hindus, and Christians of different denominations, the “passover” and Vigil liturgies took on novel and revolutionary meanings. Old inhibitions vanished and the celebrants felt free to introduce readings and chants from Indian sources at the Vigil itself (and not just as a “preparatory para-liturgy”). Āe Risen Lord was now hailed, borrowing a verse from the Hindu Jnaneshwari, as the “elephant in the garden of the dawn of knowledge,” while the celebrants lit the Paschal candle and restored the sacramental presence to the ashram chapel, after which the Regina Coeli was sung in Hindi. Grant describes the sense of embodied liturgical sharing between different faiths in terms of “feeling almost physically bound, and then free.” What especially struck the participants of the Vigil was precisely the bodily aspect of the being and the fact that we experienced it as community . Suddenly we realized that until his death, Jesus was bound by history and its limitations, but through his death and resurrection he had burst the bonds of space and time and could be recognized as not only Lord and Christ, but satpurusha, the archetypal Man of Vedic tradition in whom every member of the human race can recognize the truth of his or her own being. 7
In this way, the reading of the Creation Hymn from the Rig Veda (10.90) alongside Paul’s invocation of the mystical body in the first letter to the Corinthians enabled Christians and Jews to restore a genuinely cosmic sense to the Paschal/Passover Mystery (which Hinduism had never lost); while Hindus were encouraged by the same cross-reading to have a keener historical sense of human liberation (as the diversification of the Purusha into multiple beings is lovingly
(1997, 1999, 2001) edited by John Caputo which include such leading contemporary theorists of the religion-faith debate as Derrida, Millbank, Marion, Vattimo, Keller, Hart and Tracy. 7 Grant 72. Grant continues: “A year or two after this we hit upon the inspiration of prolonging the Vigil by a week of satsangs beginning on the eve of Palm Sunday, several of which are devoted to the themes of the Vigil readings from the old Testament, prayerfully pondered in the light of a parallel reading from Hindu scriptures and our own experience. Āis not only made it possible to go much deeper into the meanings of the Easter mystery, but also enabled us to feel free to introduce Indian readings in the earlier part of the Vigil itself which would help to make it more intelligible to our multi-religious household” (72).
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recovered in a centripetal movement to the source of the True Self or Atman). By juxtaposing texts of the Vedic and biblical traditions in this imaginative manner, members of the different religions were able to learn more about other ways of believing but also more about their own. Āey were invited to empathize with alternative ways of spiritual emancipation. From such liturgical traversals, Grant’s “multi-religious household” at Pune learnt how “cross-fertilization can bring out very vividly truths in both biblical and other texts which may have been dulled by constant repetition or, perhaps, may never have been perceived at all” (Grant 73). Grant did not hesitate to call the implications of such sharing “epoch-making.” VII While written from a largely Christian perspective, the pioneering breakthroughs of people like Grant, Abhishiktananda, and Francis Acharya were readily accommodated, and in some instances anticipated, by their Hindu interlocutors in the Indian subcontinent. Foremost amongst these were members of the Ramakrishna Vedanta movement which was profoundly inter-spiritual in character given the multiple religious belonging of its founder, who like Gandhi, had no difficulty proclaiming that while always a Hindu, he was also a “Muslim, Christian, and Sikh.” Indeed, as several of our contributors (Raghu, Siddhartha, Clooney, Bäumer) point out, the Hindu religion has, at its best, always been open to creative experimentation and hybridization. Āis is in keeping with the earliest teaching of the Rig Vedas— “Āough truth is one, the sages name it in many ways”—a sentiment echoed in the radical teaching of Ramakrishna (who embraced all the great wisdom traditions as his own) and of his famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda, who took the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago (1896) by storm when he announced the inter-religious message of Vedanta. Speaking to a fellow Hindu in a letter of May 28, 1894, Vivekananda wrote: “Do not insist upon anything dogmatic; do not go against anything—ours is to put chemicals together, the Lord knows how and when the crystals will form.” Our visits to Ramakrishna Ashams in Kalady and other towns along the Western coast of India confirmed this generosity of imagination again and again. Āough the Hindu-Christian dialogue was the one which most informed our Bangalore meeting and pilgrimage, there were also
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exchanges with other wisdom traditions of India—Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain. Āese last three have long been acknowledged as generous in their inter-religious legacies. Jainism was founded as a universal pan-religious faith, Sikhism comprised a rich blend of Islam and Hinduism (see Siraj and Siddhartha), and Buddhism emerged by transcending all partisan religious claims to possess some Absolute deity to the exclusion of others (see Makransky and O’Leary). Āough Islam is often painted as intolerant towards other religions, fundamentalist in its faith, and zealous to defend the One God of the last Prophet against all infidels, this is not at all representative of the rich and complex Muslim tradition. At our Bangalore meeting, the Muslim scholar Maqbool Siraj, told a very different story. He offered crucial insights that merit special mention here. In contradistinction to the mis-readings of Islam in the early Khilafat (sixth century) or later Wahhabi movements (from which Al Qaeda sprang), Siraj drew an alternative account of Islamic history. 8 His narrative, more in keeping with the original Imamat philosophy, explored the legacy of Islam on the Indian subcontinent as one of creative synthesis and imaginative accommodation. Particularly moving is his description of the inspiring interfaith vision of enlightened Mughal leaders like Babur and Akbar, visionaries who engaged in a vast enterprise of “translation” between Islamic and Hindu texts (including renditions of the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Upanishads in Persian). Akbar was even attributed with the promotion of a new inter-spiritual philosophy known as Din-e Ilahi, drawing from the best insights of the different faiths practiced in his jurisdiction. He engaged in frequent discussions with delegates of various religions in his court—from Purkottham Brahman and Sheikh Tajudden to Portuguese Christian missionaries and Zoroastrian representatives from Navsari in Gujarat.9 In addition to Siraj’s article see also Zaidi. Dalrymple writes of the “remarkable porousness and fluidity of the frontier” between Indian-Islamic culture and the other cultures (e.g., Hindu and European) of the Indian subcontinent. Exploring various examples of interracial fusion and cultural assimilation—a process famously described as “chutnification” by Salman Rushdie—Dalrymple celebrates the importance of spiritual “crossing over” between different religions. Indeed, it was a Deccan tradition that Hindu kings would dress in Islamic court costumes in public while every Muslim sultan in the region made a point of employing a Hindu Chief Minister. Āe cultural and spiritual “hybridity” which resulted from the intermingling of Indian Muslims and Hindus with European and Middle Eastern (mainly Persian, Egyptian, and Yemini) immigrants, “turned the Deccan into the greatest centre of Arabic learning and literary composition outside the Levant,” a cultural richness also evident in Deccani painting and architecture of 8 9
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Āese exchanges led Akbar to believe in the commonality of all religions, or what he called a “general consensus” ( Sulhe kul) among religions on certain human values. Indeed, it is humbling for Westerners to be reminded, especially in this time of anti-Islamic prejudice and fear, that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the Christian Inquisition was persecuting witches, Jews, Muslims, and heretics (Giordano Bruno was burnt alive in the Campo dei Fiori for his the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (20f). Dalrymple also notes the importance of multiple translations of sacred love scriptures between Indian and Muslim cultures, leading to remarkable cross-fertilization between the two cultures, including much cross-marriage and social mixing. Āis phenomenon was, he accepts, far more widespread in Indian than in Middle-Eastern Islam. “Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries many of the classics of both Hindu writing on love and eroticism were translated into Persian for the uses of the princes and princesses of Indian Muslim courts. Significantly, it was in the more cosmopolitan and less comprehensively Islamicized courts of he Deccan such as Bidar, Bijapur and Golconda that much of this work of translation and dissemination took place: erotic treatises such as the famous Kama Sutra and the Srngaramanjari (literally ‘Āe Bouquet of Sexual Pleasure’) were translated into Persian or Deccani Urdu, while Indian Muslim authors added new studies to the erotic shelves of the place libraries such as the Lazat al-Nissa (or ‘Delights of Women’) and the Tadhkirat al-Shahawat (‘Book of Aprhodisiacs’), both of which were much read and copied throughout the eighteenth-century Deccan . . . After the end of the enforced puritanism of Aurangzeb and Nizam ul-Mulk’s period, attitudes changed completely: Nizam Ali Kahan (Sultan of Hyderabad) even founded a department of his civil service to oversee and promote the business of dancing, music and sensuality, the Daftar Arbab-i-Nishaat (the Office of the Lord’s of Pleasure). At the same time there was an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary experimentation: in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, poets at this time wrote some of the most unblushingly amorous Indian poetry to be composed since the end of the classical period seventeen hundred years earlier” (134–35). Elsewhere, Dalrymple celebrates the following virtues of Mughal India: “But if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most magnificent, they also defined Islam at its most open-minded, tolerant and syncretic. Unlike the Ottomans or the Safavids, who ruled largely Muslim polities, the Mughal Empire was effectively built in partnership with India’s Hindu majority and succeeded as much through diplomacy as by brute force: Akbar in particular was a true humanist who strove for the reconciliation of his Hindu and Muslim subjects, and managed to unite them in the service of a coherent multireligious state. As Emperor, Akbar promoted Hindus at all levels of his administration, married a Rajpat princess, and entrusted his army to his former Hindu opponent, Raja Man Singh of Jaipur. He ended the jizya tax levied only on non-Muslims, ordered the translation of the Sanskrit classics into Persian, codified minority rights, and filled his court with Hindu and Muslim artists and intellectuals. Akbar personally adopted many Hindu and yogic practices, and even became a vegetarian . . . So great an impression did all this make on his Hindu subjects that in some of the Bardic traditions of Rajasthan, Akbar came to be equated with the Hindu divinity Lord Ram. More remarkable still to a modern world lazily used to thinking of Islam and Christianity as sworn and eternal enemies, both Akbar and his son Jahangir were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary, something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their Muslim faith” (“The Most Magnificent Muslims” 26).
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inter-religious imagination in 1600), Akbar was convening multi-faith symposia in his Indian palace! One sometimes forgets that there are seventy-two schools of Islam, not one monolithic church. Religious minorities and diversities were often better treated under the Mughal Empire than under its Holy Roman counterpart. It is true, of course, that great Christian thinkers like Aquinas and Cusanus were eminently capable of entering into creative dialogue with their Muslim contemporaries—the former with the likes of Avicenna and Averroes, the later with the Mufties of Instanbul in the council of Ferrara, Florence in 1439 (see Dallmayr). Such dialogical overtures were richly rewarded and reciprocated by their Islamic brothers, from Cordova and Samarkand to Agra and Madras. Āe Islamic tendency towards “cultural blending”—a theme so central to our volume—found cogent expression in the poetic-spiritual works of mystics like Ibn ‘Arabi, Al Hallaj, or Kabir Das. Kabir, mentioned earlier, was a fifteenth-century visionary raised in Islam who brought together what he considered to be the most promising aspects of both faiths in the spirit of bhakti and Sufi practices. Kabir composed his poetic works, renowned throughout all of North India in his time and throughout the world today, in a hybrid language that broke down barriers to experiencing the divine. He, and the woman mystic poet, Mirabai, denounced the bigotry of narrow religious sects and invited people to seek God within themselves in simplicity, integrity, and love. Indeed, Kabir described himself as the hybrid “child of Allah-Rama,” considering these two deities as but different names for the same unnamable God. Legend tells how on his death, when Hindu and Muslim sects rushed to appropriate his body for rival funeral rites, they found no one lying beneath the shroud—only a bed of flowers. Āe Islamic imagination is further explored below in the pioneering essays of Islamic scholars James Morris, Steffen Stelzer, and Hannah Merriman. Morris concentrates on the interfaith resources of enlightened Islam conceived as a multi-sided pyramid: many different paths leading to the one Apex. Commenting on the extraordinary insights of Islamic sages like Ghazali, Biruni, and the mystical Ibn ‘Arabi, Morris shows how they ingeniously sought to reconcile the historical multiplicity of religions with the unicity of the One Din. He also reveals how Ibn ‘Arabi in particular treasured the process of “creative imagination” and translation between languages and religions as a way of articulating the invisible human-divine reality which the Koran called the “Heart” ( al-qalb). Morris concludes, appropriately, with an analysis
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of a famous painting by Sultan Muhammad of a Hafiz love-poem on divine imagination ( khiyal). Stelzer celebrates the Islamic imagination as a special activity of acoustic and auditory “following,” as articulated in a number of Sufi stories and commentaries, while Merriman, for her part, illuminates the story of Mohammed’s nocturnal vision ( mi’raj) of the Lote Tree as an image of mystical ultimacy. Situated in “the eye of the heart” and only disclosed when the ego-self dissolves (fan’Ā’llah), the Lote Tree is as close as it gets to God—the place beyond which one cannot pass in the journey of ascent to the divine. Here once again, and in keeping with our basic theme, the sacred Islamic images speak as powerfully as the words and ideas which accompany them. VIII Our journey up the Western coast of India ended, as mentioned earlier, with a visit to the caves of Ajanta and Ellora. Āese ancient excavations—dating back two millennia and representing the three religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism—vividly illustrate the extraordinary power of inter-religious imagination (see Anderson and Morley). Particularly striking is the way in which, at Ellora, the three sequences of caves exist side by side, respecting both their differentiation and interaction, as one moves from one spiritual tradition to the next, occasionally hitting upon a trimurti (three-form figure) or composite religious sculpture which combines images of all three. At times one has the impression that some bee of the invisible had flown from cave to cave drawing the nectar from each and cross-pollinating their respective imaginaries in startling new fruits of the visible. Āe ShivaBuddha with Jain earrings of Cave 29 in Ellora seemed to enshrine in ageless rock the wisdom of the sacred guha as sung by Kabir: “Āere the bee of the heart is deeply immersed, and desires no other joy” (Hamsa, Kaho puratan vat ). Also striking was the deeply sensual and embodied character of the sculptures, not only in the underground Hindu temple of Ellora (Cave 16) where Shiva Lingas, Shiva-Parvati marriage feasts, and other Tantric love emblems proliferate but also in the cave murals of Ajanta where the previous lives of the Buddha are depicted in vibrant color and shape. Indeed, it is curious how the central Buddhist Heart Sutra— “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”—takes on added meaning here as sculpted and illustrated images of the Buddha slowly emerge from
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the dark void of the cave. Though truth is ineffable and unthinkable for Buddhists, it is not unimaginable: in a rich profusion of jataka— narrative stories, emblems, and testimonies—the memory of the Buddha, as living person and teacher, is recorded and transmitted down through millennia. The narrative murals in the first caves of Ajanta represent a fascinating complementarity of “apophatic” respect for transcendence and “kataphatic” sensitivity for immanence. Wherever one looks in this and other Ajanta caves, matter and spirit are inextricably linked—a point beautifully evoked by Anderson in her account of the Ellora Cave 10 below, Morley in his account of Cave 29, and Dallmayr in his observation about the root links between wisdom (sapientia) and the human senses ( sapere). In the underground guhas of Ellora and Ajanta we found three wisdom traditions concelebrating the mystery of “transcendent immanence.” We participated in a veritable feast of inter-spiritual imagining. And we recalled this special verse of Kabir: Āe creature is in Brahma, and Brahma is in the creature: they are ever distinct, yet ever united. He Himself is the tree, the seed, the germ . . . He Himself is the manifold form, the infinite space. He is the breath, the word and the meaning [ Sadho, Brahm alakh lakhaya ].
The wisdom traditions of India, figured in these caves, all bear witness in their unique ways, to the radical embodiment of the divine. And so doing they radiate out to other religions too. In the womb of these guhas one encounters the dancing heart of Shiva, the heart sanctuary of Krishna, and the heart sutra of Buddha. But one also feels the presence of the mystical qalb of Rumi and Kabir and the burning kardia of Mary and Jesus. In the crossing of these multiple hosts and guests, differences are respected, received, and reconciled. On our last day in India we hired a van to take us back from Ajanta to Mumbai where we were taking a plane back to London. Our driver was a discrete bearded man who hardly spoke during the full day’s journey. It was only as we entered the outskirts of rain-flooded Mumbai—the full monsoon having finally caught up with us—that our driver informed us that he was Muslim. During all our hours of travel we had been so excited by the encounter with the Hindu-BuddhistJain caves that we had not taken the trouble to speak properly with our driver or ask what religion he was. When he did at last speak, revealing
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a vast wealth of knowledge about the history of the caves and about his own Sufi Islamic tradition (we had, for example, passed through a famous Sufi town without knowing it!), it was as if the “uninvited guest” had turned up to meet us: a precious guiding stranger there all the time without us noticing him. As we looked out through our windows at the flooded streets of Mumbai, our driver, Ahmet, recited the words of his beloved Kabir: “Āe river and the waves are one surf: where is the difference between the river and its waves?” (Dariya ki lahar dariyao hai ji ). IX Āis book, we repeat, makes no claim to comprehensiveness. While we do not presume or pretend in this limited space to cover the religions of China, Africa, Native America, or Aboriginal Austral-Asia, the final essay on “transculturation” in Andean-Christian art by Eileen RizoPatron, co-editor of this volume, is an acknowledgement of the importance of the North-South dialogue as a necessary supplement to the East-West one addressed by other contributors. Like every “hermeneutics of the heart,” this one began to unfold in a concrete space and time: the conversation at Bangalore and the subsequent journey to the Caves of Ajanta and Ellora in June 2007. Our hope, however, is that this volume communicates at least one basic lesson learned during our conversations in India, namely, that in our third millennium religions will be inter-religious, or they will not be at peace. *** Two years after its first publication in a special issue of Religion and the Arts (12.1–3: 2008), this work has become part of a more global inter-religious hospitality project sponsored by Boston College and Glenstal Abbey, Ireland. It continues on—with the energetic assistance of Adam Fitzgerald, James Taylor, Chris Yates, and Sharon Joyce— through a series of conferences, documentaries, art festivals, and interfaith performances known as the Guestbook Project , now available at an interactive website: guestbookproject.com.
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Works Cited Abhishiktananda [Henri Le Saux]. The Secret of Arunachala: A Christian Hermit on Shiva’s Holy Mountain . Rev. ed. Delhi, India: ISPCK, 1979. Dalrymple, William. “The Most Magnificent Muslims.” New York Review Nov. 2007: 26–29. ———. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India . New York: Penguin, 2003. Eck, Diana. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Francis. Meditation: Hindu-Christian Meeting Point . Kerala, India: Seraphic Press, 2006. Grant, Sara. Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Hederman, Mark Patrick. Symbolism. Dublin, Ireland: Veritas, 2007. Kearney, Richard. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Osborne, Arthur. Ramana Maharshi. Boston MA: Weiserbooks, 1970. Nussbaum, Martha. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Zaidi, Syyed Siraj H. “Does Islam Encourage Terrorism? No.” Irish Times 13 Aug. 2007: 10.
TRAVERSALS (I): HINDU-CHRISTIAN 1. The Bangalore Conference
OPEN-SOURCE HINDUISM Siddhartha FireĀies Ashram, Bangalore, India In India the great questions of civilization were not the exclusive preserve of intellectuals, theologians, and institutionally appointed religious leaders. These matters concerned everybody and continue to concern everybody, even if in the past the upper castes had unfair advantages in discursive matters. Despite the grave atrocities related to caste, communalism, and patriarchy, India has partially succeeded in re-inventing itself along pluralistic lines, even if this process has been accompanied by social turmoil. Present day conflicts related to religion, gender, caste, and social class go to show that the process of cultural renewal is alive and kicking. Hopefully the direction of renewal will tilt decisively towards perspectives that are pluralistic and compassionate. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has the quest for meaning taken on so many different hues and forms and produced such a variety of perspectives on the goals of human existence. So much so that it is not difficult to argue that the original connotation of the word “Hindu” would include all the perspectives and experiences of those who lived on the eastern side of the river Indus. These perspectives and experiences spanned the length and breadth of what is today known as India, and well beyond its present boundaries. They were modified, extended and re-invented over the centuries. This is not unlike opensource software that allows users to study, modify, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in existing or new forms. Thus Hinduism, in its best sense, may also be considered open source. In opensource Hinduism the fluidity of the interactive process allows the old and the new to constantly inform each other, mingling and creating new hybrids. Even if the communalists are doing their best to destroy much that is good in our heritage, open-source Hinduism remains a formidable foil. When one lives in India the good and the ugly sides of religions are quickly apparent. On the one hand there are millions of ordinary people who go about their lives inspired by the humane values of their
36 siddhartha respective religions. On the other we frequently witness the murderous violence and mayhem that results from religious conflicts. Unfortunately, the good and the ugly exist side by side, and one wishes there would be less of the ugly. Yet India has been the spiritual and political laboratory of people like Mahatma Gandhi who succeeded in fine-tuning the theory and practice of non-violent civil disobedience. Gandhi saw himself as a Hindu who was also “a Muslim, Christian and Sikh.” This apparent paradox of multiple religious belonging is essential to a proper understanding of Hinduism. Inclusive approaches were articulated from the beginning of history. The Vedas stated, “The truth is one, the sages call it by different names.” If all religions lead to the one Truth, the one Consciousness, then there is little scope for religious conflict. Hinduism is clearly not a religion in the Abrahamic sense of the term. It is rather a spiritual laboratory that keeps itself open to both inside and outside influences. There is no single book, single messiah, single prophet, or single belief that holds it together. As a spiritual laboratory the one and the many, the immanent and the transcendent, the personal and the impersonal are all allowed to have their play. From the early anonymous scriptures to the later historical sages Hinduism has allowed freedom and liberty for religious discourse, cutting across caste and gender lines. Some might argue that this was not the case as far as the lower castes, especially the Dalits, were concerned. Untouchability arose from a notion of ritual pollution, which prescribed that the higher castes were purer than the lower ones. Lower castes, particularly the Dalits, were not allowed entry into the temple. Despite this, lower castes and Dalit saints emerged, especially in the bhakti tradition, across the length and breadth of the country. Sant Ravidas is well-known example (Nadkarni 262–63). Hinduism has received serious body blows in recent times. The Dalits have rightly nursed serious apprehensions and insist that Hinduism played a role in their social oppression. Sections of the secular lobby have rejected Hinduism as irrational and unscientific. The cultural nationalists have given it a bad image through their strident advocacy of a militant and aggressive Hindutva. Many feminists are shocked by patriarchal texts like the Manu Shastras. These are enough reasons for the liberal intellectual to consider throwing the baby out with the bath water. With all these serious anomalies would it not be better that Hinduism is at least ignored, insofar as that is possible, since it is unlikely to die a natural death in the near future? But any
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dispassionate observer of the Hindu heritage will admit that caste and gender can today be separated from Hinduism, that Hinduism can be vibrantly re-discovered or re-invented as a pluralistic, compassionate and socially liberative set of traditions and spiritual insights. Let me explain further. The Dalit prophet Ambedkar (mid-twentieth century “untouchable” leader), for example, has become a potent political and spiritual symbol throughout India. Some might even argue that he has displaced Gandhi as the most omnipresent symbol in India. We have had a distinguished Dalit president of India in K. R. Narayan. The chief justice of the supreme court of India, an eminent legal luminary, is a dalit. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayavati, has proved that even in the caste infested Hindu heartland of Uttar Pradesh a Dalit woman can brilliantly turn the tables on her political adversaries. It is of course highly debatable whether Hinduism has at all contributed to this emerging situation or whether secularism and Ambedkarism should take most of the credit. But there are scholars like Anantanand Rambachan who are talking of a “Hindu liberation theology” characterized by a preferential option for the poor, a focus on systemic evil, and a passion for justice that might transform oppressive structures that are economic, political, social, and religious.1 All this is by way of showing that a new context is emerging in India where the authentic and liberative message of Hinduism can be disassociated from the oppressive caste and patriarchic structures. This is not to underestimate the distance to be still covered to rid our society of caste and gender inequities. The scholar Vasudha Narayan states that it was only in the late eighteenth century the term Hindu was used regularly to refer to the dominant religion of India. 2 Harjot Oberoi states that the Vedas, The Ramayana, and the Bhagavad Gita, considered to be the main religious texts of the Hindus, do not mention the term Hindu (Oberoi 16). Even in the time of Muslim rule, Hindus were considered as those who were not Muslims, and included Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. There are of course others who argue that the word Hindu in its religious sense
1 See Rambachan. In this book, Rambachan offers a fresh interpretation of Advaita Vedanta as a life-affirming path that “provides a powerful impetus for a life of service and compassion” (7). For him, Advaita is not trapped in illusionism. 2 Narayan writes: “The religion has no single founder, creed teacher, or prophet acknowledged by all Hindus as central to the religion, and no single holy book is universally acclaimed as being of primary importance” (10).
38 siddhartha has a much longer history and has its origin in the rivalries between Hindus and Muslims between 1200 and 1500. But whether Hinduism was popularized by the British or has a much longer history, the fact remains that it is today used to describe a plurality of communities who see themselves as different from other established religions like Islam and Christianity. Even if one concedes that Sikhism and Buddhism are distinct religions despite their intimate connections with what is broadly defined as Hinduism, the narrowing of the definition of who is today a Hindu would still make it a plural and varied tradition rather than a single religion in the sense of Christianity, Islam, and or Judaism. Therefore, Hinduism does not refer to a single tradition or imply a single Hindu community, in the restricted use of the term. This constitutes the richness, openness and universal appeal of Hinduism. I would even go further to say that this is the uniqueness and genius of Hinduism. Few other traditions have creatively interacted with others, developed new perspectives and responded to the challenges of the modern era as much as Hinduism has. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Narayana Guru, Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and J. Krishnamurthi are good examples of this process in the last hundred and fifty years of our history. In more ancient times the Buddha, Ramanuja, Basava, and Kabir had stated the non-dogmatic and compassionate aspects of the Indian spiritual heritage. In our own time we have the example of Swami Agnivesh, M. V. Nadkarni, Anantanand Rambachan, and many others. Trying to cast Hinduism as a middle-eastern religion, as the cultural nationalists are attempting to do, through selective choice of texts, cultural traits, and deities, is negating the genius of a pluralistic historical process that was open source from the beginning. “The whole world is a family,”3 or Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam , is another ancient statement (Kale 104). Perhaps the quintessential Hindu is Kabir, who sang: I am neither in temple nor in mosque… All the men and women in the world are His living forms.
3
Kale 104, verse 133. The full verse reads: He is “ours,” that one is the “other,” Such is the calculation of the narrow minded; For the liberal minded, however, The whole world is one family!
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Kabir is a child of Allah-Rama, He himself is my Guru, my Pir. (qtd in Thapar 309–310)
Kabir sees Allah and Rama as two names for the same impersonal God. Ramakrishna, like so many others, was a Hindu and an effervescent part of the open-source process. Ramakrishna’s spirit was able to slip into the experience of being fully Muslim. He also claimed the experience of being fully Christian. The Ramakrishna mission, like several other “Hindu” traditions, does not even call itself Hindu. Far from being a negative element this ambiguity shows that Hinduism is wary of definitions and that the ineffable experience of the divine goes beyond all definitions and descriptions. This could be Hinduism’s gift to the global community that is fast seeing the limitations of indefensible boundaries and hide-bound differences. The potential openness and pluralism inherent within the Hindu process would make it attractive to people all over the world who wish to transcend narrow nationalist and religious frontiers. Gandhi went to great lengths to emphasize the open-endedness of Hinduism. His favorite song “raghupati raghava raja ram” is another good example of multiple belonging. The well-known line from the song “Eshwar Allah tero naam” (You are known as Eshwar and Allah) is familiar to every Indian. Ramachandra Gandhi, the grandson of the Mahatma, who broke fresh ground in contemporary open-source Hinduism, stated that if only all religions could add “non-violence” as one of their central truths we would move towards putting an end to the murderous violence unleashed in the name of God. The open-ended nature of Hinduism is also apparent in the system of margas, or pathways to achieve spiritual liberation. Hinduism recognizes that human beings come with different mental chemistries. For some the spiritual quest will lead them to jnana, where one finds liberation through insights and a deep intuitive understanding of the nature of reality. Even the notion of God can be excluded in the jnana approach. Then there is bhakti, where one finds fulfillment through intense devotion to a personal God. The overflowing love experienced for the personal deity also embraces other human beings. Bhakti has produced an enormous corpus of poems and songs, some of which have a strong egalitarian and gender sensitive appeal. Then there is karma, the path of action, best exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi, where the seeker finds the divine through service to one’s fellow beings. An option for the poor is a strong element in Gandhi’s approach to compassionate action.
40 siddhartha Many centuries ago, the Basava movement had similarly underlined its commitment to the poor. Doing away with the caste system, while embracing gender sensitivity, was also an important part of its spiritual quest. In one of his most celebrated poems, Basava suggests that the spiritual quest must make an option for the poor: The rich will make temples for Siva. What shall I, A poor man do? My legs are pillars, The body the shrine, The head a cupola of gold. Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, Things standing shall fall, But the moving ever shall stay. (qtd in Ramanujan 1)
The poor man carries the temple in his body. Basava is clearly implying that God stands with the poor man. “Things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay” can be interpreted as “what is rigid, pretentious and clichéd will decay, and what is fresh, light and spontaneous will flourish.” “Things standing” may also refer to a rigid notion of religion that is enmeshed with the caste system. The temple, into which a lower caste person cannot enter, shall fall. Jnana, bhakti, and karma are not mutually exclusive streams. They generally tend to overlap with each other. Thus the mystic and intellectual who follows the jnana approach may also be drawn to aspects of bhakti and karma. And likewise, the followers of bhakti and karma may be enriched by jnana, and so on. I have often felt that the rise of a belligerent cultural nationalism is partly due to our inability to develop and nurture a strong sense of inclusive secularism. By inclusive secularism I mean a perspective where a rational and scientific worldview engages with an inner spiritual or religious quest. A secularism that is exclusive, like the dominant French variety, is suspicious of religion and can easily become rigid and intolerant, providing grist to religious extremists who gleefully characterize it as secular-fundamentalism. An exclusive secularism can also be co-opted by market fundamentalism that overlooks the need for human community and substitutes extreme individualism and soulless consumerism in its place. It must
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also be pointed out that today’s religious traditions have certainly not been bastions against consumerism and that both secular and religious individuals are equally seduced at a subliminal level by the bombardment from hundreds of sophisticated advertisements that suggest that the highest meaning of life is to be an enthusiastic consumer. We live in a world where money ( artha) and pleasure ( kama) are projected as the main goals of life. We have forgotten personal and social responsibility ( dharma) and ultimate meaning ( moksha). In the context of the commercialization of values many people search for an inner orientation that emphasizes the human potential to be much more than a mere consumer. The restlessness emerging from a soulless consumer-oriented world leads to a crisis of identity where people seek references that will give purpose and meaning to their lives. The human being is not a mere combination of biological factors, but is constantly recreating herself. The human journey is an ongoing process and will never find closure. Every regressive step in our history had to do with the closure of the human spirit. Open-source Hinduism also includes secular spirituality. Sensitive and inclusive varieties of secularism carry an ethical and spiritual core. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was a good example. He saw science not only as a tool to eradicate poverty and disease but as a means to stamp out superstition and religious obscurantism. He recognized that inner change acted on the outer environment and vice versa. In 1945, he wrote from prison in Ahmadnagar Fort that “some kind of ethical approach” to life was necessary, even if he did not see religion as an answer. He was, what I would call, a secular-spiritual person. And the secular dimensions of open-source Hinduism have inspired some of the finest secular-spiritual persons in this country like Shabana Azmi (the actress), Aruna Roy (the activist), U. R. Anantamurthy (the novelist), and Dr. Siddalingiah (the dalit poet). And there are many hundreds and thousands of others like them who provide hope, compassion, color and song to this “ancientfuture” civilization. The challenge of open-source Hinduism in the twenty-first century is to articulate relationships at three levels: relationship with the self, relationship with society, and relationship with nature. Transformation at these three levels becomes difficult without challenging the modern notion of the human being as homo economicus, where material accumulation and competition are the dominant drives. The original Latin meaning of competition was not cutthroat competition but “running
42 siddhartha together,” as my friend Patrick Viveret, the French philosopher, states. It did not mean that some would win and others would be eliminated. We are today faced with the daunting task of joining hands with business and religious leaders, politicians, civil society leaders, media, and others to create an economic process that reverts to the original meaning of competition. In the present vertical model the human being is almost mechanically driven to compete with others to reach the top without sufficiently realizing the horizontal potential of relating to others and with nature. It is only a movement away from the vertical to a horizontal trajectory that can re-ignite the joys of conviviality, well-being, and ecological inter-connectedness. Works Cited Kale, M. R. Hitopadesha of Narayana . Delhi, India: Motilal Banarisidas, 1967. Nadkarni, M. V. Hinduism: A Gandhian Perspective . New Delhi, India: Ane Books, 2006. Narayan, Vasudha. “Hinduism.” Eastern Religions . Ed. Michael D. Coogan. London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2005. 9–109. Oberoi, Harjot S. The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition . Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Ramanujan, A. K. Speaking of Siva . New York: Penguin Books, 1973. Rambachan, Anantanand. The Advaita Worldview. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Thapar, Romila. A History of India . Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
YOGA AND THE WOUNDED HEART Jyoti Sahi Art Ashram, Bangalore, India You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. —2 Peter 1:19
I
Introduction: The Yoga of Art
The relation of art to yoga has been a concern of mine over the last forty years. I first began to reflect on this relation while still at art school after reading a book on Christian yoga1 and an essay by Ananda Coomaraswamy, which proposes that every form of art is a yogic sadhana or spiritual search. 2 During the years that I was associated with the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths, I reflected on the relation of the Christian icon to the Hindu and Buddhist understanding of the mandala as a way of meditation. The spiritual in art is concerned with the process of “incarnation”— the Word becomes flesh and pitches His tent amongst us. This is the process that is also at the heart of Eastern spiritual techniques. Carl G. Jung understood the image that we have of Jesus as a reflection of our innermost Self. This inner Self is also related to the child as an archetypal figure of the Self that remains playful, imaginative, and is the source of all our creativity. Meister Eckhart similarly spoke of the Son of God being born in our heart, and in that way becoming present in our life. The divine Child is born into the world and is received into the womb of Mother Mary. This womb is the space of Creation itself because, as the liturgy expresses it, that reality which the whole of the cosmos could not contain was contained in the womb
See Dechanet. Also of interest is Ravindra. Coomaraswamy writes: “. . . the important part once played in Indian thought by the concept of Art as Yoga, a subject sufficient in itself for a whole volume” (26–30). 1 2
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of Mother Mary. It is this process of birthing that is at the heart of the creative process. II
Art as Prayer and Meditation
Sometimes people ask when the religious artist sets time apart for prayer. But the art of making an image is itself what prayer is about. Prayer is not just a matter of asking for something. Rather it is what happens when we are open, and receive an image of the Lord into our hearts. The artist, if he is a painter of religious themes, must himself be a man of prayer. That is why a majority of the icon painters were themselves monks. The Hesychasts played a prominent part during the “iconoclastic controversy” as defenders of images (see Matus). It might seem strange to the modern Western mind that those who cultivated a purely spiritual and abstract view of both themselves and exterior reality should be at such pains to preserve the tradition of icons. Mysticism, as often understood in the West, is the negation of images, even mental ones. This was a position that we find well expressed in the apophatic tradition of Christian mysticism. But it is important to note that though the Advaitic philosophy we find in India says that the ultimate reality is beyond name and form, there has been nothing comparable to the Western “iconoclastic controversy” in Eastern religions (see Dehejia). Here the icon has a place, not as representing the ultimate truth but as a way of reaching towards that truth. It is for that reason that images based on what is called the mandala or yantra in Hindu and Buddhist meditational practices have an important and vital role in the process of stilling the mind and bringing it down to the seat of the heart. The “dark night of the soul,” the “cloud of unknowing,” these are experiences beyond the province of what can be imagined. But essentially, I believe that in Eastern experience (and by this I mean not only Eastern Christian but Hindu and Buddhist experience, too) there is no dark night of the soul, for the cloud is the light-bearing cloud in which the disciples witnessed the Transfiguration. Darkness, I feel, has a different significance in the Far East from the darkness that seems so world denying in European climes. Darkness in Indian thought, for example, is related to the womb, and it is from this darkness that light emerges. Thus we find in the Isa Upanishad a concept of darkness that leads to another type of knowing and seeing:
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Into blind darkness enter they That worship ignorance; Into darkness greater than that, as it were, they That delight in knowledge . . . Knowledge and non-knowledge— He who this pair conjointly knows, With non-knowledge passing over death, With knowledge wins the immortal. Into blind darkness enter they Who worship non-becoming; Into darkness greater than that, as it were, they Who delight in becoming . . . Becoming and destruction— He who this pair conjointly knows, With destruction passing over death, With becoming wins the immortal. (Isa Upanishad 9, 11, 12, 14)
III
The Yoga of Imagination
In what follows I explore the yoga of the heart. What do we mean by the “heart”? The heart is not just a physical organ; it is an imaginative concept where the opposites that we relate with the human personality and self-understanding are integrated. It is in the heart that we find the possible coming together of mind and body, the rational intellect and the psychic world of intuition and feeling. The concept of the heart is found in many spiritual traditions. In biblical tradition, the “heart” is associated very much with imagination ( yetzer). In India, the heart (hridaya) is regarded as the inner spiritual space of consciousness. In the modern world, the psychosomatic concept of the heart has been identified with the dimension of experience that philosopher Henry Corbin called “the imaginal.” 3 Corbin made a distinction between the “imaginal” and the “imaginary.” The “imaginary,” for him, belongs to what is often referred to as “fantasy,” that is, a virtual world that is essentially unreal and hence misleading. But the “imaginal” is a way of apprehending reality through a faculty of image-making that is essentially evocative and creative. Similarly, the poet and theoretician Coleridge conceived of an essential difference between “imagination”
3 On the concept of the “imaginal,” see Hillman 237 n. 86 and Corbin, “ Imaginalis.”
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and “fancy” (50). For him, “fancy” is concerned with memory and is a reproduction of impressions that have been received in the past. Imagination proper, on the other hand, is concerned with the future and has a prophetic dimension. IV The Heart as Site of Friendship There is a quality of beauty that unfolds when there is a real spirit of understanding and friendship. This is the living pulse at the heart of creation, which links the manifestation of diversity to an ultimate experience of the unity that underlies all natural forms. By being the eternal friend, the indwelling Lord or Sat Guru found at the heart of the mandala accompanies the disciple on the spiritual way without destroying the individual freedom of each seeker. To be a friend is to be a fellow pilgrim. We recall the image of Jesus on the way to that final destination which culminated not on the cross but in the resurrection. After his death, he appears as a stranger to two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. He shares with them an understanding of the meaning hidden at the heart of biblical tradition and shows them how every image in the books of the prophets points to the truth of his life and death. Having given them the key to his story, he makes as though to continue on his path, reluctant to stop with them at their resting place in Emmaus. But the pilgrims invite the wise stranger to join them. Only later do they come to recognize him in the breaking of bread. But at the very moment of recognition, he disappears. It is then that his friends, whom he had reprimanded for being “slow of heart to believe,” now confess: “Did not our hearts burn within us, as he talked to us on the road?” (Luke 24:13–32) The yoga of the heart is ultimately to be found in an openness that sees reality through a shared vision on the Way. The yoga of the heart is about deep feelings that cannot be simply defined by dogmatic statements. It is a way of understanding that works through images and intuition rather than through rational or discursive thought. It is a way of being hospitable and of meeting God, not through a direct vision but through a friendship that unfolds slowly by traveling together with Christ on the journey of life. While yoga is primarily concerned with yoking or bonding (see sec. IX below), it is revealed in the constant interplay between the one and the many, between unity and duality. Yoga demands the recognition
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of diĀerence even as it affirms the power that integrates. It is in this principle that true friendship is born. V
The Tree of the Cross
The legend of the search for the True Cross follows an almost dreamlike sequence of images that trace the origin of the wood of the cross back to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life which were at the center of the Garden of Paradise. Seeds from this tree were taken by the son of Adam and Eve and planted in the grave of Adam from which a tree grew up. The wood from this tree served for the building of the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple of Solomon. The wood from this tree was used to make a bridge over which the Queen of Sheba stepped when she came in search of Solomon. Finally, it was from this wood that the cross on which the Savior died was made, and it was this wood which appeared to St. Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, when she went to Jerusalem to search for this Cross of Life. In this sense, the “Stations of the Cross” can be said to lead us back to the primal Garden of Creation. They are fulfilled in the Garden of the Resurrection. This search for the True Cross is itself a way consisting of the many images which link together the living organism of the biblical narrative. Each event in the continuing journey of the Tree of Life down through the ages marks the path of that principle of vitality which links the primal tree in the Garden of Eden to the final tree on which Christ died on Calvary. Each station on this journey is like one of the chakras or mandala patterns symbolizing the whole cosmic body of salvation history. The tree becomes a symbol of the heart of that body because, as Jesus himself said to his disciples, “I am the vine, and you are the branches” (John 15:5). Through this continuing Tree of Life flows the sap—the prana or life energy that keeps the whole body alive. The tree image is both latent in the seed and also finally manifest in that tree which symbolizes the whole universe. In the same sense, the heart in its psychosomatic reality is the microcosm of the whole body, which replicates in its totality the seed symbol that lies hidden at its center. The full-grown tree is the seed in the same way as the whole circle is already present in the point or drop ( bindu) from which it spreads out its many branches.
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Meditation on the Cross
The mandala has traditionally been used as an aid to meditation. By focusing on the center of the mandala, the mind is brought to the reality that holds all the differences that we experience together. The center is the place where the image of the Lord is found. Around this center we find the space of “creation” with its four cardinal directions and its outer circumference, which comprises the outer limits of our consciousness. Here are often represented those elements that are most ambiguous and indicative of all that lies on the periphery of the conscious mind. These are irrational, chaotic images that seem to lurk in the shadows of our search for unity and order but still need to be recognized and included in the wholeness that comprises our self-awareness. In kundalini yoga, for example, the energy we associate with sexuality and fertility in general (symbolized by a serpent that lies coiled up at the base of the spine in the region of sexual organs) is aroused but also transformed into a conscious energy. Art in that sense, as all culture, comes out of this energy as a sublimated form of the life force. It is in this sense that we are to understand the mysterious injunction that “the serpent should be lifted up” (Exod. 7:8–12; cf. John 3:14). The serpent is a creature that lives on the ground, or even under the ground, in holes that lead to the very heart of the earth. But this serpent can also lift itself up, and on occasion is seen to climb up into the branches of a tree. The image of a snake wrapped round another snake, or a vertical staff, is found in very ancient cultures both in India and in Europe, and it symbolizes a process of healing (the art of medicine since ancient Greek times has been characterized by the caduceus borne by Hermes—a wand featuring the figure of a serpent twined round a vertical pole). 4 VII
The Archetypal Image
My work on religious symbolism arose out of my interest in the ideas of the psychologist Carl Jung and his understanding of the relation between what he called the integration process and the structure of
4
Cf. Sahi, Child and Serpent 159–67.
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the mandala as understood in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions of yogic meditation. Jung found that the form of the mandala is universal, but that the contemplative traditions that are to be found both in Christianity and in Eastern faith systems like Buddhism and Hinduism had given the mandala a meaning that relates to an inner process of transformation. This process is known both to the monastic branches of Christian spirituality going back to the Desert Fathers and to the yogic teachers of India. Jung—and a group of friends and collaborators like Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Heinrich Zimmer, Giuseppe Tucci, and others—also showed that this deep knowledge of the way that the unconscious functions was known to human beings from the very dawn of consciousness, as it is the process whereby unconscious images are made conscious in what we understand as the evolution of civilizations. The symbolic form that is associated with the structure of the icon is the mandala (which in Sanskrit means simply “circle”). This mandala icon brings together unconscious material and conscious understanding or interpretation. VIII
They Look on One Who Is Pierced
My own efforts to give shape to a Hindu-Christian iconography has been based on this search for the archetypal, especially in the search for spiritual wholeness which is found in the typology of icons but also in the tradition of the Hindu and Buddhist mandala.5 Mandala structures underlie the symbols that we find in the Gospel of St. John, where sacred geometry and number symbolism are very important, as they were also in Eastern traditions of art. In this connection, Pythagorean and Orphic schools played an important part in shaping the symbolic systems of the Gnostics, probably deriving a number of their ideas from ancient Asian symbol systems linked to Buddhist and “Jaina” schools. A very important symbolic form that came to have a very particular significance in early Christian iconography was that of the mandorla, or almond shaped form, created geometrically by the intersection of two arcs, giving rise to a seed or flame-like image. This form is found in nature in the shape of petals, fish, and even the eye.
5
Cf. Sahi, Stepping Stones.
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Figure 1 . Seeking Forgiveness from the SuĀering Tree (from the tribal myth called the Karam Kahani in Chotanagpur), 1998. Oil on canvas, 35” × 71”. Author’s collection.
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It was particularly favored by the Orphic schools, which saw in it a symbol of life and even the opening into the womb. Essentially this form, which looks like a wound, is the original heart mandala. The modern Italian artist Lucio Fontana has explored the aesthetics of this spear-like incision that has a very dynamic import. 6 The mandorla was used as the aural light around the Transfigured Lord, and we find it in the Tympanum structure over the door of many western Gothic Cathedrals, as for example at Chartres (color plate 3, Cosmic Drum ). In fact the characteristic Gothic lance-like window uses the geometry of this pointed arch, which was known earlier to Islamic architects and was introduced into the West after the Crusades. At this time, the meeting of European and Oriental cultures resulted in interesting new art forms, preparing the way for the Renaissance. IX
The Surya Namashkar and the Via Crucis
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The word “yoga” comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means “to join.” This root term can be traced back to an Indo-European base, which appears also in the Latin jug, as found in “conjugal,” “conjugate,” etc. It is also said to link with the word “yoke.” It is in this context that some Indian Christian thinkers like Vandana Mataji have spoken of the concept of “yoking” found in biblical tradition as linked to yoga. So when Jesus said to his disciples, “Come to me, all you who are burdened, for my yoke is easy…” (Matt. 11:29–30), one could render this as, “Come to me you who are burdened, because my yoga is easy.” Other scriptural passages can be found where “yoke” is linked to burden and work (Gen. 27:40, Lev. 26:13, Isa. 9:14, etc.). In Indian thought there is the notion of Karma Yoga , or the “yoga of work,” discussed at great length in the Bhagavad Gita (especially chapter 3). I find interesting the ancient idea that Adam was a tiller of the soil and that Justin said, in the second century A.D., that Joseph, the father of Jesus, was a maker of ploughs and yokes. In the early church, I believe, the cross was related to the plough, and Jesus carrying the cross was
See Ballo, particularly his series entitled “Concetto Spaziale,” “Attese,” and “Nature-zolle,” illustrating the “First Spatial Art Manifesto” (198–205). 7 For an in-depth study of the Surya Namashkar (classic sun salutations), see Brahmachari Amaldas and Painadath. 6
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in a sense represented as the archetypal tiller of the soil, yoked to the cross as an animal that ploughs a field. It is images such as these that inspired me when I started the series of artworks on “Jesus the Yogi,” which I describe below. At Shantivanam Ashram, 8 where the Benedictine monk Dom Bede Griffiths finally settled in South India, I once met a monk by the name of Amaldas who was particularly interested in yoga. He learned many ideas on the importance of a “spiritual yoga” from Fr. Griffiths, who had in turn studied the works of Sri Aurobindo, founder of an ashram in Pondicherry and a well-known author on the subject of “integral yoga.”9 Brother Amaldas’s yoga practice at Shantivanam involved performing the Surya Namashkar (classic sun salutations) on the banks of the Kaveri River near the ashram. One day I sketched him doing these different asanas, or body postures, and asked him what he thought about as he performed this morning greeting to the sun. He told me that he thought about Jesus’ journey to the cross, the Via Crucis, which presumably had taken place in the morning since he was judged very early in the morning before dawn (Peter had denied him thrice when the cock crew), died on the cross at noon, and was finally taken down from the cross before the end of the day. In that sense, even from early times, there is a link between the journey of Jesus to the cross and the hours of the day. Also, from early times, Sunday has been celebrated as the day of the Resurrection, and Jesus regarded as the “Sun of Justice.” It is clear that ancient sun worship did get incorporated into the Christian liturgy, as we see also in the feasts of the liturgical year. The feast of John the Baptist on mid-summer’s day (June 24) replaced an ancient Celtic feast in honor of the sun, and six months later the Church celebrates the birth of Jesus in mid-winter on the feast of the ancient “Sol Niger” (Dec. 25) just after the darkest day of the year. It is this movement of the sun that also lies behind many symbols related
8 Shantivanam, an ashram in Tamil Nadu dedicated to the Holy Trinity (hence its name in Sanskrit, Saccidananda), was founded in 1950 by two French priests, Fr. Henry le Saux (Abhishiktananda) from the Abbey of Kergonan and Fr. Jules Monchanin, a diocesan missionary. In 1968, Dom Bede Griffiths took over this ashram, and he remained there until he died. 9 Sri Aurobindo develops his seminal ideas on integral yoga in The Synthesis of Yoga. Insofar as the word “yoga” means “to bring together,” I would say it is intimately related to the idea of the “integration of the self ” advanced by Jung in his works on psychotherapy and healing. See Jung, Integration.
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Figure 2 . Surya Namashkar , 1994. Linocut design representing the different gestures of the “Salutations to the Sun” in the form of a mandala. 17” × 20”. Author’s collection.
to the Trinity, or the “three steps of the sun.” Jesus descending into hell is like the sun going down into the underworld—an archetypal story otherwise recounted from the standpoint of the divine feminine in the ancient Hindu myth of Savitri (which I develop below). The three steps of Jesus are to be found in the ancient formula that we find in the liturgy—namely, that Christ lived, died, and rose again from the dead. This pattern of three steps (tripadam in Indian mythology) is also basic to dance movement. The greeting to the morning sun thus
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goes back to very ancient sun worship. Indeed, at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna: I revealed this everlasting yoga to Vivasvat, the Sun, the father of light. He in turn revealed it to Manu, his son, the father of man. And Manu taught his son, King Ikshvaku, the saint. Then, it was taught from father to son in the line of kings who were saints; but in the revolutions of times immemorial this doctrine was forgotten by men. Today I am revealing to thee this yoga eternal, this secret supreme: because of thy love for me, and because I am thy friend. (Bhagavad Gita 4:1–3)
This meditation on the rising sun—which can be related to the concept of the “morning star” that rises in the heart, as St. Peter puts it in his second Epistle (1:19), and to the dawn meditation that we find in India—is closely linked to the Gayatri Mantra , one of the oldest mantras found in Hindu tradition. This mantra, which has a universal significance, could be translated as follows: Divine Word, This earth, The sky, The star-filled space; That Eternal Being, Light manifested through the Sun, awakening the whole creation. Supreme Being, Creator, Bestower of Wisdom and eternal Life, Effulgent light of God, We meditate and adore thee, And may our minds and hearts, our consciousness Be directed to that, Receiving illumination! 10
“OM Bhur Bhuvaha Svaha OM Tat Savitur Varenyam Bhargo Devasya Dheemahi Dhiyo Yo Naha Prachodayat” Cf. the reflection on this mantra in Tagore’s essay “Meditation,” 152–54. Also see Panikkar 38–43. 10
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The Gayatri Mantra is often recited in Christian ashrams as part of the morning prayer. The sacredness of light is found in all religious traditions and can be linked to a sense of the importance of vision, which is not only a physical sense, but is also an inner spiritual faculty. In my series of charcoal drawings on the Surya Namaskhar, inspired by Brother Amaldas, I have explicitly linked the gestures performed as greetings to the rising sun with the “Stations of the Cross,” featuring the figure of Jesus in various yogic postures (figs. 3–9). These postures of the body attempt to find a spiritual reality embodied in Creation. For, although yoga is a physical practice, it is deeply connected with the imagination, or the way that we understand the body as a vessel or vehicle of the Spirit. In that sense, yoga has a cosmic dimension and is concerned with the transformation of Nature into a deeper experience of the spiritual force present in all of Creation. The body is thus not only something external: within the body there lies the world of the imagination. There is a profound link between soul and body, and the gestures of the body symbolize inner spiritual attitudes. It is in this way that we can understand an “inner landscape.” Yogic postures can show us the body as a tree, a mountain, some animal like a snake or lion, or even as a seed. And the act of touching the earth can itself embody an inner humility—or kenosis—that honors the earth. One of the yogic postures is called Halasana, which means the posture of the plough. A yoke links animals, or connects the conscious creature with the earth, as when a plough is used to turn the soil, fixed as it is to a yoke. The plough is a very ancient symbol of agricultural work, and it is said that the Indian village plough is essentially the same implement that was used in the Mohenjodaro civilization (fig. 3). In yoga it is imagined that there is a serpent power resting at the base of the spine. As we already mentioned in “Meditation on the Cross,” the purpose of kundalini yoga is to help this serpent energy rise up towards the conscious mind, reminding us of the words in John’s gospel: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (3:14). One important yogic posture embodying this force is called Bhujanga, meaning the snake form rising from the earth. Here the body lifts itself from the ground, bending upwards. By this action energy is released from the dormant body of the yogi. I relate this asana also to the way Jesus lifted himself after falling under the weight of the cross (fig. 4).
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Figure 3. Halasana, or “Jesus Nailed to the Cross” (from the Sanskrit plough). Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
Hal =
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Figure 4. Bhujanga asana, or “Rising Serpent”. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
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In the Bhagavad Gita, yoga is also related to sacrifice. Yoga is a work, but a work where physical action itself becomes a sadhana, a spiritual search. The Vriksha asana represented in fig. 5 is a posture of “Self-Offering” which I have related to the figure of Christ on the tree of the cross ( Vriksha = “tree” in Sanskrit). The eye in the background of this figure reminds us that, through yoga, the body itself becomes a way of seeing, or darshana. The body is not just something material; it is also self-conscious. It is through the body that we come to realize an inner spiritual presence or Atma (fig. 5). A yogic posture that brings the body back to an almost fetal posture reminds us of the need to return to the lap of the Mother. The maternal lap is compared to the seat of wisdom. The word “seat” is in fact derived from “seed.” The seed is laid in the lap of Mother Earth. In fig. 6, we see the yogi bent over in the posture of a fallen seed and enveloped within the folds of a large fish. While this asana relates to Bhishma in the Mahabharata, who offered himself voluntarily to be killed as he refused to take sides in the battle, I relate it to Jesus as a seed that must die (John 12:24) and descend into the heart of the earth for three days and nights (the time Jonah remained within the belly of a whale), before being raised to new life (Matt. 12:39; Luke 11:29). Nidrasana (Sanskrit nidra = “to lie down, to sleep”) is a fundamental yogic posture. It is the position we take when we sleep. In fig. 7, Jesus appears laid in the tomb. In this posture the body is at rest and, like the energy lying in a seed, is preparing to come again to life. Death in this way can be understood as a form of sleep. Death is not a final destruction of the body but a condition in which the human vessel lies hidden for a while in the womb of mother earth. Yoga is concerned with rebirth, with a life force that is continually trying to renew the physical world. A third version of the return to the lap of Earth is fig. 8, here entitled “The Sun of Justice at the Threshold of Night and Day.” Behind this image of the bent body we see a mask-like form. It is as though a new person were now about to emerge from the navel of the crouching form. Like the sprout that comes from the broken seed, the bent body here appears like a root out of which a new form of life emerges. Yoga can be ultimately understood as the emerging form of Silence. It is a way of awakening an inner body ( jivatma). Yoga is concerned with breathing, with slowing down the processes of the physical body to awaken an inner conscious shape. The Buddha sat under the tree of Wisdom, or Bodhi Tree, and it is here that he gained enlightenment. The last
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Figure 5. Vriksha asana (the tree posture), or “Self-Offering,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
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Figure 6 . Vira-asana, or “Jesus Falls” (Sanskrit Vira = “hero who offers himself ”), 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
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Figure 7. Nidrasana, or “The Seed Dies,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
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Figure 8. The Sun of Justice at the Threshold of Night and Day, 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10/5” × 14”. Author’s collection.
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Figure 9 . Samadhi, or “Risen Lord,” 2000. Charcoal drawing, 10.5” Author’s collection.
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× 14”.
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asana of this series ( Samadhi) could be thus be associated with Jesus rising from the grave on the third day, his body glorified (fig. 9). X The Wounded Heart: Inner and Outer Climate change has now become a global issue. What do we understand by “change,” and how does it relate to our respect for nature? The “Book of Changes,” or I Ching, uses a complex system of images to relate three domains: nature, the individual person, and the social community, which includes the way that the whole state is functioning (Wilhelm, Change). What is experienced as outer, objective nature, and what we are conscious of as inner subjective nature, are both bound together as we reflect on nature both outside and within mankind and human consciousness. It is this mutual relationship that gives rise to art and constitutes the importance of art in linking man to nature (see color plate 2, Season Wound). Change is an essential coefficient in what we call “transformation.” The philosopher, artist, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was particularly concerned with processes in nature which govern the changing structures of natural forms. Gregory Bateson also addresses these questions in his work on Mind and Nature. What we are terming “consciousness” spans a world of phenomena that reach far beyond the human mind. The human mind is affected by changes that have their origin in the cosmos and, conversely, the framework of the human mind affects our whole physical environment. The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins coined the word “inscape,” by which he meant an inner landscape that is, at one level, a reflection of the world we perceive outside in nature, but at another is a principle of inner conscious ordering that affects our very way of seeing. There is also a link between this “inscape” and the structure of language—the intuition Hopkins referred to when talking about “instress.” Instress, according to him, is an aspect of the way in which human language responds to rhythm, which governs the patterns of nature and change. It is this mysterious instress that lies at the heart of poetry. Poetic vision, which arises out of the creative imagination, is determined by instress. Instress affects the way that language is structured by providing the spoken word with a recitative rhythm. This concept is probably close to what Indian aestheticians like Ananda Vardhana (ninth century) called dhvani, or “resonance” (see Amaladass). This principle
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of resonance is a kind of empathy whereby the human heart responds to external stimuli. This indeed constitutes what one might term “aesthetic experience.” In his well-known book Art Experience, Professor M. Hiriyanna, the famous modern Indian philosopher from Mysore, notes that there is a link in Indian metaphysics between this sense of resonance felt in the human heart with the rest of creation and what is understood as an experience of the innermost Self, or Atma vidya.11 I also see a link between the poetic vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins and that of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, who presents his understanding of art in a series of lectures published in a book entitled Personality. The term “personality” in the thought of Tagore relates to a deep sense of being that is not the ego but lies at the level of an inner Self that is a Divine Presence. 12 St. Paul, in turn, speaks of nature—and indeed the whole of creation—as groaning and travailing. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:19, 22–24)
This suffering that we find in creation is part of a cosmic process of transformation, often referred to in Buddhism as dukkha. In Christian art this suffering is understood as a form of empathy: a doorway leading to a new understanding of the inter-connectedness of all forms of life. The condition of being wounded has both an ecological and a social dimension (see color plate 4, Healing the Wounded Penitent). In India there has been a great deal of reflection related to what is called “Dalit Theology.” The term dalit (as we shall see below) implies one who is crushed like the earth itself—broken by the cultural realities of a social order that enslaves and marginalizes those who are exploited.
11 See chapters on “Indian Aesthetics” (43–54) and “Experience: First and Final” (82–6). 12 See Tagore, especially chapter 2, “The World of Personality.”
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A wound—a physical or mental injury—is the way that we understand the human condition of suffering. In the book of Genesis, the Lord God curses the serpent: “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). The word “bruise” implies a wound caused by crushing. In Jeremiah we are told: For thus says the Lord: Your bruise [hurt] is incurable And your wound is grievous. There is none to uphold your cause No medicine for your wound No healing for you. (30:12)
And yet in Isaiah we hear: But he was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole And with his stripes we are healed. (53:5)
XII Wonderful
Wound
We speak of a “gaping wound.” In that sense a wound represents an opening, or gap. We might even relate it to the concept of the womb. The womb can turn into a wound. And yet even a wound can become the sign of a “birthing process.” A hymn says: “Hide me in your wounds, O Lord.” There was a medieval devotion to the five wounds of Christ. We sometimes find these five wounds of the crucified Lord represented in a kind of mandala. On the circumference of the circle we find the extremities of the crucified body of Christ—as in the image of the “Vitruvian man” who, with arms and legs extended, is depicted as touching the outer circumference of an all-containing circle. Here we find the nailed palms of the extended hands, and the soles of the feet, which are also nailed together. The fifth wound is at the very center of the body, as in the pierced side of the Lord, whose body was “opened” by the lance of the soldier. According to the Gospel of St. John, this fifth wound is at the heart, from which also flows both blood and water, which together symbolize the life-giving elements (19:34).
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Figure 10 . Birth in the Cave , 2007. Acrylic on handmade paper, 18” Author’s collection.
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× 26”.
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The body is like a vessel, and the wounds are like openings into that body through which the life of the body flows out. Another way of looking at this image is to say that the body is a fountain. At the center of the fountain is a spring, and this spring gushes out in four directions, each of which can be understood as a source. And so there are five sources of life in the fullness of the body. The wound is thus conceived of not only as an injury but also as a source of outpouring life. The wound is equated with the vessel of life—the fountain from which all that is living has its source (see color plate 5, Fire Seed/Wound). The wound is the ultimate mystery. As suggested by the figure “Birth in the Cave,” the wound is like a cave—a guha. By association, the term guru (teacher) can itself be understood as a person bearing such a mystery: he is wounded in that he is burdened or impregnated with light. In Vedic tradition, this wound (which is also the container of light) is called KA, which indicates the question “What?” 13 Thomas, the disciple of Christ who doubts, is invited by the Risen Lord to “put a finger into the wounds of the Saviour—the hand into the side of the pierced Lord, and believe!” XIII Jesus
the Dalit
Jesus is the “rejected stone” which is finally chosen as the “cornerstone” that holds the whole edifice of creation together (Matt. 21:42). Jesus is both the healer and the person who is himself wounded and abandoned by society. He is betrayed not only by Judas but by all his disciples who run away, leaving him to die on the cross. Only some of the women and his beloved disciple (who remains mysteriously nameless) accompany him to the foot of the cross (see color plate 6, Traversing the Heart ). On the cross, the dying Jesus cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ” It is in the process of dying 13 The term “Ka” meaning “Who?” or “What?” appears as a refrain in the creation myth of Rig Veda 10.121. The name “Ka” was later applied to Prajapati, the active Creator who reflects on “the hidden, or unknown Creator,” also understood as the “Golden Germ.” Wendy Doninger O’Flaherty, in a commentary on the Rig Veda, writes: “ ‘Who?’, Ka, is the name of the Creator . . . explicitly said . . . to have been given to Prajapati . . . The original force of the verse is speculative: since the Creator preceded all the known gods, creating them, who could he be? . . . The Creator in this hymn is called Hiranyagarbha, a truly pregnant term. It is a compound noun, whose first element means “gold” and whose second element means “womb, seed, embryo, or child” (26).
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that Jesus enters into that empty, forsaken space in which the whole of Creation finds its meaning and fulfilment. It is this space or Sunya (Sanskrit for “emptiness” or “void”) 14 that is also described as the Tao or the Way. Thirty spokes converge on a single hub, But it is in the space where there is nothing That the usefulness of the cart lies. Clay is moulded to make a pot, But it is in the space where there is nothing That the usefulness of the clay pot lies. Cut out doors and windows to make a room But it is in the spaces where there is nothing That the usefulness of the room lies. Therefore, Benefit may be derived from something, But it is in nothing that we find usefulness. (Lao Tzu No. 11)
XIV The
Dalit Madonna
The icon of the primordial Mother has occupied a very central place in the human imagination. The mother represents the all-encompassing sphere into which the newly born person is received. She represents a kind of vessel in which the life of a future consciousness is nurtured. On the one hand, she enshrines an emptiness that leaves space for the divine to enter the human heart and home; and yet she also embodies a fullness that gives form and substance to a new revelation, or epiphany. In one sense, she is like the doorway that leads into the shelter. She is also the inner courtyard, which is both open to the skies above and enclosed by walls all around. Here, in the typical village household, many of the intimate tasks of the home are performed, such as the storing and preparing of provisions and food for the family. Here the grain is pounded and made ready for cooking on the family hearth. The figure of the Mother is intimately associated with the harvest and the preparation of food. The feminine embodies a practical
The Sanskrit word Sunya is related to Punya, the fullness which is a blessing. Thus, for example, in the Buddhist idea of Buddah’s begging bowl, the emptiness of the bowl is also that from which all creatures are fed. Ananda Coomaraswamy saw in this image a link with the Christian understanding of the Holy Grail. 14
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Figure 11. Dalit Madonna, 1978. Black ink drawing, 6”× 8”. Author’s collection.
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wisdom without which the life of the community would not be possible. But there is also a profoundly contemplative aspect to this maternal presence. She not only nurtures and sustains, she also embraces and adores. In that function she is like the household shrine. She gives a shape and orientation to all that is most spiritual in the human soul. The longing for a reality that reaches beyond the mundane and worldly is given a form, too, by the figure of the Mother. Contained within this complex image of human opposites—such as fullness and emptiness, practical cares of the home and profound spiritual aspirations—is a certain native humility. The word “humility” derives from “humus”—i.e., coming from, and belonging to, the earth. This concept is also implied by the term dalit, which has at its root the word dal, meaning the earth. At this juncture, one might ask whether it is possible to speak of a Dalit aesthetics. The word “aesthetic” seems to imply the refined and expensive. It carries with it all the trappings that characterize a leisured and elitist lifestyle. This world of the dominant and privileged is often described by the word lalit, which means refined. We are familiar with the institutions known in India as Lalit Kala , or “Fine Art.” Lalit implies playful, in a way very close to lila, which in Sanskrit means “play,” “sport,” “pastime,” “amusement.” In contrast, dalit means “broken,” “split,” “torn apart,” “scattered,” “trodden down,” “crushed,” and “destroyed.” The Dalit ki mata (“Mother of the Dalits”) is a term now often applied to Mary. She is a woman who is typically taken for granted, not recognized. Nevertheless, she becomes the vessel for a new hope in humanity. She is humble, homely, but also the bearer of another kind of wisdom, another concept of fullness. The image of the “Dalit Madonna” helps us in discovering an inner journey towards spiritual wholeness—a journey which has been very important in the Hindu tradition—while simultaneously affirming a concern for the outer problem of what we are doing to our environment and to a society that depends so much on its natural resources. The image of divinity in feminine form has been a very important aspect of Indian folk imagination. Too often Christian imagery has focused on the masculine representation of the divine, leaving out the spiritual importance of the feminine figure. Indian art and culture has tried to conceive of spiritual reality in terms that include both feminine and masculine characteristics. This is an important aspect of
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Figure 12. Sorrowful Mary (meditating on the sign of Jonah, with the whale in her womb), 1987. Sketch for a picture in the series on the Song of Songs. Chinese ink on paper, 7” × 9.5”.
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yoga—namely, that it aims at realizing the conjugal coming together of the opposing life forces we find in nature. XV
The Feminine as Healing Space
Ultimately, yoga integrates the cosmic and meta-cosmic dimensions of spirituality. The yogic process is profoundly alchemical. It transforms the material and physical into something spiritual. What is dark and opaque is transformed into translucency and light. It is in this context that yoga has been understood as being related to the sun and to an inner awakening that brings life and light to nature. We find this process described through myths as the marriage of heaven and earth, the light of the sun, and the material substance of our life here on earth. The ancient story of Savitri, daughter of the Sun, draws on several folk legends from the oral tradition. 15 In this myth, Aswapati, a childless king who ruled in North India, prays with his wife for a child, offering oblations to the Sun through the Gayatri Mantra. As a result the queen conceives, but the goddess Gayatri (who personifies the mantra)16 appears to the king and tells him they will have a daughter, not a son. The king is also told that the child is to be called “Savitri” (after the Sun who is addressed in the Gayatri Mantra as Tat Savitur, the one who awakens) and treated in every way as equal to any male. When the girl is born, she is dutifully treated like a son and taught the Vedas. But when she grows up, nobody wants to marry her, as everyone is afraid of a woman who is so wise. Finally, one day she goes out in search of a husband in her chariot and in a forest finds a young man, the son of a blind hermit who later turns out to be a king. This boy is called Satyavan, meaning “the true one.” Savitri falls in love and decides to marry him but later discovers that one year after their marriage, he will die. So on their first wedding anniversary, when Satyavan is preparing to light the sacrificial fire, Savitri accompanies her beloved into the forest where he goes to cut wood for the fire. Suddenly
15 One version of this myth is found as a multiply embedded narrative in the Mahabaratha, Varna Parva, Section CCLXLI (Pativrata-mahatmya Parva) and continuing right up to section CCLXLVII. 16 Although the Sun is usually thought of as masculine in Hindu lore, in many tribal cultures it is pictured as feminine, whereas Chandra, the Moon, appears as masculine.
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overcome by exhaustion, he comes to rest his head on her lap, where he dies, cradled on the lap of his wife. 17 Yama, the Lord of Death comes to fetch him, and Savitri hands her husband over to Yama; yet she insists on following him to the underworld. Yama repeatedly tries to persuade Savitri to go back to life, but she refuses to leave her beloved Satyavan. Finally, when Yama reaches the lowest hell of his kingdom, he turns round to find Savitri there. Amazed at her unflinching fidelity, Yama tells Savitri she may ask of him whatever boon she wants, as she is his honoured guest. She asks for a child. He is delighted and grants her wish, but she replies that she cannot have a child without her husband. So Death reluctantly returns Satyavan to her, and Savitri brings him back to life. This myth, recounted again in great detail in an epic poem by Sri Aurobindo (see Ghose, Savitri), represents Holy Wisdom, “Daughter of the Sun,” who goes down to the underworld to recover her dead lover, a manifestation of primal man. It is much like a harrowing of hell but by a feminine figure in this case. Savitri is Shakti, the primal energy of light that goes down into the underworld to recover the buried seed of life. That is how I have interpreted this myth in a series of paintings 18 in relation to the theme of the Song of Songs: “For love is strong as death” (8:5–6; see Mariaselvam). Sri Aurobindo has termed this journey of descent “integral yoga,” a discipline to be distinguished from the yogic ascent into spiritual wisdom. This is, rather, a downward movement into the unconscious, reminiscent of the orientation of Jungian psychotherapy. It recovers wisdom from the depths. There is a fundamental link, of course, between the womb that gives life and the tomb to which the body returns after death (see Sahi, Child and Serpent 35–44). We find this profound sense of the maternal space of the Cosmos reflected in many aspects of Indian symbolic thought—all of which brings us back to the significance of the cave, or guha, as a space within Mother Earth that is both a source of life-giving waters and an entry into the underworld. It is in that sense that the cave also represents a wound that needs to be healed. 19
17 The image of Satyavan lying on the lap of his bride brings to mind Michelangelo’s Pietà, with Jesus lying on the lap of his young mother. 18 See Jyoti Art Ashram for my series of paintings depicting the myth of Savitri in relation to the Song of Songs (1988–1992). These canvases now belong to the Missions Prokura of the Jesuits in Nuerenberg. 19 Concerning the concept of guha as an image of space, see Bäumer.
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One may also detect a link between the underlying spirituality encountered in the “yoga of art” and the Franciscan understanding of “creation.” St. Francis of Assisi composed a “Canticle to Brother Sun” (1224–1225 CE) in which he gives expression to a vision of the complementary symbols we find in nature (see Leclerc). Francis composed this joyful greeting to creation in the form of a conjugal coming-together of Sun and Moon, Fire and Water, Earth and Sky. In this way he was drawing on ancient mythic themes, which he proceeded to interpret in a new humanistic way as Brother and Sister, part of the all-encompassing fraternity he sought to establish through his three Orders. Soon after receiving the stigmata, he concluded his canticle with a greeting to Sister Death, a figure no longer to be feared but rather welcomed as a friend. A similar spirit can be found in the poetry of the Indian mystic Kabir. Kabir came from the Sufi tradition, but he also embraced the bhakti marga (path of devotion) of Hindu medieval saints. In the spiritual vision of Kabir there is a deep humanism that rejects the narrow asceticism of those Hindu monks who saw the world only as illusory and a source of temptation. He sings: “In the home is the true union, in the home is enjoyment of life; why should I forsake my home and wander in the forest? If Brahma helps me to realize truth, verily I will find both bondage and deliverance in the home” (xl). In the thought of Kabir, spirituality is about receiving and welcoming. It is here also that one might find the essence of an ashramic spirituality, focused on the welcome of the guest into the home. Again Kabir says: “There is one thing in the world that satisfies, and that is meeting with the Guest.” The guest who comes to the home is another name for the divine person who visits the human habitation. In the book of Revelation, the Lord says: “Look, I am standing at the door, knocking. If any of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share his meal, side by side with him” (3:20). The image of the home is very much associated with the idea of an opening into the inner chamber, be it a door or a window. It is through this opening that the divine enters the human. In the Song of Songs we have a very mysterious image of the beloved who comes knocking at the door in the night: I hear my beloved knocking: “Open to me, my sister, my love my dove, my perfect one, for my head is covered with dew, my locks with the drops of night . . .”
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My beloved thrust his hand Through the hole in the door; I trembled to the core of my being. (5:2–4)
There is a symbolic link between the cosmic significance of the home and the human body itself. Here one can find the essential seeds for an earth affirming eco-spirituality that reinterprets the “metacosmic” worldview of the mystics who strove to go beyond all forms and images, by affirming the human imagination as a kind of home to which the divine presence is invited as a guest. In the poetic tradition of Indian bhakti, the love of the soul for the divine is like the yearning of the heart for the beloved, who is invited to come into the inner space of Creation in order to transform it from within. It was in this spirit that the love poetry of the Bible, as we find it expressed in the Song of Songs, was interpreted by great mystics like St. Bernard of Clairvaux as describing the inner journey of the soul towards self-integration. XVI Conclusion In this essay, I have tried to link the image of the “cave of the heart,” a metaphor often found in Indian spiritual thought, with the figure of the wounded or pierced Jesus, who is also the wounded healer. My effort has been to bring together these various images of the “yoga of Jesus” and the “yoga of the heart” in relation to an emerging Dalit theology and a theology rooted in the land. These poetic metaphors are interrelated, though in a lateral, symbolic way. In the image of Jesus the Dalit who is symbolically linked to the image of the rock struck by Moses, I have represented the rock broken, or crushed. There is a complex system of imagery used in Christian liturgical texts that provides a basis for what is known as “typology.” Thus the rock struck in the desert, which yielded living waters, is seen as foreshadowing the pierced body of Christ on the cross. This rock is also the “stumbling block” or the “stone that the builders rejected,” which finally became the “cornerstone” of the arch that holds together the living edifice of the spiritual building of the Church.20
20 See Jyoti Art Ashram for images and discussions on Jesus as the stone that was rejected, Jesus the healer, Jesus the Dalit, Jesus the broken-hearted, Jesus living with people, etc.
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Some of these images can easily become stereotypes. Even the idea of the broken and rejected, which has an archetypal significance, may be too rigidly or exclusively applied, for instance, to those who are marginalized in society, hence giving such communities a kind of “label” which might actually prevent individuals from breaking away from their preconceived roles. In the same way, images of femininity, which I have often discussed in relation to ecological issues concerning our use of and attitude towards the land, can also become stereotypes of what it means to be a woman. Many feminists resent being reductively characterized as mere human fertility symbols. In my effort to connect the symbols of the womb, the cave of the heart, and the wound, I have tried to link symbols that are not just applicable to women or to natural forms but are part of a universal language of symbols. Indian culture has often been characterized as avoiding images of suffering or death. These diminishing factors of our existence have been understood as merely negative, or as part of what has been termed maya, or illusion. Imaginative forms in the Indian spiritual vocabulary have been largely concerned with the forces of life—the energy that gives birth rather than destroys. And yet in folk art, and even the art that is to be found in the Tantric (esoteric) traditions of India, the terrible and dark images of destructive energies have been represented often in connection with the feminine principle. Here the womb is also the tomb. Kali, the dark Mother who is also Time and the inevitable cycle of change in nature, is not rejected as “evil” in the way that the shadowy elements of life are represented in the Judeo-Christian tradition but rather as a necessary complement to the forces of life. Symbols are fundamentally ambiguous. To use them as ways of determining peoples or things is to abuse them. The seeming determinacy of images constitutes a fundamental problem, I feel, whenever we try to create visual or imaginative ways of depicting the experience of suffering. Representing the agony of the cross, for example, without including the signs that lie hidden in the suffering—the signs of a coming resurrection—would be just to glorify what is essentially a figure of corruption. The pierced and wounded body of Jesus would not be a source of life if it were not for an underlying theology of the healing power of the Savior. The rhythmic pattern of natural change that leads from growth to final disintegration and death would not be a redeeming sign if we did not also link it to a belief in transformation and the emergence of a new reality out of the old enclosing shell. Even the image of the golden egg, or germ, would be a glorified prison if
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we did not also affirm that there is a life and energy that breaks out of the shell. It is in that sense that the prophetic tradition always stressed the provisional and even inadequate nature of every symbol. The symbol is only a pointer. The moment it becomes a sign of identity, it becomes idolatrous and compromising. The image should empower people, and not limit or diminish their self-esteem. The womb is not just a physical function that makes some human beings into mothers: it is a source of life that transforms the meaning of every form of embodiment. In that sense every mandala, represented as an enclosed domain, is a symbol of the heart which, like the cave, both contains and frees the human being to love and self-surrender. It is in this sense that I have tried to understand yoga as a way of integration. It brings together what seem to be divided or opposed aspects of existence so as to point towards something that goes beyond what we understand as the dualities of the reality perceived with our present consciousness. Good and evil, light and dark, whole and broken, male and female—these are just names we give to the many distinctions that we draw between opposing factors. The importance of the imagination is that it conceives of a world where such divisions are only provisional, where there is a unity beyond duality that brings all beings into the One. Works Cited Amaladass, Anand, S.J. Philosophical Implications of Dhvani: Experience of Symbol Language in Indian Aesthetics . Publications of the Nobili Research Library 11. Vienna, Austria: Institut für Indologie, Universität Wien, 1984. Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Juan Mascaro. London: Penguin Books, 1962. Bäumer, Bettina. “From Guha to Akasa: The Mystical Cave in the Vedic and Saiva Traditions.” Concepts of Space, Ancient and Modern . Ed. Kapila Vatsyayan. New Delhi, India: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Abhinav Publications, 1991. 105–22. Brahmachari Amaldas. Yoga and Contemplation . Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Corporation, 2002. Ballo, Guido. Lucio Fontana. English . New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971. Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity . New York: Dutton, 1979. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. Ernest Rhys. London: J. M. Dent, 1906. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. The Dance of Shiva: Indian Art and Culture. New Delhi, India: Sagar Publications, 1987. Corbin, Henry. “ Mundus Imaginalis : Or, the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” Spring. Dallas TX: Spring Publications, 1972. 1–19. ———. The Voyage and the Messenger. Trans. Joseph Rowe. Berkeley CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998.
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Dechanet, J. M. Christian Yoga. Trans. R. Hindmarsh. New York: Harper Publishers, 1960. Dehejia, Harsha V. The Advaita of Art. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers, 1996. Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom . Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series 56. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Ghose, Aurobindo. The Synthesis of Yoga. Madras, India: Aurobindo Library, 1948. ———. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol . Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1950–51. Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Hiriyanna, M. Art Experience. Mysore, India: Kavyalaya Publishers, 1978. Hopkins, Gerald Manley. Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins . Ed. W. H. Gardner. 1953. London: Penguin Classics, 1985. Hume, R. E. “Isa Upanishad.” The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 2nd rev. ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. Jung, Carl G. The Integration of the Personality. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1940. ———. Symbols of Transformation. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956. ———. Psychology and Religion: West and East . Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Bollingen Series 20. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958. Jyoti Art Ashram . Ed. Jyoti Sahi. 29 June 2007
. Kabir. One Hundred Poems of Kabir . Trans. Rabindranath Tagore. London: Macmillan and Co., 1962 Lao Tzu. The Way and Its Power: A Study of the the Tao tê Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. Ed. and trans. Arthur Waley. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1956. Leclerc, Eloi, O. F. M. The Canticle of Creatures—Symbols of Union. Trans. Matthew O’Connell. Chicago IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977. Mariaselvam, Abraham. The Song of Songs , and Ancient Tamil Love Poems . Analecta Biblica 118. Rome, Italy: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1988. Matus, Thomas. Yoga and the Jesus Prayer Tradition . Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Corporation, 1992. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, trans. and annot. Rig Veda: An Anthology: One Hundred and Eight Hymns . New York: Penguin Classics, 1981. Painadath, Sebastian, S. J. Das Sonnengebet. Munich, Germany: Missio, 1994. Panikkar, Raimundo, ed. The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1977. Ravindra, Ravi. The Yoga of the Christ in the Gospel According to St. John. Dorset, England: Element Books Limited, 1990. Sahi, Jyoti. The Child and the Serpent: Reflections on Popular Indian Symbols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. ———. Stepping Stones: Reflections on the Theology of Indian Christian Culture. Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Corporation, 1986. Tagore, Rabindranath. Personality: Lectures Delivered in America . London: Macmillan and Co., 1933. ———. Sadhana: The Realization of Life. London: Macmillan and Co., 1932. Vatsayan, Kapila, ed. Concepts of Space Ancient and Modern . New Delhi, India: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1991. Wilhelm, Hellmut. Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching . Trans. Cary F. Baynes. London: R. K. P., 1961.
ON SPIRITUALITY AND ORGANIZED RELIGION: CONVERSATIONS WITH Raghu Ananthanarayanan Āe following is a transcription of the discussion held at the Bangalore Conference, “Crossing Hearts: Āe Inter-Religious Imagination” (2–3 June 2007), between yogic teacher Raghu Ananthanarayanan and several conference participants: Richard Kearney, Catherine Cornille, Siddhartha, James Morley, Jyoti Sahi, Julia Feder, Simon Sleeman, Mary Anderson, R. Rajaram, Shelley Hubele, and Kendra Bradner. Āis piece was kindly transcribed by Jessica Locke. Richard Kearney : It is an honor to have you with us here in Bangalore, Raghu. As someone who has practiced yoga for decades with the great masters, Krishnamacharya and Desikachar, before becoming a teacher and writer of yoga in your own right, I would like to begin by asking you what you think about the idea of your native India as a “spiritual laboratory.” Āis notion has been suggested at this meeting by our host, Siddartha, and several other participants. Āe fact that India has not had the tradition of dogmatic, theocratic religions, as he says, has meant that it has developed an open-ended dialogue on matters spiritual and religious for millennia. Perhaps your own experience and search are a microcosm of this heritage of tolerance, dialogue, and seeking that some would claim is unique to this Indian continent? Raghu Ananthanarayanan : I will start by telling you a story that has been on my mind for a long time. Āe story is about a yogi who was sitting under a tree meditating, when all of a sudden two cranes came by and started mating, making raucous noises and enjoying themselves. For the yogi this was too much to bear, so he turned around and hurled them an angry look. To his surprise his look burnt them. Exulting over this newfound power, he went to the nearby town where he used to go begging for food, as ascetics are required to do. He went to the home that he usually visited on his rounds, and the lady of the house made him wait. When she arrived with food for him, he glared at her, but the woman responded to the yogi’s glare with a delightful
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Tamil phrase, “Kokena Kandayo Konganava” (“Oh mendicant, why do you look at me as though I were a crane? ”). Āis comment immediately humbled him. “How did you know this?” he asked. “If you want to discover how I have this ability to perceive,” she replied, “go and talk to the butcher down the road.” Intrigued, the yogi went to find the butcher in the crowded marketplace. As the yogi approached him, the butcher said, “You’re the guy who burnt the cranes with your glare. Later, when a woman looking after her sick husband and cranky child was delayed in bringing you some offerings, you started glaring at her as well. It was she who urged you to come and meet me.” Āe yogi was completely taken aback by this, and asked the butcher to teach him the art of true meditation. Āis is a profound story in that it brings to light an unusual notion of heroism. In different traditions you have different types of people who are regarded as heroes. In the Chinese tradition, the wandering monk is a hero. Āere is a Chinese classic called “Āe Monkey” about the adventures of a wandering monk as he comes to India to collect the ancient texts of the Buddha. Āe Chinese tradition is full of lovely paintings that show one solitary person walking across a vast landscape. In the West, the hero is typically whoever wins by the sword. But in India, the householder is the hero. And the person who can answer all questions on spirituality is the householder and the king, a janaka. Janaka is not a title that is given to anybody. A janaka is a king who lives in a way that brings together the pragmatic and the philosophical simultaneously. He is a person who can live with all the wealth and power in the world, and yet live in a way that is truthful and honest, in constant meditative awareness. Āe householder also plays a key role. Take, for instance, one beautiful story from the life of Shankaracharya, the famous Hindu philosopher and saint. Āe story is about a debate he was having with Mandana Mishra, when suddenly Shankara was challenged by Mishra’s wife. He found out he was unable to continue the debate without first living as a householder. Shankara had to go through the process of living as a householder before he could even speak. To me this is a fascinating idea, and I discovered why it’s so important to me. When I graduated from college, I wondered what I should do in the world. I had pretensions of being an artist. I had many artist friends who had influenced me. One evening, as I sat alone reflecting about life, I felt absolutely at peace with myself. I thought I should go away to the Himalayas; but suddenly I heard a voice in my mind that said, “You actually don’t understand
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because you haven’t lived in the world of samsara (the ocean of sorrow and chaos that is the nature of our world).” I now recognize the deep importance of this insight. Another idea I’m still trying to understand is from the Dhammapada (a book of pithy statements made by the Buddha). Āere’s a beautiful discourse on how man experiences fear and hurt, and how man seeks to take refuge from fear and hurt. But what are the shelters he goes looking for? Man seeks refuge in wealth, in other men, in knowledge, and in the idea of God. Āe text goes on to say that the hollowness of the shelters of the first and second kinds becomes apparent very quickly because man discovers that whatever wealth he has will not get him beyond the reach of sorrow, nor will other men get him beyond sorrow. Āe other two refuges are based on belief, and are therefore much more difficult to move beyond. The worst is the idea of God, because it creates deep illusion and provokes violence. It is only when you give up these beliefs, and walk the path of understanding your sorrow directly, that you can touch and alter sorrow. I think this is a profound insight. I keep repeating it to myself in an effort to understand it better. I believe that if more people try to understand this path, we may have a new generation that can live well, and a world in which it is possible to live! My life has been deeply influenced by some of the remarkable people I have met over the years. I’ve had the tremendous fortune of spending quite a bit of time with J. Krishnamurti, for instance. I met him, Sri Desikachar, and Yogacharya Krishnamacharya at the same time. This was a profoundly significant time for me. I’d been through a very difficult period in my life—my family had suffered a series of tragic events resulting in the loss of all our wealth and reputation. My first meeting with Krishnamurti was rather unsettling and intriguing. When my wife introduced me to him, he said, “I have just a few minutes to talk to you.” I came to him with what I thought were profound questions. But every time I asked him a question, I already knew the answer because I had read a book of his, or heard a lecture that contained the answer. Every time I asked him a question, he would turn around and say something as simple or down to earth as “What’s your name? ” “My name is Raghu.” Again, I’d think of another profound question, to which I already knew the answer, and he would just turn around and say, “Where do you work, sir? ” Once I told him where I worked, he asked, “Do you work very hard? ” By this time he was laughing, my wife was laughing, and I was laughing. Āat was the end
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of the meeting, and yet what I learned was profound. What struck me was that I didn’t know Krishnamurti at all, and I still don’t. When I read his books, I read my mind into his words, and I say I understand. But what do I understand? I just understand my mind. And every time I read it, I seem to understand it differently. So what have I really understood? After this meeting, I started reading books and listening to teachers very differently. Āe second time I met with Krishnamurti he said, “Much of what you’re talking about is just a consequence. Just look at the fact that you felt very hurt and let down by your father. Can you deal with your feeling of being hurt?” Shortly after that meeting I happened to read a statement attributed to Lao Tzu that said, “Listen with a listening in which the other becomes what he is meant to be.” Āe only time that I’ve ever experienced such listening is when I’ve spoken to Krishnamurti (or Krishnaji as we call him). And it’s really an extraordinary experience. I’ve also been with him in small group meetings. I’ve found this to be rather revealing, because whenever I am with him and have a question that is part of an ongoing conversation, he will answer me. But when he’s talking to somebody else and I have a question, he will not answer me. If I’m not in the here and the now, he’s not there with me. And that’s left me with the constant motivation to get back to that space, and to listen to others in that space. Two other major influential figures in my life have been Sri Desikachar and Yogacharya Krishnamacharya, my yoga teachers. I met them at about the same time as I met Krishnaji, and the entire experience has been life changing for me for several reasons. One is that I come from a Brahmin family, but I later found out that I am, more precisely, a brahma-bandhu. Being a brahma-bandhu means belonging to a clan of people who are supposed to be Brahmins. Later, when reading the Dhammapada, I discovered what being a Brahmin meant. Here the Buddha brilliantly describes a Brahmin not as a member of the highest priestly Hindu caste—as is normally assumed—but as a person who is in touch with the ultimate reality underlying all phenomena. Except for Krishnamurti, and maybe a couple of others, I don’t think there are any Brahmins at all in this world. But there are a lot of people who claim to be through some sort of adherence to ritual and tradition. It is part of the Brahmin tradition that a male child at the threshold of puberty is initiated to the ritual practice by going through the Upanayanam, or “thread ceremony.” I was put through this when I was twelve or thirteen years old. My father thought we
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should take a whole set of people to a very famous shrine on a hill in Tirupathi, not very far from Chennai. I went through the holy ceremony, and I was supposed to pray to the sun three times a day. I kept asking everyone around me, “Please tell me what is the significance of this. If you don’t tell me what it means, I’m not going to do this.” Nevertheless, I did the prayers for one year—that was my promise. But nobody taught me what it meant, so I stopped doing it, and I stopped wearing my holy thread. I stopped doing it, until I met Sri Krishnamacharya. When I started studying with him, what I found most interesting was talking about the spiritual scriptures with him. He would interpret the Bhagavad Gita. He would interpret the Yoga Sutras. He would talk about the Upanishads. And there was nothing he said that seemed to me to contradict what Krishnaji said. Āe way he would explain the Bhagavad Gita and the way he would look at the Yoga Sutras was to show how outer practice in harmony with inner visualization is deeply cleansing and energizing. So I started wearing the holy thread once again for some time and saying all the prayers because there was really a beautiful meaning to it, the way it is done, the structure of it. Ultimately I discovered that it just has to do with how you cleanse your mind, and what you affirm of yourself, and how you meditate. Another eye-opening experience with Sri Krishnamacharya was this: Mrs. Skelton had brought a group of students from the United States down to India. Āere were also Muslims who would come to Desikachar’s school, and people from all over the world. Somebody raised this question: “When we teach non-Hindus chanting, can we teach them the word Om, or not?” The Yogacharya swiftly turned around and asked us, “Do you believe that the word Om is a sound that expresses the divine within, that which lies beyond all description and form?” We all said, “Indeed, we do.” Āen he asked, “Don’t you believe that everything under the sun is of this essence? ” “Yes, of course.” Turning back to the person who had raised the question, he simply replied: “How, then, can you even ask this question, when you know already that you’re dealing with a person whose very own essence is the word Om?” Intriguing reply, coming from a person like Sri Krishnamacharya. Yogacharya Krishnamacharya and Sri Desikachar, his son, were my yoga gurus. Āere were two or three very important yoga teachers who brought yoga back to prominence in India. One of them is Sri Krishnamacharya, and his three best-known students are Desikachar,
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B. K. S. Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois—though each has a different style. You also have the Brahmachari School, the Yogendra School, the Shivananda School, and the Satyananda School. Āese are broadly the main schools, but there are all other kinds of variations and distortions. Krishnamacharya was very traditional and well-read, a so-called “Hindu” representative of one of the sects of Brahmanism. He was a master of yoga, and a master of Sankhya, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Visheshika, and Nyaya philosophies. Many of his explanations and the ways in which he dealt with the ideas of Indian thought were rooted in tradition yet refreshingly insightful because they were rooted in a deep understanding of human sorrow and meditative practice. Another major influential factor in my life has been the experience of working with T-Group learning and Encounter Group learning. How I came to this is curious. When I was doing some organizational consulting with a group of engineers (I am, by the way, also an engineer), a friend mentioned how I ought to get involved with a group of people who were pioneering encounter groups in India. Āere was an article in the paper by one of the luminaries in this movement at that time on how the ancient Indian philosophy of Sankhya and Western psychology were related. I wrote back to him and said, “You have probably studied Sankhya in English because you’ve misinterpreted some of the key words.” I didn’t know that he was a professor. So he wrote back to me and said, “Why don’t you come over to this workshop and we’ll have a discussion? ” I discovered that his workshop was indeed fascinating—that the Yoga Sutra, Sankhya, and what these people were talking about were, for me, exactly the same. I began to understand the Yoga Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita much better by working with what he was saying. Yoga is ultimately about the transformation of the mind—how can I see reality clearly, “as it is”? Jessica Locke: Could you place the Yoga and Sankhya philosophies in perspective? Raghu Ananthanarayanan : Āese philosophies are not really part of the Vedic tradition, but they’re not really non-Vedic either. Āey’re somewhere in the middle. In some parts they refute the Vedas, in other parts not, but they are fundamental philosophies. Sankhya teaches about what is reality, what is the world. Sankhya talks about manifestation and evolution. If I have to place Sankhya and Yoga in relation to each other, it goes something like this: at a certain point in time, there is a thesis-antithesis-synthesis of doctrines: Poorva Pak-
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sham, Prathi Paksham, and Siddhantham. Let’s just call them points of view. One point of view, the Vedic point of view, says that this world is not real; the other says the world is real. What I need to do is live in such a way that my next life will be beautiful. I have to sacrifice and do these ceremonies, and there are all these gods and goddesses. If I propitiate them well and gain merit, I will go to the other world and be reborn with all the positive fruits of this effort, and ultimately go to heaven or merge with God. Āe opposite view is that there is only what you see. It’s a very materialist philosophy, called the Charvaka philosophy, which teaches that only what you see is real. There’s only earth, fire, water, and air. Everything you see can be explained by a mixture of these elements. Since you know that life is going to end with death, the purpose of life is to maximize pleasure. What comes in the way of pleasure is fear, so you must learn how to maximize pleasure and minimize fear. Āe teacher who best epitomizes this school of thought is Shukracharya, while Brihaspathi is the great teacher of those who believe in the other world and rebirth. Āese two worldviews are in some sense perennial! Āe hedonistic, materialistic, pleasure-seeking philosophy on the one hand and, on the other, a philosophy much like every other sanctioned religion, where you have a proxy sitting on top who says, “Show me obedience and sacrifice, and I’ll show you the way to God.” So Sankhya comes in and says, “If it’s so easy to go to heaven by just following rituals, then why is the person who is doing all these yagnas (fire rituals) wasting his time here? Why doesn’t he just jump into the fire so he can go straight to heaven? Does the belief not say that the Fire God is the messenger who takes all the prayers and offerings to the gods?” And then Sankhya looks at the other philosophy and says that there are too many things materialism cannot explain by just talking about the material mixtures. So Sankhya is the first philosophy that says there is sorrow, there is a way out of sorrow, and the way out of sorrow is to develop an insightful discrimination between the tangible, the intangible, and the seer who is distinct from both. The only difference between the Yoga and Sankhya philosophies is that Yoga brings in the idea of God. It refers to God as intelligence, whereas Sankhya makes no reference to God at all. Yogacharya Krishnamacharya says, “In Sankhya there is no mention of ishvara, but in Yoga there is mention of ishvara as intelligence.” Furthermore, my experience with group work has been that it comes very close to the Upanishadic idea of discovering truth. Āere is a very interesting passage in the Upanishads, for instance, that describes
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dialogue. It describes dialogue as Sakala, Sahrdaya, Samvada . Sakala, the first term, means that all my faculties are open to receiving. The second, Sahrdaya, means a harmony or resonance of the heart. And the third, Samvada, means dialogue. So the entire discovery of truth is through this process. What happens in a group setting is the creation of a context in which you can discover your own truth through a process of dialogue. Today I find that I can only really describe group processes through Sankhya and Yoga. Other ways of talking about it don’t convince me as much. So these are the ideas and practices I’m working with. I apply this inquiry and approach to everything, including organizational development. Most of my ideas in organizational development come from conversations with Ganapathi Sthapati, who is a traditional temple builder. While talking about the essence of his tradition, he once said, “the divine is constantly revealing him or herself through beauty. And every time we human beings discover beauty within ourselves, we touch divinity. You may touch divinity by discovering rhythm and order in words through poetry, in the body through dance, in sound through music, in form through sculpture, in space through architecture, and in thought through mathematics. Āese are the six paths for encountering the divine through rhythm and harmony. The offering you make in a temple is beauty, just plain beauty.” Āis, to me, is a marvelous way of describing the six ways to the divine, which is much better than the way through the proxy at the top who has to show you the divine. I don’t like that path. Āis way, you don’t have to pay anybody or give up autonomy. Āis makes a lot more sense and is completely compatible with yoga and self-reflexivity.1 1 There is one other strong influence I use in my work as an organizational consultant, which is the Vaastu basis of design. Āe Vaastu shastras are the traditional Indian approach to design. In the Vaastu tradition, the basis of design rests on three anchors. The first is functionality: what is the need-use of this design? The second is aesthetics: what will make the design beautiful? Āe third is Ramayam: what will awaken a meditative, inward evocation? And if a design doesn’t have these three factors, it isn’t a complete design. Āis is of interest because when I go into organizations, I’m designing for people, but the entire debate is around effectiveness and efficiency. The person who has to create this effectiveness and efficiency is usually left out. If the third anchor of design—the inner evocation—is not brought in, then whom are you designing for? Āe entire process becomes dry and instrumental. Today I’m also reading more and more papers about spirituality and organizations. Āis is a mixed bag of ethical and humanistic approaches and individual practices. A key criterion, for me, in designing an organization is that every person should experience creativity. Design is not just about how something works. Āe whole process (and
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Siddhartha: Thanks, Raghu. I think you’ve given us a flavor of many things that you have been struggling with, reflecting on, bringing in yoga and organizational development. To use the word Hinduism, this is a liberative way of using Hinduism, showing that Hinduism is a space, a spiritual laboratory. It’s not a defined religion. I think that what you’ve said shows one way to carry this process ahead, connecting with the traditions of this country, connecting it with your work with Encounter Groups and organizational development. Raghu Ananthanarayanan: Just a word on this notion of Hinduism. I have a feeling the problem is very simple. Āe problem is that in India I don’t think we ever make an effort at defining ourselves. We live, and we live in harmony, and we believe in certain things. Most of what is called “yoga” comes from a tradition that says, “the harmonizing of what is in the self and what is outside is the way.” A tradition that comes up with this kind of statement will not leave behind artifacts. Religions that say we must take on some kind of form in order to attract and capture power will continuously create artifacts and rituals, whereas this yogic tradition will only create meditative practices. In meditative practices, in every form, at every level, and in the other, there is God, and I don’t have to do anything special beyond this. It may be easy for a Protestant fundamentalist to come along and say, “You haven’t given them what you’ve promised to give, so I’m going to give them what they want. I’m going to teach the way to heaven.” And if someone comes along and makes all these promises to you in a vociferous way, you’re going to give them a chance. So it’s very difficult for any original people, any original form of thought, ever to defend itself against what another person who comes along says about it. Hinduism, and the word Hindu itself, is not even Indian. Āe word Hindu comes from the other side of the Indus. It was the Jesuits who first codified Hinduism as a religion, when they first came here. It had not been codified before that. What mattered before were only the rules and ethics of being human. So actually the term sanathana dharma makes a lot more sense than Hinduism. Āe term Hinduism creates some difficulty because of its political connotations. Sanathana the output) doesn’t work if it doesn’t cause a person to become self-reflective. This is not always easy to achieve given the current thinking about business organizations. However, more and more people are becoming inclined to start a discussion on the subject, and a few ideas do get implemented.
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dharma, on the other hand, means whatever action will enable life to flourish. That’s the closest translation of sanathana dharma. Āe word dharma actually means to reinstate that which is fallen and to enliven that which is upright. Of course, the word itself is also used today to refer to religion—Abrahamic religions or whatever—and that’s a very sad thing. Jim Morley: I’d like to go back to the theme of ishvara because I think it’s central. It’s a central theme to your talk because you’ve selected several ancient and very traditional Indian traditions that are mostly atheistic. You mentioned Buddhism, Sankhya, of course Yoga, and J. Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti, of all people, was a great renouncer of religion, while at the same time advocating something of an existential philosophy of individual morality. Sort of a rejection of religion is what he went through, right? So his is a kind of atheistic spirituality. Krishnamurti and Desikachar, the yoga teacher, were great friends and were very humbled by each other. Āey had a very profound relationship, actually, and it was very historic, even. Āis has been a theme in my work because I’m constantly looking for a bond between religions that unites them but also distinguishes them. And it seems to me that when you get God and theologies and institutions out of the picture, and you focus on what people do, what they practice, especially their relationships to one another, there’s a lot in common. And I think what I’ve also discovered is that yoga is an inter-religion. It’s a spirituality that avoids the complications of institutionalized religions. Āat’s why Patanjali put it together. And Sankhya, of course, is a part of that picture. So I wonder if you might address the issue of atheistic spirituality more directly. Raghu Ananthanarayanan: Let me try. One of the things I’ve read, and I don’t remember exactly where, is that God is a dream of man. Āere’s a line in the Veda that says, “Maybe the Gods know, maybe they don’t know.” A crucial thing about so-called Indian spirituality is that, when it comes to ultimate matters, the meanings of key words and concepts are left quite fluid. Take a word like Brahma. As a child, you’re given an ideal picture of Brahma. Later you are told that “all that is alive and surrounds you is Brahma.” And later, when you start understanding the word on your own, you realize it simply means “that which is ever expanding.” I think that’s a beautiful description of the universe. Maya
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is another key word. Maya simply means “that which is born, and that which is dying.” I think that’s a fabulous description of the world as we see it, because the moment we’ve seen the world, it’s already gone. What I find intriguing about the Hindu scriptures is that everything has the possibility of being understood self-reflectively. Every word has a huge breadth and depth of meaning. So the first time you chant Om, you chant it and they tell you, “ Om refers to tangible and intangible reality.” Āey tell you this, and also as you go along you are expected to discover what it means. You discover something more, and then the word becomes more profound, and then the word is just a signifier! It points to and triggers an inner state of meditative awareness! You take another word like lingam. Okay, what does the lingam mean? I have to admit I get angry when people say it is just a sexual symbol. Āis is not the right occasion to enquire why the “lingam” attracts so much sexually associated meanings. There are five lingams. What are the five lingams? Earth is a lingam because it signifies something much more profound that is beyond itself. Water is a lingam because it also signifies something profound beyond itself. Likewise, fire is lingam, air is lingam, and space is lingam. Āat’s it. It is simply a signifier of something incredibly more vast and primal. What is it pointing to? I don’t know. It’s a signifier of something way beyond words and imagination—God. What is the easiest way of signifying something? Drawing a line. Some of the temples that depict these lingams are beautifully designed. A temple which says “air is a signifier of God” has two lamps in the sanctum. One lamp is absolutely quiet; it’s a steady flame. The other lamp is placed so there’s a slight breeze that comes in, so the light flickers. That tells you there is air— something you can’t see directly but that you know because the flame flickers and it’s a signifier of God. And what is God? We keep coming up with different descriptions of God. Āe most beautiful is Krishna. Krishna is a God who grows with you. He is a playful toddler, a mischievous child, a vibrant adolescent, a heroic warrior, and a wise Guru. But when you delve deeper, you discover that the word Krishna simply describes the color of the sky when there’s no moon. It’s the depth of indigo that you see on a dark night: that is Krishna. I think that’s profound. So, does it appeal to the atheist or non-atheist? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Āe idea of God is very meaningful and healing, but you are meant to evolve out of the idea as you grow inwardly. Use it, but go beyond it; don’t get stuck.
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Simon Sleeman: Thanks, Raghu. I’d like to say that I didn’t find your response atheistic at all. In listening to you decide what to say next, I realized this is a matter of being attentive to something outside yourself, which I would describe as attentiveness to the spirit. It’s that which is likely to lead you to the closest truth, this attentiveness to the spirit. So I don’t find it atheistic at all! I think it’s profoundly faithful. Also what you say about the six paths, that the divine is revealed in beauty. I think this is absolutely true. Richard Kearney : My question is along the same lines. Āe last refuge of scoundrels is God, some say. Yoga provides, as you suggest, a way of dealing with sorrow, pain, and wounds—a way which many today embrace as a form of spirituality without God or religion. My question is this: Given the fact that in the world today there are so many billions of people who do believe in God or gods and who call themselves religious, is it possible—or feasible, or practical, or fair—to say to these billions of people that your last refuge is the idea of God, even if by doing so you are increasing your (and their) sorrow rather that decreasing it? In other words, is there a way in which one can bring that healing spirituality of yoga back to the religions and restore the life within them, rather than completely evacuating or voiding our contemporary world of the religious? I say this in two respects. One, because in much of Western philosophy, at the moment, there is what is called a “return of the religious” aĀer the Enlightenment. Not just in the political and practical sense—“We’ve got to understand Islam because we’re bombing and being bombed. We’ve got to learn about Hinduism and Buddhism because there are so many Hindus and Buddhists in the world today!” Āere’s also the return of a ghost that’s haunting us—a residual, remaindered, formerly repressed phantom of religion. A sense that there may be something valuable in what was being called the “religious” after all, even if we did need to pass through the purgative movements of modern critique and suspicion— Enlightenment atheism, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, feminism—in order to deconstruct the wounding and violent nature of religion. But we don’t necessarily have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So my question would be, is there a possibility in something like yoga of restoring the healing possibilities of spirituality to the religious? I ask this because in the West this can sometimes be problematic. For example, there’s a current tendency, certainly in North America, to think of yoga as a freewheeling spirituality without any religious or cultural
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context, where you develop a beautiful, healthy body and follow a collective fad that has now become a multi-million dollar industry. Āere is much more to yoga than that, of course, but it tends to be a New Age movement in that direction. “Regardless of what is happening in the wider world out there, I pursue my own inner journey and make sure my calves and abs are well toned for my holiday in the Bahamas.” Āat sort of attitude. So, against such misuses or misunderstandings of yoga, is there a possibility of grafting the liberating and therapeutic side of yoga back onto some form of religion so as to reanimate the good within religion? Raghu Ananthanarayanan : I don’t really know the answer to this question, but let me just speculate along with you. I come from almost exactly the same position with respect to yoga as you are suggesting. Āat’s one of the reasons why in our school we teach one-on-one. We don’t teach in a group. Āis is because each person requires something different, at each point in time, to address his or her particular experience of sorrow at that time. We encourage prayer if the person has deep beliefs, inquiry if they are seekers and questioners, just regular asana and pranayama if they are not attracted to the deeper aspects of yoga. All of these methods are suggested in the Yoga Sutras (the aphorisms of yoga) as alternatives. Āe right practice is one that is both harmonious with the person and awakens his or her spiritual quest. Āat’s the purpose of the one-on-one teaching. At another level, the word religion itself—and Krishnaji has said this many times—is a beautiful word. It means to “bring together as one.” But what we’re discussing as “religion” is politics. And most forms of civilization are answers to fear of death, as you’ve been saying. I’m afraid of death, and I’m afraid of fear, so come and give me an answer. Before I’ve found out that this answer of yours is not real, you’ve made a lot of money, or you’ve made a position or you’ve made a status for yourself. And you hang onto that. Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in organized religion today is just an organized way for dealing with people’s fears, as though the high priests really knew. When I finished college, I was worried like hell. What am I going to do in life? I was overcome by all of these questions of meaning and the purpose of life. I didn’t want to go to America because if I did, I would have to go to a college that would give me a scholarship, mostly for research related to war, or arms, or something like that! So what do I do with my life? It was a choice I agonized over: what do I put my
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energy into, what can I bring alive in my life? I don’t think the heads of these religious bodies know the answers to these questions. Āe heads of state don’t know either. If Blair has made England a great country by selling thirty percent of his country’s arms in the Cayman Islands, don’t tell me he doesn’t know whom the guns are going to. And why is he doing this? It’s not so difficult to see what he’s doing; he’s contributing to war. If fifteen percent of the GDP of the world is going to war, it’s not such a difficult question to figure out how we can get everybody fed. Āere’s no question. Everybody knows the answer. It’s like Bob Dylan said, “It’s blowin’ in the wind.” It’s another struggle we have to deal with along with the idea of God. What do we do? I had a student once who gave me a small book. He said, “Read these statements. Can you tell me where they come from?” I couldn’t make out the difference between the Christian statements, the Sufi statements, the Zen statements, and the Upanishadic statements. Āey all sounded exactly the same. When the prophet started his work in Medina, he had to get a group of people going, believing in themselves, and he did a great job. Other people have used this and constructed all kinds of structures of organized religion around it and now they’re the biggest money-spinners in the world. So who’s going to stop them? Āe issue is not the billions who believe. It is the few who cynically manipulate fear and belief. Julia Feder : I’d like to go back to something you said earlier, Raghu, about your frustration with the interpretation of the lingam as a sexual symbol, and I have to say that’s a part of the Hindu tradition that I don’t really understand. I’m not trying to offend, I just am seeking greater understanding here. If the lingam is a signifier of something that is beyond, then what would the meaning of the yoni be in that context? Raghu Ananthanarayanan: Very simple—that’s another signifier. Just as you are a signifier, and I am a signifier. Yoni means the vulva. Āere is a whole Upanishad piece that talks about what is ecstasy. It starts by saying that the greatest kind of pleasure a young male can experience is sexual pleasure. And they multiply it by a hundred, increasing it up through various levels. We have no problem at all in Indian art with accepting that sex is a beautiful thing and that sex is human and that sex is God. Āere’s even a whole text in the Shaivite tradition that talks about various points of time when we can experience the stop-
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ping of the mind and transcend it. And one of them is when you have sex without worrying about things and just experience the immense pleasure of the embrace. Āere’s no guilt, there’s no issue attached to it. Āe other thing that is important to know is that in several of the so-called spiritual texts are a whole set of discussions about topics that would be categorized separately in a modern library. Āere are discussions about evolution and about the nature of time. And then there are other parts that talk about how to “keep your nose clean,” literally. And when Max Müller and other Indologists came to India, they talked about all of them as spiritual texts, and that’s the problem, because we haven’t categorized knowledge in that way in Indian tradition. We haven’t said, “Āis is science, and this is not.” We’ve simply said that all of this is real, and all of this is the way we look at life, therefore, right living comprises of the following…” Take the definition of time for example. The Yoga Sutras say that there is a subatomic particle that moves from a current position to the immediate next position, and this movement is time. It’s called a kshana. Āat’s the basic measure of time. But since this time cannot be measured, it goes on to say that the measure of time is based on more tangible movement. Āe same text then discusses change, impermanence, and sorrow caused by clinging to a mistaken idea of time. So it’s not that a sexual connotation doesn’t exist. It is not a central idea, yet it is not an impediment to spiritual inquiry or progress either. To me, Hindu thought reflects the belief that sex, as much as understanding all the scientific ideas, is a way to divinity. But calling the lingam only a sexual symbol is ridiculous. And lingam is a word that comes from Sankhya, where it refers to a whole stage of evolution and manifestation. Shelley Hubele: My question is a bit more conversational, I think. You spoke of religion as a situational phenomenon with someone telling you how to live your life and accepting money in order to do so, or as a way to hold off pain and suffering. I wonder, though, at what point does the experience of religion for those who are actually within the religion become valid, and if the ritual and communal and metaphysical understanding is valid, and the religion as such is spiritual and meaningful for the individual? Is that reconcilable with religion as you’ve presented it, as an institution? Raghu Ananthanarayanan: I have nothing against religion in the form of the practices. I practice some of them—I do my prayers every now
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and again, I do chanting. My wife believes in prayer, and she gets a lot out of it, and she practices yoga and all of the things I discuss. Āe issue has nothing to do with religion or religious practice. Āe issue has to do with organized religion and organized interpretation. I really have an issue with organized interpretation because it actually takes away from religious experience. For example, most Hindu rituals are very simple, everyday acts. I’m sure this is true of all rituals, but it is certainly true of Indian rituals. What you have in an Indian ritual is the concept that the purest fire is the fire the woman of the home cooks food with. So you actually bring the fire from there and place it in front of your deities. You use this fire in the prayer and rituals. You cook the simplest food that can be cooked in that particular season, and you place it in front of the deity. What is the offering and what is the ritual? Āe ritual is the quality with which you make the simplest things and the quality with which you offer it. This is blessed, because it is done with a meditative quality, it is just a simple action. Āat’s all. I’m supposed to do my rituals every morning just to remind myself to be able to pay that kind of attention to everything that I do. If I achieve this attentiveness, then all my acts are an offering to the Āou. Āere are times when people who do not have religion or ritual go through problems, because they do not understand and internalize inner boundaries. So religion as disciplined respectful practice is essential. But if I am left to myself to discover this, if my fear is not compounded by your explanations of how you can get me out of it, I can understand and overcome my fears. But you compound it for me by talking about heaven and hell, and I’m going to get stuck and become dependent on you both for the interpretation of reality, and to be my savior. Once I’m stuck, I suffer and you make the money. Āat to me is organized religion. I think that’s dehumanizing, whereas rituals and religion are not dehumanizing. Āey’re beautiful. Āey are the source of dance and music! Catherine Cornille: I’d like to continue this conversation also. Shelley asked what makes religion valid, and I’d like to ask what makes religion invalid. You said it is organized religion, but the phrase “organized religion” is a very imprecise one. What does it exactly mean? I think you being a disciple of Krishnamurti, and him showing you how to look at things, is a seed of organization which, with growth, becomes an organized religion. But then, within Hinduism you have a number of organized religions, and Christianity is an organized
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religion, even though it’s not really, it actually has a number of suborganized religions. So it’s very general to say organized religion is bad and the rest is good. I would like you to clarify precisely what is bad about organized religion and what, precisely, an organized religion is, because you affirm the importance of rituals, which are provided by organized religion. So where does that ritual that is of organized religion no longer seem to be helpful or constructive? And my question is really a deeper one with regard to Hinduism itself. What has always mystified me is whether there is a critical mass within the spiritual laboratory that is Hinduism. Is everything that is experimented with okay? Is there any kind of criterion within Hinduism that makes a particular guru illegitimate or a particular movement immoral? I’m sure there is no orthodoxy on this matter, so what I’m looking for is a general idea, I suppose. R. Rajaram : Āis is one of the most common questions that people who are trying to learn about Hinduism ask. Āere is, as you say, no real answer, but as a starter I would say that the first thing you really need to know is that even as we say that Hinduism is a great collective of many traditions, there is one category that helps conceptual clarity. It is an amalgam of great traditions and Vedic traditions. When we say great traditions, we do not mean it as an adjective. It is dominant and subaltern traditions. Some people in America say that Hinduism is essentially Brahmanism, and there is no such thing as non-Brahmanic Hinduism. But I think this is inaccurate. Āere is certainly some rubric of principles that can guide what you are doing within Hinduism, which would be your belief in the oneness of reality with the potential for plurality. And finally, there is the notion of Jivatma and Paramaatma, which would mean your individual soul and the cosmic soul. Though your perspectives are different, ultimately the goal is finding unity with the Paramaatma. Āen there are the four stages of life’s journey that are certainly notions that could be called Hindu. It’s a very irresponsible statement when someone says that in Hinduism “anything goes.” But within this rubric, there’s a lot of room for diversity of positions and plurality of perspectives. Raghu Ananthanarayanan: Let me add to what Rajaram has said. Āe word religion itself is problematic because that word has lost its original meaning. If you stick with the meaning that religion is that which brings the energies of the self together, then I think yoga and religion
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are the exact same thing. Yoga may be an excellent translation for the word religion and religion may be an excellent translation for the word yoga. But if I did that, then I’d be getting into a problem. So what do I do? Āe reason I went into yoga was because I was searching for the answer to some questions: What is Indian? What is India? I searched quite desperately. I traveled, I read a lot of Buddhism, I talked to a few people. What I found was that all of Indian religious thought agrees with the fundamental principles of yoga. Any religious thought you find in India will talk about yama (interpersonal ethic), niyama (personal discipline), some form of pranayama and samadhi (contemplation and meditation). Āere’s no Indian thought that doesn’t speak about all of this. Āe fundamental purpose of any of these practices is to be able to get into that state of meditation. What I find very strange is that people who have not experienced that state of meditation talk about what was said by other people in that state of meditation. For example, take Shankara. Shankara, in his state of meditation, explicated what is advaita. You have these quintessential statements in the Vedas. Shankaracharya in his state of meditation gave it one meaning, and another sage said another thing in his state of meditation. Do I know anything about it? I don’t. But all their followers keep fighting over the interpretation of their particular saint. I don’t understand this. So whenever those kinds of orthodoxies come in, I call it religion and I keep away. To me, organized religion is anything that somebody is talking about which they haven’t really experienced. Which is why I call them “proxies.” Āere is an important rule called apta vachana that says you should only listen to that person who behaves and reflects what he speaks about. So in the general Indian public, people don’t much care for gods, goddesses, this, that, and the other. Āey actually care more about living teachers. So they go to anybody who is a wise teacher. Āey’ll go to a Muslim or a Hindu saint because they think that he is someone who reflects truth. They’ll go to anybody who has a kind of saintliness about him. So the first rule is: Do you live by what you say? If you do, then I’ll listen to you. Āe second rule is you only take as evidence that which you have experienced directly. Everything else is provisional. So you listen to somebody, and you think that this person is making sense, but unless you experience something for yourself, do not take it as truth. When I first started working with my teacher, I would not ask any questions. I would just do what he told me to do. He would say,
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“Do this chanting.” I would do the chanting. He would say, “Do this asana.” I would do the asana. Āis continued until I became ready to ask questions, and finally after I’d been working with him for four or five years, he said, “Do you have any questions?” So I said, “I don’t understand what the word prana means.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll tell you the next time you come.” Āen I learned from Desikachar that the Yogacharya actually went and read up in his books again, and he answered me for three lessons. After that, I was extremely careful when I asked him a question. So, I could ask him any question I wanted, but unless I brought a certain quality to it, he wouldn’t answer it. To me, that gives another view on religion. Because if I move my body in certain ways, lift up my arms, put them down again, that is not yoga. It is yoga when I bring a certain quality to it, attention to my breath and attention to my body when I’m doing it. So in a sense it’s not that difficult to distinguish between what, for lack of a better word, we call spiritual and that which is organized religion. Organized religion, to me, is when an external force is telling you all sorts of things and doing things to make you believe. Inner search does not come from the outside. Any human being who calls himself a guru is not a guru. Āe word guru has nothing to do with the person. It’s the experience of ignorance being taken away. So when somebody sits there and claims, “I’m a guru,” he’s lying. What I find beautiful about Hinduism is that it has many alternative ways and interpretations. It has various methods and practices. It has its great temples and collective forms of worship, but it allows for individual discovery of truth. Maybe the awakening of the individual to walk the path and discover for him or herself is the central endeavor. Āat’s why I like Siddhartha’s term, “spiritual laboratory.” Siddhartha: Sometimes there’s a sense that the last two days have had a kind of unreality about them. As a global civilization, we are going headlong into self-destruction and, in a sense, ostrich-like, we are debating all these issues without awareness of what is happening around. Could it be because, at one level, we feel there is nothing we can do about it and we should just take care of our individual souls? Āis is a valid way of thinking. Perhaps that’s why we’re going about this discussion. We haven’t brought in the possibility that we could potentially self-destruct. We will have millions of global warming refugees in India and other parts of the world in the next twenty years. Perhaps the divisions between religions and all the particularities of
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each religion are really irrelevant. If religion means something, then it challenges that we can come together to deal with these common issues that we’re up against. And if we can’t come together on these common issues, then these religions aren’t worth their sod. Āey’re just talking about individual souls, and fear, and death, and nothing more. Maybe we should just face the goddess and be humble, and the goddess will say, “Who are you to decide whether the planet should survive or not? ” But part of me is seeing the unreality and the total, utter irrelevance of religions if they cannot respond to these challenges. In terms of what Christ stood for, what Gandhi stood for, what Ramakrishna stood for, what the Buddha stood for, it’s surprising that we do not see it fit to come together around these pressing issues and work together on the things that matter most. Āe three issues that I think matter most are personal transformation, social compassion, and ecological connectedness. Jyoti Sahi: I thought when we first came together for this meeting, we were interested in the thought of certain people like Abhishiktananda or Bede Griffiths, and the relevance they had. And the kind of definition of Hinduism that has been given here means that all that they stood for was complete nonsense. Because if they are trying to connect a Christian tradition or an Islamic tradition with the Hindu one, it appears that there is nothing there to connect. So I agree with what you’ve said that there are all kinds of falsities that can be found in institutions. I myself have been linked to the Quaker tradition, which tried to get away from institutions yet in the process became an institution. It hasn’t happened yet with Krishnamurti, but I’ve thought that even Krishnamurti schools risk becoming a form of church. So you can’t really say that you can get away from institutions. Āey are as good and as bad as we are as human beings. We are embodiments, and that is our problem. Jim Morley: Jyoti, I have to strongly disagree with you. I think you’re being unfair to the Quakers. Āe Quakers are a beautiful example of an institution that has worked very hard to keep a lot of the spirit without the trappings of institutions. Āey have not become an institution like other religious institutions have. Jyoti Sahi: But they have an influence as an institution. We are dealing with a group who call themselves Quakers; I have worked with them,
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and they are an institution. So if you are talking about institutional churches, they are among them. They might not define it, but there is something in it that is embodied. I feel that to imagine that religions or spirituality could not be embodied is a bit like saying that we all have to be angels. Jim Morley: You could say that the Quakers are a social body; they’re an organization. But they really do not have dogmas and doctrines that resemble in any way traditional Christian theology. And in a way, they actually come very close in practice to the Buddhist and Hindu versions of yoga. But I also want to respond to Catherine’s question about what is organized religion. To a professional theologian like yourself, some of our vocabulary may sound amateurish, and I acknowledge that. Let me try this. I’m going back to my old friend, Carl Jung. Jung has some good one-liners and one of them is, the purpose of organized religion is to protect the individual from ever having a sincerely religious experience. Āis is the same way in which political dogmas protect people from ever having a truly democratic experience. I think it’s an important challenge to dogmatic religion that we have to take up. Organized institutional religion has something inherently dangerous about it. Mary Anderson : My comment is in relation to what Raghu said, that every time one touches beauty in oneself, one touches the divine. Āat has been resonating in my mind, and originally it was as sort of a question about what you meant by these two words, oneself and the divine. As I’ve thought about it, what came to mind was the beauty of that statement having such ambiguity. You don’t really know what it means, that to find beauty in oneself is to touch the divine and that they’re exactly the same, or that they’re being named by different words. Somehow there’s a meeting between these two differences. I’d like to hear you talk more about what you understand that sentence to mean. But also following on the discussion of individual religious experience and institutions, I’d like to hold up that phrase and hold up the paradox or ambiguity between a meaning that could separate two things that are, in a sense, the same by the use of words. We seem to be doing that with individual religious experience, somehow attaching that to the mystical, as if it is somehow separate from the institution. But the institution itself can also be thought as the outgrowth of that individual or a larger collective that allows the individual to be an
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individual. So I’d like to hold that up as a kind of paradox, that if we reject the institutions, we’re rejecting something about the individual, or the possibility of institutions to help provide a collective for individuals coming together, and maybe we should not polarize the two. For me, that relates to the idea that when one touches beauty in oneself, one touches the divine. Raghu Ananthanarayanan: The way a sutra, or any specific statement, is supposed to be understood is through a hermeneutic process of shravanam, or listening; mananam, or thinking about and inquiring into it; and then nididhyasanam, which means deepening and developing the inquiry into an embodied practice. I think different statements stir us in different ways, and that has to do with who I am, what I am, what I listen to. But year after year I keep coming back to these lines about touching beauty within. What I’ve experienced is that there are certain points in time when I spontaneously feel beautiful. It could be in a relationship or in working, doing something. When I experience that, I don’t have any idea of a separation between myself and what is happening. There is a flow, a feeling of being close to tears; it’s a lovely feeling. There’s a song that goes: “A beam of light will fill my head/ and I’ll remember what’s been said/ By all the good men this world has ever seen.” It’s like that. Suddenly you just remember certain lines. These are some insights that just hit you, and you keep finding different meanings for the sutras each time this happens. Let us struggle a little more with the meaning of organized religion because I like what you’ve said. For me the question has been: Am I hanging onto something out of fear, or do I have it in me to look at the truth of myself and discover why I am doing something? Āere’s a beautiful Buddhist idea of meditation, which is: “that which I thought was me becomes an object of contemplation.” Every time I’m able to make that which I thought was me an object of my contemplation, I have moved a little bit closer to truth, closer to something that’s inside. I’ve heard psychologists talk about this too, “making the subject the object of my subject.” Now, I don’t think the issue is with a guru or a religion or something like that. Āe issue is with how I am engaging with it, which is why I have to ask: what am I getting caught up with? Am I getting caught with an external agency, or do I already look into myself to discover truth? Am I getting stuck, or is it just a step? Without institutions, where do I find a proper context for learning? But if I
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become dependent on a particular priest, teacher, or institution, then I have a problem. Julia Feder: I’d like to add my voice to the discussion about the positive or negative power of institutionalized religion. When we’re talking about a problem as urgent as global warming, for example, do we have the luxury of throwing aside these institutions? I think the best way to affect change is to engage these institutions. If we’re all working as individuals and throw out the idea of proxies… I don’t think we have the time to do something like that. I think we have to rely on proxies and the power of institutions in order to affect change. Richard Kearney: I’d like to go back to Siddartha’s worry that certain meetings like this on religious and spiritual matters can run the risk of evading the real suffering of the world. As I see it, we are engaging in the question of inter-religious imagination as a way of responding to the sad facts of war, poverty, and ecological disaster on a global level, and the fact that many of the violent struggles in the world today have, alas, religious causes (albeit in the sense of perverted religious instincts and ideologies). It’s against this tragic world backdrop that we have come to this “Crossing Hearts” meeting here in Bangalore to see if the great wisdom traditions—which this Indian continent has historically fostered in such an experimental and pluralist way—might offer some solution. This is not a conference on world government and politics. If it were on global warming, for example, we should probably have invited people like Al Gore or Gordon Brown, or leaders of the United Nations who are in a position to influence world opinion on this crucial matter. But we are talking here at another level, beneath the political, economic, and environmental, though obviously not oblivious or insensitive to such public domains. We are here to ask the question if there might be another place of encounter in what several of us, from different wisdom traditions, have been calling, by way of an ancient shared metaphor, “the cave of the heart.” Āis refers to a key symbolic place in diverse religions—Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist—a key concept? Āe cave of the heart—or guha, as it is called in Sanskrit—has come up again and again during this seminar as both a wound and an aperture. It signals a special if often neglected place of connection and crossing, a space of tacit inter-animation between opposites and adversaries. For many people, religion
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properly practiced through meditation, through yoga, through prayer, sometimes also through sacramental rituals, allows an ability to go inwards and find a spiritual resource in the heart of imagination. It opens up what Siddartha and Siraj have both referred to as a “spiritual laboratory.” If the “inner” work of heart excavation is neglected or ignored, then I don’t think we are ever, ultimately, going to find a solution to vast “outer” crises of climate change and war. If people aren’t “right-minded” or “right-hearted,” you can issue all the edicts you want, people will still drive their SUVs in the US and the UK will still sell its arms in the Cayman Islands. All this will continue unless there is also a change of heart. I think the greatness of Al Gore, incidentally, is that as a world politician he has also undergone a change of heart. As did people like Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, and Aung San Suu Kyi. What I’m saying is that the two levels of change— personal and public, spiritual and global—are connected. Āe cave of the heart is not some escape hatch for beautiful souls. It is not some utopian sanctuary for the feeble and faint-spirited. Even Marx admitted that religion is “the heart of a heartless world.” No matter how abused and disfigured religions can become, there is invariably something beautiful still harbored in most of the wisdom traditions that continues to be conveyed through sacraments, images, stories, rituals, and prayers—namely, through the religious imaginary . If we cut that out completely, it’s harder to let the wound of the heart be healed. And without that inner healing, no amount of praxis is going to work. I think that real healing and the giving of life is the ultimate test of any genuine spirituality. And this will always involve some radical translation into action and change. Āe heart is not separate from life but its very source and well-spring. If there is no giving of life, then we’re wasting our time. Simon Sleeman: One thing that has troubled me at times is the reference to our own efforts. Yoga and therapies and other explorations are helpful. But somehow I feel that the ultimate gesture is the handing over of responsibility for myself and the application of my attention to the guidance of someone else, of the spirit. I don’t think that that is actually reneging on my own responsibilities for my life and myself. Āe organized religion that I have been part of, as a Benedictine monk, has provided me with the space, time, and support to undergo that transformation and that exploration, and I hope that it will continue to provide me with the life and the support that is going to get me
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there. No matter how loyal or assiduous I am in ritual or anything else, I know I’m not going to make it there by myself. Siddhartha: Richard and Simon, thank you for what you’ve said. I think we have enough of an understanding of politics, economics, and society to know what is going on in the world. And we have enough political activists and social activists trying to change the world. And you’re very right that unless there is a sense, somewhere inside, that we can lead the world differently, then all these ideas cannot be embodied. Āere are so many ideas about what’s going wrong and what can be done, but nothing’s happening in the way it should. Unless there is a way of life that is different, we cannot change society. I sometimes use, in relation to spirituality, the idea of the vertical and the horizontal. A lot of spirituality today is about you and your private salvation, you and your god, you and your peers, you and your debt. And I think Gandhi and Christ showed another way, the horizontal way. I’m not saying the vertical is irrelevant, but there’s also the horizontal way. Āe horizontal way refers to you and the other, to active and transformative social engagement. And horizontal also means that you are close to the Earth. So this inner bliss and meaning can be confined to a purely vertical plane, or we can try to move it to the horizontal plane where the vertical is also present. Whether it’s Christ or Gandhi, there’s an ongoing drive to go to the horizontal plane. And I think Christ is about the hope that the horizontal plane is real. The Bhagavad Gita also talks about hope in a different kind of way, as nishkama karma. We have to act without being attached to the fruits of our actions. So we cannot be concerned with whether we will succeed or not, but we must continue to move along the horizontal plane, moving in that direction. Any discussion of spirituality must, I believe, grapple with this horizontal plane. To me, the more spiritual I get, the more the vertical and horizontal planes come together. Āere cannot be one that does not include the other. Kendra Bradner : I’ve been trying to think about how to process the experience of this conference, and, Siddartha, for me what you’ve said about the horizontal and vertical planes and the engagement with the world around us is very important. I think that the subject of this conference—an inter-religious one—is crucial to keep in mind. We’ve spoken a lot about the mystical traditions and going beyond dogmas and particularities of religions, and I’d like to emphasize that I
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strongly believe in the unity of our various spiritual and mystical and religious experiences. Also, the philosopher Levinas speaks about the importance of engaging the Other in their otherness. And I think if we engage in a dialogue, we need to keep in mind the way that Others present themselves and that real, true spiritual experiences have been experienced in the teachings and practices of particular religions. I’d like to put that out as a comment and not as a condemnation of what has been said; I think there’s something very necessary to remember about the particularities. Simon Sleeman: I just want to reflect on the fact that the cross hanging over our Benedictine altar in Glenstal Abbey (Ireland) used to be one with a very long vertical line and a small horizontal one, and we’ve taken it down and replaced it with one that has two lines of equal length. Siddhartha: I agree that the horizontal and the vertical are not mutually exclusive; it’s a way of clarifying things. R. Rajaram: In the challenges facing us now, we need all the resources we can get. One of the things that is so crucial about inter-religious imagination is that the resources of one religion are not accessible to another. Religions are often experienced as frozen cultural resources with respect to each other. The challenge is how to make them flow freely and become more porous and available to each other. One of the things that struck me as a teacher is how easily we appropriate our children in religious terms. A child could be only two years old, but he’ll be a Hindu child or a Christian child or a Muslim child, before the child ever has a choice of whether he wants to be a Hindu, a Christian, or a Muslim. It’s actually a human rights issue, if you really push it further. Siddhartha: Āis is why I think it is so important to continue imagining India as a spiritual laboratory for different religious conversations and connections.
EMPATHY AND INTER-RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION Catherine Cornille Boston College The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measure, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. We can know men to a certain extent if, at the same time as we observe them from outside, we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way, the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. —Simone Weil, Waiting for God 118–19
Although Simone Weil’s words may ring perfectly true, the role and status of empathy in inter-religious imagination and understanding has been subject to considerable debate. Very few scholars of religion have in fact ventured into systematic reflection on the role of empathy in the study of other religions. The term has generally been associated with the bygone days of romantic hermeneutics and with pretences to understanding the religious other better than this other understands itself. However, every attempt to go beyond the purely descriptive account of the religious life of the other and to understand the meaning of symbols, beliefs, and rituals involves some capacity to resonate with the affective dimension of another tradition and to grasp the experiential import of a particular teaching, ritual, or symbol. Just as a purely historical discussion of the Christian devotion to the Sacred Heart can only begin to offer insight into its meaning for Christians, a purely external description of the ritual motions of a Ganesha puja allows little or no access to the meaning of such gestures in the life of a Hindu. Any attempt to enter imaginatively into the religious life of another thus requires some degree of empathy. And empathy itself, in turn, presupposes considerable religious imagination. Though empathy remains an elusive capacity, difficult to fully grasp, verify, or control, I wish to offer some reflections on the nature of empathy and its role in inter-religious imagination.
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cornille I Empathy as Transposition
The term empathy (einfühlung) emerged in the late nineteenth century from a confluence of romantic hermeneutics and philosophical aesthetics. It was first used as a psychological category by Theodore Lipps who described empathy as a form of “inner imitation,” or as a complete identification with the object of aesthetic enjoyment (376, 380). In empathy, the feelings and experiences associated with this imitation are projected onto the other as their source. When used in a strictly interpersonal context, empathy came to be understood as a process of transposition (Dilthey’s Transposition, Hineinversetzen) into the life world of the other in order to grasp the intentions and the mindset of the other. The ultimate nature and goal of empathy is then, as Edith Stein puts it, “the experience of foreign consciousnesses” (11) or “the comprehension of mental persons” (83). In his Idees II, a text which is believed to have been influenced by Stein, Husserl describes the process of transposition in some detail: I put myself in the place of another subject, and by empathy I grasp what motivates him and how strongly it does so, with what power. And I learn to understand inwardly how he behaves, and how he would behave, under the influence of such and such motives, determining him with such and such force, i.e. I grasp what he is capable of and what is beyond him. I can understand many inner correlations, having fathomed him so. It is in this way that I grasp his Ego, for it is precisely the identical Ego of these motivations, ones that have this direction and this power. I secure these motivations by placing myself in his situation, his level of education, his development as a youth, etc., and to do so I must needs share in that situation ; I not only empathize with his thinking, his feeling and his action, but I must also follow him in them, his motives becoming my quasi-motives, ones which, however, motivate with insight in the mode of intuitively fulfilling empathy. (287)
This account of the process of empathy as transposition raises certain points of interest for a discussion of inter-religious empathy. First, it is clear that for Husserl, empathy consists mainly in identifying with the particular motives or intentions underlying particular actions. In the case of empathic understanding of individuals belonging to other religions, it is not the religious experience itself but the motivation behind the religious action which is the focus of empathic understanding. In contemplating a person offering puja to the elephant god Ganesha, for example, empathy involves identifying with the intention which lies at the origin of an action, whether this be success in exams or
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bliss in marriage, relief from physical suffering or from obstacles to spiritual growth. These religious motivations may be seen to represent a common ground through which individuals from different religions may come to understand one another. While the religious images and symbols of another religion are often alien and alienating, a search for the more universal religious desires and impulses (happiness, health, fertility, success, longevity, wisdom, knowledge, etc.) and sentiments (love, peace, detachment, equanimity, ecstasy, solidarity, possession, etc.) offers a greater chance of empathy. In order to enter into the particularity of the religious life of the other, empathy then requires, as Husserl points out, that one assume the whole social, cultural, religious and educational context of the other. This would include identification with the concrete religious worldview and beliefs of the other, or some measure of conversion to the religion of the other. When the Dutch phenomenologist of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw, describes the process of empathic understanding of the other, he speaks not only of transposing oneself into the religious life of the other but—in a reverse movement—of transposing the life and experience of the other into one’s own. In some passages, he refers to the importance of “transposing oneself into the object and re-experiencing it” or of “entering into a coherent stream of consciousness” (“Some Recent Achievements” 401). But in describing the various stages of the phenomenological method, he also speaks of “the interpolation of the phenomenon into our own lives” ( Religion in Essence 674). In the process of empathy, the distinction between putting oneself into the experience of the other and bringing the experience of the other into one’s own life is often vague and fluid. Even though the religious life of the other remains the goal of empathy, one’s own life experience typically forms the basis and source from which one may come to identify with the other. It must be pointed out that neither Husserl, Stein, nor van der Leeuw believed in the possibility of reliving the experience of the other. Husserl emphasizes the difference between the primordial and the nonprimordial event, and the fact that all empathic understanding of the motivations of others always lack the spontaneity of the original event. Van der Leeuw, for example, points out that “the immediate is never and nowhere given,” and that “the primal experience upon which our experiences are grounded, has always passed irrevocably away by the time our attention is directed to it.” That being the case, however, he also believed that it was in principle not more difficult for him
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to understand the experience of “an Egyptian scribe who wrote his note on papyrus four thousand years ago” than it was to understand the experience of having himself written some lines in a school essay thirty years ago. “That he was another than myself” he states, “makes no difference whatever, since the boy who prepared the school work thirty years ago is also, to my own contemplation ‘another,’ and I must objectify myself in my experience of those bygone days.” All empathic understanding of the other thus involves a process of reconstruction or reconstitution of that experience. Quoting Terrentius Afer’s famous maxim “homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto ” (I am human and nothing human can be alien to me) van der Leeuw states that “this is no key to the deepest comprehension of the remotest experience, but is nevertheless the triumphant assertion that the essentially human always remains essentially human, and is, as such, comprehensible.” 1 In the second half of the twentieth century, the idea of empathy as transposition into the life and experience of others has been questioned from various perspectives. The postmodern emphasis on particularity and difference has rendered suspect the very suggestion that one might be able to resonate with the experience of others, let alone across cultural and religious boundaries. And the hermeneutical tradition has challenged the very notion of separate egos, implied in the idea of “transposition.” This is reflected in Paul Ricoeur’s strong claim that otherness “is not added on to selfhood from the outside, as though to prevent its solipsistic drift, but belongs instead to the tenor of meaning and to the ontological constitution of selfhood” (317). This dissolution of the radical distinction between self and other thus questions the very utility or authenticity of empathy as a concept since, as Heidegger already suggested, “only those who cut the I off from the Other must latch onto ‘empathy’ as that act that is supposed to instate the initially absent bond between the I and the other” (124). From a hermeneutical perspective, the understanding of the experiential life of others came to be regarded not so much as a matter of transposition into the reified experiences or motivations of others but rather as an endless process of becoming understood.
1 Religion in Essence and Manifestation 675. Van der Leeuw was also strongly inspired by Eduard Spranger’s notion of “universal mental structures” developed in Types of Men .
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Even though the idea of transposition into the religious experience of the other has thus become obsolete, the notion of empathy may still point to the epistemic priority of the experience of the other in interreligious understanding. While this experience may always remain beyond the purview of anyone not belonging to that tradition, it is by attempting to enter into the religious universe of the other that one’s own religious imagination may be expanded and enriched. We shall now turn to a discussion of certain factors which may stimulate, or otherwise obstruct the process of empathy. II
Empathy and Sympathy
One of the first requirements for advancing one’s understanding of the religious life of the other is a positive disposition toward the other, generally called “sympathy.” The terms empathy and sympathy were in fact originally used interchangeably, until in the early twentieth century empathy came to be used as the cognitive counterpart of sympathy. Max Scheler thus refers to sympathy as “fellow-feeling” while empathy came to denote “all such attitudes as merely contribute to our apprehending, understanding, and in general reproducing (emotionally) the experiences of others, including their states of feeling” (8). Both terms, however, remain closely related as empathy requires sympathy and sympathy builds upon empathy. Sympathy is here understood not merely as the affective quality of personal warmth and concern for the other but also as the attitude of generosity with regard to the intelligibility and the meaningfulness of the religious life of the other. Any a priori rejection of the presence of truth and coherence in the other religion will generally restrict empathic understanding, if only by diminishing any desire to enter into the experiences of the other. In the context of the relationship between religions or between believers, the attitude of sympathy (or antipathy) for the religious other is generally grounded in religious or theological attitudes toward the religious other. It is not surprising that growth and deepening of understanding of other religions in the West has developed in consonance with a growing theological openness toward the presence of truth in other religions. This is of course not to deny the possibility of attaining a certain empathic understanding of the other in a climate of religious exclusivism and intolerance, as the many insightful accounts
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of other religions by traditional missionaries bear out. It is also not to suggest that empathy must necessarily involve a positive valuation of the religious symbols, teachings and practices of other religions. One may indeed come to a profound experiential understanding of the meaning of a particular teaching while rejecting its validity or truth. But the more religious openness toward other religions, the greater the energy and desire to immerse oneself in their symbols, teachings and practices and to understand their meaning and role in the life of believers. Such openness removes taboos about entering the places of worship of other religions and contemplating its images or objects of worship. For centuries, the worship of Hindu Gods was considered rote idolatry and Christians were forbidden from even glancing at Hindu deities. Within such a theological atmosphere, an empathic understanding of the meaning of Krishna in the lives of Hindu believers would be virtually unimaginable. Empathy thus presupposes an absence of fear and a relative freedom of religious conscience, which from a Christian point of view is a relatively recent achievement. Even though sympathy for the beliefs and practices of other religions may no longer be inhibited by theological strictures, one still cannot but wonder to which extent firm commitment to the truth of one religion impedes the religious imagination, or the empathic understanding of the meaning of particular symbols and rituals in the life of another religion. After all, the truth claims of different religions remain to various degrees mutually exclusive, and feelings of sympathy for the religious beliefs of the other may be experienced as a betrayal of one’s own faith and commitment. Commitment to one’s own tradition may thus naturally temper one’s sympathy for the contradictory or irreconcilable beliefs of the other. If, for example, one’s own religious life is permeated by faith in the unique and full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, one’s sympathy for a figure like Krishna might be somewhat hampered. Within the context of inter-religious imagination, sympathy thus involves more than mere tolerance, and may constitute an important challenge for empathic understanding of the other. While too little sympathy may impede empathy, too much of it may also distort proper understanding. In compensation for the negative attitudes of the past, some may come to develop an exaggerated sympathy for beliefs and practices of other religions. This may lead to a well-willing tendency to downplay elements which might clash with one’s own religious and cultural values and orientations, or to project one’s own personal experience and meaning upon the other, as the cri-
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tiques of Orientalism clearly reveal. The attitude of sympathy required for empathy thus involves a willingness to be touched by the other, without outspoken negative or positive presuppositions, and with permanent attention to the self-understanding of the other. III Empathy and Experience The role of personal experience in the empathic understanding of others has been subject to some debate. Most theories of empathy acknowledge the instrumental function of one’s own past experience in the process of understanding the experience of others. Empathy has generally been regarded as a form of inference by analogy, or of pairing the experiences and expressions of the other with one’s own. When I see a person prostrate in front of a religious image, I intuitively recall my own feelings of devotion and surrender to my own object of faith. Discussing the role of previous experience, Dilthey suggests that empathy is only possible “if the context which exists in one’s own experience and has been encountered in innumerable ways is always—and with all the potentialities contained in it—present and ready” (226). Within the context of religious and inter-religious imagination, this would suggest that the richer and more diverse one’s own religious life, the more chance one may have of understanding that of others, or that the capacity for empathy with religious others depends on the nature and degree of intensity of one’s own religious life. As such, individuals with little or no experience of or tendency toward religious enthusiasm may find it difficult to empathize with the religious life of Hare Krishna members, just as person inclined toward a devotional relation to the divine may find a non-theistic experience of ultimate reality unimaginable or inaccessible. For the inter-religious imagination, this raises the question whether empathic understanding of the religious other is limited to those experiences which are already part of one’s own religious repertoire, thus allowing for little or no genuinely new experiences. In spite of Lipps’s early conception of empathy as inference by analogy, most discussions of empathy suggest the possibility of empathizing with experiences which are not already part of one’s own life experiences. Dilthey himself, who emphasizes the importance of past experience, recognizes the possibility of being lifted beyond that experience when, in reading the letters of Luther, he states:
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The possibilities of experiencing religious states in one’s own life is narrowly limited for me as for most contemporaries. But when I read through the letters and writings of Luther . . . I experience a religious process, in which life and death are at issue, of such eruptive power and energy as is beyond the possibility of direct experience for a man of our time. (227)
These lines thus clearly suggest the possibility of resonating with experiences which are beyond one’s own, at least in intensity and depth. Max Scheler is very explicit in arguing for the possibility of empathy with mental states and experiences which have not been encountered before. Whereas he admits that empathy with sensory or physical experiences of pain or pleasure may require prior experience of the same, he believes that the more purely internal, or, as he puts it, the more “vital” the experience, the higher our innate capacity for empathy without prior experience. He states that “we can have a lively and immediate participation in joy or sorrow, can share with others their appreciation of value, and can even enter into another commiseration for a third party, without ever having sampled that particular quality of experience before. A person who has never felt mortal danger can still understand and envisage it, just as he can also share in it.” Scheler uses the example of Jesus’ experience of despair in the garden of Gethsemane, suggesting that “for every candid heart which steeps itself in that desolation it operates not as a reminder or revival of personal sufferings, but as the revelation of a new and greater suffering hitherto undreamed of ” (47). Going beyond the more familiar territory of Christianity, he also points to the example of the Buddha’s encounter with suffering as accessible, not only intellectually but also experientially to individuals for whom it is not part of one’s immediate experience. Whereas Dilthey and Scheler merely suggest the possibility of empathic understanding of new or foreign experiences, Edith Stein offers some theoretical discussion of the process and the limits of such empathy. For her, one’s own basic set of mental and emotional dispositions remain the basic “structure” from which empathy, or the lack thereof, evolves. As she puts it: All foreign experience permitting itself to be derived from my own structure can be fulfilled, even if this structure has not yet actually unfolded. I can experience values empathically and discover correlative levels of my own person, even though my primordial experience has not yet presented an opportunity for their exposure. He who has never looked dan-
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ger in the face himself can still experience himself as brave or cowardly in the empathic representation of another’s situation. (104)
Her account of this capacity of entering into new experiential territory appeals to what phenomenologists call “fulfilling intuition”: it is by filling out the elements not yet present within one’s own life experience that one gains empathic understanding of the other. Here again, the importance of past experience is unmistakable, for it is only insofar as one has some familiarity with or propensity toward devotion that one may achieve some intuition of forms of devotion which differ from one’s own in kind and intensity. Thus, while Christians may generally be unfamiliar with ecstatic forms of devotion, their own personal contact with more moderate forms of devotion may permit them to achieve a certain intuitive understanding of the experiences of bliss experienced during the more ecstatic forms of worship typical of Hare Krishna services. As for experiences and dispositions that are radically discontinuous with or opposed to one’s own, Stein states that they present themselves “in the manner of empty presentation” or unfulfilled intuition. Here, she offers the example of a skeptic trying to empathize with a person “who offers all his earthly goods to his faith”: I see him behave in this way and empathize a value experiencing as the motive for his conduct. The correlate of this is not accessible to me, causing me to ascribe to him a personal level I do not myself possess. In this way I empathically gain the type of homo religious by nature foreign to me, and I understand it even though what newly confronts me here will always remain unfulfilled. (105)
This, of course also applies the other way around, unless the person was once a skeptic. In the case of religious persons attempting to enter into the lived experience of another religion, a considerable arsenal of lived and potential experiences may be seen to lie at one’s disposal. The specificities of one’s own religious tradition may aid in the process of empathic understanding of others, theistic traditions offering a better chance for understanding devotional feelings and attitudes in others, and religions based on divine laws and commandments for understanding the experience of religious observance in other traditions. Here again, however, the capacity for empathic identification with the other is often highly personal and variable. Though Christianity on the whole does not cultivate religious “possession,” some Christians may more easily enter into the reality and power of the experience of spirit
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possession, typical of shamanistic traditions, than others. Or images of other religions which may evoke a powerful resonance in some, may leave others completely cold. All this merely points to the fact that inter-religious empathy remains a mysterious capacity which can never be guaranteed or controlled. It can, however, be nourished by prolonged participation in the other religions and by personal identification with particular believers. IV
Empathy and Participation
One of the important mediators of empathy is actual participation in the daily and religious life of the other tradition. This is why participant observation plays such a crucial role in anthropological research, and why students of religion are generally encouraged to spend extended periods of time immersed in the religious life of the tradition they are engaged with. Armchair study of other religions may lead to all sorts of imagined empathic understanding. But it is only by participating in the religious life of the other that the full measure of the familiarity and the distinctiveness of the religious experience of the other reveals itself. This was brought home to me in a powerful way when I visited a Ganesha temple in South India after years of studying Hinduism. Having gained a solid intellectual understanding of the tradition and the mythology associated with Ganesha, I felt quite at home in the temple, recognizing much of what I had been taught—until my attention was caught by a woman offering flowers to the god with the elephant head. At once, my illusion of understanding devotional Hinduism was shattered, and I became powerfully aware of the distance separating my own religious life from that of the other. While I might be able to identify with the abstract feelings of adoration, or with the particular human and religious needs motivating any particular instance of worship, the concrete object of worship—that which for the devotee is arguably the most important part of the experience— would always remain beyond my empathic understanding, unless, of course, I became a devotee myself. Theories of ritual have come to emphasize the performative function of ritual and the ways in which ritual gestures “shape” or mold the bodies of participants according to the dominant values of a particular religion or culture. Participation in the ritual life of a tradition and imitation of the ritual gestures may thus also be seen to stimulate
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awareness of the experiences associated with particular beliefs and practices. While one may know that surrender to God defines the term Islam, participation in the performance of Muslim prayer or Muslim fast offers a chance for a deeper understanding of the particular meaning and experience of surrender for Muslims. And whereas the Jewish and Christian understanding of God may be close, participation in the celebration of Jewish ritual life may give Christians a greater awareness of the distinctive sense of majesty and holiness characteristic of the Jewish relationship to the divine. Cultural differences may at times also play a role in inter-religious empathy. As religious traditions are increasingly moving out of their cultures of origin, and as even non-universalistic religions are establishing themselves in different parts of the world and adapting to their new environment, these traditional cultural barriers to inter-religious empathy are slowly decreasing. Hindus may attend Catholic mass where familiar ritual gestures such as arati are performed, and American Christians may participate in Zen meditation seated on chairs and hearing Buddhist sutras chanted in English. While some may bemoan the dissolution of the distinctive cultural colors or different religions, and while the exotic dimension of the other religion might itself at times be a point of appeal and fascination, the fading of cultural barriers cannot but facilitate inter-religious empathy and imagination. Time also plays an important role in the cultivation of inter-religious imagination and empathy. Symbols and rituals of other religions are by definition alien and even alienating upon initial encounter. Few Christians will immediately resonate with the meaning of Ganesha or Krishna for Hindus. My own first encounter with Hinduism may be seen as a case in point. I was in my early twenties when I first heard someone talk about her love for Krishna. While the enthusiasm of the speaker was infectious, nothing she said made any sense to me. The stories about Krishna seemed fanciful and incoherent and left me merely perplexed. As I went on to study Hinduism and to encounter Krishna devotees, the foreignness of the other tradition gradually dissipated and I gained a gradual understanding of the range of emotions associated with the love of Krishna. As in any form of religious education, one often absorbs religious feelings through significant others. The development of friendships with the devotees of a particular tradition and prolonged participation in their religious life thus forms a natural stimulant for empathy.
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All this raises certain important ethical or deontological questions regarding participation in the ritual life of other religions and its limits. While such participation may be tolerated by both one’s own and the host religion, it may still be regarded as a form of betrayal or hypocrisy. The “feigned” or empty performance of ritual gestures in which one participates in a ritual without corresponding conviction may be accompanied by a sense that it is disrespectful to the religious other. Moreover, most religions actually contain restrictions and regulations regarding ritual participation of non-members. Whereas some aspects of ritual life may be open to all, the more “sacred” the ritual place or act, the more limited it becomes to initiated members, or even to certain select groups among the initiates. While anyone may participate in the Christian liturgy, the sacrament of the Eucharist is—at least in theory—limited to baptized members. And in some Hindu temples, the holy of holies remains beyond limits to non-Hindus. In addition to this, all rites of passage (initiation, puberty rituals, etc.) are only accessible to members of a particular religion. As such, various forms of internal and external barriers are often in place to prevent full participation in the ritual life of other religions. However, some degree of limited participation still plays an important role as both a catalyst and a corrective of one’s empathic understanding of the other. V
Empathy and Imagination
If our capacity for empathy is not restricted to feelings and experiences which are part of our own past repertoire, then it is the faculty of the imagination which frees us from confinement to our own immediate memory of experience and which opens the mind to the world of religious difference. The imagination, of course, plays an essential role in all religious life. To begin with the obvious, it allows us to conceive of a reality beyond the purely immanent and historical. It is the imagination which allows the human mind to enter into the world of symbolic and mythical representation and to assimilate the highly complex, and often contradictory meanings embedded in religious symbols. Whereas the religious imagination is usually shaped by a particular religious tradition, encounter with other religions may allow the imagination to stretch beyond its established religious boundaries and to conceive of symbolic universes hitherto unimagined. It is imagination which provides the capacity to move from our own lived context into that of
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another, as Dilthey also pointed out: “Imagination can strengthen or diminish the emphasis on attitudes, powers, feelings and ideas contained in our own lives and this enables us to re-produce the mental life of another person” (227). The power of imagination may be variable and the capacity for entering into the worldview of another religion unpredictable. But the religious imagination is by no means limited to the set of symbols and images which are part of one’s own tradition. Certain religious symbols are recurrent across religious traditions. While the religious meaning of natural symbols (water, fire, the earth, trees, etc.) may differ from one religion to the next, they may bring about basic empathic resonance across religious traditions. A more developed empathic understanding of the other tradition then merely requires penetration into the specific context of the other religion, and opening of oneself to symbolic connotations which may not have been explored in one’s own tradition. Inter-religious imagination may also operate on the principle of the “excluded other.” While one’s religious imagination is shaped by a particular set of symbols and practices, each religious expression may be seen to also evoke its opposite: belief in a personal God suggesting the possibility of non-personal representations of ultimate reality, and belief in a male God, the possibility of feminine expressions of the divine. While the excluded other may not appeal to one’s religious imagination with the same force as one’s familiar set of religious symbols and expressions, it may still touch latent chords of resonance which may in time grow into a deeper empathic understanding. Confrontation with the religious symbols, teachings, and practices of other religions may also awaken the imagination to forms of being or levels of religious consciousness which have no immediate point of connection with one’s own tradition. Though fearful or wrathful deities are scarcely present in the Christian imagination, Hindu images as that of Kali—the dark and bloodthirsty goddess, wearing skulls and severed arms and wielding a severed head and a sword dripping with blood—have triggered the imagination of a good number of Western and Christian feminists. However, as has become evident in recent studies, the meaning of Kali for Western feminists often differs significantly from her meaning and use in the traditional Hindu context. This brings us back to the importance of empathy in inter-religious imagination. Just as empathy requires imagination, inter-religious
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imagination also needs empathy if it is to remain grounded in the experience of the other. The religious imagination may project meanings onto the images and symbols of other religions and develop religious resonances which are in radical discontinuity with the religious tradition bearing these symbols. This may be considered perfectly legitimate and part of a hermeneutical process which in turn may enrich the tradition of origin. Moving away from the traditional understanding of empathy, the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, emphasizes the fact of standing outside and perceiving the other from a different perspective (which has been rendered as exotopy)2 as the very condition for growth in self-understanding. He states that there is an enduring image that is partial, and therefore false, according to which to better understand a foreign culture one should live in it, and, forgetting one’s own, look at the world through the eyes of its culture. As I have said, such an image is partial. To be sure, to enter in some measure into an alien culture and look at the world through its eyes, is a necessary moment in the process of understanding; but if understanding were exhausted in this moment, it would have been no more than a simple duplication, and would have brought nothing new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce its self, its place in time, its culture; it does not forget anything. The chief matter of understanding is the exotopy of the one who does the understanding—in time, space and culture—in relation to what he wants to understand creatively. Even his own external aspect is not really accessible to man, he cannot interpret it as a whole; mirrors and photographs prove of no help; a man’s real external aspect can be seen and understood only by other persons, thanks to their spatial exotopy, and thanks to the fact that they are other. In the realm of culture, exotopy is the most powerful level of understanding. It is only through the eyes of an other culture that the alien culture reveals itself more completely and more deeply, but never exhaustively, because there will come other cultures, that will see and understand even more. (qtd. in Todorov 109)
Bakhtin explicitly moves away from the term “empathy,” replacing it with the notion of “life-entering,” pointing to the more hermeneutical and dynamic nature of all forms of interpersonal and intercultural understanding.3 The term exotopy is Todorov’s translation of Bakhtin’s Russian coinage vnrnskhodimost, “finding oneself outside” (Todorov 99). 3 For an in-depth discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of “life-entering” in contrast with empathy, see Flood 159–66. 2
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While the impossibility of perfect empathic understanding of the other may thus be regarded as a blessing and a source of growth for all involved in the dialogue between religions, the notion of empathy continues to fulfill an important critical function in inter-religious imagination. Where the religious imagination is unbound and free to project any meaning upon the religious symbols and images of the other, empathy still points to the experience of the other as the ultimate goal and norm of understanding. It is indeed by remaining focused on the religious universe of the other that one’s own religious imagination may be stretched and deepened, and put to the service of genuine dialogue between religions. Works Cited Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selective Writings. Ed. H. P. Richman. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Flood, Gavin. Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion . London: Cassell, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York Press, 1966. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy II . Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. Lipps, Theodore. “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings.” A Modern Book of Esthetics . Ed. Melvin Rader. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979. 374–82. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another . Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Scheler, Max. Āe Nature of Sympathy . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954. Spranger, Eduard. Types of Men: Āe Psychology and Ethics of Personality . Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1928. Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy . The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. Stueber, Karsten. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: Āe Dialogical Principle . Trans. Wlad Godzich. Theory and History of Literature 13. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation . 1933. Trans. J. E. Turner. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. ———. “Some Recent Achievements of Psychological Research and their Application to History, in particular the History of Religions.” 1926. Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion . Trans. and ed. Jacques Waardenburg. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. 399–446. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God . Trans. Emma Craufurd. 1951. New York: PerennialHarper Collins, 2001.
INCLUSIVE IMAGINATION: A COMMENT ON RELIGION AND CULTURE IN INDIA Chandan Gowda University of Michigan Āe rise of religious intolerance is one of the nightmares of our present. It has narrowed perceptions of inter-religious life and perverted social relations. Norms of political responsibility oblige us to reflect on the dangerous problem of religious fundamentalism or “communalism,” as it is commonly termed in public discourses in India, and imagine ways of overcoming it. Communalism cannot be checked merely by preventing religious extremists from occupying state power. Even if all the functionaries of the Hindu fundamentalist party and its affiliate cultural associations were to vanish from India, the problem of communalism would still not be solved since inter-religious prejudice is widespread and not directly reducible to political instrumentation. Āerefore the electoral success of formally secular political parties, though extremely important, can only go a limited extent in dealing with communalism. Secularist perspectives on the problem of communalism in India insist, in the manner of liberalism, that religion be confined to the private realm and that the state ensure that all religious communities have the freedom to practice a faith of their choosing. Āe dominance of secularism over the Indian democratic imagination becomes evident when we recognize that Mahatma Gandhi was the last major political figure in India who spoke about religion and politics in the same breath in the service of creating a non-violent, pluralistic social order. Indeed, the two realms were inseparable for him. 1 How do we address the vast constituency of people who subscribe to religious faith but are not fundamentalist about it? In a multi-religious
1 The difficulty of defining Hinduism as a “religion” in the Semitic sense of the term has long been noted in scholarly and popular discussions—hence the well-worn cliché: “Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life.” Apart from a formal-legal appreciation of the tenets of secularism, the difficulties of actualizing the separateness of the secular from the religious in the Indian cultural context should become clear.
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context, such as India, it is important to create political languages that resonate with the shared moral intuition of different communities. Āe secularist critique of communalism, which is deeply anchored in concepts of western liberalism, such as individual rights, majority rights, minority rights, to name a few, has limited appeal to the popular ethical imagination in India. To help render illegitimate the fundamentalist desires to defend and protect Hinduism, Indian philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi recalls an episode from the life of Swami Vivekananda, the famous nineteeth-century Hindu religious reformer: Swami Vivekananda was in Kashmir towards the end of his life but his heart was heavy even in that paradise on earth. Large-hearted though he was, he felt tormented by the fact that successive invaders had desecrated and destroyed countless sacred images of Hinduism’s Gods and Goddesses and pulled down Hindu temples and built mosques over their ruins. Unable to bear the burden of this humiliating testimony of history, Vivekananda poured out his anguish at the feet of the Divine Mother in a Kali temple. “How could you let this happen, Mother, why did you permit this desecration? ” he asked despairingly. Swamiji has himself recorded all this, and reports that Kali whispered in his heart the following reply to his question: “What is it to you, Vivekananda, if the invader breaks my images? Do you protect me, or do I protect you?” Only the revelatory authority of that chastisement and consolation can heal the wounds of history from which Hinduism suffers. (10)
Āis moral tale is likely to strike a chord with the popular politicalethical imagination more effectively than secularist exhortations to keep religion a private issue. As a critique of arrogance and the human temptation to indulge in self-deification, it has an intimate relation with the living moral universes in India. I do not wish to deny validity to secularism in India. It is indeed important—from the point of administrative even-handedness and equity—that the Indian constitution and the Indian bureaucracy continue to affirm secularism. However, I believe that a secularist imagination should not dominate political sensibilities in the realm of “civil society” institutions in India. What qualifies as injustice and domination? What constitutes the violation of dignity? Communities grapple with these questions in their everyday social transactions. Indian cinema as a source of rich public narratives, for example, provides rich testimony to the humanistic traditions prevalent in India. Āe cinematic medium, which comes alive through a wide-array of genres like mythologies, historical dramas, family sagas, romance, and modern-day action, has enabled power-
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ful attempts at imagining community life in contemporary India. Āe language and music in Indian cinema form a popular imaginary that subverts the official rhetoric of community identities and goes beyond denominational religious divides. Suffering, self-sacrifice, selfless action, and other virtues central to the centuries-old devotional (bhakti) literature in India continue to provide the parameters of ethical conduct in many of the commercially successful films in recent times. For instance, Mungaru Male (literally, “Pre-Monsoon Rains”)— released in 2006, and now the biggest commercial blockbuster in the eighty-year history of Kannada cinema—is ongoing testimony to the cultural value placed on the subordination of individual desires for the sake of the community’s well-being. The film’s narrative, in broad strokes, goes like this: Preetham, a young man, falls in love with Nandini at first sight but remains unaware of her whereabouts. His mother takes him along to visit a friend in another town, whose daughter is about to be married. Āe daughter is none other than Nandini! Preetham woos her nevertheless. Nandini returns his love following his sincere efforts at winning her heart, and agrees to elope with him. Her mother, who learns of these plans, but not the identity of the person who has brought them about, turns to Preetham for help in saving her daughter’s marriage. Her husband also beseeches him to ensure the success of his daughter’s wedding, as his future son-in-law had saved his life during military combat. On learning of her son’s love for Nandini, Preetham’s mother asks him to give it up and not ruin the happiness of her friends’ family. Preetham gives in to the wishes of the elders and takes the only way out: he lies to Nandini that he was never serious about his love and was merely playing all along. A shocked Nandini now decides to marry her fiancé. And Preetham is left alone, with only his rightful conduct to speak for him. Although tacky in its conception, manipulative towards the audience’s emotions, and indifferent to any serious social issue, Mungaru Male nevertheless is a clear endorsement of the long-standing value—common to many religious communities in India—of showing deference to familial authority and, by extension, to the wishes of the larger community. Yajamana (Master), 2 another hugely popular Kannada film from 2000, upholds the virtues of a joint family authority structure, where 2
In the Rig Veda,
Yajamana refers to a person who conducts a sacrificial rite
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each member exercises restraint and responsibility in the interests of the larger family. In Sivaji—Āe BOSS ,3 the most successful Tamil film of 2007, the hero single-handedly takes on the task of cleaning up the enormous mess created by a corrupt state and a greedy market. Āe allegory of justice found in this tale of overweening individual heroism is analogous to that found in Indian mythological episodes where God Vishnu reincarnates himself on earth to annul the evil forces on the verge of total triumph. Examples of films like these, which proffer clear moral resolutions, are legion. In the context of a modern education system that has deracinated large numbers of Indians, “fieldwork” in familiar places becomes essential for creating an inclusive imagination sensitive to both the immediate and the enduring elements of cultural worlds in India. One of the biggest political challenges, I believe, is to discover, and perhaps even create, a language to address issues of fundamental ethical importance like non-violence, charitableness, friendship, and generosity whose idiom resonates with the shared moral intuition of different religious communities in India. An integral part of this politics will also be to discredit the nineteenth-century European idea of a nation that presumes a “natural” link between a culture, a people, and a territory. Āe logical extension of this mode of thinking is a genocidal situation where people seen as “others” have no place in that nation, and eliminating them in one form or another appears the only available option. Imagining forms of dwelling that depart from the genocidal idea of the nation state is a moral imperative for our times. Works Cited Gandhi, Ramachandra. Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry . 2nd ed. Bangalore, India: Wiley Eastern Limited, 1994.
(yagna). The film’s title is drawing on both the philosophical and the colloquial senses of the term. 3 The BOSS, we are told in the film, stands for Bachelor of Social Service! Sivaji— Āe BOSS , the title of the hundredth film of Rajnikanth, the superstar of South Indian cinema, alludes to the actor’s real name: Sivaji Rao Gaekwad. Sivaji (1627–1680) is also the legendary ruler from Maharashtra known for his heroic encounter with Aurangzeb, the powerful Mughal Emperor.
MY ADVENTURE WITH INTER-RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE Joseph A. Samarakone, O.M.I. Aanmodaya Ashram, Kancheepuram, South India I believe it was the Spirit of God who drove me into this vast field of inter-religious relation and who continues to prod me to cross the frontiers of my religion to enter into dialogue with other religious traditions. This has been my experience ever since my school days. Though my early education took place in Christian schools, most of my teachers were Hindus, especially Shaivites. They made a deep impression on me by their life of dedication and commitment; they were epitomes of deep spirituality. I asked no question then but journeyed on as a young boy guided by the doctrine that Christianity is the only true religion and salvation is possible only through the Church. Then came the breakthrough, like a bolt from the blue, from altogether unexpected quarters: in my first year of philosophy, in 1960, at the Sri Lanka National Seminary, Kandy, during a lecture on “Educational Psychology,” my American Rector, Fr. Frederick Sackett, O.M.I., said, “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus [Outside the Church there is no Salvation] is a doctrine condemned by the Church!” I was startled. The Rector continued to inform me that in 1949 a Jesuit priest, Fr. Leonard Feeney, S.J., propounded this doctrine. The Official Church sat up and took cognizance of this; he was asked to withdraw his proposition. But Fr. Feeney was adamant, and as a result he was excommunicated. Thus Fr. Feeney found himself “Outside the Church!” This was music to my ears! In a moment I realized that all those beautiful people in my life belonging to other religions are not going to be lost after all; there is salvation for all of them. I tried to share my joy with the other Brothers, but they were not much impressed by this. Four years rolled by. As I began my second year of theology in 1964, the Professor of Sacramental Theology, Fr. Dalston Forbes, O.M.I., basing himself on the great Dutch Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., surprised me when he said, “Non-Christian religions are sacraments of God!” From this point onwards I never looked back, though at this point of time I accepted the view that “Jesus Christ is the Primordial Sacrament of God” and, therefore, “all Religions must find
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their fulfilment in Jesus Christ.” But I did not have the slightest doubt that all religions are capable of leading their followers to the “Feet of the Divine.” As if to confirm me in my new thinking, my own Religious Superior, Fr. S. N. Arulnesan, O.M.I., took me to an ashram in Kandy (Sri Lanka) where I studied. It was the Ashram of the Divine Life Society—a branch of the Shivananda Ashram of Rishikesh. I couldn’t have gone to a better ashram. Swami Saccidananda, the Guru of this Ashram, was a person with an inter-religious heart and mind. During the worship on that day, among other scriptures he reached out to the Gospel according to John and read the Prologue. I was simply thrilled. These are the landmark events which shaped my mind and heart in my early formative years as an “inter-religious person” without much conscious effort on my part, like the growth of an embryo in the womb of a mother. After my ordination in 1966, I served my mother province, Sri Lanka, for almost ten years. In 1976 I was sent to India to be in charge of one of our Formation Houses—the Oblate Scholasticate in Chennai. I set foot on Mother India on July 1, 1976. From the outset I was dreaming of a formation that would be firmly rooted in the soil of India—in the spiritual and cultural traditions of the Land. Just about this time the Jesuits of India had come out with a well-prepared study on “Inculturation in Formation.” It was the fruit of a three-year indepth survey, study, and reflection conducted by a special commission. This served as a resource book in my efforts at “inculturating” the formation of our O.M.I. Brothers. (I will return to the notion of inculturation below). Within a year of my coming to India, sometime in May 1977, I met Fr. Bede Griffiths, O.S.B. (who assumed the name Swami Dhyananda) purely by chance. When I looked at this holy man,his whole demeanour awakened something even deeper within me, and the thought passed through me like a flash of lightning: here is an authentic Christian sannyasi of India! This meeting was to blossom into a long and abiding friendship which made inroads into my inner life, bringing about radical transformation. Swami Bede invited me to his ashram, Santhivanam, in Tamil Nadu. During my visit to the Saccidananda ashram of Santhivanam in May of 1979, I felt the place was permeated by his graceful presence. It was to prove a watershed in my life in general and in my entry into the spiritual tradition of my land in particular. That moment is still very vivid in my mind: we stood for the arathi
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with hands folded and placed on our head, offering our whole selves to God. Floodgates opened within me, and I had an unspeakable experience of worshipping my Sat Guru Jesus for the first time “rooted in my culture”; and this was further heightened as I prostrated myself before the divine mystery. The whole worship with Bede Griffiths was a memorable experience. Two things in particular attracted me: the chanting of the Gayatri Mantra, which I have kept with me ever since, and the Tiruvacagam of Saint Manickavacagar. Fr. Bede asked me to chant the Āiruvacagam in Tamil, and I chanted it without any prior preparation as though I had been chanting this for many years. Today in our ashram the Āiruvacagam holds an important place in our daily worship. If ever I considered someone as a guru who awakened me to the depths of my being and showed me the path to sannyasa, it was Swami Bede Griffiths—Dhyananda. The utter simplicity of his life brought about an immediate change in my own, and his compassionate persona (true to his name Dhyananda) posed a great challenge. These two virtues he embodied—simplicity and compassion—still keep beckoning me to greater heights of sannyasa. In 1978 the Provincial of the F.M.M. Sisters of Madras, Sister Angela Hurley, decided that all the sisters of the province should have an initiation into Indian spirituality. Sacred Heart Sisters Vandana Mataji and Ishpriya Mataji were invited to animate this ten-day session. Vandana Mataji wanted a priest who could celebrate the Eucharist every day, picking up the thread from the sessions. Since by then my deep interest in Indian spirituality was well known, my Superior, Fr. Stanislaus Phillips, O.M.I., suggested that I participate in this sadhana. This was another great moment in my life when I was being led by the Spirit Herself to drink deep “from our own wells nourished by the same Spirit.” I sat at the feet of Vandana Mataji imbibing the rich treasures of the spiritual heritage of India. This encounter with Vandana Mataji blossomed into a deep and long-standing friendship, and in my tirthayatra I consider Vandana Mataji as my Spiritual Mother who has been leading me step by step to come into my own inheritance. I have had the joy of being with her on many occasions in the Jeevan Dhara ashram she founded at Jaiharikhal in the foothills of the Himalayas. There is even an O.M.I. Kuttir in this ashram built by my Austrian confrere, Fr. Josef Anthofer, O.M.I. Many O.M.I.’s have been to this inter-religious ashram.
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Another person who provided a lot of intellectual input on my inter-spiritual journey was Swami Amalorpavadass or Amalorananda. I was very much impressed by the great institution he founded, commissioned by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI)—the National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre (NBCLC) in Bangalore, with the aim of translating the directives of Vatican II into real life in the Church of India. I admired his tireless efforts in the field of inculturation. In the eighties I had moved to our Formation House Nivedanam in Bangalore where my own efforts at inculturating the formation of our students were proceeding relentlessly. Fr. Amalorpavadass once visited our Formation House, Nivedanam, and stayed with us for a day. Sometime later he invited me to participate in the Ashram Aikiya meeting, though I was not in an ashram then. He seemed to believe that I had absorbed many values of the ashram ideal in our Formation House. Ashram Aikiya members used to tell me that Father Amalor had added one more to the ashram list: “Fr. Samarakone’s Ashram”! From the 1980s another person who drew me into this ministry of inter-religious dialogue was Fr. Albert Nambiaparambil, C.M.I. The many inter-religious seminars, meetings, and “live-ins” in which he invited me to participate enriched my inter-religious imagination and brought me face to face with holy men and women, sages and saints, who let me witness the ever-vibrant religious plurality of our land and convinced me beyond a doubt that the great providence of God has willed the plurality of religions! Among the other moments of spiritual enrichment I experienced along the way, I would like to mention the following: 1. Though I had attended many erudite lectures on Srimad Bhagavad Gita, the ten-day Gita Sadhana—which I participated in under the inspirational guidance of Fr. Sebastian Painadath, S.J. at Sameeksha, Kalady, Kerala, in June/July 1994—made me appreciate the teachings of the Srimad Bhagavad Gita , which I still continue to relish and cite in the prayer and worship of our own O.M.I. Ashram. 2. A ten-day sadhana on the Āiruvacagam of Saint Manickavacagar by a great scholar and saintly person, Arunai Vadivel, awakened me to the rich treasures of this great Tamil mystical song, opening a deep abyss within me and letting me savor the sweetness of these verses. Before the depth experience of the Divine Mystery gushing forth like torrents from these songs, the tall and absolute claims of
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Christianity to be “the superior” and “only way” paled into insignificance! 3. One of the Church documents which gave me a lot of backing in my efforts at Inter-Religious dialogue was the document, Āe Attitude of the Church towards the Followers of Other Religions (no more “Non-Christians”!). This text was officially approved by Pope John Paul II on Pentecost Sunday, June 10, 1984 and released by the Vatican Secretariat for Inter-Religious Dialogue. This was a landmark document coming nearly twenty years after the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate: Declarations of the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions—five years in the making and, unlike the other Church documents, one which involved a lot of discussion with the Asian Churches. This document very clearly brought out the rich experience of the Church after twenty years of “dialoguing” with the people of other faiths, breaking new ground with far greater openness and reach. Some of the most insightful moments of this document include ( a) a person discovers that s/he does not possess the truth in a perfect and total way but can walk together with others towards that goal (§ 21); ( b) the Church has the duty of discovering and bringing to light and fullness all the richness the Father has hidden in creation and history, not only to celebrate the glory of God in its liturgy but also to promote among all humankind the movement of the gifts of the Father (§ 22); (c) the Spirit also works outside the confines of the Mystical Body;1 the Spirit both anticipates and accompanies the path of the Church which, nevertheless, feels itself impelled to discern the signs of Her presence, to follow Her wherever She leads and to serve Her as a humble and discreet collaborator (§ 24); and ( d) in biblical language “conversion” is the humble and penitent return of the heart to God; all persons are constantly called to this conversion, and in the course of this process, the decision may be made to leave one’s previous spiritual or religious situation in order to direct oneself towards another (§ 37).
1 See the first Encyclical, Redemptor Hominis , delivered by Pope John Paul II in Rome on 4 March 1979 at the beginning of his papal ministry. In spite of its emphasis on “the Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, [as] the centre of the Universe and of history,” it is able to recognize the “Spirit of truth operating outside the visible confines of the Mystical Body” (§ 1).
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One of the persons involved in the making of this document was Fr. Marcello Zago, O.M.I., then Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue and later (in September 1986) to become our own Superior General. He was very much appreciative of the efforts the Indian Unit of our congregation was making in the field of inculturation. In order to bring this to the attention of the congregation, Fr. Zago decided that a three-week Plenary Session of our O.M.I. General Administration, including a one-week Joint Session with the Provincials and Major Superiors of Asia-Oceania Region (AORC), be held in India in our Nivedanam house in Bangalore. The theme of the Joint Session was “Our Missionary Involvement in the Face of the Challenges of Inculturation.” I was then the Major Superior of the Indian Unit and was entrusted with the task of organizing this meeting, which was held in February 1989. I was fortunate enough to get Fr. Aloysius Pieris, S.J., of Sri Lanka, as the resource person for this Joint Session. It was a great moment of celebration when our Major Superiors were able to witness the encounter of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the spiritual and cultural heritage of our land and the first signs of the emergence of the local Church! For me this was the culmination of my efforts at inculturation, and I experienced a great sense of fulfilment. Soon after this I laid down office as the Delegation Superior of the O.M.I. Unit of India. At this time there was an evaluation of our life and work presided over by the then Provincial of Sri Lanka, Fr. Anselm Silvia, O.M.I. In the very first session the Provincial asked the members what our priorities were. To my great surprise someone said, “We should establish an ashram!” The Provincial, too, was taken aback because he very well knew the resistance I faced as I set in motion the process of inculturation. The Provincial was very frank: “I want a discussion on this matter and a vote taken.” When the vote was taken it was a unanimous decision by all the O.M.I.’s of India that an ashram should be established. It was certainly a defining moment! And so Aanmodaya Ashram was established in Enathur, Kancheepuram, in October 1990 with one of the first Indian Oblates, Swami Amalraj Jesudass, as the first Acharya Guru. Fr. Denis Dancause, O.M.I., a Canadian Oblate who had been spending three months every year in our delegation for many years, laid the foundation stone on October 14, 1990—the eve of the feast of the great Christian mystic, Teresa of Avilla. Fr. Denis himself was deeply involved in the process of inculturation taking place in the Delegation at every level of life. In 1993 our Superior General Marcello Zago came to preside over the
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Silver Jubilee Celebrations of the O.M.I. presence in India. Talking to me at this time, Father Zago asked me if I would like to go to the Oblate Ashram. I told him that I would be delighted. Thus the Spirit once again “drove me to the Aanmodaya Ashram.” I arrived on July 14, 1993 and have been there ever since. Though the Aanmodaya Ashram is open to all (irrespective of caste, creed, gender, religion, or race), and while people from all walks of life keep coming and benefiting from the services we provide—especially holistic healing through dhyanam (meditation)—the main group we are serving is Christian: religious seminarians, priests, and quite a few lay westerners. To these an opportunity is provided to experience (and not just to have an intellectual knowledge of ) the rich spiritual treasures of the religious traditions of the land, through our Indian forms of prayer, dhyanam, worship, and liturgy, along with the input talks. The sacred scriptures of our land and the biblical scriptures are integrated to make a dynamic synthesis in our worship. This is a common practice in “classical Indian Hermeneutics.” 2 Participants are gradually initiated to Ashtanga Yoga —the eight stages through which an aspirant is led, step by step, towards union with God ( yoga). Experience has shown that an experiential approach like this has a more lasting effect, and the participants have mostly gone back relishing their rewarding experience. The classical Indian threefold method of Shravanam (listening attentively and with faith), Mananam (pondering over and allowing oneself to be transformed by the Word), and Nididhyasanam (realizing or becoming embodiment of the Word) is used to open ourselves to the Vac—the Word of God. In the process, I first observed the absence of fundamentalistic expressions in the Indian scriptures, while the Bible was full of religious polemics denouncing the “gods” and religions of In this classical Indian Hermeneutics one allows the biblical text, especially the Gospel of Jesus, to flow into the two principal streams of the land—the spiritual stream and the social liberative stream—while allowing these streams, in turn, to interpret the biblical text, especially the Gospel of Jesus, thus bringing about a “Gospel-Culture Encounter.” At this point of confluence (Sangamam), the Word becomes fecundated with fresh, new, and deeper ways of understanding. This enables people to sit at the Sangamam, the point of confluence, and drink deep from their own wells nourished by the Spirit , and allow themselves to be nourished by the enriched Word. Vatican II says, “the Church nourishes her children from the one table of the Word of God and the Body of Christ” (cf. Dei Verbum § 21). I have been celebrating the Word of God in this inculturated form for the last couple of decades with great rewarding experience both for me and the people to whom I “break the Word.” 2
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others, and always claiming superiority of “our God.” This surprised me and offended my inter-religious mind and heart. Then suddenly, to my pleasant surprise, I realized that the Gospels were completely devoid of such fundamentalistic expressions. Today, as I read the Gospel of Jesus in our ashram in an inter-religious context, I see Him as an “inter-religious person” par excellence! Thus it dawned on me that Jesus, though born in a specifically Hebrew culture and religion, had undergone such a transformation that he was able to liberate Yahweh from being a “tribal God of Israel” to Abba—the Father of all people. I was able to appreciate the moment of “conversion” for Jesus when he came face to face with the Syrophoenician woman whose humble demeanor so struck him that he was able to recognize a “great faith” in the woman (Matt. 15:21–28; cf. Mark 7:24–30). And again, amazed at the faith of the Roman centurion, Jesus exclaims, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith”! (Matt. 8:10; cf. Luke 7:1–10). In the same breath he adds, “. . . many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham . . . in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness . . .” (Matt. 8:11–12). As a young boy imbued with a sense of Christian religious superiority, I used to read with triumphalistic glee the exploits of the prophet Elijah with the prophets of Baal—Elijah triumphing over them when they were unable to bring down fire from heaven to burn their sacrifice even though they cried to “their god” the whole day, while Elijah’s God answered with fire before the batting of an eyelid! (1 Kings 18:20–40). And I was also struck by a passage about the healing of Naaman the leper by the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 5:1–19), where the climactic line reads: “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel!” (5:15). In the Gospels, on the other hand, I discovered that Jesus handled this same event of Naaman’s healing in a very different way: “. . . there were many lepers in Israel at the time of prophet Elisha; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian”! (Luke 4:27). In this instance, as in so many others, the inter-religious person of Jesus was manifesting the all-embracing love of God. This inter-religious Jesus so formed and transformed his disciples that, years after the resurrection, they were able to present in the Gospels a Jesus who transcended all narrow and sectarian religious boundaries. The most unfortunate thing is that Christians down through the centuries, who took great pride in calling themselves disciples of Jesus, had very little of Jesus and his teaching in themselves. As I reflect
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(mananam) on the difference between the Gospel teachings and their betrayal by so many so-called Christians in history, I have a dream: would to God that all Christian people be weaned away from religious fundamentalism and become truly disciples of Jesus formed in the Spirit! A reflective reading of the passion narratives, especially in the Gospel according to John, reveals how Jesus departed from the traditional God of power and presented a new vision. Especially after his desert experience, Jesus broke away from the religious establishment. Though himself a deeply religious person, Jesus didn’t show any predilection for any religion. As he says to the woman at the well, for me one of the pivotal passages of all holy scripture: “. . . the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither in this mountain nor Jerusalem … the hour is now here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him” (John 4:23; cf. Rev. 7:9). Jesus proclaimed an all-inclusive kingdom, breaking all frontiers and embracing all people. Explaining the greatness of people who qualify to be in the kingdom, Jesus says, “Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt. 11:11). The beautiful prayer that Jesus has taught, the Our Father, has arisen beyond all sectarian boundaries and has become truly a veritable universal prayer that every believer in God can pray. This is the great legacy that Jesus has bequeathed to all his disciples and to all people of goodwill. But Christianity, which claims to continue his work among the people, got embroiled in Roman imperialism, which equated one particular historical institution with the kingdom of God—namely, the Church. Or as someone cryptically remarked: “Jesus preached the kingdom, and out came Churchianity!” Today, especially after Vatican II, a paradigm shift has taken place. The Church has begun, at least conceptually, to realize her life and work in reference to the kingdom. The Council proclaimed that “the Church in Christ is in the nature of sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all people” (Lumen Gentium § 1). As a “sacrament” or a “sign” of Jesus “who revealed that God is with us to deliver us from the darkness of sin and death and to raise us up to eternal life ( Dei Verbum § 4), the Church should live this legacy of Jesus and proclaim God’s saving love for all people irrespective of any religious affiliation. The Holy Spirit would
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then be seen as the source of everything, bringing everything into existence—including all religions—and guiding all towards the universal communion of God’s kingdom; all people and all religions are invited by the Spirit to play a participatory role to make the Universal Kingdom of Communion come, not in the hereafter, but here and now. By way of supplementing the above, let me add some further thoughts on the crucial importance of moving from a “conversion” model to an “inculturation” model of double or multiple belonging. It is in the field of inter-religious dialogue that we now speak about “double religious belonging.” This term was coined by Michael Amaladoss, S.J., and it means that, while being rooted in one’s own tradition, one should have the ability to break the frontiers of this tradition so as to enter fully into the religious traditions of the other and to bring about an integration of both in one’s own person. 3 In 1974 the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conference (FABC) gave us this comprehensive definition of inculturation: The local Church is a Church incarnate in a people, a Church indigenous and inculturated. And this means concretely a Church in continuous, humble, and loving dialogue with the living traditions, the cultures, the religions—in brief, with all the life-realities of the people in whose midst it has sunk its roots deeply and whose history and life it gladly makes its own. It seeks to share in whatever truly belongs to the people: its meanings and its values, its inspirations, its thought and its language, its songs and its artistry—even its frailties and the failings it assumes—so that they too may be healed. For so did God’s Son assume the totality of our fallen condition, save only for sin, so that He might make it truly His own, and redeem it in His Paschal Mystery.
The local churches everywhere taken together comprise the Universal Church. There is diversity in the local churches or “Jesus Communities” (what Jesus called “ grex parvulus,” “the little flock”). These diversities come from the universality of the Christian presence in every religion and culture, and the values of the “Kingdom Communities” around these particular local churches provide the basis for the universality of the church. The “kingdom” of Jesus’ vision embraces all people, all religions, all cultures, even people who have no religion and, therefore, all ideologies and all life-realities of the people. Thus the kingdom is larger 3
See Amaladoss.
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than the Church. The Church is a servant of the kingdom and her mission is to let the kingdom bloom and come to fullness both within the hearts of people—as Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you!”—and without, in our society and the world at large. Here we see a great paradigm shift: the mission of the church is to be understood in reference to the kingdom and not so much in terms of church expansion. Now emerges a new theology of religion which in turn informs our present missionary ecclesiology. There is a dynamic relation between the Christian message (Word) and the particular culture—an insertion of the Christian life in the total culture, including the religion of the community, where it takes root and produces fruits, taking the sap from the soil and, therefore, the culture of the land. God has revealed himself in other ways than through the Bible—“in many and various ways” (Heb. 1:1)—from the very beginning. Today Christians are aware of the presence of God in other religions. “Religions are Sacraments of God!”—a great pronouncement made by the Dutch theologian Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. I was thrilled when I heard this during my dogmatic theology class in 1964–65. The wisdom and the experience of God in other religions challenge the Church. Christians have begun to discover the riches God has lavished on other nations. In true dialogue we come to share one another’s spiritual riches. It is a great challenge to our faith and religion to relate ourselves to these other religions and experience the pervasive presence of the Spirit among all. A practical example of this “new vision” was tangibly given to all, both inside and outside the church, by the late Pope John Paul II himself when he called the leaders of all religions and people for a “Day of Prayer for Peace” at Assisi on October 27, 1986. Commenting on this momentous event, the late Marcello Zago, former Superior General of the Oblates, said, “This event was a recognition of these religions and prayer in particular, a recognition that these religions and prayer not only have a social role, but are also effective before God.” Generally, Christians are wont to think that Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit to continue the mission of Jesus. This is Pneumatology (the science of the Holy Spirit) as a function of Christology. A broader vision of the work of the Spirit in consonance with the “new vision” would be to see the Holy Spirit as the source of everything and to see the Spirit herself giving birth to Jesus Christ and his group of disciples, orienting them towards the Universal Kingdom of Communion which
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Figure 1 . Interfaith symbols. Pen and ink drawings by Simone Kearney, 2007.
the same Spirit is effecting at the heart of humanity. This is Christology as a function of Pneumatology. People of all religions are being guided by the Spirit towards harmony and communion. Therefore, people of all religions, including Christians, are called upon to play a participatory role, joining hands with all women and men of goodwill to make the Universal Kingdom of Communion come, not in the hereafter, but here and now! One of the main texts on which the traditional Christian evangelists relied in their efforts to proselytize through baptism was Matthew 28:19. They called this a “mandate” received from Jesus. However, eminent Scripture scholars such as Raymond Brown, S.S.S. are of the view that this command is not from Jesus at all but from the laterday Church, which gave us the Gospel of Matthew. In the Acts of the Apostles we see the struggle of the early Church to take the Word to the so-called “Gentiles” (Acts 10). If the risen Lord Jesus had settled this issue while he was still with the Apostles, then what we read in chapter ten of the Acts of the Apostles would be redundant. Besides, it is poor hermeneutics to pluck one text out of the Gospel, oftentimes out of context, and to hold this out as the definitive teaching of Jesus. Every text of the Gospel must be interpreted in the whole context of the teaching of Jesus as we meet him in the Gospel.
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Hence I am of the firm view that proselytizing goes against all civilized human behavior. From my own experience in inter-religious dialogue, the people of other religions tell us how deeply humiliated they feel when Christians ask them to convert to Christianity. Jesus, too, seems to be against this practice (see Matthew 23:15). For Jesus, baptism is understood as kenosis, self-emptying. But this is not to deny that the Spirit can occasionally lead a particular person from one religion to another for the greater good of humankind—e.g., Saul becoming Paul, the disciple of Christ; an Anglican Newman becoming the Catholic Cardinal Newman. And there is also the interesting example of A. M. Varaprasadam, S.J., a former Provincial of the Madurai Province when he was traveling with an Anglican pastor by train in India. Suddenly, a Western gentleman walked in, dressed in dhothi and angavastram complete with vibuthi (sacred ashes) smeared on his forehead. To their amusement, he even offered vibuthi to the Christian ministers. Later during their conversation they learned that this person was an American and that he had been a Catholic priest. Now, he had left Catholicism and converted to Hinduism. The Jesuit asked him a pointed question: “You had been a Catholic priest once and now you have converted to Hinduism. Therefore, it logically follows there is something in Hinduism that is totally absent in Christianity, and this something attracts you very much. What is this something?” The answer came in a second: “Advaita4 [non-dualism]! In Christianity God is an object of worship, but in Hinduism we are called to be one with the Divine—God is the subject of our being .” On reflection, however, Fr. Vaprasadam would later remark: “It is not that advaita is not found in the Gospels; it is very much there, especially in the Gospel of John. But we Indian Christians have failed to draw this out from the Gospel of Jesus.” It is best that we leave this conversion to the Spirit. Let me conclude finally with a Tamil song from my native land. It is a verse dedicated to Lord Shiva as a loving Divine Mother, taken from the Tiruvacagam (Sacred Utterances) of the Tamil Saint Manikkavacaga.5 This is, as I mentioned earlier, a favorite Book of Mystical 4 The classical Hindu doctrine of advaita offers the spiritual insight that the ultimate reality is neither monistic nor dualistic. 5 “Pal ninainthu uttum thai yinum salap Parinthu ni paviyen udaya Uninai urukki ul oli perukki
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Songs from which my friend and mentor Dom Bede Griffiths would always ask me to sing whenever I visited him over the years at his inter-religious ashram at Shantivanam: The mother’s thoughtful care her infant feeds: Thou deign’st With greater love to visit sinful me, — Melting my flesh, flooding my soul with inward light, Unfailing rapture’s honeyed sweetness Thou Bestowest,—through my every part infusing joy! My Wealth of bliss! O Civa—Peruman! Close following Thee I’ve seized, and hold Thee fast! Henceforth, ah, whither grace imparting would’st Thou rise? (Tiruvacagam chap. 37, no. 9)
Works Cited Amaladoss, Michael, S.J. “Double Religious Belonging and Liminality.” Vidyajyoti 66.1 (2002): 21–34. Dei Verbum. Second Vatican Council. 18 Nov. 1965. John Paul II. Redemptor Hominis. Encylical. 4 Mar. 1979. Lumen Gentium. Second Vatican Council. 21 Nov. 1964. Nostra Aetate: Declarations of the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions . Second Vatican Council. 28 Oct. 1965. Tiruvacagam or Sacred Utterances of the Tamil Poet, Saint and Sage Manikka-Vacagar. Trans. G. U. Pope. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1900. Varaprasadam, A. M., S.J. Personal communication with the author. c. 1995. Zago, Marcello, O.M.I. Sedes 15 Mar. 1987: 81.
Ulappila aanatham aaya Theninaich chorinthu puram puram thirintha Selvame sivaperumane Yan unai thodarnthu chikkena pidithen Engu ezhuntharulvathiniye.” Entitled “Pidiththa Pathu” (“The Decad of the ‘Tenacious Grasp’ ”). When this crowning work by Reverend Pope was completed in 1900, he was eighty years old!
A MONK’S JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF GOD Simon Sleeman, O.S.B. Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick, Ireland Āe Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all. —Karl Rahner
I am a Benedictine monk and have been so for the last thirty years. Āe religious tradition I grew up with operated within the metaphor of salvation. I was a sinner, and life was about saving my soul. Life’s task was to keep my soul free from sin so that I could navigate my safe passage to the next life. Āe Church impressed on us the fact that this life was of little significance. It was simply a prelude to the next, which promised an immortality of bliss or an immortality of woe depending on how one did. One consequence of this preoccupation with the next life was a loss of connection with the web of this life. It left us with a sense of homelessness in this world. Each of us, rugged individuals quarrying away at our own salvation, uncoupled from the web of life—and all the while the environment suffered, and we suffered. Āe key to salvation was a series of dogmas and creeds laid out in a catechism to be learnt by heart. If I held the right beliefs I could be saved; if I held the wrong ones I was in trouble. Āere was no question of stepping outside this defined pattern of religious belief and practice. And in case you were unsure, it was made clear that there was no salvation outside the church. Āe clergy held all the trump cards. Ārough confession they could rescue us from our sinful ways. And not only could they save us from our sinful ways, they also controlled all access points to the divine. Moreover, the body was enemy number one. Āe emotional and the sexual sides of life were never mentioned. Āey were the dark sides that had to be controlled. Āe rational mind was in charge. In this belief system, where both self and creation were regarded as evil, the exploration of an inner world was strongly discouraged. Āe interior life was ignored, treated as if it did not exist. Only religious professionals had access to an interior life.
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Lastly, effort alone was rewarded—achievement was not an issue. You were commended for the number of masses you attended, the length of time you spent on your knees praying, the number of novenas you said. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor puts it this way: For nearly two thousand years the church has preached the good news of a radical change in the structures of human existence. Countless people have spent themselves in this service. Yet what is there to show for it? So little unfortunately, that many generations ago Christians developed a theology which shifted the emphasis from achievement to effort. It was thought wrong to judge others in terms of their success in bringing about change. Āe fact that they had failed to bring others to a real encounter with the living Christ was passed over in favour of praise for the efforts they made. (9–10)
My religious world was fraught with fear and anxiety—fear of a judging God and constant anxiety about the secret impulses that continued to surface in my body. I soon realized that this way of living, presented as a meaningful existence, was not working, was not delivering the very thing I wanted—life, and life in abundance. This model left me feeling a stranger, and “no less lonesome inside.” So I determined to find a model that would provide the life I yearned for. The first clue I got was the discovery of psychotherapy, and some good and competent therapists. Āey helped me to make connections with my underworld, which, though almost completely cut off, had not gone away. It was in fact this very underworld which continued to percolate upwards, demanding my attention, and then pushing me onwards. A second source of “usable knowledge” came from the New Age movement. Āis provided a corrective to the dogmatic heaviness of church culture. It promoted the feminine, the body, movement, and nature. Āe body was given central importance as a site of transcendence rather than as a hindrance to life’s possibilities. Āird, from my reading of Eastern spirituality, I discovered the validity and importance of interiority. Everyone had legitimate access to this inner realm—to our own inward journeys. As mentioned earlier, while growing up as an Irish Catholic, the inner life was viewed with deep suspicion. Exploration of this world was considered selfindulgent, narcissistic, and only for the elite brigade of religious professionals. Āe laity had devotions to attend that would keep them in their place—out there—on the straight and narrow.
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A fourth source of learning came from literature. One author in particular, D. H. Lawrence, helped me to believe in the validity of my own inner experience. My excessively cerebral education had compounded the effects of my religious upbringing, as it too relied on cultivating the rational mind, completely ignoring the inner world of feeling and emotion. In his article on “Āe Novel and the Feelings” Lawrence asks: What am I, when I am at home? I’m supposed to be a sensible human being. Yet I carry a whole waste-paper basket of ideas at the top of my head, and in some other part of my anatomy, the dark continent of myself, I have a whole stormy chaos of “feelings.” And with these selfsame feelings I simply don’t get a chance. Some of them roar like lions, some twist like snakes, some bleat like snow-white lambs, some warble like linnets, some are absolutely dumb, but swift as slippery fishes, some are oysters that open on occasion: and lo here am I, adding another scrap of paper to the ideal accumulation in the waste-paper basket, hoping to settle the matter that way. Āe lion springs on me I wave an idea at him. Āe serpent casts a terrifying glance at me, and I hand him a Moody and Sankey hymn book. Matters go from bad to worse. (26)
Reading this was a huge comfort. Someone else knew. Later on, from reading ecology I began to appreciate a more accurate relationship with my world. I was not its master, and it was not an inert lump of stuff—a vast realm of natural resources for my enjoyment and exploitation. I saw the world now as a fragile, living system in delicate balance and myself as a part of this system. I am not an objective observer looking on! If I do occupy a unique position in its ecology, this brings added responsibilities. Ecological problems are, in the first instance, spiritual rather than moral or financial. As long as I see myself as separate from the world, as master of that world, I will continue to abuse and exploit it. Despite these advances, it was only recently that I stumbled on the fact that my interest in the spiritual life was superficial. I was not really after spiritual transformation or growth. What I wanted was peace and relaxation, to be “suspended in a saline solution in a Californian flotation tank listening to Bach”! Āis was my dream—“Lord, grant me relief rather than a cure.” But the penny dropped suddenly one day: a true spiritual path involves change, challenge, and sacrifice. It was then that I was invited to India. Could I make sense of it? Would it deepen me? Many others had tried to grow new selves in India. Yet as Sarah Macdonald writes:
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simon sleeman, o.s.b. It is pointless to try. India is beyond statement, for anything you say the opposite is also true. It’s rich and poor, spiritual and material, cruel and kind, angry but peaceful, ugly and beautiful, and smart but stupid. It is all the extremes. India defies understanding and for once, for me, that’s okay. (123)
After a three-week visit, it is a huge challenge to try to accommodate the multiplicity of new experiences India provides. At one level, there is an incredible intensity to life in India that challenges one at every moment; at another, there is a balance and serenity that defies comprehension—a genuine acceptance of what is! As I reflect on this time, with its rich tapestry of events, I ask myself whether this experience has added to the depth of my search. Āe answer is “yes,” and in two ways. I should state that these are personal thoughts and may well be an idealization of my experience. Āis does not matter as long as they have provided a lever to shift my life forward even a fraction. The first way has to do with what I can only describe as the “spaciousness” of India. To say that India is a spacious country is to state the obvious, but its ability to accommodate diversity and accept difference suggests the term “spaciousness.” Āis I experienced twice. The first time this spaciousness confronted me was at the Fireflies Conference, where the Hinduism I encountered was presented as “a spiritual laboratory that keeps itself open to both inside and outside influences.” With “no single book, single messiah, single prophet, or single belief that holds it together,” Hinduism seemed relaxed, spacious, and able to accommodate and even welcome others. Āis is not to suggest or imply that the powerful sacred texts and temples of the Hindus are anything other than inspiring. Āe second time was at the caves in Ellora. Āese ancient caves—some over two thousand years old—reveal a place of inter-religious sharing on a grand scale. In their massiveness, they are physically spacious, but it is in their accommodation of three different religious traditions, side by side, that they offer an incredible psychological spaciousness—a unique instance of creating space for the other. In this vast complex, Hindu caves nestle comfortably between the equally impressive though simpler caves of the Buddhists and Jains. The effect of this spaciousness was to stretch me, open me out, curl back the leaves of my own ideology, and expose me once again to the tentacles of God and the spirit. It taught me that a single tradition can be limiting. Our task as monks is surely to let others be; to be open to
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the truth of the other; and to wait in humble obedience for the right move for life, even if this means only inching our way forward. If we are to survive, then we have to accept each other, create spaces for each other, come out from behind our clashing ideologies and access the mystical source from which all our belief systems emerge! I am not saying that our own creeds, dogmas, and devotional practices are to be discarded or abandoned as unimportant. Āey are important, but only as secondary rather than primary tributaries of truth. The second impact of this trip was the effect of the multiplicity of images and symbols found in India. Āey seem to be everywhere— around corners, under trees, on the side of roads, and in temples: statues of elephants, half-elephant / half-human gods, half-human / half-lion gods, dancing gods, and the incredible Shiva Lingam in the holy of holies, not to mention the unashamed sexual imagery in many of the temples. How could I make sense of all this wild and wonderful imagery? It was too vibrant and lively to dismiss as pantheism or paganism! It was on return home that I discovered these images roaming around both my conscious and nighttime dreamworld. Āey seemed to bubble up from below my carefully crafted world and exposed me to a different kind of energy. These images seemed to provide a bridge or highway to my unconscious—symbols of vital instinctual forces operating autonomously in the depths of my psyche. Could these ancient images be archetypes which touched and activated deep layers of my psychic life? Āere is no doubt that because of our obsessive attachment to what D. H. Lawrence called “mental consciousness” we have lost contact with this archaic ground of our existence. And so, perhaps, Hinduism is ahead of us here, after all—its images and symbols serving to maintain a healthy contact with our psychic underworld. D. H. Lawrence had indeed warned us that if we didn’t voluntarily explore the psychic underworld, we would be involuntarily dragged into it, with destructive and negative consequences. And my journey is not nearly complete. I have learned at this stage of my life that no matter what tradition we belong to or stray into, at the heart of the universe there is one eternal spirit guiding us. Ultimately, the test for us all will not be the dogmatic purity of our faith or great feats of asceticism. Āe test will be whether we have become people who are “fully alive.” And the evidence of this will show in our lives and will be recognized by all.
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simon sleeman, o.s.b. Works Cited
Lawrence, D. H. “Āe Novel and the Feelings.” Lawrence on Education . Ed. Joy and Raymond Williams. London: Penguin, 1973. 25–30. MacDonald, Sarah. Holy Cow! London: Bantam Books, 2004. Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome, O. P. Becoming Human, Together . Dublin, Ireland: Veritas, 1986. Rahner, Karl. “Āe Spirituality of the Church of the Future.” Āeological Investigations 20 (1981): 143–53. Siddhartha. “Open-Source Hinduism.” “Āe Inter-Religious Imagination: Crossing Hearts” Conference. Fireflies Ahsram. Bangalore, India. 1–4 June 2007.
EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS IN TANTRIC YOGA AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MERLEAU-PONTY* James Morley Ramapo College of New Jersey Shortly after my graduate training in phenomenological psychology, personal circumstances made me a frequent visitor to India. I was not, like many Western travelers, staying in ashrams or five-star hotels but was actually living amongst middle class Indians to whom I was related by marriage. During my many extended stays, I was through good fortune introduced to a renowned authority on yoga and we developed a warm relationship where I was exposed to yoga practice in the best possible way. As my yoga practice developed I grew perpetually astonished by the correspondence between yoga and the existential-phenomenology of my graduate training—a serendipitous discovery upon which this essay will be based. But one of the most remarkable aspects of my accidentally privileged access to ordinary Indian life has been my visits to rural village settings—the so-called “real” India. There, I had the opportunity to witness such phenomena as exorcisms, spirit possessions, traditional healing practices, and daily rituals, which added another dimension to my understanding of the place of yoga in Indian spiritual life. In other words, I came to see that there is, for lack of a better term, a concrete “folk yoga” far more primordial and archaic than the Sanskritized or formal versions of yoga we find in Western bookshops. In due time I came to appreciate this other less literate, more down-to-earth dimension to Indian spiritual practices—equally yogic but with another more somatic focus that is best described as Tantric. Ahead I shall strive to illustrate how this Tantric dimension of yoga and the particularly incarnational version of phenomenology expressed by Merleau-Ponty both share a profound commonality that may be mutually illuminating.
* I wish to express special thanks to my friend and fellow pilgrim, Richard Kearney, for his encouragement and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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morley I Yoga and Phenomenology: Towards a Secular Spirituality
Perhaps the original inter-religious movement, the practice of yoga is an ancient approach to personal spiritual development that eschews dogma, creed, and institutionalization. Originating in the religious trance technologies of Neolithic culture, Mircea Eliade describes yoga as “a living fossil, a modality of archaic spirituality that has survived nowhere else.” 1 Indeed, in India we find one of the few civilizations whose religious continuity was unbroken by foreign conquests as such invaders, and new religious movements alike, were merely absorbed into the massive “spiritual laboratory” that is pluralistic India. In fact, the Ellora caves bear physical testimony to this ecumenism. Few places on earth demonstrate such open acceptance of multiple religious standpoints. For, instead of defacing or carving over each other’s previous stonework, each generation of artisans at Ellora respectfully left their predecessors’ work untouched. The remarkable sculpture of Shiva at Ellora is profoundly exemplary of exactly this spirit of “unity within diversity”—the Indian eco-religious contribution to humankind, and a worthy ideal for any age where we see the symbols of three religions almost playfully flowing together (sanga) into a common image. Here the Hindu deity Shiva is represented in the form of a stick-wielding teacher whose earrings reflect Jainism while his right hand expresses a Buddhist hand gesture ( dharma mudra). Clearly the message is one of respect and reverence to all approaches to spiritual knowledge (fig. 1).2 Moreover, throughout the Ellora and Adjanta caves—Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain—we see figures assuming a common body posture, which should not be overlooked. Nearly all prominent carved figures maintain the seated meditation position called the lotus posture or padma-asana, the emblem of yoga practice. Indeed, one of the remark-
1
Eliade 361. This text is an unparalleled masterpiece of yoga scholarship. I wish to thank Mary Anderson for her graciously detailed explication of all of these Ellora and Ajanta cave sculptures, and for referring me to the following two texts: Gupte and Mahajan 216, and Dhavalikar 82–3. The authors do point out that this statue has strongly mixed influences especially South Indian Chola sources. I was referred to this inter-religious interpretation through local folk tradition and maintain that the Jain ear symbolism reflects a specific South Indian Jain ritual of piercing the ears of children shortly after birth. Also, one finds earrings to be ubiquitous to Jain imagery. 2
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Figure 1. Shiva Lakulisha Figure (Cave 29), c. 700 CE. Stone carving. Ellora, India. Photograph: James Morley.
able continuities that may have sustained India’s pluralistic spirituality is the practice of yoga, common to all Indian religions. While thematically permeating nearly all dimensions of Indian art and literature reaching back into the Harappan Indus river culture (4000–3000 BCE), it was not until Patanjali (150–200 CE) that yoga received a formal written status as a discipline in its own right, distinct perhaps from the other schools of philosophy and religion of ancient India. In his classical Sanskrit Yoga Sutras , Patanjali appears to have sifted through the religious systems of his time and culture (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Samkhya, and even Tantric-tribal) to assemble the most effective contemplative techniques available at the time into one integrated approach. The Yoga Sutras can be viewed as a practice manual that is theologically agnostic and, in contemporary terms, pluralistic in a way that offers the paradoxical possibility of a “secular spirituality”—that is, a point of view which is neutral in matters of religious doctrine (or belief or non-belief ) and serves as more of a practical applied developmental psychology than a metaphysical or religious system.
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From this it is no wonder that yoga finds widespread popularity in a contemporary postmodern culture that is increasingly a planetary “inter-culture” where entrenched forms of institutionalized religions are viewed with claustrophobic suspicion by the new cosmopolitan and media-savvy middle classes. These same middle classes seek contact with the archaic dimension denied them by the alienated lifestyles of industrialized civilization. Most importantly, yoga is a system of contemplative practices that emphasizes the somatic incarnate domain of human experience neglected by the religious mainstream. So while being the most ancient of all psychological systems, yoga is simultaneously the holistic health paradigm of the future, a practical yet contemplative health practice. 3 Another recourse for the religio-phobic yet psycho-spiritually inquisitive is a version of contemporary academic philosophy which also maintains a secular, though admittedly somewhat intellectualized approach to human knowledge. This is phenomenology. Like yoga, phenomenology affirms the domain of subjectively lived experience and promotes a meditation method that maintains neutrality towards belief systems. Yet, one of its distinctions is that while the Western academic world generally maintains a secular distance from religion in favor of the physical sciences, phenomenology maintains an openness towards the possibility of a hermeneutically (interpretive) engaged approach to religious experience, i.e. a point of view that allows one to undergo subjective religious experiences while also maintaining an autonomous detachment from any particular system of belief. 4 It is in this way that phenomenology affirms a pluralistic openness to multiple subjective standpoints—not just that of the physical sciences. The comparison, of course, goes deeper, and ahead I shall speak to how, across culture and history, this remarkable correspondence takes place and how this association is based on a common movement away from each other’s respective mainstream orthodoxies towards a unique emphasis on human embodiment.
3 For an excellent survey of contemporary yoga as it has disseminated across Western culture, see de Michelis. For a descriptive account of contemporary yoga culture in yoga ashrams within India itself, see Strauss. 4 While slightly predating the phenomenological movement, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experiences represents this style of inquiry followed by the scholarship of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and, of course, the many recent endeavors of Richard Kearney, co-editor of this volume.
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Nirodaha and Epoche—Convergent Meditation Strategies
Previous authors have also commented on the correspondence between yoga and phenomenology but only on the basis of a point of view that assumes a shared transcendental idealism. These readings have rightly stressed Patanjali’s comprehensive definition of yoga—namely, “the suspension ( nirodaha) of the whirlpools of the mind, such that the true seer may come forth to see the world as it is” 5—as a meeting point between the two traditions. By applying the meditation method of nirodaha, the yoga practitioner strives to disconnect or “put into abeyance” the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional habits ( samskaras) that distort one’s experience of the objects of world. Correspondingly Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, differentiated phenomenology from the naturalistic materialism of his time by calling for a “return to the things themselves”—the world as it gives itself to experience without judgments or metaphysical presuppositions about the reality character of the objects of the world. Husserl employed a radical meditation method which he called the epoche, which is an “‘inhibiting’ or ‘putting out of play’ of all positions taken toward the already-given objective world.” He also calls this methodological epoche a “parenthesizing of the Objective world” ( Cartesian Meditations 20–1). This is a refusal to take for granted any assumed beliefs or doubts regarding the ontological status of any object or world. So, despite being severed across history and culture with no discernable intellectual links whatsoever, we find here a remarkable correspondence between phenomenology and yoga; but because all previous comparative studies 6 have assumed the commonality between yoga 5
The translation is my own rendering of Yoga Sutras 1.2 and 1.3: “yogaha chitta vrittri nirodaha; tada drastuh svarupe vasthanam .” Barbra Stoller-Miller more conventionally translates these sutras as: “Yoga is the cessation of the turnings of thought; When the thought ceases, the spirit stands in its true identity as observer of the world” (29). There is a long 1600–year commentary tradition of vigorous debate regarding the grammar of these famously subtle and enigmatic fragments. The crucial issue here is the word nirodaha often translated as “ceasing,” “stopping,” or “ending.” Specialists such as Ian Whicher argue at great length against such translations. He claims that nirodaha is a much more subtle meditation construct in a way that supports my rendering as “suspension.” See Whicher, “Nirodaha.” 6 Paranjpe and Hanson; Puligandla; and Sinari. In all of these articles Husserl’s model of a transcendental ego was compared to the yogic notion of samadhi as a
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and phenomenology to be a shared transcendental idealism, i.e. both meditations leading towards a consciousness suspended outside the body and beyond the sensory world, it is important to note that this idealist model of comparison can only apply to Husserl’s version of intentionality as expressed in the earlier stages of his career. For in his later mature philosophy Husserl developed in the direction of a less cognitive and more corporeal form of intentionality best articulated by his successor, Merleau-Ponty, as will be discussed below. Because these studies only appropriate this one, problematical, viewpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology they also, reciprocally, perpetuate an exclusively transcendental or idealist reading of yoga philosophy. Furthermore, this idealism supports the conventional appropriation of yoga by the more formal orthodox “Sanskritized” (higher caste) Indian systems of interpretation7 and restricts access to other less intellectualized “folk” dimensions of yoga practice. While the value of these readings cannot but be appreciated, I find it necessary to assert that there is another non-idealist reading of the yoga and phenomenology convergence. This would be a reading that corresponds with the more tribal, archaic, or Tantric roots of yoga that has hitherto had a very limited voice in academic discussions of yoga. In strong contrast, I suggest that it is actually the overcoming of tranmutual transcendence from the world. It appears that these authors did not appear to have access to the more recent translations of Husserl’s later works which I am citing here as evidence of an alternative non-transcendental reading of Husserl’s phenomenological project and yoga. In fact, samadhi, the developmental goal of yoga, can be interpreted, as does Whicher, as a restoration of the senses, not a departure from them. It is an immersion into a direct experience of the world unmediated by socialized typifications that is made possible by yoga practice. Also, for his full text see Whicher, Integrity. I have myself written on this issue in a previous article. See Morley, “Inspiration and Expiration.” 7 Few discussions of India can overlook the issue of caste. M.S. Srinivas described a pattern within Indian culture where communities would strive to raise their caste status by miming the lifestyles of the higher priestly Brahmin castes. Upward mobility was achieved by abandoning their rustic nature-goddesses’ tribal cults for such mainstream deities as Shiva, Vishnu, or Krishna along with priestly vegetarianism, Sanskrit chanting, and conventional temple practices. This is not unlike how lower middle-class Westerners will alter their church and political affiliations, or purchase certain consumer products and labels to appear more affluent. It has become my own observation that this Sanskritization may be a factor in how yoga is represented to Westerners and Indians alike. When yoga is constructed through higher-caste culture, this other rustic tribal aspect may get sifted out of play. As tribal and lower-caste culture continues to be downplayed and depreciated across India, I wonder if we need to recover from the tribals and the agricultural castes what my friend Siddartha calls an “earth yoga” that would have a more explicitly ecological and ethical orientation. See Srinivas.
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scendental idealism that distinguishes both yoga and phenomenology from their respective mainstream traditions and that this is the common basis for not only a mutual exegesis but also a radically embodied approach to spirituality. Such an approach may give voice to the marginalized esoteric traditions latent within so many religious traditions and perhaps more clearly elucidate these spiritualities, which, while marginalized to the academic and theological fringes, have occupied the very inter-religious heart of so many world religious systems. III
Merleau-Ponty’s Articulation of an Ontology of Embodiment
Taking up the later Husserl’s discovery 8 of the somatic foundation of experience, Merleau-Ponty bolstered this insight with the discoveries Towards the end of his life Husserl’s thought took certain turns, which did not at all correspond with the stereotypes of his thought endemic to the secondary literature. These late texts (only published in German in 1951 and translated into English in 1989) reveal a philosopher who is keenly concerned with the experiential body as the ultimate point of contact between consciousness and nature. He states that every object, perceived or imagined, is in some kind of spatio-temporal orientation to the perceiver’s body. Only through one’s living-body can the experienced world become constituted: “. . . all that is thingly real in the surrounding world of the ego has its relation to the body.” He goes on to say: “Furthermore, obviously connected with this is the distinction the body acquires as the bearer of the zero point ( null punct) of orientation, the bearer of the here and now, out of which the pure ego intuits space and the whole world of the senses. Thus each thing that appears has eo ipso an orienting relation to the body, and this refers not only to what actually appears but to each thing that is supposed [imagined] to be able to appear” ( Ideas Pertaining 61). Thus, for Husserl, the entire spectrum of possible experiences, perceptual or imaginary, is rooted to this corporeal “zero point” which is “the bearer of the here and now.” From this we can see how Husserl’s notion of the transcendental does not entail an isolated disembodied ego extended at a distance above the lived world of perceptual experience—as implied in the previous comparative studies—but, instead, corporeal experience is itself, for Husserl, the transcendental ground. This spatial zero point of the body coincides with Husserl’s understanding of a temporal zero point, namely the impenetrable upsurge of the “now” point that perpetually slips from reflective articulation. All consciousness is, for Husserl, immersed in the ongoing temporal stream, but unlike the Newtonian constructions of objective linear time independent of consciousness, Husserl shows us how, given the phenomenological standpoint in lived experience versus the natural attitude of materialist scientism, consciousness is the upsurge of temporality itself. For Husserl the living present, which is the carnal presence of the body, is a spontaneously self-generated act, it “is the absolute beginning . . . the primal source, that from which all others are continuously generated. In itself, however, it is not generated; it does not come into existence as that which is generated but through spontaneous generation. It does not grow up (it has no seed): it is primal creation” ( Internal Time 131). This is the body as the consciousness of nature itself. Yet when phenomenology reaches this “seedless” primal source or ‘zero point’ it is also at something of a dead end for 8
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of gestalt psychology to challenge any claim to sense experience divorced from form or meaning. In the same stroke, his more clearly articulated thesis of the “primacy of the phenomenal world” undoes any idealist endeavor to locate truth apart from directly lived experience in a manner that was even more explicit than Husserl’s latter writings. In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology attempts more explicitly to circumvent both the idealist and materialist traditions of the European metaphysical traditions. Through a combined appropriation of gestalt psychology’s insight that the ideal and the material are holistically fused within a figureground cohesion, Heidegger’s existential understanding of “worldedness,” and the psychoanalytic insight that culture is grounded in somatic affectivity, Merleau-Ponty represents the most forward edge of the phenomenological movement. To quote him, “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute; it only tries to bring them down to earth.” Further, he says: “The perceiving mind is an incarnated mind” (Primacy of Perception 13). This is not only a unity in the Heideggerian sense of Dasein or Being-in-the-World, but it is a bodily being-in-the-world. In his latter works Merleau-Ponty tried to develop an entirely new ontological nomenclature to convey this insight, which comes closer than any previous European philosophy to addressing the dilemma of ontological dualism by affirming the primacy of sensory-somatic experience.
reflective discourse and language. This somatic ground, though discovered by phenomenological reflection, cannot be explored through that very same act of cognitive reflection. Like the dog chasing its tail, there is perpetual slippage between reflection and corporeal life. So, despite discovering the importance of corporeality, any attempt to build on this insight is impeded by the use of conceptual academic terminology to describe embodied experience, as it resists such articulation. The main point, however, is that this “primal source” is not necessarily an ideal one which is transcendentally set apart from nature but is instead one that is grounded in nature via the very flesh of the human body. As an aside, it is remarkable how Husserl’s metaphor of “seedlessness” (above) is also similarly employed in the Yoga Sutras (1.25, 3.50) and their commentary tradition. This “seedless” unconditioned state is referred to in such terms as samadhi, iswara, or purusha in contrast to the conditioned state of everyday ignorance ( avidya) and its corollary of chronic dissatisfaction ( dukkha). This “seedlessness” is a point of personal development where one is no longer influenced by the conditioning mechanisms set in karmic motion by the “seeds” of past deeds ( samskaras) nor is one compelled by desire for the future fruition of the seeds of ones present actions. Such seeds are “burned” (cleansed) into this unconditioned vantage point, a freedom ( kaivala) that is the ultimate goal of yoga practice.
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First, it is important to review Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word “body.” The “lived body” or “phenomenal body” is not the same thing as the objective body as constructed by the physical sciences or allopathic medicine. “[W]e must think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which perceives nature which it also inhabits” (Āemes 128). The lived body is sentience itself, it is my personal spatiality, the body to which I am born, fall ill, desire, nurture children, age, and die. It is my flesh and blood existence, it is mine as much as it is the common form taken by all humans. This lived body is the fulcrum or lexicon of all human experience. It is neither subject nor object, purely mental or purely physical, nor can it be sufficiently comprehended through the traditional philosophical categories of immanence and transcendence. Like Freud’s unconscious, it can never be fully grasped through reflection; it can never be caught in the act of living because, similar to nature itself, it is the concrete basis for all such reflection. Then, unlike the psychodynamic unconscious, it is not just a repository of “representations” or merely a linguistic “defilé of signifiers” but is “feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of ‘what’ is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it” (130). This “disposition” or “opening” is a pre-rational or pre-categorical modality that founds rationality but is not reducible to it. Merleau-Ponty criticizes Cartesian constructions of consciousness as pure nothingness (for-itself ) in dualistic opposition to non-consciousness or pure being in-itself. Whereas much Western rationalist philosophy views the alterity between such dialectical opposites as an unbridgeable chasm or separation, Merleau-Ponty reverses this dualist reasoning by articulating this alterity as itself the corporeal “hinge” between thing and idea, subject and object, even self and other. Thus, the empty gap between subject and object becomes the living conduit out of which the two emerge. To further escape the problems inherent to dualism, idealism and materialism, Merleau-Ponty believed that a new metaphysical terminology was necessary to sidestep the dilemmas built into the language of “subject” and “object.” He described our situation as one of entrelacs or the interlacing of a closely-woven fabric. 9 Putting aside even the
9 I should mention that one of the meanings of tantra is “loom” or “weave,” implying, of course, the inter-woven tapestry of the cosmos—and the homologous bodycosmos dynamic.
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psychological terminology of “consciousness” and “phenomena,” he endeavored to describe, again, what lies between the self and the world, the between out of which both are contingent and derivative. He called this “between” the “chiasm,” “flesh of the world” or “brute being.” He also describes it as a dehiscence or opening-up that is always the already unfolding quality of existence. This is a new understanding of the phenomenological concept of intentionality that was already nascent in Husserl’s late works. IV
Turning “East” for Corroboration on the Theme of Embodiment
To reiterate, Merleau-Ponty’s thought strives to bypass the tradition of metaphysics that assumes either an absolutely ideal or material world (or a dualism between the two) through the idea of a third term of the “lived body,” or what he later calls the chiasm or “flesh of the world.” This is to serve as a new ontology that would take us out of the Western or European tradition of metaphysics. From here it would seem natural to turn to other non-Western traditions for corroboration on an approach to existence that is positive towards the phenomenon of embodiment. But this search can disappoint. Despite its many obvious distinctions from the European style of philosophy and religion, much mainstream orthodox Indian thought, as a whole, has strong idealist tendencies. 10 It is even more disappointing to learn how poorly the body fares in this worldview (including some aspects of mainstream yoga). For
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There was much more cultural diffusion between India and the classical Mediterranean world than most scholarship has previously acknowledged. Thomas McEvilley’s research, based on physical archeological evidence, makes a persuasive case for how mainstream Vedantism and Buddhism were very likely influenced by the idealism of Plato and Aristotle. It is acknowledged that there was a vigorous trade in luxury goods between India and the post-Alexandrian Hellenic kingdoms and later the Roman Empire. In fact, there were fusion Greco-Buddhist kingdoms in Bactria (present Pakistan and Afghanistan) that greatly impacted the rest of India. He also demonstrates, on the other hand, a cultural diffusion between Tantric Indian yoga and certain Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Orphic-Dionysian Greek spiritualities—perhaps even influencing medieval Christian mysticism, Jewish Kabbalism, and Islamic Sufism. It seems the wind blew both ways and McEvilley’s work has profound implications for mutual cross-cultural understanding. See McEvilley, Āe Shape of Ancient Āought , “The Spinal Serpent,” and “An Archeology of Yoga.”
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example, while Buddha taught of a middle way between extreme ascetic denial of the senses or decadent surrender to them, in the end, incarnation is for so many Buddhists and Hindus a misfortune to be overcome or a dream from whence we should wake. Rarely would conventional Buddhists, or Vedantists, explicitly affirm incarnate existence. At best, these institutionalized South Asian traditions respected the body as the “vehicle” through which enlightenment may be achieved, but this is only a benignly neutral affirmation of embodiment not unlike the mainstream Judeo-Christian affirmation of the body as the “temple” of the soul—but never synonymous with the soul itself. Having said this, it is also true that in South Asia there also exists an esoteric yet living tradition that affirms the human body more than any other known religious tradition—Tantric yoga. It is here that Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology of embodiment, and yoga generally, can find a more appropriate point of mutual corroboration. V
Jivatma : Towards a Phenomenological Explication of the Tantric Approach to Yoga
While India may be the world’s “spiritual laboratory,” from the Tantric perspective this laboratory is specifically located within embodied consciousness ( jivatma).11 As it was primarily an oral tradition, specialists on Tantrism 12 concur that a clear definition of this movement is extremely difficult to articulate and scholarship in this area is only in its beginning stages. Nor will space permit a satisfactory definition to be offered here. Yet, in broad strokes, Tantrism could be understood in historical terms as (1) a mode of experience rooted in archaic matriarchal shamanism, and (2) an identifiable medieval movement (starting in the seventh and eighth centuries) involving alchemical/medical strategies for transforming the body to achieve salvation. Though having declined into esoteric secrecy over the past few centuries, Tantrism remains today, in often fragmented cultural forms, intermingled with
11 The Sanskrit word Jiva usually refers to “individual life” or self.” Jivatma or Jivamukta could also be understood “living as individual mortal flesh while also simultaneously a fully realized immortal being,” i.e., a collapse of the individual-cosmos bifurcation. We have here a concept very much in keeping with Merleau-Ponty’s project to circumvent dualist nomenclature. 12 Here I refer to the recent research of White, Āe Alchemical Body .
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mainstream Jainism, Himalayan Buddhism, various Hindu cults, and Chinese Taoism. Even contemporary Hatha yoga, as we know it in the health clubs of today, is rooted in this tradition. Like phenomenology, Tantrism embraces the sensory world as the true reality and rejects any metaphysical system that asserts the primacy of another ideal transcendental realm. In turn, the bodily consciousness takes on heightened focus. Sir John Woodroffe13 describes the Tantric approach to the body in this way: “There is nothing in the universe which is not in the human body.” Further, “Whatever of mind or matter exists in the universe exists in some form or manner in the human body. ‘ What is here is there. What is not here is nowhere ’” (Woodroffe 50, emphasis mine). Moreover, the human body as the crown of creation is to be explored as a microcosm of the universe. David Gordon White describes “a particular attitude on the part of the Tantric adept toward the cosmos, whereby he feels integrated within an all-embracing system of micro-macrocosmic correlations” (Introduction 8). Through conscious embodiment ( jivatma) the forces of nature cannot just be abstractly studied at an objective distance, but existentially lived, engaged, and immersed into through meditation practice—the goal of Tantric yoga. In this sense, Tantric yoga is not merely a subjective psychology, but a radical approach to the study of external nature and the cosmos. 14 This paradigm of the body as a homology of the cosmos, or as a microcosm of the macrocosm—in Merleau-Pontean terms, the “flesh of the world”—is a conception of embodiment that is no dualist “temple of the soul” but a perspective of the human body as the very source of divinity itself as much as it is a science of nature. Several cosmological themes stand out as Tantric. There is the emphasis on the feminine aspect of divinity and nature. Tantric goddesses are not one-dimensionally maternal, nor delicate angelic consorts, but also beings of profound sexual-spiritual power. In contradistinction to 13 Sir John Woodroffe was a British high court judge in Imperial Calcutta who was one of the first Europeans to take up Tantric scholarship and yoga practice. His translations and commentaries remain important resources. 14 But this could not be accomplished by academic means alone. Like the psychotherapeutic relationship, a personal long-term individualized relationship with a teacher was found to be essential to this pedagogical process. See Thompson for the visionary chapter “Of Physics and Tantra Yoga” where he discusses the implications of Tantric meditation practice as a potential form of scholarly research and pedagogy.
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Figure 2. Gokorna Naga Devi, c. 1990–2007. Oil painting. Small Sea Temple, Gokorna, Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley.
the West, sexuality itself is associated with feminine activity ( prakriti) while masculinity (purusa) is viewed as not quite passive but neutral in that it is only initiated into activity by the feminine forces. Throughout rural India we see evidence of Tantrism in everyday religious icons that invoke the feminine fertility of the earth—typically symbolized through serpents (nagas). Such imagery richly proliferates across rural India, as can be demonstrated in the naga devi figure we see on the external wall of a small seaside shrine just outside the temple town of Gokarna (fig. 2). As much as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology stresses the dehiscence of “lived body,” Tantra evokes a corresponding notion of the “subtle body” understood as layered in sheaths or envelopes that, like serpent skins, are shed as embodied consciousness develops forward into more complex dimensions and forms. Below we can see a very typical Tantric shrine located deep within a cave ( guha) on a seaside hill
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Figure 3. Cave Temple (interior altar). Gokarna, Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley.
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outside of Gokarna (fig. 3).15 The Shiva lingam is in the foreground and the goddess is in the background. To the side lies a coiled snakeskin offering, a ritual representation of one of Shiva’s animal vehicles—the serpent. Again, such imagery is ubiquitous across India. One hesitates to discuss Tantric “subtle body” concepts of chakras, kundalini energy, nadi points, and esoteric ritualized sexuality—so many of which have been profoundly misunderstood by popular culture in the West. This is not for prudish reasons but because these matters deserve a more sustained and detailed clarification than can be offered here. But briefly, from a phenomenological standpoint, one need not conceptualize chakras and nadi energy channels in literal terms as material natural phenomena but appreciate them as meditation templates to assist the practitioner in coming to terms with one’s lived body. These were to be “imaginative” pedagogical tools to be used in conjunction with mandalas, yoga postures ( asanas), breath control ( pranayama), and chanting to achieve, practical, contempla16 of the lived tive awareness of the spatial internal dimensionality microcosmic or even mesocosmic body. But, by saying that this “esoteric physiology” is best understood in “imaginary” terms does not diminish its significance. It is through phenomenology’s appreciation of imaginary experience that such somatic constructs may be liberated from the criteria of literalism, and be better elucidated and contexualized.17 Here I evoke Husserl’s famous passage “fiction is the source whence the knowledge of eternal truths draws its sustenance,” as well as Richard Kearney’s many works on the centrality of imagination to
15 This is the same cave (guha) referred to by Richard Kearney in the introduction to this volume. Photo by the author, June 2007. 16 Neurologists use the technical terms of “exteroception” to describe the senses directed to the external environment (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) while the terms “proprioception” and “interoception” refer to internal bodily senses. Proprioception refers sensory experience of muscular, tendon, and joint movements—usually associated with the sense of “balance” or “spatial coordination” generally. Interoception is the sensation of one’s internal organs such as the experience of headaches, chest pain, digestion, and breathing. Normally we are only aware of such internal senses when we fall ill. Yoga practices such as moving postures ( asana) and breath control (pranayama) teach one to live these internal senses with as much attention as we give to the exteroceptive senses. Yogic esoteric physiology may have served as imaginary templates for the further refinement of these internal somatic senses. Here again, the theme of the interior cavern (or guha) emerges. 17 For a treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to imagination, see Morley, “The Texture of the Real.”
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both religion and philosophy. 18 Certainly, more detailed future studies in these matters would be of mutual benefit to both yoga practitioners and academic phenomenology. Finally, the very idea of ritualized sexuality simply does not translate very well into Western representational thought and is especially ripe for misunderstanding. Even in rare instances when certain traditional Tantric sects may have actually employed ritualized sexual conjunction ( maithuna), these acts only occurred after prolonged periods of ritual and liturgy where any eventual sexual contact was brief, symbolic, and impersonal—not at all synonymous with what is commonly understood as simple “sexual pleasure.” Typically, this “cosmological sexuality” is relegated to the domain of symbolism. In the Tantric Buddhist temple painting seen in color plate 8, 19 for instance, we find a classic depiction of Tantric creative cosmology. The female (prakriti) figure’s head is thrown back with arms lifted in an ecstatic embrace as the Buddha ( purusa) sits in rapt contemplation of his consort’s translucent splendor. We see halos of color radiating out from their conjunction. One can witness such symbolism at any contemporary Hindu Vedic wedding ceremony where the groom takes the liturgical form of a diety such as Shiva, and the bride takes the imaginary form of the cosmic feminine force ( Shakti) both replicating the dynamic cosmic interplay of existence itself. Still, the centrality of sexuality to Tantric creation spirituality can’t be overlooked.20 The many goddesses of the Ellora caves could not but move the onlooker to notice their aesthetic of cosmic sexuality. 21
18 Husserl, Ideas I 184; see Kearney, Āe Wake of Imagination , and more recently, Āe God Who May Be . 19 Photo from Sangacholings Gompa, above the village of Pelling, West Sikkim. Taken by the author in 1996. 20 During our visit to the Ellora caves, Richard Kearney asked one of our guides about the existence of any Tantric imagery. The guide, delighted by this rare request, proceeded to demonstrate a richly detailed panorama, discretely carved in small detail, depicting a cacophony of sexual acts performed by the deities. Certainly, these Hindu sections of the Ellora caves were profoundly influenced by the popular Tantric movements of their time. 21 Several goddess figures expressed feminine features so pronounced that many previous onlookers were provoked into literally reaching out to grasp and touch the carvings as can be seen by the hand-worn breasts in the photograph below. One wonders if this was the intention of the stone carvers. In any case, as we seek forms of worship beyond the patriarchal representations of mainstream theology, Tantrism may offer a glimpse into alternative visions of the sacred that are inclusive of both male and female embodied numinousity. Photo by author, June 2007.
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Figure 4 . Yakshi Siddhayika, Jain Mother Goddess (Jain Cave 32), c. 1000– 1300 CE. Stone carving. Ellora, India. Photograph: James Morley.
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Merleau-Ponty speaks in almost Tantric terms when he writes that “sexuality is co-extensive with life.” And further: “There is an interfusion of sexuality and existence, which means that existence permeates sexuality and vice versa” (Phenomenology of Perception 169). VI Conclusion Despite its recognition of the limits of language, phenomenology remains paradoxically trapped in an abstract representational methodology for pursuing its goal of articulating corporeal experience. Merleau-Ponty’s attempts at elucidation (as well as hermeneutics, deconstruction, so on) can only resort to language and interpretation because, as one writer says, “it is the only game in town” (Fish 355). Of course, the obvious next step would be a phenomenological methodology based on body experience apart from language. But how would one systematize such a procedure? Tantric yoga, like Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenology, is an experiential ontology but, unlike phenomenology, yoga would bypass academic discourse in favor of direct psycho-physical meditation practice transmitted through a personal relationship between a teacher and a student. Though phenomenology prides itself as “a return to the things themselves,” it could learn a great deal from the methodology inherent in somatic yoga practice. Then again, yoga’s focus on direct practice may have led to many misunderstandings of the meaning of yoga such as the reduction of yoga to physical exercise, or extreme asceticism. The seeming reluctance of traditional yoga practitioners (especially Tantric) to develop an autonomous systematic academic discourse may be the reason why it so often comes to us as an appendage to larger religious systems. 22 An example of this is the tendency on the part of so many commentators to interpret the otherwise deliberately ambiguous yogic term Ishvara not as “teacher, guide, or ideal” but as “transcendental deity,” thereby fixing Patanjali’s sutras onto their own theological systems. To suggest that phenomenology is the conceptual system best suited to yoga is to risk turning yoga into just this sort of appendage or, even worse, another Orientalism that interprets Indian thought solely 22 Such as the way Vivekananda presented yoga to the West as inseparable from Hinduism.
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in terms of European constructs. Yet, despite this risk, I hope I have demonstrated in this brief initial sketch the possibilities for such a true mutuality. Phenomenology needs a somatic methodology that can go beyond academic language and yoga needs a language that will not do violence to the lived somatic experience of contemplative practice. Works Cited de Michelis, Elizabeth. A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism . London: Continuum, 2004. Dhavalikar, M. K. Ellora. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2003. Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Fish, Stanley. Is Āere a Text in Āis Class? Āe Authority of Interpretive Communities . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Gupte, Ramesh Shankar and B. D. Mahajan. Ajanta, Ellora and Aurangabad Caves . Bombay, India: D. B. Taraporevala Sons and Co., 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology . Trans. Dorian Cairns. The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. ———. Ideas I: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology . Trans. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books, 1962. ———. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution . Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. ———. Āe Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness . Trans. J. S. Churchill. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1964. Kearney, Richard. Āe God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion . Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. Āe Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture . Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. McEvilley, Thomas. “An Archeology of Yoga.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 1 (1981): 44–77. ———. Āe Shape of Ancient Āought: Comparative Studies of Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Alworth Press, 2003. ———. “The Spinal Serpent.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 24 (1993): 67–77. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception . Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. ———. Āe Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics . Ed. and intro. James Edie. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. Āemes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952–1960 . Trans. John O’Neil. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Morley, James. “Inspiration and Expiration: Yoga Practice through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body.” Philosophy East and West 51.1 (2000): 73–82. ———. “The Texture of the Real: Merleau-Ponty on Imagination and Pscyhopathology.” Imagination and Its Pathologies . Ed. James Phillips and James Morley. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003. Paranjpe, A. and K. Hanson. “On Dealing with the Stream of Consciousness: A Comparison of Husserl and Yoga.” Asian Contributions to Psychology . Ed. Anand C.
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Paranjpe, David Y. J. Ho, and Robert W. Rieber. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988. 215–31. Puligandla, R. “Phenomenological Reduction and Yoga Meditation.” Philosophy East and West 20.1 (1970): 19–33. Sinari, Ramakant. “The Method of Phenomenological Reduction and Yoga.” Philosophy East and West 15.3–4 (1965): 217–28. Srinivas, M. N. Āe Cohesive Role of Sanskritization and Other Essays . Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stoller-Miller, B., trans. Yoga: Discipline of Freedom: Āe Yoga Sutra Attributed to Patanjali. New York: Bantam, 1993. Strauss, Sarah. Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures . Oxford, England: Berg, 2005. Thompson, William Irwin. Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Whicher, Ian. Āe Integrity of Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. ———. “Nirodaha, Yoga Praxis and the Transformation of Mind.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 25 (1997): 1–67. White, David Gordon. Āe Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India . Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Introduction. Tantra in Practice . Ed. David Gordon White. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. 3–38. Woodroffe, John [Arthur Avalon]. Āe Serpent Power: Being the Sat-Cakra-Niupana and Paduka-Pancaka. 1919. New York: Dover Publications, 1958.
CONFESSIONS OF A HINDU-CATHOLIC ARTIST Caroline Mackenzie Bangalore, Karnataka, India I
The Shaping of an Inter-religious Artist
My first experience of religious imagination was when I was an art student at St Martin’s School of Art, London. I was sent to the Indian Sculpture section of the British Museum for a drawing exercise. Here I discovered a connection between images and an experience of selftranscendence through the body and emotions. At my Anglican boarding school there was compulsory chapel. The whole concept of prayer was remote from me. Although for others in the West this may not be the case, I had no sense of the numinous in Christian culture. However I did have one prayer: “Please God, don’t make it so boring!” In strong contrast, when I first came to India in 1976 and made a study tour of cave temples at Ellora, Ajanta, Badami, Aihole, and the living temples of South India, I was moved by artwork experienced in relation to devotion and worship. The problematic social dimensions of the caste system were unknown to me until I encountered Indian Christianity. I was particularly amazed and enchanted by goddess figures such as the exquisite bronze Parvati in the Tanjore museum and Durga fighting the Buffalo Demon in the cave at Mahaballipuram. Both signified to me the presence of female sexuality as being in the image of the divine. Although, according to the Bible, as a woman I am made in the image of God, the cultural message that I receive is highly ambivalent. As an outsider viewing Hindu images, I did not realize that the position of women in Hindu culture and religion is just as ambivalent as in Christianity, although in a slightly different way. Looking at Durga riding on her lion and accompanied by female warriors and ganas (dwarfs), I was struck by her acting alone. She was not just an object of male desire but a subject of the action. Although the sculpture was of course conceived by a male artist, it acted for me as affirmation of my aspiration to find a language to articulate my experience of the world. All through my school study of art history,
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and later in my art school training, I was aware of a gap between how I thought of or experienced myself, and the images of women that I saw in art. I was also searching for images of men who supported the creativity and personhood of women. My desire to heal this gap between inherited culture and my experience found resonance with the process of inculturation I encountered in India. Indian Christians have been articulating their faith experience and vision in terms of Indian culture. I am searching to articulate my faith experience from my perspective as a woman. I first encountered Indian Christian culture when I was living, studying, and working at INSCAPE Art Ashram, Silvepura. However, on account of my negative experiences of Christianity in the UK, I was more of an interested observer than a full-fledged participant. After six years at Silvepura, I moved to Melkote, a Sri Vaishnava temple town near Mysore. Because of the connection I felt with Hindu images, I thought that my search for a religious community and practice would be met through becoming a Sri Vaishnava Hindu. But when I got to Melkote I found that at the social level the position of women was far worse than in Western Christianity. Although feminist insights often, or mainly, remain marginal to the imaginative power structures in the West (at least in my UK experience), there is nevertheless a clear acceptance of books and images by women. It was this shock of actually living in a very traditional Hindu society that motivated me to look once again at Christianity. At this point my six-year exposure to inculturated Christianity at INSCAPE took on a new relevance. I went on Indian Christian Spirituality retreats given by Fr. D. S. Amalorpavadass at Anjali ashram. I did my first church commissions in the context of inculturation. Fr. Amalor asked me to do Stations of the Cross to be hung on the coconut trees at Anjali Ashram. Then Jyoti Sahi asked me to help him with designs for the pillars, window grills, and the tabernacle at Maitri Sagar (Ocean of Friendship). This is a project of a Joseph of Tarbes sister working with bonded laborers in Kolar district. Both these commissions were in the context of inculturation, and both incorporated a cosmic and mythic dimension into Christian images. All the stations carved in teak wood were based on forms related to the coconut tree. At Maitri Sagar the theme was the Exodus related to liberation theology. Jyoti’s idea was to symbolize the Exodus journey using the biblical symbols of the “burning bush” and the Red Sea, and then to give the journey a clear relationship to nature. Thus
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on the pillars you see the seed, the tree, the fruit, the cosmic egg, the egg breaking open, the overflowing pot. Several significant experiences in Melkote and in Indian Christianity led me to want to practice as a Christian. Thus, in 1986 I was received into the Catholic Church. One of the deciding factors was the discovery that, as an artist, I could make contributions to a Christian culture that could be relevant and exciting. In fact, this was an answer to my prayer, “Please God, don’t make it so boring!” However, although I felt connected with the church in the Indian context, I also slowly began to recognize my difference from it. By the 1980s the thrust of inculturation was towards Dalit and tribal theology. As mentioned above, my first connection with a sense of the sacred was mediated through classical Hindu imagination. I noticed that foreign pioneers such as Abhishiktananda and Fr. Bede Griffiths were often considered as offshoots of Western culture. Most Dalit and tribal Christians wanted nothing to do with high-caste Hindu culture that reminded them only of their oppression in the caste system. Although one of the stated aims of Bede and Abhishiktananda was to contribute to the inculturation of the church in India, they also wrote of how they were searching, as Bede said, “for the other half of my soul.” In 1988 I had to return to the UK as a result of changes in visa regulations. After a one-year period of acute disorientation and grieving, my central question was, “How can I bring here what I have learned and feel to be so relevant to the Western situation? ” It was during this sojourn back in the West, which extended through 2002, that I came to realize imagination plays a key role. But I also learned that a people’s collective imagination is naturally resistant to change. The fact that I am now back again in India (since 2003) shows that I have not yet found the means to live the vision opened up by inculturation in the West. I had returned in 1988 from India to the UK speaking English with an Indian accent. I then realized I was an outsider, looking in at the culture I had come from. I was especially struck by the contrast between a church culture that seemed dry and stuck, and the liveliness of so-called “New Age” networks like the Dances of Universal Peace. The Christians I met were well meaning, serious, and worthy, but the creative imagination that could make this faith relevant to the burning questions of ecology, inter-faith dialogue, gender justice, and consumerism were lacking. Outside the church, by contrast, I found a thriving spirituality in well-organized New Age networks. I was also
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impressed by friends who were seriously practicing Buddhism in one of the various forms present in the UK. Searching for a connection with the rich and inspiring experiences in India, I found myself split. In the church, thanks to my Indian exposure, I still found the Mass a profoundly meaningful ritual. However, going to church was a dampening experience. Virtually all the “art” in the Roman Catholic churches that I attended was mass-produced and made in imitation of some natural material. I felt disempowered— just one more anonymous person in the pew. The parish structure seemed to revolve around the (overworked) priest and a few, mostly old, parishioners. In search of a more vibrant sense of community, I discovered the DUP (Dances of Universal Peace) network. They hold ten-day “dance camps” during the summer months. These camps involve up to five hundred people, mostly white middle class, who choose to spend their holidays not going on a package tour abroad but instead camping in an organic field. There are programmes for all ages—toddlers, children, “tweens,” and teens. The adults have a choice of participating in sacred dances led by expert teachers from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. People are encouraged to camp in circles around a shared central fire for cooking. It is interesting to note, in fact, how this culture has a mandala structure. The dances and meetings are held in large circular marquees that are given a sacred center by means of a multireligious shrine created at the centre. The dance rituals were originated by Samuel Lewis in the 1960s in San Francisco. He wanted people to “dance, pray, and eat together.” The dances come from all the religious traditions. They consist in singing a short phrase from one particular religious tradition and doing simple dance movements in a circle. The dances are accompanied by guitar, drum, and any other available instruments. The whole process is self-made, and no reproduced music or singing is used. Everyone sings and dances. These DUP camps offer a vibrant counter-culture to Western individualistic consumerism. Thanks to radio and TV, many people no longer sing for themselves. Dancing is restricted to those who have a partner. But here everyone is included in the circle, and all sing and dance. The communal cooking brings individuals together and counteracts the idea of a holiday as a time to sit back and consume. Each person is given a “karma yoga” ticket that designates a small work towards the running of the camp, like lighting the lamps for evening sessions, looking after the small children, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.
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Imagination and experimentation are salient features of dance camp culture. Women and men clearly share leadership. People who come to the camps have a chance to offer their ideas and talents. There is an effort to embody a culture that challenges and tries to replace unimaginative Christian culture and secular consumerism. This sort of counter-cultural challenge is lacking in ordinary parish Christianity. There the orientation still tends to be towards helping “poor” people in foreign countries. At the most cynical, this appears to be a defence to shore up the idea that we are okay, and they are not. There are endless parish activities to raise money for foreign causes or simply to repair the fabric of the buildings. These activities tend to be securely within the normal materialistic, “efficient” Western culture. At the dance camps there are many inspiring Christian dances. Some of the most moving dances are based on the Beatitudes or mantras like “I am the door.” A series of African Christian dances have been introduced from a seminary in South Africa. Sometimes an agape with bread and wine will be celebrated as part of these dance cycles. However, the depth and mystery of the Mass is not there. Finally for all the vibrancy and energy, there is something a little frustrating and superficial about Dance Camp culture. For me as an artist there are no permanent sacred spaces. From 1989 onwards I did various small commissions, mainly stained-glass windows, for churches in the UK. In 1996, I was invited back to India to design the interior of the chapel of Cistercian nuns at Ananda Matha Ashram, Makkiyad, Wynad District in Kerala. It involved twelve window grills, altar, tabernacle and front door. This was a marvellous opportunity to create sacred space that gives equal value to masculine and feminine experience. I was also able to integrate many insights from my Melkote experience into a Christian contemplative place. As a result of this achievement, when I got back to the UK, I was invited to do a major re-design of St Helen’s Roman Catholic Church, Caerphilly in Wales. This work came through Nigel Dees, a friend who was a retired architect. He was a committed Christian who at the age of forty had started meditation because of his high blood pressure. This led him on to explore yoga and various New Age spiritualities. In 1990, at my invitation he and his wife visited India. They met Jyoti and Jane Sahi and saw various inculturated churches and chapels. While in the West Nigel felt he had to keep his holistic Eastern practices separate from his church activities, here he encountered examples of integration. The
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Saccidananda chapel at the N.B.C.L.C. (National Biblical Catechetical and Liturgical Centre), Bangalore, Anjali Ashram, and INSCAPE Art Ashram all showed how Christianity could be expressed in a different way. As it does for many Western visitors, the integration of Indian culture with Christian faith spoke strongly to him. Seeing my work at Ananda Matha, Nigel was determined to find a way to bring this kind of work to the West. An opportunity arose when an old friend of his became parish priest at St Helen’s Caerphilly. Looking at the 1960s church, Fr. John said that it looked more like an aircraft hanger than a church. Since Nigel had established a reputation for his sensitive re-design of churches, he asked him for help. Nigel said he was too old to do this job, but he put forward my name. The brief I was given was “to create a greater feeling of reverence and an environment that proclaims the glory of God.” In India I had worked within the guidelines of the “inculturation” movement. This meant a link was made between the artwork and the type of spirituality to be supported and promoted. In contrast, here there was very little discussion about a positive vision to be promoted. The quantity surveyor (a Catholic!) used to wind me up by saying that all they really wanted was a nice carpet, a slap of paint on the walls, and as many radiators as possible to resemble the heat in a living room! For the Art and Architecture Committee the preoccupation was that the work should relate to the tradition in an appropriate manner, according to them. From the perspective of Nigel and me, the aim was to take responsibility to do some inculturation in the West. I was trying to promote the integration of Eastern and feminist insights into mainstream Western Christian culture. As I write these words I am wondering who will read them and make a judgment about my suitability to do church work. If these aims had been stated clearly in words, it is doubtful that the commission could have gone ahead. The artwork was a kind of Trojan Horse that introduced apparently threatening ideas under cover of imagination and beauty. Looking back, I now realize that insights from Eastern cultures indeed touch on shadow aspects of Western Christian culture (I develop this point below). I also discovered that the art of hermeneutics was, from a practical perspective, a key to the success of this project. I first encountered the idea of hermeneutics and the multivalent interpretation of an art work in the Philosophical Implications of Dhvani by Indian theologian Anand Amaladass, S.J. He related Indian aesthetic theory to contemporary Western work on hermeneutics by Ricoeur and Gadamer.
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Figure 1 . Caroline Mackenzie (design) and Judith Perry (production). Āe Five Elements . Altar Frontal at St. Helen’s, Caerphilly, Wales, UK. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
From this, I learned to present an interpretation of each artwork that could appeal to the taste and even prejudices of the viewer. At the same time, I was aware that other interpretations were tacitly embedded in these images—interpretations that might, in fact, challenge that very worldview. Let me take one simple example. The Altar Frontal at St. Helen’s (fig. 1) is based on the four classical elements—Earth, Water, Fire, Air—with the fifth, Ether, at the center. This painting was based on my work in India and inspired at a dance camp. At one of the dance camps, some Christian friends and I asked an Anglican priest by the name of “Ric the Vic” (a member of a community who chose to live in tents all the year round) to celebrate a Eucharist as part of the African Christian dances. I painted a vestment with these symbols for him to wear on this occasion. In the event, the Eucharist was not well accepted as the majority of those at dance camp feel very negative about anything “churchy.” I developed the design nonetheless, and it was approved by the Art and Architecture Committee. This committee consisted of four celibate male priests and one married layman. I explained the design
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in terms of their power structure as the Seed of the Word, the Water of Baptism, the Dove as Holy Spirit, and the Fire of Pentecost. The central circle I related to the Blessed Sacrament. For Jungian friends, I explained it as a mandala where opposites are integrated around a sacred center or transcendent function. For inter-faith groups, I would explain that it represented the principle of difference and relationship to the whole. For ecologists it is a simple cosmic design. For many people, all these interpretations and many more are perfectly valid and meaningful. The commission was fraught with tensions that were exacerbated by my being a woman. On one day three meetings were arranged. First, two male heating engineers were consulted about the radiators under my proposed wood carvings. This was followed by two male lighting engineers. Then, after a cup of coffee served by a woman we came to the main meeting to consider my designs for the Altar Frontal. This involved the Art and Architecture Committee mentioned above. During all the sessions the parish priest, the male quantity surveyor, and the male architect were present. This added to a total of eleven men. This is the culture of the church in the UK at the turn of the twentyfirst century! The design under discussion was an earlier one (not the one finally agreed upon) that featured a tree with multicoloured leaves to be made in appliqué. The design was based on an Indian textile. For the sake of the commission, I explained it in biblical terms as the vine, the branches, and the tree for the healing of nations. I also related it to cosmic designs found in the local Celtic culture. One of the priests said it looked “pagan.” This criticism blew the lid off the pressure cooker! I exploded and entered into an emotive verbal fight with this priest. As far as I can remember, it ended up with my tirade about the exclusion of youth, the problem of ecology, and the lack of sexual awareness in Christian culture. Nigel said he wanted to disappear into the floor! Later, the lighting engineer telephoned to ask whether I still had the job. Miraculously, I did. I think this was mainly due to the fact that Nigel was on the committee and approved my designs. The tabernacle at St. Helen’s (fig. 2) is inspired by Jyoti Sahi’s design at N.B.C.L.C. (The National Biblical Catechetical and Liturgical Centre). Like the altar frontal, it is based on the elements. The lowest cube shape represents earth, above this water, fire at the center, then air, and at the top ether. On the tabernacle door (fig. 3) there is a figure of the Lord rising in a blaze of light (cf. Luke 20:37–38). The whole pillar
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Figure 2. Caroline Mackenzie (design) and Dawson Stone (production). Tabernacle at St. Helen’s Church . Forest of Dean Sandstone, 9’ tall. Caerphilly, Wales, UK. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
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Figure 3 . Caroline Mackenize (design) and Mr. Vasudevan (production). From Darkness into Light (tabernacle door with risen Lord in a blaze of light). Detail of the Tabernacle, brass repoussée. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
suggests the cosmic dimension of the person. Surprisingly, the pillar design was passed by the committee with relatively little problem. However, the engraving of the risen Lord on the door, From Darkness into Light , was refused twice. The reason given was that because of Good Friday, it should be a crucifix. But then that is the day the tabernacle is empty and the door is left open so that the figure will not be seen. Another problem may have been that the Risen Christ is here shown naked, except for a loincloth. The normal mass-produced images of the resurrected Christ show him fully clothed and often looking like a Roman Emperor. The difficulty of relating resurrection to the beauty of the human body seems to be part of the Western
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Christian shadow. (There are, of course, exceptions like a naked Risen Christ by Michelangelo). Once again my thanks go to Nigel, who announced he would resign from the committee if all did not sit together and reconsider the decision to refuse the design. The earlier refusals had been done by telephone. Nigel said I must not be present in case an emotional argument started! The meeting lasted an hour and, entirely thanks to Nigel’s persuasion—plus my essay on how the image related to scripture and tradition—it was finally passed. Four months after this, on the night before I delivered all of the three-years’ work to the church, Nigel died in an emergency operation for bowel cancer. The motivating force behind the work at St. Helen’s, for both Nigel and me, was to create a religious environment where ecology, the body, the emotions, and the feminine could become part of the spirituality and liturgy. I imagined that this work might lead to other opportunities to bring insights from Indian Christian culture into the West. However, no further commissions were forthcoming, and I had no chance to speak about the spirituality and liturgy that might relate to this sacred space. II
Inner Journey Pictures
I was thus thrown back on my own resources. I painted a series of thirty-six watercolors that explore, in a practical and graphic way, how changing the collective images or archetypes affects the process of individuation. Looking back on my disappointment of not finding an opening for more public work, I now view these pictures as an important document articulating the purpose of my project to inculturate Indian insights in the West. As mentioned above, after coming back to Christ and the church in India, I discovered that my interest in inculturation as a foreigner was significantly different from that of many of my Indian Christian friends. Besides the connection I made with the DUP upon my return to the UK in 1988, my other great inspiration in this regard was psychotherapy. Whereas earlier there had been a stigma attached to undergoing psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, I found that many of my perfectly “normal” friends were learning greater self-knowledge and experiencing healing through various forms of psychotherapy. Thus from 1989 to 1996 I underwent
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regular therapy, first with a Jungian Catholic woman, and then with a Freudian/Gestalt Buddhist man. I found this work fascinating and life giving. My twelve years in India (1976–1988) had provided a perfect basis for creating a mythic language to understand and work with my inner world. One of C. G. Jung’s basic theories is that people get neurotic or sick if there is a wide gap between the unconscious mind and the religious symbols and practices they are involved with or have simply inherited. He studied myths and symbols from different traditions in an attempt to make contact with the unconscious mind of his patients expressed through dreams and pictures in mythological language. He found that a healing occurred if the patient’s conscious mind could be expanded so as to accommodate and make sense of his or her inner world. He saw that for certain people a crucial task in the process of individuation was to live their religious life from the whole personality and not just from the level of the conscious part of the mind. I could not have done the work at St. Helen’s (1999–2002) without my experience of the theory and practice of inculturation in India. The series of watercolors I painted after that work gave me an inkling of my motivation. Bringing Indian insights to Western Christian culture was not part of a nationalist project in the UK, as inculturation was believed to be for many in India. My motivation was to create a religious culture that related to, and made sense of, what was coming up from my unconscious and searching for conscious integration. These pictures surprised me by describing a process of healing and empowerment that had come about through my being given this chance to participate in creating a public sacred space in my own country. When I started psychotherapy I initially experienced myself as a victim. As part of an early series of paintings entitled “The Heart Garden,” I had then made a watercolor entitled Āe Victim Comes to Meet Her Violator, where my power or “redness” is projected out onto “The Red Man.” However, in the new series, “Blue Man and Lion Lady,” done after St. Helen’s, there is a gradual owning of my “redness.” Inspired by the Hindu deity Narasimha, a Man-Lion incarnation of Vishnu (fig. 4), I have been able to imagine an inner mythic figure that I call Lion Lady (fig. 5). She is a typical “shadow” figure. Both personally and collectively she embodies qualities like ruthlessness, ambition, creativity, destructiveness, anger, and passion that, as a woman and a Christian, I am not supposed to possess, far less to express. A cornerstone of
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Figure 4 . Caroline Mackenzie. Yoga Narasimha (The Man-Lion Incarnation of Vishnu), 2007. Watercolor, inspired by brass repoussée image in hill temple at Melkote. Photograph: Antony Sleeman, O.S.B., Ireland.
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Figure 5 . Caroline Mackenzie (design), carved in collaboration with T. N. Muniyandi, E. P. Mohan, and Elumalai. Lion Lady, 2004–2005. Granite sculpture, 3’6” × 3’ × 3’. Fireflies Intercultural Centre, Bangalore, India. Photograph: Anugraha John.
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Jung’s theory and practice is that in our shadow we find both our most feared qualities as well as our greatest gifts.1 It was only after the St. Helen’s work that I realized it was the qualities of the Lion Lady that had actually helped me to create the new church. To get in touch with repressed contents requires an expansion of consciousness. In my paintings, the emergence of the positive qualities of the Lion Lady is facilitated by a good animus figure, the Blue Man. This figure is based on images of Krishna as seen in miniature paintings and in my life experience of some men who support women’s creativity. The two contrasting attitudes towards this female “redness” are seen in the pictures entitled Nailing down Redness and Banquet Hall (color plates 9 and 12). Another thread running through this series is the application of the public images in the church to the healing process in the inner world. At the turning point of the series, in Āe Healing (color plate 10), one can see the inner split between the needy, greedy Lion Baby and the Tender Child. From her enclosure in a hard shell (lower mid left), the Tender Child opens up to the Overflowing Pot, shown also on the altar frontal at St. Helen’s (fig. 1). At the top right you see the Lion Baby feeling abandoned and in a helpless rage. Next to her, the inner attitude of compassion is imagined through a female Good Samaritan, as featured in the wood carving of fig. 6. This attitude of compassion allows anger to turn into grief. This grief is then expressed through a quotation from the wood carving called Āe Grievers (fig. 7).
1 See Jung’s Aion: “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole egopersonality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognising the dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (Collected Works 9.2: 8; par. 14, my emphasis). On the positive aspect which is hidden within the shadow or guarded by it, Jung writes: “Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness, on the one hand, and wisdom on the other. Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness rides roughshod over moral and any other human wishes and considerations, and is therefore just as terrifying and fascinating in its effects as the glance of a poisonous snake” (9.2: 234; par. 370 , my emphasis). This might be said to describe the dynamic energy of the Lion Lady that gave me the courage to do the work at St. Helens, knowing full well that the work was not exactly comfortable for my patrons.
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Figure 6 . Caroline Mackenzie. Āe Good Samaritan . Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
The next painting in the “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series is called Mysterium Coniunctionis (color plate 11). On the left, one can see the risen Christ from the “tabernacle door” (fig. 3) and Mary Magdalene from the wood carving entitled Āree Women and Angel inside Empty Tomb (fig. 8). On the right the split sides of the personality are coming together, expressed in terms of erotic love. Red is here seen a male and blue as female. The gender symbolism of these colours is quite fluid or reversible. Another image of resurrection or integration is found at the end of the series where “Blue Man and Lion Lady” drink tea together in front of the tabernacle (color plate 12). Once again, here we find quotations from the St. Helen’s tabernacle setting and door (figs. 2
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Figure 7 . Caroline Mackenzie. Āe Grievers . Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
and 3) that can help us relate the archetype of resurrection to an inner personal experience of resurrection. This series of pictures that I have called “Blue Man and Lion Lady” was started in the UK in 2002 and completed in India in 2003. It was during this more recent visit that I started to experiment with giving my sculpture designs to traditional Indian stonemasons. This led to my association with the Fireflies Intercultural Centre. Siddhartha, its founding director, had long been interested in encouraging artisans, especially sculptors, to do new work that was less polished than the current fashion required. Thus I became Artist in Residence at Fireflies from 2004 to 2005. Thanks to the good organization and facilities
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Figure 8. Caroline Mackenzie. Āree Women and an Angel inside the Empty Tomb. Oak-wood bas relief, 30” × 30” × 4”. Photograph: Caroline Mackenzie.
at Fireflies, I was able to work with a team of three masons and an assistant. The ethos of Fireflies is to respect all religious traditions, as well as insights from the secular world. It was particularly striking to work in this environment after having spent three years working within the structure and needs of one specific religious tradition. I also discovered that working every day with the Hindu craftsmen enabled certain qualities to emerge in me that had been restricted when in my Western Christian context.
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Ecologically Engaged Christianity and the use of Masks in Liturgy
When I finished the work at St. Helen’s, my hope had been to develop liturgies that related to the artwork and the imaginative vision of the sacred space. However, I found no opening for this in my Western context. In India in 2006, I experimented with using masks as part of the Easter liturgies at Maitri Sagar. Building on this experience, it was at Fireflies that I began to realize—in ritual form—the vision that had been articulated at St. Helen’s. Siddhartha often speaks of India as a “laboratory of the spirit,” and at Fireflies this attitude creates the conditions for serious experimentation with the religious imagination. The Easter at Fireflies was made possible through the openness and training of Fr. Paul Kattukaran. He is a diocesan priest who worked with Jyoti Sahi and was the chaplain at INSCAPE Art Ashram for some time. We wanted to relate the liturgies to our concerns for ecological responsibility and gender equality. I wanted to embody the cosmic symbolism portrayed in the Altar Frontal and Tabernacle at St. Helen’s, but this time in a dramatic way. We were both in agreement that masks could be helpful in the liturgies and that this imaginative drama could be integrated with the traditional Easter liturgies. IV
Background to the Mask Work
I first encountered the mask on an art retreat given by Jyoti Sahi in Wales in 1990. Jyoti had been inspired by masks through his meeting with J. J. Pallath, a Jesuit anthropologist who had been asked to make a study of Āeyyam . This is a shamanic form of masked performance and prophecy done by certain Dalit groups in Kerala. For ten days they wear huge masks and become deities for the community. For the rest of the year they are labourers, many of them bonded to a rich landowner. A group of these Dalits had been converted to Christianity by an Italian Jesuit in the 1930s. Following the theology of that time, he declared the Theyyams to be devilish, and forbade the Dalit converts to use them. This group became particularly violent and difficult to deal with. After Vatican II, however, with the new ideas of openness to local cultures, J. J. Pallath (who was not a Dalit himself) was asked to make a study of Hindu mask-performing Dalits and the Christian
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non-performing Dalits. His study led him to feel that the masks, far from being devilish, had a healing and integrating quality. Since 1992 I have been using masks to understand the process of projection and recollection. I have explored shadow qualities that I have projected out onto people and other religions, particularly Hinduism. I now have four masks based on the elements. These are as follows: (1) Earth—an amalgamation of the Celtic Green Man and Shiva (color plate Mackenzie 7); (2) Water—a divine feminine figure based on Hindu goddesses like Saraswati and Lakshmi (color plate 9); (3) Fire—based on Narasimha, the Man-Lion (color plate 10); and (4) Air—based on Saraswati’s vehicle, the Hamsa or swan, and the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit as a bird (color plates 13–16). In the West I had enjoyed using the masks in various contexts, such as a Maypole Festival in my village and at the dance camps. I found it was mainly the so-called “New Age” people or Buddhist friends who appreciated the masks. On the whole, Christians regarded them like a carnival. They were not considered helpful for spiritual practice. In fact, they were seen as a positive distraction. The one Christian group that did show some openness was the John Main Christian Meditation network. I consider the 2007 Easter at Fireflies a breakthrough in integrating embodied imagination into a clearly Christian liturgical context. This Easter Triduum approximated very closely to the liturgies I dreamed my artwork would someday support at St. Helen’s. This integration was made possible because of the openness and spontaneity of Fr. Paul Kattukaran and the small group who participated with us. One Element mask was introduced as an intrinsic part of each of the four liturgies. On Maundy Thursday, the “Fire Lion” had his feet washed, on Good Friday the “Green Man” carried the cross, on Saturday the “Water Goddess” prepared the way for the renewal of baptismal vows, and on Sunday the “Bird” expressed the Resurrection. The motivation for making and performing these masks was a search for healing. Each mask represents a quality that has been cut off and rejected by Western Christian culture. I have discovered these split-off parts through Hindu imagery. Through making and wearing the mask in the Mass I was able to bring these qualities into relationship with Christ, who is my Ishtadevata (chosen form of the Divine). If salvation has something to do with the human being’s participation in the Divine, then this may explain why I found certain moments in the liturgy profoundly healing. There is also a personal wound as seen in the image
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of the raging Lion Baby in Āe Healing (color plate 10). I will clarify the process by a detailed description of one liturgy. As I was the one who made and performed the masks on this occasion, I will describe the Maundy Thursday liturgy from my perspective. I made an imaginative link between the feet as the lowest part of the body and the “shadow” as the part of the personality despised by the conscious mind. The terrifying unwanted qualities that are repressed erupt into consciousness with a raw violence. In the liturgy, the lion wants to come into the “sacred space” (e.g., the meditation hall at Fireflies) where all the participants are seated going through the liturgy. Accompanied by a drummer and wearing the mask plus costume with gungaru (ankle bells), I went round the outside of the hall on the veranda peering in at the windows and roaring. Finally, I burst into the sacred space and enacted destruction and rage at being excluded. Georges, one of the participants, pushed me out saying, “This is a holy place—get out!” After another round of the veranda, I came to the window near the door. From there I heard the antiphon, “A new commandment I give you to love one another as I have loved you.” At this I opened the doors slowly. Some people said, “Get out!” Paul representing Christ said, “Come in. Let the Lion Man come in.” After some more drama and drumming, at the invitation of the Christ figure I was invited to sit on a stool next to the altar in such a way that everyone could see the lion mask clearly. Then the Gospel was read. Paul gave a minimal homily about how the Lion-Man is Everyman, or every person. He then invited the Lion to have his feet washed. After this acceptance, the lion turns into the sun. The claws unfold to represent the rays of the sun. After this, just as I was about to go out of the hall, one of the participants by the name of Claudia came and said to the Lion, “Please stay. Please be part of our community.” Using one of the Christian Dances of Universal Peace, Ubi Caritas,2 we two did a dance. Then everyone joined in. It is a dance where you progress to meet all the people in the circle, so each person had a chance to dance with the Lion. While everyone washed each other’s feet I went out and changed and came back to participate in the Eucharist. After dinner a few of us returned to the meditation hall for the traditional
2 “Ubi caritas et amor/ Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est” (Where charity and love are found, there is God).
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time of adoration. This was a quiet period around the altar—a simple boulder—with songs and silence. Participating both in the Mass and the adoration gave meaning and orientation to the mask performance. It created a holding ground that gave me the freedom to enter into the wound from which creativity comes and to experience healing at great depth. I had used this and the other masks in my psychotherapy and in New Age contexts. While all of this was meaningful, the opportunity to integrate the imaginative drama with the Eucharist and in the community was much more satisfying. V Conclusion When I am in a very optimistic and positive mood, I see my journey as a dance that helps to establish creative connections between East and West. On bad days it looks like fragmentation and homelessness. But then, Christ recommended homelessness: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20). I have made some progress, only to be blocked in each place. When I first came to India, my world was changed through my encounter first with Hinduism and then with inculturated Christianity. As a foreigner I found that my attraction to “high caste” Hinduism separated me from the main thrust of inculturation. Back in the UK, thanks to my training and exposure in India, I was able to create a public sacred space that integrated many insights and challenged Western Christian culture. In the West, I enjoyed the Dances of Universal Peace and found myself transformed through psychotherapy. However, I could not find a context to discuss the relationship between the inculturated artwork and spiritual practice and liturgy. Mainly because of this seemingly intractable split between the different groups, and finding no further work, I returned to India. I have had a glimpse of integration through using masks in the Easter liturgy thanks to the spontaneity and willingness to experiment amongst a few Christians. However, at present this experiment remains a one off event. It is not clear how we can develop it further. It seems to me that the multivalent nature of art and the emotional involvement of drama are not luxury items but have transformative power that can appeal to different groups normally separated from each other. I am especially concerned that as a Western person I take
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responsibility for creating a relevant religious culture. At its simplest, this requires vision, commitment, and also money. The artist’s imagination proceeds from an embodied person who has to eat three meals a day. My experience in the West has been that art in a religious context is simply not affordable. At the same time, large sums of money are spent regularly on air travel for study tours abroad. I sometimes start to calculate how many sacred spaces I could design or liturgies I could create if I had about twenty air tickets! However it is more than this. The imagination is still experienced as a threat. As I have tried to show, creativity really does come from the shadow. It will require humility and courage to admit that as Western people we really need a serious (and playful!) inculturation project that gives full scope to non-verbal imagination. I also think we cannot do this alone. My spontaneity comes alive when I am with like-minded people. This seems to happen in India in a way I have not found in the West. Just as many foreigners have helped to develop inculturation in India, maybe we will need Indians to help us to rediscover our religious imagination. Works Cited Amaladass, Anand, S.J. Philosophical Implications of Dhvani: Experience of Symbol Language in Indian Aesthetics . Publications of the Nobili Research Library 11. Vienna, Austria: Institut für Indologie, Universität Wien, 1984. Jung, Carl Gustav. Āe Collected Works of Carl Gusav Jung . Ed. Gerhard Adler, Michael Fordham, and Herbert Read. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 21 vols. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pallath, J. J. Āeyyam: An Analytical Study of the Folk Culture, Wisdom and Personality. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1995.
2. In Āe Wake Of Bangalore
THE HEART BEYOND HEARTS Swami Tyagananda Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, Boston While “heartless” is a commonly used, legitimate word in the English language, it is literally an impossibility. No human being is really heartless, unless the word is used in a metaphorical way. Everyone has a heart. In fact, not just “a” heart but more than one heart. Āe heart we are most familiar with is the anatomical heart, a hollow, muscular organ that pumps blood throughout the body. Our second heart is the emotional heart, which is the seat of emotions and feelings. Yogis characterize this seat of emotions as the point where the two psychic channels, ida and pingala, cross to form “the knot of Vishnu.” 1 Beyond these two hearts is the third heart, the spiritual heart. Āis is the center of higher consciousness, the seat of the true Self ( atman). It is also the center where spiritual seekers focus their awareness on the objects of their meditation. In the case of those practicing theistic meditations, the object is usually their Chosen Deity. 2 All of these “hearts” are located in the same region. A surgeon can see the anatomical heart at the time of heart surgery. Āe emotional heart can be felt very palpably when a person is moved by a strong surge of emotion. Āe spiritual heart, though, can neither be seen nor felt so easily. It needs to be discovered or awakened. Āe spiritual heart is dormant in most people, its presence obscured by the veil of ignorance, past mental impressions, and desires. Āe Katha Upanishad (2.1.12) says: “Āe Self ( atman) is difficult to see because it is lodged inaccessibly deep in the cave of the heart which is itself situated in the midst of misery.” 3 Āe “cave of the heart” is the spiritual heart and 1 Āe two channels cross again near the eyebrows to form another knot, “the knot of Shiva,” which is the seat of higher intellectual life. 2 Āe various deities in Hinduism are seen within the tradition as the one Divine Being manifesting through different forms and names. This framework provides an opportunity to choose a divine form and name, to which one is naturally drawn, in order to reach out to the Divine. Āe form and name that is chosen, usually by the spiritual teacher ( guru), is the Chosen Deity ( ishta devata). 3 In Hindu philosophical thought, the Self ( atman) is pure, objectless consciousness; it is the only nonmaterial part of the human personality. It is distinguished from
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“misery” refers to the body and the senses, which are the source of pain and suffering and the consequent misery.4 What is the “spiritual heart” really? It is the faculty of spiritual intuition ( buddhi) through which supersensuous knowledge comes. According to Yoga-Vedanta psychology, the mind has two layers: one layer (called manas) classifies information received through the senses and also detects sensations like pain and pleasure; the second layer (called buddhi) makes decisions. Both the functions, analysis and synthesis, that these layers perform are important and useful in life. Very little of buddhi is actually used, or even needed, for our daily activities and encounters, which are mediated through the senses. Āe partially functional buddhi is not enough, though, for experiences that are beyond the reach of the mind and the senses. In most people, the power of the buddhi is latent and needs to be awakened. Āe buddhi, once awakened, becomes fully functional and then becomes more than mere “intellect.” It is the faculty of spiritual intuition and it is this that is described in the Upanishads as “heart,” “the lotus of the heart,” or “the cave of the heart.” Āe awakening, or the discovery, of the spiritual heart is the first real spiritual experience meditators get, and it opens the door for more experiences in their spiritual journey. Āe process of consciously directing a single stream of thought toward a higher spiritual center—usually the heart—is called meditation.5 For meditation to succeed, the mind must be fixed at the heart (or, whichever higher center one is focusing on) and this becomes possible only when the spiritual heart is discovered. Since the mind cannot be fixed at an imaginary place, it wanders aimlessly during meditation, a common experience that most beginners in meditation practice are familiar with. Unable to locate the spiritual heart, most
the body, the mind, the senses, and the ego, which are all considered products of matter. Āe Upanishads are the philosophical portion of the Vedas, the primary scripture of the Hindus, which are at least three thousand years old. All translations of Sanskrit texts in this essay, the Katha Upanishad and the Yoga-Sutra, are mine. 4 All of the “problems” that human beings have spring from, or are related to, either the body or the senses, both of which are limited, weak, changeable, and vulnerable to outside forces. Some problems are specific (such as poverty or homelessness) but others are general and pervasive (such as mortality). 5 Āe process of tying the mind down at a particular center is called dharana. See Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra 3.1.
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6 meditators succeed in concentrating only on the emotional heart. Devotional practices such as prayer and worship often activate the emotional heart first and then, gradually, they awaken the spiritual heart. Āe spiritual heart is beyond emotions. Āe discovery of the spiritual heart is a fascinating experience. In the early stages of meditation practice, everything within the body of the meditator appears to be solid, and darkness is all that is seen when the eyes are closed. Āe spiritual heart has not been located and, until it is, those attempting meditation appear to be fumbling their way in what seems like a dark room or a tunnel. What sustains this search is intense faith and what fuels it is purity of purpose, purity of emotion, and purity of reason. 7 Suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the darkness within gives way to a glow of light and one discovers space, a space that is much larger than that occupied by the anatomical heart. Āis inner, lighted space is the seat of pure, objectless consciousness. Āis is the spiritual heart. Āe longer one dwells in it, the larger the space becomes. Āe inner space has no boundaries. Enthroned in the center of the spiritual heart is the Chosen Deity, which the meditator is now able to see in perfect clarity. Āis is the place where the Upanishads locate the true Self ( atman).8 A strong anatomical heart ensures good physical health. A purified emotional heart ensures good emotional health. An awakened spiritual heart ensures good spiritual health. Physical health and emotional health are both important for a happy, fulfilling, meaningful life. They are inadequate, though, when life eventually meets its inseparable counterpart, death. What survives death and destruction is spirit. Without the direct experience of one’s true Self ( atman), the spirit within, a person remains trapped in the endless circle of birth and death. 9
6 Āis can result in people getting overwhelmed by emotion during meditation. Spiritual teachers advise that during meditation it is best to keep emotions under check as far as possible. 7 Āese three—purity of purpose, purity of emotion, purity of reason—are attained, respectively, through the practices associated with karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga. 8 Clearly, the atman is not “located” in the heart in the same way a person is located in a room. Āe heart is described as the seat of the atman in the sense that it is “there” that the direct experience of the atman can be had. 9 It is this entrapment that is expressed through the concepts of karma and rebirth.
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Spiritual life is a life rooted in the spirit, and the spirit is discovered in the light of buddhi. Āe light of buddhi is not different from the light of the spirit. Seeing that light is really being that light. It is through the spiritual heart that we enter the realm of being. According to Vedanta, we have “become” mortal, imperfect, and bound by forgetting our atman nature. In order to recover our apparently lost memory, we have to end the process of “becoming” and begin the process of “being” what we always are—immortal, perfect and free.
CHILDHOOD, INTUITION, VOCATION: REMEMBERING SARA GRANT Fanny Howe University of California, San Diego Years ago, and far from the world I know, a young girl by the name of Sara Grant was sent oĀ in a very particular direction by her parents. She went to the Convent schools of the Sacred Heart at both Roehampton and Hove, England, to pursue a traditional Catholic childhood education in the early twentieth century. She must have been well adapted for such an environment from the beginning because she went on to become a Sister of the Sacred Heart, and remained faithful to her vows until the end of her life. From early in her childhood, however, she had quarreled with her teachers over their reification of Jesus and the way they gave attributes to the ultimate mystery, God. Even when she was very young she believed that God was unknowable and Jesus was a way to the truth, not an end in himself—a teacher, and not an object of worship that could become an obstacle to deeper cosmological truths. Early on she may have wondered if institutional Christianity even believes in the unity of God, given its insistence on other religions being inferior, if not wrong, and its casual but dogmatic exclusion of others from its gifts. All the same, the misconceptions she was taught as a student became a drive to correction. She followed one question and one way of life. Such a clean trajectory seems unthinkable to many of us in the modern West, so my aim in writing about her is partly driven by my own agitated questioning. Why did Sara Grant have such certainty as to live a cloistered life and devote herself to one purpose? My own youth had been a mad scramble to find a foothold in a conflicted world placed arbitrarily before me. For many years, as one who could not stand historical injustice, I spent my time trying to prove to myself that I was wrong to sense that this injustice was also eternal. Sara Grant, on the other hand, spent her time trying to prove to herself that her deepest intuition, her inner compass, was right. Her strength and determination may have been largely a product of the
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sense of order and safety instilled in her during her childhood. Yet, in either case—no matter what the upbringing—if a child feels misled by the adults in her life, this may be enough to impel her to devote herself to adjusting the error. For one child the medium for her quest might be scholarship, for another religion, for another art. Because Sara Grant was educated early on as a religious person, her commitment involved Christian theology, theory, and practice, before a twist of fate took her on a radically new path. She was sent by her order to India. It is here, as she tells the story in her Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, that Sister Sara suĀered a kind of breakdown. She found herself in a country she had never imagined she would visit. There she was among people of a diĀerent, enigmatic faith, having to teach them philosophy, including the philosophy of Hinduism about which she knew nothing at all. She had studied at Oxford with Iris Murdoch. She knew Aquinas inside and out. Now it was her study of Hinduism in preparation for teaching that destabilized her. Young and alone in Bombay, she must have experienced the usual symptoms of culture shock—vertigo, fear, loss of direction—underscored, now, by a cracking apart of her faith foundation. When she encountered Hinduism, she could not deny that this philosophy spoke the truth. Non-dualism ( advaita) isn’t just another way of looking at things. When fully grasped, it can threaten one’s faith in order, eĀective prayer, and individual worth. It can destroy the westerner’s assumption that events add up in the end and reveal the eye of God as a watchful, influential and kindly one to whom you can appeal as you move along. It alters the dimensions of reality by putting everything (unseen and seen) together in one radiant whole. A person who has fully understood this totality cannot retreat to an earlier position without scars. But one can retreat, scarred, and many do, because the cost of crossing over and out of the familiar is too high to pay. Some become scholars and attempt to explain non-dualism to students; others become practitioners of meditation and yoga at home in their own culture and bring what they have carried safely back to others. Some return to their own religious practice, more highly attuned to its profound origins. Sara Grant, along with a few other men and women from the West, crossed over and submerged herself in advaita. She learned Sanskrit, the many schools of Hindu philosophy, started an inter-religious ashram with Christian nuns, presented papers all over India, entered into
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dialogue with monks and activists and post Vatican II religions, and stayed in India for the next forty-five years, her life-time. When I met her in 1999, she was wearing a sari and sitting with her bare feet up on the chair in the Sacred Heart house in Oxford. She was small and very good looking, with grey hair tied back, and she provided an energetic outpouring of conversation. She concluded by remarking that the Holy Spirit, at this time, is “brooding, brooding” over the world. In her years at the ashram she had attempted to reconcile a system of spiritual practice that is based on the word with one that is more like a speechless dance. The dance was between the inner self that has no language and the Lord of the cosmos. It is a dance that requires imagination, balance, attention, flexibility, silence. The in and the out are one manifestation of the same created consciousness. About her early teaching career in Bombay, she wrote: The staff and students of Sophia College were drawn from all religious communities. As I came to know and love them, it became quite clear that in spite of all our diĀerences, the same Spirit was at work in all of us. Philosophy in all its branches was a marvelous meeting ground for minds, but very soon a new and very searching question presented itself: what exactly was I, a Christian educator, supposed to be doing for my students who were mostly not Christians? (19)
She realized that she could not set out to convert them (all females) since they were part of a culture that arranged marriages within its own tradition. She couldn’t preach the Gospel and make them feel inadequate by doing so. So she turned to St. Ignatius who had described ways of helping people “form themselves in an integrity of mind and heart which would lead them to acknowledge truth wherever they met it, and follow it out to the end” (19–20). At that time the name for such an inclusive method was “inculturation.” Sister Sara entered into that activity whole-heartedly, first by transcending diĀerences between Christian church backgrounds (Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Evangelical) for the formation of an ashram, and then by devoting her studies to locating the cross-over moments in each religion. She became the facilitator of the Christa Prema Seva Ashram, and had to abandon her teaching practice only after many years of trying to juggle both. Liberation theology—with its emphasis on the Gospels’ preferential option for the poor and seeing Christ in the least among us—helped give her a larger social context for her purpose. It was the sixties
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everywhere, after all, and certain points on the globe were producing similar thinking. Sara Grant wrote many essays on this subject, and presented several papers at conferences around India. But she was driven to solitary study of the first problem she had as a child. What is the relationship between the individual person, Jesus, and the ineĀable mystery? She translated from certain Sanskrit texts and placed them beside sections of the Gospels, showing where their meanings converged. But the major task she undertook was interpreting the writings of Hindu philosopher Sankara (also known as Sankaracarya), the first to consolidate the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta. What helped her with this, surprisingly perhaps, was her deep familiarity with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The overlaps in their systems were striking and helped her in her deepest pursuit of correspondences. By this time she was immersed in Hindu culture and language and able to swing back and forth between the two, without suĀering the loss of either. She used a variety of texts from the Rig Veda and the Gospels, from writings about them, all the while determined to “envisage much more radical possibilities.” As we enter more and more precipitously into a global culture where people from everywhere merge and react to each other, as animals might do, it is the template of the past to which we return for guidance in how to relate to our neighbors ethically, and how to construct models for our children. This is not the recent past, but the old, old past that preceded humanism and the evolution of the Western model of enlightenment. What frail structure (tribe, boat, tent, altar) stood at the heart of all that we have become under the sun? In Sara Grant’s urgent words, we need to recover in our Christology the cosmic and theocentric vision of the early Church, for the loss of which reaction to the Arian heresy was no doubt largely responsible: the Father and the Spirit withdrew into the shadows. The former only too often assuming the image of the stern and demanding judge, to be appeased only by the death of an innocent man, his own son, and Jesus was left to carry the whole burden of redeeming the world, including somehow making salvation accessible to his fellow members of the human race who had never heard of him through the teaching of his disciples. (79)
She came to believe that the Church feared the Spirit at the same time as it domesticated God. What was left was the body of Christ crucified hanging like a huge insect on altars and church lawns or else as “an imaginary friend” to individuals. In the Rig Veda and the Upanishads,
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Sister Sara found an equivalent figure to the Christ she had imagined as a child. This person (Self) was more like the original thought behind articulated thought, the unarticulated, unseen, unseeable form that is both beginning and end of each self on earth. She herself translated this verse: I know that great Person shining like the sun, beyond darkness, Knowing whom a man passes beyond death. There is no other way to the abode. I know him who is beyond age, the Self of all, who goes everywhere, all pervading. Desiring true freedom, I surrender, I take refuge. I go to him who tells me by his light that I am the Self. (Svetasvatara Upanishad 3.8)
This is Jesus in an Indian context and consciousness. This archetypal person exudes a freedom and fluidity that Sara Grant believed was more true to the essence of the Christ. She called Jesus her guru and wanted to free the Christian Christ from the bondage of Western history, which strangled his essential teachings in the name of sacrifice, laws, and judgment. Above all, she wanted to free God from history, since the eternal has no history, no name, no form, and it is this mysterious inaccessibility of God from historical forces that raises the question she had as a child. What is the relation between the eternal and the temporal, absolute existence and created existence, in terms of the ultimate consummation of the latter? Sankara taught and Sara Grant concurred with him that “the created order of being could be understood only if it was seen in a relation of radical dependence on absolute Being, apart from which its existence is unthinkable.” Reason, therefore, had to “abdicate any claim to selfsufficiency in the matter of supreme knowledge” (86–7). Sister Sara found in Sankara’s writings the insight she had been seeking since childhood. That is, a person is made of reciprocal (and reasonable) relationships with all that is real, natural, and human in the world. But there is no reciprocal relationship between the human and the mystery that created him and her. Even our highest consciousness is constantly flowing from and to the same source, one that is utterly unknowable and on which we are terminally dependent. To express the experience of that consciousness, she turned to the following lines from the English poet and Catholic convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliĀs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” (“No worst, there is none,” lines 9–10).
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What she had sensed as true when she was a child, she now knew, through years of thought and practice, was true. Because the religious imagination of one tradition corresponds to the other, we can see at the heart of each person everywhere the same fundamental relationship to the divine. In the Taittiriya Upanishad, she found this psalm: O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful! I am food! I am food! I am food! I am the food-eater! I am the food-eater! I am the food-eater! I am the uniting agent! I am the uniting agent! I am the uniting agent! I am the firstborn of the world order, earlier than the gods, at the source of eternal life. He who gives me, surely saves thus! I who am food eat the eater of food—I have overcome the whole world. I am shining like the sun. He who knows this—such is the secret knowledge. (Taittiriya Upanishad 10.6)
Works Cited Eight Upanishads . Vol. 1. Trans. Swami Gambhirananda. Kolkata, India: Advaita Asharama, 2006. Grant, Sara. Toward an Alternative Āeology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian . Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Corporation, 1991. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.” Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. W. H. Gardner. 1953. London: Penguin Classics, 1985. 61.
Suggestions For Further Reading Grant, Sara. Sankaracarya’s Concept of Relation . Delhi, India: Motilal BandaridassPublishers, 1999. ———. Lord of the Dance. Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Company, 1987. Sankaracharya. Tattva Bodha of Sankaracharya . Bombay, India: Central Chinmaya Mission Trust, 1986.
ARUNACHALA* Shirley du Boulay Oxford, England Even before the sun rises the sky is lit up. —Odette Baumer-Despeigne, Introduction x
Ā e man whom Henri Le Saux credited with his true initiation into Indian spirituality was Sri Ramana Maharshi. For more than fifty years the great sage had lived only a hundred-and-fifty kilometers from Kulitallai, so a visit became possible soon after Henri’s arrival in India. He was thirty-nine at the time and had only been in India for a year, during which he was living at Shantivanam with Fr. Jules Monchanin. Both men had heard of Ramana and were deeply impressed by him, though Monchanin said there was “not an atom of Christianity in that serene and beautiful spirit” (qtd. in Life 33). In January 1949 Monchanin suggested that they go to see him together—the Bishop, to their surprise, supporting the visit and urging them to stay in the ashram itself. Ramana Maharshi fitted the description of holiness bestowed on St. Teresa of Avila, for though his influence was far-reaching and profound he was, in some inscrutable way, “extraordinarily ordinary.” By the time Henri and Jules Monchanin visited the ashram, hundreds of people of many different nationalities, religions, and occupations had flocked there to receive his darshan.1 His first western disciple, in 1911, was a high ranking member of the Madras Police Force; in the 1950s Paul Brunton spread his fame by writing of him in his book In Search of Secret India ; and the English writer Somerset Maugham based the guru in his novel Ā e Razor’s Edge on him. A powerful description of the sage comes from one of his biographers, Arthur Osborne: Sri Bhagavan 2 would turn to the devotee, his eyes fixed upon him with blazing intentness. Ā e luminosity, the power of his eyes pierced into * For a complete biography of Swami Abhishiktananda, see myĀ e Cave of the Heart (Orbis, 2005). Ā is essay is a revised and edited version of chapter six from that book. 1 Sight, vision; coming face-to-face with transcendent Reality in human form. 2 Literally, “God.” It is a title used for one like Sri Ramana who is recognized as having realized his identity with the Self.
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shirley du boulay one, breaking down the thought-process. Sometimes it was as though an electric current was passing through one, a vast peace, a flood of light. One devotee has described it: “Suddenly Bhagavan turned his luminous, transparent eyes on me. Before that I could not stand his gaze for long. Now I looked straight back into those terrible, wonderful eyes, how long I could not tell. Ā ey held me in a sort of vibration distinctly audible to me.” (144–45)
Ramana Maharshi’s influence on Henri was so profound that it is worth knowing something about this remarkable man. Ramana Maharshi was born at a significant time in the Hindu Calendar. It was December 29, 1879, and Tiruchuzhi, a little town in Tamil Nadu, was celebrating the festival of Arudra Darshan, when the God Shiva appears as Nataraja in the cosmic dance of creation. Ā e image of Shiva was garlanded with flowers, and all day and most of the night it was taken through the streets to the sound of drum and conch and the chanting of the people, the men clad only in the dhoti and the women wearing deep red and gold saris. Ā e processions and celebrations continued far into the night, and as dawn was breaking, the image was taken back to the temple. At just that moment a child was born to Alagammal, the wife of Sundaram Ayyar, an accountant’s clerk. Ā e child was named Venkataraman and was later to be revered as an embodiment of Shiva and known as Sri Ramana Maharshi. In most ways Venkataraman was a normal-enough boy: athletic, fond of football, wrestling, and swimming, and blessed with an amazingly retentive memory which enabled him to repeat a lesson after hearing it just once. Ā e one odd thing about him was the depth of his sleep: he would sleep so deeply that his friends would shout and bang at the door to wake him; they would even beat him and carry him around and put him back to bed, and he would know nothing about it until they told him the next morning. He saw no significance in this, though later devotees regarded it as an early sign of his ability to plunge beyond thought. Doctors of the twenty-first century would perhaps see it as some sort of seizure. Venkataraman read little religious theory, but he had heard of the sacred mountain of Arunachala, and when he discovered it was a real place and not all that far away, he was amazed and excited. Soon after that he discovered the life-stories of the Tamil Saints and he realized that the Divine could be manifested in both places and in people. A throbbing awareness began to awaken in him, a state of bliss. “At first I thought it was some kind of fever,” he said, “but I decided, if so it is a pleasant fever, so let it stay” (qtd. in Osborne 17).
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Only a few months later this “current of awareness” grew until Venkataram reached a state rarely attained permanently during life on earth, a state for which it is hard to find a name (qtd. in Osborne 18). It has been called Self-realization, sahaja samadhi, enlightenment, unity consciousness, mystical union. Most of the spiritual texts in Sanskrit use the word Awakening, as did Ramana himself and as did Henri Le Saux. Awakening to the Self. Ā e young Venkataram reached this state in a curious way. He was a healthy young man of seventeen when suddenly he was overcome with a violent fear of death. He dealt with this fear by lying with his limbs outstretched, stiff as though he was already dead, holding his breath and asking himself various questions: “Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? Ā is body dies . . . itwill be reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body I? . . . Āe body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. Ā at means I am deathless Spirit” (qtd. in Osborne 18–19). As his senses withdrew from outer objects and his mind from thought, in a flash he realized “that all passes away and disappears; but myself I remain, I am ” ( Secret 17). For Abhishiktananda, this was a reminder of the Kena Upanishad: “A lightning-flash; the eye blinks— Ah! /—the sign of Brahman” (qtd. in Secret 17). From that moment all fear of death vanished and his constant questions were, Who am I? What is the Self ? Soon after this experience he was drawn to the sacred mountain of Arunachala where, now known as Sri Ramana Maharshi, he spent the rest of his life in silence and solitude, always available to the devotees who were increasingly drawn to him—devotees who could tell he had reached a rare stage of enlightenment and were eager to sit in his presence. Ramana Maharshi taught the purest form of Advaita, or non-duality. Ā e word Advaita comes from the Sanskrit words a and dvaita, literally “not two”—non-duality. It is the fundamental insight of the Upanishads, and one which was to dominate the rest of Henri’s life. Its central teaching is the oneness of the individual soul with the Absolute, and Ramana taught it through the discipline of Self-knowledge. Ā is is as hard to communicate as any mystical experience, and language itself can be a barrier, particularly because the word “Self ” is sometimes misunderstood in Christian cultures, where it tends to be equated with selfishness or self-centredness. What then did Ramana Maharshi mean by the word? What is the Self?
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In answer to questions about the nature of the Self Ramana Maharshi would say, “Ā e only reality is the Self,” or “Ā e Self is the center of centers.” “Ā e Pure Mind—the mind free from thoughts is the Self.” Or perhaps most simply, “Ā e Self is only Be-ing, not being this or that. It is simply Being.” He was teaching his disciples that supremely simple art that most people, especially people for whom the mind is king, find so supremely difficult—simply “to be.” He taught his disciples largely by silence, but also by what he called “investigation,” arguing that just as water is got by boring a well, so also you realize the Self by investigation. Some of these exchanges have been recorded. D. How to realize the Self? M. It is already realized. One should know this simple fact. Ā at is all. D. But I do not know it. How shall I know it? M. Do you deny your existence? D. No; how can that be done? M. Ā en the truth is admitted. D. Yet, I do not see. How shall I realize the Self ? M. Find out who says “I.” D. Yes, I say “I.” M. Who is this “I”? Is it the body or some one besides the body? D. It is not the body. It is someone beside it. M. Find it out. D. I am unable to do it. M. . . . Find out wherefrom this “I” arises. Ā en this “I” will disappear and the infinite Self will remain . . . D. Wherefrom does it arise? M. Find out. D. I do not know. Please enlighten me. M. It is not from without. It is from within. Where does it come from? If elsewhere you can be led there. Being within you must find out yourself. (Talk 336, Talks 302–3)
Ā ough Ramana’s writings had not been translated into French at the time, Henri had read enough about him in articles in various periodicals to be convinced that his visit to the famous sage was going to be a high point in his life. Ā e darshan took place in a large open shelter, supported on bamboo poles and covered with coconut leaves, known as a pandal in India. It had by then become something of a ritual and in view of Ramana’s age—he was seventy at the time and very frail after a life of asceticism—disciples and devotees were only allowed to come into his presence at certain times. Henri was convinced that something was
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going to take place between them, that he would receive a message, if not in words, at least something would be communicated spiritually. But there is nothing so destructive of fulfillment as high expectation. Nothing happened and he felt let down and filled with sadness. He did not even like the context in which he met the sage—the liturgical atmosphere, the constant reference to him as “Bhagavan,” which, as it means “Lord,” he considered almost blasphemous when applied to a human being. All he could see was an old man with a gentle face and beautiful eyes—so ordinary, rather like his own grandfather. All through the meal which followed the darshan Henri could not take his eyes off him. He watched him eat the same food as them, use his fingers just as they did, occasionally talk as they did. But how could he accept being called “Bhagavan”? Why did he allow himself to be worshipped in this way? Where was the halo? Ironically, in view of the importance Ramana was to have in his life, this first meeting was a huge disappointment. Later they returned to the pandal where for the first time Henri heard the Vedas chanted, as timelessly and simply as they had been chanted by the rishis in the forests for thousands of years. Ā ese archetypal sounds drew him as nothing so far had done. Something was stirring, though this was not destined to be the high experience for which he had hoped. He woke next morning with a fever, and by the evening he knew he had to leave. He could not burden the ashram with illness. But before he left he had an important encounter with Ethel Merston, a sensitive and kindly Englishwoman who had known Gurdjieff, Ouspenski, and Krishnamurti and who always spent her holdiays at Tiruvannãmalai. On hearing of his disappointment she spoke bluntly: “You have come here with far too much ‘baggage,’ ” she said. “You want to know, you want to understand. You are insisting that what is intended for you should necessarily come to you by the path which you have determined. Make yourself empty; simply be receptive: make your meditation one of pure expectation.” ( Secret 8)
Perhaps the outer fever was an expression of some profound inner transformation. After Ethel’s firm and kindly words his consciousness mysteriously changed, even before his mind recognized it: Ā e invisible halo of the Sage had been perceived by something in me deeper than any words. Unknown harmonics awoke in my heart. A melody made itself felt, and especially an all-embracing ground-bass . . . In the Sage of Arunachala of our own time I discerned the unique Sage of
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As the fever abated he realized the depth of himself to which the Sage of Arunachala had penetrated. He would never be quite the same again. Six months later he returned to Tiruvannamalai—now released from his western clothes and comfortable in kavi, the two strips of orange cloth worn by Hindu ascetics—only to find Ramana very ill with a tumor on his arm and unable to see anyone but his medical helpers and closest friends. However, Ethel used her influence to find him somewhere to stay and during his time there Ramana began to hold darshan again, Henri saying of this that he did his best to keep his rational mind in abeyance and tried “simply to attend to the hidden influence” (Secret 11). He spent some time wandering round the caves hewed into the side of the mountain, meditating in crevices in the rock but careful not to disturb the hermits living there, motionless in their caves. He talked to Ramana’s disciples and learned more about the sage he was coming to venerate so deeply. A Telegu brahmin explained Ramana’s teaching to him, using the philosophical terminology which at that time Henri found very congenial, though it was not a conversation which he recounted when he later came to write about this experience. All he said was, “But now, as I look back, I cannot help smiling gently at such attempts to define in intellectual terms that which by its very nature excludes the possibility of being reduced to ideas” (Secret 13). Another brahmin told him of the marvelous indifference with which Ramana bore his suffering and how his central teaching was to find the heart deep within oneself, beyond mind and thought. But once again it was Ethel Merston who opened his eyes to something which had so far eluded him: that at Arunachala there was not only a great sage but a temple and, most of all, a mountain—Arunachala itself. Grace could be bestowed through any of these three channels. One day it would be the mountain itself which would draw him. He listened carefully, but it was to be some time before he really understood. And understanding served only to multiply the divisions inside him. He had already admitted to having “two loves”—India and France. Now more divisions were appearing. He was a French
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priest wearing the clothes of a Hindu ascetic and longing to penetrate the spirit of Hinduism. He was deeply Christian and of the old-fashioned variety, never traveling without his Mass kit and unable to say Mass unless there was room to stand upright and a door that could be locked to prevent the sacred vessels from being profaned—two conditions not readily found in a cave in a mountainside. Now, as he came to love the mountain, he found his heart divided between the sacred river Kavery, where he lived with Father Monchanin, and the sacred mountain of Arunachala. Yet it was two-and-a-half years before he returned to Tiruvannamalai. He had intended to go in the spring of 1950, but as he prepared to leave Kulittalai he read in a Tamil paper that Sri Ramana had died. At the moment of his death, the report said, a beam of light had flashed across the sky and was seen by the sage’s disciples as far away as Madras, though they were unaware of its significance. Despite the love he was beginning to feel for the mountain, if the Maharshi was not at Tiruvannamalai then Henri had no desire to be there. However, while taking some European friends round Tamil Nadu, he found himself so near Tiruvannamalai that he suggested they visit the ashram. Ā e Vedas were chanted at Ramana’s tomb and once again Henri fell under their spell; even more significantly, he discovered that there were hermitages scattered round the mountainside and a brahmin, who looked after the visitors, told Henri that there was an empty cave overlooking the Temple and that Henri was welcome to settle there. He began to understand. “If Ramana was himself so great, how much more so must be this Arunachala which drew Ramana to himself?” (Secret 23). Ā e mountain had begun to cast its spell over him. It is all up with anyone who has paused, even for a moment, to attend to the gentle whisper of Arunachala. Arunachala has already taken him captive, and will play with him without mercy to the bitter end. Darkness after light, desertion after embraces, he will never let him go until he has emptied him of everything in himself that is not the one and only Arunachala and that still persists in giving him a name, as one names another—until he has been finally swallowed up, having disappeared for ever in the shining of his Dawn-light, Aruna. (Secret 23)
Ā e italicized another is the only sign he gives of the oneness, the unity that lay ahead of him.
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So at the end of March, 1952, Dom Henri Le Saux—a European Benedictine monk in his early forties, having by then taken the name of Swami Abhishiktananda—for the first time dressed, ate and lived as a sadhu, a wandering monk, in the caves of Arunachala. Ā e fact that he also lived in silence he attributed to the “spell-binding wiles” of the mountain. He tells how this came about in his typically self-deprecating way. When he arrived, he spent a few days at the ashram making the “necessary arrangements,” while admitting that the real sadhu would simply drop everything, bow reverently towards the mountain, and sit down in the first convenient cavity he saw. “But alas, how long it takes for those who are burdened with bodily and mental baggage to become once more simply themselves and as natural as children” (Secret 25). He was taken to a large cave (known as the cave of Vanatti and previously occupied by “the pickaxe monk,” so called as he was often seen carrying a pickaxe) and introduced to the watchman, Kadirvel. Kadirvel’s eyes lit up at the sight of a white skin, assuming the owner would have plenty of cash and that rich visitors would call, and he set about drawing and carrying water, cleaning the cave, and running small errands. And of course he talked. Exasperated by the continual chatter, Abhishiktananda decided the only thing he could do was to let it be known that he was keeping total silence. Arunachala had won again; Abhishiktananda had no alternative but to honor his promise. Ā at evening he wrote in his diary: “Deep joy, deep peace. Not even any reading possible, the antaram (the interior) is too ‘busy.’ Hunger itself hardly intrudes, even though since last evening I have eaten nothing but bananas” ( Ascent 25). His day started early in the morning. While it was still dark, he would say Mass in his cave, deep in the heart of the mountain. Ā en he would sit in front of his sacro speco ,3 as he called his cave, and wait for the sun to rise. As the dawn broke, blazing with the warm redness that gives the mountain its name, 4 he would greet it in the Indian way, hands together about his head, and, making a full prostration, sing the Lumen Christi and the Gloria as they are sung at dawn in the Syrian Church. He sang Lauds, saying the Lord’s Prayer with his arms stretched out facing Tiruvannamalai, the town at the foot of Arunachala. (It is a measure of his involvement with the place that
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Sacred space, as St. Benedict’s cave at Subiaco was known. Arunachala: aruna—“the rosy color of dawn”; achala—“mountain.”
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the town had already become another word that he prefaced with the personal pronoun: it was now “my” Tiruvannamalai as it was “my” Hindus and “my” people.) Soon realism joined him in the cave. It was all very well that he was clothed in saffron robes and sitting, relatively comfortless, in a cave. But what if . . .? What if he knew he would be there for ever? What if no one knew or cared that he was there? What if no one brought him his midday meal and he had to beg for his food? Would he still feel such joy? Ā en, in the depth of his soul, he heard what he called “the call to total dispossession,” the call to total stripping, which is the call to total freedom; since he only is free who has nothing, absolutely nothing that he can call his own. ( Secret 28)
His silence, undertaken almost accidentally in self-defense, was to be the bearer of countless graces. On his first evening in the cave of Vanatti, Henri received three powerful intimations which he recorded in his spiritual diary. He accepted Hindu sannyasa5 as an end in itself, not merely as a means of proclaiming the Christian Gospel. He embraced silence. And he went even further in his acceptance of poverty, promising himself to take his bowl and, without any feeling of shame, beg for his food, for a true sannyasi has nothing in reserve, not even a handful of rice; he entrusts himself totally to Providence. Henri determined that he would live forever as a genuine Christian sannyasi, a Hindu-Christian monk. Such insights are not usually immediately fulfilled, and these were not. Only two days later he was in evangelical mode, writing, “My dream is to Christianize my race . . . it is a question of preparing for a Christian India, of preparing for it not by using various ways and means, but by myself being among the first-fruits by opening a path” (Ascent 28). Ā e way had changed—he would not proclaim the Gospel in the traditional manner of missionaries—but the goal remained the same. His devotion to Christ was total, both then and throughout his life. Ā ough he was to change radically, at the time he believed that only by embracing Christianity would India find spiritual fulfillment.
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His determination to bury his pride and beg for his food was a matter over which, at first, he compromised. He had wanted to share in the distribution of rice at the temple, but this practice was about to cease, so he accepted a proper midday meal, in silence, from one of the temple managers who considered it an honor to give alms to the new sadhu. He would then go to the market and buy a few bananas for his evening meal, showing the shopkeeper a coin, though it was never accepted. He was visibly a sannyasi and was treated as one . Of these three intimations, the most important was silence—the still pool where his understanding was to mature and where enlightenment was born, the aspect of his inner life which was to permeate the rest of his life. Ā is first spell of silence lasted for ten days, but he returned in May, staying at the cave of Vanatti for three weeks. When the building of an open-air cinema at the foot of the mountain below his cave ruined his peace, he moved to the cave of Arutpal Tirtham, the cave known as “the spring of the milk of grace.” As always, he did not take himself too seriously over the question of silence, often admitting to a contradictory attitude, acknowledging his great love of company and laughing at himself for preaching silence while loving to talk. Nor did he always find it easy: sometimes when visitors called he felt the sacrifice acutely. But he had made it clear that he did not want to be disturbed and was, as he put it, “caught out at my own game” when he found he was regarded as a munivar, an ascetic who is vowed to silence. Even when the police came to see him they allowed the exchanges to take place wordlessly, on paper; and to the embarrassment of the new sadhu, people came and prostrated before him, offering him all the signs of reverence that are usually offered to idols in temples. “Ā ey sat in meditation; meanwhile the Buddha remained sitting in the lotus position, motionless at the back of the cave,” he wrote ( Life 61). Once, when seriously tempted to conversation by the presence of an interesting visitor, he asked himself firmly, “What would the professor learn from the monk if he were to divert him from the One and Only? ” ( Lettres 52). So he kept silence, allowing both himself and his visitor to be taught by silence. Once he had accepted the silence, he learned to value it, to love it. He was “willing to remain forever in my cave, keeping silence, without any concern for keeping witness. To be the first Christian for God at the Holy Mountain of Arunachala” ( Ascent 26). Gradually he was drawn away from reminders of ordinary life, discovering that there were different sorts of silence. Ā e outer form, simply not speaking,
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and the great inner silence, “the abstinence from all thought, of the indescribable solitude of the Alone, deep within” ( Secret 30). Silence was to be the vast arena in which the drama of his search was to be played out. Just before the end of this first stay in the cave of Vanatti he wrote a poem to Arunachala, a love poem acknowledging what his beloved mountain is teaching him. In silence you teach me silence, O Arunachala, You who never depart from your silence, May I not have entered Your cave in vain; of “mine” and “me” may nothing any longer remain. ( Ascent 37)
He was discovering a peace he had never imagined possible, though he knew he had not yet reached the inmost depth where, alone and without a second, advaita, You are. You shine in the form of Self You are “I.” ( Ascent 37)
Ā e poem ends with a ringing declaration of “Jesus Brahman!” Arunachala was passing on its message that the essence of Hinduism and Christianity, indeed of all religions, is the same. It is typical of the man that his time at Arunachala, while focusing mostly on deep silence like “pure water, or air which is so purified that it has no discernable odor” ( Secret 30), was full of people—his encounters with whom he records in loving detail. Ā ere were the people dedicated to look after him, uninvited visitors to the cave—sometimes children would come after school and sit silently gazing at him. Wordlessly he formed a friendship with his nearest neighbor Lakshmi Devi, a highly esteemed woman with many disciples who kept a vow of silence for twelve years. Once his period of silence was over he would go and visit someone every afternoon, and indeed there was a rich mixture of people, “a jumble of the devout” ( Lettres 60). Ā ere were Hindus, Parsees, Muslims, Protestants, and Jews, all drawn to the irresistible combination of sage, mountain and temple. He told his friend Canon Lemarié of the French woman who worshipped at Sacré Coeur and Fatima and who considered Buddha, Shiva, and Ramana Maharshi to be her gurus; of the doctor who came to India and became first a Buddhist monk, then a theosophist, then married a Hindu girl and went from ashram to ashram “making up a spiritual cocktail as undrinkable as the ‘cocktails’
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of liqueurs that your cross-Channel neighbors are so fond of ” (Lettres 60). He met the esoteric Sujata, who was impressed by the brightness of his halo, and a professor who specialized in Persian poetry, who likewise exclaimed how radiant he was looking. Abhishiktananda was intrigued: “Could it be, then, that even at the physical level something passes from the mountain of Arunachala into the hearts of those who shelter in its caves?” ( Secret 49). He developed a great admiration for Srimati Radhabai Ammeyar, who lived in a cave so small and low that even when seated there was just a hair’s breadth between head and roof and whose daily and only meal during her three years of silence was a few handfuls of rice-flour, roasted and mixed with curds. And there was a young sadhu called Saccidananda, whose singing delighted him as much as the chattering of some of Radhabai’s guests irritated him. He readily admitted he did not have the patience of his new friend. While he was living in the cave of Vanatti, he was living almost totally as a Hindu monk, yet like all non-Hindus at that time, he was not normally allowed into the central part of Hindu temples: he could only go as far as the outer courts. He was to become a rare exception to this rule. One day during his period of silence he was visited by Arunachala Gurukkal, one of the priests of the Temple of Annamalaiyar.6 Ā e priest often came to see him, and through signs and through writing in Tamil, they managed to communicate at such a deep level that the Hindu, clearly impressed by this Christian priest, insisted that once his period of silence was over, he personally would show him everything in the Temple. While delighted, Abhishiktananda was well aware of both his monastic status and his priesthood, and was always careful not to be taken for a Christian turned Hindu; he would have to “exercise all my casuist-canonist subtlety to remain outside any participation in formal worship . . . Above all I must avoid the scandal and false interpretations of too broad-minded an attitude” ( Lettres 58). Of course, he accepted the invitation. How could he resist it? In the event it was his friend’s elder brother, one of only two temple priests who had the right to sit beside the image during the great processions, who was his guide. First they went round the outside of the Temple, past the old banyan tree where sadhus, young and old, men and women, sick and healthy, said their rosaries and chanted 6
Ā e Tamil word for the Lord of Arunachala.
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OM namah Shivaya (Om glory to Shiva). As they walked through the pillared halls, the cloisters, and side chapels, his guide explained the symbolism, but as they approached the shrine itself, the holy of holies, it was in darkness and silence. Eventually they entered the sanctuary itself, the place beyond symbols, where the stone of the Shivalinga stands. Of this Abhishiktananda writes nothing except that it was “the sign of the Presence of the Lord Arunachala in the midst of his people, and the pledge of his grace” ( Secret 105). His brevity on this subject, his unwillingness to search for words, seems appropriate. Ā e depth of the relationship between Abhishiktananda and Arunachala Gurukkal was shown when Henri had to leave Arunachala at short notice and was distressed that he had no time to say goodbye to his friend. But suddenly there was Gurukkal, standing in the entrance to the cave, asking what had happened. “I was lying half-asleep in one of the mandapas of the Temple, when you came and touched me on the side. I awoke with a start, ran straight home, took my bath, and without waiting to have my meal, I came up here . . . It is the lila [the creation as divine play] of the Lord Arunachala” ( Secret 107). So, too, he learned more about the mountain of Arunachala. Ā e name means the dawn-colored mountain, and it has been worshipped as the abode of Shiva since the beginning of time. Hindu mythology crystallizes round the great figures of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who form a triad of Hindu Gods. Ā ey each have many attributes, but broadly Brahma is the god of creation, Vishnu is the preserver of the universe and the embodiment of goodness and mercy, and Shiva combines the three roles of creator, preserver, and destroyer. Ā e legend is that there was a dispute between Brahma and Vishnu about who came first and who was the greater. As this undignified argument raged, a vast column of light appeared between them. Ā ey agreed that the first to reach the foot or the summit of the column of fire and to return to where they were as they spoke would be taken as the greatest. Hundreds of years passed, but neither Brahma nor Vishnu could find either the beginning or the end of the great column of flame. How could they? It had neither a beginning nor an end. It was Shiva who had appeared in this guise and who was seen to be the greatest. Shiva, as Abhishiktananda put it, “is unique and infinite with the uniqueness and infinity of Being itself ” (Secret 52).
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Ā rough the ages of the world the linga of fire became first a mountain of diamond, then of ruby, and in our time, a mountain of rock accessible to ordinary mortals and able to bring salvation, for, according to Hindu mythology, in Shiva-Arunachala the Supreme Lord is made visible. Ramana Maharshi wrote thus: To its caves, age after age, there has come a succession of those who are hungry for wisdom and renunciation, whom the Mountain, the divine Magnet, draws to it bosom, to teach them in its own silence the royal path of the supreme Silence, and how to be established in the Self. (qtd. in Secret 53–4)
Ā ese first three visits to Arunachala changed Abhishiktananda radically. Ā e silence of the mountain had transformed advaita from an inspiring subject of intellectual discussion to an experienced reality. Not yet, it is true, a permanent reality, but something frequently glimpsed and gratefully recognized that enabled him to say, “Even before the sun rises, the sky is lit up.” His motivation in coming to India had to be reassessed, and he wrote to his sister Marie-Ā érèse that he was not a missionary, “just a poor Christian monk in the midst of Hindu monks” ( Life 63), and that he was “not a Hindu monk in order to bring about conversions. Ā e Indo-Christian monastic way of life is an end in itself, not a means” ( Ascent 28). Ramana’s ashram had shed new light on the Gospel and now he knew that “it will not be monastic institutions, more or less perfect in both Christian and Indian terms, that will reveal Christ to India. Only Christian Ramanas will do it. All that monks can do is to prepare the way for these Ramanas” (Ascent 64). Moments of illumination such as he experienced in those weeks are beyond words and cannot be shared easily, so it is not surprising that his early attempts to express the inexpressible are mostly found in his diary. One of the striking aspects of the entries made during this third visit to Arunachala was his struggle to make distinctions between theoretical understanding and experience—indeed between opposites of any kind. He was urging himself to be free from the mind, yet he was using his mind; he had to if he were to reflect on what was happening to him. It is as if he was drawing attention to distinctions and paradox in order to show that they can be transcended.
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For instance he was finding that in India there is little distinction between God’s work and human work—all is the work of the Spirit. Ā en the distinction between time and eternity is stressed as he is drawn into God’s lila, the divine play of creation. In semi-poetic style he writes: If I act like a sulky child who says: I don’t want to play, not I!— then from eternity I fall into time from Spirit I fall into flesh. (Ascent 44)
He overrides Pauline value judgments about the opposites of the flesh and the spirit, content to acknowledge that the flesh is necessary to manifest love. “Ā e human being is also spirit, but he is flesh at the same time . . . He cannot escape from the law of the flesh, from his condition as an incarnate spirit.” And at the heart of this polarity, again beyond the opposites, lies God becoming Man in the Incarnation, the “essential sacrament following necessarily and absolutely from the material condition of the human world” ( Ascent 46). As he experienced the transcending of distinctions, so his attitude to theology and the liturgy began to change. On the Feast of the Trinity in June, he was deeply disappointed by the liturgy of the day that presented the Trinity as something external, “repeating, alas, not the faltering words of wondering children, but unassimilated scholastic formulas.” Now he could only celebrate the Trinity inwardly: “I don’t know how to adore the Trinity, for I am within it, and I do not know which way to turn to make the sashtangam [full prostration]. I am at the very centre in the centre who is the son” ( Ascent 43). Many times he struggles to express satori or enlightenment. It is attained “when I have realized that the centre is as truly everywhere as it is in ‘myself.’ ” It is “a state of being beyond, in which we sink.” But, he asks—with echoes of Ramana Maharshi’s constant question—“Who am I? What is it that sinks? I do not know, but there is a ‘sinking,’ as when we say that we sink into sleep, sink into our mother’s arms. A ‘surrender’ of self, but a surrender to no one and to no thing, but just a surrender” (Ascent 49). Perhaps it is a lack of confidence in this new state, perhaps his typical modesty, that leads him to write in the third person about something that it is clear he has experienced himself. An entry in his diary towards the end of this 1952 visit to Arunachala has the directness and simplicity of true experience.
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shirley du boulay Anyone who has attained satori, anyone who has been enlightened, continues to see grass as green and the sky as blue, to consider rice as something to eat and cloth as something to wear, and the train as a means of transport. What he is liberated from is the relationship to “himself ” that until then he projected onto these things. Ā ings are seen in themselves, and no longer in dependence on “himself.” Dear ones are no less loved, but there is no longer the least attachment, the least turning back on “himself.” (Ascent 50)
Later still, looking back over the whole experience, he wrote even more profoundly. Ā e caves have vanished, he writes, the hermits of Arunachala have vanished, even he himself has vanished, swallowed up in the Depth of the Heart of Arunachala, merged in the Self, the Unique Arunachala. ( Secret 55)
Works Cited Abhishiktananda [Henri Le Saux]. Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: Ā e Spiritual Diary of Swami Abhishiktananda . Ed. Raimon Panikkar. Trans. David Fleming and James Stuart. Delhi, India: ISPCK, 1998. ———. Henri Le Saux: Lettres d’un sannyasi chrétien à Jospeh Lemarié . Paris, France: Editions du Cerf, 1999. ———. Ā e Secret of Arunachala: A Christian Hermit on Shiva’s Holy Mountain . Rev. ed. Delhi, India: ISPCK, 1979. ———. Swami Abhishiktananda: His Life Told through His Letters . Ed. James Stuart. Delhi, India: ISPCK, 1989. Baumer-Despeigne, Odette. Introduction. Ā e Spiritual Journey of Henri Le SauxAbhishiktananda. vii–x. Spencer MA: Cisterian Publications, 1983. Du Boulay, Shirley. Ā e Cave of the Heart: A Biography of Swami Abhishiktananda . New York: Orbis Books, 2005. Monchanin, J. J. Monchanin: Mystique de l’Inde, mystère chrétien . Ed. S. Siauve. Paris, France: Fayard, 1974. Osborne, Arthur. Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge . York Beach ME: Samuel Weiser, 1970. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi . 3 vols. Tiruvannamalai, India: T. N. Venktaraman, Sri Ramanasramam, 1972.
THE LORD OF THE HEART: ABHINAVAGUPTA’S AESTHETICS AND KASHMIR ŚAIVISM Bettina Bäumer Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla In more than one tradition aesthetics plays an important mediating role between the sensuous and the spiritual levels, leading from senseexperience to mystical experience. This interrelatedness of aesthetics and metaphysics has been most thoroughly elaborated in so-called Kashmir Śaivism, especially by its greatest exponent, Abhinavagupta. Here, it is based on the Tantras/Śaiva Āgamas. Specific studies on the central concepts of rasa, bhāva, dhvani, sahr ̣daya, pratibhā , etc. have been undertaken by important scholars, based mostly on the two main texts by Abhinavagupta on aesthetics and poetics, the Abhinavabhāratī on Bharata’s NāṭyaŚāstra, and the Locana on Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka. However, the rootedness of these concepts in the total context of the cosmology and metaphysics of Trika and Pratyabhijñā still needs to be fully explored. Indeed, these two important areas are completely interconnected: aesthetics acquires an unknown depth-dimension and Trika philosophy, or saṃ vidadavayavāda as it is correctly 1 ), finds called (“the doctrine of the non-dualism of consciousness” concrete expression in the arts. Abhinavagupta is the genius who has embodied all these disciplines and traditions in his own person and work. According to his South-Indian disciple Madhurāja, he played the vīṇ ā and had therefore an intimate acquaintance with music, to mention only one example. I do not think it necessary to give an introduction to Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1025 CE), but it should be mentioned that his importance transcends by far the limits of his place of origin and his position in the context of Indian philosophy or aesthetics. It is precisely in linking the different fields of mysticism, philosophy, and poetics that he assumes a universal importance which has still to be discovered fully. The points I am going to raise and the texts to which I will refer should themselves help to throw light on his personality and genius. 1
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
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In a beautiful metaphor in one of his extraordinary maṅgalaślokas, or benedictory verses to the Īśvarapratyabhijñā Vivr ̣tivimarŚinī, he describes his multi-disciplinary training and his work in different fields: I have cleansed myself first by bathing fully in grammar; I have collected the flowers of discerning wisdom that grow on that wish-granting creeper of insightful imagination which grows out of the roots of good reasoning,2 and worshipped the Lord of my heart with them. I have enjoyed the benefits of such beautiful great literature and poetry as can be compared with liquor made out of the essence of Ambrosia; and now, in the company of my beloved lady: discourse on divine non-duality, I am going to repose. (qtd. in Chakrabarti 27)
This simile implies that all his learning, starting from Sanskrit grammar, has been aimed at one purpose: to worship (not externally but mentally) the Lord of his heart , and ultimately, to find rest with his beloved, who is the non-dualistic doctrine ( kathā, lit. “story”). As compared with a worldly lover, he enjoys her company after consuming the essence of the liquor of rasa—obviously an allusion to the role of the aesthetic (as well as mystical ) experience. This is the prerequisite to the final resting in the non-duality of the Lord (viśrānti). From this comparison we can also draw the conclusion that all of Abhinavagupta’s philosophical work is permeated by this rasa, even the essence ( sāra) of it; his work is not ṣuṣka, or “dry,” as he sometimes calls the other philosophical systems like Sām ̣ khya or Nyāya. Whoever has read even a few lines or verses of his works can testify to the taste of this rasāsvāda—whether it is concerned with Tantric exegesis, as in the Tantrāloka, the Parātrīśika Vivaran ̣ a, the Mālinīvijaya Vārttika; with philosophy as in the Vimarśinī and Vivṛtivimarśinī on the Pratyabhijñā Kārikā; or with aesthetics proper. It is difficult to choose from such a rich ocean of rasa in order to present a few drops—an impossible undertaking in fact. I can only present some topics and samples of Abhinavagupta’s work which can throw light on the intimate relationship between aesthetic experience, philosophical insight, and spiritual experience. Abhinavagupta’s multidisciplinary approach explores not only what is mentioned in the above śloka but also the concerns of various modern disciplines,
2 Sattarka: it means also discriminative knowledge, spiritual discrimination, and it is one of the yogāṅgas in Śaiva yoga.
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including the phenomenology of perception, psychology, and linguistic analysis—all in the service of an analysis of states of consciousness and of the practical ways ( upāya) to attain higher levels of consciousness. We may first look at some philosophical topics which are directly related to aesthetics. Every art-form is ultimately embedded in a given cosmology. The cosmology of the Śaivāgamas comprises thirtysix tattvas or levels of reality, also translated as “principles” or “elements,” though the term “cosmotheandric” (used and elaborated by R. Panikkar) would be more fitting since they include not only the cosmic elements but the sense-organs, the mental faculties, and the divine manifestations. The total reality is contained therein, but it is transcended by the Absolute which is beyond any “personal” God, even Śiva (as a tattva). Hence, the thirty-seventh level is anuttara, the “unsurpassable.” Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra is a complete presentation of nāṭya including all the aspects of art—drama, music, dance, poetry, architecture, painting, and aesthetic theory. In his extensive commentary Abhinavabhāratī, Abhinavagupta has preluded each chapter by a benedictory verse or maṅgalaśloka. A study of his benedictory verses alone would reveal his genius. Now, each adhyāya, or chapter, of the Nāṭyaśāstra has been made to correspond to one element of the thirtysix tattvas, and each tattva is worshipped and praised as a form of Śiva (on the model of the aṣaṭmūrti). These verses are not only highly poetical but they connect the subject of the respective chapter with the tattva invoked. This alone is a stroke of genius because the connection is not always obvious. I cannot resist giving a few examples. The first and basic tattva is obviously earth ( pṛthivī), which is invoked at the very beginning: I salute the Lord in the form of the Earth, the sustaining power, who is the basic substratum [of the macro and microcosm], in order to help the growth of the seed of the world. ( Abhinava Bhsāratī 1.1)
Three levels of meaning can be discerned in this verse, as in most others: the cosmological, the dramatic, and the yogic (with a reference to mūlādhāra as a cakra). The conception that the world is a drama is well-known, even outside India ( jagannāṭya, saṃ sāranāṭya, etc). In the context of the pūrvaraṅga or prelude, the space which is ritually demarcated on the stage is praised as the spatial form of Śiva:
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We worship that spatial Body [Form] of Śiva which plays the role of the prelude in the creation of the cosmic drama by providing space [for the same]. (Abhinava Bhāratī 5.1) 3
As the cosmic creation begins with empty space which makes it possible for other elements to unfold, in the same way the theatrical space is created. And space, ākāśa, has since the Upanis ạ ds been a simile for Brahman. It is not surprising that the very essence (literally) of the aesthetic experience, namely rasa, is the divine body in the form of the element Water—the very element of fluidity which has a liquefying effect on the sahṛdaya, or the sensitive spectator/listener: We worship the watery Form of the Lord that is full of rasa, is Śiva [auspicious] and delights the creeper of the seed of creation involved in the production of the world drama. ( Abhinava Bhāratī 2.1)
Professor K. D. Tripathi, eminent scholar on the lishes this connection when he writes,
Nāṭyaśāstra, estab-
It is remarkable that the pervasive as well as the quintessential nature of this aesthetic experience is designated by the term rasa, which reminds us of its cosmic and spiritual connotations in Vedic cosmogony and metaphysics. From the enjoyment aspect of this experience, the terms employed are āsvāda, rasanā and carvaṇ ā and they are equally rooted in the sensation proper to the sense of taste related of āpam (water). (71)
As for the cosmic elements, the sense-organs are similarly praised as forms of Śiva and elements of the Nāṭya. For instance, the sandhyaṅgas are connected with the organ of touch (sparśa), and Maheśa is invoked as of the nature of “inner touch” (antarasparśamaya, Abhinava Bhāratī adh. 19). For instance, the organ of hearing ( śrotra) is connected with all the sounds and the manifold manifestations of speech (adh. 20). In fact, each verse could be analyzed in its relation between the tattva and the subject-matter of the respective chapter. But this is outside the scope of this paper. Coming to the thirty-sixth and highest tattva, the author takes refuge in the Śiva-principle, the abode of fullness, in whom all the rasas and bhāvas—the basic emotions and sentiments of the world drama—rest, and who reveals its hidden, ultimate meaning (adh. 36). As expected, the maṅgala to the thirty-seventh adhyāya is dedicated to the Absolute
3
I am grateful to P. L. Sharma for translating this passage and the following one.
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(anuttara), beyond all manifestation, but its hidden foundation (adh. 37). The meaning is clear: the entire world of the arts is based on the cosmic, human, and divine reality as contained in the scheme of the tattvas, and it is this interrelatedness which allows every particular expression in form, sound, movement, speech, etc. to lead back to its source. In other words, it is universalization or sādhāranīkaraṇ a which takes place. In contrast to Vedānta, in the non-dualism of Trika or Pratyabhijñā there is no denial of the multiplicity and beauty of manifestation. The unity and center of all reality is the supreme Consciousness, also called the Heart ( hṛdaya). At the end of his commentary on the Parātrīsikā Tantra Abhinavagupta says: The Heart, being one only, contains diversified knowledge, in which the categories of the universe ( tattva), the worlds ( bhuvana) and all the experients from Śiva down to the limited souls assume diverse forms, though non-different from the highest Reality, making even the wonderful supreme Consciousness variegated by manifesting it. ( Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇ a 261)
As with the conception of the world drama or jagannāṭya, Abhinavagupta and his predecessors—especially Utpaladeva and Bhat ̣ṭa Nārāyaṇa—similarly use the metaphor of painting for enunciating their metaphysics of manifestation. The basic elements of this metaphor are the plain wall or canvas, which corresponds to the purity of absolute Consciousness, and the variety of colors and forms represented on its background, creating a beautiful manifestation. This entire simile is contained in the two words citra and ābhāsa, and both equally denote “painting” in a technical sense. Ābhāsa means the luminous manifestation of the universe, of which the painting is an “imitation.” In the above quoted passage there is a play with the words citra and vicitra/vaicitrya: citra here means painting and vaicitrya is multiplicity. The Lord, i.e. the highest Reality ( paramārtha), is also called the “ever manifest image” (sarvadābhātavigraha) (Utpaladeva 2.3.16). Multiplicity ( vaicitrya), which in other Indian systems is considered an obstacle to the unity of consciousness, is viewed positively in the parādvaita of Kashmir Śaivism. Therefore, citra as something wonderful, luminous, surprising, and beautiful, as well as in the sense of painting, is underlying the wonderful manifoldness of universal forms, conceived as the cosmic painting ( jagaccitra) of the universal Artist. As Bhat ̣t ̣a Nārāyaṇ a (ninth century) exclaims in his hymn Stavacintāmaṇi:
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Adoration to [Śiva] the bearer of the trident whose art is praiseworthy, for he draws the universal picture even without a wall and an instrument. (verse 9)
But not everybody can perceive this world picture, just as not everybody can appreciate a work of art: O Lord! Is there any wise man who would not be wonderstruck by contemplating, through your Energy the ever new and varied conditions of the world picture? (verse 80)
This positive view of the variegated multiplicity of universal forms is not only implicitly but even explicitly the basis of aesthetics: In this (stream) the knowledge that is produced is accordingly one, from which beauty streams out. What we call beauty ( saubhāgya) is (in fact) the appropriation of differentiated objects and manifold elements of experience through one’s own power. For the power of consciousness which rises from the light of the art of one’s own joyful wonder, for being manifest ( vyaktam) it colours the universe, and manifestation is due to its nature. ( Mālinīvijaya Vārttika 1.275–77; Hanneder 103, modified)
The double meaning of rāga and its root rañj-, color and love, or passion, is purposely used because the underlying image is that of painting, in the sense of the variegated colors of multiplicity in relation to the one underlying Consciousness. That beauty is never simply an objectified external reality but always experienced in the mind and senses of the receiver is expressed here by the word svīkriyaiva, “making one’s own” (here “appropriation”). In fact, creation itself is “the emission into all directions of the life-giving consciousness that is beautified by bliss” (Mālinīvijaya Vārttika; 5.271–72 Hanneder 203). Before I move away from a metaphysics of manifestation and the beauty of multiplicity, I have to refer to an important doctrine which Abhinavagupta has developed but which was already existing in earlier forms and interpretations in Sām ̣ khya and in Jaina Philosophy: sarvātmakatvavāda, or in its briefest, sūtra-like expression, sarvaṃ sarvātmakam. We will here confine ourselves to the implications for aesthetics of such a universal concept. In translation one could say: “Everything is of the nature of the whole/the totality,” or, “The whole is contained in each part [of it].” If in our modern, technology-dominated, dichotomized world we are deeply in search of a holistic worldview and lifestyle, it is this view which could fully respond to this search—if we are able to put it into practice. In Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇ a, it starts as
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a theological concept implying that “Everything in the universe is an image of the totality that is Śiva”—a point he again demonstrates in the system of the tattvas.4 What I am concerned with in this context is the applicability of this vision of reality to art. I can only hint at it, but this could be elaborated in the case of different art-forms. In one perfectly produced note the whole rāga can be present. In one detail of a miniature painting, the whole picture is contained. In one perfect movement a whole dance-sequence can be summed up. In a temple, an upaśikhara or miniature replica of the spire represents the entire temple structure, and so on. If this is not the case, the art form cannot be called perfect. This also implies that even a fragment of a sculpture speaks for the whole which is lost. R. M. Rilke has a wonderful poem on the torso of Apollo, an ancient fragment of a Greek sculpture, where he discovers the entire sculpture as if it were a living presence. We did not know his incredible head . . . would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. (“Archaischer Torso Apollos”) 5
Poetry is another example: Abhinavagupta himself quotes some fragments of his own Hymns which are lost in their entirety. But what fragments they are! Interestingly, and probably without having read Abhinavagupta, Richard Lannoy came to the same conclusion in his paper, “Some Images of Totality,” presented at the seminar on saundarya. He applies the idea of art objects belonging to different ages and calls them “a grand metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things as they loom from the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the ground of all being” (Lannoy 21). The holistic conception of sarvaṃ sarvātmakam reflects exactly that interconnectedness, where even a blade of grass contains the whole universe. This spirit of Kashmir Śaivism is ecstatically expressed by Utpaladeva, paramaguru of Abhinavagupta and great philosopher of Pratyabhijñā:
4 Modern sciences like biology or astrophysics may be able to confirm such an insight, but that is outside my capacity. 5 “Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt . . . und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändernaus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du must dein Leben ändern.”
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With my eyes closed Relishing the wonder of inner devotion May I worship even the blades of grass thus: “Homage to Śiva, to my own Self!” ( Śivastotrāvalī 5.15)
Not by chance do we find in this verse two basic concepts of aesthetics: camatkāra, (wonder, surprise) and carvaṇ ā (rumination)—used here in a spiritual sense. The Lord, the blade of grass, and his own self are all one in this act of inner worship. 6 So far we have looked at aesthetics in terms of manifestation, beauty, and the interconnectedness of art (e.g., nāṭya and painting) with cosmology and creation. The much misunderstood concept of anukaraṇ a could be seen in the light of Trika metaphysics not as “imitation” but as “reflection”, particularly in the context of bimba-pratibimba: the (Divine) original and its reflection (much like a reflection in a mirror). Space does not permit us to go into the philosophical implications of this pair of concepts, but this pairing suggests what is certainly an important approach in bringing aesthetics and metaphysics together— an approach which needs to be fully developed on the basis of Utpaladeva’s and Abhinavagupta’s works. But I want to throw some light on two other aspects of aesthetics which are more connected with the experience of the artist, the saḥ rdaya (or the “one who receives” [I do not like the translations “aesthete” or “connoisseur”]), and with spiritual experience. Every artist will testify that his or her creative activity has to spring from freedom, and this notwithstanding the hard labor that is involved in mastering any art-form—the sculptor working on stone, the dancer working with her own body, or whatever. Now, Kashmir Śaivism is in other terms called svātantryavāda, the teaching of absolute autonomy. The first expression of the Divine Freedom is the Energy of Will (icchāśakti). In a seminal passage in his Mālinīvijaya Vārttika , Abhinavagupta unfolds the implications of such a freedom: This [light], as it is absolutely superior, manifests everything. Because it is autonomous, its power of will is called ‘autonomy’. And it rests in its own self, because nothing that is different from it can exist. This resting in one’s own self is called bliss of God. The power of its autonomy lies in the fact that [even in the process of manifestation, which implies
6 Again, the scope of this paper does not permit a detailed exploration of the spiritual aesthetics of Utpaladeva’s mystical hymn.
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duality] it is never separate from its own nature. [For] it is in its own realm of self-light, that it causes the confusing beauty of the world to appear. (1.87–89, Hanneder 72)
Since the human artist shares in the power of the Divine Artist and 7 he also his freedom (a theme which I have developed elsewhere), receives a share in the Divine Energy of Will which impels him to create. This Śakti is “Bhairavī Herself, the Supreme Goddess who is ever characterized by the wonder of being immersed in the one essence of freedom” ( Parātrīśikā Vivarana 72) [ svātantrya-ekarasa-āveśacamatkāra-lakṣaṇ ā]. It is She who is both the creator and the enjoyer, as again the terms rasa and camatkāra indicate, and āveśa denotes possession by and union with the Divine (even in the context of the human artist we speak of him or her as being “possessed” by creativity). If in the aesthetic experience we differentiate eight or nine rasas, here the one or single rasa is freedom ( svātantrya). It is then the same Divine power of Freedom which expresses itself, or rather Herself, in a sense of wonder (in the context of yoga it is called vismaya by the Śivasūtras [1.12]) and in a flash of intuitive insight or pratibhā. All of these concepts and the experiences they denote are closely related, and all are valid in the three realms alluded to above: the Divine and its creativity, the human artist and the one who enjoys the aesthetic experience, and the yogi or spiritual practitioner. The metaphysical background for this interrelatedness is expressed by Abhinavagupta in his Tantrāloka: All this universe is reflected in the pure sky of the consciousness (cidambara) of the Lord, Bhairava, unaided by anything else. The perfect independence of the Lord in relation to the universal nature is called supreme illuminating intuition ( pratibhā), the Goddess Absolute. ( Tantrāloka 3.65–66)8
The same pratibhā produces poetic and artistic inspiration, as well as unlimited knowledge and activity at the spiritual level. Both share in the same wonder of delight ( camatkāra). Abhinavagupta states this in the context of the knowledge produced by language, or the phonemes:
7 8
See Bäumer, “The Divine Artist.” I am grateful to M. Dyczkowski for translating this passage.
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In the measure in which the uncreated reality exceeds, to the same degree the wonder of delight ( camatkāra) increases . . . Those who rest in the intuitive consciousness (pratibhā) consisting in the fullness of the first letters, certainly attain poetic and rhetoric gifts. But he who rests in pure Consciousness in its highest form, devoid of any limitations of conventions, what is it that he does not know? What is it that he is not able to do? ( Tantrāloka 11.76–80)
Abhinavagupta not only provides the metaphysical framework of meaning for aesthetics, he also analyzes the psychological—in a sense even physiological—conditions of artistic creation and aesthetic experience. Apart from the well-known exposition of the nine rasas in his Bhāratī, he finds many occasions to describe or hint at the aesthetic experience. One important context is the analysis of sense-experience 9 The other and the phases of consciousness in the Krama system. tantric traditions which he integrated in his Trika synthesis, such as the Kula or Kaula, emphasize the “prescription of intensity” (Sanderson) instead of prescribing a refraining from sensual and acoustic experience. The senses are divinized powers, and the way to experience the Divine through them is an increase in intensity. Between ordinary sense-perception and the realization of the fullness of consciousness lies precisely the realm of the aesthetic enhancement and sublimation of sense-perception. To give only a few examples of such a process: Now whatever enters the inner psychic apparatus or the outer senses of all beings, that abides as sentient life-energy [ cetanarūpena prāṇ ātmanā] in the middle channel i.e., suṣumnā whose main characteristic is to enliven all the parts of the body. That life energy is said to be “ojas” [vital luster], that is then diffused as an enlivening factor in the form of common vigour [ vīrya] in all parts of the body. When an exciting visual or auditory perception enters the percipient, then on account of its exciting power, it fans the flame of passion in the form of the agitation of the vigour. Of the form, sound, etc. even a single one, because of its being made powerful by the augmented vigour referred to previously, can bring about the excitement of the senses pertaining to all other objects also. (Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇ a 42)
It is only the fullness of delight that can bring about a state of aesthetic sensitivity ( sahṛdayatā). “Excessive delight is possible only to those whose heart is expanded by vital energy which has the boundless
9
See Rastogi.
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capacity to strengthen sensibility and which is established by repeated association with objects of enjoyment” (43). But Abhinavagupta immediately adds, by referring to Somānanda’s famous dictum, that not only pleasant but even painful experiences can lead to expansion of consciousness. 10 Abhinavagupta even says that if one is not able to enjoy good music, one is also not receptive to the ultimate experience; hence he calls such a person ahṛdaya (heartless, insensitive). Utpaladeva, in his mystical hymn, had already used the same term to denote somebody “who is not immersed in the delight of your nectar, and who has no heart” ( Śivastotrāvalī 3.7). Here, again, we find the terms rāga and rasa, but in the context of bhakti. One can almost deduce that, in this system, aesthetic and hence sensual sensibility is a necessary condition of spiritual sensibility, for both are expressed by the term sahṛdayatā, or “being endowed with a heart.” Therefore Abhinavagupta—drawing on the example of musical acoustics—says in the Tantrāloka in the context of the Divine way (śāmbhava): When the ears are filled with the sound of sweet song or the nostrils with the scent of sandalwood, etc. the state of indifference disappears and the heart is invaded by a state of vibration ( spandamānatā). Such a state is precisely the so-called energy of beatitude, thanks to which man is “gifted with heart” (sahṛdaya). (3.209–10; Gnoli xliv)
This expansion of consciousness is related to the universal expansion of the Divine Energy ( śaktisphāra). And the supreme power of this [Brahman] consists in sound, touch, taste, which are of the nature of food, being enjoyable, consisting of parts of the five elements. Therefore, a sweet sound produces an increase in energy. This energy is supreme, pure, and has the nature of creativity. That very power is vitality [ojas], life [ prāṇ a], that is beauty [ kāntatā]. (Tantrāloka 3.228–230ab)
I have consciously avoided any technical discussion on Kāvyaśāstra (treatises on poetics) or Nāṭyaśāstra, and I have presented the technical concepts in a non-technical context to show their connection with metaphysics, Tantra, and spirituality. Nevertheless, each one could be developed on the lines and on the basis of the texts quoted: rasa, sahṛdaya, pratibhā, ābhāsa, citra, etc. What Abhinavagupta has done
10
See also Vijñāna Bhairava, verses 93 and 101.
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is based on the Āgamas and on his predecessors in the various fields of knowledge, including aesthetics, but the synthesis he has developed and the interconnections he has established are entirely the result of his own genius. To show the integration that he has achieved, drawing from the various sources and masters, would require a book and not a single essay. I may therefore be allowed to rest with these hints and to conclude with a verse that sums up the incredible ability of the author to interweave various levels, forms, and meanings into a single, beautiful text: Troop of delights who storm the hearts of men and make them dance in many an antic step; concealing your own intention as you play; men call you brute and stupid, in their ignorance thinking themselves intelligent thereby. That title of stupidity, I think, If given to them would be honorific, For it would seem to liken them to you. (Dhvanyāloka 162; Tantrāloka 1.332)
In his Dhvanyāloka Locana, he gives this verse as an example forvastudhvani, which he defines as follows: “If the matter in hand is charming and is suggested by a literal description of an extraneous subject possessing properties such as insentiency which render it impossible for the described purpose, then we have a case of vastudhvani.” Consider also the following commentary by Abhinavagupta: “Here the germane matter, which is revealed by suggestion, is the extraordinary way of life of a man while he is being despised by the world as a fool . . .” (Dhvanyāloka 162; 1.13). Strangely enough, the translators could not identify this verse, which is among the concluding verses of the first chapter of the Tantrāloka. There the translation would be different, depending on the very first word in the vocative: bhāvavrāta. Literally translated it would read: O totality of things of this world! You forcefully take hold of the hearts of men And you play, like an actor [dancer] who hides his innermost self under many disguises. The one who calls you insentient [ jaḍa, stupid] he is himself insensitive [stupid], though he pretends to be sensitive [sahṛdaya]. And yet, it seems to me that his stupidity is a praise for him because it likens him to you!
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Who are the actors of the drama of this verse? It is addressed to a plural entity implying both the multitude of emotions ( bhāva) in the aesthetic sense and the multiplicity of worldly objects in the metaphysical/spiritual context. But the comparison is with an actor (singular) who puts on many disguises and attracts the hearts of the spectators. This refers to a saint who acts like a madman in order to be despised by people; historically, it may refer to a Pāśupata ascetic. Although he is totally detached, he acts like a man having attachments. But there is yet another level of interpretation, as given by Jayaratha, whose commentary on the Tantrāloka passage is illuminating. It has been summarized by Lilian Silburn as follows: Divine Consciousness manifests the universe, and in this respect it is “the totality of things” (or states), and every insentient thing participates in the same Consciousness which, by self-limitation, becomes insentient. In truth, whatever exists is nothing but an aspect of Consciousness (bhāvānāṃ hi vastutaścaitanyam eva rūpam ). If the things would not participate in Consciousness, they would not exist at all. Besides, in a tantric perspective, the objects or things can contribute by their beauty to the unfolding or revelation of Being, and thus help the adept to open him/herself to the Divinity. (Silburn and Padoux 126)
By analyzing this single verse we therefore discover at least three layers of meaning, expressed as a suggestion ( dhvani): (1) the theatrical (the actor and the spectators), (2) the religious (the mad ascetic), and (3) the metaphysical (the reality of the world). The other suggested meaning is that the so-called stupid or insentient man is praised at the end because his insentience ( jaḍatā) makes him like the Divine Consciousness, which has descended to the level of matter. He is like a spectator viewing a drama or the performance of a mad yogi who does not get at the hidden meaning or the true identity. Ultimately this verse reveals that the entire aesthetic metaphysics of Abhinavagupta is based on play ( krīḍā)11—a play disguising one’s own real nature, whether in the case of the actor or of the saint, or of the Divine himself, who enters the self-limitation and concealment playfully. This līlā reveals the non-dualism inherent in the philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism, where even the so-called inert matter is nothing but a condensation of Consciousness. It is for this reason that every object and every state ( bhāva) reflects the Divine: bimba-pratibimba.
11
See Bäumer, “The Play of the Three Worlds.”
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Abhinavagupta. The Īśvarapratyabhijñā Vimarśinī by Abhinavagupta. Ed. Pt. Madhusudan Kaul Shastri. Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 22 and 23. Bombay, India: 1918–1921. ———. The Īśvarapratyabhijñā Vivritivimarśinī by Abhinavagupta. Ed. Pt. Madhusudan Kaul Shastri. 3 vols. Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 60, 62, 65. Bombay, India: 1938–1943. ———. Parātrīśikā Vivaran ̣ a by Abhinavagupta: The Secret of Tantric Mysticism. Trans. Jaideva Singh. Corrected with notes by Swami Lakshmanjee. Ed. Bettina Bäumer. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988. ———. The Tantrāloka of Abhinava Gupta, with Commentary by Rajanaka Jayartha. Ed. Madhusudan Kaul Shastri. Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 23, 28, 30, 35, 29, 41, 47, 59, 52, 57 and 58. Bombay, India: 1918–38. Bailly, Constantina Rhodes. Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir: A Translation and Study of Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali. SUNY Series in the Shaiva Traditions of Kashmir. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1987. Bäumer, Bettina. “The Divine Artist.” The Indian Theosophist, Thakur Jaideva Singh Felicitation Number 82 (1985): 79–86. ———. “The Play of the Three Worlds: The Trika Concept of Līlā.” The Gods at Play, Līlā in South Asia . Ed. W. Sax. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 35–49. Bharata. Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata with Abhinava Bhāratī. Ed. M. Ramakrishna Kavi and J. S. Pade. 4 vols. Gaekwad’s Oriental Series. Baroda, India: Oriental Institute, 1956–1964. Chakrabarti, Arindam. “The Heart of Repose, the Repose of the Heart.” Das and Fürlinger 27–36. Das, Sadananda and Ernst Fürlinger. Sāmarasya: Studies in Indian Arts, Philosophy and Interreligious Dialogue. New Delhi, India: D. K. Printworld, 2005. Dehejia, H. V. and M. Paranjape, eds. Saundarya: The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India . New Delhi, India: Samvad Foundation, 2003. The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Ed. Daniel H. H. Ingalls. Trans. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Gnoli, Raniero. The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies 62. Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1968. Hanneder, Jürgen, ed. and trans. Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Revelation: An Edition and Annotated Translation of Mālinīślokavārttika I, 1–39 . Groningen, the Netherlands: Egbert Forsten, 1998. Lakshman Joo, Swami. Vijñāna Bhairava: The Practice of Centering Awareness. 2nd ed. Varanasi, India: Indica Books, 2007. Lannoy, Richard. “Some Images of Totality.” Dehejia and Paranjape 14–23. Masson, J. L. and M. V. Patwardhan. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969. Narayaṇ a Bhat ṭ ạ . The Stava-Chintamaṇ i of Bhat ṭ ạ Narayan ̣ a, with Commentary by Kshemaraja. Ed. Mukunda Rama Sastri. Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 10. Srinagar, India: 1918. ———. Le Stavacintāmaṇ i de Bhat ṭ ạ nārāyana. Trans. and comm. Lilian Silburn. 2nd ed. Paris, France: De Boccard, 1979. Padoux, André. Vāc: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
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Pandey, Kanti Chandra. Abhinavagupta: An Historical and Philosophical Study . 2nd rev. ed. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series 1. Varanasi, India: Chowhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1963. Raghavan, V. Abhinavagupta and His Works. Chaukhamba Oriental Research Studies 20. Varanasi, India: Chaukhamba Orientalia, 1980. Rastogi, Navjivan. Krama Tantricism of Kashmir. Vol. 1. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979. Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Archaischer Torso Apollos.” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. London: Picador, 1987. 61. Sanderson, Alexis. “A Commentary on the Opening Verses of the Tantrasāra of Abhinavagupta.” Das and Fürlinger 89–148. ———. “Krama Śaivism.” The Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Mircea Eliade. Vol. 13. New York: Macmillan, 1987. 14a–15a. ———. “Man ̣ḍala and Āgamic Identity in the Trika of Kashmir.” Mantras et Diagrammes Rituelles dans l’Hindouisme. Ed. André Padoux. Paris, France: Editions du CNRS, 1986. 169–214. ———. “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions.” The World’s Religions. Ed. S. Sutherland, L. Houlden, P. Clarke, and F. Hardy. London: Routledge, 1988. 660–704. ———. “The Visualisation of the Deities of the Trika.” L’Image Divine. Ed. André Padoux. Paris, France: Editions du CNRS, 1990. 31–88. Silburn, Lilian and André Padoux, trans. Abhinavagupta: La lumière sur les Tantras. Chapitres 1 a 5 du Tantrāloka de Abhinavagupta. By Abhinavagupta. Paris, France: De Boccard, 1998. The Śivadéṣtị of Śrīsomānandanātha, with the Vritti by Utpaladeva. Ed. Madhusudan Kaul Shastri. Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 54. Srinagar, India: 1934. The Śivastotravālī of Utpaladevācārya, with the Sanskrit Commentary of Kṣemarāja. Ed. Rājānaka Laks m ̣ aṇa. Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series 15. Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1964. Tripathi, K. D. “From Sensuous to Supersensuous: Some Terms of Indian Aesthetics.” Prakr ̣ti. Vol. 3. Ed. Bettina Bäumer. New Delhi, India: IGNCA and D. K. Printworld, 1995. 67–77. Utpaladeva. The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva with the Author’s Vétti. Ed. and trans. Raffaele Torella. Rev. ed. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 2002. Le Vijñāna Bhairava . Trans. and comm. Lilian Silburn. Paris, France: De Boccard, 1983. Vijñāna Bhairava or Divine Consciousness: A Treasury of 112 Types of Yoga. Trans. Jaideva Singh. Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
ENCOUNTERING THE DIVINE MOTHER IN HINDU AND CHRISTIAN HYMNS Francis X. Clooney, S.J. Harvard Divinity School What are Christians to do with the invitation and the powers of sacred Hindu hymns addressed to the Divine Mother, the Divine Consort, or the Supreme Goddess particularly in relation to the tradition of Mary available to Catholicism? In this piece I explore how texts from the Tantric tradition, such as the Saundarya Lahari, may assist in awakening our Catholic religious and inter-religious imaginations. I approach the question here by setting my reĀ ections on the Saundarya Lahari (“Flood of Bliss, Flood of Beauty”) side-by-side with my reading of the Stabat Mater, a medieval hymn to Mary (“Flood of Sorrow, Flood of Love”). In my book Divine Mother, Blessed Mother ,1 from which this brief comparative study is drawn, I offer a more detailed exegesis of the entire Hindu hymn for the interested reader. I
Devi in the
Saundarya Lahari Flood of Beauty
: Flood of Bliss,
The Saundarya Lahari 2 is a hymn of one hundred verses in length, composed in the Sanskrit language, in honor of the great goddess, here simply called Devi. Though the consort of the god Shiva, Devi is also Herself the supreme Reality whose domain encompasses even Him. This Hindu hymn, often referred to as a “Flood of Bliss” or “Flood of Beauty”, is attributed to the 8th century Vedanta theologian Shankara, and as such is one of many learned devotional compositions grouped under his authorship. 1 Adapted from Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Divine Mother, Blessed Mother (2005), chap. 3, pages 154–57, 178–85, with permission from Oxford University Press. In the interest of accessibility, all Sanskrit terms are here rendered in English phonetic transliteration. 2 “Today, the Saundarya Lahari is widely known, published and translated frequently into numerous Indian languages and into English. It is readily available on tape and CD” (Clooney, Divine Mother 154).
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The Saundarya Lahari is rooted in the context of south Indian tantra. “Tantra” refers to a web of Indian intellectual and ritual systems that are notoriously hard to define, but Andre Padoux has highlighted some distinctive features: The ideological aspect of the Tantric vision is the cosmos as permeated by power (or powers), a vision wherein energy ( shakti) is both cosmic and human and where the microcosm and macrocosm correspond and interact. The ideology is important because it explains such Tantric features as the concept and practice of kundalini, as well as a number of yogic and ritual practices for the use and control of that power. It also explains some aspects of the speculation and practices concerning the power of the word ( vac), especially the nature and power of mantras, and so forth. This ideology not only colors, but orientates and organizes, and gives meaning to all Tantric practices and observances. (Brown and Harper 19)
Padoux notes that in tantra there is a “use of means pertaining to this world for supramundane ends” (20); desire and pleasure are not renounced but maximized, albeit for ultimately spiritual purposes. Included in this utilization of pleasure are transgressive practices. Sexual desire is often objectified in the attractiveness and potency of a young, unmarried woman, and particularly in the female sexual organ. Other characteristic features of tantra include an emphasis on ritual, great esteem for mantras and their use in meditation, the fashioning of ritual diagrams ( yantras), and ritual hand gestures ( mudras). Some of these features will recur in the pages to follow, others not. While the Saundarya Lahari offers a public and “respectable” face for tantra, it is faithful to its tantric heritage by refusing to separate material, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual realities. We should assume that each of the hymn’s claims is played out on all four levels. As tantric, the Saundarya Lahari belongs to a tradition prizing the material and bodily as well as the spiritual and intellectual, external beauty as well as virtue, desire as well as desire’s abolition, the female as well as male. Even spiritual advancement is marked according to physical and psychological mastery, particularly with regard to the bodily centers of power known as chakras. These are usually presented as located in the human body, but in the Saundarya Lahari they also correspond to divine and human worlds that are themselves included within Devi. Similarly, tantric worship transgresses dominant brahmanical moral norms, and is aimed at overcoming traditionally settled boundaries by
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strategies such as the “five m’s”: drinking wine ( madya), eating meat (mamsa), fish (matsya) and fermented grain (mudra), and engaging in extra-marital sex ( maithuna).3 The Saundarya Lahari, however, seems uninterested in any of the actual transgressions that might be thought to arise in its tantric context. No violations of dharma are described. Even the complete physical description of Devi in the latter part of the hymn is modest; it omits reference to Her sexual organ ( yoni), as the description moves from Her navel to Her hips and knees. Her breasts are described in detail, but primarily as signs of Her maternal role. The Saundarya Lahari also claims superiority to earlier tantric systems, as is clear in its recollection of how Shiva brought Devi’s own, final tantra down to earth: After deceiving all the worlds by the sixty-four tantras dependent on the perfections attributed to them Pasupati4 rested, but due to his connection with You He once again brought down to earth Your tantra which of its own accord accomplishes all human goals at once. (31)
One might name sixty-four important tantric traditions—as do the commentators—but the point is primarily to assert the superiority of Her new path over the complex and difficult expert paths of older times. Indeed, the verse in context seems also to be saying that tantra itself is now accessory to an easier, more direct encounter with Her. On the whole, the Saundarya Lahari offers a public face for tantra, devotional and accessible to a wider audience. The hymn is in part an argument that approaching Devi as the beautiful goddess is not a lesser form of tantra, but rather a path of purification and visualization that more easily and efficiently achieves all that tantra promises. In support of the idea that the Saundarya Lahari invites a wider audience into encounter with Devi, we can note the importance given by commentators to Shankara’s noble intentions in composing it as his gracious gift to a confused world. Honored as a prominent public intellectual and spiritual master, Shankara composes the hymn out of compassion for people drowning in the ocean of confusion and suffering ( samsara). By his verses of praise, Shankara seeks to illumine
3 4
On the “five m’s,” see Tigunait 45 and Brooks 155. Pasupati is another name for Shiva.
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Devi’s essence, until now hidden in scripture. He employs all his literary skill to illumine Her status as the means to all visible and invisible human goals. The Saundarya Lahari presents a goddess who is unfathomably deep and of whom knowledge is precious and rare; yet She is nonetheless luminously visible and available to those willing to gaze upon Her. Devi’s names and manifest form do not express adequately who She is, yet attention to appearances opens the way, now, to the deeper realities one seeks. The word devi means simply “goddess,” or “Goddess,” but we can say a little more. By tradition this Devi is linked to Shiva who (even in the Saundarya Lahari) is famously “the destroyer of the three demon cities.” But Devi is clearly more than a consort, if “consort” indicates a dependent female being. She is the supreme Deity, Power itself, and the source of the power of other divinities. Such is the thesis stated in the first verse: Only joined with Power has the God power to rule, otherwise He cannot even quiver—and so You are worthy of adoration by Hari, Hara, Viriñci, and all the rest, and so how dare I who’ve done nothing meritorious reverence and praise You? (1)
Key points are stated succinctly here. That She is Power is announced. That Shiva rules is also affirmed, as is His utter dependence on Her for His ability. She is Power, She is Shiva’s consort yet the one on whom He depends, She is transcendent and yet irresistibly approachable to devotees who wish to praise Her. Other deities ornament the scene by their ceaseless worship of Her. The author’s admission that he cannot of himself successfully honor Her is both a conventional poetic claim and an acute realization that mere words, such as his, can bear this great burden—communicating knowledge of Her—only by Her grace. In large part, Devi possesses attributes characteristic also of a supreme male figure, such as omnipotence, creative cosmic power and the power to save, serene and sovereign rule over the world in its every detail, the power to consume the world and recreate it. 5 It is a goal of the Flood of Bliss to strip away the mythology surrounding a merely 5 On traditional characterizations of divine qualities, see, for instance, chap. 2 of Clooney, Hindu God, Christian God .
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lovely goddess, lest She be treated as a lesser goddess, conformed to social conventions. Throughout, though, She remains also a beautiful woman, mother and consort. She is marked as not-Shiva, and Shiva’s mythology and theology are always nearby, background for Her identity. Her body is beautiful and erotic, and therein lies the key to the power by which She rules the world, divine beings, and even Her spouse. The supreme Devi is established in a social setting where She interacts with a wide range of familial figures. Devi is certainly a woman, and certainly a goddess. Throughout, She is represented in ways not entirely free from cultural expectations about women and their bodies. But the Saundarya Lahari aims to use such expectations to highlight, rather than downplay, the distinctive nature of Her power and its exercise. That She is female is not a deficiency; from beginning to end, She is both female and supreme. She can be approached only if recognized as a woman. The final and climactic portrayal of Her union with Shiva in Her bedchamber offers an intense, erotic union that makes sense in terms of Her female identity as a counterpoint to His male identity, even if He is only a character in Her drama. Your servants, Druhina, Hari, Rudra, and Ishvara form Your couch, and Shiva seems a bedsheet of transparent hue, as if the subtle erotic sentiment were embodied, red in desire, reĀ ecting Your radiance, and milking the pleasure in Your eyes. (92) Her hair is curly, She is simple in nature, gentle in smile; in Her frame She is soft as a sirisa Āower yet in the region of Her breasts hard like rock; at the waist She is quite slim but at the hips prodigious: She triumphs, She protects the world, Shambhu’s grace, Aruna. (93)
After this meditation at the doorway of Her inner sanctum, the devotee is left there—as if a guest invited to enter that precinct, into Her presence, onto Her couch. It is left to the person who reaches this point, senses enhanced, to decide whether to enter inside and enjoy Devi there, or to return to other matters. The hymn’s language of praise has been ultimately turned into an opportunity for encounter, left unspoken, as the devotee stands before Her. The hymn thus concludes with praise that is both conventional and yet deeply invigorated, impassioned beyond the cooler observations of the opening verses:
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francis x. clooney, s.j. I desire wisdom, Mother, so tell me, when I shall drink that essence of chewed betel juice reddened with lac dye, the water that washed Your feet, the essence of betel from Vani’s lotus mouth that makes poets even of those mute by birth? (98) Whoever is devoted to You will play with Sarasvati and Laksmi, rival Vidhi and Hari, have a beautiful form that melts even Pleasure’s chastity, live a long life free from the bonds that bind beasts, and enjoy the taste known as “highest bliss.” (99) Illumining the sun with small Ā ames, bathing the moon whence nectar Ā ows with drops from moonstones, satisfying the ocean with its own drops of water— and me too, praising You with Your own words, O mother of all words. (100)
Although I have suggested that the Saundarya Lahari assumes women already to be with Devi, harmoniously part of Her retinue, we have no evidence that the hymn was intended to be a source of liberation for human women. We can nonetheless discover in it strategies by which to recompose contemporary conceptualizations of gender in an affirmation of physicality, pleasure, and beauty as spiritually significant and not just instrumental to the spiritual. In saying this, I am aware that my reading of the Saundarya Lahari —a male American scholar who is not a Hindu reading a medieval Sanskrit text written by males for males—cannot be accepted uncritically in a contemporary Indian feminist context. But I do believe that there is much in the Saundarya Lahari that can aid us today in understanding what it means to attribute gender to the divine person, and in exploring how contemporary women and men can reimagine their own roles in relation to the divine. Devi is all that humans already are, in the socially standard ways of human being and relating and the rarified tantric distillations of being and relating; She is a woman who helps males to maximalize their potential. She includes all the intermediate gradations of human development up to the satisfaction of the highest human capacity. She is thus the beginning and end of the process of divinization, enabling all beings, gods and humans, to become more, even up to a final bliss-
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ful immersion within Her. To participate in Her bliss, novice practitioners—including attentive readers—must assent to a gradual but ultimately complete deconstruction and enhancement of their own bodies, sensations, pleasures, and relationships. One loses all of this, regains it, and then is able to see Her directly and completely. The key to entering Her world seems to be a combination of reverence, intellect, and intense curiosity, which together make deepening interior vision possible. What kind of commitment and practice is required for a reader to enter upon the path of transformation the Saundarya Lahari intends? I admitted early on in this chapter that the hymn is located within a tradition of tantric expertise, and we can presume that ordinarily it is read and taught with trained teachers who themselves have received training from a preceding generation. The more one appropriates the language and practices of the tradition, the better off one will be. Nonetheless, there are opportunities for the attentive non-initiate reader, because we do have the hymn and its difficult though vastly informative commentaries. Humans can grow in an increasingly unrestricted fashion because Devi Herself insures the continuity of the divine with all else. The hymn is optimistic about the continuity between ordinary human experience and a maximal participation in the world of Devi, and it opens the highest possibilities for the simplest listeners and readers. By taking the Saundarya Lahari to heart, the reader moves from thinking about goddesses and issues of gender in India to simpler and more subtle reĀ ections on goddess power, to a purified visualization of Her form and, finally, to a face to face encounter in which one speaks directly to Her. It is this direct address that gives the Saundarya Lahari its force right from the start, when the poet says to Her that he cannot adequately praise Her. Though inadequate, he talks to Her throughout, and only by that speech can he know the inadequacy of his words. The hymn seems profoundly generous in its expectations of Her accessibility to those who invoke Her and imagine Her presence as best they can: for those who can do more, there is much more to do; for those who can only do less, She is here already. The reader is then left to decide what to do about this possibility. But we can give advice only indirectly, by turning now to a contemplative classic of the Marian tradition.
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Mary at the Cross in the Stabat Mater Flood of Sorrow, Flood of Love
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For a comparison with the powerful and richly developed one hundred verses of the Saundarya Lahari I have chosen the stark, spare, brilliant Stabat Mater , a medieval Latin hymn of just ten verses. It begins by contemplating Mary standing in grief at the cross of Her son, and ends by asking her to bestow on the viewer the life and saving power sent forth by Jesus who died. 6 I suggest that this contemplation of Mary offers a lens through which to glimpse more clearly what Christians are (and are not) able to accomplish in visualizing Mary even if choosing not to contemplate Devi. In the first two verses, the author contemplates Mary standing by the cross of her dying son, sharing His grief: The sorrowful mother was standing in tears near the cross as her Son was hanging there, and through her sighing soul that shared his sadness and was sorrowing, a sword pierced. (1) Oh how sad and afflicted was that blessed mother of the only-begotten, as she was bewailing and sorrowing and trembling, as she stood looking upon the punishments of her renowned Son. (2)
Verse 3 is as it were a step back, an invitation to watch Mary watching Jesus, to contemplate the scene so attentively as to share its grief: Who are those who would not weep should they look upon the mother of Christ in such torment? who would be unable to share the sadness of the holy mother, to contemplate her sorrowing with her Son? (3)
Verse 4 completes the simple act of contemplation at the moment of its inevitable conclusion, the death of Jesus, and the completion of Mary’s act of standing there, watching: 6 The hymn’s authorship is uncertain; it has been attributed to several popes as well as St. Bonaventure (died 1274) and Jacopone da Todi (died 1306). I have used the standard version of the hymn found in Blume (312–13). For my analysis I have devised a spare, simple translation, perhaps not ideal for all uses. I urge readers to consult more standard versions available in Christian hymns and, of couse, to hear some choral settings of the hymn.
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She looked upon Jesus suffering torments, beaten down with whips for the sins of His own people, she looked upon her own sweet child, dying, abandoned, until he sent forth his spirit. (4)
He is dead. She has seen Him dying and has confronted the finality of that death. But still she stands there by the cross, as it were for an eternity. His crucified corpse remains powerfully symbolic, but after verse 4, the scene is entirely Mary’s, for she is the living presence on Calvary. Jesus, God, provides a backdrop for encounter with Mary. So the author turns to address her directly. She has poured out her tears and has become a font of love, and so she is the one able to connect the onlooker to the divine power Ā owing from the desolate scene. By the logic of the hymn she alone is now the conveyor of any possible salvific meaning coming forth from the horrific scene before our eyes. The next verses are a series of strongly phrased pleas, even commands, urging her then to make the connections: O mother, font of love, make me feel the force of sorrow, that I might lament with you, make my heart burn in loving Christ, God, that I might be pleasing to Him. (5) Holy mother, do this— in my heart firmly fix the wounds of the crucified, share with me the punishments your so worthy, so wounded Son suffered for me. (6) Make me truly weep with you, sorrowing with the crucified as long as I live; to stand near the cross with you, to be with you willingly, wailing— this I desire. (7) Virgin famous among virgins, be not bitter toward me now, but make me wail with you, make me carry the death of Christ, a share in His passion as I recollect His wounds. (8) Make me inĀicted by these wounds and inebriated by this cross because of love of your Son . . . (9a)
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The author wants not only to contemplate Mary’s suffering and tears, and those of Jesus, but also to join in, to bear the wounds, the piercing, and the grief. Such eventualities alone can satisfy the speaker’s deepest desire and open a path beyond death. The final lines of the Stabat Mater look to judgment day, the eschatological fulfillment and completion of the dynamics toward damnation or salvation. Here too, as in the Saundarya Lahari the expectation is that this foremost of women is the one to lead the viewer to the final, desired completion: . . . enĀamed and on fire, through you, O Virgin, may I be defended on the day of judgment. (9b) Make me guarded by the cross, protected by the death of Christ, cherished by grace, and when this body dies, make it that my soul be given the glory of paradise. Amen. (10)
The power of the hymn is in part due to the familiar sorrow of the scene itself, but also to the realization that Mary, who stands there, is still here now, as mediator. Having watched her, the onlooker is able to address her, and receive the desired gift from her; here too, the attentive gaze opens the way to encounter and speech. There is no claim that Mary saves on her own. While Devi simply gives from Her own fullness, somehow nearby Her Shiva, Mary mediates the benefits of the dead Jesus, who in turn had mediated the graces of His Father. In perfectly orthodox fashion, the hymn is imaginatively positioned before Christ crucified. No thought is given to a Marian alternative that would conceal the cross and the divine power, love, and judgment it represents. But dramatically, it is Mary who matters. She is the one able to link the viewer intimately to the horrifying scene on the cross. She is the one who can connect the deceased and for now unresponsive Jesus to those who would share the fruits of His death. Her grief and preoccupation with her dying and dead son do not render her incapable of taking charge of the process of salvation. There are other differences, of course. Devi is married to God, Shiva, and Her sons are Ganesha and Skanda; Mary is not-God, she is the mother of the deceased Jesus and only by grace the Mother of God. Devi is sexually active, Mary is the mother who remains ever virgin.
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Devotion to Devi promises bliss here and now, as well as there, later on; bliss Ā oods the body and soul of the one who contemplates Her; devotion to Mary marks the traversal of suffering as necessary for those seeking the bliss that lies beyond death. Christ saves by His death; she saves by a love that stands with both the living and the dead. We may connect the Stabat Mater ’s focus on death with Mary’s status as the one who is not-God. There is no continuity between the divine and human, no straightforward, reliable path. Jesus exemplifies such continuity, but He is dead, and now only Mary is able to bridge the chasms between life and death, the human and divine, perhaps even female and male ways of salvation. To find God by going to Mary requires a leap, the discovery of God in her who is not-God. In the Stabat Mater, there is a fear of judgment, a hope for a separation of body and soul, death for the former and bliss for the latter. Words such as “death,” “virgin birth,” and “Mary, the Mother of God” evoke rupture and point us to the leap that is to be made across the human-divine divide. In the Saundarya Lahari , the bliss is spiritual and physical both, liberation is to be perfected in the future, but at every moment its bliss can be tasted, even sensually. There is little of suffering in the Saundarya Lahari, and little of joy in the Stabat Mater, and so we have a Mother of Bliss and a mother of sorrows. Yet both are so all-encompassing that neither are the opposites somehow omitted. Hearing the hymns together, we thus reĀ ect on the rupture of the cross and not-divine on the one side, and the Ā ow of a continuing and increasing bliss on the other. Eventually, of course, we must nuance our readings of both hymns by attention to other writings and other religious evidence, since neither Hindu nor Christian ways of contemplation can really be encompassed by any single text. But the power of these classic hymns lies in their choice to speak to the point, saying certain things while omitting others. In an odd way, then, Mary standing near her deceased son is in striking parallel with Devi who is usually seated near or on Her consort Shiva. Jesus has died and Mary still stands there. Shiva is a God bereft of any power or energy apart from Devi. The path of bliss and beauty runs parallel to the path of sorrow and love. Neither the Saundarya Lahari nor Stabat Mater denies the enduring importance of the male deity, but in neither hymn is the male able to satisfy the viewer’s desire. Shiva had been active and powerful at some earlier time, elsewhere, and now Devi stands before us. Jesus and His Father have been
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famously active, but now the Father is silent and the Son is dead. Mary stands there, alive and able to mediate the gift. In neither hymn is the climax fully described. In both, it occurs after the hymn is over, as if praise and direct address are only preliminary to a still further experience too intimate for portrayal by a third party. The bliss in Devi’s chamber is left to the imagination, while Mary’s response and life in Paradise cannot be expressed in a world still signed by the cross. Both dramas engage the spectator as participant, both are completed only after words are finished. Her unimaginable bliss and her unimaginable sorrow transport the viewer somewhere else, somewhere unthought of before. Like the Sri Guna Ratna Kosha and the Akathistos, the Saundarya Lahari and Stabat Mater are hymns of direct address. The contemplative process, the purification and clarification of vision, and entrance into the bliss beyond (or through) sorrow—these are always also about encountering Her/her, She/she who is addressed everywhere in both hymns: the mother, the power, the ocean of beauty, the font of bliss and love. Both are sensitive particularly to the ascetical practice that must precede encountering Her. In the Saundarya Lahari , what has already been viewed is reduced to its barest, elemental form; in the Stabat Mater , the patient prolongation of an eye- and heartwrenching viewing of a Son who dies in the presence of His mother makes us look upon the starkest of desolations. In both, vision is necessarily an involvement, a purification, and the initiation of participation in the scene that had been viewed, until one finally sees through it, beyond it. Those who cannot see their way into an encounter with Devi may however choose to see Mary in light of Devi. Either way, to recite— read, sing—the hymns attentively is to become involved in the scenes themselves. One then stands before Her, addressing Her, awaiting Her bestowal of the desired transformative touch. By a single, continuous affirmation that is increasingly a simple pure gaze, one encounters Devi; by a series of ruptures and losses, one finds in Mary the gift conceptually supposed to be God’s gift. Which encounter we choose involves issues that go well beyond the hymns and this chapter too, but as attentive readers we become capable of making a more reĀective choice about where we are to look.
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Works Cited Blume, Clemens, S.J., ed. Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi. Vol. 54. Leipzig, Germany: O. R. Reisland, 1915. Brooks, Douglas. The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Shakta Tantrism. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Brown, Robert L. and Katherine Anne Harper, eds. The Roots of Tantra. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2002. Brown, W. Norman, trans. The Saundarya Lahari or Flood of Beauty. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Clooney, Francis X., S.J. Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary. New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions. New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tigunait, Pandit Rajmani. Shakti: The Power in Tantra. Honesdale PA: Himalayan Institute Press, 1998.
NARRATIVES OF A DIALOGUE PILGRIM Albert Nambiaparambil, C.M.I. Upasana, Kerala, India For the past forty years I have been committed to a project of interfaith dialogue in India. Raising the question of whether religions divide or unite, I discovered the need to highlight the boundaries of languagegames typically used by dialogue partners from diĀ erent religious traditions, through an experiential approach that understands dialogue as an experience of “openness eliciting openness.” My purpose in the following piece is to recount various stages of this ongoing pilgrimage of love—a pilgrimage in tension, with the horizon set on experiential expressions of surrender before the IneĀ able Mystery, where dialogue becomes a celebration of communion. 1 I Do Religions Divide or Unite? As I sit down to take note of the first lessons learned in the path of interfaith dialogue, I recall the closing statement of the declaration that emerged as a result of the first Interfaith event at the World Conference of Religions in Kochi, Kerala, on November 15–21, 1981: “Let our words be matched by deeds” (Nambiaparambil, Religion and Man No. 137). We have come a long way. But these parting words of the meeting continue to ring new notes for us, as we continue our interfaith pilgrimage, trying to learn new lessons in interfaith literacy. Back in the seventies, I had to cover long distances by train, mostly in the three-tier compartments. These travels provided excellent opportunities to discover new interfaith friends. One of these friends was Mr. P. Govinappilla, a Marxist leader and writer from Kerala. I recall one of those meaningful exchanges.
1 A preliminary version of this article was published in Dharma 32.2 (2007), and I thank the editors for kindly allowing me to publish a much revised and expanded version here.
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Our conversation revolved around the “hope that is in us.” He shared his dream of the society of tomorrow, without class, without exploitation and alienation. I shared with him a packet of bananachips along with the conversation. To give him a taste of the society of my dreams, I cited a passage from the gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 25, on the norms set therein for the sharing of resources, and on the last judgment. As I recall now, his response was that he was not seeing this vision lived out or taught by the Christian community at large. So let me remind our dialogue friends of this crucial point: our words are to be matched by deeds, and our deeds speak louder than our words. We were around thirty interfaith fellow-pilgrims winding up our three-day “live-together experience” in C. S. R. Pariyaram, Kerala, in April 2007, sitting on the banks of the Chalakudy River. We were there telling our own stories, sharing our interfaith experiences and experiments. We found time also to share our dreams and our failure-stories, as we move on and on. In that parting session, one of the participants, Mr. Joseph Puthiadam—who had been silent throughout the proceedings—had this to share: Our family settled near Peerumedu in Kerala. In our village, we were Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. A church was established in our village. Slowly this church became the unifying point, the meeting point for us all, especially during holiday celebrations. Our communities did not feel, then, the distances between us. Later on, a temple and then a mosque were established. Suddenly we realized that we were diĀ erent, that we were separate. In Bangalore, I heard an invitation from Fr. Albert to join in this interfaith pilgrimage. I am now here in this path of dialogue.
He is now a regular partner in our dialogue meetings, always ready to extend a supporting hand as we meet. But the question that he raised is delicate. Is “religion” a dividing factor in humanity or a unifying one? We often hear statements such as “religions divide” and “religions unite” in diĀ erent linguistic contexts. It can also be said that “religions” divide while “religion” unites. I hear others saying that religion, at a superficial level, divides while, at the deeper level, “religion” can be a unifying bond. Leaving these two “slogans” about religion aside for further discussion, let me turn to another slogan gaining ground in inter-religious circles: to be religious is to be inter-religious .
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Figure 1 . Inter-religious meditation mat. Jesuit Ashram, Kalady, Kerala, India. Photograph: Simone Kearney.
II A Commitment to Dialogue Recently in a meeting organized by the CBCI (Catholic Bishops Conference of India) commission for dialogue, I heard once again this slogan “to be religious is to be inter-religious.” In interfaith gatherings I have heard partners from diĀ erent religious traditions giving reasons for their dialogic involvement, picking up one or other assertions or statements from their particular tradition. Our Hindu friends very often pick up the Vedic assertion ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti (Rig Veda 1.164.46) [truth is one, seekers call it by diĀ erent names]. Our Muslim partners often repeat the sayings as “we accept all the Prophets, and give the same respect to all the Prophets.” Thus, from the diĀerent religious or inter-religious circles, this formulation that “to be religious is to be inter-religious” is getting general acceptance.
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Recently while taking part in an interfaith meeting associated with the kumbhamela event at Allahabad, a Catholic religious leader asked me very personally as to what is the end or purpose of this “dialogue.” He was, as I understood then, asking me to give the reason or motive of our involvement in interfaith dialogue. The context and participants were predominantly Hindu. Was he asking me to link this dialoguecommitment to the important task of proclaiming the “good news”? I wonder! I did not wait or ask for a further clarification. Rather, my response took a diĀerent route—that of presenting the Christian Mission of dialogue as the continuation of the mission of Love. My reason for dialogue is nothing but the expression of Love, which is the essence of being a Christian (1 John 4:16). Will this notion of dialogue, as the expression of the Christian vocation of Love, be understood or accepted by all Christians? Not necessarily so, I would say. The Christian vocation to “proclaim” the good news cannot be compromised and sidetracked. How to relate or link these two commitments is a valid question that we shall address further along in this essay (see sec. VIII). At this point, let me simply state that the commitment to interfaith dialogue flows from my being a Christian and needs no further justification. So, too, the task of proclamation of the “good news” is the path of any Christian. But, I have often wondered, who is the agent of proclamation in contexts of dialogue? Christians? “Yes” should be the answer. But interfaith encounters expose us to those of other faiths becoming agents of the “good news” as well. I recall an incident. An interfaith “live-together” was being organized in Pune, at the Christ-PremaSeva Ashram, back in 1974. We were having our simple, vegetarian lunch, seated on the floor. Towards the end, Swami Chidanandaji of Shivananda Ashram, rose from his place and started distributing printed copies of the Prayer of Assisi, “Lord make me an instrument of thy peace,” to all the participants. I recall the instance of another Hindu Swami—whom I had not wanted to invite for that “live-in”— making his contribution for the expenses to be covered with the words: “Fr. Albert, this is the Lord’s work, do carry on.” In a poem I wrote with the title “this is my body,” I envisioned the commitment to dialogue as flowing from the Eucharistic experience. Tuning in to the music and bhajans of the Hindu pilgrims on their way to the uphill shrine of Lord Ayyppa of Sabarimala in Kerala, repeating the words that everything and everyone is the same Lord, llamellamayyappan, I wrote these lines:
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Floating in this river of sorrow, searching for a ray of hope in darkness, Humans, pilgrims, repeat this cry— this is my body . (xiii)
So it came as a surprise and reward to me when Hon. Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer took note of these meditative lines and wrote: “What is the significance of ‘this is my body’ in dialogue? That is the methodology of Nambiaparambil” (qtd. in Nambiaparambil, Pilgrims 3). I certainly appreciate Justice Iyer’s question. The lines that I have cited here flow from the Christian faith celebrated in the Eucharistic experience. This may not resonate with one looking at the Eucharist from a secular perspective. Nor will it, perhaps, ring a note for one who is worried about the Eucharistic celebration as a dividing factor in the sense that others are not allowed or invited to inter-communion. I return to this slogan that “to be religious is to be inter-religious.” This was latent in the call of the Holy Father Pope Paul VI to the fellow pilgrims who met him in Mumbai “to meet not in buildings of stone and brick but as pilgrims set out to find God” (Nambiaparambil and Gispert-Sauch No. 8). For any pilgrim, indeed, the focus is on the “further shores,” on the “not-yet,” on the Beyond. The baggage, the heritage of every tradition, is neither sidetracked, denied, nor compromised, but the attention—as fellow pilgrims—is on the goal to be reached. With this focus on the fellowship of all pilgrims, the slogan “to be religious is to be inter-religious” is, I feel, very suggestive. III
Dialogue as Celebration
As I started oĀ finding my paths in this dialogue pilgrimage, along with the supporting hands of a few friends, I took steps to begin a few centers for dialogue. One of them was Sopanam, in a township on the way to the uphill town of Munnar, in Kerala. As is natural with any institution run by a religious congregation, it was but natural that those who are in charge need not have a special charisma for this ministry of dialogue. A very well run English medium school was started by us and it was but natural that the focus and attention should shift to the efficient running of the school. A few years ago there was too much of the monsoon rains. The students of the school were playing football in the ground by the side of the school. The ball fell in the small river almost overflowing. Two boys—both Hindus—trying to retrieve the ball fell into that river and
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were drowned in the flood. The body of one of the boys was recovered. But all the attempts to get back the other body failed. It was now the very first anniversary marking the death of the two young boys. The school Principal rang me up and asked for my opinion about any meaningful way of marking the death anniversary of the two schoolboys. Well, I suggested that we observe the day by an interfaith prayer service, with songs, prayers, readings from sacred scriptures, followed by moments of silent reflections. The parent of that young student, whose body was not retraced, lighted the very first wick of the oil-lamp. The prayer session lasted one hour and a half. The students, staĀ, and the few parents who joined us were very much moved and touched by this celebration of the painful memories. I mention this at the outset of these reflections, to point out that the language of celebration may be most meaningful in our interfaith pilgrimage, and that interfaith language can take diĀ erent expressions. IV Identity and Openness It was the year end of 1980. After almost eight years of continuous travel in India, forming interfaith groups, organizing interfaith “livetogether” sessions in diĀ erent centers, it was time for us to take stock of the interfaith steps so far taken. The directors of diĀ erent dialogue groups and centers along with a few diocesan coordinators of dialogue came together in the Shivanandashram, Rishikesh. During the prayer-reflection session on the very first evening, Monsignor Pietro Rossano, the Vatican Secretary in charge of dialogue, shared the intimate feelings of “tension between identity and openness” that he was experiencing there and then. Dialogue as a movement was setting in motion diĀerent waves in the Christian communities, especially in the Indian church. Liturgical experiments, attempts at inculturation and adaptation were being tried out in diĀ erent places. There were reactions and doubts. We started oĀ with the bhajan (prayer-hymn), “Om Jagadeeswara.” Taking up the sharing mood, Swami Chidanandaji, president of the Shivanandashram, had this to oĀ er: “I will not say anything about the tension between ‘identity and openness’; but, I can tell you that openness elicits openness; that, the more open you are, the more open we will be.” A keynote worth stressing here is that dialogue is between persons, not between systems and organizations. Ideologies, systems, and
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organizations all do come into the picture, of course. They matter and have a great role to play in interfaith dialogue. But dialogue is between human beings. It is in this expression of openness eliciting openness that interfaith dialogue should happen. Dialogue is the flowering of inter-subjectivity. Partners in interfaith dialogue are contributing to the great “we” formation. The drama of life that it would make us play out in our real life is that of heaven is other people , in contrast to the “hell is other people” featured in Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. There is always the inherent danger of human relations falling from I-I to I-it, from a subject-subject relation to a subject-object relation. Genuine conversation and conversion should be in this subject-subject horizon. I would say that I have no right to make anyone an “object” of conversion. In any authentic dialogue, conversions can occur and do occur in both the partners of dialogue. But this should not be the result of one partner making the other an “object” of conversion. V
The Boundaries of “Kitchen Language”
Let me go back to a Hindu-Christian encounter that took place at the Vatican, Rome, in the office of the Pontifical Council for InterReligious Dialogue. I accompanied my friend Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati to meet the President of the Pontifical Council. By way of conversation the Vatican official raised the issue of re-incarnation, that of punarjanma, which is a tenet of the Hindu faith-tradition but not of the Christian tradition. In responding to the question raised by the Cardinal, my Hindu friend observed: both of us—Christian and Hindu—“believe” that all is not over after this life, that life continues after death. He added that both of us “know” practically nothing about the life hereafter and that all the talk thereabout is more or less a kind of “blah, blah.” The conversation or “dialogue” around punarjanma did end there and took up other topics. That dialogue was indeed very friendly. Let me now borrow a tool for testing meaningful language—for sorting out language that is meaningful from nonsensical language— oĀered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I would say that any language gets meaning within the boundaries of its use, within its particular language-game. This is all the more applicable within the faith-language used in any “religious language,” where creeds and beliefs, symbols and rituals come into play. “There are three persons in the Trinity,” for
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instance, is a basic assertion within the Christian faith-tradition. That there is only one, there cannot be two, is asserted in the Islamic tradition. These two assertions get meaning within the boundaries of the two faith-languages or language-games. Thus languages get meaning within the boundaries of the particular faith tradition. I would feel like saying that any religious language is beautiful and meaningful as any “kitchen language” is meaningful within the particular “kitchen.” Partners in interfaith dialogue have to be on guard against crossing the boundaries of a particular faith-tradition. Even if the same words—such as “salvation,” “incarnation,” “god,” “creator,” etc.—are used by a Hindu and a Christian, the meanings involved may be quite diĀerent between the two “kitchens”! This may be the case when one asserts the need or the right to “conversion,” while the other partner rules out the right to convert another as going against human dignity. In the latter, a faith in karma-theory may be involved, while in the former there may not be that faith. Thus, for a Christian, the appeal may be to the duty enshrined in the teachings of the gospel or in a certain article of the UN Charter (Nolde No. 18). In any case, it would be important to clarify the boundaries of the “kitchens” or the “games” involved. Inter-religious encounters often oĀer participants opportunities for learning from their failures. Let me illustrate this point by mentioning one instance of failure from which we learned a painful lesson. It was in November 1981, during the last session of the World Conference of Religions, at Kochi. The draft declaration that emerged from the deliberations of over three hundred dialogue pilgrims was being discussed for approval. The draft was read out. The moderator of the session was Fr. Amalor, director of the NBCLC (National, Biblical, Catechetical, Liturgical Center), Bangalore. He sought the permission of the participants to take up the draft for discussion. There was strong opposition to the draft from a group of Buddhist delegates. They were not happy about the overload of theistic terminology—such as “God,” “divine,” “absolute”—in the draft. In this delicate situation, Raimundo Panikkar, a key speaker of the meeting, brought in an additional paragraph, confessing our failure to arrive at a language meaningful to all, to express all that we wanted to say (Nambiaparambil, Pilgrims 130). Once this confessional statement was agreed upon, the objections were withdrawn.
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VI Obstacles to Understanding It is important to face, to understand, the wrong questions that are being raised in interfaith encounters and in interfaith contexts. Recently, I heard the question of “salvation outside the Church” repeated in two conferences convened by a Hindu Ashram, in Benares and Allahabad (during the Kumbhamela of 2006). The question is often raised clubbing the three monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as “converting” religions. Mentioning the Catholic tradition in particular, the assertion that “there is no salvation outside the Church” is made. I have heard a response from the Christian side, however, that this assertion is no longer held by Christians, that it is a “pre-Vatican” position no longer taught by the Church. The objective of my approach is rather diĀ erent—that of helping participants sort out the words in the very question before they jump to a ready-made answer. My eĀ ort would be to ask the question as to who is “inside” and who is “outside.” Again, the focus should be on pointing out the diĀerences involved in the use of the word “salvation” within Hindu and Christian contexts. The word “church” may evoke diĀerent pictures between diĀ erent partners who raise the question, and even among those Christians who straight away jump to a positive or negative answer. My aim is to assist dialogue partners in discovering the answer for themselves by clarifying the diĀ erent meanings involved in the words used. Thus, for a Hindu “salvation” would mean getting out of the circle of birth and rebirth, out of samsara. I would also point out the fact that the official teaching of the Catholic Church is against the position that restricts salvation to baptized people, denying salvation to Hindus or those of other faiths. There was an issue that was repeatedly raised in the context of interfaith dialogue: the uniqueness of Christ and of Christianity. I recall an incident back in 1971 during the inaugural function of the Chavara Cultural Centre of Kochi, Kerala, India. A seminar on “Religion and Culture” was part of the program. A Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim were in the panel of speakers. The Christian speaker, while giving a picture of Christianity vis-à-vis world culture, remarked that Jesus was the only founder of a religion who had made the claim to be the “way, truth, and light” of the world. After that session, I met this speaker and observed that his statement was perhaps misplaced—my reason being that one of the religions at issue, Hinduism, has no founder. I have noticed that Christian
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partners in dialogue often raise this question of the “uniqueness of Christ” and seek answers. This eĀort is rarely undertaken by Hindu dialogue partners, although we hear them sharing their vision of Hinduism as the ancient religion— sanathana dharma —the most universal and tolerant religion. Muslims come out presenting Islam as the religion of peace, as laying out the most perfect code of life. Buddhists point to compassion as the outstanding trait. Christianity is presented often as the religion of love. I recall another instance, where the question of “uniqueness” was raised in the context of conversion from one religion to another. The conversion of a Hindu writer, Madhavikutty, from Hinduism to Islam was making media headlines in Kerala. Following this news, another Hindu writer, Balachandran Chullikkattu, announced his conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism. Mr. Chullikkattu was a key speaker in Upasana, Thodupuzha, Kerala. As it is the custom, there was a discussion following his presentation. A Hindu participant in the meeting raised this question to the speaker: “What is lacking or missing in Hinduism that you find in Buddhism? ” Without pausing even for a moment of reflection, Mr. Chullikkattu raised a return question whether the questioner was married or not. On getting a positive reply, the speaker continued whether he had married his wife after proving her to be the most beautiful woman around! There was no further question on this topic. The question of “uniqueness” continues to be raised and discussed in the contexts of ongoing dialogues. This is but natural. Even dialogue partners from other faiths, who are not that bent on raising this question in relation to their own religion, still make an eĀ ort to point out the distinguishing features of their own traditions. This discussion on “uniqueness” should go on. The answer, I would say, is to be sought and found within the context of the faith assertions of diĀ erent religious traditions. There are other assertions that block dialogue partners from understanding each other. Let me oĀ er one example. Consider the statement: “Jesus is the only savior.” The opposite would be to say there are as many saviors as there are religions. In any case, it would be worth the trouble to take a close look at the context and time frame within which the word “only” appears in the Bible in the Acts of the Apostles (4:12). The implication, in this context, is neither that there are no other redeemers nor that others should be eliminated. The world-time vision held by the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) is
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that of linear, all-inclusive time. For a Christian, history’s final aim is Christ. The use of the word in this context is not at all exclusive, although in ordinary use the word “only” is exclusive. My Hindu friends who raise this question have a circular or spiral vision of time, with as many incarnations (manifestations of the One for the union of all with the One) as there are cycles or yugas. For them the word “only” would sound exclusive. The inability or difficulty of dialogue partners to understand each other because of diĀerences in world-time vision is a key factor in inter-religious literacy and communication. Partners in dialogue are often afraid to open themselves up because they are aware of the existence of documents that give the impression that one group or other claims “superiority” over others. Our working assumption is that dialogue is possible only between “equals.” Any claim to superiority by one side risks blocking dialogic openness. The document Dominus Jesus is often cited as an example. We find in this document the assertion that Jesus is the universal and “only” savior, that the “kingdom of God” cannot be seen separated from the Church, and so on. There are pointers in the document regarding the dangers of religious indiĀ erentism and relativism. The language used is, I feel, a language that may be labeled as “possessive” or even “proprietary.” Those who are not familiar with this style may find it difficult to accept the claims made in the document. While an eĀort should be made on the part of Christians to understand the difficulty of “outsiders” in understanding this language, we should keep in mind that the document is nothing but a restatement of the traditional teachings of the Church. It is important to emphasize the particular linguistic context of the language used in this and similar documents. This could help dialogue partners diĀerentiate the content from the kind of language used to express the stand against relativism. I have often felt that there are contexts in interfaith dialogue wherein the only way to make our faith content “absolute” is to make the language about faith “relative.” This is all the more true when partners who engage in these dialogues also go through experiences in interreligious prayer, meditation, sharing sessions. One way is to avoid using sectarian words and symbols, and instead to use words that are suggestive, evocative, and capable of producing vibrations in all the participants. In the last week of May, 2007, a few of us fellow pilgrims went on an “interfaith retreat,” sharing our interfaith dreams as well as the
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difficulties met with in our paths. A group of students from Carmel Giri Public School at Korandakad, Munnar—the venue of our meeting—expressed their readiness to join us in an experiential exposure to interfaith dialogue. They joined us with their own song, “Lead Kindly Light.” Together we later sang: “We Shall Overcome” and the “Song of Ruth.” There was no relativism in this approach. Rather, we were trying to help one another in an experiential exposure. Were the differences between faith tenets blurred in and by this exercise? Was their faith made relative when they—participants from Hindu and Christian traditions—lighted diĀerent wicks of the oil lamp, while everyone chanted, asato ma sad gamaya, tamaso ma jyotir gamaya (from the unreal lead me to the real, from darkness lead me into light . . .)? Far from it, as far as I could see. VII
Changing Pictures, Changing Language
It would be helpful to invoke another tenet from Wittgenstein to test the “meaningfulness” of language. According to this tenet, any language that is meaningful will elicit a picture. Thus, if a word cannot evoke some kind of picture in us, that word is meaningless; it is “nonsense.” Calling myself a “Christian,” I have or should have my own picture of self-understanding as a member of this particular community. The same can be said about those of other communities. In opening out to those of other faith-traditions, we would and should look for pictures of self-understanding that are inclusive and open. Before I took to this interfaith path, I was happy with a kind of picture that placed me in a circle or sphere, with Christ as the center. In this picture, those of other faiths are invited to join this community through the acceptance of baptism. Later on, I found myself more comfortable with another picture wherein others, those of other faiths and ideologies, were placed in diĀ erent circles around my circle of Christians. At a later stage, as I got more and more involved with those of other faiths, a deep dissatisfaction grew within me about my earlier pictures of self-understanding. I picked up an atomic or starlike picture, with a light placed at the centre. This picture brought home to me the experience of us all being equal as fellow pilgrims. My Hindu friends often draw pictures of diĀerent paths leading to the same mountain top, diĀ erent rivers flowing and merging in the same ocean, the same moon seen as many moons in a pond with the waves reflecting the One, and so on.
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The eĀort of all dialogue pilgrims, I would say, is to abandon the exclusive pictures and begin to draw more and more inclusive pictures of dialogic self-understanding. There was a time when, from a kind of exclusive self-understanding, I was happy to label others as “pantheists,” as “non-Christians,” as “polytheists.” The dialogic discovery of others helped me change my descriptive labels to: “those of other faiths or religious traditions,” “fellow pilgrims,” etc. VIII
The Need for Intra-Religious Dialogue
As suggested earlier (sec. 2), any Christian partner is placed in a delicate situation when called upon—by both insiders and outsiders—to relate the task of “dialogue” with that of “proclamation.” I had to find my own responses to this challenge as I progressed along the pilgrimage of dialogue. This was a new learning and unlearning process for me. I recall the time when dialogue was understood as a means for proclamation, a preparation for proclamation. Related to this question was the new look at other religions that emerged from the perspective of their redemptive value . There was a time when the word “natural” was used to qualify these other religions, while Christianity was regarded as the “supernatural” religion. The Second Vatican Council gave us a diĀ erent positive picture of these other religions, however. It taught us to understand them as containing seeds of the Word of God, as reflecting the rays of the Spirit that enlightens us all ( Nostra Aetate Nos. 2–3). Well known in theological circles is the phrase “Anonymous Christians,” referring to members of other religious traditions considered from the perspective of their redemptive value. The issue before us is not only that of the salvation of people from other religions, but of the saving function of these very religions. Any serious inter-religious dialogue calls upon dialogue partners to engage in intra-religious dialogues within their communities, on these and related issues. In the context of such ongoing reflections, the role of dialogue vis-àvis evangelization was carefully reconsidered during the CBCI session of Calcutta, in preparation for the Synod on Evangelization in Rome. The group called upon to draft the proceedings of this meeting arrived at a new formulation of dialogue as “flowing from the Christian faith in God’s saving presence in the religious traditions of mankind and the expression of the firm hope in their fulfillment in Christ” (Nambiaparambil and Gispert-Sauch No. 5). While it is clear that the duty
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of proclamation of the good news is in no way diminished or compromised by the ministry of dialogue, it remains to be seen whether such formulation gives a satisfactory answer to the questions posed by those of other faiths, as well as by insiders. Proclamation and inter-religious dialogue may best be regarded, I suggest, as mutually related paths of the one mission of Love. Dialogue, intra-religious dialogue when seriously engaged in, changes or converts the communities involved. Let me illustrate this by a transformation that the Indian Church underwent within itself. The duty of religious education to those of other faiths in educational institutions run by Christians was raised and discussed in the 1969 Seminar on “The Church in India.” This issue was again raised in subsequent meetings within the Church. The need to provide religious education to those of other religious traditions was brought in for the consideration of the drafting committee, with Fr. Gispert-Sauch, S.J. in charge of drafting the Guidelines on Inter-Religious Dialogue set up by the CBCI Dialogue Commission. The main issue was whether we are bound to provide for the religious education of students of other faiths by competent persons from their own traditions. The practice so far had been to give religious instruction to Christians, while oĀ ering moral education to outsiders, i.e., students from other religious backgrounds. The issue was raised and shelved during the first edition of the Guidelines. But the topic was again raised when the second edition of the Guidelines was being drafted. This time, the Dialogue Commission discussed the matter in detail. The new revised edition incorporated the proposal and asserted that it is our duty as Christian educators to provide for the religious education of those students from other religious traditions, by competent persons from within those faiths, wherever possible (Nambiaparambil and Gispert-Sauch No. 104). On a few occasions I have cited the fruits of intra-religious dialogue within the Christian community in India, requesting, suggesting, and inviting those of other faiths to go through the homework of intra-religious dialogue within their own home-communities. IX
Equal Treatment of All Believers?
In our meeting at Chalakudy, Kerala, referred to earlier, we made a new attempt to share our prejudices and stereotypes about others. To set the ball rolling, I shared my own inhibitions regarding Muslims. As
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I started oĀ, two of my Christian partners expressed their doubts as to the “prudence,” or the very purpose, of sharing our misunderstandings about other faith-traditions with our dialogue partners. My response was that as dialogue partners we should come out into the open, sharing our own prejudices. This way, there will be no divergence between what we share in our own home communities about those of other faith families and the language that we use when we come together in interfaith pilgrimage. In response, a long-time dialogue partner from the Islamic tradition shared his own inhibited pictures about Christians. This sharing brought about a sense of “release” to both of us. One of the Christian participants, who had earlier expressed his doubts about this attempt, later confessed to me that the sharing of our own hidden prejudices was a great moment in the path toward interfaith openness. The “secular,” understood as equidistant from all religions or as equal treatment of all religions, is bringing in a new, important note to interfaith dialogue in India. This is aĀecting our interfaith language positively. The secular dimension of our nation oĀ ers us, dialogue pilgrims, a sense of freedom, openness, and courage in this path. One of the keynotes of interfaith dialogue is the assurance that all of us are equal in this path. It would serve no purpose here to compare religions, and place one religion over another. The secular note ensures equal treatment to all believers. In interfaith contexts I have often heard expressions such as “all religions are equal,” “all religions are the same,” etc. I find it difficult, however, to use the word “equal” about religions! The question remains: Is sarvadharma samabhavana—the attitude of considering all religions as equal—an essential note of interfaith understanding and openness? Is “equality” a note applicable to religions or to persons as fellow-pilgrims? Perhaps a way of looking at other religious traditions as sarvadharma mamabhavana—namely, one’s own—may be more apt for us all . In dialogue meetings we often hear partners sharing their deep concern for “tolerance.” This word, when said by dialogue friends, suggests a very positive content—that of appreciative acceptance of diĀerent traditions, even while belonging to one tradition. Our Hindu friends in dialogue often point out this “tolerance” as the specific note of Hindu religiosity, while others stress the need to move beyond tolerance toward an appreciative acceptance and openness to other traditions. I would say that such openness and acceptance of other paths is already implied in the Hindu use of this word.
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India is the nation with the greatest confluence of diĀ erent religions in the world, and the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism. We have here an atmosphere that welcomes multilateral dialogues. But, when dialogue happens between followers of two communities—bilateral dialogues—this demands from both parties all the more attention and caution in the language selected, in the symbols used, in the background prepared, in the rituals selected. Just an example to illustrate this point: Christians are inclined to call God “father,” but our Muslim friends are not that happy with this use of the word “father” about God. We have to be attentive in choosing our symbols. To illustrate this, let me cite the example of Advocate K. P. Alikunju—who is sadly no longer with us—a Muslim. He was a regular in all the dialogue meetings that I organized at the Chavara Centre of Kochi, in the seventies. In those early years of our dialogue pilgrimage, he would never light the oil lamp along with us during the interfaith prayer services we often held. But later on, he started lighting the oil lamp, or the candles, of his own accord. X Pilgrimage in Tension Examples can be given wherein I could not go all the way with certain rituals or cultural practices, such as singing certain songs that are—to me—very much identified with one particular tradition. Inter-communion is an issue often raised when the Eucharist is celebrated during interfaith “live-together” sessions. I recall the instance of a Hindu dialogue partner who lined up to receive communion, as we were both resource persons in a course on dialogue held in a seminary. One seminarian later told me of his surprise at a Hindu partaking in the Eucharistic sacrament. When I shared this with my Hindu friend, h is reply was that he had accepted communion on the assumption that not accepting it would have been a cause for shock to the seminarians! There are many other issues, such as the use of sacred scriptures of other religions in the liturgy. Bilateral dialogues will demand from partners answers to the questions likely to be raised in such contexts. As an example, the “death and resurrection of Jesus” are likely to be raised in dialogues between an Ahammadiya and a Christian; so too the belief in the Trinity may need a kind of delicate sharing between Muslim and Christian dialogue partners. In a dialogue wherein Bud-
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dhist members are participants, I would be cautious with the use of monotheistic language. In Upasana—the “center for religious-cultural integration” of which I am at present the director—a few rationalists take part in the weekly meetings and in the discussion that follows. They are not allowed to stand up during moments of silent prayer at the beginning. I would say: let us agree to disagree, to respect certain boundaries. In April 2007, I participated in a meeting organized by the CBCI Dialogue Commission in Bangalore. Directors of centers for dialogue, regional coordinators of dialogue, members of the commission and a few special invitees were the participants. There was, after the dinner, a get-together of us all—a cultural meeting. We the participants were invited to a rhythmic dance, with a Sufi-touch. The song that was sung along with the rhythmic steps had certain words expressing surrender to a particular Hindu deity, Govinda. Though invited pressingly to join the dance formation, I found it difficult to repeat the word. A few other Christian friends found no difficulty at all in singing the words or with the dance. I noticed one of the members of the commission walking out of the room as the dance song started. Later on, he shared with me his own difficulty in taking part in that practice. There were, and there are, others among the “insiders” who may find nothing objectionable with any such elements. Is there not a hidden danger of syncretism in certain expressions that a few of our friends dare to embrace during certain interfaith meetings? I recall a Christian dialogue partner who was in the habit of greeting others, using the name of a Hindu deity as Om Nama Shivaya , even when the greeted partner belonged to the Christian community! It was difficult for me to respond with the same words. Bilateral and multilateral exchanges and celebrations may demand from us sensitivity to each other’s sensitivities and those of the communities involved (Nambiaparambil, Pilgrims 84). There are revivalist groups who look with suspicion on all attempts at inculturation and adaptation. They, in turn, look with suspicion on any move towards dialogue as compromising one’s own faith. But if “to be religious is to be inter-religious,” to be inter-religious is to move on and on as fellow pilgrims, in healthy tension towards a mystery that transcends all parties in the dialogue partnership.
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XI
In-Depth Encounters and the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans
Very often, interfaith dialogue remains at the level of exchanges at the knowledge level, of information gathering and sharing, of analytical skills, of comparative religion. This is important, good, and indeed necessary. When I entered the field, I noticed that dialogue remained at this level most of the time. As I took up the work as secretary of the Commission for Dialogue in the CBCI, however, a new step was taken. In February of 1973, the Commission organized in Benares a four-day interfaith “live-together,” with participants of many diĀ erent faiths. They shared their life-stories and anecdotes around topics that were deeply personal, intermingled with prayers, songs, and meditation sessions in which all could join. This was a very enriching experience for us all. We followed this pattern of inter-religious in-depth encounters on many occasions. In-depth interfaith confluence at times takes on novel expressions. One such expression was that of an interfaith procession with symbols of diĀerent religious and spiritual traditions held or raised at diĀ erent spots, with prayers said for each tradition by one member or another from each religion, with the Talisman of Gandhi or the Prayer of Assisi as a banner held in the front. Converging in a circle, in a campfire pattern, participants gave expression to their deep experiences in songs and prayers, with lighted candles in their hands. Perhaps such in-depth experiences are the ones that dialogue pilgrims cherish and long for, the ones that bring them together again and again to interfaith celebrations. Called upon to explain the rationale behind our interfaith endeavors, I am often reminded of a few lines from “Viswadarshan” (World Vision), a poem by G. Shankarakurup. The poet first conjures up the image of himself as a butterfly sitting on a globe, musing that the globe rotates because of the movement of his wings. But an exploding vision of expanding horizons, with the sudden emergence of unknown stars and distant galaxies in a vast universe, shatters his delusion of being “master” of the world, and he is overcome by awe and dread: Oh vastness, I salute thee! Oh darkness, my sincere salutations to thee. When afar, we are near! When near, so afar in this wondrous world! . . . Filled with pride I took my pen, and now I lay it down in a shudder.
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If only I could practice a little humility and purity of vision! (21, 25; translation mine) 2
Lost in this vision, the butterfly-poet undergoes a genuine conversion, realizing the earth is but a gipsy girl, and he is but a meager spot on her outer garment! G. Shankarakurup lived across the street from the Prior General’s House, Kochi, where I worked while running the Chavara Cultural Centre. One day, during one of my frequent visits, I asked him what had made him write this poem. He revealed he had been inspired by Arjuna’s vision of God, following his plea to his divine charioteer Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. It was at that peak moment of divine manifestation that he had been moved to write these lines! The poet then proceeded to share his reply to a rationalist who had criticized him for harboring “superstitious” ideas and for giving the name of temple-deity Guruvayoorappan to a literary endowment he had established (with proceeds from his first Gnanapeedham poetry award): “A bird soaring high up in the air can look down and exclaim—what astonishing heights I have reached! The same bird can direct its gaze higher up to the unexplored distances and say—how much farther I have yet to go!” Viswadarshan, the poet told the rationalist critic, symbolizes the second outlook. My point here is that to be true fellow pilgrims in an interfaith pilgrimage, partners need to regain this sense of awe and sublime dread which is the key feature of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the essential sign of religious experience as highlighted in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy . Partners here engage in novel and creative forms of communication in an attempt to give expression to the ineĀ able, from which words endlessly return unable to reach the Word— yato vaco nivartante apprapya manasa saha (Taittiriya Upanishad 11.4). The focus is on the mysterium, while pilgrims oĀ er up their expressions in an attitude of total surrender ( saranam gacchami ). Pilgrims
2
doorame namaskarikunnu nine jnan andhakarame ninakumen sadara namovakam. doorttiladuppamundaduppattinkal tanne, dooravum prtibhatan mohana prapanchattil . . njan ahamkarattode kayyilentiayatanippena— vaikatte tazhe kuninjum virapoondum. Ittiri vinayavum samasudhamam chetovruttiyum— seelikuvan eniku sadhicchengil!
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are overtaken, at this point, by a paradoxical sense of creative shattering, accompanied by hope and the celebration of that hope. XII “From darkness, lead me into light” I am raising a question for which there is no ready answer. Again and again, I hear one question from my friends and from those who are cynical about these dialogues: what have you achieved? This question is usually followed by a list of continuing communal tensions or conflicts. In other areas such as hospital apostolate, educational ministry, social action, you have clear criteria for success or failure. All such tangible means of evaluating success or failure are simply not there in this ministry of dialogue! Is it possible to measure the sense of communion and trust that emerges among fellow pilgrims of diĀerent religions unless, and until, one enters and participates in this very confluence? I wonder. Related to this difficulty is the fact that those involved in interfaith activities cannot convey to others the networking of fellowship so far achieved, except, perhaps, by sharing the address list of friends across the boundaries. Many a dialogue center or group has this story to tell—a story of diminishing or disappearing membership, of centers going through a transition to activities that can show tangible results! Naturally, under such conditions, interfaith programs will have to give way to other projects, to adjust to new situations. As I got started on this interfaith path, I met Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati, a Hindu monk mentioned earlier in relation to the HinduChristian encounter at the Vatican Secretariat. Yati told stories about his early school days. The students at his school were given a questionnaire to fill out. The names of diĀ erent religions were read out and, one by one, students had to identify the religion to which they belonged. Yati told us that he used to stand up for all the three religions that were being marked out for each student. Even though the teacher scolded him, he insisted on belonging to all religions (Nambiaparambil, Pilgrims 46). I have come across a few individuals who indeed hold that while rooted in one particular tradition, one can be experientially inserted in another as well. Others deny the possibility of such multiple religious loyalty! One day while pondering over this situation, often encountered in interfaith contexts, I received this message by email:
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Life oĀers multiple opportunities to learn and experience our beliefs. My friend, Ann Holmes Redding, is both a Christian and a Muslim. I am a Buddhist-Baptist. The Jewish writer Mark Epstein, who wrote a book called Going On Being told me there is a whole church of Buddhist-Baptists in Manhattan. Some time ago I went to a Japanese teriyaki restaurant in the University District of Seattle. The restaurant was run by Koreans. The owner asked me about my religion. I told him. He said that is impossible—to be both a Buddhist and a Baptist. I asked him how a Korean could run a Japanese restaurant. I can’t remember now exactly what he said, but you get my point, don’t you? (Sky)
Leaving aside the issue of dual or multiple membership for future reflection and feedback from dialogue friends, let me just say here that the deeper you delve into your own religious experience, the more closely you are likely to empathize with those of other faiths, in their experiential expressions. This affinity or bond is a fruit and flowering of interfaith dialogue. I would not label this as “relativism,” or as a compromising of one’s own faith tenets. Interfaith encounters may, and do, expose us fellow travelers to a situation of recognizing the limitations of our own faith languages, especially in moments when eĀorts are made to tune in to the vibrations of other faith languages. In answering the question—where do we go from here?—we might start by sorting out and reflecting on the kind of dialogue we are involved in. If the focus is on addressing issues of social or common concern—such as reaching out to the downtrodden, the oppressed, the marginalized, the environment, etc.—the goal can be outlined, targeted, and the success or failure evaluated. If the focus is on the reduction of tensions in a pluralistic society, the fruits can be felt and experienced. If the aim is to assist in ushering forth the “kingdom of God”—as Christians would call it—this, too, can be measured by the values of the kingdom (justice, mercy, honesty, loving service, etc.). But if it is true that “to be religious is to be inter-religious,” then our reflections on dialogue could be summed up by saying that “religious language has to be inter-religious language.” Turning back, I recall an attitude with which I long walked—an attitude of self-sufficiency. A few of my personal friends, who had the duty and courage to guide me, reminded me that we Christians have the full truth. In my encounters, however, I heard my own fellow pilgrims from other religions telling me that they too were walking along with a similar attitude of self-sufficiency—an attitude expressed through various formulations, such as being the most tolerant, the most ancient,
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the latest in the line of prophets and religions, the least dogmatic, and so on. There were occasions when I had to exclaim that, after all, there is no “Christian” or “Hindu” or “Muslim” God! Even the word “God” may not be necessary when we open out to the Jains, Buddhists, and so on, in communicating an experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Should we, then, not point to “transcendence” as the keynote of being religious? If so, the language of transcendence, in the dimension of verticality, is addressed to the “Other.” In the horizontal dimension, meanwhile, we reach out to “others” and to “Nature.” In seeking new expressions for the experience of transcendence, we may be touching and crossing the boundaries our own language—allowing our religious language to flower as inter-religious language. To illustrate this inter-religious flowering of language, let me share another special moment in our dialogue journey. It was during the cultural evening session of our interfaith world conference of religions at Kerala, India, 1981. A demonstration piece from the ancient art of kathakali was being played out on stage, depicting the story of the victory of good over evil. Suddenly, the lights went oĀ . We were all engulfed in darkness. As a way out of this dilemma, we promptly lighted kerosene lamps, and the dance drama continued. Before the dawn of electric lights, kathakali had in fact always been staged under the light of kerosene lamps! Recalling those tense moments when we were all left in darkness, Fr. George Pulikuthiyil, who was helping me with the organization of the cultural center, told the blind mother of an actor who played a key role in the drama that all of us had found ourselves in total darkness for a few moments, whereas she was always in darkness. That good mother responded: “My dear, you shouldn’t say that. I am never in darkness. My light never goes out.” Let me then conclude by reciting the ancient prayer, tamasoma jyotir gamaya (from darkness, lead me into light), as an illustration of the flowering of inter-religious language. Works Cited Nambiaparambil, Albert, C.M.I. Pilgrims on the Seashore of Endless Worlds . Rev. ed. Bangalore, India: Asian Trading Corporation, 2002. ———, ed. Religion and Man: Proceedings of the World Conference of Religions on Religion and Man . Kochi, India: World Fellowship of Inter-Religious Councils, 1981.
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——— and George Gispert-Sauch, S.J., eds. Guidelines on Inter-religious Dialogue. Rev. ed. New Delhi, India: CBCI Commission for Dialogue, 1989. Nolde, O. Frederick. Freedom’s Charter: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights . New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1949. Nostra Aetate: Declarations of the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions . Second Vatican Council. 28 Oct. 1965. Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy . Trans. John W. Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950. Shankarakurup, G. “Vishwadarshan.” Viswadarshan. Rev. ed. Thrissur, India: Current Books, 2002. 13–26. Sky. E-mail to the author. 17 June 2007. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1997.
PRANAYAMA: BREATHING FROM THE HEART Richard Kearney Boston College During a recent visit to India I discovered the Hindu notion of the “cave of the heart” (or guha in Sanskrit). On a visit to the pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, overlooking the Ganges in the foothills of the Himalayas, I took classes with a wise teacher: a Hatha yogi called Ashish Das. Before sharing his vast learning on the Vedic heart, Ashish proposed I take lessons in Pranayama or yoga breathing. I did. Ā ere was, from the outset, something slightly daunting about Ashish. It was hard to identify what exactly. His intensity was fierce and calm at once. When he spoke or moved he never looked about him. His eyes gazed but never flickered or dimmed, as though he was guided by a spirit not his own, some subtle power beyond or within him. He seemed to address my whole being, without reserve or gap, though he hardly knew me. In the face of that intensity, a part of me withdrew a little, without my wishing it, perhaps out of fear or caution, as if to yield too quickly might spell the end of the kind of life I’d known up until then. Despite my initial hesitations, I submitted to his instruction. My first class on the Vedas began with special breathing exercises of concentration and restraint. “You cannot read until you learn to breathe.” Ā ey were Ashish’s first words to me. He cautioned me with a quote from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika: “As lions and tigers are tamed very slowly so should prana be brought under control very slowly in gradation measured according to one’s capacity and limitations. Otherwise it may kill the practitioner!” I raised my arms in mock alarm, but Ashish proceeded unperturbed. “Since breath is the first aspect of the body to be affected by feeling,” he explained, “this is where one must begin.” Pranayama exercises should only be taught in specific conditions by special teachers. Never on one’s own. Ā e aim of pranayama is to help us transcend the fluctuations and addictions of our given situation by putting the body into a pattern of breathing that most people never observe. It is, in other words, a refusal to breathe like
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the majority of mankind, inducing one to descend from shallow chestbreathing to deep abdominal-breathing. Ashish taught me to inhale and exhale in such a way that the spine balanced the movement of the diaphragm, the lower vertebrae drawing down with each exhalation and allowing for the release of the whole back of the body through the sacrum and lower abdomen. “It is the key to grounding,” he said. Each inhalation, by contrast, is a drawing up of the “bird of prana” from the interiority of one’s being, a way of allowing the energy of one’s self and of the universe (for prana refers to both) to infuse one’s being. Ā e proper balancing of inhalation and exhalation enables us to reach the rhythm and depth of sleep without renouncing lucid awareness. And as an aid for this balancing, Ashish taught me to imagine small wavelets lapping against the shore as I breathed, visualizing the ebb and flow of water on sand. He also taught me to imagine my breathing as a swarm of bees entering and exiting a hive, each expiration emitting a buzzing sound with vibrating closed lips and internalizing this sound until one felt reverberations deep inside the breast bone. Ā is technique is known as Bramari. Ā e reason for practicing pranayama like this before studying was, Ashish explained, to “appease the fluctuations of the mind.” By carefully retaining and expelling breath, consciousness can become calm and centered. No reading without breathing. Ashish repeated this time and again, glancing across at the volume of Upanishads awaiting us on the table. First inhale, then listen. In-spire to be inspired. Ā e hardest thing for me in all this was to try not to try. For the more I tried the more the breath eluded me. Yet Ashish kept reminding me that one can only change one’s breath by watching it, listening to it, by not trying to change it . After the first three exercises of pranayama—deep breathing, cleansing breathing, restrained breathing—I sat with Ashish in the cloistered Academy garden, flowering with blazing red bougainvillea. Here he instructed me in some basic Sanskrit lessons on the guha, or “cave of the heart.” Ā e passages he selected were chiefly located in the sacred Vedanta scriptures, most especially the Upanishads. Ashish brought along the Sanskrit originals with commentaries by Swami Chinmayananda. Ā e first passage we looked at together was from the opening chapter of the Kaivalya Upanishad: parena nakam nhitam guhayam vibhrajadetadyatayo visanti. Rendered into English this reads, “Higher than heaven, seated in the cave of the heart [ guhayam], it shines, which the seeker attains” (1:3). What struck me most, I told Ashish, was that the
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shining truth the seeker desires is larger and higher than the heavens themselves, but is to be discovered at the very bottom of the innermost vault of the heart. Delighted by my getting this paradox, Ashish quickly turned to chapter 18:61 of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna reveals to the warrior, Arjuna, that “God dwells in the heart of all beings [ hrddese] . . . which turn and spin through the wonder of His illusive power.” Here again, explained Ashish pointing to his chest, we encounter the image of the highest divinity residing within the most intimate core of our being—the innermost space where the source of power invisibly resides. But it was really only when we opened the pages of the Katha Upanishad that the Vedantin imagery of the heart, gravitating around the ancient Sanskrit tropes of guha and hyrd, leapt from the page. Sitting beside me with the old leather-bound edition spread wide on his knees, Ashish chose six particular verses that, he confided, had deeply inspired the souls of countless saddhus and swamis throughout the ages. He cast a slightly grave look as he spoke. Was he simply being respectful of the Vedantin codes of esoteric discretion? I wondered. Or was he looking deep inside me and recognizing a conflict between pilgrim and spectator? Ā e genuine searcher of the heart, stripped bare of my western academic books and computer files, versus the predatory researcher of exotic Oriental verities? Which was more important, Ashish seemed to be saying, pilgrimage or plot? I could not tell and dared not ask such questions of a teacher I scarcely knew. I waited in silence, braving his steady regard, until he eventually raised his head. Lifting the book up from his knees, Ashish read these verses aloud: 1. “Ā e wise sage, who by means of meditation on his Self, recognizes the Ancient, Who is difficult to be seen, Who is hidden in the cave of the heart [ guha hitam], who dwells in the abyss . . . he renounces joy and sorrow” (KU 1,2,12). 2. “Ā e Atman subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, is seated in the cavity of the heart [ guhayam] of each living being. He who is free from the willing and wishing with his mind and the senses composed, beholds the majesty of the Self and becomes free from sorrow” (KU 1,2, 20). 3. “Ā e two who enjoy the fruits of their good works being seated in the cavity of the heart [ guha], the Seat of the Supreme, the knowers of Brahman call them shadow and light . . .” (KU 1,3,1).
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4. “Who beholds him seated within the five elements, him who is born of tapas of Brahma, who was created before the waters, who entered the Cave of the Heart [ guham pravisya tisthantam ], and dwells there, he verily sees Brahman. Ā is is verily that [ Brahman] which thou has asked for” (KU 2,4,6). 5. “Him, the enjoyer, who is born along with Prana in the form of all deities, who entering into the cave of the heart, abides therein, and who was born with the elements. He who knows Him verily knows Brahman. Ā is is indeed that [ etad vai tat ]” (KU 2,4,7). 6. “Ā e purusha of the size of a thumb, the Inner Self, is always seated in the heart [ hrdaye] of all living beings; one should draw Him out from one’s own body with steadiness, as one draws the pith from a reed; one should know him as Pure and Immortal” (KU 2,5, 17). Ashish almost chanted the six verses, raising up the Katha Upanishad in both hands as though it were a votive offering. And as he sang aloud the breath of his living person was like a medium in temporary possession by some other, some third, some departed person or thing, some timeless spirit writing and reading and speaking itself through him. Ashish seemed lost in the incantations to the point of selfforgetting. Ā e white parallel stripes on his forehead—marking his allegiance to the Shaivite faith—suddenly shone like arrows sprung from a bow which preceded this moment and sailed towards some distant target situated well beyond our sight as we sat there in the walled garden. But as I imagined such things I checked myself of a sudden, wondering if I was not mysticizing this simple ordinary man standing here before me. Oriental fantasies of a Western voyeur? Despite such doubts, however, I went with the flow of his special presence. “I can help you get to the bottom of this,” Ashish promised me, as soon as he’d finished reciting. “But you must be ready to reach into the hidden abyss which the Upanishads reveal in these verses.” Ā en, after a pause he added: “I will accompany you this part of the way. No one can do it alone.” As he spoke these last words, it seemed that Ashish too had overcome some initial scruple or suspicion and was now ready to trust me. He raised his lids and stole a kindly glance before placing the seasoned edition of the Upanishad on a marble-topped table in front of our bench. Ā en leaning forward over the opened pages he started to interpret each verse for me in turn. His words were guided by Swami Chinmayananda’s commentaries, appended to his edition of the Upa-
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nishads; but I suspected from the fire in his sallow eyes that many of the insights were his own. Ā e first mention of the guha, explained Ashish earnestly, occurs in a stanza where the Katha Upanishad broaches the question of selfdiscovery. Beyond and beneath all the fine theories of Eternal Truth and Total Mind, it suggests, resides a more intimate personal experience of the ultimate in the form of an utterly simple realization, “Ā is I am” ( Ayam Aham Asmi ). Ā is ultimate reality points to a deathless or “ancient” inner Self beyond the ego-self ( Ahamkar) where our conscious surface life normally operates. Ā is is Atman. But it is, the first verse tells us, “hard to see.” To our ordinary perception it remains illusive. Just as the eye, being an instrument, can only see objects external to itself but never itself. Ā e guha is like the blind spot of the eye, that which enables us to perceive all things but which cannot itself be perceived. Ā e truth of Atman is lodged, as the stanza says, “in the inmost recess” of our being; it is the subtlest principle in all of us, deeper than Mind, Body, or Breath. It is the Bliss Sheath where the source of life, the spark of the divine, the steam at the core of water lies. It is that truth “hidden in the cave of the heart.” Ashish’s voice reached a mini-crescendo with the last sentence, then subsided gently, like soft rain onto earth. He sat back against the whitewashed garden wall for a few moments before opening the Chinmayananda commentary at another particular passage which he also read to me: It is an ancient Vedantin concept, sanctioned by the Vedas and acceptable even today, that in the cave of the heart is the seat of True Intelligence. To a modern microscope-gazer, whose philosophy rises no higher than the principle of “see to believe,” this statement may read as absurd, for to him intelligence is lodged in the brain. But if we walk from the laboratory to the library and listen to the opinion of great authors of what true intelligence is we shall, even today, hear a quite different story. Ā e immortal Shakespeare himself has caricatured more than one of his unforgettable characters to show that sheer intelligence divorced from the softness of emotions amounts to brutality and villainy. All poets and men of letters, philosophers and thinkers, in short, all but the matterof-fact scientists, roar in unison, that enduring thoughts can bubble up only when an intellect is sweetened by the syrup of the heart. In spiritual Self-discovery also, an intellect tempered by the qualities of the heart alone can be of service. And this truth is pointed out by the general acceptance in the Vedas that intelligence resides in the cave of the heart and Self-realization is gained through a controlled application of a happy synthesis of both head and heart.
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I could not help imagining that Ashish chose this passage as a lesson for me, assuming I shared the Western tendency to value abstract reason above intuition and experience. I felt a little targeted and responded somewhat defensively. “Isn’t that a dualist way of thinking? ” I frowned, interrupting his reading. “Isn’t that suggesting that the hard head and soft heart are two separate entities that then need to be brought together in some happy synthesis—after the event? And what kind of ‘heart’ are we talking about anyway? Literal? Imaginary? An organ? A figure of speech? A trope of Spirit?” “Ah, two or not two. It all depends,” replied Ashish, relishing the challenge. He shrugged exaggeratedly, hunching his shoulders as high as his ears and opening his palms flat as if expecting something to land in them. Ā e intensity of expression assumed during his recitation gave way to mirth. He seemed chuffed to be interrogated like this, as though it invited him to pick even more minutely through the intricate thickets of sense which garlanded each verse. “It all depends,” he elaborated, “ who is doing the thinking! If it is the ego-self then everything appears as fundamentally divided, separate, split. But that is only in appearance. It is but an illusion conjured up by the jugglery of our projecting minds. Maya. If, however, we consider the matter from the heart of the Atman or True Self, there is no division at all.” Ā at is why we are told that the intelligence dwells within the heart. Not above it or beyond it, but at its very core . “Ā is becomes even clearer in the second verse. Look!” Ashish purred with enthusiasm. “Here we see that the old oppositions of higher and lower, external and internal, small and great, dissolve altogether when we reach the Guha. Atman—as the goal of all seekers—is described as the smallest of the small and the greatest of the great. Ā e cave of the heart contains a tiny inner space—the ‘size of a thumb’ the final verse tells us—which is also larger than the universes whirling around in outer space! Akasa, the ancients called it. Even the minutest space conceivable, the smallest gap between the joints of your bones, even such infinitesimal chinks are pervaded by the All-Pervading-Essence. Ā e smallest pause between the systole and diastole of your heart, between the inhalation and exhalation of your breath, that is where God resides.” Ashish paused, placed a finger on the line, and looked intently at me. “Ā is is the opposite of dualism, no?” After this last question, Ashish cocked an eyelid and beamed. I was beginning to realize there was quite an imp inside this yogi! As a follower of advaita wisdom, Ashish was, I could see, firmly committed
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to the principle of One-without-a-second, the radical vision that “All is One.” Our afternoon chat in the Academy garden was proving a perfect occasion to demonstrate his belief to me, his single captive audience. He had me cornered. He was not about to let his quarry escape! But the earnestness of his mission was not without a hint of humor. Ā ere was a childlike sense of folly which I’d witnessed in some of the wise mystical people I’d come across on previous travels: the Passionist French philosopher, Stanislas Breton, who at the age of ninety would get down on all fours and play cat-and-mouse with my children; the Buddhist sage, Ā ich Nhat Hahn, perched on a cushion like a small Koala bear balancing on a bamboo shoot; the hoaryheaded yoga master, BKS Iyengar, bellowing like a mischievous water buffalo as he flung flowers back at his devoted followers; the Dalai Lama, yawning and scratching himself like a badly behaved baboon; or the minute Lama Choquinyma, squat and wide-eyed as a tortoise in the Schechen Monastery of Kathmandu, bestowing one visitor’s gift on the other with a gentle chuckle. Ā e heaven of Brahaloka is a place of wise animals and birds, and the Kingdom is a place for little children where these joyful mentors will be at home. In all my asana practices with Ashish I was struck by how he seemed to take on the shape of each creaturely pose he performed—dog, turtle, lion, cobra, pigeon, locust, crane. As if yoga was a way of taking us back to nature through the renunciation of nature. Enabling us to return to the flow of the natural universe by unnatural ways of breathing, sitting, and bending. As though we had to stand on our heads to see things right side up! But at the time the playfulness was not enough. I was not quite done with my objections. What, I still wanted to know, about the references in the second mantra to “freeing oneself from willing and wishing”? (Ā e humanist in me still wrestled with the mystic). Wasn’t that still clinging to dualist notions of desire as bad and desirelessness as good? And if that were so, then what kind of heart were we talking about? A heart without will or desire? A completely impassive heart? But is that not a contradiction in terms? Who could imagine such a thing? For an instant Ashish seemed surprised by the robustness of my question. But he quickly recovered and, splicing two palms in an apex, continued in a baser voice. Again, he said, it is a question of interpretation. “It all comes down to how you see it. Ā ere are some, it is true, who take this verse’s reference to non-wishing [ Akrathus] to mean a state of morbid inaction and impotency. It is true that certain
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Hindus have followed this view. But they are mistaken. For as the great Hindu sage Sankara explained, this verse refers only to those desires so taken up with external distractions that they dissipate the energies of the seeker and make it impossible for one to enter the cave of the heart. Ā ey upset the calm of meditation. But careful! [He held the palm of his hand up before me.] Even our spiritual hankering for God may itself become an addiction, an attachment, an obstacle to the inner repose in which the Self rests in the Supreme, in which Atman meets Brahman. To free ourselves from willing and desiring is to free ourselves from pain. Like the last line of the verse says. It is all about letting go of one’s will. Ā e courage to abandon cravings of body and mind. For as Atman I am neither body nor mind. I am the quick of both. I am where both converge in the seat of the heart.” Ashish concluded this last peroration with a quiet flourish, folding both hands, one on top of the other, over his breast bone. Ā is was surely Ashish’s way of saying the session was over. But I had one last question. It was a little rude of me to continue, but I felt I might not get another shot at this with someone as wise. “Why,” I asked, “did the third verse speak of ‘ two’ being seated in the guha of the Supreme? Why did it say that knowers of Brahman will call them ‘shadow and light’? Is that not another division of the world into opposites? And just when it seemed like we had reached that insight about One-Without-A-Second [ advaita] in the cave of the heart?” “It may seem like that,” consented Ashish with a bow. “But it is not so.” He paused then, as though sensing of a sudden that my last question was bordering on idle curiosity, over-zealous inquisitiveness. He seemed to want to slow our conversation down, let things settle a bit. After some moments of studied silence, he shifted from Lotus to a version of Cobbler’s pose, turning his feet up with his hands as reading something on the skin of his soles. He continued then in an even, measured tone. “You are still reading these words with your brain not your heart,” he said. “But you must understand this passage to mean that while the I-ego [ Jiva] of the mind sees these two as separate, the I-Self [Atma] which lies beneath it, sees through the falsehood of duality. And this is true of all opposites. True Self realizes that one is but a shadow replica of the other, a copy, a counterfeit. Like a reflection of oneself seen on the surface of a mirror. If the ego is the reflection, Atma is the original. And since the reflection is a mere illusion, it is nothing but shadow. It does not exist. And if the shadow does not exist, then we are left with only one Self, the divine Param-atman,
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True Self of Light and Fire that dwells in the depth of the heart and illumines all things.” Ashish almost warbled as he pronounced the last sentences, so chuffed was he to have had occasion to deliver this sequence of logical propositions about what must be one of the most illogical phenomena of Vedantin spirituality. After a pause, during which Ashish poured two cups of tea from a pottery jug which one of the Academy assistants had brought and placed on the table (scarcely noticed by us), I pursued this final point. My tone was less excited now, less confrontational, more complicit. I took a sip of hot tea and, pointing to the opening sentence of the fourth verse, asked Ashish what was meant then by the Mantra 2:4, 6—the suggestion that the True Self dwelling in the Guha “sees Brahman” because it was created “ before the waters,” that is, before the everyday universe we inhabit? Does that not betray some kind of prejudice, I wanted to know, against the reality of our material universe? I gestured to the things around us there in the garden. Ā e tea pot and cups, the table and chairs, the flowers and shrubs, the walls and trees, and our very own bodies of flesh and blood. Is this Vedantin verse not still caught up in a two-tier system where the Spirit is good and Matter bad? “Ā at,” Ashish calmly conceded, “is a common misconception. A matter of some dispute. No two Upanishads agree on how Creation took place. And each account is best understood as a myth-explanation of a myth-world. For each community, even each individual, comes with different cultural or personal viewpoints. But again, we must realize that deep down, these are no more than dreams and delusions. Like the famous story of the snake-in-the-rope. As long as you see only through half-light the rope will appear like a snake. But as soon as you see through this error and shed true light on your perception, as soon as your projections and conditionings drop off, you realize that the macrocosm is but a reflection of the microcosm. You discover that even this distinction dissolves. Ā e rope becomes a rope again. It is what it is . In the cave of the heart we see that seemingly different worlds are identical with the transcendental Brahman. We understand that All is One again. Ā at ‘this is verily that.’ ” Hatha yoga is one of the most ancient paths towards this oneness, Ashish explained, combining as it does the twin principles of HA and THA, sun and moon, male and female, earth and sky. It is all about awakening to the truth that all is one . Everything is connected.
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Taking a last taste of tea—he did everything so delicately—Ashish returned his cup to the table and pointed his index finger to the fifth mantra in the volume, clearly prompted by some afterthought. “Remember, look,” he said. “See right here where it describes the guham, the dweller of the guha as ‘enjoyer.’ Ā e Sanskrit word, aditi, literally means ‘eater.’ We eat the divine! And prana, don’t forget, is the most vital of all elements! It is our life-force. It goes all the way down to the pit of the self so that the real self can rise up again. Only the heart dweller can enjoy the whole universe, the full cosmic breath, the food of life. For all joys of the world are joys lived in Brahman— in the blissful discovery that we partake of all things, each this, each that, for all is one. But the drawing out of this inner self into oneness with the universe is not obvious. It is not easy. We have to journey to the center of the center, the core of cores, the guha of guhas, before we can distinguish true from false. Ā at’s why the final verse describes this work as distillation—‘drawing out the pith from the reed .’ ” “Reeds,” he repeated the word, gesturing to the flower bed near our feet, “just like these daffodil stems in front of us, are fragile plants. Ā e extraction of its life-force, its pure essence [ Chit], requires discipline and delicacy. A very special kind of practice, measured and careful. And huge patience. It’s hard work.” “You mean yoga? ” I said. “You mean the pranayama exercises we did just now? ” Ashish gave a complicit smile and tucked his chin back into his neck. Ā en closing the Sanskrit volume on his lap, he replied that this was one way, yes. But the most important thing was to descend into the guha yourself. What we’d been discussing in the garden for over an hour were words. Only words. But there comes a time to put down the book and enter the heart directly, for yourself. “I will take you to visit Saint Vasistha’s Guha one of these days,” he said. “Vasishta was the divine Rama’s famous teacher and he lived in a cave by the Ganges thousands of years ago. It is just twenty miles north of here, a few hours journey upriver. But now, it is time for you to rest.” Ā en rising with a namaste bow from the garden bench, Ashish placed the Katha Upanishad back in its copper case and walked towards the Academy hall. His light cotton jupa flapped about him in the breeze that was beginning to gust as light faded. He strutted like a peacock, feathers aflutter. But he seemed oblivious to the creatureliness of his pose. He did not look back. I followed him as far as the gate of the Academy, where our paths parted.
SPIRITUAL IMPROVISATIONS: RAMAKRISHNA, AUROBINDO, AND THE FREEDOM OF TRADITION Martin Cohen Boston College If my path leads to the true goal and you do not adopt my religion, shouldn’t I condemn you, or kill you? But if your path unwittingly serves mine by leading part of the way to the goal, shouldn’t I better refrain from killing you? If all paths lead to the same goal, on the other hand, couldn’t we all just be friends without the need to subordinate one another? Or if diĀ erent paths do exhibit significant human differences along the way, even while leading to the same goal, couldn’t there at least be some reciprocal learning on that less than ultimate level? But what if reciprocal learning can happen even at the deepest levels? What if diĀ erences as well as similarities can be discerned in individuals and traditions at the deepest and most supervening reaches of attainment? This possibility posits a fallible and unfolding utopia in which heaven and earth would forever inform each other, and everyone could keep learning from everyone else. In this essay I will attempt to portray the countenance of that possibility. To achieve this, modes of apprehension, intuition, communion, ecstasy and heart-realization often said to be “ultimate” must be reconceived. I Ramakrishna’s
Foot
Sometime in 1882, the forty-six-year-old Sri Ramakrishna put his foot on the body of an eighteen year-old named Narendra. Narendra saw the older man in a “strange state” coming toward him while muttering something to himself. The man was already thought by some to be a Paramahamsa, or Great Swan, who can separate out the milk of Truth and distill the purest pranic energy from the turgid waters of life. Narendra, soon to be renamed Swami Vivekananda, was certain this crazy man was about to make an embarrassing scene. Here is Vivekananda’s account of what happened next:
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As I was thinking this, he quickly approached me and placed his own right foot on my body, and immediately I had an unprecedented experience at his touch. As I looked, I began to see that all the things in the room, with the walls themselves, were spinning wildly and dissolving into somewhere. It was as if my sense of self was rushing all at once into an all-consuming Great Nothing. Then I was overcome with a terrible fear as it occurred to me that with the destruction of one’s sense of self comes death, and that this itself was at the threshold of death—so close! Not able to restrain myself, I cried out, “Hey! What are you doing to me? I have a father and a mother!” When he heard me say such things, the strange crazy man laughed out loud, touched my chest with his hand, and said, “Then enough now, the work doesn’t have to be done all at once. It will come about in good time.” (Kripal 211)
Vivekananda’s influential interpretation of this event is based on the notion of prana as the constitutive energy of the universe. Ramakrishna’s foot transferred what matters—what becomes matter—to the body of the young man. 1 The energy which in yogic theory underlies, sustains, and precipitates the physical universe flowed, as if from the fuller vessel to the emptier, into the body, very possibly the lap, of the college student named Narendra. “When Ramakrishna went into samadhi, a type of mystical absorption, he would sometimes place his foot ‘in the lap’—that is on the genitals—of a young boy disciple” (Kripal 2). 1 Socrates and Aristodemus are strolling along toward a banquet celebrating Agathon’s victory at the Athenian competition for best tragedy, when the great philosopher falls into a trance that would look, to those who dwell many miles to the east, like the samadhi of a yogi. Standing immobile and impervious on a porch, he leaves Aristodemus with the unhappy task of explaining to the eminent Athenians gathered at Agathon’s house that Socrates will arrive when his mysterious contemplation reaches its end, not when etiquette or gastronomical rhythms might mandate. The ugly, snub-nosed old man is awaited like an absent beloved by many of those already assembled, despite their belief that pretty young men are the suitable objects of such yearning. Agathon says to Socrates, as he arrives in the middle of dinner: “Here, Socrates, lie down alongside me, so that by my touching you I may enjoy a piece of the wisdom that just occurred to you while you were on the porch.” Socrates replies: “It would be a good thing, Agathon, if wisdom were the sort of thing that flows from the fuller of us into the emptier . . . for then I set a high price on my being placed alongside you.” Agathon’s first mistake is to think that wisdom is the sort of thing that flows like sexual fluids between bodies; his second is to covet the wisdom of Socrates: “My own may turn out to be a sorry sort of wisdom, and disputable like a dream.” Wisdom may be conveyed or awakened by words and argument, not by touch. Vivekananda’s response to his physical contact with Ramarkrishna’s foot, therefore, is boggling to epistemologies that take as self-evident that no infusions of wisdom, energy or spirit unmediated by words can occur.
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If prana is always homogenous and the same, and is all that matters, the only diĀ erence between people is the amount of prana they contain and control; a person with inexhaustible prana needs nothing from a person whose pranic vessel is depleted or leaky. The main qualitative language traditional yoga has at its disposal is the language of refinement; a person whose prana is more refined has nothing to learn, energetically, from a person whose prana is more crude. Only as a new kind of qualitative language augments the quantitative does it become intelligible how a person with lots of prana, perhaps enough to send streaming from his foot in such quantities that it could set oĀ the most momentous experience of another man’s life, could learn from those whose feet are not the organs for such a copious flow. There are wheels or lotuses, called chakras, correlated with the physical spinal column, which receive, store, express, participate in, and perceive various levels of prana; the higher the chakra, the more refined and powerful its energy. Concentration on the highest chakra, at the crown of the head, can result in nirvikalpa samadhi, said to be the highest realization where even concentration on a Divine Beloved is superseded by immersion in what is quality-less and undiĀ erentiated. Atman becomes Brahman; the soul is united with its transcendent home, from which it was never really separated. The simple spiritual arithmetic which shows nirvikalpa to possess the most prana transforms the dissolution into the Great Nothing feared by Narendra into the immersion in the Infinite declared by Vivekananda to be the goal of all human striving. The yogi, hungry for the most refined and savory prana, ascends from chakra to chakra, following a simple vertical map toward the highest, which is conflated with the best. Ramakrishna’s first great awakening is almost a parody of this scheme, as a tiny facsimile of himself traverses the spiritual journey often assumed to last years or lifetimes in a single imaginative session. In Ā e Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna , Nikhilananda oĀ ered this translation2 from the Srisriramakrsna-Kathamrta (known to Bengalis simply as Kathamrta), the text of Mahendranath Gupta’s recollections of talks delivered by Ramakrishna: A person exactly resembling me entered my body and began communing with each one of the six lotuses. The petals of these lotuses had been
2 Nikhilananda writes: “I have made a literal translation, omitting only a few pages of no particular interest to English-speaking readers” (Preface vii).
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closed; but as each of them experienced the communion, the drooping flower bloomed and turned itself upward. (Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna 744)
JeĀ Kripal returned to the original Bengali and found this: This is very secret talk. I saw a boy of twenty-three exactly like me, going up the subtle channel, erotically playing with the vagina-shaped lotuses with his tongue! First the Anus, then the Phallus, then the Navel, the four-petaled, the six-petaled, the ten-petaled—they were all drooping—now they became aroused! When he got to the heart—I remember it well—after he made love to it with his tongue, the drooping twelvepetaled lotus became aroused—and blossomed forth! After that the sixteen petaled lotus in the throat and the two-petaled lotus in the forehead [became aroused]. Finally, the thousand-petaled lotus blossomed forth! Ever since then I have been in this state . (127; Kathamrta 4.238)
All the chakras, not just the top ones, are continuously aroused. the arousal extends through the whole body:
3
And
As one practices sadhana, a love-body forms—with eyes of love and ears of love. With these eyes one sees him (The Lord)—with these ears his voice can be heard. Again, genitals of love form . . . With this love-body one has sex with the Self. (Kripal 193; Kathamrta 3.22)
Ramakrishna, who frequently notes that the hairs on his body are standing erect, mentions with approval this remark by one of his tantric friends: “When the great love occurs, all the holes of the body— down to the hairpores—become great vaginas. In each and every hole, one experiences the pleasure of sex with the Self.” The association of the vagina with flowers, and with the lotus in particular, was familiar to Ramakrishna from Indian culture. But this mystical cunnilingus, and the pansomatic orgasm that ensued, was hardly a sadhana—a spiritual practice—prescribed by tradition, even in the tantric branch which is sometimes a haven for uncontainable spiritual adventure and responsible radicalism. The subtle energy channel through which the homunculus made his spiritually lascivious pilgrimage is called the sushumna; the vertical direction of the journey enacts the progression described in tantric
Ramakrishna once remarked that he preferred to keep the kundalini energy between the fifth and sixth chakras so that he could enjoy talking and engaging with the world. When it went higher, he tended to lose himself in some sort of trance. So he did not accept the scheme that higher is better. 3
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and yogic literature of the kundalini, coiled like a snake in the muladhara chakra at the root of the spine, awakening and ascending from chakra to chakra until it reaches the sahasrara at the crown of the head. The kundalini force is often imaged as piercing each center rather violently, releasing dormant prana; it structures these energies according to a teleology privileging higher over lower, transcendence over immanence, ecstasy over fun. The stabilization of the energy in the higher chakras is consistently portrayed as a difficult and dangerous process, so foreign to normal experience that the realms of thinking, emotion, and habitual action preoccupying humanity suĀer a kind of apocalypse as they are overwhelmed by the surging kundalini. Some combination of political savvy, prudence, and his own difficulties with the sexual and scatological outrageousness of his Master prompted Vivekananda—and Nikhilananda and others—to veil some of Ramakrishna’s antics. Kripal’s translation of the previously expurgated portions of the Bengali manuscripts make it possible to view the dignity beyond dignity in which Ramakrishna was enthroned. 4 Ramakrishna does not heed the etiquettes of awe, discipline, and esoteric caution as he playfully licks his way to enlightenment, and then decides, in eĀ ect, that the delights of the highest chakra, sometimes described as an orgasm of the pineal gland, are not sufficient fun. They must be extended to the whole body, to all its parts, functions, and organs, so that intercourse with the infinite satchidananda happens in an infinite variety of ways. “The end of spiritual states,” says Ramakrishna in the sentence from the Kathamrta most easily appropriated to my project, “cannot be determined. They grow and they grow” ( Kathamrta 1.149). 5 Filling the charted channels—such as the sushumna, meridians, nadis, or whatever a particular system
4 Diotima tells the young Socrates that “we detach from eros a certain kind of eros and give it the name eros, imposing on it the name eros.” All making, all arts and crafts, all acquisition and activity, are based on love—of money, of beauty, of power, of philosophy. The whole world is erotic, not just the sexual acts on which the name is imposed; even the physical cosmos must go through the erotic pangs of rebirth in each moment in order to persist through time. Sexual love—which has always been a particularly compelling analogy for mystical experience and is sometimes one of its expressions—is but one kind of love and the more tumescent and overt expressions of eros but one of the phases of sexual love. If the mysticisms of transport and transcendence, the unio mysticas of divine intoxication, are brought into poetic correspondence with sexual consummation, what phases of spirituality would correspond to the other parts of the erotic cycle? 5 I am indebted to JeĀ Kripal for translating this passage for me personally.
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specifies—with energy is like painting colors inside the predrawn lines of a spiritual coloring book, compared to Ramakrishna’s improvisational energetic explorations. 6 An energy, a stream of incorporeal matter, passed from Ramakrishna to Narendra. A greater fullness of being made the young man fear the onslaught of a Great Nothing. An awake man, sufficiently in command of the process he initiated that he could control it by the prestidigitation of hand and foot and will, brought another man to the precipice of trance and dissolution. Ramakrishna, his distinctive personality intact, was replete with an energy that his love body knew how to organize and express in orchestrated enthusiasms of love for God and human beings. When he oĀ ered this invasive gift to his beloved Narendra, who lacked such a love-body, the contours of the young man’s personality, his circumscribed love for father and mother, were threatened by energies that could only seem undiĀ erentiated since he as yet lacked a structure to contain them. Vivekananda is the name of the new structure he eventually constructed, formed from the selective assimilation and rejection of such energies. There is a clue here: the same energy appears formless or formed, induces either trance or delighted participation in the world that Ramakrishna called a mansion of fun, and Vivekananda, following Vedanta, called mayic illusion. An energy intimated or intuited is invariably a component or an adumbration, a contributor to the whole which may be mistaken for the whole. Intuition tends toward a false sense of revelatory finality; the more real the intuition, the more susceptible it is to this kind of distortion. The various rushes, tingles, and impelling enthusiasms that are taken for a direct perception of energy may be only its incidental consequences; and when the practitioner in search of an esoteric content to witness comes face to face with something quite real that has been coaxed into view, this visibility is often as much the result of a dissociation from salutary balances and structural underpinnings as it is a heightening of otherwise dormant and stunted powers. Surpassing may be a mask for failing to integrate. The receding from view of some humanly important energies is the often unnecessary sacrifice, Aurobindo and others will extend this energetic artistry. There are many hierarchies, and I am reticent about claiming to know which, if any, subsumes the others. If I have any evangelism left, it may be to urge a bit of this reticence on others. 6
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in propitiation of illusory or disrespectful gods, oĀ ered to elicit the stunning appearance of other important energies. The two great figures for Eros juxtaposed in the Socrates/Diotima speech in Plato’s dialogue, Ā e Symposium, form an imagistic antinomy. Eros is supremely selfish: as the son of Poros (Resource) and Penia (Poverty), he plots to trap the beautiful and the good but is tough, squalid, shoeless, and homeless, lying on the ground without a blanket or a bed, always dwelling with neediness. And Eros is supremely selfless: he is a great Daemon, located between the human and the divine, unceasingly serving both by ferrying to gods the requests and sacrifices of human beings and to human beings the orders and responses of gods. Love, argues the images, is at once the extreme of selfishness and selflessness. Moaning and crying with anxious desire when Narendra is slow about paying him a visit or Kali temporarily refuses to bestow on him her devastating gifts, yet overflowing with unstinting solicitation for all his disciples and all humanity, Ramakrishna is a kind of Daemon—as he is in preferring the duality of adoring a Divinity beyond himself to the self-annihilating immersion of nirvikalpa samadhi. He helps bring to the realm of Eastern energetics and realization the daemonic celebration that the human is always between a reality it has not yet attained and a reality to which it is no longer limited. II
Aurobindo’s Challenge to the Ultimacy of Enlightenment
Aurobindo’s father did not want his sons to be influenced by the “steamy and retrograde mysticism” of their homeland. To avoid this contamination, Aurobindo was sent away to Ireland at the age of five, and to England at the age of seven. He won prizes in Greek and Latin verse at King’s College, and read Rimbaud and Mallarme in the original before he read the Bhagavad Gita in translation. When he was twenty, he returned to India out of concern for the political plight of his people. He had no particular curiosity about the mysticism denigrated by his father. A wandering ascetic monk covered in ashes passed by while his brother, Barin, was wrapped in blankets, shivering with fever. Without a word, the monk asked for a glass of water, drew a sign, chanted a mantra, and had Barin drink the water. Five minutes later, Barin was cured, and Aurobindo was interested in yoga, wondering whether the power that healed his brother could uplift his nation.
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Aurobindo was to have many of his foundational yogic realizations in a prison cell, or in a cage in the middle of a courtroom, while on trial to be hanged for political insurrection against the British. Aurobindo had heard about the kundalini that ascends through the spine. To his surprise, when he sat down to meditate, he felt instead a descending force, “a solid cool block of peace.” When the Peace is established, this higher or Divine Force from above can descend and work in us. It descends usually first into the head and liberates the inner mind centres, then into the heart centre . . . then into the navel and other vital centres . . . then into the sacral region and below . . . It works at the same time for perfection as well as liberation; it takes up the whole nature part by part and deals with it, rejecting what has to be rejected, sublimating what has to be sublimated, creating what has to be created. It integrates, harmonizes, establishes a new rhythm in the nature. ( On Yoga II 277)
Unlike the ascending force which moves explosively upward once it is awakened, whether or not it suits the rhythm of unfolding that would be safe and optimal, the descending force has a wisdom that modulates itself in answer to the precise prayer that would be articulated if the whole self knew how to speak in a coordinated voice. Not only is the traditional progression through the chakras disrupted but the chakras become less crucial as mediators and centers of energy transmission. The ascent of the Kundalini—not its descent, so far as I know—is a recognized phenomenon. There is one that corresponds in our Yoga, the feeling of the consciousness ascending from the vital or physical to meet the higher consciousness. This is not necessarily through the cakras but is often felt in the whole body. Similarly the descent of the higher consciousness is not felt necessarily or usually through the cakras but as occupying the whole neck, chest, abdomen, body. ( On Himself 111)
A daemonic movement up and down supplants the purely ascending vertical movement; an attempt to concentrate on one chakra gives way to a diĀusion of energy—Aurobindo generally uses the tantric term shakti—throughout the whole body. 7 Aurobindo’s story gives new splendor to the birds of the Rig Veda: “Two birds beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, cling to a com7 Since the energy “in” the body is connected to energy outside the body—in yogic texts, the chakras are, among their other functions, organs of perception—the infusion of energy into the whole body gave Aurobindo a lot to look at in his physical and spiritual environment.
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mon tree, and one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not” (1.164.20). It is the story of a drive for oneness so heroic that it includes multiplicity, time and eternity, nature and spirit, individuality, universality and transcendence; the only attainment it fails to reach is partiality. In his eĀ ort to use yoga to become the bird who eats, Aurobindo inadvertently became the bird who watches: The first result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness . . . which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world—only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty form, materialized shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only absolutely That featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, absolute, yet supremely and solely real . . . What this experience brought was an inexpressible Peace, stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. ( On Himself 101)
Then this bird who watches, the Upanishadic Purusha, the sagacious Witness, who had been quite content on his Vedantic perch, unaccountably develops a longing. Without regressing to the state of selfish and frantic longing yogic detachment overcomes, he begins to savor the world: The aspect of an illusory world gave place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was no reimprisonment in the senses, or diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth . . . Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realization, a first step toward the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale. (On Himself 102)
He wants to caress his buddy, the winged bird of Nature, Prakriti, so he needs to become a whole body—an I, not just an Eye. He wants to drink the wine spiked with the joy of shakti, the ananda that throws others into the drunken spiritual stupor of luminous samadhi, yet withstand the inebriation, as Socrates can drink and drink with his friend Aristophanes without becoming drunk. These two birds, poised on their trees for millennia, are experimenting with new relations, and
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looking a bit confused. An erotic, spiritually uncompromised Purusha is seeking all the adventures of universal vitality, universal mentality, and universal physicality. The chit of Sat-chit-ananda, existenceconsciousness-bliss—redefined by Aurobindo as chit-shakti, a consciousness-force that sustains and upholds as well as witnesses—faces new responsibilities and intimacies. The spell of the notion of ultimacy can be broken by two recognitions: the first would be to admit that the reality with which even the most exalted person is united is not in all respects supreme and allinclusive; the second, which was Aurobindo’s path, is to note that a fuller invasion, integration, and humanization of the supreme reality is always possible. Aurobindo usually spoke in a voice consonant with his tradition of his realization of the illimitable and immutable Brahman, and those who received an audience with him, from Tagore to a skeptical American professor, 8 noted the great peace and immobility he embodied. Aurobindo’s identification with Brahman was so strong that he had no incentive for finding an ontology of ever-expanding spiritual states, since it would be incoherent to seek anything beyond what is thought to be all-inclusive. In his scheme, spiritual growth after enlightenment consists in bringing the infinite more fully into the domains of body, vital, and mind, not in the perusal of new orders of infinity, 9 each of which can elicit another facet of enlightenment, nor in the suspicion that what appears infinite will always disguise characteristics and functions that animate some dimensions of the human at the expense of others. 10 He coaxed expansions after the apparent
8 “In the summer of 1961, I paid a visit to Frederic Spiegelberg, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religions at Stanford University. Spiegelberg told me how he had traveled 7,000 miles to meet Sri Aurobindo Ghose, and was told that he would only be given four seconds to look into his eyes, since there were thousands of pilgrims who had walked thousands of miles to do the same things. When he complained, they told him he would not be able to stand any more. ‘And they were right!’ Spiegelberg said to me. ‘Looking into his eyes was looking right through to the Absolute.’ I asked myself how I would compare that with my experience of Buber’s eyes, the depth of which had always struck me. My answer was that when you looked into Buber’s eyes, you did not see the Absolute; rather you knew that he really meant you” (Friedman 383). 9 This would be an analogue in mystical experience to George Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers. Cantor demonstrates that some infinites are larger than other infinities. Similarly, it is possible to say to a mystic embraced by the Infinite: I honor your achievement and wish to bask gratefully in its radiance, but you do realize, don’t you, that there are other Infinities? 10 Aurobindo did show that what appears unsurpassable or infinite to a person is usually but a refraction of a larger Reality. A spontaneous illumination at any level
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culmination of infinite realization by discerning regions of opacity and resistance that were previously hidden from view by yogic achievement.11 Though he extolled the mobile energies, which he called the female shakti, he let them dance on the surface of the divine immobility rather than engage in an intercourse of the depths that would leave both partners forever altered. Philosophically, he proclaimed a parity between Purusha, the still witness of the cosmic pageant, and Prakriti, the realm of nature and life; his yoga fostered both the imperturbable and the dynamic, the sattvic and the rajasic; and he redefined the kind of stillness the aspirant should seek as a plenum of vibrations and potencies that are not committed toward a particular manifestation, so the insubstantial witness of Vedanta becomes replete with the spectrum of life energies. 12 For all that, the still core of Self remains the lord of his yoga, whose goal is an imperialist invasion of every aspect of the self, from mind to cells, with the unmanifest and unleashable power of brahmanic quietude.
tends to seem ultimate to the person undergoing it. Aurobindo invents a language that provides a way to suspect the unqualified truth and sufficiency of illuminations while granting them a measure of validity. Higher mind is less perspicuous and revelatory than illumined mind; illumined mind less than intuitive mind; intuitive mind less than overmind; overmind less than supermind. His system ends at supermind, refusing a regress of suspicion. 11 Aurobindo gives the example of a yogi bitten by a poisonous snake who used his powers to control the eĀ ects of the venom. Twenty years later the habitually calm yogi was overcome by a fit of anger and died of the snake bite while the regime of yogic control was abrogated. Aurobindo writes: “The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature—not by imposing Siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature that is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring Siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life—like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of the Siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramentalised physical” ( On Himself 112). A suppression and overriding of the poison, but not a fundamental healing, had enabled the yogi to function normally. The example can be generalized to instances that are not so preternatural. A yogi may constantly behave with equanimity, kindness, and luminosity, but these behaviors, however genuine as an expression of an achieved higher level, may coexist with tumult and harshness on other levels that are lurking undetected. 12 There are some tantric precedents for this move, such as Kashmiri Shaivism. Aurobindo’s formulations seem to come from his unsolicited yogic experiences, not from an awareness of these sources.
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When stillness is thought to dominate over mobility, an implicit terminus to the human endeavor has been asserted. Despite his revision of Patanjali’s sankhya dualism, Aurobindo is the inheritor of the yogic presupposition, stated in the renowned beginning of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, that the highest power rests in absence: “Yoga is the science of the cessation of the fluctuation of the mind-stuĀ .” It is easier to conceive the end of a process that moves toward zero than one that moves toward infinity; a process of purifying the bad than a process of acquiring the good. That is one reason enlightenment is so often defined as the absence of something—thought, delusion, tension, suffering, resistance, clinging, whatever; it can then be conceptualized as an attainable finale, such as a concentrated mind free from thought, a body and soul from which tension has been extirpated, etc. One can foresee a full enlightenment by extrapolating to the point when the purification is complete, and savor a preliminary enlightenment when enough detachment is achieved from impeding factors that their arising does not disrupt immersion in the enlightenment mind. III Bodhidharma’s
Swindle
At the age of one hundred, Bodhidharma walked from India to China to bring a more profound version of Buddha dharma to the East. If you are one hundred years old and strolling thousands of miles through perilous regions, it helps to be able to beat people up. The martial prowess that protected the man who became the first patriarch of Zen during his journey set loose the efflorescence of martial arts in China. The emperor of Southern China, a patron of Buddhist monasteries, heard that a great sage had a arrived from the West. He went before him, beseeching: “Please tell me the holy secret of Buddhism.” Bodhidharma growled: “Vast emptiness and nothing holy about it.” The emperor asked how much good karma he had accrued by building temples and promoting Buddhism. Bodhidharma responded: “None.” He asked: “Who are you? ” Bodhidharma answered: “I don’t know.” Then he turned his back on the discombobulated monarch and walked to the north of China. There he meditated before a blank wall for nine years, progressing from vast emptiness to vaster emptiness. Furious at himself for falling asleep during his meditative vigil, Bodhidharma cut oĀ his eyelids, leaving posterity to contend with his gaze of unrelenting spiritual vigilance. It took the tradition many centuries to find the human look in those unblinking eyes visible in Hakuin’s portraits
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of Bodhidharma where the patriarch, his eternal lids apart, 13 is profoundly befuddled and sweetly fierce. Some scholarship now says Bodhidharma is a fictional construction. There was no Bodhidharma. If that is true, it is but a minor swindle, for it is a deft stratagem, and altogether fitting, that the hero of emptiness, who “knows that life and death, existence and annihilation are part of a single body” (Chuang-Tzu), should not exist. The real swindle was to lull posterity into believing that nirvana can readily salvage the inherent sweetness of samsara, or that yogic concentration on a blank wall will lead naturally to cherishing attention on the pageant of the colorful world. In that famous emanation from the Bodhidharma lineage, the ox-herding pictures, a man hangs out in a tavern before seeking, chasing, lassoing, and riding the bull of enlightenment. Then: a calligraphic circle with nothing inside. The sequence ends with a repetition of the man in the tavern. But the tavern has been so thoroughly purified of demons that the daemonic has been exorcised as well. It is no longer a human dwelling. A man who has incinerated his personality during nine years of fierce, unremitting meditation embodies a freedom that will illuminate the world but not the spiritual artistry to transmute all that is good and potentially good about ordinary life into a countenance. No calculable competition can be waged about degrees of humanity in a dharma combat pitting Bodhidharma’s “I don’t know” against Socrates’ “I know that I don’t know”; no victor emerges as these two
13 Though I’m pretty sure Keats never heard of Bodhidharma, I think of the sonnet “Bright Star” (1819) as his response to the great first Patriarch of Zen, whom I call a swindler rather in the way Mumon expresses his reverence for Joshu by saying he spoke out with bad breath. Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon in death. (1819)
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great fools stare into each other’s eyes through the centuries, trying to fathom who is better at not-knowing what the other does not know. Montaigne grants that he wrestles with the old champions by snatches and little light attacks, taking them on only at their stiĀ est points.14 He is vividly aware that the unshining human radiance he can wield against the stoic stature of his predecessors has been won only with the help of his enraptured fascination with the snub-nosed man who also hides his shining. 15 New koans are born as fallible people make light attacks on what once was taken to be insuperable not-knowing or knowing: What can an enlightened master learn from those who are not enlightened—real, fundamental learning, not just the acquisition of more skillful means for leading others to the same state? What can the luminaries from diĀ erent traditions learn from one another? Borges speaks of what is irretrievable and omnipresent: “Perhaps some feature of the Crucified Face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the Face died, was eĀaced, so that God might become everyone.” 16 The visages of detachment, asceticism, and impersonality, the severity to transcend and repudiate, may be the ground and epicenter for a more realistic tenderness, a more illuminated anger, a more far-reaching confusion, a more vulnerable and responsive commingling. The magisterial movement from preliminary enlightenment to infiltration of the mental, vital, and physical being in Aurobindo’s 14 “Still, I know well how audaciously I always attempt to match the level of my pilferings, to keep pace with them, not without a rash hope that I may deceive the eyes of the judges who try to discover them. But this is as much by virtue of my use of them as by virtue of my inventiveness or my power. And then, I do not wrestle with those old champions wholesale and body against body; I do so by snatches, by little light attacks. I don’t go at them stubbornly, I only feel them out; and I don’t go nearly as much as I think about going. If I were a match for them, I would be a good man, for I take them on only at their stiĀ est points” (Montaigne 108). 15 “. . . his speeches too are most like the silenuses when opened up. For were one willing to hear Socrates’ speeches, they would at first look altogether laughable. The words and phrases that they wrap around themselves on the outside are like that, the very hide of a hybristic satyr. For he talks of packassess, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and tanners, and it looks as if he is always saying the same things through the same things; and hence every inexperienced human being would laugh at his speeches. But if one sees them opened up and gets oneself inside them, one will find, first, that they alone of speeches have sense inside; and, second, that they are the most divine, and have the largest number of images of virtue in them . . .” (Plato 52). 16 “We lost those features, in the way a magical number may be lost, a number made up of customary figures; in the same way as an image in a kaleidoscope is lost forever. We may see them and not know it. The profile of a Jew in the subway may be that of Christ; the hands which gives us some coins at a change window may recall those which some soldiers nailed to the Cross” (Borges 176).
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terrestrial yoga, or from emptiness to the enlightened ordinary in Bodhidharma’s Zen, can be transposed into a shimmy—a recurring, incremental negotiation—between spiritual transcendence and integral humanness. By flirting with oneness without becoming too infatuated, it is possible to reinterpret experiences that might otherwise present themselves as universal or unqualified realization, always reclaiming the sense of being a small character in a big universe, like the mythic, metamorphic K’un of the northern darkness described by Chuang-Tzu: the fish is enormous, yet the name K’un means fish roe, the tiniest of fish. The K’un changes into a bird whose name is P’eng, an enormous bird whose wings are like clouds across the sky. After soaring on extended wings, those who can revel in limitation become like the cicada and little dove and little quail who laugh at the powers and exertions of the P’eng shouldering the blue sky. At each expansion, whether conceived psychologically, politically, cosmologically, or spiritually, the feeling of enormity resulting from the contrast with what was before yields to the feeling of smallness resulting from the contrast with the universe that is still beyond. At first, the enormity and the smallness, the exuberant outreach and modest retrenchment, are successive. Increasingly, the systole of transcendence and diastole of immanence are experienced as waves of the same event. Someone who is at once the vast P’eng and the little dove, a dragonlike adept and a bumbling human, becomes the custodian of an incessantly unfolding and self-revising enlightenment. 17 The Kun and the P’eng, as well as the little dove, remain endearingly infinitesimal. What matters is not so much the place on the cycle from transcendence to immanence, macrocosm to microcosm, or origin to manifestation where a person is most at home. The ability to traverse deftly the whole cycle has benefits, but a personality predisposed to ecstatic mysticism or earthy good sense may receive the same states and levels of consciousness. The tendency of spiritual systems has been to construe styles of integration as the definitive spiritual stations, disregarding 17 This enlightenment has a diĀ erent inflection from the frequent depiction of a realized being who is said to encompass the cosmos, and to be intimate with transcendence, only by virtue of relinquishing ego in an act of pure receptivity and utter humility. The movement to encompass more, and the retrenchment into delimited boundaries, may still be conceived as grounded in reception and grace, but what is received is felt and known to be immeasurably less than the giving Source from which it ultimately derives, not only in its mode (reception rather than generation), but also in quality, amplitude, and expanse.
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what was being integrated; peace, bliss, or emptiness, for example, would be thought of as a state or station, rather than as alternative modes of dwelling in a state or station. Aurobindo is less like this than most; for example, he contends that an experience of nirvana of the sort recounted earlier, when the world became a “cinematic” play of empty forms, could recur at any level. Still, there are changes in consciousness Aurobindo, identified with a massive immobility, would interpret as processes of integrating lower levels into that immobility, which others could with equal validity consider processes of expansion into higher levels. Vivekananda had his experience of aborted dissolution before he had heard Ramakrishna tell the story of the salt doll who went to measure the depth of the ocean but melted into samadhi before it could report the water’s depth. The metaphor of a drop of dissolvable substance becoming one with a body of water that recurs in the mystical literature of many traditions does not distinguish between dissolving into a puddle, a lake, or an ocean. All these experiences tend to present themselves as oneness; they all fulfill the dissolution of individuality that is sometimes sought. The puddle is as vast as an ocean to a drop: a phenomenology of spiritual puddles. The kind of mystical union Vivekananda calls the goal of all religions can be reconceived as a potentially useful moment in a process that may be allowed to progress further. The self opens to a newness that can be thought of as latent in its own depths or as an infusion from beyond. That newness, which may take the form of qualities, insights, potencies, energies, or states of being, may or may not overwhelm the self to the extent that conscious perception is displaced. If the newness presents itself as so vast and so undiĀ erentiated that conscious awareness can discern no qualities, a potential meaning of the word nirguna may be invoked. Nirguna is the Sanskrit word meaning “without qualities;” saguna means with qualities. Nirguna becomes saguna—an event that would be neither possible nor desirable as these words are usually used; what appears to be without qualities can reveal itself as having qualities. 18 This is a happy transition, not the inevitable melancholy passage from I-Thou to I-It of which Martin Buber speaks, nor the falling away from the highest state seen by some schools of
18 Nirguna becomes saguna is a formulation of George Simon. I will treat his discoveries and perspectives at length on another occasion.
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yoga. The same reality is perceived as saguna rather than nirguna after a person has expanded. The drop is at first awed by a puddle, experiencing it as the whole universe; but after it develops either more size or more savvy, it may see the contours of the puddle, requiring a lake to induce the feeling of dissolving into an unlimited vastness it once had when confronted by a smaller body of water. Samadhi or mystical union does not indicate a particular level of reality, certainly not an all-encompassing level, but a proportion between the impinging reality and the reality with which the person is already identified. As nirguna becomes saguna, and an experience or reality that appeared ultimate or indistinct shows itself to be one reality in relation to others, it becomes possible for the reality to cross the threshold of the human. The vast, undiĀerentiated force becomes a unique human trait, unpredictable because there can be no standardized spiritual demeanor; the sense of a mystic horizon becomes, perhaps, a bemused attitude, a joy coexisting with somberness, a way of moving, a lilt of personality, an indiscernible new coloration to some old habits. When the newness has penetrated the self, when it has become integrated, the self is enlarged. It will now take a larger reality to make the self dissolve and revere and aspire. This cycle is unending, and the person who has watched it happen again and again may realize, even in the midst of an overwhelming ecstasy, that more will come. Works Cited Aurobindo. On Himself. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1989. ———. On Yoga II, Tome 2 . Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1989. Borges, Jorge Luis. A Personal Anthology . New York: Grove Press, 1967. Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings . Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1996. Friedman, Maurice. Martin Buber’s Life and Work: Ā e Later Years . New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983. Gupta, Mahendranath [M]. Srisriramakrsnakathamrta. 31st ed. Calcutta, India: Kathamrita Bhaban, 1987. Keats, John. “Bright Star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats . Intro. Edward Hirsch. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. 365–66. Kripal, JeĀrey J. Kali’s Child. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Montaigne, Michel de. Ā e Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald Frame. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1976. Nikhilananda, trans. Ā e Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna . New York: RamakrishnaVivekananda Center, 1984. ———. Preface. Gospel vii–ix. Plato. Plato’s Symposium . Trans. Seth Benardete. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
COLOR PLATES
Color Plate 1 . Jyoti Sahi. Pentecost Harvest Dance , 2007. Oil on canvas. Bangalore, India. Private Collection. Photograph: Sarah Kearney.
Color Plate 2. Jyoti Sahi. Season Wound, 2007. Oil on canvas, 24” × 30”. Collection of the artist.
Color Plate 3 . Jyoti Sahi. Ā e Cosmic Drum , 2000. Oil on canvas, 36” × 36”. Collection of the artist.
Color Plate 4. Jyoti Sahi. Healing the Wounded Penitent, 2006. Oil on canvas, 48” × 60”. Collection of the artist.
Color Plate 5 . Jyoti Sahi. Fire Seed/Wound , 2002. Water color and collage, 15” × 21”. Collection of the artist.
Color Plate 6. Jyoti Sahi. Traversing the Heart, 2007. Oil on canvas, 42” × 64”. Collection of Missio in Aachen, 2007.
Color Plate 7 . Trifold deity at Ellora (Cave 29), c. 700 CE. Stone carving. Photograph: James Morley, 2007.
Color Plate 8. Tantric Buddhist Temple painting. Sangacholing Gompa, above the village of Pelling, West Sikkim. Photograph: James Morley, 1996.
Color Plate 9 . Caroline Mackenzie. Nailing down Redness , in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie.
Color Plate 10 . Caroline Mackenzie. Ā e Healing, in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie.
Color Plate 11 . Caroline Mackenzie. Mysterium Coniunctionis, in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie.
Color Plate 12 . Caroline Mackenzie. Banquet Hall—song of Songs 2:4 (“He has taken me into his banquet hall and the banner over my head is love”), in “Blue Man and Lion Lady” series. Photograph: C. Mackenzie.
Color Plates 13–16 . “Ritual Masks” series, made and performed by Caroline Mackenzie, 2006. Clockwise from upper leĀ : Earth Mask, Air Mask, Water Mask, Fire Mask. Photographs: C. Mackenzie.
Color Plate 17 . “Sultan Muhammad”, “Heavenly and Earthly Drunkenness” (painting, recto), folio from a Divan of Hafiz, c. 1526–1527. Harvard Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, GiĀ of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Cary Welch, Jr. Partially owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, 1988 (1988.460.3). Photo: Allan Macintyre. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Color Plate 18 . “Abul Fazl ibn Mubarak presenting the Akbarnama to the Grand Magul Akbar. Mughal miniature.”
Color Plate 19. “Muhammad près du Sidrat al-Muntaha,” from Le livre de l’ascension du Prophète , c. 1436. Heart, Afghanistan. Manuscrits Orientaux Supplément Turc 190, folio 34. Reprinted with permission from Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Color Plate 20 . “Muhammad se prosternant,” from Le livre de l’ascension du Prophète, c. 1436. Heart, Afghanistan. Manuscrits Orientaux Supplèment Turc 190, folio 36v. Reprinted with permission from Bibliothèque National de France.
Color Plate 21 . Angelos of Crete. Ā e Virgin Glykophilousa (“Ā e Kardiotissa”), icon on wooden panel, second half of the fiĀeenth century. Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens (T1582). Photograph: Y. Yiannelos, courtesy of Chrysanthe Baltoyianni’s Icons: Mother of God .
Color Plate 22. Nicario Jiménez Quispe. Divina Pastora (Spinning Cosmic Yarn). Portable altarpiece. Painted wood and clay. Fig. 5 in Popular Art and Social Change in the Retablos of Nicario Jiménez Quispe, ed. Carol Damian and Steve Stein (Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). Photograph: Carol Damian.
Color Plate 23 . Jane Rizo-Patrón. Zumbayllu (Embryo of the Sun), 1979. Spinning sculpture, based on the Inkarrí myth. Made in Orcopampa, Perú. Photograph: Luz Osgood, 2005.
TRAVERSALS (II): CHRISTIAN, ISLAMIC, BUDDHIST, JEWISH 1. Islamic Legacies
IMAGING ISLAM: INTELLECT AND IMAGINATION IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, AND PAINTING James W. Morris Boston College O my God, cause us to see things as they really are! —Prayer of Muhammad
This essay briefly introduces the approaches of four classical Muslim philosopher-theologians to the understanding of Islam—or rather, since their subject is the universal human reality of dīn,1 of religion in the widest possible sense—to the subsequent artistic integration of their perspectives in two later paragons of Islamic mystical poetry (Hafiz) and painting (Sultan Muhammad). The essay format allows only a brief vignette for each of these fascinatingly complex thinkers and artists. But at least these glimpses should be sufficient to highlight the profound gulf that separates all the Islamic humanities and premodern Islamic thought in general from the very recent hybrids of materialism, historicism, and nationalism that characterize this past century’s newly-forged Islamist political ideologies. The prophetic saying quoted in our epigraph, one of the most famous prayers recorded in the collections of hadith, already sums up our subject here. For the two inseparable dimensions of this saying beautifully summarize two equally indispensable practical dimensions of any approach to religious understanding and appropriate practice. The first task—and a far harder one than we might at first imagine—is our ongoing effort simply to see as much as possible of the relevant “things,” to come to actually perceive and properly appreciate all the related phenomena, all the infinite divine “Signs on the horizons and the souls” (41:53), to use the familiar Qur’anic language. For there is simply no apparent end to this first, primordial human responsibility. Its fundamental importance is likewise emphasized in another equally famous hadith, in the Prophet’s repeated prayer: “O my Lord, increase 1 Dīn refers to the essential metaphysical relationship between the divine Source and all creatures. It is the primary subject of the Qur’an and—from that Qur’anic perspective—of each of the recurrent cycles of prophetic revelation.
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me in knowing!” Secondly—and more obviously requiring an element of higher illumination, along with all the powers of our human intelligence and imagination—there is the subsequent task of coming to see those endless particular phenomena of religious life and traditions “as they really are”: i.e., of recognizing and realizing the deeper reality, the all-inclusive logos that they manifest. The very fact that this central teaching takes the form of a prayer reminds us of two additional, indispensable conditions both for our own religious understanding, and for any further mutual comprehension and communication, which necessarily depends on that initial foundation of real and comprehensively informed awareness. First, the formulation of this saying carefully and explicitly reminds us that “we”—in the sense of all human beings, at all our stages of realization—are equally and interactively involved in this imperative, this inherent human responsibility, so that whatever we genuinely discover about the religious life of others necessarily deepens and enriches our own humanity. 2 And secondly, the fact that this saying is a prayer clearly implies that any deeper understanding in this domain—as with all our acts of divine service, all our infinitely varied ʿibādāt—necessarily depends both on our own ongoing practical and intellectual efforts and on the mysterious gifts of grace: in other words, that the distinctively human vocation of transforming spiritual realization, in all its forms and expressions, always remains dependent on the individual mystery of inner surrender and illumination ( taslīm or islām). I
Ghazali on the Three Fundamental Dimensions of Religious Life
The first classical Muslim thinker introduced here is also the historical personality whose name is most likely to be widely familiar to Muslims today. The influential figure of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) led an immensely active, intellectually prolific and socially engaged 2 Muhammad was not ordinarily given to using the merely honorific first-person plural. Throughout the Qur’an and hadith—just as with the radically different meanings of the Arabic plural and singular “you”—the inclusive plural here clearly points to the much wider “We,” the full pleroma of divine Names that find their uniquely comprehensive, integrated manifestation in the fully human reality ( insān, not the mortal-animal bashar) of the Adamic state.
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life as a religious scholar, teacher, political spokesman, and spiritual guide—a life whose stages are memorably summarized in his famous late autobiography, “The Deliverer From Error” ( al-Munqidh min al-Dalāl), which has been widely translated into many modern languages. Not coincidentally, that part of the Islamic world in which Ghazali grew up was ravaged, both during and just before his lifetime, by a host of bloodily destructive civil wars, religious revolutions, barbarian invasions, and bloody occupations. Almost all of those devastatingly violent regional and internecine urban conflicts—which did eventually destroy his once-flourishing native metropolis of Nishapur (near modern Mashhad in western Iran), long before the Mongol invasions—were framed in sectarian Islamic terms. Against that poignant historical backdrop, his deepest reflections on the multiple dimensions of religion and their interactions are summarized, in compressed and allusive form, in the remarkable conclusion of his famous ethical treatise, “The Scale of Right Action”. 3 There he begins by explaining that the key Arabic term madhhab,4 or “way of proceeding (toward God)”—which closely approximates to the ways people today popularly speak of “religions” in the plural, in most political and journalistic contexts—potentially has three different levels of meaning: The first level is what people cling to and take sides with in boasting and disputations . . . theway of one’s forefathers and ancestors, the (religion) of one’s teacher and of the people of the town where one grows up. This differs according to towns and countries, and according to the teachers concerned.
Now the great majority of humankind, Ghazali insists, by nature (due to their limited capacities and worldly preoccupations) can only
Mīzān al-‘amal : see the full annotated translation of this concluding chapter in our forthcoming volume Openings: From the Qur’an to the Islamic Humanities, as well as the fully annotated earlier version in my “ ‘He who speaks’ ” (see al-Ghazali). 4 While the warring “schools” ( madhāhib) that Ghazali is referring to reflect familiar historical categories from the fields of fiqh, kalam theology, and other politically powerful competing sects at that time, recent historians of that period and region have carefully pointed out the ways that such terms actually functioned primarily as identifying labels for a wide variety of local and regional political factions, tribal confederations, etc. which successively invaded, dominated, and eventually largely destroyed that great metropolis of medieval Iran (one of the largest cities in the world at that time). 3
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acknowledge that there is this one true way, the expression of their own familiar local “beliefs”: 5 These people, who are far more numerous, say that the [true way] is only one: it is what they believe. And that [belief ] is what [should be] proclaimed in teaching and guidance with every single human being, however different their condition may be. This is what [the great majority] are passionately attached to, whether it be [this] belief or any other . . .
But Ghazali immediately goes on to explain that the deeper reality of the human situation—of dīn as the ultimate inner connection of every soul with its divine Source and Ground—is perceived quite differently by those fully accomplished ( mukammal ) human beings who can actually begin to “see things as they really are.” Even though such rare insightful, capable and appropriately motivated individuals are obliged to agree outwardly with the prevailing unexamined beliefs of the local majority whenever they express themselves in public, they always realize that in fact there are also two more essential levels of religion as well, each one equally fundamental and indispensable in its proper sphere of application: The second . . . is what is appropriate, in (moral, intellectual, spiritual) guidance and teaching, to whoever comes seeking to learn or to be guided. Now this cannot be specified in only one way, but rather it differs according to the student, so that each student must be confronted with what their understanding can handle . . . The third . . . is what a person holds to in their innermost self, between themselves and God, such that no one other than God is aware of it. One does not mention that except to someone who is like oneself in his awareness of what one has become cognizant of, or else to a person who has reached a stage where they are capable of (readily) becoming aware of it and of understanding it.
Now the limited focus of this essay does not allow us to elaborate on Ghazali’s own fascinating practical insights into spiritual pedagogy and religious politics which he developed on the basis of this threelevel conception of religion, in an immensely prolific and influential body of writings which are still widely read, studied, and imitated everywhere in the Muslim world today, providing foundational texts
5 Iʿtiqād: a familiar Arabic term which, quite tellingly, is entirely absent from the Qur’an.
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in fields as diverse as philosophy, spiritual thought and practice, kalam theology, and fiqh. For our purposes here, it is sufficient to point out that the distinctive threefold conception he outlines in this concluding passage of his Mīzān means that human beings’ perceptions of religions, in all their outwardly endless diversity and changing forms, can be compared to a kind of multi-sided pyramid. From that perspective, the perceptions of the mass of people living at each of the many local bases of that single pyramid, who remain primarily at that limited socio-political level of belief, necessarily lead them to perceive all other religions (i.e., beyond their own local group’s beliefs) as simply a multiplicity of conflicting—and self-evidently false or incomplete— belief-systems; the exclusive truth of their own unexamined beliefs is an axiomatic function of whatever particular social group they happen to have grown up with and adhere to. In contrast, those who find themselves at Ghazali’s second level— referring to the many individuals who are “seeking right guidance” and thereby advancing up one or another of the many paths of realization forming the multiple sides of that pyramid, as far as their particular abilities and predispositions allow—evidently have in common at least the three distinguishing features he mentions later in this concluding passage: the initial doubt which liberated them from their initial restricted beliefs; their dawning intuition of a higher, inclusive Truth/Reality; and the growing spiritual and intellectual love which flows from that still inchoate intuition. Finally, Ghazali’s hypothetical third, unitary level—which he says can only be shared indirectly and allusively by the rare masters of each path—is that of spiritual perfection, of actual realization ( tahqīq) of the Truly Real ( al-Haqq). Of course there is nothing radically new about Ghazali’s theological and philosophic understanding outlined in this famous passage of his Mīzān. At its dramatic conclusion, for example, he pointedly alludes to central imagery of the Qur’an and hadith when he describes the experience of those inhabiting each of these three levels of spiritual realization in terms drawn from the classical scriptural symbolism of the (spiritually) “blind”; of those traveling by the scattered, reflected lights of “the stars and the moon”; and of those actually seeing by the fully illuminating Light of the divine Sun. Here this far-reaching traditional Qur’anic symbolism is particularly significant in that it highlights the intrinsic, absolutely natural and unavoidable, multiplicity of the sides of this pyramid of realization: the many different pathways
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leading toward the one Apex, with their necessarily shifting historical forms and their varying degrees of emphasis on contrasting spiritual methods emphasizing the relative roles of intellect, will (discipline), imagination, or love and devotion. Others may be reminded of the close correspondence between Ghazali’s perspectives here and the prevalent conception in later Islamic civilization of the four spiritual stages or dimensions of Religion ( dīn) as sharīʾat, tarīqat, maʿrifat and haqīqat.6 Perhaps the most important practical implication of Ghazali’s perspective, however, is that both sides of our opening hadith—i.e., what is actually perceived (indeed, what is even perceivable!) as “religion,” and therefore what kind and degree of understanding is actually possible—will always be viewed entirely differently from each of these three basic levels of realization. More troublingly, someone who perceives the realities of religion to be merely socially reinforced beliefs can only perceive any account or reference to either of Ghazali’s two higher levels as simply another, alternative set of misguided beliefs. And individuals who are following one of the many pathways up the sides of this imagined pyramid may indeed see more clearly the limited nature and functions of the socially grounded beliefs they have now left behind, but they are still likely to perceive at first the other alternative routes to the Apex—if they even happen to see them at all—as both different and inferior to their own chosen path. However, the perspectives of each climber regarding almost everyone else should also become increasingly transformed as they finally approach their common destination, a process which eventually and unavoidably brings each of them (in so many different ways) much closer together—just as in the archetypal case of Muhammad’s own spiritual Ascension (miʿrāj) through each of the spiritual worlds and its associated prophetic spirits. The ongoing dramatic interplay of each of those successive stages and possibilities is beautifully illuminated in Hafiz’s multi-faceted ghazal (short love poem) and its extraordinary visual elaboration in Sultan Muhammad’s painting discussed at the end of this essay. All of this, as Ghazali points out here—and as he went on to apply in his own massive, lastingly effective and still highly accessible body 6 This later classical mnemonic formulation refers roughly to the four stages of widely shared ritual and social forms, practical spiritual “pathways,” the unfolding of individual spiritual “knowing,” and the full attainment of spiritual “truth/reality.”
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of writing, in every sphere of Islamic thought—raises awesome challenges of communication, pedagogy, and guidance, wherever we may be situated in that ongoing collective process of human transformation and spiritual growth. No wonder, then, that one of his favorite and frequently repeated hadith was the famous “speak to the people according to their (differing) capacities of understanding.” In the next stages of this essay, we briefly introduce three other classical Muslim thinkers—perhaps the most accomplished scientist, philosopher, and mystical thinker of the entire civilization—whose pioneering perspectives on the study of religion were primarily focused, in turn, on each of Ghazali’s three ascending levels. Eventually, though, when pushed far enough, each of their distinctive approaches necessarily leads us towards a more comprehensive vision of the whole— toward that multi-dimensional, harmonic perspective so memorably captured in the strikingly compressed poetic and visual expression of these teachings by Hafiz and his artist counterpart. II
Biruni and the Socio-Historical Phenomenology of Religions
The remarkable polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (d. 1048) is best known today as one of the most extraordinary scientific and mathematical geniuses of all time, someone whose rigorous observations and critical insights in so many different scientific fields were often centuries ahead of his time. In reality, his pioneering contributions to the phenomenological and historical study of religion were no less original, although the far-sighted significance and originality of his carefully accurate, critical, and comprehensive methodological approach to the understanding and communication of the historical, intellectual, and anthropological dimensions of religion have not yet been widely recognized and appreciated. It is one of the curious mysteries of modern scholarship and academic publicity that the later Maghrebi philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) has been so widely acclaimed as the father of the modern social sciences, when in fact several of Biruni’s books come even closer to exemplifying the critical norms and self-consciously descriptive and analytical approaches of most modern social scientists and historians. To put it simply—and in every science, the most fundamental laws and principles often do seem very simple once someone has perceived
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7 and in and proven them—Biruni was, in his classic study of India his equally pioneering earlier work of universal religious history ( alAthār al-Bāqiyya), one of the first writers we know of to systematically pose the now-obvious question of just what different peoples, in all their diversity and social realities, actually believed and practiced in the different dimensions of their religious and social life. More specifically, and just as important from a methodological standpoint, Biruni did not concern himself with imposing familiar theological categories and judgments on his subjects, whether in the questions he asked or in the presentation of his research. Thus he did not accept that only some areas of life and thought (as defined by his own faith) are “religious,” while others are not; nor did he limit himself to earlier learned books and their presumptively normative accounts, to the exclusion of actually listening to informants from the various groups he was studying. Instead, he drew on representatives from all available strata of the peoples he encountered, from the full spectrum of castes and specialists accessible to him, ranging from astronomers and Brahmins to yogis and traders. In contrast to virtually all earlier writings available in his day, he explicitly and quite self-consciously tried to give an accurate and comprehensive picture of his subject, instead of simply entertaining his readers and patrons with details of what was curious, titillating, or shocking. In other words, we could say without exaggeration that he was probably Islamic civilization’s first cultural anthropologist—except that the scope of his research interests and analyses, especially in his broader historical and textual concerns, repeatedly goes considerably beyond what that discipline normally tackles today. In all of these respects, of course, Biruni seems to have been inspired by the classical scientific procedures followed (at least nominally) in each of Aristotle’s works: i.e., he begins by carefully seeking out all the relevant phenomena; then canvassing and critiquing all the available theoretical and explanatory hypotheses; and finally by proposing or suggesting his own alternative, more comprehensive interpretive perspectives.8
7 The title of Biruni’s immense study of the religions of northwest India, Tahqīq mā li-l-Hind . . .[“The Verification of What is in India . . .”] is especially significant, in that the key word tahqīq fairly applies to his rigorously empirical scientific method that he developed in so many different fields of knowledge. 8 It is worth noting that in fact Biruni’s conception of his scientific and advisory relation to his conquering Ghaznavid patrons also seems to have closely mirrored the
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In this brief vignette, we can only highlight two or three of the most fundamental contributions of Biruni’s careful phenomenological approach to our contemporary global interest in inter-religious understanding. First, even a minimal attempt at a carefully descriptive account of the most basic dimensions of actual religious life (whatever the particular historical setting and tradition in question) immediately highlights the extraordinarily rich diversity and multiplicity of the religious realities that actually exist. Indeed this radical diversity can be observed whatever the particular domain in question, from popular social matters like actual social norms, beliefs, patterns of behavior, and devotional lives and practices, on to more intellectual and theoretical concerns such as different individuals’ actual understandings of cosmology, metaphysics, history, or spirituality. Hence devoting attention to this inherently curious and intentionally comprehensive approach to gathering and analyzing the actual phenomena of religious life—as opposed to this or that presumptively normative theological account—repeatedly “causes us to see” and discover a whole range of “things” that we might otherwise never have noticed. This is particularly evident, of course, when we apply Biruni’s perspectives to our own apparently familiar religious surroundings. For any practicing anthropologist or psychologist quickly becomes aware how much of our immensely rich practical knowledge of our own religious life-spheres typically remains simply implicit—i.e., quite operative but usually still unconscious—until we begin to question and analyze those elements that only reach our consciousness when they are revealed through their contrasts with the mirrors of unfamiliar cultures and very different personalities. Secondly, Biruni’s intensely critical mind seems to have quickly discovered that there are no simple, reductive, top-down explanations for this radical observed diversity in all these various domains of human life. In particular, the intensely diverse intellectual and religious milieu of his own central Asian homeland—the cosmopolitan crossroads of all the global trade-routes and cultural exchanges of that age—was a constant reminder that the longstanding, irreducible diversities of perspective and understanding that he constantly encountered in his own and other religious settings were not simply explainable by the
idealized conception of the relations between Alexander the Great and Aristotle that was prevalent throughout classical Islamic (and later Hellenistic) cultures.
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assumed effects of this or that official theology or dominant teaching group. Of course Biruni, even in his earlier works, was careful to point out the universal sociological and political tendencies of religiously and intellectually dominant social groups (the self-styled “elites” whom he found in every religion and culture he studied) to attempt to control, dominate and manipulate their less educated local populace. But such recurrent attempts are necessarily restricted in their effectiveness— as Ghazali pointedly suggests in the passages we were just discussing—by the equally observable reality, at each level, of a wide-ranging natural diversity of spiritual capacities, perspectives and beliefs. That deeper human diversity tends to become more immediately obvious, of course, whenever we encounter concretely other religions and unfamiliar social groups. But it is also a recurrent human reality—as ideologues of every age have always tended to carefully forget—that the Qur’an itself repeatedly points to as a central, quite intentional result of divine Providence. Paradoxically, this omnipresent religious diversity, rooted in the inherent natural differences of every sort of human capacity and personality, seems to be particularly difficult to discern whenever people (perhaps especially intellectuals from local elites) are thinking and speaking about their own particular traditions. Against that backdrop of presumed theological uniformity, particularly intense amid the heated Muslim theological and sectarian disputes of Biruni’s own day, his consciously inclusive phenomenological approach to other, unfamiliar religious traditions dramatically highlighted—for readers from his own religio-cultural milieu—the extremely partial, unstable, and shifting nature of those locally operative, taken-for-granted “beliefs” comprising Ghazali’s first level of religion. At the same time, he pointedly revealed how little the controversial theological labels and presumptions of his own culture had to do with the vastly more complex realities—and the more deeply observable regularities—of actual religious, social, and cultural life. 9
9 Long before Swift, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters , there was a wide-ranging tradition, persisting in many genres of Islamic literature and philosophy, to use critical discussions and problematic accounts of remote others—whether purportedly historical or openly imaginary, like our science fiction—as subtle polemic vehicles for communicating social, religious, and intellectual criticism of features of the writer’s (and his audience’s) own familiar world. Such implications are visible everywhere in Biruni’s India.
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Finally, the larger social patterns, similarities, and eventual laws that do emerge, upon deeper reflection, from Biruni’s carefully phenomenological approach to each religious tradition, in a particular social and historical context, are in fact empirical regularities that seem to apply to human beings more widely, whatever their particular religion or culture. Thus Biruni was able to translate astronomical and cosmological texts from Sanskrit (or Greek) into Arabic, for example, because he was convinced from their study that astronomers (or astrologers) in every culture and historical setting had been generally talking about the same things. Similarly, he was able to translate—or rather, to interpret—the classical Yogasutras and their centuries-old traditions of oral commentary into the Arabic of his day because he spontaneously recognized that the more recently emerging Sufi movements of his own religion and cultural context were already talking about very similar spiritual realities and practices. III
Farabi and the Ongoing Challenges of Guidance and Instruction 10
Few Muslim thinkers, in any field, have been more lastingly influential and original than the great philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950), whose pioneering insights into the meanings, forms and historical transformation of religions were practically applied and developed, in more specifically Islamic settings, by a long line of famous Muslim philosophers and reformers from Avicenna, through Tusi and Ibn Khaldun, on down to influential figures like Fazlur Rahman and Khomeini in our own time—not to mention Farabi’s far-reaching indirect influences on an even more impressive list of philosophers and theologians in later Christian, Jewish, and even Marxist settings. If Farabi is mentioned in this essay, it is precisely because most of his writings (unlike those of his later Muslim and non-Muslim interpreters) normally take up the fundamental questions of the meanings, roles, and understanding of religion in an explicitly multi-cultural, comparative perspective,
10 See the longer introductory presentation of this practical and highly contemporary dimension of Farabi’s religious thinking in the opening chapter of our Orientations: Islamic Thought in a World Civilization .
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taking into account ample historical evidence from many earlier and contemporary religious and philosophical traditions. 11 The special connection of Farabi with Ghazali’s second level of religion—i.e., with the multiple pathways of instruction and realization— has to do with his constant close attention to the fundamental ongoing human differences of receptivity, motivation, capacity, and other resources (including the lasting effects of religious belief on political and social organization) that all affect the actually available possibilities and outcomes of each attempt at religious and spiritual pedagogy and reform. Many modern interpreters have exclusively emphasized the undeniable political emphases, interests and aims of Farabi and his influential Muslim (and other) successors. But that political emphasis is only accurate, and really useful, when we realize that, just as with Plato’s Republic, Farabi’s constantly clear-sighted focus on recognizing the multiple competing aims of human beings—and then on bringing about the constellation of available means necessary to accomplish the highest human aims—in fact helps to illuminate the manifold roles of a given religion in every area of our life, beginning with the proper ordering of our own soul. No other Islamic philosopher makes philosophy and the quest for understanding so clearly and unambiguously a prologue to action—but to right and lastingly effective action. In other words, Farabi’s probingly analytical political perspective is particularly relevant to anyone approaching religious understanding in terms of Ghazali’s second level: whether as a “climber” and seeker, or as a teacher and guide. That is to say, he teaches us, when we are talking and thinking about religion—any religion—to approach it in terms of its actual operative meanings in specific, concrete situations and contexts: not in abstract conceptual and theological terms but in terms of its real and potential meanings and functions in the conflicted, problematic situation at hand. And to do so at every level, from the psychological and individual on up through much wider social, historical, and political contexts. For more limited spirits, of course— as Ghazali has already suggested—a first superficial encounter with that characteristic Farabian approach can readily lead to a familiar sophomoric sort of debunking or simpleminded political reductionFortunately, the most important of Farabi’s writings on the interrelations of religions and philosophy have recently become available in reliable English translations and scholarly interpretations. See the relevant English bibliography of key works at the end of Orientations. 11
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ism, in which religions are only seen and understood as socio-political ideologies: an attitude most familiar in the popular pseudo-Marxism (including its highly publicized Wahhabi and Salafi hybrid variants) affected by journalists and public commentators almost everywhere in the world these days. Yet Farabi’s own intentions are radically different, and in truth almost impossible for anyone to ignore. For what he seeks to do is to remind each of his readers of our own individually unavoidable responsibility both for choosing our ultimate ends, and then for realistically carrying those ends into action—and of the truly infinite distance in this regard between pious words, on the one hand, and actual choices and genuinely effective actions, on the other. Even a glimpse of religious history, in Islam or any other tradition, should suggest how constantly we all need such effective “hypocrisy-detectors,” and how unfortunately rare and profoundly challenging are those moments and exemplars of genuine human choosing, which are the ultimate aim of this philosopher’s enduring writings. IV
Ibn ‘Arabi and the “View from Above”
Ibn ‘Arabi, unlike Biruni and Farabi, is not just a noteworthy pioneer and historical exemplar when it comes to articulating the roles of imagination and intellect in religious understanding. Since his death in 1240, his writings—along with more accessible local adaptations by a long line of both learned and popular interpreters, poets, teachers, and translators—have constantly been the primary reference and inspiration for Muslims from virtually every cultural background, path, and school who have struggled to understand and come to terms with the extraordinary multiplicity of practical religious approaches and competing theological interpretations that so typified the classical forms of Islamic civilization almost everywhere well into the nineteenth century.12 Indeed it would be misleading to refer simply to Ibn ‘Arabi in this context without constantly keeping in mind that all of his thought and writing is so profoundly rooted in both the letter and the deepest spirit of the Qur’an and the authentic hadith, that any reference to him 12 For an overview of this process and its far-ranging dimensions, see Morris, “ ‘Except His Face . . .’: The Political and Aesthetic Dimensions of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Legacy.”; “Ibn ‘Arabī in the ‘Far West’; and “Ibn Arabī and His Interpreters.”
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should also be taken as a kind of shorthand allusion to the profound treatment of the historical multiplicity of “religions” and the Unicity of the one perennial Dīn that is woven throughout those scriptures. What might seem ironic or puzzling, though, is the remarkable way that contemporary students of other, non-Muslim religious traditions have increasingly turned to Ibn ‘Arabi—or to other interpreters of that “greatest teacher” (al-shaykh al-akbar) recently writing and translating into European languages—in order to comprehend as well the ongoing interplay between diversity and creativity (at Ghazali’s initial level of historical forms and expressions) and deeper unities (at the level of ultimate ends and the wider processes of spiritual realization) both within and between those other, non-Islamic religious traditions. The steadily increasing volume of translations and studies of his extremely demanding symbolic writings, in so many languages, together with the sudden proliferation of international conferences and symposia devoted to his ideas and teachings, are solid and visible evidence of the widespread contemporary appeal of his distinctively ecumenical and irenic approach to religious understanding among both scholarly students of religion and wider popular audiences alike. 13 But what is the deeper basis of Ibn ‘Arabi’s centuries-long interest in earlier Muslim civilization for so many disparate modern thinkers seriously wrestling with the deepest issues of religious diversity and mutual understanding? Why is it that, to take one recent telling example, one of the famous scholarly authorities on Catholic spirituality can stand up (at a scholarly conference devoted to a famous medieval Spanish Jewish thinker) and remark that “If Ibn ‘Arabi didn’t exist, we would have to invent him”—i.e., in order to carry on adequately that kind of essential inter-religious dialogue? Anyone who has studied even a little of Ibn ‘Arabi will realize how impossible it is to answer such questions in the space of a few paragraphs. So within this introductory essay, a few very brief allusions will have to suffice. To begin with, if we return to Ghazali’s own extremely allusive remarks about the third and highest—and ultimately unitary—level of religious insight, or to the apex of our own corresponding image of the multi-faceted pyramid of pathways of realization, it must be obvious
13 See the extensive bibliographic references, focusing on English-language translations and studies, included at the end of Orientations (as well the study devoted to Ibn ‘Arabi in chapter two of that work).
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(as Ghazali pointedly implies) that if there existed any surely effective way of guiding everyone to that kind of all-encompassing insight and realized vision of the divine Truth ( al-Haqq), we would all have heard of it already. So if we do observe that Ibn ‘Arabi—like Hafiz, his poetic peer and master-translator whom we shall encounter in just a moment—is somehow an extraordinarily effective communicator in at least suggesting some real sense of what that culminating level of religious insight is or implies, then what grounds could be offered for such an assertion, beyond the long-accumulating historical evidence of Ibn ‘Arabi’s singularly persuasive effectiveness in this regard? The inner secret of this historical effectiveness and success, I would suggest, is that Ibn ‘Arabi—who frequently describes himself above all as a pure “translator” ( tarjumān) unveiling the inner connections between the infinite divine “Signs” (including all of creation and experience), their illuminating “Books” (including all the prophets and saints, as well as their scriptures), and their One universal Source— constantly and quite intentionally collapses what Ghazali had earlier conceptually described as three distinct levels of religion. In other words, Ibn ‘Arabi characteristically uses all his extraordinary rhetorical skills (together with the underlying metaphysical symbolism of the Qur’an and hadith) in order to remind each of his students that the Reality that they imagine they are still seeking is already, immediately, constantly, infinitely present in each divine ‘Breath’, in each momentary turning and reawakening of the heart. The image of the actual effects of his uniquely allusive and transforming form of writing that immediately comes to mind—as the different levels of the imagined conceptual pyramid Ghazali outlined earlier suddenly collapse into that single living Point—is one of a sort of mysterious experiential implosion, of an otherwise inexplicable experience of spiritual “fusion.” And fusion may indeed be the most appropriate image for that paradoxical reality and presence of the Spirit within each human being and at each instant of the ever-renewed creation, which alone reveals—at each instant it is revealed—the Source and Goal of the infinitely renewed revelation. This suggestion would also help to explain the extraordinary appeal of Ibn ‘Arabi, for centuries throughout Islamic civilization and today increasingly all over the world, to artists, poets, musicians, healers, and creators—to all those who are likewise striving to draw us back from our received ideas, habits, customs, and general “heedlessness” (the Qur’anic ghafla) to that unmistakable reality of illuminated spiritual Knowing (ma‘rifa) which is Ibn ‘Arabi’s unique subject and aim.
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To put all this in other, more familiar terms, the immense phenomenological project of Biruni with which we began this ascent, wherever it starts, eventually leads us, when we pursue those outwardly so varied phenomenal appearances of religious life and thought deeply enough, toward the one place in which all such meanings are mirrored and originate: that invisible human-divine reality the Qur’an calls the ‘Heart’ (al-qalb), the only possible—and universally present—Apex of al-Ghazali’s pyramid of religious understanding. There Biruni and Ibn ‘Arabi ultimately meet. In ontological and philosophical terms, that meeting place, the unique locus of all human experience and manifestation, is the central subject of all of Ibn ‘Arabi’s voluminous writings: the world of the “creative Imagination,” both the cosmic shadow-Play and its endlessly renewed reflections in each human heart. 14 Since one cannot even pretend to outline Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics and its scriptural symbolism within the bounds of this essay, we must turn instead to its marvelous—and far more readily accessible—recapitulation and summation in one of the incomparable ghazals of Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390), and to its even more unforgettable creative reflection in a masterpiece of illumination by the great Safavid painter, Sultan Muhammad (d. mid-1500’s). V Hafiz’s Ghazals and Sultan Muhammad’s “Allegory of Drunkenness” Because the art and effectiveness of Hafiz’s ghazals, in a way very similar to Ibn ‘Arabi’s prose, depends upon each reader’s—or listener’s, since his lyrics were originally composed to be played and sung—intimate familiarity with an immense body of metaphysical symbolism and interpretive assumptions shared with and presupposed by its original audiences, we shall begin here instead with the famous miniature painting of one of his last ghazals by the Safavid master Sultan Muhammad, from a royal collection of Hafiz’s poems now in the Metropolitan Museum (color plate 17). 15 It is no exaggeration to say 14 See the more detailed treatment of this dimension of Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought, largely through translations from his “Meccan Illuminations,” in Morris, The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ʿArabī’s “Meccan Illuminations” . 15 This painting is a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Cary Welch, Jr. to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Harvard University Art Museums, and is reproduced with the kind permission of the donors and of both museums. Special thanks are due
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that this remarkably powerful and complex painting—like the poems of Hafiz but far more immediately accessible to uninitiated modern viewers—provides us with an extraordinarily condensed representation of the entire Qur’anic world-view, in both the architectonics of its metaphysics and the inner dynamics of its depiction of the corresponding human levels of love, testing, suffering, illumination, and spiritual growth. Even without consulting the poem that it so carefully illuminates—roughly translated at the end of this essay—the first-time viewer can already almost immediately grasp the essential outlines of this Qur’anic spiritual universe, so closely paralleling Ghazali’s opening discussion (and Ibn ‘Arabi’s integration) of the three key dimensions of spiritual realization. The single poetic line at the top of the painting—the fifth and central, transitional line of Hafiz’s ghazal16—clearly sets out the explicitly ontological character of the whole cosmic scene before us, beginning with the angels and perfected human spirits (the muqarrabūn, “those drawn near to God”) at the top of the painting, and of the universe: “The Angel of divine Love 17 grasped the pitcher of Life/Delight, from its depths poured Rose-water over the faces of the houris and spirits.” Thus the subject of this painting is immediately signaled to be all the creative manifestations of the divine creative Love (rahma) and the full spectrum of human responses and expressions of love and desire—and their indispensable educational consequences—through which human souls are gradually perfected in love and realized awareness of all the divine Names or attributes, eventually returning as polished mirrors of
to Prof. Michael Barry, Curator of Islamic Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, for his initial help in directly viewing and in procuring the reproduction of this painting; to Neal Stimler at the Met, as well as to Mary McWilliams and Christopher Linnane at Harvard, for their help with the necessary permissions. There are no original titles for either the poems of Hafiz or their manuscript illustrations. Thus the museums’ current reference captions for this painting reflect titles used in earlier exhibitions, and images of the same miniature painting can be found on the internet under slightly different titles. For larger full-page reproductions, closer to the original painting in size, see Welch’s Royal Persian Manuscripts 68 (in full color) and Wonders of the Age 128 (in black and white). 16 In the original manuscript collection of Hafiz’s poems, the four preceding initial lines of the ghazal, translated at the end of this essay below, are given immediately opposite the painting, at the bottom of the facing page (omitted in this reproduction). 17 Rahmat: the all-encompassing creative divine maternal Love that gives rise to the created universe at every instant—the central divine Attribute which is invoked at the beginning of every Sura of the Qur’an (and, almost universally in Islamic devotional practice, before undertaking any significant action).
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that divine Source. That universal process of divine manifestation and the “Return” cycle of its uniquely human realization and perfection is beautifully summarized (especially for modern viewers encountering this tradition for the first time) in the famous Divine Saying that is so profoundly elaborated in Hafiz’s poem: “I was a hidden Treasure, 18 and I loved to be known: hence I created creation/ human beings ( alkhalq), so that I might be known.” Given those familiar cultural clues, it was immediately obvious to this painting’s original noble viewers that the next lower level of this beautiful cosmic palace (and “tavern”!) represents the immense realm of the divine Imagination ( khiyāl) or “intermediate world” ( barzakh), which is above all the realm of all those realized souls and divine Knowers and Friends ( awliyāʾ) represented here by the central depiction of the reclining Hafiz, contemplating or reading and inwardly envisaging that open “Book” which is here, again according to the cultural conventions of this age, at once equally the “Qur’an” (both as the revealed divine “Recitation” and the cosmic musical archetype of all Creation), its manifestations throughout all of creation and humanity (all the other tippling couples and revelers of the painting), and the illuminating powers of all that poetry-music, painting, and the other ritual forms and practices which help to reveal to us the deeper divine meanings of that Book of all being. Here it helps particularly to know that the closing pen-name and verbal imperative “Hafiz,” in each of these poems, refers forcefully to a whole spectrum of central human spiritual responsibilities and choices that are dramatically depicted everywhere throughout this painting. 19 18 See the corresponding allusion to this central hadith in line 9 of the poem (translated below, sec. 6)—the “Treasure House” being the human spirit’s initial, unknowing proximity to God at its emergence, in the “last night” of its primordial Covenant (Qur’an 7:174), prior to its descent into the world and body—the perpetually ruined “Wine-House” where it can begin the essential earthly process of loving, choosing, experiencing, and the growing knowing of the divine Names that can only be realized through those tests. 19 To begin with, the divine Name or distinctive quality of being suggested by the Arabic active present participle hāfiz immediately and directly evokes in each reader a complex semantic family of both divine and human realities and responsibilities, the consciousness of which immediately heightens each reader’s awareness both of our relative realization of that particular divine Name and of our many failures to do justice to its demands. At a second and deeper stage of reflection and attention, just as we find with almost every line of Hafiz’s poems, we realize that that same divine Name is also an even more compelling verbal imperative, demanding that we do realize and put into action—“assiduously, constantly, and perseveringly” (to quote Lane),
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From this perspective, this central Hafiz-figure represents all those rare but essential realized human beings—the true spiritual Knowers (‘urafā’ ) and “Friends of God” ( awliyāʾ Allāh), the fundamental spiritual intermediaries, in both this world and beyond (including the spirits of the Prophets which animate each of the heavenly spheres)—of whom the Qur’an repeatedly says that “He loves them, and they love Him” (5:54) and “there is no fear for them, nor do they ever despair” (2:38, 62, 112, etc.). These accomplished human spirits, whose illuminated Hearts are the real “world-seeing Cup” reflecting the Wine of creative Love in all its manifestations, can be seen at the center left of the painting 20—still at this cosmic intermediate, “balcony” stage of being—both “raising” all the outwardly mundane experiences and attachments of this world to their real, transmuted state as divine “Signs” and presences, 21 and at the same time “lowering” the transmuted Wine of their essential spiritual guidance, love, inspiration, and wisdom back into the wider human community, throughout history. Thus the painter leaves it carefully indeterminate whether that
as the Arabic intensive third form imperative implies—all the implications of our true human spiritual reality and ultimate destiny as someone who is indeed “ Hāfiz”. The significance of this Name/imperative reflects the multiple meanings of that key Arabic root ( h-f-z), which occurs a total of forty-four times in the Qur’an: fifteen times in relation to God (and three more regarding His angels or spiritual intermediaries); six times in relation to the Prophet; with the remaining twenty verses referring to corresponding human qualities and responsibilities (or the lack thereof). As with each of the other divine Names and qualities, the dramatic interplay of these two equally essential metaphysical perspectives—the divine Reality and its ongoing human manifestations and discoveries—lies at the heart of all the love-imagery of Hafiz and the wider poetic tradition culminating in his work, in its pervasive symbolic framework of the ongoing mutual courtship of the human soul and its Beloved. The range of meanings of this h-f-z root in the Qur’an are very wide indeed: ( a) to maintain, sustain, uphold; and (b) to protect, guard, preserve—the two meanings most obviously involved in the verses referring to God’s creative and sustaining activities. But also, and even more obviously relating to our corresponding human demands and responsibilities: ( c) to watch out, take care, bear in mind; ( d ) to be heedful, mindful, attentive; and finally (e) to follow, observe, comply with (an oath, covenant, divine command, etc.). By the time we have reached the end of each of Hafiz’s poems, he suggests, reminds—and then often insists, in the immediate, personal second-person imperative—that we reflect on our actual realization of each of these fundamentally human responsibilities. 20 Just beyond the intimate “bridal-chamber” of spiritual seclusion and initiation (see translation below), with its mysterious solitary couple in the room next to the poet-visionary, just inside the balcony. 21 Western readers will find more familiar explanations of Hafiz’s (and his painter’s) perspectives here in such memorable places as Yeats’s The Circus Animals’ Desertion and throughout all of Rilke’s quintessentially Hafizian elegies and his own remarkable accounts of the poetic process.
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transmuted Wine depicted being raised by the long turban-band at the left—with one pitcher of that elixir already being carried off into the wider world beyond the margin—is being raised or lowered. For both functions of the realized Friends/ awliyāʾ are equally omnipresent and indispensable, on every plane of manifest being. What is decisive in this image, though, is that this spiritually central transformation of our experience and scattered practical loves into true inner knowing (the “exaltation” aspect), along with the inspiration and illumination and awakened love that flows from its “lowering” revelation to the historical, social world, are only visible and recognized here by those particular already intoxicated lovers/seekers who are already inwardly standing outside in the promised “Gardens.” Those more attentive readers and viewers familiar with the art and intentions of Hafiz and his painter are like the totally intoxicated dervishes and musicians already outside the walled-in, familiar building of unenlightened worldly tippling, of constant “buying and selling,” 22 that defines the status of all those who imagine that their bodily, social existence (the visibly “constructed” world of their beliefs) is the whole of being—those characters who are no longer consuming or needing the outward, visible wine because they are already participating in the all-encompassing vision of those spirits at the top of the painting, even if their bodies are still visible on this lower plane. With this basic metaphysical architectonic in mind—which, again, is constantly present throughout the Qur’an and every one of Hafiz’s incomparable ghazals, and most fully articulated in the immensely influential volumes of Ibn ‘Arabi’s “Meccan Illuminations”—the viewer/ listener can then begin to enter into the marvelously complex human dynamics of the painting and poem, so powerfully revealed here in the intense energy and individuality of each of Sultan Muhammad’s characters. (With any reproduction of this painting, a magnifying glass is absolutely essential to begin to perceive the defining characteristics, loves, attachments, and intoxications—the endless manifold “wines” of our earthly lives and pairings—that are brought to life in each of these uniquely individualized figures.) This demanding but intensely consuming process of beginning to make the essential existential con22 A familiar allusion to the Qur’an’s constant cautionary reminder (at 2:41, 5:44, etc.) that we are all too often “selling short” our souls for the transient, ephemeral attachments of this lowest material realm.
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nections between each of the figures of this painting (and of Hafiz’s underlying lyrics) and their corresponding concrete figurations in the realms of our own experience can of course only take place within each viewer/reader’s own active and thoughtful imagination. That is precisely the ongoing spiritual process that is so dramatically represented here by the love-struck, grey-bearded figure of the reclining poet, whose illuminated “Book” of the heart is all the Wine he needs—and for whom the totality of the rest of this painting only represents what is already fully present and transfigured in his own imagination. One of the most pervasive features of the spiritual dynamics of this painting—making it a far more complex Islamic equivalent of Plato’s Symposium—is its focus on the frequently paired figures of a couple of transfixed lovers/drinkers, where one is pouring or offering the wine (or more accurately and problematically, the divine “Rose-water” of Love from this poem’s central verses) to the other partner. Here—as in so many of his uniquely dramatic miniatures—Sultan Muhammad offers a brilliant contemplative depiction of all the endlessly rich and familiar forms of human relationship and interaction that make it possible for us to learn, and then to gradually begin to manifest, the “Most Beautiful Names” of divine Beauty, Mercy and Compassion that typify the realized human being ( insān), as well as those illusory fantasies of worldly power, control, security, and momentary pleasure to which human beings (in their unenlightened, semi-animal state as bashar) are initially so often attached. A final key element of ambiguity and insight, which each reader must provide in the long process of actively contemplating and interpreting this painting, is suggested more clearly by the accompanying poem’s pointedly ambiguous words about “sleeping” and “waking” Fortune (bakht and dawlat: terms evoking each soul’s particular destiny and divine Providence). In ordinary usage, as Hafiz ironically reminds his readers, these phrases refer to manifest or non-existent, unrealized “good fortune” in their usual worldly sense of money, status, power, possessions, security, and so on. Yet those same key spiritual terms, as the Qur’an constantly reminds us, ultimately must refer to our uniquely individual inner states of knowing and realization, where the actual realities of our spiritual state are usually only revealed to us in the “dream-like” intermediate, contemplative world of the barzakh and “divine Imagination” ( khiyāl)—here again symbolized by the central figure of the reclining poet, in whose spirit and “wine-cup”
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of the Heart this entire cosmic play is present and integrated at all its perpetually ongoing stages. The essential secret of all those provocative loves and intoxications, of course, is fully revealed and highlighted in the final three verses of the underlying ghazal, translated below: in reality, each human soul can only fulfill its destiny through leaving behind all the unappreciated “Treasure-house” of its source-world of pure but innocent spirit and actively, consciously entering—lovingly enticed and fascinatedly entranced by the endlessly intoxicating manifestations (“curls,” “radiant cheeks,” and “thousand Graces”) of the divine Beloved/Mother (the root of rahma is the cosmic Womb)—into the spiritually richer crucible of all the outwardly transient ruins and stumblingly painful discoveries of the embodied human state, with its unique divine “Trust” of free choice and responsibility. With that shared symbolic framework clearly in mind—as it was so immediately and richly present for each of Hafiz’s original readers and of this painting’s original viewers—we can now begin to appreciate just how this painting is meant to offer up the dramatic visual equivalent of Ibn ‘Arabi’s distinctively all-encompassing “fusion” of every stage of Ghazali’s initial conceptual “stages” of religious life and realization. Outwardly, all of Sultan Muhammad’s highly individualized characters and couples here—like each of the speakers in Plato’s Symposium—appear almost equally intoxicated, possessed, and out of control: almost all sport the “loosened turbans” (emblematic of grace and the intoxication of true love) mentioned in line two of Hafiz’s poem. The painter has clearly set up his painting so that—just as everywhere we turn throughout this world—his figures will immediately and spontaneously bring up to consciousness each viewer’s own varied critical judgments as to what is “real” or “bad” or “worthy” or “spiritual” intoxication, among all these apparent forms of earthly attachment, delusion, and already incipient suffering (the “hangovers” of earthly existence being one of the stock symbols of this same poetic/Qur’anic tradition). At that point, each viewer/reader is again and again faced with a very simple yet decisive choice: either we can become “critics”—the hypocritical plaintiff or judgmental critic (muddāʿī), being a central figure in Hafiz’s spiritual dramaturgy—who retreat into the familiarly comforting categories and judgments of our self and society, culture, and ego; or else, actively entering the “picture” of this divine Imagination/Shadow-play ourselves, we can begin
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to seek out, discover, and contemplate the deeper divine Wisdom and all-transforming Love, which reveals Her radiant cheeks, curls, and all the rest only in the process of actively and fully participating in this (ultimately inescapable) drama of “unveiling” of the divine Bride (the preceding line four of Hafiz’s poem), in that hesitant yet unavoidable marriage of intellect and imagination which is the uniquely human responsibility and “hidden Treasure” of each soul. Either way, Sultan Muhammad’s painting, like each ghazal of Hafiz, is meant to be animated, to become a mirroring movie whose focal dramas, meanings, and eventual revelations all take place within each reader/viewer’s actively participating imagination and reflection—a film whose story and import necessarily appear differently each time we return to its contemplation. Both works offer a marvelous gateway into the extraordinary, and today so often neglected, transformation of imagination and intellect within the universe of the classical Islamic humanities. VI
Hafiz’s Words for Sultan Muhammad’s Music
We must conclude with a very approximate literal translation of the lyric ghazal underlying this miniature, which Sultan Muhammad’s painting interrupts precisely and dramatically in the exact middle of the poem, in this original manuscript collection of Hafiz’s verses. An adequate commentary and explanation of these verses, which would require a much longer essay than this one, must be reserved for another occasion.23 This initial translation should be sufficient, though, for readers to begin to explore the endlessly fascinating interactions between Hafiz’s symbolic verses and Sultan Muhammad’s equally spirited imaginative re-creation of the poet’s intentions in this masterly “illustration.”
23 The extended explanation of this ghazal and its reflections in Sultan Muhammad’s painting is in preparation for a festschrift for Professor Carole Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh).
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james w. mor r is The doorway of the palace of the Magians 24 was swept and watered, the Pir 25 was seated, having greeted with peace both old and young; The cup-pourers had all tightened their belts for serving Him, but from the loosening of turbans 26 an umbrella 27 was set up against the clouds; The shimmering of the Cup and goblet veiled the light of the Moon, the [radiant] cheeks of the young Magians had cut off the way of the sun! The bride Fortune, in that [hidden] bridal chamber, with thousands of hidden graces, curled her tresses and poured rose-water over the petals of the Rose. The Angel of divine Love 28 grasped the pitcher of delight, from its dregs poured rose-water over the faces of houris and fairies; From the fervor and drunken uproar of the sweetly-mannered Beauties, the sugar was broken, the jasmine spilled, the rebab was playing!
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I greeted [the Pir] and with a smiling face he replied: “O dreg-drainer, indigent, wine-smitten one, Who would do this that you have done, out of feebleness of intention and judgment— to leave the Treasure-house, and pitch your tent in these Tavern-ruins?!
24 The Magian fire-temple, like the Christian monastery, being a common image in Hafiz for the joyful Sufi reunion for the remembrance of God ( dhikr), whose musicians (including in this case three wild “qalandar” dervishes) are memorably depicted in the garden at the bottom of this painting. 25 The old Sufi master and sage, who addresses Hafiz in lines 7–10; in this poem his disciples are depicted as his servants, young children, and charming and beautiful Moon-faced “mirrors” (the shāhidān, below) or youthful human manifestations of the divine Beauty and spiritual light ( nūr, of the spiritual Moon). Here he can perhaps be seen initially as the prominent, white-haired figure ( pīr, like the Arabic shaykh, means “old man” as well as “master”) on the porch of the “Tavern” at the lower right of the painting. 26 Or “abandoning of heads”; in either case, this is a positive idiomatic Persian expression for ecstatic drunkenness and high spirits. 27 Or “parasol” (one of the standard images of royal status)—only here blocking any clouds of ill fortune or spiritual obscurity rather than the sun. 28 Rahmat: see note 17 above. 29 Literally shāhidān , “witnesses” or manifestations of the divine Beauty (a technical Sufi term); the ecstatic contemplation of such beautiful adolescent faces was one (highly controversial and frequently disputed) aspect of some medieval spiritual orders. For Hafiz (and Ibn ‘Arabi), of course, the entire created world—and each human being contemplating that endless spectacle— are nothing but witnessed and witnessing of the manifested divine Beauty.
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I’m afraid that they’ll not let you be united with awakened [Good] Fortune, because you, you fell asleep in the arms of sleeping Fortune! Come to the Wine-house, Hafiz/ remember!, so I can present to you a thousand ranks of those whose prayers have been answered.” 30
Works Cited al-Biruni, Abu Rayhan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad. Al-Āthār al-Bāqiya ‘an al-Qurūn alKhāliya [“The Chronology of Ancient Nations”]. Ed. and trans. Edward Sachau. London, 1879. ———. Tahqīq ma lil Hind [“Al-Bīrūnī’s India”]. Ed. and trans. Edward Sachau. 2 vols. London, 1888. al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid. Al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism: His Deliverance from Error [al-Munqidh min al-Dalal] and Five Key Texts . Trans. R. J. McCarthy. Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2000. ———. Mīzān al-‘Amal [“The Scale of Right Action”]. Final chap. trans. James W. Morris. “‘He who speaks does not know . . .’: Some Remarks by Ghazālī.” Studies in Mystical Literature 5 (1987): 1–20. Lane, Edward William. “H-F-Z.” An Arabic-English Lexicon . Vol. 2. London, 1865. 601–02. Morris, James W. “ ‘Except His Face . . .’: The Political and Aesthetic Dimensions of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Legacy.” Journal of the Muhyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabī Society 23 (1998): 1–13. ———. “Ibn Arabī and His Interpreters.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106.3, 106.4, 107.1 (1986): 539–51, 733–56. ———. “Ibn ‘Arabī in the ‘Far West’: Visible and Invisible Influences.” Journal of the Muhyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabī Society 29 (2001): 87–122. ———. Openings: From the Qur’an to the Islamic Humanities . Work in progress. ———. Orientations: Islamic Thought in a World Civilization . London: Archetype, 2003. ———. The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ʿArabī’s “Meccan Illuminations”. Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2005. Welch, Stuart Cary. Royal Persian Manuscripts . London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. ———. Wonders of the Age: Masterpieces of Early Safavid Painting, 1501–1576 . Exhibition Catalogue. Cambridge MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1979.
30 To avoid complicated and tangential explanations, two panegyric lines to Hafiz’s patron have been omitted at this point in the translation (in Qazvini edition), or immediately preceding this final line (in the recent Khanlari edition).
INDIA: A LABORATORY OF INTER-RELIGIOUS EXPERIMENT Maqbool Ahmed Siraj BBC World Service, Bangalore, India The Indian subcontinent, repository of nearly one-fifth of humanity, is peopled with followers of nearly all known world religions. Although the current Hindutva movement (a political philosophy of the Hindu rightist outfits) claims that Hindus are the original inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, history bears witness that Hindus, previously known as Aryans, came here from Central Asia and drove away the Dravidians—original inhabitants of the North Indian plains—to the South Indian peninsula. Eventually, Muslims came via three different routes: First, they arrived through the maritime route at the Malabar coast in Kerala, as merchants from Arab countries; later on, Arab-Muslim armies conquered Sindh in 712 AD; and, finally, Muslims arrived from Central Asia through the Khyber Pass (now between Pakistan and Afghanistan). This led to the establishment in Delhi of a Muslim kingdom that would continue up to 1857. Jews had arrived around 70 AD when Titus demolished the Temple in Jerusalem. They settled down in Cochin (now Kochi) and in Mumbai and Pune. Christians had begun arriving soon after Christ’s message began to spread, and there is evidence of Christians settling in Kerala soon after Christ. Parsis, the Zoroastrians, arrived when Muslim armies captured Persia around 580 AD and Parsis were persecuted. They first settled in what today is Gujarat in India. Now the only original pockets of residence of Parsis in the World exist in Mumbai and Pune. Buddhism and Jainism are religions native to India, as their founders were born here, albeit Buddhism could not withstand the persecution ordered by the Brahmin Shankaracharyas. It then spread out to several countries of Indo-China and China itself. It retained few adherents in India inasmuch as only one-half percent of people in India today profess Buddhism. Sikhism was also born here as a result of a synthesis between South Asian Islam and Hinduism. It won a lot of adherents in areas that constitute Punjab in northwest India today, and has its shrines spread over cities that lie across India and Pakistan. Among all these faiths, Hinduism and Islam have the largest body of
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followers.1 Though carving out of Pakistan from the Indian subcontinent removed almost two-thirds of the subcontinent’s Muslims and placed them into two different political entities—namely, Pakistan and Bangladesh2—this separation does not in any way erase the history of inter-religious experiments in this vital area of the globe. The whole area is still considered a single civilizational entity. Pakistan often looked to the Middle East in its quest to become closely identified with Muslim lands. But it has not been found to be in possession of worthwhile Middle Eastern credentials. Nor did its cooperation treaties with Iran and Turkey under the Regional Cooperation Development (RCD) during 1960s and 70s bear any substantial fruit. RCD is now defunct. Pakistan was very reluctantly brought round to accept that its civilizational roots lie within the Indo-Aryan ethos. Today it is part of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Bangladesh, after having seceded from Pakistan on the basis of ethno-lingual differences, has always considered itself quintessentially South Asian. A fractious relationship between various South Asian neighbors, principally between India and Pakistan, is often interpreted in terms of historical animosity between Hindus and Muslims which naturally leads to Hinduism and Islam being perceived at opposite poles. This is far from being true. Similarly, the recent rise of the Hindutva movement leading to the demolition of Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, in the north Indian city of Ayodhya, may give the impression that these two communities are totally at variance with each other. Historical interpretations that led to the razing down of the mosque tried to convey the impression that the Muslim rule in India, spanning between 1191 AD and 1857 AD, had been a reign of oppression, with Hindus being subjugated to subservience. Obviously, much homework has gone into politicizing the history of the last millennium for servicing the electoral politics of the latter half of the twentieth century. Hindus and Muslims did not live like frozen cubes all through the span of 650 years of Muslim rule in India. Lively intercourse pervaded all sectors of existence: social, political, intellectual, and cultural. The protagonists of cultural nationalism today make out a case for purging national life of any traces of composite culture that developed in Hinduism currently has around 900 million followers in the Indian subcontinent, while Islam has around 450 million. 2 East Pakistan was politically severed from Pakistan and became Bangladesh in 1971 with the help of the Indian military. 1
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the Indo-Gangetic plains during the 650 years of Muslim rule. This has led them to fabricate a history of cultural suppression of Hindus in medieval India. In addition, the need has emerged to project a homogenized Hindu cultural identity by underplaying the fissures and contradictions within them and ignoring the cultural variety. Simultaneously, there is also an effort to present Muslims as a monolith in order to demonize them. The Muslim rightist also easily walks into this trap by trying to make the community a part of the Muslim ummah, the notional community of the faithful, totally in negation of their cultural and civilizational roots in the subcontinent. A closer examination of the history reveals that Muslims developed a profound cultural understanding of Indian ethos, customs, mythology, and literature inasmuch as the Hindu epic Ramayana3 became the most translated book in Islamic languages like Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It is hard to share the sense of amazement of some non-Muslims when they hear that the Ramayana was translated into Persian at the behest of Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542–1606). The Ramayana is not the only Hindu literary masterpiece to be transferred into the Persian language. Akbar ordered several of the Sanskrit classics to be translated. A committee of scholars with cross-lingual expertise was in fact constituted by the Mughal court to oversee important translation assignments (see color plate 18). Bearded maulvis trained in Sanskrit engaged in discourse with saffron robed Persian scholars. The committee included worthies such as Naqeeb Khan, Mulla Abdul Qadir Badayuni, Mulla Sheri, and Sultan Haji Thanesari. It rendered the Mahabharata,4 the second of the great Hindu epics, into Persian and titled it Razm Namah (literally, the Saga of the BattleĀ eld ). The royal ateliers were directed to illustrate and gild its pages. The Ramayana was translated by Mulla Abdul Qadir Badayuni a year later. The Atharva 3 The Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic authored by poet Valmiki, tells the story of the prince of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita was abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka (modern Sri Lanka). In its current form the Ramayana is dated between 500 BC and 100 BC. It comprises twenty-four thousand verses. Ramayana has had a profound impact on the cultural consciousness of India. While most literary critics would place it in the category of mythology, there have been efforts, of late, to describe it as serious history. 4 The Mahabhartha, penned by Vyasa, embodies the essential Hindu philosophy of life, and is hence of immense importance to the culture of India. The four principal themes discussed in this epic are artha (wealth), kama (pleasure), dharma (duty) and moksha (salvation).
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Veda—a Vedic-era collection of prayers, charms, and hymns—was translated by Haji Ibrahim Sirhindi. The translation of Lord Krishna’s biography, Harbans was undertaken by Mullah Sheri. Badayuni took up the task of translating Singhasan Batisi into Persian and titled it Khurd Afza in Persian. The famous Sanskrit treatise Rajataringini by Kalhana was translated by Maulana Shah Mohammad Shahabadi. It may be recalled that it was originally commissioned by the Kashmiri Sultan Zainulabedin. The famous Sanskrit folktales collected in the Panchatantra were rendered into Persian by Mulla Hussain Waiz and were named Kaleela wa Dimna. Akbar found the morals of the stories extremely inspiring, yet found Waiz’s translation deficient in transferring the essence. He then ordered its review by his noble courtier Abul Fazl (see color plate 18) who ultimately came up with a simple rendering entitled Ayyar e Danish . Hindi poet Malik Mohammad Jaisi (b. 1498) composed his Hindi poetry collection Padmavath during the reign of Sher Shah (in 1542) and later authored Akhravat and Chitra Rekha. Padmavath is of no less literary value than the Ramayana. Abul Fazl’s elder brother, Faizi, translated the famous Sanskrit work Leelavath into Persian, and the Persian book Zeech Jadeed Mirzai into Sanskrit. On the translation board of these two works were Gangadhar, Kishen Jyotishi, Fatehullah Khan Shirazi, and Abul Fazal. Mughal Emperor Akbar himself wrote poetry in Hindi and took the pseudonym of Rai Karan. The words of his famous couplet, “Jako jas hai jagat mein, jagat sarai jahi / Tako japon saphal hai, kahe Akbar sahi”— generally paraphrased as “The world is a hospitable inn for those who are just and right, wherever they may find themselves / As a form of worship, their life’s journey will be assured of success”—ultimately became a testament to his own life. Akbar’s court bristled with Hindi and Sanskrit poets and scholars—among whom Raimanohar Mol, Raja Mukund Singh, Rai Jagannath, Raja Todermal, and Raja Man Singh were prominent. The list is endless. The general encouragement accorded to Indian languages led to the blossoming of Hindi as a lingua franca. Leading Hindi poets like Haridas, Surdas, Tulsi Das, Ras Khan, Nandas, Kabir Das, Raheem Khankahnan, Chaturbhuj Das, Chechet Swami, Parmanand Das, Govindswamy were products of this age. Joining this poetic galaxy was the emperor’s own son, Prince Sultan Daniyal. Emperor Jehangir lauded his brother’s Hindi poetry in his chronicle known as Tuzk e Jehangiri.
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Kabir Das, 5 a household name in North India because of his Hindi poetry, represented a syncretic cult. The poet, born in 1398 AD in Varanasi to a weaver’s family, admired the virtues of Islam and Hinduism and also satirized the external forms of rites and rituals of the two religions. He was severely critical of what he did not think was in the public interest. His words were in a universal language that, literally and figuratively, broke down barriers to experiencing the divine. He was essentially a product of the Bhakti (devotion) movement then in evidence. He drew admiration from both communities, as well as flak from selected quarters. He spawned a large body of followers, known as “Kabirpanthis,” who practice a mélange of Islamic and Hindu rites and rituals. History has it that Hindus and Muslims fought when he died. Hindus wanted to cremate his remains while Muslims sought the burial. It is said his body disappeared leaving a pile of flowers for the contending followers. What is certain is that he was critical of
5 Despite the extensive global awareness of his verses and sayings, many facts about Kabir Das’s life remain unknown to this date. Even basic details of his biography— e.g., when he was born, who were his parents, what his family life was like, when he died—are all shrouded in mystery. Indeed, little appears to be known about him with any degree of certainty. Perhaps these controversies can be attributed partly to the parochial manipulation of his life history by various religious sects. Hindus want him to be a representative of their religion. They claim that he was born to a Hindu woman, even though he was raised by a Muslim family and that he was a disciple of a Hindu Guru, Ramananda. Some dismiss theories of Kabir’s illegitimate birth by claiming that his birth-mother, even though unmarried, had an Immaculate Conception. Muslims tend to emphasize his Muslim upbringing and his initiation into the Sufi traditions. The celibate/ascetic sects claim that Kabir never married and if evidence of his marriage is presented, they retort that he never had an intimate relationship with his wife. Proponents of tantric traditions point to Kabir’s songs to show that he was influenced very much by the Kundalini practices. Sikh and Shabad-based traditions say that the essence of Kabir’s practice was based on tuning in to the internal sounds, even though they vehemently deny that Guru Nanak was Kabir’s disciple and tend to support the theory that Kabir died before the birth of Guru Nanak. In summary, each sect’s claim on Kabir appears to be self-serving and, hence, cannot be considered as providing reliable information on his life. Indeed, it is likely that divergent viewpoints and claims on Kabir’s life will continue to exist despite the efforts of historians, philosophers and literary scholars to reach consensus. Kabir is often considered to be a social or religious reformer who tried to bridge the gap among various castes and religious sects. Even though Kabir showed a healthy disregard for conventional boundaries of society and organized religion, his intrinsic pursuit was rooted in spirituality and spirituality alone. In the process of conveying the innate spirituality of all of creation, Kabir, in all likelihood, had to deal with and overcome prevalent parochial barriers. But this ought not to be misconstrued to imply that his intent was to reform society or religion.
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hypocrisies of religious leaders and wanted the people to seek God within themselves and follow the path of honesty, simplicity and integrity. It is also a fantastic fallacy of history to attribute the founding of a new faith, Din e Ilahi , to Emperor Akbar. 6 Akbar himself was unlettered. The death of his erudite father Babur early in his childhood did not allow him to attain an education. But what he missed by pedagogy, he tried to attain through proximity to a wide-ranging ulema (Islamic theologians and scholars). Governance of a country of as vast a diversity as India imparted a rare catholicity to his outlook. Be it Purkottham Brahman or Sheikh Tajuddin, Portuguese missionaries or a Zoroastrian delegation from Navsari in Gujarat, all had free access to the emperor’s court. Their daily discourses, debates, and arguments cast diverse influences on the emperor. All this led to Akbar developing a basic belief in the commonness of all religions, but never to the extent of heresy against Islam or coercing his citizens to follow a new faith. Nevertheless, several apocryphal accounts have been blended with history in the attempt to prove that Akbar founded Din e Ilahi .7 Firmans (fiats from the royal court) such as bans on cow-slaughter, however, can be attributed to his deep respect for the sensitivities of Hindu subjects who worshipped cows, as well as to the advice of royal hakeems (doctors) that cow beef caused several ailments and was not desirable from a health point of view. In fact, such bans extended— beyond cows—to buffalo, horses, and even camels. Similarly, Akbar’s commandments with regard to the appreciation of light ( charagh afrozi) have been exaggerated to mean “sun worship.” The essence of
6 See Choudhury. This view is also propagated by the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. See “Din-i-Ilahi.” 7 Interestingly, the term Din e Ilahi (or Din-i-Ilahi) is not mentioned among the chronicles of Akbar’s age, which are legion. The term, denoting a new faith, was first used by Mohsin Fani in Dabistan e Mazahib (School of Religions ), written around 1655, several decades after the emperor’s death (Akbar died in 1606, after a fiftyyear rule). The Accounts of a Portuguese Father (1595)—cited in Shaikh Mohammad Ikram’s Raud e Kausar (127, 137 n)—mention rumors, at best, about Akbar’s intention to found a new faith. And Shaikh Ikram tells us that three missions of Portuguese Fathers had been sent to the court of Akbar between 1591 and 1597, and the third mission stayed in the court till the death of the Emperor. From their first-hand reports he concludes: “At most Akbar could be credited with founding a new ‘cult’ rather than a new religion,” stressing the fact that a cult is part of a religion, and does not constitute a revolt against the core doctrine (128). It is therefore wrong to rush to the conclusion that Akbar’s syncretic ways led to founding of a new religion.
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Akbar’s catholic outlook was a matter of Sulhe kul, or “general consensus,” among all religions on certain human values. Long after Akbar, the Mughal court continued the tradition of cultural blending. The Ramayana was translated into Persian in a poetic style by Sheikh Saadullah during the tenure of Emperor Jehangir, and was titled as Rama wo Seeta .8 The famous Sanskrit work Padmavat was rendered into Persian in 1617. Chitravalli, the Hindi poetry collection by poet Usman is creation of Jehangir’s age. Sheikh Nabi Hindi of Mhow compiled his Hindi poems in a book, Gyan Deep , which is Sufi-cum-romantic poetry. Hindi poet Jagannath Pandit Raj was the favorite poet of Emperor Shah Jehan, who conferred the title of Kavi Rai (poet laureate) on him. Hindi poet Sundar, who later compiled the Sundar Shringar, was also appointed poet laureate. It was during Shah Jehan’s tenure that Maulana Abdur Rahman Chishti penned the dialogue between Hindu deities, Mahadev and Parvathi, and built up an analogy with Adam and Eve, the first ancestors of human beings according to the Islamic and Christian theology. Chishti also wrote a poetic translation of the Bhagavad Gita into Persian. Dara Shikoh, the third son of Shah Jehan, wrote Majmaaul Bahrain wherein he tries to close the gap between Islam and Hinduism, regarding them as two springs from the same source. Mughal literary activity did not confine itself to literary masterpieces. Dara Shikoh developed a deep understanding of rural ambience and compiled a book of farming tips entitled Nuskha dar Fanni Falahat (The Art of Agriculture ). Hindu-Muslim interaction went beyond literature and gave rise to several syncretic movements like Kabir Panthis, blending elements of faith and culture of both Hinduism and Islam. Today it is said to have a following of four million people. On a larger plane, even Sikhism represents this inter-religious trend. Sikhism’s founder Guru Nanak’s preachings came in the backdrop of brahminical domination, on one hand, and the spread of teachings of Sufi and Bhakti saints, on the other. He rejected brahminical values and caste domination and concluded that teachings of bhakti and Sufi differed only in form, not in content. It was from the teachings of Muslim Sufis (notably Sheikh Baba Fariduddin Ganj Shakar) and Sant
8 Makhtutat e Farsi . These Persian manuscripts are preserved in the India Office Library in London (detailed bibliographical data is not readily available).
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Kabir that Guru Nanak drew his inspiration. He preached monotheism and quiet devotion to God. His hymns were drawn from different sources. Out of Nanak’s teachings came an enduring religious community with distinctive history and evolution separate from Hindu and Muslim religions but drawing the egalitarian aspects from both. Nanak denounced orthodox practitioners of Islam as well as Hinduism, and placed his emphasis on vibrant intercommunity relationships based on the subaltern versions of Islam and Hinduism. His teachings at one level are a synthesis of the values of both the religions—such as reincarnation and the doctrine of Karma from Hinduism, and Tawhid (monotheism) and congregation in worship from Islam. In fact it was a Muslim Sufi, Mian Meer (1550–1635), who was invited to lay the first brick for the foundation of Harmandar Sahib, the holiest of the Sikh shrines in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, in 1588. 9 But there are even less heard variants of syncretism in India, such as the Sultani Jats of Jalandhar. 10 They are known so as they are devotees of Sultan Sakhi Sarwar, a sage whose mausoleum is in Shahkot, now in Pakistan. They are mostly peasants who eat only Halal11 meat and smoke on huqqa (hubble bubble). They set up Sultan ziyarats (small minaret-like structures outside their villages, each with a niche to light a lamp inside). They clean these on Thursday evenings and light up
9 Several authorities can be cited in support of this statement. For instance, Ghulam Muhayy-ud-Din, known as Bute Shah, states that Shah Mian Mir came to Amritsar at Guru Arjan’s request and “with his own blessed hand put four bricks, one on each side, and another one in the middle of the tank” (139). Sohan Lal Suri writes, “Guru Arjan went to Lahore to see Shah Mian Mir and sought his assistance in the construction of the tank and buildings at Amritsar.” Guru Arjan Dev got Mian Mir to lay the foundation of the Darbar Sahib. Foundation was laid, built at lower ground level rather than on a high plinth as is done with Temples and Mosques, in keeping with the Sikh spirit of humility. The Golden Temple was completed in about two years time. Guru Arjan Dev ji appointed Baba Buddha ji —a famous Sikh saint from the times of Guru Nanak—as first Granthi (priest) of the Golden Temple ( Umdatut-Twarikh 28–9). 10 Jats are members of a population group that settled in the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent, and now inhabit mainly the states of Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh in India. Also present by immigration in Afghanistan and Iran, they are often identified with the Gypsies of Syria. 11 Halal is a characteristic way of slaughtering animals (shared by Muslims and Jews) in which only blood is drained away and the animal’s brain retains contact with the body till the last drop is out in order that flesh does not have traces of blood. It is called Halal in Islamic terminology. Jewish Kosher meat is similar, though it has a few more features.
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their lamps. This may not be pleasing to the ears of followers of Salafi Islam or other puritanical sects who frown on any form of devotion to deceased ancestors, sages, or saints. Until 1947, Sultani Jats used to go out on a jatra (pilgrimage) to Shahkot’s mausoleum every year. Partition of British India into the nations of India and Pakistan discontinued this tradition. During Sikh rule, the Sikh governor of Multan banned it and levied one hundred rupees as a fine on anyone who attempted going on a jatra. But the practice could not be curbed. It continued to be observed until Ludhiana and Jalandhar Gazetteers started their publication. Cultural interaction extended beyond the Hindi heartland. Sultan Nasir Shah (1282–1325) was fond of Bangla, the Bengali language. When he found that classical literary masterpieces were absent in Bangla, he commissioned the translation of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into the Bangla language. Sultan Hussain Shah appointed Maladhar Basu to translate Hindu scriptural works like the Bhagwat Puranas in Bangla. Hussain Shah’s commander-in-chief Praful commissioned the second translation of the Mahabharata. He appointed Jayasri Karan on the project. Even down south in the Indian peninsula, Hindu-Muslim interaction produced works like Seerahpuranam by Maulavi Umaru Pulaver in Tamil Nadu, southernmost province of India and home to the rich Tamil language. Seerahpuranam is considered to be one of the best works by the seventeenth-century poet. He depicts the history related to Prophet Mohammed in a mythological tone. It contains 5,027 poems in three Kandams (parts): Vilathathu Kandam, Noobuvathu Kandam, and Hijurathu Kandam. Similarly, neighboring Kerala witnessed a blossoming of literary activity among Muslims. Even in Gujarat, Muslims contributed immensely to enrich Gujarati literature, and “Gujri,” a distinct dialect, emerged due to the interaction of Muslims and Hindus. Hindutva or Muslim zealots may be interested in projecting ancient and medieval history into neat compartments of Hindu and Muslim history. But people have long been absorbing nourishing influences from each other’s faith, cultures, customs, ethos, and habits. This is why it is so important to look at South Asian Islam as it has been lived out, rather than from the doctrinal prism.
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“Din-i-Ilahi.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Oct. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation. 23 Oct. 2007 . Ikram, Sheikh Mohammad. Aab-e-Kausar. New Delhi, India: Adabi Dunia, 1991. ———. Raud e Kausar . 10th ed. Delhi, India: Adbi Duniya, 1991. Makhtutat e Farsi . Vol. 1. Ms. India Office Library, London. Muhhay-ud-Din, Gulam. Tawarikh-i-Punjab. Ms. Dr. Ganda Singh Collection. Punjabi University, Patiala, India, n.d. Roy Choudhury, Makhan Lal. The Din-i-Ilahi, or, The Religion of Akbar . 1952. Calcutta, India: Oriental Books-Dasgupta and Co., 1985. Shikoh, Dara. Nuskha Dar Fanni-Falahat . Trans. Razia Akbar. Secunderabad, India: The Asian Agri-History Foundation, 2002. Suri, Sohan Lal. Umdat-ut-Twarikh. Vol. 1. Lahore, British India: Arya Press, 1885.
THE PARADOX OF PROXIMITY TO THE INFINITE: AN EXPLORATION OF SIDRAT AL-MUNTAHA, “THE LOTE TREE BEYOND WHICH NONE MAY PASS” Hannah Bigelow Merriman Kalliopeia Foundation, San Rafael, California Sidrat al-muntaha, typically translated as “the lote tree of the boundary” or the “the lote tree beyond which none may pass,” is a mysterious threshold described in Islamic tradition as the tree that the Prophet Mohammed encountered at the climax of the mi’raj, his legendary nocturnal ascent through the seven heavens. When I Ārst came across the lote tree in the Qur’an, I was immediately intrigued by its foreboding name and presence at the culmination of the Prophet’s heavenly journey. I was drawn to explore the lote tree more deeply, but found very little written on the subject in English. This only increased my curiosity about this elusive symbol. As I contemplated what limited information I could Ā nd, however, I realized that this was in fact appropriate. The lote tree, I began to understand, represents the limit of human knowledge. The lote tree that can be grasped intellectually cannot be the lote tree of the boundary referred to in the Qur’an as “of the Signs of his Lord, the Greatest!” (The Holy Qur’an, Al-Najm 53.18).1 On the contrary, I began to realize that to approach the depth of meaning of this symbol, the proper mode is not cognition but imagination. My experience is that by following Mohammed’s mystical ascent with the imagination, some glimmer of that moment of intimacy refracts into consciousness to open what SuĀ poets have called the “eye of the heart.” So with the lote tree; if approached with the religious imagination, this mysterious symbol casts a light upon an essential potential in the human being. Focused through the lenses of its linguistic, Qur’anic, and interpretive contexts, the light becomes still more clear. This paper represents the fruits of my efforts at “seeing” the
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Qur’anic citations are taken from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of The Holy Qur’an.
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lote tree of the boundary, and an offering in the hopes that this subject may prove as illuminating for the reader as it has been for me. Drawing from scriptural and interpretive traditions, this paper approaches the lote tree of the boundary as representing a state of mystical nearness to God. After providing contextual descriptions from the Qur’an and hadith (sayings or traditions of the Prophet Mohammed), the lote tree’s meaning is explored through the themes of boundary-marking between the created and uncreated divine realm; the Prophet’s proximity to and eventual crossing of this boundary; and the ensuing theophanic revelation. Qur’anic references and hadith literature form the primary sources of this exploration, with SuĀ commentary and etymological analysis of the Arabic terms providing a more nuanced texture of the Prophet Mohammed’s experience. I The Prophet Mohammed’s Night Journey In order to examine the Prophet’s experience of the lote tree, it is necessary to place it in the context of the entire mi’raj. The mi’raj is the term for the Prophet Mohammed’s ascent through the seven heavens to God’s throne, which occurred during the isra‘, the nocturnal mystical journey—often called the “night journey”—of the Prophet. This journey is referred to twice in the Qur’an, 2 but is greatly embellished in the hadith and later Islamic literature. The night journey occurred in 620 CE, ten years after Mohammed had begun receiving Qur’anic revelations through the angel Gabriel. Much like the earliest revelations, the night journey was unexpected. Mysteriously awakened by Gabriel, tradition holds that Mohammed was given a magical winged animal called buraq that carried him from Mecca to the temple mount in Jerusalem, referred to in Arabic as al-masjid al-aqsa , or the “furthest mosque” (Armstrong 138). From there, Mohammed ascended through the seven levels of heaven. The order of the events during this ascension varies across the hadith literature, but the main episodes are consistent: along the way Mohammed met with previous prophets (including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus) and led them in prayer; he was asked by an angel to choose between milk and wine, and he negotiated with God the number of daily prayers required for Muslims.
2
See Sura Al-Isra 17.1 and 17.60, and Sura Al-Najm 53.13–18.
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Finally, having arrived at the highest heaven, Mohammed is shown the sidrat al-muntaha , the “lote tree beyond which none may pass.” This is described in the Qur’an as follows: Will ye then dispute with him concerning what he saw? For indeed he saw him at a second descent Near the Lote-tree beyond which none may pass: Near it is the Garden of the Abode. Behold, the Lote-tree was shrouded (in mystery unspeakable!) (His) sight never swerved Nor did it go wrong! For truly did he see, of the Signs of his Lord, The Greatest! (Al-Najm 53.7–18)
II
Descriptions of the Lote Tree in Hadith
Because there are so few Qur’anic references to the lote tree, it is in the hadith that we Ānd the account of the Prophet’s night journey fully developed and elaborated upon. The following is a summary of the main descriptions of the heavenly tree from the relevant hadith: Then I was taken to sidrat-ul-muntaha whose leaves were like elephant ears and its fruit like big earthenware vessels. And when it was covered by the Command of Allah, it underwent such a change that none amongst the creation has the power to praise its beauty. (Sahih Muslim 1.309) When the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) was taken for the night journey, he was taken to sidrat-ul-muntaha, which is situated on the sixth heaven, where terminates everything that ascends from the earth and is held there, and where terminates everything that descends from above it and is held there. (It is with reference to this that) Allah said, “When that which covers covered the lote-tree” (Qur’an 53:16). He (the narrator) said: (It was) gold moths. (Sahih Muslim 1.329) 3 Gabriel said, “This is the Lote Tree of the utmost boundary. Behold!” There ran four rivers, two were hidden and two were visible, I asked “What are these two kinds of rivers, O Gabriel?” He replied, “As for the hidden rivers, they are two rivers in Paradise and the visible rivers are the Nile and the Euphrates.” (Bukhari 5.58.227) He saw sidrat al-muntaha , covered by the command of Allah, and its greatness, its butterflies of gold and various colors, surrounded by angels. (Ibn Kathir 9.572)
3 This hadith suggests that the lote tree was between the sixth and seventh heavens; however, the majority of hadith place the tree at the edge of the seventh heaven.
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As is the case with hadith in general, each account presents a slightly different version of the story. Read together, however, a narrative emerges: Mohammed is brought to the tree, which is described as having large leaves and fruit, and from which four rivers flow. At God’s command, the tree is “enveloped” or “enshrouded,” becoming so beautiful that “none amongst the creation has power to praise its beauty.” In several accounts, the tree is enshrouded by golden moths or butterflies. Having reviewed these primary sources, we may now turn to the key themes of the lote tree: its role as boundary-marker, its location, and Mohammed’s proximity thereto. III
Paradox and Proximity: The Lote Tree as Boundary-Marker
For Arabs at the time of Mohammad, the lote tree would have been a potent symbol. A desert shrub bearing small, sweet fruits, the sidrat or lote tree is from the zizyphus genus, and was probably of the spina christi or Christ’s Thorn variety, so-named because it is traditionally considered the plant from which Christ’s crown of thorns was made. 4 Crucially, the lote tree was commonly used to mark property lines in the Middle East, a tradition that continues to this day in regions of Palestine (Rippin 549). The boundary-marking property of the earthly lote tree intimates the heavenly tree’s metaphysical function. But what boundary exactly does the heavenly lote tree delineate? The qualiĀer of the tree al-muntaha has been translated to mean “beyond which none may pass,” “utmost extremity,” or “the furthest boundary.” In the Qur’anic commentary, the lote tree is generally interpreted as the end of the realm accessible to human knowledge and the beginning of the ineffable divine mystery. According to Yusuf Ali, for example, “The furthest Lote-tree marked the bounds of heavenly knowledge as revealed to men, beyond which neither angels nor men could pass” (1444). This conĀrms the hadith above that describes the lote tree as the terminal point of both human and angelic awareness, both the ceiling and container for “everything that ascends from the 4 Furthermore, the lote tree evokes the burning bush of Moses’ experience in Exodus 3:2, establishing a resonance between the revelation of Mohammed and the prophets Moses and Jesus.
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earth.” At the same time, this limit contains “everything that descends from above it” 5—i.e., from the divine—making it both boundary and meeting place of a two different forms of consciousness. 6 The lote tree is a threshold of divine consciousness, beyond which no created being may pass. Mohammed arrives at this threshold, however, and the entire episode at the zenith of his ascent unfolds in unparalleled proximity to this boundary. The notion of the lote tree as the boundary-marker is further reinforced by the Qur’anic description of its location. Al-Najm 53:7 begins “in the highest point on the horizon,” 7 indicating that the revelation of the lote tree occurs on another boundary: a celestial horizon. On earth, horizons represent the end of the land and the beginning of the sky. The imagery of a heavenly horizon reinforces the function of the lote tree as a boundary-marker: it represents the point of contact between the created heavenly and uncreated divine realms. Of course, to locate a Āxed, “highest point” on a horizon is impossible because it continually changes depending on one’s own location. Furthermore, horizons are optical illusions—they are perceived as continuous straight lines, but in actuality the edges of the earth (and presumably, the heavenly spheres of pre-modern cosmology) are round. The Qur’an speciĀ es, however, that the encounter takes place at the “highest point on the horizon,” thereby Āxing the lote tree in paradox. 8 The river imagery further adds to the idea of the lote tree as the place where opposites meet. According to the hadith, there are four rivers, two concealed (batiniyya) and two revealed (zahiriyya) (Reat 174). The Arabic terms describing these rivers are drawn from two of the most important names of God amongst the ninety-nine names: al-batin (the concealed) and al-zahir (the manifest). Like many of the names of God, these two form a holy pair, describing opposite attributes of God, whose reality encompasses them both. These attributes are also found elsewhere in the Qur’an to describe God, for example al-Mujaadalah
See Sahih Muslim above. The symbol of two earthly and two heavenly rivers flowing from the lote tree seems to support this, resonating with the metaphor of “meeting of two oceans” of Sura Ar-Rahman 55.19. 7 For the purposes of this paper, I am assuming that verses 53.7–11 are an account of the same events as 53.12–18. There is not a consensus among Qur’anic commentators on this point. For more, see Sells 177. 8 The well-known Qur’anic verse 41.53 (“We shall show them Our signs in the horizons”) also reinforces the meaning of horizon as a place of theophany. 5 6
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58:3: “He is the First and Last, the Manifest and Hidden, and He is the knower of All Things.” The language of batin and zahir thus reinforces the rivers’ source as a boundary between God’s manifest and unmanifest nature, that is, between the created and the uncreated. This contextualizes the qualiĀer al-muntaha, which means “beyond which no being may pass;” for no created thing can pass beyond the boundary to the uncreated. IV Nearness to God If the lote tree marks a celestial and metaphysical boundary, where was the Prophet Mohammed in relation to this threshold? The Qur’an describes Mohammed’s proximity to the tree before its transformation: While he was in the highest part of the horizon then he approached and came closer, And was at a distance of two bow-lengths or (even) nearer; so did (God) convey the inspiration to His servant conveyed what He (meant) to convey. (Al-Najm 53.7–11)
Here Mohammed is described as being at a distance of “two bowlengths” from God. Analyzing the language and symbolism of Mohammed’s “distance from” or “relation to” the threshold provides insight into the passage as a whole. The Arabic word for bow, qawas, comes from the verb “to bend,” “curve,” or “shoot,” which seems an unlikely metric for measuring distance. However, the circular property of a bow is not only intentional but reveals a host of possible interpretations, which elucidate the entire passage. In the material culture of seventh century Arabia, the pairing of drawn bows carried a particular meaning. According to the commentary of Ayatullah Yazdi, It was the custom among the Arabs that when they wanted to get into covenant among themselves, each of the consenting individuals used to join his bow with that of the other to show that both of them are united or bound by an agreement or they . . . simultaneously shoot their arrows in one and the same direction. (1582)
The distance of “two bows-length” thus evokes the covenantal relationship of human and God, recalling the primordial covenant of human and divine of the Day of Alastu (Al-Araf 7.126), when uncreated souls
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were offered the trust of witnessing God’s Lordship on earth. Mohammed is not only “near” to this primordial covenant, he is in fact within or inhabiting that space of that most intimate trust between God and man, and present to the agreement of humanity to take on the burden and grace of existence. 9 The “two-bows’ distance” has metaphysical as well as covenantal implications. Yusuf Ali writes that mystics have interpreted this verse as “two drawn bows, with their chords touching” (1444), thus forming a circle. This imagery is evocative of the soul’s journey, as illustrated by the two arcs in Āg. 1. The image of two arcs, one ascendant and the other descendant, forms a circle of divine emanation and return from primordial unity. 10 At the threshold of existence and non-existence, Mohammed’s experience at the lote tree recapitulates the procession and return of mystical cosmology. Thus from the description of “two bows-length” we have the notion of entering into a covenant with the Creator, and the theme of a circular return to the divine source. At this stage, Mohammed is on the boundary, with one foot in the hidden world and one foot in the manifest. From a mystical perspective, it is the “station” where creation both begins and ends, and the limit of human thought. Yet Mohammed somehow moves “nearer” to this threshold, beyond the opposing duality of what is hidden and manifest, created or uncreated. It is at that stage where the lote tree undergoes its magical transformation before the eyes of the Prophet. V
“Or Even Nearer”—Transcending the Boundary
The unique proximity of Mohammed to the divine is furthered in the Qur’anic verse: “And [he was] was at a distance of two bow-lengths or (even) nearer .” The close proximity and presence to a divine process
9 The covenant is recounted in Sura Al-Araf 7.172: “When thy Lord drew forth from the Children of Adam—from their loins—their descendants, and made them testify concerning themselves, (saying): ‘Am I not your Lord (who cherishes and sustains you)?’—They said: ‘Yea! We do testify!’ (This), lest ye should say on the Day of Judgment: ‘Of this we were never mindful.’ ” 10 Cf. Sura Al-Baqarah 2.28: “How can ye reject the faith in God? —seeing that ye were without life, and He gave you life; then will He cause you to die, and will again bring you to life; and again to Him will ye return.”
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Figure 1. “Divine Emanation and Return from Primordial Unity.” Reprinted with permission from Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 6.
has already been established with the imagery of two bows. Why then the addition of the phrase “or even nearer”? One interpretation comes from the twelfth-century SuĀ philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi, in his treatise The Universal Tree (Shajarat Al-Kawn). Ibn ‘Arabi writes: “Had he stopped at two bows’ length it would have been inferred that there was a place where the Lord was, and the only reason for His saying: ‘or nearer’ was to negate [the idea that He was in a] place” (156). According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the addition of the phrase “or nearer” serves to disorient the reader. God’s presence cannot be limited to a single location; how then can one become closer to something that is everywhere? The problem recalls the Hermetic maxim that “God is an inĀ nite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere” (see Copenhaver xlvii). This is a Qur’anic attempt to disorient us, says Ibn ‘Arabi—to thwart our mind’s inclination to localize and limit the divine. This is echoed by the commentary of Ayatullah Yazdi: It must be remembered that the expression of getting nearer used in this verse and in the preceding one does not at all mean in the sense of any space or any physical distance between God and the Holy Prophet.
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The nearness referred to here stand for the higher position of the Holy Prophet in the order of creation as the one the nearest to God. (1583)
Again, it is noted that “nearer” is not meant to be interpreted as a physical distance but as a spiritual state distinguishing Mohammed from the rest of creation. The notion of “nearness” as a mystical state in the context of the lote tree is discussed in the Encyclopedia of Sufi Symbolism by Javad Nurbakhsh. He describes the location of the Prophet in the following way: The prophet traversed the circumference of the circle of perfection, passing through the descendant and ascendant arcs, which together measure the length of two bows and reached the point of origin, of annihilation in God . . . such that no space remained between him and his Beloved. (121)
For the SuĀs, Mohammed’s transcending the realm of duality and into the place where “no space” remained between him and his beloved is the paradigm for the mystical quest. In this context, the lote tree represents the Ā nal limit before complete union is possible. It is the threshold that can only be crossed by abandoning the individuated self, ego, or intellect—only that which is uncreated within the human being may pass through the boundary. VI Dazzling
Concealment
Behold, the Lote-tree was shrouded (in mystery unspeakable!) (His) sight never swerved Nor did it go wrong! For truly did he see, of the Signs of his Lord, The Greatest! (Al-Najm 53.16–18)
We have in detail examined the “location” of the sidrat al-muntaha and seen that it has the speciĀc characteristics of paradox, proximity to God, and the notion of crossing a threshold, limit, or boundary. Now I want to turn to the question of what transpired after this proximity was attained; what did Mohammed see, that is described in both Qur’an and hadith as “of the Signs of his Lord, the Greatest”? We will begin with the accounts of the hadith as narrated by Mohammed. The tree is described in two stages: before and after being enshrouded. When Mohammed arrives at the edge of the seventh heaven, he is shown a tree with magniĀ cently large leaves and fruits. The illustration from Miraj-nameh, a Āfteenth-century Turkish
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rendition of the Prophet’s night journey, shows the tree “with branches of emerald and pearl, laden with fruit of all kinds” (color plate 19). The image is of a bountiful, life-giving tree similar to the paradisical tree of life, mentioned in the Qur’an. 11 What occurs next is speciĀ c to the lote tree, however: a divinely-initiated transformation. God commands the tree to be “enshrouded,” after which point “no creatures have the power to describe its beauty.” The hadith variably describe the tree as either becoming multicolored or covered with gold moths, butterflies, or angels. The etymology of the Qur’anic language provides insight into this mysterious transformation of the tree and the resulting experience of “inspiration.” The verb used in the Qur’an to describe the enshrouding, covering, or envelopin g ( ghashiya) also has the connotations of overcoming or overwhelming something with the intention to induce swooning (Kassis 475). There is a double-meaning of covering the object on the one hand, and on the other hand overwhelming whatever is before that object. The verse thus implies that both the lote tree and its viewer are transĀ gured. The etymology of the word sidrat, or lote tree, opens another vantage point into the mystical process of ghashiya. Interestingly, the normative word for tree in Arabic is shajarah, which is used in the Qur’an to describe both the blessed tree of paradise and the cursed tree of hell. Why, then, this other term for the lote tree of the boundary? The root of sidrat is sadira, which is a verb meaning “to be dazzled (eye)” or “having his eyes dazzled by a thing, so that he turns away his face from it” (Lane). If we include the shades of meaning suggested by the verbal form at the root of the noun sidr, the lote tree becomes “the dazzling thing beyond which none may pass.” The semantic Ā eld of the lote tree, sidrat, when associated with the verb ghashiya, evokes an experience of dazzling amazement that utterly overwhelms the capacity to witness. Paradoxically, the Qur’an repeats that Mohammed’s sight “never swerved” and that in fact “he did see, of the Signs of his Lord, the Greatest.” Thus some faculty of perception extended into what was hidden in order to perceive the theophany. Much like The Cloud of Unknowing of medieval Christian mysticism, the ultimate “With it We grow for you gardens of date-palms and vines: in them have ye abundant fruits: and of them ye eat (and have enjoyment),—Also a tree springing out of Mount Sinai, which produces oil, and relish for those who use it for food.” (Sura Al-Mu’minun 23.19–20). 11
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theophany occurs after the covering, or in this case overwhelming, of normal perception. VII Luminous
Theophany
Following the dazzling concealment of the lote tree, it is unclear whether Mohammed actually crosses the boundary into a new realm, or whether all sense of orientation terminates altogether—the subsequent experiences are only described in terms of light and flame. According to hadith, for example, the lote tree is enshrouded with golden winged creatures, aflame with the love of God. Likewise, after the tree’s transformation the pictorial narrative of Miraj-nameh shows Mohammed enveloped in exquisite Ā re as he “bows down to worship the Eternal” (color plate 20). 12 The image of heavenly flame evokes spiritual light, a crucial theme in Islamic mysticism that denotes divine presence. Hadith report that after the mi’raj, Mohammed’s companions asked him: “Have you seen your Lord?” There are two versions of the Prophet’s response: “How can I see Him since there was a light?” or “I only saw a light” (Muslim 1: 161). The Prophet’s response coheres with the description of God as light in Sura Al-Nur 24.53, known as the “light verse”: God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp (the lamp is a glass the glass as it were a glittering star) kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no Ā re touched it; Light upon Light; (God guides to His Light whom He will.) (Al-Nur 24.35; Koran Interpreted 366)
The whole of the night journey, therefore, leads the Prophet toward the experience of luminous theophany, toward a “light upon light”
12 With regards to light, it is also worth noting that the name of the aforementioned buraq, the mysterious creature that brought the Prophet to heaven, comes from the Arabic root for lightening.
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that could only be witnessed—with “eyes never swerving”—by passing an impassable boundary into the ineffable realm of divine mystery. VIII Conclusion It is my hope that the themes highlighted in this paper begin to articulate the contours and depth of meaning of the sidrat al-muntaha . In its most general sense, its themes of paradox, nearness, and illumination represent a paradigm of mystical union; at the same time, it is not a subject whose meaning can be apprehended, clearly deĀned, and explicated. The ascension to and beyond the lote tree of the boundary calls for an abandonment of reason and ultimately of self, crystallizing in narrative form the SuĀ process of fana’ fi‘llah, annihilation in God. In his book The Theme of Ascension in Mystical Writings , Qassim AlSamarrai writes: God cannot be apprehended [with reason] for it is soon blinded by diffusion of Divine light . . . This degree of annihilation caused by its being drawn near to the “Light of the heavens and earth” . . . is the highest degree of perception to which contingent being can attain. Here when the SuĀ sheds his limitations of humanity . . . the true light is revealed and illumination streams in on his soul. (Al-Samarrai 139)
This could easily be a description of Mohammed’s luminous experience beyond the lote tree. I believe, however, that the deepest signiĀ cance of the lote tree is not just a matter of mystical paradox, crossing holy boundaries, or annihilation of self. All these are the means to an incredibly profound human potential symbolized by the story of the night journey—total irradiation by divine light. This potential is, in SuĀ mysticism, a grace endowed uniquely upon the human being—a blessing and a burden established by the primordial covenant of Alastu. This is why accounts of the mi’raj make a point of emphasizing the angel Gabriel’s inability to follow Mohammed beyond the lote tree—only the human being is permitted that degree of intimacy. The poet and mystic Jalaluddin Rumi provides a playful account of this interaction: When Mohammed passed the Lote Tree and Gabriel’s observation post, station and limit, he said to Gabriel, “Come, fly after me!” He replied, “Go! Go! I am not your match!” Again he said, “Come, oh burner of veils! I have still not reached my zenith.”
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He replied, “Oh my sweet glory! If I fly beyond this limit, my wings will burn” . . . Oh Gabriel! Although you are noble and mighty, you are neither moth nor candle. When the flaming candle sends its invitation, the moth’s spirit does not hold back from being consumed! (qtd. in Chittick 222)
Mohammed’s chastisement of Gabriel for fearing to cross the lote tree of the boundary, represents a deep insight of SuĀsm. Although the angel exists to serve God, only the human being is created with the mothlike recklessness to trade existence itself for intimacy with “the light of heaven and earth.” Perhaps that explains the meaning of the golden moths enshrouding the lote tree—after all, what could be more precious than that religious passion needed to cross the furthest boundaries of self into what is unknown, unsafe, and divine? By representing the limit of human knowledge and the transformation available thereafter, the lote tree is an elegant allegory of the mystical journey. To my eyes, however, it is also an invitation. The symbolism pulls at the imagination and reminds the heart of what from a mystical perspective is its deepest fulĀ llment. Works Cited Armstrong, Karen. Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet. San Francisco CA: Harper, 1992. Bakhtiar, Laleh. Sufi: Expression of The Mystic Quest . London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Chittick, William. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1983. Copenhaver, Brian P. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English Translation with Notes and Introduction . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The Encyclopedia of Islam . Ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. 12 vols. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 1960–2005. The Holy Qur’an. Trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali. New York: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 1987. The Holy Qur’an, with Commentary by Ayatullah Agha Haji Mirza Mahdi Pooya Yazdi. Trans S. V. Mir Ahmed Ali. Elmhurst NY: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2004. Ibn ‘Arabi. Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Shajarat al-Kawn . Trans. Arthur Jeffrey. Lahore, Pakistan: Aziz Publishers, 1980. Ibn Kathir. Tafsir Ibn Kathir . 10 vols. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Darussalam Publishers, 2000. Kassis, Hanna. A Concordance of The Qur’an. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1983. The Koran Interpreted: A Translation. Trans. A. J. Arberry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
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Lane, Edward William. “Sidr.” An Arabic-English Lexicon . Vol. 4. Beirut, Lebanon: Librairie du Liban, 1980. 1331. Nurbakhsh, Javad. Symbolism of the Natural World . Vol. 4 of Sufi Symbolism: The Nurbakhsh Encyclopedia of Sufi Terminology. New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatuallahi Publications, 1990. Reat, N. R. “The Tree Symbol in Islam.” Studies in Comparative Religion 9 (1975): 164–82. Rippin, Andrew. “Sidrat al-muntaha.” Vol. 9 of The Encyclopedia of Islam . Ed. C. E. Bosworth et al. 549. al-Samarai, Qassim. The Theme of Ascension in Mystical Writings . Baghdad, Iraq: National Printing and Publishing Company, 1968. Sells, Michael. “Ascension.” Vol. 1 of The Encyclopedia of Islam . Ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. 177.
FOLLOWING SteĀen A. J. Stelzer Ā e American University in Cairo The following remarks are inspired by a particular phenomenon that occurs with remarkable obstinacy in Islamic hagiography. Besides being struck by it, my motivation for this essay lies in the thought that it marks an issue that is of larger concern—if there is something “larger” than the legends of saints—and points towards religious imagination in the widest sense. I hope to be able to explain what makes me use such a sweeping expression. But not without mentioning that the title of this paper could also be “Imagination and Obedience.” And not without telling a few stories. The first is taken from a famous collection of tales about Jalaluddin Rūmī, and it goes like this: Hājī Baktāsh was a man with the heart of a knower of God and had an illuminated interior. But he was not obedient [to the Prophet]. He sent his chief ( naqīb), Shaykh Eshāq, with several disciples to Mowlānā to ask: “What are you doing? What are you seeking? And what is the tumult you’ve stirred up in the world?” And this question was based on the fact that when all the great and small of the world became desirous of Mowlānā, and all the shaykhs, religious scholars and commanders delighted in his words, and many authority-revering disciples turned away from their formality-bound shaykhs to become bondsmen and disciples of this family which has attained reality and confirmed the truth, jealousy because of this stung those shaykhs in the extreme, and from every direction everyone said something out of envy and made a remark and voiced criticism. Then Hajī Baktāsh as well had said: “If you have found this is what is sought after, be quiet! But if you have not found it, what is this tumult you’ve stirred up in the world? And why have you caused mankind to look at you, and thrown so many people’s shops into confusion?” . . . It is said that when Shaykh Eshāq arrived before the door of the madrasa, it so happened that Mowlānā Rūmī was at that moment performingthe samā‘.1 Shaykh Eshāq kissed the threshold of the madrasa
1 Madrasa: literally, “school.” Here it refers to the place in which the samā, the ceremony of whirling, as well as, sohbāh, the “talks” characteristic for Sufi-teaching, may take place.
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and entered with absolute politeness and concentration ( then Mowlānā began to recite this ghazal:
hodūr). Just
“If you have no friend, why don’t you seek one? If you’ve attained the beloved, why not make merry? You sit in indolence, thinking: ‘This is a wonder!’ You’re a wonder for not desiring such a wonder.” . . . up to the end. This dervish lost his senses. He wrote down the ghazal and the date of the occasion. Then he departed. When he reached Hājī Baktāsh and described the case to him, including everything he had seen and heard, and presented him with the date of the occasion, Hājī Baktāsh said: “That was the very day that I beheld Mowlānā enter through the door like a fierce lion, and he said: ‘Oh your sister’s a whore! Our passionate excitement is from wedding festivities and merriment, not from burning and seeking.’ And he grabbed my throat firmly. I was afraid of dying. I lowered my head and sought forgiveness, and I displayed desperation and self-abasement. That moment he disappeared from my view. Now, oh my dervishes, his power and magnificence is of such an extent that it cannot be contained in the imagination of similitude ( methāl) of the likes ( amthāl) of us. It is only conceivable by following (emtethāl) the example ( methāl) of this essence-like (ma‘ni-methāl) apparition.” (Aflākī 263–65)
Like most of the stories told of Rūmī, or told by him, this one is a love story. I think the best way to comment on it, and to give it the drift one would like it to have, is by retelling it. I will, however, try to fish out only a few items: 1. The way in which Rūmī lives and practices Islam, or, at least, is seen to do so, provokes a conflict with its official ( rasmī), legalistic, form-bound representatives. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that Hajī Baktāsh, the eponymous founder of the BektashiSufi-Order, known even amongst Sufis as extremely “unorthodox,” joins the choir. To understand what moves someone who should be in complete agreement with Rūmī to be so upset and send a messenger to convey his grievance—or, in other words, to understand why he is moved by jealousy, and which particular kind moves him—one must pay close attention to the way he is portrayed: “Hājī Baktāsh was a man with the heart of a knower of God and had an illuminated interior. But he was not obedient [to the Prophet].” 2. The conflict between the two Shaykhs is portrayed as weaving around the motives of “seeking” and “attaining,” whereas it is really triggered by the issue of following. Hajī Baktāsh claims to be dis-
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turbed by the “noise” that Rūmī creates, while in reality the disturbance, or the jealousy, lies deeper. But to see that, he needs an encounter of, or rather in, imagination. 3. Hajī Baktāsh describes an encounter with Mowlānā Rūmī that is imaginary. This does not mean that it didn’t occur and he “merely” imagined it. It describes the quality of that meeting. Of particular interest in this case is that a written record—or Shaykh Eshāq’s ingenious idea to jot down the date he meets Rūmī, when he is about to faint (or before he faints, or after he fainted?)—allows one to temporally connect the two meetings, to date them, albeit each in a diĀ erent way, and thereby to bring two events into contact: a written, recorded time which makes one event acceptable to the mind, and another event that has no time and is given it only by contact with the former. The meeting of the two imaginary events is, thus, itself imaginary. 4. A second “fainting”—this time not a loss of consciousness on the side of the reporter, but the disappearance of the reported—leads to a description of Rūmī in the style of a grand conclusion. And it is important that it is formulated through a cascade of likenesses, a play of and on imaginations: “Now, oh my dervishes, his power and magnificence is of such an extent that it cannot be contained in the imagination of similitude ( methāl) of the likes of us ( amthāl). It is only conceivable by following ( emtethāl) the example ( methāl) of this essence-like apparition ( ma‘ni-methāl).” The imaginary or—as one might say in order to stay closer to the sources—“matters of likeness” ( mithl) play an important role in Islam as much as in any other religion. The Qur’an informs us repeatedly of “Allah striking similitudes for men” (Qur’an 24:35) [ wa yadribullahu-l amthāla li-l nās ], to make them think or understand. Islamic cosmology developed a hierarchy of “worlds” in which the “world of likeness,” or “the world of the Image” ( ‘ālam al-mithāl ) functions as an intermediary world between the sensory ( al-mulk) and the suprasensory (al-malakūt) worlds, or, as it is expressed in classical scholastic terms, between the world of the body and the world of the spirit. This mediating function is also formulated in an eschatological perspective, where the world of the barzakh, or “in-between” world, is said to be a world that holds apart and connects the nether world ( al dunya) and the “next world” ( al ākhira).
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All of this is, of course, expressed in more or less similar terms in other religions and has found its way through various translations and variations into the languages of scholastic philosophy and its inheritors. It is, therefore, not so remarkable. What makes it interesting is the discovery of a particular scholar of Islamic thought, Henry Corbin, who noticed that the “world of the image, the mundus imaginalis,” as he called it, played a role in Islamic cosmology and in the recitals of the journeys of spiritual initiation which made it difficult to relegate to the secondary rank of the “merely imaginary,” the “fantastic,” and demanded, instead, full appreciation as “a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition.” 2 This concept of the “imaginal,” as he called it, stood for him in stark contrast to a concept of the “imaginary” which actually implied a “degradation of the image,” and which he localized in the development of Western thought. It led him to paint the frightening picture of a world in which, due to a lack of sequencing “the plurality of universes in ascensional order, our Imagination will remain unbalanced, [and] its recurrent conjunctions with the will to power will be an endless source of horrors. We will be continually searching for a new discipline of the Imagination, and we will have great difficulty in finding it as long as we persist in seeing in it only a certain way of keeping our distance with regard to what we call the real, and in order to exert an influence on that real” (Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis”). These words deserve close examination, and, judging by the number of excellent scholars of Ibn ‘Arabi which have appeared in the wake of Corbin’s work, they have found extensive consideration. Let me, in passing, only call attention to Corbin’s connecting the necessity for searching—here, searching for ever new “disciplines of Imagination”— with the motive of distance. Perhaps, there will be reason to come back to it. To return to Hajī Baktāsh, who is so worried, or so jealous, about the upheaval Rūmī causes amongst jurists and Sufis, and even amongst Sufis like himself, Hajī Baktāsh has his moments of imagination as well: first, Rūmī wasn’t there where he saw him. The written record 2
Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis.” See also Corbin, Creative Imagination.
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of his messenger implied that he was somewhere else, right in front of Shaykh Eshāq. But, other than having this on record, how can Shaykh Eshāq be sure that what he saw wasn’t an apparition? And why couldn’t Rūmī have been in both places at the same time? Hadn’t one heard about the karamāt al awliya’, the miracles of the Friends of God? Are not the words he hears Rūmī recite, “You sit in indolence, thinking: ‘This is a wonder! / You’re a wonder for not desiring such a wonder,’” (also) addressed to him? For Hajī Baktāsh, Rūmī appears; he appears in a likeness ( mithl), “like a fierce lion.” Yet it is not quite correct to say that he appears in the imagination, because the image is at best an image at the limit. “It cannot be contained in the imagination.” Not in any imagination, that is to say. Or, should there be more than one, then not in a particular imagination, which is “the imagination of the similitude ( methāl) of the likes of us ( amthāl).” “It is only conceivable by following ( emtethāl) the example (methāl) of this essence-like apparition ( ma‘nī-methāl).” The interpretation of this statement is as difficult as its translation. It is, therefore, advisable to hold on to the Sufi-rule to keep one’s eyes on one’s feet. First: it seems necessary to distinguish between a) limited or limitable and b) unlimitable imagination. This distinction is based on the idea that the perception of an image, or, more correctly, its imagination, is an event that involves a tri-partite structure of “likenesses.” In other words, the seer, the seeing, and the seen are likenesses, 3 and an image is, therefore, actually only seen when these three are “alike,” i.e., when they are consonant with one another. In the case of Rūmī’s likeness, which Hajī Baktāsh calls ma‘nī-methāl, literally, “meaninglike apparition,” there is something that explodes this containment. Consequently, either Shaykh Eshāq loses his consciousness in front of it, or Hajī Baktāsh, having fled from his fear of dying into a display of self-nihilating, is left by the image. In this sense, the formulation he gives us to chew on could be said to be an attempt to contain what cannot be contained. As he says, “it is only conceivable” in such and such a way. 3 Expressed with more clarity by Rūmī: “Sayyid Burhān al-Dīn was teaching. In the midst of his words a fool said: ‘We need words without any analogies.’ He replied: ‘Come without analogy! Then you will hear words without analogy.’ After all, you are an analogy of your self; you are not this” (qtd. in Chittick, Path of Love 276). Chittick translates bīmisāl, from the Arabic ‘ mithāl’, i.e., likeness, as “analogy.”
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Second: “unlimitable imagination” does not refer to a realm beyond imagination. All the classic accounts of imagination stress its width, the “stretch” of imagination, or, as one might say, its “infinite” elasticity.4 Therefore, my rather awkward and quite dispensable formulation is used here to point not to a further reach of imagination but to another kind. And we call it “imagination” only because the word that Aflaki’s translator translates as “following” is emtethāl which is based on the same root as all the other “likenesses,” namely, mathala. Third: we are left, for the time being, with two tasks—to read a few stories in which someone makes an issue out of “following” or “not following” and to wonder how Aflākī’s translator reached “following” from a form of imagining. In this way, we would be slowly moving towards our second title: “imagination and obedience.” The first instance of a lack of obedience is Hajī Baktāsh himself. He is said to not obey the Prophet, despite the important fact that he “was a man with the heart of a knower of God and had an illuminated interior.” Similarly, one of the disciples of Rūmī’s father, called Khvāja Faqīh Ahmad, is described as performing miracles and speaking of invisible matters. [But] he was not obedient [to the Prophet] . . . And Mowlānā said: “He is not someone who follows a model. A sincere person who follows a model is someone who imitates his model by way of obedience in every respect. This man is a solitary horseman who has rescued his carpet from the whirlpool and obtained deliverance. In the invisible realm these persons are called people of laxity. We shall see what the divine will ordains and how He treats them.” (Aflākī 288–89)
In the writings of Shams-i Tabrizi, Rūmī’s beloved companion and “awakener,” we hear of a Shaykh Mohammad who “would bow and prostrate in prayer and say: ‘I am the servant of the Shari‘a -minded.’ But he did not follow [the Prophet].” This Shaykh was even the cause for a dispute about the nature of following: “Someone said: ‘He was the essence of following ( motāba‘at).’ I said, ‘No, he did not follow’ ” (Maqālāt-e Shams, qtd. in Lewis 150). To be able to assess the weight of these remarks and to understand why a pure heart and the ability to see things inaccessible to common sight—which certainly are essential characteristics of the spiritual traveler and qualify him for high degrees of imagination—are not 4
See, for instance, Ibn ‘Arabi.
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everything and not even the most important provisions on the path to God, we have to understand the role that the sequela prophetae, the following of the Prophet, played in Islam for many centuries. 5 Claude Addas summarizes this very well when, in a few lines devoted to Ibn ‘Arabi’s love of the Prophet of Islam, she points out “that in the framework of the Islamic tradition, it is the Prophet Mohammad—and he alone—who constitutes the exemplum, the infallible model that the pilgrim of God should imitate to the highest degree” (Addas). The motive of the model ( mithāl), the image, or imagination indicated in these words is further unfolded in her remarks about the “Perfect Man” who, due to the fact that he realizes the attribute of servanthood most completely and, thus, pays fullest due to Lordship, is the mithl, the “likeness” of God in this lower world. Moreover, he is himself only the “substitute” ( nā’ib) of the Prophet who, due to his unsurpassable perfection, alone holds this prerogative . . . In other words, the Prophet is the ultimate barzakh, the “isthmus” where higher and lower coincide; being in the image of God who describes Himself as “the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden” (Qur’an 57:3) and for whom he is the “supreme receptacle” ( al-majlā al-a‘zam), he is both this and that, and yet neither this nor that, hence his sublime perfection. (Addas)
The Prophet is thus the locus of imagination. Any image would pass through him or through his imagination and issue from them, and it is understandable why the religious traveler should keep his attention fixed on him. But, at the same time, the description given of him as a barzakh, an “isthmus,” applies to all creatures who are, as we say, endowed with imagination, that is, first of all to all human beings. His excellence, therefore, cannot reside in imagination, or not alone in it. Regarding his humanity which is as plain and common as any other human being’s, his rank seems rather to be established through the fact that he is told of it and that it is given to him as a likeness: “Say: ‘I am only a mortal the like of you . . .’ ” (Qur’an 18:110) [Qul innamā ana basharun mithlukum]. This oĀer, or order, would, of course, give a particular taste to a “mortality” which is, nonetheless, thoroughly
We use the past tense here, not because the lively sense for this following of the Prophet has disappeared altogether from the Muslim world. It still exists, albeit always in danger of being attacked and thus less obviously, less noticeably than throughout most of the previous centuries of Islam’s history. 5
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like any other. In a way, it asks someone to accept himself as a human being, and to accept that likeness as it is given. The excellence of the Prophet and the reason for our Shaykhs’ insistence on obeying and following him lies in the degree to which he accepts that order, that is, in his obedience. And it lies in the fact that this obedience becomes, thereby, the model ( mithāl). What we point to when we say “Prophet” is the most excellent image, which is the image of the servant, 6 that is, “the one whose face is never turned away from his Lord.” Ibn ‘Arabi described imagination as one of three “talismans” which (together with reflection and habit) rule over man with an iron fist. He calls reflection “the most intractable ruling power in the cosmos” and says of imagination that “God gave it the power to rule over meanings (ma‘anī ) . . . [And] no meaning is able to hold itself back from imagination” (qtd. in Chittick, Path of Knowledge 184). Such words imply that imagination—the gift of love of a God who loves to be known, who created creation to that purpose, and who lowers himself to His creatures so that they can know Him “on their own terms” 7—has quite a sharp edge. There is not only an endless shower of more or less enchanting images that we, other shadows, are invited to watch with bliss or horror, with fascination or boredom. There is also a nagging question, renewed with each image, reminding us of our insignificance. Or, to put it in religious terms, reminding us of the fact that our existence has been called out of non-existence, and that, for all of its exuberance, it has never left non-existence behind and is, therefore, “imaginary.” As a reaction, from fear of losing one’s “carpet in the whirlpool,” it would be understandable if we tried to appropriate the images, and, maybe, this unwillingness with image, this ensuing discrepancy, is what we call “me,” or “mine,” or “my image,” “my imagination.” After all, what does saying “this is like that” imply but discrepancy?
Usually called “The Muhammadan Reality” ( al-haqīqāh al-muhammadiyyah). “The sincere lover is he who passes into the attributes of the beloved, not he who brings the beloved down to his own attributes. Do you not see that the Real, when he loved us, descended to us in His hidden gentleness by means of that which corresponds (munāsaba) to us and above which His eminence and greatness are high exalted?” (Ibn al-‘Arabi, qtd. in Chittick, Path of Knowledge 72). 6 7
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Then, wherein does the excellence of the Prophet, who is a human being like you, consist? In that, in the midst of images and imaginations, his face is turned not towards them, but towards Allah. He sees, but his seeing is held in the gaze of the divine. Image-wise, one might say he looks with all images at nothing and no one. But in that, he gives imagination its due, and honors its Creator. For, whoever is turned towards Him, He will show them to themselves. And whoever is turned away from Him, though facing a million things, will see nothing. But it won’t show. It appears that obedience is not just a corollary to imagination but one of its constituents. This is especially relevant when we ascribe to it the capacity to bridge the world of “meanings” ( ma‘ānī) and the world of senses, and to give us news of that which is “beyond us.” As much as we would like to let go of transcendence and put in its place what Corbin called “another new discipline of Imagination” to end all need for the transcendent—because we grew so tired of it, or just find it more “realistic”—we should see that “likeness without transcendence” is meaning-less. It is for this reason that imagination requires obedience. And it is for this reason that our Shaykhs are so keen on obedience to the Prophet. As usual, Rūmī describes this in clear and beautiful words: What does not come into man’s imagination is called a “gift” because whatever passes through his imagination is in proportion to his aspiration and his worth. However, God’s gift is in proportion to God’s worth. Therefore, that gift is that which is suitable to God, not what is suitable to the Imagination or ambition of God’s servant. “What no eye has seen or ear heard nor has occurred to the mind of man”—that is, no matter how much eyes have seen, ears heard, or minds conceived the gift you expect of Me, My gift is above and beyond all that. (Rūmī 138)
In other words, imagination requires obedience to be sincere with itself. Without it both the “nearest” and the “farthest” image will be only my own image. And I will not know it. Or, as Rūmī’s companion, Shams al-Tabrīzī, put it: The world of God is very great and spacious. You’ve put it in a box: “It’s only this that my intellect perceives.” So, you’ve confined the Creator of the intellect inside the intellect. What you imagine is not the Prophet—that’s your Prophet, not God’s Prophet. You’ve read your own picture—read the Companion’s picture. You’ve read your own page— read the Companion’s page! (Shams-i Tabrizi 131)
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We are all familiar with obedience based on force, and we have learned to resent, in the name of the mature use of reason, those religious laws that ask us to obey on the ground of promises of reward and punishment. Often this is a way to avoid being bound to anything, and we eagerly choose it because we have managed to become blind to the benefits of binding. Whoever understands that the whirlpool mentioned above is not just a nice image, or to put it diĀ erently, is really an image, will understand even the reason to ask for such obedience. But the obedience mentioned in our stories is of another kind, and I wonder if it can be called by another name. As the author of “The Poem of the Cloak,” a famous poem in praise of the Prophet, writes: Even those at his side could not keep up with him . . . How can slumberous souls in this world grasp his reality Distracted as they are by the strength of their Dreams? 8
Maybe, then, the name we are looking for is a name that makes, in Corbin’s words, “keeping our distance with regard to what we call real” difficult. Maybe, obedience to the Prophet, and obedience to any of the spiritual guides who, as Rūmī says, are “the dust on the path of Muhammad,” can be called obedience out of love. Though I don’t know if one can imagine such obedience. However, there are many stories that illustrate it. Here is one: They report that Abu Yazid didn’t eat Persian melon. He said, “I have not come to know how the Prophet ate Persian melon.” I mean that following has a form and a meaning. He preserved the form of the following. So why did he ruin the reality of following and the meaning of following? For Muhammad said, “ Glory be to You! We have not worshipped You as You should be worshipped! ” Abu Yazid said: “ Glory be to me! How magnificent is my status! ” If anyone supposes that his state was stronger than that of Muhammad, he is very stupid and ignorant. (Burda 82)
Abu Yazid al-Bistāmī, “The Sultan of Knowers,” one of the greatest Friends of God, cannot be blamed for neglecting obedience to the Prophet. To the contrary, he follows him in the smallest detail. He eats what the Prophet ate, sleeps as the Prophet slept, walks as he walked, deals with others as he did. This is called “following the Prophet’s sunnāh.” And, although Abu Yazīd does not explain to us why he 8 Burda 12–13. What Yusuf translates as “those at his side” is, more literally, “those near him or far” ( al-qurbi wa al-bu‘di minhu ).
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acted the way he did, we can take it as a sure proof of the enormous role such following played in this religion and perhaps, with the help of our previous remarks, understand its purpose. Yet even Abu Yazīd does not escape the ever-critical eyes of Shams. Strictly speaking, it is not legally required to follow the Prophet’s ways in such detail. If he does, then that must be an expression of his love of the Prophet. Is such following not loud enough to silence all critical minds? Yet Shams is impervious. For him, Abu Yazid did not just neglect something in his obedience, no, he ruined the meaning of following! Why and how? Because in a moment of ecstasy he said, “Glory be to Me!” We must understand: Shams does not blame him for losing his self-control and for allowing these words that should be only said by Allah Himself “to fall out of his mouth.” This could be an expression of his love. But he blames him because the Prophet, who is the “best example” and closer than anyone to Allah, had pronounced a glorification of Allah by saying, “Glory be to You!” To say in such closeness, such intimacy, close to the One who says “We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16) [ Wa nahnu aqrab ilayhi min habli ’l-warīd], to say to the One who is closer to you than you are to yourself, to say “You,” “Glory be to You”— that is the most perfect expression of servanthood, of obedience, of worship. Who followed the Prophet, not just in form, but in reality, would obey with such obedience. The Arabic word used for it in Hajī Baktāsh’s summary of his experience with the “fiery lion” is imtithāl. It is not as commonly used as ittibā. The dictionaries tell us that the latter denotes “following when being ordered, or forced,” and it always contains an element of resistance that is to be overcome. The former denotes “gladly following,” or, as it is put, rather awkwardly, but very tellingly, “polite obedience.”9 Really following the Prophet would then be like being gently pulled into his likeness, in such a way that there is no telling who pulls and who follows. Or, if one were allowed to say so, it would be like inmagination.
Imtithāl, “polite obedience,” is oĀ ered to parents as a choice when naming their newborns. Most of them have given it to a baby girl, probably because that is what they find most desirable in a little female. I take it as encouragement to my attempts to understand the character of obedience to the Prophet. 9
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But these are still likenesses—some more elegant, some rather clumsy. In the end, I would rather send you oĀ , with a full turn of face, on another round. So consider: When we are given knowledge by the Prophets, we cannot call that imagination. Because they speak to each human being in accordance with his or her understanding. So there is no need to say that something is like this or that. We can accept it the way it comes. We believe and act .
Works Cited Addas, Claude. “The Experience and Doctrine of Love in Ibn ‘Arabī.” Trans. Cecilia Twinch. Symposium. Worcester College, Oxford. 4–6 May 2002. The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. 9 Oct. 2007 . Aflākī, Shams al-Dīn Ahmad-e. Ā e Feats of the Knowers of God [Manāqeb al-ārefīn] . Trans. John O’Kane. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Ā e Burda of Al-Busiri: Ā e Poem of the Cloak . Trans. Hamza Yusuf. Essex, England: Sandala, 2002. Chittick, William. Ā e Sufi Path of Knowledge . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989. ———. Ā e Sufi Path of Love . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1983. Corbin,Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. ———. “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.” 9 Oct. 2007 . Lewis, Franklin D. Rūmī: Past and Present, East and West . Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications, 2003. Rūmī, Jalaluddin. Signs of the Unseen . Trans. William M. Thackston, Jr. Boston MA: Shambhala, 1999. Shams-i Tabrizi. Me and Rūmī: Ā e Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi . Trans. W. Chittick. Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2004.
2. Buddhist OĀerings
KNOWING THE HEART SŪTRA BY HEART Joseph S. O’leary Sophia University, Tokyo At one point in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the repentant Stephen Dedalus “prays” by reciting a paragraph of Newman. He shows admirable resourcefulness in having learnt by heart a text that touches his heart and that he can recite from the heart. For busy modern people, hanging on by the skin of their teeth to some semblance of a spiritual life, to have learnt by heart a number of such texts is a precious resource—be they psalms, hymns, the Memorare, the Suscipe, the Veni Creator , the Veni Sancte Spiritus , or excerpts from spiritual classics.1 Words lodged in the mind, so that they become part of the very texture of the mind, have a latent virtue ready for deployment in the moment of need; they shed their gracious perfume when one turns them over in rumination, and on occasion they may spark a dazzling epiphany. Religion cannot Āourish without a rich stock of such words. A text that many Buddhists know by heart is the Heart Sūtra. As a concentrated summary of the doctrine of Emptiness ( śūnyatā) that is the distinctive foundational teaching of Mahāyāna [Greater Vehicle] Buddhism, this short text—only 280 or so syllables in the widely used Chinese translation from the original Sanskrit—is a package of spiritual and intellectual dynamite. The title refers to the hrdaya—“heart” or “essence”—of Perfect Wisdom. The sūtra distills the essence of its predecessors, the Prajñāpāramitā [ Perfection of Wisdom ] Sūtras in eight thousand, twenty-five thousand, and one hundred thousand lines.2 It lends itself to analytical unpacking, and has been a favorite
1 The spiritual and pastoral crisis of Catholicism has to do with the paucity of such resources, as seen in the lack of memorable scriptural translations, the failure to provide the faithful with a Prayer Book, and above all the sawdust of committeegenerated liturgical language, such as the new ICEL texts soon to be imposed on a disempowered Church. 2 “According to Indian psychology, the heart is where the consciousnesses that pervade the body gather. In the same way, all of the meanings of the vast, intermediate, and brief mother sūtras are gathered in this small sūtra” (Lopez 30).
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stalking-horse for learned commentators in India, China, Tibet, and Japan, who have often read into its dicta the concerns of their own period and culture. But the text has also been handled, recited, chanted, copied by devotees over the centuries. It has become a prayer carried in the heart of the peoples who used it. Christians and post-Christian Westerners who are drawn by the intellectual impact of the Perfection of Wisdom tradition, and of the Madhyamaka philosophy built upon it by Nāgārjuna and his commentators from the second century on, may be tempted to slight the human, social context of the reception of these texts. Little is known about this, and the current trend is to present Mahāyāna as a peripheral and “very limited minority movement that received almost no popular support,” 3 with little inĀuence on Indian Buddhism in the first five centuries CE. But there is something missing in this picture. The very abundance and diversity of the Mahāyāna sūtras, with their slow growth out of standard Buddhism toward a set of original emphases, 4 along with the high philosophical sophistication of the work of Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Asanga, and Vasubandhu in the second to fourth centuries, amply attest a thriving and self-confident religious movement, even if it did not quite carry all before it as previous scholarship tended to imagine. Christians who learn the Heart Sūtra by heart are thus not merely embracing a set of ideas but are taking a step towards a heart-knowledge of that alien yet insistently appealing tradition we call Buddhism, striking up acquaintance with the cultures and peoples amid which this little text forged its way. (Though faithfully translated, the gulf between Sanskrit and Chinese is such that the respective versions belong to different worlds.) The quest to draw on Buddhist strategies for a renewal of Christian theology will be a stilted and disembodied exercise if it is confined to the level of ideas. Just as Christian categories are rooted in the densely human and historical world of Scripture, and take their hue from the successive languages and cultures in which they were articulated, so the complexion of Buddhist terms cannot be appreciated without reference to what Āeshes them out—their enact-
Schopen 264. Schopen is strongly criticized in Huntington, Jr. For a glimpse of the complex compositional history, see Rawlinson in Lancaster, and the other essays in that volume. 3 4
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ment in lay and monastic lives over millennia and their pervasive presence in Asian art and literature. I
The Blessings of Emptiness
The Heart Sūtra spells out the teaching that all things are devoid of substantial being or identity by negating a list of scholastic categories from the Abhidharma treatises that form the third “basket” of the early Buddhist scriptural canon: Where there is emptiness there is neither form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness [the five skandhas or heaps that make up what we wrongly call the self ], no eye, or ear, or nose, or tongue, or body, or mind [the six senses], no form, nor sound, nor smell, nor taste, nor touchable, nor object of mind [the six sense-objects], no sight organ element, etc. until we come to, no mind-consciousness element [the six sense-faculties]; there is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, etc. until we come to, there is no decay and death, nor extinction of decay and death [the twelvefold chain of dependent origination and its extinction]; there is no suffering, nor origination, nor stopping, nor path [the Four Noble Truths]; there is no cognition, no attainment and no non-attainment. 5
Emptiness applies right across the board, and not even the most hallowed categories are spared. Actually there is little to say about emptiness as such; an extensive discourse on emptiness can only take the form of declarations that a long list of items are empty, and the same is true of discourse on other such ultimate or nirvanic realities as “inconceivable liberation” (see the Vimalakīrti Sūtra , sec. 5). This monotony can be relieved only by imaginative dramatization, as in the Vimalakīrti, or by descent to more practical discussion of the virtues of a bodhisattva. The Madhyamaka thinkers flesh out the declaration of emptiness in subtle dialectic, as they overturn the claims of all candidates to substantial being, and they often devote the best of their efforts to upholding the conventional validity of worldly objects and categories once their fundamental insubstantiality has been shown. The Heart Sūtra says all there is to be said, directly, about emptiness; its brevity corresponds well to the essence of the doctrine.
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Translation from Conze, Perfect Wisdom.
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The current situation of Christian faith makes imperative an opening of mind and heart to the Mahāyāna conviction that all is empty of substantial being; that language and religions are radically conventional, Āimsy constructions to be handled skillfully and discreetly in pursuit of wisdom; and that wisdom itself is not at all a matter of drop-dead stunning theophanies or detailed blueprints such as fundamentalists crave, but something that intrinsically shies away from definitive formulation. The enclave of biblical studies and European theology has become stiĀing, and is poisoned by bad-tempered disputes, yet the force of habit keeps us from opening the window to the luminous perspectives of our sister religion, in which the delusions of an imperfectly focused dogmatic tradition can be serenely analyzed and overcome, and the core message of Scripture allowed to resonate anew in a purified, disencumbered, and demystified form.6 The idea is not to replace Christian foundationalism with Buddhist foundationalism but to seek a Āexibility of thought suited to the crisis of foundations or “withdrawal of origins” with which contemporary religious thought is obliged to live. 7 Could theology adopt the sūtra’s rhetoric and place all the Christian categories under erasure in the same way: “there is no God, no Incarnation, no Church, no sacraments, no sin, no judgment, no forgiveness, no atonement, no grace, no holiness”? Buddhism does not seem to have the notion of blasphemy, and even shocking Zen utterances such as “If you meet the Buddha, slay the Buddha” do not prompt an outcry from defenders of orthodoxy. It is understood that this iconoclastic attitude is not a destructive nihilism but a way of enacting freedom from “attachment to views.” There are similar currents in Christianity in the tradition of negative theology, which points to the mystery of the divine by denying all human categories as infinitely inadequate. The critique of the central religious institution of sacrifice by the Prophets, the Pauline opposition of “the Spirit that gives life” and “the letter that kills” (2 Cor. 3:6), or the way that Jesus deconstructs the adulation of his worshippers (“Why do you call me good? ” [Mark 10:18]), indicate a strong iconoclastic dynamic within Scripture. Christians know how words John P. Keenan has been a pioneering explorer of this space, and I hope he pulls out all the stops in his forthcoming Christian Commentary on the Heart Sūtra in Catherine Cornille’s series, Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Classics. 7 See my forthcoming study, L’art du jugement en théologie . 6
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grow stale and have to be renewed by contact with the realities to which they refer, so that one must shake off reliance on words as a form of spiritual bondage. Put quotation marks around each of the negated terms above—“God,” “Incarnation,” “Church”—and the value of such negation as breaking with reliance on words will be apparent. It could also be of value in pointing to the limits of a Greek ontology of substance as the vehicle of doctrinal articulation. Finally, the instincts of modern atheism and agnosticism cannot just be bluntly repressed; they must be brought within the household of faith by being assumed and purified. In its affirmations, faith must be tempered by long acquaintance with the negations that it ultimately overcomes. The negations of atheism have a valid aspect, in that they highlight objectionable or simply incredible aspects of dogma and force us to rethink them. If Hegel has a lesson for Christians, it is that they should take the negative on board, under the sign of the Cross. This may be done most serenely and comprehensively through embracing the gracious Emptiness embodied in Buddhism. 8 II
The Wisdom of Non-Duality
The puzzle, surfacing here, and well known to Buddhists, of how to wield the sword of emptiness skillfully is one that Buddhist-Christian theologians will wrestle with for a long time. One thing that Buddhism insists on is that the sword of emptiness must be wielded compassionately, with the liberation of suffering beings kept always in view. Compassion and intellectual radicalism are unlikely yoke-fellows, yet for Buddhism the ultimate refinement of wisdom is that it allows itself to be guided by the heart toward its healing application. To bring a “hermeneutics of the heart” to the drastic negations of Mahāyāna Buddhism may entail that one hear them from the very start in the key of compassion. These negations are meant to heal us of fixation and delusion; they are a medicine for psychic scars. If we descend into the “cave of the heart” and cultivate what Heidegger calls Stimmung, the attunement of mind-heart to what is manifesting itself, if we under-
A key work on the blessings of Emptiness as a homeopathic cure for contemporary nihilism remains Nishitani. The translator, Jan Van Bragt, recently deceased, was a key figure in Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan, which he pursued in the key of friendship, of an encounter from heart to heart. 8
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take a contemplative and acoustic thinking that takes its cue from the words of the text when they are heard “as one hears in the heart” ( sicut auditur in corde [Augustine, Confessions 7.16]), then we will hear the sūtra’s negations as Buddhists hear them, as the cutting of the chain that binds us, link by link, and the restoration of our spiritual freedom. The sūtra touches us first not as an edifying text, and not with the personal devotional warmth that characterizes the Christian prayers I mentioned at the start. Rather it produces a sense of exhilaration, as it demolishes one rigid mindset after another. The first target of this deconstruction is the self. Or rather, the self has already been decomposed into the five heaps (skandhas), and now these heaps are further dismantled by the insight that they are empty of substantial identity: “The Holy Lord and Bodhisattva . . . looked down from on high, He beheld but five heaps, and he saw that in their own-being they were empty.” The highest vision of the earlier Buddhism was the realization that all the dependently-originated factors of our experience—the elements of our material being, our volitional and emotional impulses, consciousness itself—are such that they offer no place where the notion of an ego can lodge. Close inspection reveals an ongoing life-process at no point stabilized by the imposition of an unchanging personal identity. Rather, our fixation on such an identity blocks our access to the phenomenological realities of existence. Early Buddhist texts already anticipate the Mahāyāna doctrine that not only the human being, but everything whatever, lacks a substantial identity. In a sense there is nothing new about the Mahāyāna declarations, just as there is nothing new about Jesus’ commandment of love in respect to earlier Jewish tradition; in both cases we have a delayed explosion as the full implications of an older teaching are realized or taken to heart. Western thinkers have done their share to relativize or pulverize the ego—from Hume through F. H. Bradley, Mach, Mauthner, Musil, Sartre, Lacan, Beckett. Such thinkers offer an extremely useful lead-in to Buddhism for the Western student. But does their dismantling of ego issue in a coldly resigned skeptical empiricism, or in joyful liberation and delicate compassion? Christians have sometimes tended to react to the Buddhist teaching of non-self with a heavily personal emphasis, or else have immediately exploited it for inĀated theological speculation about divine self-emptying ( kenosis). Against the latter tendencies, we should tell ourselves that the Buddhist teaching of non-self has no field of application outside present empirical reality, where it
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functions as a sword cutting off delusion and freeing one to appreciate the reality of phenomena that arise and pass away. The central passage of the sūtra is the following: Form is emptiness, and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, nor does form differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.
Like many profound dicta, these words, familiar though they are to East Asian ears, will always retain a residual opacity, teasing the mind like a kōan. They are words to be kept in the heart, where their meaning can come into focus over time in different ways. We may brood on the riddles presented: Phenomena are empty of own-being—hence form is empty—but why is form emptiness—or emptiness form? What does “not differ from” add to “is”? What does “whatever is emptiness, that is form” add to the previous two statements? “The same is true . . .” implies that we can say not only that “feeling is emptiness,” “perception is emptiness,” etc. but also “emptiness is feeling,” “emptiness is perception,” “emptiness is impulse,” and “emptiness is consciousness.” Emptiness is all phenomena, with whichever of the five skandhas they are associated; and all phenomena are emptiness. Should we take it that empty reality, the thusness (tathatā) of things, is forever the same, but that our understanding of it is as various as the myriad phenomena that offer points of departure for grasping it?9 Of course such exegetical and speculative puzzling risks missing the point of the text. We must let the text act on us at the existential level, as it dislodges our attachment to each of the five heaps as if they were solid and substantial, and at the same time corrects an attachment to emptiness itself that would miss the way the five heaps serve as its conventional vehicle. The text thus guides us to the middle path between the extremes of substantialism (śāsvata-vāda) and nihilism ( uccheda-vāda). According to a sober, minimalist interpretation found in the Indian commentators, “form is emptiness in the sense that emptiness is the final nature of form . . . emptiness is form in that emptiness is not to be
9 “If, for instance, you take the statement that ‘X is emptiness and the very emptiness is X,’ then the version in 100,000 lines laboriously applies this principle to about 200 items, beginning with form, and ending with the dharmas, or attributes, which are characteristic of a Buddha” (Conze, The Prajñāpāramitā Literature 10).
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discovered apart from form” (Lopez 72). In one version of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra eighteen forms of emptiness are distinguished. Suzuki’s pregnant comments on these indicate the radical edge of the teaching: “Existence is sometimes divided into Samskrita and Asamskrita, sometimes into inner and outer, sometimes into the five Skandhas, etc., according to points of view necessitated by course of reasoning. All these distinctions are, however, only relative and have no corresponding objectivity, and are, therefore, all empty” (Suzuki 259). The sameness and simplicity of emptiness can be approached from different respects, different conventional perspectives in which emptiness comes to light. In each case the discovery of emptiness entails a discrediting of the very oppositions and categorizations whence the search was launched. This permits a multitude of subtle deconstructive discourses in which conventionality is brought to the realization of its own incoherence, while yet remaining indispensable for action and communication and as a salvific skillful means. The ultimate sameness (samatā) of empty reality reduces every “this and that” of our experience to a surface discrimination, without deep roots. To realize this is the first step to unimpeded enlightenment, “the true, pure, and all-pervading knowledge possessed by all the Buddhas . . . whereby the Buddhas gain an insight into the nature of all realities, of all forms” (Suzuki 250). Thus what seemed to be a dry philosophical ontology of emptiness is proclaimed in a religious context and with psychological effect. Suzuki contests the identification of Emptiness with relativity: “If all things are what they are because of the causal net pervading the entire range of existence, and if they are thus characterized as Emptiness, Emptiness is relativity. But this identification of Emptiness and relativity is untenable . . . The scholars have not fully grasped the purpose of the Mahāyāna teaching; they are still holding to their former position, that is, the position we generally have prior to the awakening of the inner sense” (Suzuki 272–73). This opposes the view that emptiness means simply that things are “empty of a separate self ” (Nhat Hanh 9), which would reduce Buddhist wisdom to a sense of the interconnectedness of everything. While such a view may have deep roots in the Hua-yen (Flower-Ornament) tradition, based on the vast sūtra of that name, with its vision of the “unimpeded mutual interpretation of all dharmas,” it tends to rob the emptiness-teaching of its shock value, imposing a bland harmony. Here is how Thich Nhat Hanh addresses the problem of evil:
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In the West you have been struggling for many years with the problem of evil. How is it possible that evil should be there? It seems that it is difficult for the Western mind to understand. But in the light of nonduality, there is no problem: As soon as the idea of good is there, the idea of evil is there. Buddha needs Māra in order to reveal himself, and vice versa. (36)
He goes on to imagine Buddha and Māra sharing a friendly cup of tea and thanking each other for their support. But put Hitler in the role of Māra and Anne Frank in the role of Buddha and it becomes apparent how this vision glosses over painful reality. What I see as the undiluted doctrine of emptiness, on the other hand, is more capable of confronting evil. To some extent it might rejoin the Plotinian-Augustian view that evil has no substantial existence and, in another aspect, the Plotinian sense of the Good as “beyond being.” The identification of emptiness with relativity that Suzuki attacks also applies to the purely functional interpretation of emptiness among some Western scholars, who present Nāgārjuna as a mere reformer of philosophical language, in the manner of Hume or Wittgenstein. 10 But emptiness is not just a matter of logical demystification. Nāgārjuna’s demonstrations of the lack of substantial identity in a long series of hallowed items is a defense of emptiness against objections, a deconstruction of false claimants to own-being. But emptiness itself is a datum of enlightened insight, set down in the scriptural word, and more likely to be awakened by meditation thereon than by argument. Emptiness is a leap beyond ordinary thinking: “As long as we are bound to a realm of particulars we see causality and relativity everywhere, because this is the place for them to function. But since we are never satisfied with this state of affairs . . . we leap for life or death over the bottomless abyss gaping before us. The leap lands us in the realm of Emptiness, and we realize that it is after all this Emptiness that lies underneath the world of causes and conditions” (Suzuki 275). Suspicious postmodernists may dismiss Suzuki as being deliberately evasive. But he is giving a coherent account, one steadied by his long Zen practice, and inviting us to approach emptiness with the heart rather than the head. Even the non-meditator can get a feel for it as a bourne of thought, a space of relief from the oppressive realm of causes and
10
This is the tendency of Garfield, for example.
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conditions, facts and limited perspectives. Thus emptiness may perfume our thought and give it a wholesome orientation. III Gracious
Bodhisattvas
Emptiness may seem a painfully abstract topic, rather anemic in comparison with the riches of the Hegelian BegriĀ or Heidegger’s Seinsdenken. To overcome this perception what is required, rather than elaborate intellectual apologetics, is a heart-understanding of emptiness. Wisdom, prajñā, breaks down into jñā, knowledge, and pra-, an intensifying prefix. What kind of special insight is designated by this term? Western philosophy has often promised a kind of Enlightenment, whether the noetic penetration of Hegel, or the Neoplatonic “touching” of the supreme simplicity of the One, or the other more intuitive modes of understanding to which Schelling, Bradley, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger offer to be midwives. The Buddhist notion is more comprehensive than these. Wisdom is embedded in prior samādhi, meditative absorption, to which it brings a new dimension of discernment, vipassana. Both samādhi and prajñā are virtues, the summit and seal of a virtuous life. If they lend their meaning to the prior virtues such as giving ( dāna) and endurance ( ksānti), they also demand the practice of these virtues as a warrant of their own authenticity. The abundant fruits of the spirituality of emptiness in the culture of Tibet and East Asia, not only in religious practice but in poetry, sculpture and painting, may alert us to an aspect of the Heart Sūtra that we could easily miss in our fixation on doctrinal and philosophical matters, namely, the way the teaching of the sūtra is enshrined within an intense interpersonal drama. “The players are few and formidable: Śākyamuni Buddha, Avalokiteśvara, and Śāriputra, with Prajñāpāramitā, the mother of the Buddhas, silently present” (Lopez 3). Just as the Buddhist Dharma is more than a dry objective teaching, being conjoined with Buddha and Sangha in the Triple Refuge, so the Heart Sūtra is not a laconic list of tenets, for it is communicated by gracious Buddha and bodhisattva figures to the listening community. An expanded version of the sūtra extends this interpersonal context to the point of overpopulation. Here the Buddha amid “a large gathering of both monks and Bodhisattvas,” is absorbed in concentration. Śāriputra, “through the Buddha’s might,” asks the meditating Avalokiteśvara how people should practice “if they want to course in
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the course of this deep perfection of wisdom?,” and it is in reply to this that the teaching of the sūtra is pronounced (Conze, Perfect Wisdom 140). This corresponds to the standard initial scenario of sūtras—the Buddha addressing an audience of monks and (in later Mahāyāna sūtras) bodhisattvas, his words heard and recorded by the beloved disciple Ānanda. The addressee, Śāriputra, is a stock figure in Mahāyāna sūtras, where he stands for mastery of Abhidharma scholasticism, which is overcome by the higher insights of the Mahāyāna. In the background is the audience of all living beings, for whom these questions are being asked and answered. The ending of this version opens the interpersonal context to embrace them all. The Buddha emerges from his concentration, and applauds Avalokiteśvara: “As you have explained it, so it is approved by all the Tathāgatas.” This is received with joy by Śāriputra, Avalokiteśvara, the monks and bodhisattvas, and “the whole world with its gods, men, asuras, garudas and gandharvas.” The Buddha here is no longer the sturdy teacher of the Pāli Canon. “The Buddha says nothing until the epilogue, but rather silently empowers Śāriputra to ask and Avalokiteśvara to answer . . . the Buddha is no longer simply the teacher but is transformed into the principle of enlightenment, a silent, eternal, numinous presence, thedharmakāya.”11 This gracious enabling silence can be thought of as maternal, womblike. The Buddha remains sunk in meditation—not in a demonstration of indifference, as if he were some kind of deus otiosus, but in the sense of having returned to his own deepest identity as the dharma-kāya, the body of the Buddha as a metaphysical principle, distinguished from his form-body (rūpa-kāya). The Buddha as dharmakāya is reality itself and it is by what we may call his “grace” that all the other voices of the text are enabled and permitted to resonate (Lopez 7). As to Avalokiteśvara (Ch. Kuan-yin; J. Kannon), bearer of the Buddha’s message, he is the bodhisattva of compassion—or for all practical purposes a Buddha—who “sees the cries of the world” (as one might see a drowning man before his cries reach one’s ears). Infinitely responsive to its sufferings, he takes a myriad forms, with the versatility
11 Heidegger’s evocation of the “quiet power of the possible” and of Being as “the loving enabling” ( mögendes Vermögen), at the beginning of “Brief über den Humanismus” could serve as a model for bringing out the nature of this gracious enabling presence.
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of a benign trickster-figure, in order to come to the rescue of beings in their present need, as recounted in the Kannon chapter of the Lotus Sūtra and as commemorated in iconography of the eleven-faced or thousand-armed Kannon (see Ishikami 76–85). His is a maternal presence, and it is logical that in China his sex changes. Reassuringly, the Sūtra confides Wisdom’s starkest utterances to the voice of Compassion, their male strength sheathed in a womb of loving attention. Avalokiteśvara is not fixated on emptiness: “His eye turns in two opposite directions . . . in the direction of Śūnyatā and in the direction of Sarvasattva (all beings). He does not immerse himself in the ocean of eternal tranquility . . . he somehow keeps himself on the wavy surface of the ocean, allowing himself to suffer the fate of an aspen leaf on the turbulent waters.” 12 Wisdom without compassion is lamed if not blind—wisdom without its heart. Mahāyāna thought is traversed by the tensions between wisdom and compassion and by those between wisdom and samādhi. In both cases an initial duality is softened by a discipline that develops the two separately in a balanced way (see Viévard). Another quasi-personal figure in the text is the Perfection of Wisdom itself. Personified as the mother of the Buddhas, she pervades the sūtras dedicated to her, and in this one reveals her very heart. Buddhist iconography gives richly detailed face and form to this idea. She “becomes the object of a cult, and a number of Ritual Texts describe the methods by which her spiritual power can be evoked.” She is imaged sitting cross-legged on a white lotus: “Her left hand, near her heart, carries the book. Her right hand, near her breasts, makes the gesture of argumentation.” 13 The personae who figure in the sūtra may be divided into two categories: the teachers—the Buddha, Avalokiteśvara, the Prajñāpāramitā herself—and the listeners—Śāriputra and the “I” who begins the text with the standard formula “Thus have I heard.” Like all sūtras the text is the word of the Buddha ( Buddha-vacana), that is, the historical
12 Suzuki 323. The late Heinrich Dumoulin, S.J. stressed in his later writings the inseparability of wisdom and compassion as the central vision of Buddhism. He regretted that he had failed to stress compassion when consulted on shaping the brief statement on Buddhism in Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate. 13 Conze, The Prajñāpāramitā Literature 14. There are also “trinities composed of the Buddha, the four-armed Prajñāpāramitā and the four-armed Avalokiteśvara. . . representing Buddha, Dharma and Samgha respectively” (23).
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Buddha Śākyamuni, as recorded by his beloved disciple Ānanda. In this case, some have claimed that the transmitter cannot be Ānanda but must be a bodhisattva of higher rank, able to understand the new Mahāyāna teaching; Bhāvaviveka proposes Mañjuśrī, bodhisattva of wisdom. But that would transfer the “I” who reports the teaching from the side of the disciples to the side of the teachers, altering the interpersonal dynamics of the situation. Perhaps when we recite or copy out the sūtra we identify ourselves not with Avalokita but with the listening scribe, Ānanda, grateful for the teaching though it largely eludes our grasp. The hearer of the text, the community reciting it—who form another dimension of its interpersonal context—can also easily identify with Śāriputra, the representative slow learner. The three teaching figures may be felt to be embracing maternal presences, who guide Śāriputra as if he were a child. To hear this dharma with the heart is to become a member of the sangha, which lives that dharma, and the text realizes the inseparability of dharma and sangha as it invites us into its interpersonal play. As we enact its radical negations of each of the basic categories that were formulated in the earlier Abhidharma scholasticism, we make the words of Avalokiteśvara our own, yet we do so from the perspective of the rather stunned hearer, Śāriputra, in a constant overcoming of our own unenlightened commonsense attitudes. The sūtra culminates not in the doctrine of emptiness but in the emergence of the figures of bodhisattvas and Buddhas born of the practice of perfect wisdom. Emptiness is not just a notion, it is the insight of wisdom; and wisdom is not just a virtue or sagacity, it is the very mode of being of a bodhisattva. The Heart Sūtra aims not to convey insights on emptiness but to induce us into the bodhisattva mode of being. More than that, if wisdom is “the mother of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas” (Suzuki 247) the sūtra itself becomes a mother or midwife giving birth to its readers as bodhisattvas. Perhaps it most plays this role in its concluding “spell of great knowledge . . . allayer of all suffering”: “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail!” To some readers, this mantra will be the least useful and palatable part of the text. Yet it enacts an opening out of the abstract discourse of the text to a horizon of concrete engagement. That is, when we recite the text, we enact the emptying it expresses, and its dynamism impels us to the ecstatic embrace of Wisdom in the mantra, in which we taste joyful release from the shackles that the preceding negations have cut, one
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by one. On the lips of Kannon, the mantra combines joyful disengagement with compassionate engagement on behalf of deluded, suffering beings. And so our heart-engagement with the text, as Christians, finally brings us back to a compassion like that which is at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Kannon has “gone beyond” rather as Christ, who laid down his life for those he called his friends (see John 15:13–14), has entered into a domain of perfect freedom, into which he draws us as a “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45), carrying us forward to the evergreater future of God’s Kingdom. Conversely, the New Testament may confer on the Buddhist vision the eschatological dynamic it lacks, reading the message of emptiness in light of a hope-filled awareness that “the figure of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). Works Cited Conze, Edward. Perfect Wisdom: The Short Prajñāpāramitā Texts. Totnes, Devon, England: Buddhist Publishing Group, 1993. ———. The Prajñāpāramitā Literature. Tokyo, Japan: Reiyukai, 1978. Dumoulin, Heinrich. Understanding Buddhism: Key Themes. New York: Weatherhill, 1994. Garfield, Jay. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. “Brief über den Humanismus” [Letter on Humanism]. Wegmarken. Gesamtausgabe 9. Frankfurt, Germany: Klostermann, 1977. Huntington, Jr., C. W. “History, Tradition, and Truth.” History of Religions 46:2 (2007): 187–227. Ishikami, Zen’ō. Hotoke to Bosatsu [Buddhas and Bodhisattvas]. Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Shoseki, 1983. Keenan, John P. A Christian Commentary on the Heart Sūtra . Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Classics. Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming. Lopez, Donald S. The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1988. Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of Understanding. Berkeley CA: Parallax, 1988. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness . Trans. Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1982. O’Leary, Joseph S. L’art du jugement en théologie . Paris, France: Éditions du Cerf, forthcoming 2008. Rawlinson, Andrew. “The Position of the Astasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā in the Development of Early Mahāyāna.” Prajñāpāramitā and Related Systems: Studies in Honor of Edward Conze . Ed. Lewis Lancaster. Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series 1. Berkeley CA: The Group in Buddhist Studies and The Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, 1997. 3–34. Schopen, Gregory. Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India . Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. Suzuki, D. T. Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series. 1934. London: Rider, 1977. Viévard, Ludovic. Vacuité [śūnyatā] et compassion [karunā] dans le bouddhisme madhyamaka. Paris, France: Collège de France, 2002.
PURE PERCEPTION AND EQUANIMITY OF HEART John Makransky Boston College If you are pure within, all will be pure without, so have pure vision regarding all things my heartfriends! —Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, Natural Great Perfection 137
How can Tibetan Buddhist meditations be made accessible to people of all backgrounds and faiths, that they might shed light on their own spiritual lives? Āis is a challenge I undertake in my book Awakening through Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness ,1 from which I here distill some key pointers for the earnest explorer of the inter-religious imagination. I Seeing Past Our Delusions Āe movie A Beautiful Mind chronicles the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia and descended into a delusory world of perceiving and reacting to nonexistent people. After many years spent recovering from his illness, Professor Nash is visited at Princeton by a representative from the Nobel Prize committee, who informs him that he has been nominated for the prize for his early work on game theory. In a poignant scene, Nash realizes the investigator has been purposely sent to ascertain if he is sane enough to receive the Nobel Prize in public. “Would I embarrass you? Āe answer is possibly. You see, I am crazy,” Nash says to the investigator, who takes in this admission.
1 Adapted from John Makransky, Awakening Ārough Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness (2007) with permission from Wisdom Publications, 199 Elm Street, Somerville MA 02144 USA, . For information on the book, accompanying CD of guided meditations, and author Q&A, go to <www.johnmakransky .org>.
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“I still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them.” At that moment, the investigator realizes that Nash has found a remarkable ground of sanity after his long struggle with his delusions. Nash’s response is instructive for us. He knows he is mentally ill, that nonexistent people continue to appear to him. But he has learned to ignore such false appearances, no matter how vividly they appear, by relying instead upon what is more real and more trustworthy: the love of his family and friends. We are in an analogous situation. Most of us are not schizophrenic, of course. But like Nash, we are haunted by a deluded vision of others without realizing that it is just the distorted creation of our own minds. For example, we tend to view most beings around us as nothing more than “strangers,” unaware that “stranger” is merely the product of our own thought. But like John Nash, we can learn, indeed are learning, to shift our attention away from that deluded vision so as to connect with the fuller reality of the people all around us through the power of love. In the last chapter, we were given the secret of deep sanity, a secret like John Nash’s. We don’t have to believe our own narrow, reductive thoughts of people . Even when our own thoughts tell us: “Āis is just a stranger,” or “Āis person is just a jerk,” we can ignore the thought, lean in past it, and connect with the fuller reality of the person, heart to heart. We can drop out of the fickle, changeable field of discriminatory judgments, individual and social, which deny the fullness and holiness of each being. Isn’t it exhausting to spend so much time judging everyone? Why not take a much-needed vacation from that syndrome? Why not connect with others in a more dependable way—by relying upon the enduring and impartial wisdom of love? Āis is not an attempt to put on “rose-colored” glasses that hide the truth of others. It is just the opposite. We are learning to take off the Coke bottle-like glasses that have occluded the sacred truth that each person is seen accurately only through eyes of wisdom and love, the eyes of the Buddha in us, the eyes of God. Such pure vision is not some ideal from on high. It is our own inmost vision.
pure perception and equanimity of heart II Pure
Perception
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2
Pure perception . . . is to recognize the buddha-nature in all sentient beings and to see primordial purity and perfection in all phenomena. Every sentient being is endowed with the essence of buddhahood, just as [sesame] oil pervades every sesame seed. Ignorance is simply to be unaware of this buddha-nature, like a poor man who does not know that there is a pot of gold buried beneath his hovel. Āe journey to enlightenment is thus a rediscovery of this forgotten nature, like seeing the ever-brilliant sun again as the clouds that have been hiding it are blown away. —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Spirit of Tibet 82
As Khyentse Rinpoche says, to perceive purely is to recognize both the primordial purity of phenomena and the buddha nature within all sentient beings. In meditation practice, as we learn to relinquish our ego-centered and dualistic frames of reference into the wisdom of natural awareness, we sense the essential purity and perfection of phenomena within the infinite, open, and unchanging nature of mind—all thoughts, feelings, and sensations recognized as manifestations of primordial awareness, like rays of light recognized by the sun as its own expression. Āis wisdom is the ultimate aspect of pure perception. As the meditation further unfolds, we let the energy of that vast awareness manifest in the pure vision of love: first by recalling our benefactors and receiving their unconditional love and then by extending that love to all others. Ārough impartial, all-inclusive love, we sense the intrinsic goodness of beings that is prior to everyone’s selfcentered thoughts and reactions. Impartial love knows and reverences the intrinsic sacredness of beings, their inner dignity, their buddha nature. Āis love is the relative aspect of pure perception. Āe impure perception of ego understands others from the head, thinking. Āis is the good one; that one is a jerk; that one doesn’t matter. Such impure perception pretends to a kind of omniscience, 2 Pure perception (Tibetan dag nang) is codified in Tibetan Buddhism as one of the central practices of the Vajrayana tradition. Because Dzogchen (the Tibetan tradition I teach from) is understood to express the very essence of Vajrayana, pure perception becomes a central theme here. Āemes of pure perception are also prominent in Mahayana scriptures and commentaries that preceded and contributed to the emergence of Vajrayana traditions in India: e.g., perception by transcendental wisdom of the intrinsically pure suchness of beings and things as elaborated in Prajna-paramita scriptures and Maitreya texts; pure perception of the innate buddha nature of each being as elaborated in buddha nature literature, and so forth. See Makransky, Buddhahood Embodied 41–54, 323–35.
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as if such limited thoughts captured the whole truth of others. Pure perception, in contrast, is a power of knowing from beyond our egos. It senses others intuitively through the wisdom and love that values each one as holy mystery, beyond the grasp of self-centered, reductive thoughts. For this reason, as we begin to awaken to such pure perception in meditation practice, it dawns on us that we hadn’t known others nearly as well as we had previously thought, even those nearest to us! Because now, rather than knowing them just through our familiar thoughts of them, we are starting to sense them from a deeper place. Who is doing this pure perceiving? It is our inner capacity of wisdom and love that does the perceiving; our buddha nature, not our brittle, self-concerned egos. Only our inmost goodness can sense so directly the essential purity and goodness of others. We let our buddha nature, our primordial capacity of wisdom and love know others in their buddha nature, their intrinsic worthiness and holiness. We learn to “see” beings from the depth of our heart, rather than through ego-grasping consciousness. III
Pure Perception Is an Active Power and an Offering to the World
Āe term pure perception can be deceptive because we might think that it denotes a merely passive kind of observing. But it is really an active power of knowing. Ārough meditation, potent energies of knowing and loving that had been hidden in our minds are unleashed. Indeed, it begins to dawn on us that, as we extend love, we are not just wishing for others to have well-being and joy, we are actually communing with the primordial well-being that already abides in the nature of their minds. Our buddha nature is communicating with theirs, below the radar of self-centered understanding. Āere is more. Pure perception not only perceives and communicates with others’ inmost goodness and well-being but also evokes it by calling it forth from them. We can see now how this process manifests in our meditation practice: when we receive the wise love of our benefactors, our own enlightened potential of love, reverence, and joy is evoked and brought forth. In the same way, when we extend this powerful love to others, it helps awaken their enlightened potential. In the summer of 1981, while I was a PhD student in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin, my teacher Geshe Sopa invited H. H.
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the Dalai Lama to Madison to give the transmission of Kalachakra, a special Buddhist empowerment. It was the first time such a teaching was to be offered in the West. My wife Barbara and I were put in charge of finding housing for all who wanted to come, including many Tibetans and high-ranking lamas traveling from Europe and throughout North America. Āe University kindly provided some low-cost college dorms to help house the participants, and it turned out that we had to use every available space for accommodations. We ended up having to assign a renowned lama named Nechung Rinpoche to a dorm room that was rather dark and dingy from generations of use. Nechung Rinpoche was the type of spiritual teacher who just naturally exuded warmth and kindness, and Barbara and I loved to be near him. After the Dalai Lama’s teachings were completed, we went to see him in his small room to say goodbye. He welcomed us as if we were honored dignitaries. Barbara and I were aghast at the stained and scarred walls and apologized for the shabby accommodation, but Rinpoche just looked at us wide-eyed, as if he had no idea what we were talking about. “Āis place is a pure realm,” he declared, his face filled with gratitude and joy. Barbara and I exchanged a quizzical look, thinking, He actually means it! Āat dingy place was heaven for him, and the people all around were divine beings in his eyes. In spite of our initial bewilderment, his pure view became infectious. Suddenly, we too felt totally blessed to be right there, as if it truly were a holy realm, and we, with him, were pure and holy beings. Rinpoche’s pure perception was not merely a passive knowing but an active and evocative presence of love that mirrored the purity he saw in people back at them, helping them sense their own sacredness. During the course of our lives, don’t we often feel like we are inhabiting a shabby place surrounded by “strangers”? Āat is why it is so liberating to be in the presence of a spiritual benefactor who simply doesn’t believe in such limiting ego-constructs of the world. When someone abides in a purer vision, their presence signals to us that our reductive labels are false, that all those around us are holy, precious beings, every single one. For anyone to abide in such vision is to make a tremendous offering to this world, for it holds the door open for many others to also come to recognition of their true selves. By understanding that the meditation of love and wisdom can lead us from impure vision toward pure vision, we can learn to cooperate with it and to experience it more deeply. We can increasingly let the meditation undercut our impure perception of others as merely
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“stranger” or “dislikable.” We can lean in past such concepts by the power of wise love, as if leaning into others’ hearts to sense their inner dignity. As the meditation strips away our adherence to such reductive labels, it increasingly awakens the dormant power of unconditional love and intuitive knowing within us, our buddha nature. We thus learn to cooperate with this pure perception of the heart that senses others in their deep worthiness, even as we continue to learn, like John Nash, to ignore the impure perception of the head that reduces them to caricatures. IV
The Buddha Within Does the Perceiving: Merging with the Pure Perception of Our Spiritual Benefactors
At the final stage of the meditation, the field of benefactors merges into oneness with our own heart. 3 We experience the power of love in our heart as one with theirs. We can thereby discover that the heart of love within our benefactors is ultimately one with our own, and that our heart, like theirs, is also linked to the hearts of many others. Indeed, we are discovering that our inmost heart, like theirs, is the heart of a buddha. As such practice matures, it feels as if a buddha of impartial love and wisdom long buried in us is starting to wake up and act right through our mind and body. It is as if a buddha within, long inhibited, is now finally allowed to unleash its knowledge and liberating energy—to radiate its vast enlightened will for the welfare of beings and to communicate with their basic goodness. At this stage of practice, we are not just wishing for others’ well-being, we are starting to commune with and evoke the very source of their well-being, their own inmost potential of love and wisdom. Such pure perception (Tibetan dag nang) is not something we arrive at just by thinking about these ideas or about the meditation instructions. It emerges naturally from the ground of our being through long, 3 Benefactors are people that have held you in the wish of love, the wish for your deep well-being and happiness. Āese include loving people you have known throughout your life, as well as deeply spiritual figures who have touched your life—inspiring and blessing you by their writings, actions, or presence to you. Buddhists identify such spiritual benefactors as buddhas and bodhisattvas, including their own spiritual teachers. A Christian might think instead of Christ, Mary, or the communion of saints, a Jew of most cherished prophets or rabbis, and so forth.
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regular practice of the meditation. As practice brings out the innate power of pure perception and loving energy, it begins to flow beyond sessions of meditation into our ordinary day, gently informing our life, our work, and our relationships. In this subtle process, we are not just sensing beings around us through our eyes and ears but through our heart. There is a soft, natural resonance of knowing and loving that intuits the intrinsic goodness and purity of persons below the fabrications of all our reductive minds. Āis is how Nechung Rinpoche was present to Barbara and me. Āis is how anyone who takes up this practice can learn to be present to others. To put it another way, in the moment of unconditional love it is not the ego-centered self that is viewing but the power of love viewing through you. In that moment you are surrendering “your own” point of view to the buddha’s—as if you were a window for the buddha’s unconditional love to shine through you. Such love feels as if it comes from beyond ourselves while also, paradoxically, from most deeply within. Āis pure perception, buddha vision, comes through us as we, like John Nash, learn to ignore the delusion of “enemies” and “strangers” that had closed it out. V
Recognizing a Corresponding Truth in Other Traditions
Āe practice we are learning gives us the experiential knowledge to recognize sacred truth when we hear it, whatever its source. For example, one of my Catholic colleagues at Boston College, Father Michael Himes, describes an analogous viewpoint for becoming a window for God’s love by embodying unconditional love for others. He writes, “Āe whole last supper discourse in John’s gospel (chaps. 13–17), is a magnificent reflection on love and communion. And, astonishingly, not once does Jesus ever tell his disciples to love God, although we are repeatedly told to love one another. For God is not the object of love; in a sense, God is not even the subject of love . . . God is the doing, the loving.” God is the power of unconditional love that comes through persons, willing deepest good for all. Related to this, Fr. Himes notes, come teachings from Jesus that have shocked many people, such as: “You have heard it said that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you that you must love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” When some ask him why, Jesus replies, “. . . you must do so to be children of
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your Father in heaven who makes the sun shine on the wicked as well as the good . . .” As Fr. Himes notes, “Āere are no bounds to God’s love, so do not put any bounds to yours.” To be receptive to God means to become transparent to the active, all-inclusive, and unconditional love that is God. 4 VI
Sacred Text, Image, and Practice Illumine Each Other
Our meditation practices have been transmitted down to us from an ancient past and can thus provide a window into understanding the inner meanings of ancient scriptures and iconographies. An ancient Buddhist text called the Tathagatagarbha Sutra (Buddha Nature Scripture) is renowned for revealing through images what is intuited in meditation. At the beginning of the scripture, Buddha Shakyamuni enters a meditative concentration and generates a luminous vision that is witnessed by a huge gathering of beings. In the vision, an infinite array of lotus flowers appears, rises up, and fills the whole sky, emanating colorful rays of light in all directions. Hidden within each flower is a radiant, seated buddha form, completely still. Suddenly the lotus flowers open and wilt away, revealing the luminous buddhas. Each of the infinite buddhas radiates light in all directions, transporting the assembly of witnesses with ecstasy and wonder. Shakyamuni Buddha then explains the meaning of this startling visionary image to the astonished throng. Someone with extraordinary perception, he says, is able to perceive the presence of the splendid, unmoving buddha forms concealed within the lotus flowers, even while they remain hidden from the ordinary perception of other beings. But when the lotuses open and wither away, then all beings are able to see the luminous buddha forms and come to recognize that they had been present all along. Similarly, Buddha Shakyamuni, with his pure perception, sees through the deluded discriminations of sentient beings into their untainted, already-abiding buddha nature. He senses directly that all beings “have a tathagatagarbha [buddha nature] that is eternally unsullied and that is replete with virtues no different from my own.” From this awakened perspective, he teaches the way for beings to cut 4
Himes 10, 11, 18. See also Makransky, “Buddha and Christ.”
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Figure 1. Douglas Goodman, “Circle of Communion,” 2007. Illustration created for John Makransky’s book,Awakening Ārough Love (Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2007). Collection of the Dzogchen Center, Cambridge MA.
through their delusions, so that they wither away like the lotuses in the vision, and thus all may realize the innate buddhaness hidden within their minds and bodies ( Tathagatagarbha Sutra 95–96ff.). Because our tradition is historically connected to such scriptures, we can see how text and practice inform each other. In our meditation we are discovering the innate buddha that has been hidden within our minds and bodies all along, a great capacity of unconditional love and pure awareness that discerns and resonates with the corresponding capacity that is hidden within all others. Āis is the dawning of pure perception. Our meditation is not just some desperate attempt to try to see other beings as good. It actually cuts through the obscurations
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of the discriminating mind that had hidden their intrinsic worth and dignity, so we can commune with them on that level. Chapter 3 mentioned that many examples of Asian literature and iconography image the attainment of enlightenment in terms of “pure buddha realms.” In such literature, buddhahood, fullest enlightenment, is not depicted as an isolated accomplishment that stands apart from beings. Rather, fully enlightened awareness manifests in a luminous buddha form that radiates its qualities of love, compassion, and liberating power to a vast circle of bodhisattvas (buddhist saints) and through them to innumerable other beings. Such a buddha form comes to be designated in Sanskrit texts as sambhoga-kaya. Sam can mean “complete” or “together with, communal.” Bhoga means “enjoyment,” and kaya means “body.” To refer to buddhahood as sambhoga-kaya, then, is to imply that the complete realization of enlightenment is experienced communally, embodied in joyous communion with many others through the wise love that wills deepest freedom for all. To be fully enlightened is to have fully unleashed the liberating power of such enlightened qualities, so that they spontaneously bless and evoke the corresponding goodness dormant in the hearts of many other beings. 5 Āis imagery informs our understanding of pure perception, for with increasing practice experience we sense that we are participating in a purer dimension of reality previously unnoticed, to resonate with the deeper truth and dignity of beings below the radar of discriminatory minds. Increasingly, through practice, this mundane, everyday world is rediscovered as a “buddha realm,” a pure dimension of radiant communion, each being sensed in reverence and love as holy mystery.6 And when we encounter others who inhabit the world in this 5 Several early Mahayana commentaries proclaim that the full enlightenment of a buddha embodies itself in three basic ways: (1) Dharma-kaya (embodiment of the real) is a buddha’s full realization of the infinite, empty, luminous nature of mind; since buddhahood is one with the deep nature of reality as such ( dharma-ta), that is its ultimate body ( kaya); (2) Sambhoga-kaya (embodiment in communal joy) is the luminous energy of dharmakaya as it manifests in radiant form, to commune joyously with circles of bodhisattvas who are receptive to the joyful, liberating powers of enlightenment; and (3) Nirmana-kaya (creative embodiment) is buddhahood as it creatively and spontaneously expresses liberating truth to ordinary beings through persons, phenomena of nature, ritual forms, works of art, and so forth. See Makransky, Buddhahood Embodied, chaps. 4, 5, and 13. 6 To participate in this purer dimension of reality broadly corresponds to what Vajrayana Buddhism describes as participation in a mandala of Buddha activity, see Tulku, chap. 16 and Ray, chap. 7.
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way—our mentors, teachers, benefactors—they help evoke our own capacity to do so as well. Āomas Merton writes about similar experiences. He spent years in contemplative practice at a Catholic monastery in Kentucky, where he prayed, worshiped, and communed with all others in the love of God. One day he went to Louisville on an errand for the monastery. He wrote: In Louisville, at the corner of fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation . . . Āen it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire . . . can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. Āere would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. (156–58)
As you sense the tremendous dignity of others, let your attention turn to the kinds of people you hadn’t previously noticed—people routinely marginalized and banished to the realm of “strangers.” Pay fresh attention to people in racial, ethnic, or social groups different from your own, those who are poorly clothed or homeless, those imprisoned in habits of addiction or abuse, those denigrated for their sexual orientation, and so forth. As the label “stranger” comes crashing down, let the dignity of each such person reveal itself to you, evoking your reverence and care. Recall such people later when you meditate on compassion. Remember how it felt at times in your life when others held you distastefully at a distance, when you were judged or dismissed as a stranger, even if your experience was far less severe. Let such memories help you empathize with what others are feeling, empowering your compassion and care for them. As I sit down to write my conclusion, I realize it is September 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the tragic attack on the United States by terrorists from abroad. Today, politicians across America are discussing ways to protect Americans from their enemies—mostly through strategies of self-defense. Certainly nations must take measures to protect their people. But if we want to be protected, we should focus
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attention not only outward toward potential sources of violence against us but also inward at our own attitudes toward the masses of people in the world, many of whom sympathize with those who oppose us. In our economic, political, and military relations with people of other nations, do our actions express genuine concern for their lives or cynical attempts to gain control over them and their resources? It will never be enough for leaders to posture as if they cared about the peoples of other lands without acting accordingly. Unless, as a people, we genuinely wish for the well-being of people in other nations, and act courageously from that motivation over the long term, no military solution will be enough to protect us. Government and military leaders who care deeply for the peoples of other cultures, and embody that concern through concrete actions, wield much greater power to protect their own people. General George Marshall’s reconstruction efforts in Europe after the Second World War exemplified this. Gandhi’s successful work for Indian independence embodied his concern for both the Indian and British peoples. I hope that readers from diverse walks of life, religious traditions, and cultures who enter into the meditations and teachings of this book receive inspiration and blessing for their lives. In a class on Buddhist meditation I taught last spring, students kept journals on how the meditations of natural love and wisdom informed their lives, most of them as Christians, Jews, and so forth. One student, a devout Catholic, had this entry in her journal: Today after meditating, I spontaneously wrote this: “If you steer from fear, and cling to no thing, you’ll find freedom to give and joy to sing. You’ll know who you are, held from above; you’ll know the Truth that God Is. . . . you’ll know God is Love.”
Āese meditations from Buddhism helped deepen her faith in the reality of God as unconditional, all-embracing love. From such journals, I also received inspiration and light for my own spiritual path as a Buddhist. I hope the practices in this book help people of different faiths, and no formal faith, enter similarly into a dialogue with the Buddhist tradition of deep mutual learning and appreciation.
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Works Cited Dilgo Khyentse and Mathieu Ricard. Āe Spirit of Tibet: Āe Life and World of Khyentse Rinpoche, Spiritual Teacher . New York: Aperture Foundation, 2000. Himes, Michael. Doing the Truth in Love . New York: Paulist Press, 1995. Makransky, John. Awakening Ārough Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness . Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2007. ———. “Buddha and Christ as Mediators of the Transcendant: A Mahayana Buddhist Perspective.” Buddhism and Christianity in Dialogue . Ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel. Norwich, England: SCM, 2005. 176–211. ———. Buddahood Embodied: Sources of Controversy in India and Tibet . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. Merton, Āomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander . New York: Image, 1989. Nyoshul Khenpo and Surya Das. Natural Great Perfection. Ithaca NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1995. Ray, Reginald. Secret of the Vajra World . Boston MA: Shambhala, 2001. Tathagatagarbha Sutra. Trans. William Grossnick. Buddhism in Practice . Ed. Donald Lopez. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 92–106. Tulku, Chagdud. Gates to Buddhist Practice . Junction City CA: Padma, 2001.
ON SEEING THE BIRTH OF THE HEART Mary M. Anderson Harvard University Āis: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? Āere was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. —T. S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi” Le monde est grand, mais en nous il est profond comme la mer. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Āis is an essay in seeing and articulating meaning in two works of art from Christian and Buddhist traditions: the fifteenth-century Christian icon of the Kardiotissa known as “Āe Virgin of the Passion” (color plate 21, and fig. 1), and the Vishvakarma cave, a Buddhist chaitya-griha located in Ellora, India (figs. 2–5). In seeking to experience these works of art and bring their respective religious traditions into dialogue with each other, primary emphasis will be given to the representation of interiority and seeing within it the revelatory dialectic intrinsic to both aesthetic representation and human religiosity. To speak of interiority and its aesthetic representation will be to engage this revelatory dialectic both in the works of art and in human being, to see the confluence of subjective and objective, interior and exterior domains rendered in visible form. By inquiring into the nature of art and human perception, this essay endeavors to see these works as incorporating, and thus bearing witness to, the interior valences of human subjectivity, faith, and their epic presence within material form. It is this material form—pictorial, sculptural, architectural—and its inherent silence that will guide our seeing these works of art, allowing them to disclose their meaning both within and without established epistemic and historical contexts. Āis paradoxical situation that all works of art testify to—that of being deeply situated within material
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and temporal bonds, and yet, at the same time, extending beyond or without them—highlights the double nature of representation, its dialectical movement between visible and invisible, external and internal, grounds. “Āe exterior spectacle helps the intimate grandeur unfold,” writes Gaston Bachelard, distilling Baudelaire’s thought on the relationship between interior and exterior domains (192). 1 Within each of these images—the Kardiotissa and the Vishvakarma—this coincidence of exterior spectacle and internal grandeur is present; in each there is ample realization of the invisible within the visible, of the interpenetration of these two apparently opposite realms. In light of this coincidence of apparent opposites, these works of art will teach both the poverty of language and its plenitude, for words attempting to describe the experience of seeing will inevitably belie the experience itself, and yet it is in language—its poverty and its plenty—that an articulate witness to the humanity borne within such silent form may be found. I The Advent of Sight Āe Kardiotissa icon and the Vishvakarma cave are religious representations, religious in the normative sense that both the images and their meaning can be situated within a particular religious tradition— Christian and Buddhist, respectively. Moving within and beyond these individual frames, this essay approaches each work from an aesthetic perspective, one that cultivates meaning within form, its phenomenal and symbolic aspects. With the aid of a compassionate eye, if not an innocent one, 2 this aesthetic lens hopes to open a view into the perichoresis of material and spiritual form, without dismissing or replacing normative religious or historical content. To see these works will be to acknowledge a religiosity that lies beyond and within the already interpreted religious paradigm—a religiosity that may be called the heart of humanity, a heart and a humanity that, while expressed and cultivated through religion, is prior to and unbounded by its institutional frames. It is not, however, to religious experience that this essay appeals, for as 1 “In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes a symbol of it” (Baudelaire Journaux intimes, qtd. in Bachelard 192). 2 An allusion to John Ruskin’s concept of “the innocent eye,” later refuted by Gombrich.
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Hans Küng cautions, “one should not forget that religious experience, Christian as well as Buddhist, is already interpreted experience—interpreted differently according to the particular religious paradigm, the system of beliefs, the theoretical-practical context wherein the believer is situated” (ix). Instead this essay appeals toward a seeing at eye level , acknowledging its own interpretative frame yet endeavoring to enter the work and enlarge vision toward seeing “the birth of the heart,” which these works of art remember and trace. Āis essay thus endeavors to orient the reader within what may be called “the religiosity” of representation itself. To work toward this possibility, a brief foray into the structure and poetics of representation—as word, concept and phenomenon—including some questions that it generates, will offer resource for seeing the poetry and religiosity of these two outstanding works of art. In the first half of the essay, aspects of eastern and western aesthetics will be introduced, with an eye toward tilling the ground from which these images will be seen. Thereafter, each work will be given somewhat singular treatment, their exegeses will run along parallel lines, merging formal, symbolic and (a)theological aspects. It will be left to the reader to reflect, compare and conclude. While quite partial in its scope, the essay hopes to approach representation in such a way that the ethics and wisdom of the inter-religious imagination, as a discipline and a praxis, begin to reorient our conceptions of “the religious” and “the aesthetic” by situating them within the very definition of what it means to be human. II
To Represent: The Word, Resemblance, and Rasa
“Present” is at the heart of the word “representation.” It is both a verb, to present, and a noun that indicates a gift, a temporal moment, and a tense in language. Heralding from the Latin repraesentare, “to present,” literally “to place before,” representation carries the multiple senses of “making present,” “setting into view,” “a show,” “depiction,” or “manifestation.” In this, representation holds direct and indirect relation to meanings inherent in the words “revelation,” “presence,” “image,” “epiphany,” “theophany,” among others—words often and traditionally ascribed to the fields of religion and religious discourse. As in the word “revelation” the prefix of representation, re-, adds the sense of both repetition and withdrawal, an event happening and/or being disclosed. Significantly, “present”—the word, time, gift, at the heart of
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representation—is itself made up of a prefix, pre-, “before,” and -sent, which carries thought into the sentient realm, the senses, the body and its spatial and temporal relations. Āe Latin praesens -entis (p.p. of praeesse) furthers our understanding of this “present” at the heart of representation by drawing prae- “before,” and -esse “to be,” into one word. Together, the two reflect both the sensible and ontological meaning— the sense and essence—residing at the core of representation itself. Considered one of the oldest concepts in Western thought, representation draws philosophical import from a momentum established in the works of Plato (c. 428–348 BCE), whose reflections in Āe Republic “gave birth to aesthetics when Socrates claim[ed] that a painting is a representation that aims to reproduce only the appearance or image of an object” (Goldman 137). When Socrates was asked, “Which is the art of painting designed to be—an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear—of appearance or of reality?” he answered, “Of appearance [ phantasmatos],” thus distinguishing ultimate reality from the mere appearance of perceivable nature ( Āe Republic Bk. 10, 598b). Although Plato’s critique of representation, particularly of poetry, is both renowned and variously interpreted, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), his pupil, is said to have understood representation “as the activity most characteristic of human beings” (“Representation” 260). Human being, Aristotle writes, “is far more imitative [than the other animals] and learns his first lessons by representing things” (lit. “making by imitation”) (1448a4.2). It is in Plato’s thought, however, that a formative principle and criterion for representation are found. While Plato affirmed that the principle of measure was fundamental to every art in that it corresponded to the ultimate principles of the beautiful and the good, the criterion of resemblance, mimesis, was divided into two categories according to its moral value for the ideal society ( polis). In the Sophist Plato distinguishes between eikastike, or true imitation based on “likenessmaking,” and phantastike, or false imitation which was “imaginative or phantastic” (264c). Representation was seen as successful if it held a true resemblance to its object of reference in the world, that is, if it offered a “visual experience similar to that of the object, such that the intention is recoverable from this experience” (Goldman 137). Āis relationship between an image or word, and the object, intention or reality it seeks to convey, 3 is central to any discussion of representa-
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Āat which is represented is that which Aristotle called the “object.” See Mitchell 15.
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tion, particularly those that problematize resemblance as an insufficient criterion. 4 Although Aristotle’s Poetics commends the educative value of representation—the reason for our delight in seeing images ( eikonas) is that, as we are looking we are learning, collecting the meaning of things (1447b.5–6)—Plato’s legendary skepticism regarding its value gave rise to questions in epistemology, cognition, and ethics, ones that seed contemporary discourse and are relevant to our intention here: whether there is any knowledge acquired by perceiving the representation of an object, including those representations that do not intend reference to a specific object; whether the encounter with representations changes (enhances, distorts, opens) our perception of the world and its objects; and whether there is human (social, ethical, political) benefit to the exercise of the imagination inherent in making, viewing, and participating with, representations—the latter question in particular being critical to an understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. 5 For our purposes here, the first question may be modified to read: whether there is any knowledge of a subject, the human subject, gained through perceiving representations. And the second question may be refined to include inquiry into seeing the “real” as both a subjective and objective phenomenon, indeed, a phenomenon without such a distinction. 6 In turning to the Eastern philosophical tradition, specifically in South Asia, such modifications and refinements are not peripheral but instead integral to aesthetic theory. A primary example is found in the Indian concept of Rasa, which here provides counter and extension to Plato’s thought on representation and resemblance. Textually originating in the Natya Shastra, the authorship of which is traditionally ascribed to Bharata (c. 200–500 CE), 7 and later developed into As in those postmodern discourses (e.g., feminist, post-colonial), which expose inscriptions of power in representation and develop the poststructuralist view that representations are not “simply verifiable against some external reality but are always constructed out of existing cultural codes” (“Representation” 261). 5 Goldman addresses aspects of these and other questions. 6 Āis non-dualistic seeing is characterized in Zen Buddhism as kensho, Ken (chien) meaning “ ‘to see’, ‘to sight’, ‘to open one’s eye to,’ ” and Sho (hsing) being “ ‘nature’ ‘the suchness of a thing,’ ‘essence’ ” (Suzuki 41). 7 Āe life of Bharata, an Indian sage and writer, and the time of authorship of the Natya Shastra have been variously dated, ranging from the fifth century BCE to the sixth century CE. Āere is some convergence of opinion that the latter was written 200–300 CE. Āe authorship of the Natya Shastra, Rangacharya writes, “is traditionally ascribed to Bharata, who was considered a sage. But even that may be doubted. The original work, the text says in its first chapter, was composed by God Brahma 4
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a comprehensive philosophy of aesthetics in the commentaries of Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020 CE), the concept of Rasa may be thought of as the cornerstone of Indian aesthetic theory; it is, “like Dharma, one of the key-words of Indian culture characterizing its aesthetic aspect” (Prasad 1). Described as “the fruit of nearly two thousand years of Indian contemplation on Art, Drama and Poetry,” Rasa is considered to be a “living principle governing the whole of our life” and not solely as a doctrinal or theoretical concept (Prasad 1). 8 From the Sanskrit, literally meaning “juice,” the word Rasa is variously translated into English as “essence,” “flavor,” “relish,” “character,” “sentiment.” 9 Composed of two letters Ra and Sa, meaning “to give” and “motion,” respectively (Prasad 2), Rasa is that which appeals to the sense of taste: “Because it is enjoyably tasted, it is called rasa” (Bharata 55). Used as both a verb and a noun, it can mean both to “roar,” “cry,” “sound,” “reverberate” and, “juice of fruits,” “any liquid or fluid,” “the best or finest or prime part of any thing” (Prasad 2). Mythologically, Rasa is the name of a fabulous river flowing beneath the earth. In the Vedas it is used in the sense of “water,” “sap” (Rig Veda), “joy” (Yajur Veda), and “liquor” (Sama Veda). In the Upanishads the meaning of Rasa extends from “essential element” and “vital part” (Brihadaranyaka) to “supreme reality,” “highest taste,” “divine experience accompanied by a sense of supreme delight” (Prasad 5). 10 Bharata’s Natya Shastra details eight bhavas—human emotions, feel-
for the celestial immortals ruled by Indra. In the last chapter, it is said that for the terrestrial world, it was (re)composed or edited by Kohala, Vatsya, Sandilya and Dattila, who are mentioned both as the sons and disciples of Bharata. But these are only names; nothing more is known about them.” For further discussion of authorship and the place of the Natya Shastra in the Indian tradition see Rangacharya’s “About the Natyasastra.” 8 Quoting V. K. Gokak, Prasad writes, “ Rasa is one of those quintessential words in Sanskrit which sum up a whole philosophy or even a civilization.” Prasad continues: “Also, Rasa theory is not only the backbone of the Dhvani theory, but the unifying element synthesizing the beginning, the middle and the end of the whole of Indian poetics. It is the greatest achievement of Sanskrit literary criticism which presents a unique crystallization of art, philosophy and psychology” (Prasad 1). 9 For Sanskrit references and transliterations I use those of each author that I cite. 10 This language suggests comparison with Dionysius the Areopagite’s (fifth century CE) understanding of the divine eros (e.g., On the Divine Names). It also bears relation to contemporary French discourses (e.g., Lacan, Kristeva) on jouissance.
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ings, or mental states—which correspond to different Rasas: just as “[c]ondiments and herbs render food tasty; so is the mutual relation between bhava-s and rasa-s.” 11 There is “no rasa (flavour),” he affirms, “without a bhava and there is no bhava without rasa.” Although Rasa is “the seed of all ( Sthayi) bhava-s (of the spectators),” the Natya Shastra clearly states that “rasa is produced from bhava-s and not vice versa” (Bharata 55). Set within the context of Indian dramatic and literary arts, the act of tasting Rasa is a form of birth in the seer, 12 a pleasure like that of communion with God, for which “Lord Buddha, used the word pamojjabahulam meaning the acme of bliss” (H. N. Dutta, qtd. in Prasad 9 n. 35). Āe Rasas have origins, colors and deities accorded to them; their purpose is to realize and awaken emotion such that it is experienced directly yet at a distance, “in an impersonal contemplative mood” (Prasad 7). Āis paradoxical experience of communion and detachment engendered through the mutual relation of Rasa and bhava, is the measure of a work of art; that which defines the aesthetic experience is that which is “born from the union of the play with the performance of the actors” (Gnoli xv). In Pandey’s modern comparative aesthetics, Rasa is described as the aesthetic object issuing from dramatic representation and “not to be found in the creations of nature” (Pandey 12); Rasa is “organic unity,” “not pure unity but unity in multiplicity, and a particular subjective state of mind binds this multiplicity into an organic whole (Pandey 22, 12). As unity in multiplicity one finds here a coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum); it thus seems to rightly follow that, in the Taittiriya Upanishad, Rasa is identified with God, the self-creator—a God known as truth (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss ( ananda).13 It is especially in this latter characterization that one sees the capacities afforded dramatic and poetic representation—that the truth of the
11 Āe eight bhavas, detailed in the Natya Shastra are “Delight ( rati), Laughter ( hasa), Sorrow ( soka), Anger ( krodha), Heroism ( utsaha), Fear ( bhaya), Disgust ( jugupsa), and Wonder ( vismaya)” (Gnoli xv). 12 Bharata, “in a famous aphorism which, interpreted and elaborated in various ways, forms the point of departure of all later Indian aesthetic thoughts, says, in essence, that Rasa is born from the union of the play with the performance of the actors. ‘Out of the union of the Determinants—he says literally—, the Consequents and the Transitory Mental States, the birth of Rasa takes place,’ ” (Gnoli xv). 13 Taittiriya Upanishad II.vii.1, identifies Brahman with Rasa, the source of joy. Shankaracarya’s commentary elaborates on this correspondence (Taittiriya 362).
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work of art is not located in its resemblance to an objective referent in the world or its recoverable intention but is instead emergent in the relation between the art and the human being who sees and responds. Indeed, in Abhinavagupta’s philosophy of aesthetics, definitive for all subsequent Indian aesthetic theory, Rasa is known only through direct experience, yet significantly, it is known through art, through direct experience of representation. While Rasa is understood to be “distinct from worldly objects, and also different from such things as their (i.e., worldly objects’) imitation, reflection and pictorial presentation (alekhya),” it also belongs to “the (suggestive) function in poetry.” Rasa is, Abhinavagupta writes, “never included under worldly dealings (vyavahara) and is never dreamed of as being revealed directly through words” (qtd. in Masson and Patwardhan 50–1). Āere is, in this reference to the veiling and unveiling nature of language, a sense of ultimacy within the experience of Rasa, one that the relational structure of representation and human perception stimulates. It is an ultimacy that awakens the self and consciousness of the seer. Gupteswar Prasad speaks of it eloquently, in this way: “Indian poetics equates the pleasure of Rasa with that of divine bliss which the seer gets when he is face-to-face with God or realizes Him in the depths of his being” (6). In Rasa the divine is made present through the art of form, a form that, while it is art, it is also real, beautiful, “because of [its] appeal to the heart ( samvada)” (qtd. in Masson and Patwardhan 51). Although abbreviated, this glance into the phenomenon of representation via Plato’s criterion of resemblance and the Indian concept of Rasa, yields insight for seeing the images of the Kardiotissa and the Vishvakarma. From the etymology of the word “representation” to its aesthetic roots in eastern and western thought, it becomes evident that the nature of presence, reality, and being-in-the-world are central to any discussion of representation and its affect for human life. Representation has the capacity to authentically move the viewer, and in this movement to promote self-realization, “a coming closer to the Divine Light” (Prasad 7). In the Indian concept of Rasa, we see that the function of aesthetic representation is to affect and awaken humanity.14 Not simply “a making again” via resemblance to a referent in the world, representation carries with it an ambivalent capacity to both realize
14 A relationship between the concept of Rasa and Aristotle’s view of catharsis in the Poetics is apparent, though I am unable to develop it here.
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the self and to falsify, distort or misrepresent an original object, giving the appearance of reality without necessarily providing access to it. As in Plato’s skeptical view of its value and Abhinavagupta’s cautionary distinction of Rasa from correct knowledge ( samyagjnana) or erroneous cognition ( bhranti) (see Masson and Patwardhan 51), representations can conjure visibility for a referent even when no obvious claim is made upon an object in the world. In this sense, rather than being sui generis and autonomous as in Abhinavagupta’s view, 15 art can be seen as simply substitutional, as illusory and idolatrous replacement for the real, for the things themselves. This potential for falsity or fiction is in part due to the re- of representation, that is, its assumed relation to an original object. “Every representation,” W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “exacts some cost, in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between intention and realization, original and copy” (21). Yet this gap, this fault, is, paradoxically, the raison d’être of representation. For the gap that representation opens—between life and theater, original and copy, idea and realization, experience and expression—affords the distance and the difference necessary for vision, Rasa, and meaning to take place.16 Āis gap is integral to the revelatory aspect of representation and its dialectical movement between “proximity and distance, presence and absence, similarity and difference, participation and interruption” (Tracy 389). 17 Indeed, representation is this movement, a continual revealing and concealing of its subject in one and the same moment. In an effort toward seeing the poetics and religiosity of this revelatory movement within art, specifically within a Christian icon and a Buddhist cave, we may now begin the second half of this essay
15 “Abhinava likes to insist on the autonomy of a work of art, on the fact that it is sui generis and need have no object corresponding to it in the real world. Āus he remarks of the dance that imitates nothing in real life, but is pure creation, with no practical aim (to be free of practical aims is for Abhinava one of the defining characteristics of drama, as indeed it is of all art). Āus he remarks, apropos of Siva’s famous cosmic dance, that it is the spontaneous expression of his overflowing bliss, in which no thought other than sheer creative beauty exists” (Masson and Patwardhan 51). 16 This statement bears a relation to Saussure’s understanding of difference as the origin of meaning (see Johnson 41) and Bharata’s understanding of Rasa as requiring a distance between the actors and the audience in a dramatic representation. 17 Tracy is speaking of what he terms the Christian dialectic of Word-as-Logos and Word-as-Kerygma: “Word, in this Christian scenario, seems to suggest both close proximity and distance, presence and absence, similarity and difference, participation and interruption” (389).
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with a meditation on the image of the Virgin Kardiotissa and Child (color plate 21). 18 III Kardiotissa Āe Kardiotissa is an icon ( eikon), an image that is understood to mediate God’s self-revelation and presence. In the Christian tradition, the icon constitutes this space of mediation, a space that proceeds from, yet holds to, a dynamic continuity with its source. As the visible image of this continuity with, and a procession from, its source, the icon incorporates an incarnational aesthetic that finds meaning precisely through its mediation in matter. Āis mediative aspect of the icon and of matter may be understood here in light of the Latin, mediat(us), a being “divided in the middle,” for the icon both formally and theologically represents an agency that arbitrates or intercedes. Embodying the revelatory dialectic integral to representation—the gap which ensures that “presence is never full, simple, or whole” (Tracy 390)—yet also, acting as a portal to prayer, the icon of the Virgin Kardiotissa and Child can be seen as both a symbol and a representation; 19 the image represents the Mother ( mater) of God, the archetype of intercession, even as its form invites the viewer to the prayerful intercession that it materially re-presents. As a symbol that both represents and realizes what it signifies, the icon of the Kardiotissa is similar to a Christian sacrament, described both as an outward manifestation of an inward grace and as a sign “in which signified and signifier are assumed to cohere” (Tracy 389). At the nominal level alone, the Kardiotissa reveals the correlation between incarnation and crucifixion, and in this, the salvific coincidence of birth and death. As an iconographic variant of the Virgin
18 Āis image of the Kardiotissa is found in the Byzantine Museum in Athens (T1582) and is plate number 54 (no. 26) in Chrysanthe Baltoyianni’s Icons. Āe icon was written in the late fifteenth century by the renowned iconographer, Angelos of Crete; it is considered to belong to his mature works. I am grateful to the Byzantine Museum of Athens for their permission to reproduce this image here. Original photograph by Y. Yiannelos, reproduced in Baltoyianni 125. 19 In contrast to Dupré, I make a distinction between “symbol” and “representation.” A symbol is a form of representation, one that shows what it signifies in its form. A symbol embodies the signified, unlike a sign, which simply points to it. See Dupré.
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Glykophilousa, “the one who kisses sweetly,” 20 the Virgin Kardiotissa acts as the internal and external architecture to which the Christ child is infinitely linked. Described as a “representation which is connected with a specific prefiguration of the future Passion of the Child” (Baltoyianni 114) 21—hence its epithet, “Āe Virgin of the Passion”— the Kardiotissa is an image that lends visibility to the pathos of “the present” in representation, a passion and interiority rendered visible through the external and familiar image of the Virgin Mother and Child. To look at the Kardiotissa and Child is to witness the paradox of the Incarnation, to stand in the matrix of a paradoxical birth: from a virgin womb a child is born, of matter and spirit, in the image of God, as the Word that upholds the universe. Āis Christ child is the image of the eternal Logos, the Word that was in the beginning with God (John 1:1). Āus, Nicephorus of Constantinople will write against the iconoclasts, “If we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears” (qtd. in Virilio 121). 22 In seeing the Virgin Kardiotissa one encounters the single material source for the incarnate child, the pure body of the Virgin mother, clothed in a mantle of darkness shaped by gold. In her child we witness the kardia (heart) of the Kardiotissa, the body of Christ begotten within her body, her womb turned inside out. Āe icon thus lends outward form, visibility, to the interiority of the womb, to the real body within the body spoken of by St. Photios as the heart. In the Kardiotissa icon we bear witness to this heart as the Word of God, the Heart of the universe, the love born of a perfect union of human and divine. It is a union conceived within a human body, within the womb of the Virgin mother, the mediatus between heaven and earth: In Christ, the final purpose of creation has been revealed: the union of humanity and divinity in a paradoxical conquest, which does not transform or dissolve God into man or man into God, which rather renews human nature and imprints on it the mode of existence of the Eternal
See also Song of Songs 1:2: “Let me kiss him with the kisses of his mouth!” See Baltoyianni 105–15. 22 Nicephorus, early ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote in defense of the icon against the iconoclasts. For historical and theological background on the icon and the iconclastic period, see Schönborn. 20 21
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It is this love, the infinite Beauty of its union and the eternal sorrow of its difference, which is represented here as birth and death within a human frame. In the solemnity of this birth that is death, this presence that is absence, this union that is division, the Passion of the Virgin and the Child is revealed. Approaching the pictorial composition of the icon, the eye is first drawn to the position of the child’s head, no longer parallel or “cheek to cheek” as in the Glykophilousa but instead distinguished by its being perpendicular to the face of the Virgin, configuring a right angle between their two faces (fig. 1). This right angle, as a quadrant of a larger whole, metonymically implies the form of a cross, made explicit through the upraised arms of the child. 23 Āe lines of this cross are reinforced by the direction of the Virgin’s hands as they intersect the extension and reach of the child’s arms. Āat this cross is formed within the measure and direction of their two faces forefronts the relational structure of humanity and the two faces of matter, the human and the divine inextricably conjoined. In viewing the solemn beauty that presents their humanity to the eye, one realizes that neither the Virgin’s nor the Christ child’s head bears a halo. Looking even closer to the manner in which the late fifteenth-century iconographer, Angelos of Crete, has rendered the faces of mother and child, we see that they are of the same skin (fig. 1); it has a woven, linear gravure evocative of their embedment in matter and the perichoretic capacities of the virginal womb. 24 Such embedment and its incarnational resonance is imagined as a “sameness of skin,” denoting both a human boundary and a ground of continuity between mother and child. By building up a surface through lines that appear as a crossing of threads, Angelos of Crete has painted the skin as a kind of fabric, metaphorically intertwining two lives out of one flesh. This
23 See Tracy’s exposition on the Word and his listing of “the classical Christian dialectics: Incarnation/cross; sacrament/word; cosmos/history; symbol/allegory; icon/ idol . . .”(389). 24 In Christian doctrine the term “perichoresis” is normally applied to the interrelationship or interpenetration of the Persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It also designates the consubstantiality of the three Persons who are believed to be conjoined without losing their distinct identities. In Christian prayers and hymns the Virgin Mary is praised as the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity.
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Figure 1 . Angelos of Crete. Āe Virgin Glykophilousa (“Āe Kardiotissa”) , second half of the fifteenth century. Detail, icon on wood panel. Byzantine Museum, Athens. Photograph: Y. Yiannelos.
visual allusion corresponds to the fifth-century image of the Virgin as a textile-loom, her womb weaving the flesh of the body of Christ, “giving it form and texture” (Constas 170). By rendering visible the interiority and procreativity of the Virgin’s womb, this active allusion deepens the poetic and theological soundings found within the medieval “tunic of the womb” (Jacquart and Āomasset 23) and the Biblical “tunic without seam” cited in the Gospel of John (19:23). Apparent in all of these imaginative phrasings is a perceptual dialectic linking an interior, corporeal locus—the Virgin’s womb—and its exteriorized, corporeal form—the Christ child. One sees the flesh of the Virgin and the child—their faces, hands, his arms and leg—as the outward surface
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of an interior origin, now exposed. 25 In this, there is again relation to the catechetical definition of a sacrament, as the outward, visible sign of an inward, spiritual grace. Āe seamlessness of the skin and the darkness of the Virgin’s clothing reveal in image that which is concealed from sight—the invisible enclosure of the womb. Āe Kardiotissa represents the virginal, maternal, and sacramental reality of being “divided in the middle,” the mediatus of being one body that has the capacity to become two. In the child’s body we see the tension of the cross, the living horizon effected in this division and union of the human and the divine, heaven and earth. Āis horizon is given symbolic form in the garments worn by the child. The light blue chiton with gold flowerets clothes the upper body of the infant Christ, drawing relation upward to the celestial skies. His gold-threaded himation falls below, covering the lower half of his body. It is sinewy; its folds and coloration recall the terrestrial realm, with a golden and earthy brown similar in hue to their shared flesh. Between the light blue chiton and the goldthreaded himation the horizon between heaven and earth is demarcated, a limen that represents the mean between finite and infinite. In the child’s clothes is found an objective form for a cosmic and subjective reality—the hypostatic union of Christ—perfect humanity and perfect divinity in a single human being. Yet it is the body of the Virgin that provides the armature to which the infant Christ is bound; the Virgin mother is the architecture, the pillar that carries the weight of the love she has borne. Recalling the cross, implicit in the composition of their two faces, the bodies of mother and child face each other. In a gesture of poignant obedience and submission, the Christ child’s body performs his future words: “Here is your mother” (John 19:27). For in the image of the infant facing his mother with arms outstretched there lies a mirror representation of the Crucifixion—the sacrifice that will separate his body from his mother will nail his body to a cross and expose his body as both the veil of his divinity and the vessel of his humanity.
25 Baltoyianni writes of the exposed leg of the child as relating to the iconography of the Flight into Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents, each of which have the same meaning—that of the future sacrifice of the infant Christ. Baltoyianni notes that this semiology “has also been used in the similarly prefigurative representation of the Sacrifice of Abraham, where the young Issac lets his head fall back, exposing his bare neck” (114).
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In this pictorial event the Kardiotissa creates a temporal image of the future in reverse; the icon depicts a temporal present wherein birth and death mirror and moor each other in a visible surrendering to the flesh of human existence. In the fullness of both time and image, the body of Christ is the Cross and the birth of Christ is his Crucifixion. It is in the Virgin’s countenance that we witness the sorrow of this knowledge and in her hands that we see the grace that supports this knowing without impediment. Facing the events to come, the mournful expression of the Virgin endures this prescient truth, as if recalling the beginning of this end in the words of the archangel Gabriel: “Āe Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Veiled and directed outwards, the gaze of the Virgin looks toward that destiny which the viewer, looking in the opposite direction, also sees: “Woman, here is your son” (John 19:26). Looking above toward the will of the Father, the child is a body suspended, limning the horizon between outside and in, above and below, past and future. Āe position of the child’s head, in a gesture of obedience to the Father, is an extension of his gaze into the space of the infinite, a space outside the picture plane yet firmly grasped by the eyes of the heart. Āe Christ child as a “Living Icon of Love” is presented in a wholeness of body (Maximus, qtd. in Schönborn 125); the Virgin, as a three-quarter torso that casts anchor across the entire bottom edge of the picture plane, exudes the authority of an edifice, a foundation. She supports not the weight of the child but his possibility. The presence of the body of the child signifies the emptiness of the womb, reflecting the Virgin’s sole human parentage of Christ and in this, her solitude—a solitude representative of the human condition, of the paradox that is the birth of love and its perichoretic exchange with the other. In the Virgin’s consent resides the lament sealed in Simeon’s words, “and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:35). Āe iconic silence of the image conceals an eternal dimension for this mother’s child is the Word of God, the revelation of “the heart of hearts of the Father’s loving-kindness” (Schönborn 112). Āis “heart of hearts” is a reality rendered in the icon of the Kardiotissa and Child. It is an image that accords matter and its pathos to the body within the body—the heart of humanity and its birth in a seamless dimension. Āis image of humanity is an image of reciprocal relation, one that acknowledges corporeality in a beauty that tears at
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the fabric of a universe, a universe upheld by the infinite extension of a reach. To understand the icon as an image that is continuous with its source is to realize the capacities of representation at eye level, that is, from the perspective of a humanity that unites above and below, at a horizon that remembers its division in the light of the mediatus, a being divided in the middle. “I had seen birth and death / But had thought they were different,” writes T. S. Eliot. It is in this paradox that the reality of the Kardiotissa resides, for “the one who kisses sweetly” is the point of entry to a birth that takes place on the Cross. IV Vishvakarma Āe cave known as the Vishvakarma, or Sutar-ka-jhopda, meaning “carpenter’s hut (fig. 2), is one of the last and finest of the Deccan rock-cut chaitya halls excavated in western India. 26 It is the sole chaitya-griha or prayer hall among the twelve Buddhist caves at Ellora, 27 the other eleven being viharas, or monastery halls. Number ten among a total of thirty-four Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves, the Vishvakarma cave is dated circa 700 CE and survives as a stunning tribute to the late Mahayana Buddhist era in India, 500–750 CE. 28 Similar in form to the fifth-century chaitya halls of Caves 19 and 26 at Ajanta,29 and bearing the template of their prototype at Karli (first century BCE), the Vishvakarma is a material homage both to the labor of the human imagination and the faithful artistry of generations of Buddhist monks. 26 Images of the Vishvakarma were taken in June 2007 as part of a research project conducted at Ellora and Ajanta under the auspices of a Tata Summer Research Grant from the South Asian Initiative at Harvard University. A 2007 Graduate Student Council Summer Research Grant at Harvard University allowed me to extend my research and documentation. I am grateful to both agencies for their generous support. 27 Āe Ellora caves are located near the city of Aurangabad in the Sahyadri hills of Maharashtra. Āey consist of thirty-two caves—seventeen Hindu (600–900 CE), twelve Buddhist (600–800 CE), and five Jain (800–1100 CE). Bearing the influence of the earlier Ajanta caves (200 BCE–650 CE), Ellora exemplifies an ancient, interreligious and architectural interface between art and faith. 28 Pathy writes, however, that the Buddhist caves at Ellora show evidence of the Vajrayana (the vehicle of the thunderbolt) cult, in which “self discipline and meditation was [seen] as a means of attaining Buddhahood in contradistinction to the Mahayana belief which held that the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas would by their endless grace and compassion help the devotee attain Nirvana” (48–9). 29 For an historical understanding of the relationship between caves 19 and 26 at Ajanta see Spink.
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Along with Ellora’s Caves 9, 11, and 12, the “carpenter’s hut” heralds the twilight of Buddhism in west central India, for by the end of the seventh century CE the Brahmanical faith had begun to reassert itself. Sixteen Hindu caves at Ellora testify to this resurgence of Brahmanism beginning in the middle of the sixth century CE and continuing through the close of the eighth. Vishvakarma, the cave’s colloquial name, is also that of the celestial artisan, “the Creator of the universe and the personification of the arts,” 30 thus lending substance to the claim that its venerable form “marks the culmination of chaitya architecture in India” (Pathy 56). Known also as a “chaitya,” from the Sanskrit relating to a funeral pile or mound ( cita), a sacred tree or funereal monument, 31 the Vishvakarma and its epithets summon thought toward the human and cosmic processes of creation and destruction, that which gives life and that which marks death. It is, perhaps, poetic justice that its names draw seeming opposites into each other, birth and death, beginning and end, into the oneness of the circle they represent. In this, the cave’s names recall the metaphor for the Buddhist self “unattainable” (anupalabdha): “Āe self in its is-ness, pure and simple, is comparable to a circle without circumference and, therefore, with its center nowhere—which is everywhere” (Suzuki, “Self ” 15). Yet the trenchant physicality of the Vishvakarma both harbors and belies this formless figuration. The cave has a formal measure, a spatial beginning and end, and is, at once, monumental and intimate; its materiality evokes what Gaston Bachelard attributes to a poet’s words, an “ inner immensity that gives . . . real meaning to certain expressions concerning the visible world” (185). In fact, the Vishvakarma is a certain expression concerning the visible world: its certainty is written in the endurance of stone; its basalt rock encloses a cosmos within its bounds. Āe immensity of the Vishvakarma is at once architectural, spatial, and, internal, non-objective, for its apsidal hollow effects a turning of the seer inward. Indicative of a re-turning to the center of the cosmos, 32 this inward-turning is accomplished in form—by virtue 30 Āe word “Vishvakarmas” also designates those artisans who carry on the tradition of artisanry, “the holders of architectural and artistic heritage [who] have maintained the skill and the theoretical basis essential for designing and executing almost all facets of the built environment” ( Vaastu Marabu). 31 Āis etymology is from the OED online: . 32 As an axis mundi, the center is indicative of the point of intersection and communication between upper and lower realms.
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Figure 2 . Vishvakarma (Cave 10, interior view with triforium), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson.
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of its size the volume of the cave physically envelops the viewer and yet, at the same time, it embodies an interiority that echoes the viewer’s subjective terrain. Its contours magnify being, reorienting seer and seen on a threshold coinciding interior and exterior domains. In this regard, the cave effects the “present” at the heart of representation as it lends form, or formal analogy, to a formless phenomenon, to a vision wherein “the object of sight and the seeing subject” are not separated, to a seeing wherein “there is no more bifurcation of subject and object” (Suzuki, “What Is” 42). 33 Described as a prayer hall (Dhavalikar 20), a place of worship (Pathy 56), a cathedral (Brankston 4), and a rock temple (Burgess 10), the Vishvakarma chaitya-griha is all and none of these; while each of these descriptions apply, none of them are adequate to the phenomenon the cave enfolds. To enter the enclosure of the Vishvakarma is to be immersed in the meaning of -griha, “house,” and the sense of dwelling that characterizes prayer, hearth, and home. For this chaitya-griha is also a garbha-griha, literally, “the womb of the house,” a sanctum and a shrine. Contrary to the implications of its familiar name, Sutar-ka-jhopda (carpenter’s hut), the cave was not built, assembled, or cast; it has been excavated from solid, living rock. What was originally present fifteen hundred years ago is still available to the eye though its mass has become articulate through a process of loss, decrease, removal. Representing the birth of form through a process of kenosis or emptying, the excavation that defines the formal interior of the cave is analogous to the generative emptying of the womb and, in Buddhism, to the spiritual purifying of the “receptacle-consciousness” ( alaya) (Cook 46). Āe excavation that birthed the Vishvakarma may then be seen as symbolic of the Buddhist search for nonobjectifiable emptiness or, in the Mahayana doctrine of the tathagata-garbha, of the “womb of Buddhahood” (Cook 44), the origin and source of the One Mind ( ekacitta) of all the Buddhas” (E. H. Johnston, qtd. in Snodgrass 196). 34 Suzuki is describing the experience of kensho; see note 6. Tathagata can be translated literally as “thus come” or “thus gone,” and refers to one who is Enlightened, who has attained perfection. Tathagata is a name given to the Buddha, as in a verse inscribed on the balcony in the Vishvakarma cave which reads: “Ye dharma hetu prabhava hetum / tesam Tathagato hyavadattesam cha / yo nirodha evam vadi maha-sramana [All things proceed from cause; this cause has been declared by Tathagata (Buddha); all things will cease to exist; that is, that which is declared by the great sramana (Buddha)]” (qtd. in Dhavalikar 22). Āe tathagata-garbha contains all states of existence in their pure and undefiled condition (Snodgrass 197). 33 34
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Implicative of both the womb and the wound of matter, the cave gives access to a chthonic interiority that represents both a death to the profane world and a second birth—a coincidence of apparent opposites for “death and birth are after all two aspects of one same change of state” (Guénon 140). In that Buddhism teaches the way of enlightenment as a series of deaths to the self, a process of emptying in order to realize the pure mind, it is significant that the physical excavation of the cave actualizes this same process in stone. Each of the twenty-eight octagonal pillars that mark the division between the cave’s central nave and side aisles, was born of the slow, repetitive stroke of time and subtraction. Āeir plain bracket capitals with vaseand-foliage ( ghata-pallava) ornamentation, symbolizing prosperity in Hindu mythology, 35 reveal the profit of this same stroke, as does the triforium above, detailed with figures of the Buddha in the dharmachakrapravartana mudra —the preaching attitude symbolic of the first turning of the wheel of law at Sarnath (figs. 2, 4).36 From the triforium along the rectangular colonnade, the corbel arch of the roof springs. Extending the vertical line of the pillars upward, the roof links right side and left in a straight seam at the height of its arch. In place of wooden beams the artists have carved stone ones (fig. 3),37 creating a monolithic chamber whose architectural interior reverberates and enlarges that of the human body—its vaulted cavity echoes a rib cage; its rhythmic beams, the ribs and vertebrae; its arched seam, the spine. Each corbelled rib originates from this entablature, curving
35 Dhavalikar writes of this vase-and-foliage motif as “characteristic of the Gupta period, which is referred to as ‘Āe Golden Age’ in Indian history” (Dhavalikar 20). 36 Āe dharmachakrapravartana mudra is the hand gesture that indicates a preaching attitude; it refers to the Buddha’s teaching the path to Enlightenment and specifically to his first sermon at Sarnath, India, which was given to five disciples. In Sanskrit, this first sermon is called the Dharmachakrapravartana Sutra (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta [Pali]). Dharmachakrapravartana is a Sanskrit compound word whose components signify: the teaching or truth that leads to liberation from suffering (dharma / dhamma [Pali]); the wheel ( chakra / chakka [Pali]); and, the “turning, rolling or setting into motion” ( pravartana / pavattana [Pali]). It can thus be translated into English as “Setting in Motion or Turning the Wheel of Truth.” 37 “When rock-cutting activity began in western India, the artists had no previous experience of excavating caves. Āey were basically trained as carpenters and hence they have been referred to as carpenters working on stone. Consequently the early rock-cut caves are just copies of wooden structures in stone, and, there were numerous wooden attachments in the early caves. In fact, the chronology of early caves has been based to a considerable extent on the amount of woodwork in them. It decreased as artists gained experience in course of time” (Dhavalikar 3).
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Figure 3 . Vishvakarma (stone rafter ceiling), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson.
upward from behind a carved Nâga (cobra) figure, alternately male and female, with the former in an attitude of adoration and the latter holding a flower in the right hand. As if uniting female and male at the foundations of the world, the frieze acts as a firmament dividing and joining above and below, preparing the solid columns of earthen stone to lift and uphold the linear contours of the heavens above.38 At the end of the colonnade, at the curve of the nave, in the center of the apse, beneath the ribs of stone, lies the place of the heart (figs. 2, 4). In it, the stupa or dâgoba (Pali)—from the Sanskrit dhatu-garbha, literally “relic-receptacle,” “relic-womb”—abides. As with the image of the Christ child re-presenting the heart of humanity in the Kardiotissa icon, the stupa—as heart, as womb within the larger womb 38 Guénon writes of the cave as the “complete image of the world, reflecting all states without exception; otherwise the equation of the cave roof with the Heavens would be absolutely incomprehensible” (Guénon 144).
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of the cave—becomes the body within the body, the ever-present yet unattainable ( anupalabdha) center of the circle that is without circumference. Composite and monolithic, as was the aesthetic custom during the Mahayana period (fig. 4), this stupa literalizes in form the metaphor just described. Its mass of stone represents the heart of the cave, the center of the guha (Sanskrit, “cave”)—in the Brahmanical tradition, the “cave of the heart” (Katha Upanishad I.14; II.12). Symbolizing the vital organ beneath the ribs and the child within the mother’s womb, the stupa represents the hidden and invisible point of origin “containing the seed, or potentiality, of Enlightenment” (Snodgrass, 201). In Shingon (“True Word”) Buddhism, a branch of the esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism, a tributary of Mahayana, it is believed that this seed becomes the child whose birth is the advent of light, the “birth of Enlightenment from the innermost centre of the mind” (Snodgrass 198). Derived from “the root guh ‘to cover’ or ‘conceal’ or ‘hide’ ” (Guénon 145), the word guha signifies this innermost point of the heart and of the universe, the center “which contains in potentia all the possibilities of manifestation” (Snodgrass 201). Intrinsic to Buddhism and its parent faith, 39 the guha or cave image, like the Kardiotissa icon, brings together seeming opposites, representing both form and formlessness, the innermost point and the highest peak. In the Vishvakarma cave the stupa incorporates this summit and center, the womb and the embryo, the container of the uncontainable; 40 it becomes a true symbol in that it both represents and formally realizes the meaning it seeks to convey. The stupa’s form is majestic, substantial, even as its mass signifies a void, a paradox that both recalls the Sanskrit word shunyata, “the void that is full” (Berkson 381), and echoes a verse from the Prajnaparamita Hrydaya, or Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form.” Embodying the dialectic of absence and presence intrinsic to representation, the stupa’s grandeur conceals the emptiness that is commensurate with its formal origin. As the threshold between the chthonic Āe Brahmanical tradition, now commonly called “Hinduism,” is the parent faith of Buddhism. In the former, “the cave of the heart” is “the jivatma, the Spirit of self (atma) manifested in the human individual, and the paramatma, the supreme and unconditioned Self that is identical with Brahman” (Snodgrass 201). 40 In Greek, “chorion tou achoretou,” the container of the uncontainable, is the name for the Virgin of the Chora (Istanbul, Turkey), also called the Virgin Blachernitissa or, in Russian Orthodox iconography, the Virgin of the Sign. See Ousterhout 93. 39
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Figure 4. Vishvakarma (view of composite stupa), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson.
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and the celestial, the wound between darkness and light, the interval between death and second birth, the stupa is a form of illumination from within; its verticality charts the path of the heart, the preparatory, essential and realization stages in the attainment of Buddhahood. As its cylindrical mass moves upward into the anda, the dome or hemisphere crested by a central flowering harmika,41 the stupa wordlessly depicts the seat of enlightenment: on its front facing the entrance to the cave, the Buddha teaches, his hands still in dharmachakrapravartana mudra, his body seated in the pralambapadasana pose with knees bent and separated feet on the ground. At nearly eleven feet high, set within an ornate frontispiece some six feet higher (fig. 5), and with the roof ten feet higher again, the figure of the Buddha transfigures light into silence, giving it a face and a body as stone concentrates form into prayer. Evoking comparison between the guha (cave of the heart) and the Christian “closet [Greek, tameion] of the heart” (Mt. 6:6) of which St. Dimitri of Rostov writes, the Vishvakarma cave presents the intimacy and interiority of contemplation in an exquisite stillness of stone. Āe harmika (fig. 5), symbolic of fire (agni), which in its Vedic origins is linked to the sense of sight and inner realization, is both an altar and a crown, a reliquary and a throne. It opens to the firmament above. Below, as if to offer witness to the fruits of ascetic life, the Buddha’s figure portrays the wholeness and perfection of humanity, his body in a state of balanced tranquility and his countenance emanating a beneficent calm. Though scarred by time and the hubris of a dissonant belief, the Buddha sits in the unwavering posture of the teaching mudra, instructing the seer in changelessness and the “perfection of the ability to experience reality in the emptiness mode” (Cook 47). On the face of the stupa and before the bodhi tree, this Heart teaches, with Avalokitesvara, bodhisattva of compassion on his right, and Manjusri, bodhisattva of supreme wisdom on his left (fig. 4). As with the icon
41 Āe harmika is a rectilinear or squared-off platform, altar, or throne within which relics may be stored. It is symbolic of the summit of the High Altar ( uttaravedi), “equates the square of Heaven,” is “the citadel of the gods” ( deva-kotuva), and “the tip of the mountain peak emerging from the Egg” (Snodgrass 103, 226). Formally, the harmika is a transitional element situated between the anda, or cylindrical/hemispherical mass of the stupa, and the chattravali or umbrella which consists of multiple moldings descending in size. Āe Vishvakarma stupa, however, ends at the harmika, which is itself multiple and performs the role of the chattravali. See also Bunce 54, 522–23.
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Figure 5. Vishvakarma (detail of the stupa, anda and harmika), c. 700 CE. Excavated basalt rock. Ellora, India. Photograph: Mary M. Anderson.
of the Kardiotissa and Child, the stupa, the Buddha, and the Vishvakarma as a whole, represent thresholds that coalesce interior and exterior, seen and unseen, in the phenomenal aspect of matter. It has been said that what we believe needs to be seen to be believed. Āe Vishvakarma bears witness to a more subtle credo, one that instructs vision toward the matter of faith: “Āere was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt.” Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space . Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1964. Baltoyianni, Chrysanthe. Icons: Mother of God. Athens, Greece: Adams Editions, 1994. Berkson, Carmel. Ellora: Concept and Style . New Delhi, India: Abhinav Publications, 1992.
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Bharata. Āe Natyasastra: English Translation with Critical Notes . Trans. Adya Rangacharya. New Delhi, India: Munishiram Manoharlal, 1996. Brankston, A. D. Buddhist Cave Temple: From China to Ellora . London: Asiatic Review, 1938. Bunce, Fredrick W. The Iconography of Architectural Plans: A Study of the Influence of Buddhism and Hinduism on Plans of South and Southeast Asia . New Delhi, India: D. K. Printworld, 2002. Burgess, James. Āe Rock Temples of Elura or Verul . Bombay, India: Education’s Society Press, 1877. Constas, Nicholas. “Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Āeotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 3.2 (1995): 169–95. Cook, Francis H. Hua-yen Buddhism: Āe Jewel Net of Indra . University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Dhavalikar, M. K. Ellora. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dmitri of Rostov. “Āe Inner Closet of the Heart.” Āe Art of Prayer . Ed. Timothy Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. 43–50. Dupré, Louis. Symbols of the Sacred . Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Eliot, T. S. “Journey of the Magi.” Āe Norton Anthology of Poetry . 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1970. 1012–13. Gnoli, Raniero. Āe Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta . Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1968. Goldman, Alan. “Representation: Conceptual and Historical Overview.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Vol. 4. Ed. Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 137–39. Guénon, René. Fundamental Symbols: Āe Universal Language of Sacred Science . Trans. Alvin Moore, Jr. Rev. and ed. Martin Lings. Ed. Michel Valsan. Rev. ed. Cambridge, England: Quinta Essentia, 1995. Trans. of Symboles fondamentaux de la science . 1962. Hofstadter, Albert and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. New York: Modern Library, 1964. Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Āomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages . Trans. Matthew Adamson. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Johnson, Barbara. “Writing.” Lentricchia and McLaughlin 39–49. Küng, Hans. “Notulae on the Buddhist-Christian Encounter.” Foreword. Āe Heart of Buddhism. By Takeuchi Yoshinori. Ed. James W. Heisig. New York: Crossroad, 1991. vii–xii. Lentricchia, Frank and Āomas McLaughlin, eds. Critical Terms for Literary Study . Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Lewis, Charlton T. “Praesens, entis.” An Elementary Latin Dictionary . Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1995. 641. Masson, J. L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona, India: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1985. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Representation.” Lentricchia and McLaughlin 11–22. Āe New Oxford Annotated Bible . New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Ousterhout, Robert. “Āe Virgin of the Chora: An Image and Its Contexts.” Āe Sacred Image East and West . Ed. Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pandey, Kanti Chandra. Indian Aesthetics. Banaras, India: Vidya Vilas, 1950. Pathy, T. V. Ajanta, Ellora, and Aurangabad Caves: An Appreciation . Aurangabad, India: S. P. Atre, Mudranika, 1991. Plato. Āe Republic . Vol. 2. Trans. Paul Shorey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. ———. Āe Sophist. Trans. Harold North Fowler. London: William Heinemann, 1928.
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Prasad, Gupteshwar. I. A. Richards and Indian Āeory of Rasa . New Delhi, India: Sarup and Sons, 1994. Rangacharya, Adya. “About the Natyasastra.” Introduction. Āe Natyasastra: English Translation with Critical Notes . By Bharata. Trans. Rangacharya. New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1996. xvii–xxiii. “Representation.” Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism . Ed. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 260–1. Schönborn, Christoph. God’s Human Face: Āe Christ-Icon . Trans. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco CA: Ignatius, 1995. Snodgrass, Adrian. Āe Symbolism of the Stupa . Studies on Southeast Asia. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Spink, Walter M. Ajanta: A Brief History and Guide . Ann Arbor MI: Asian Art Archives at University of Michigan, 1994. Suzuki, Teitaro Daisetz. “Self the Unattainable.” Āe Buddha Eye . Ed. Frederick Franck. New York: Crossroad, 1991. 15–21. ———. “What Is the ‘I’?” Āe Buddha Eye 31–46. Taittiriya Upanishad. Eight Upanishads . Vol. 1. Trans. Swami Gambhirananda. Kolkata, India: Advaita Ashrama, 2006. Taylor, Mark C., ed. Critical Terms for Religious Studies . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Pres, 1998. Tracy, David. “Writing.” Taylor 383–93. Vaastu Marabu. Dir. Bala Kailasam. Min Bimbangal, 1992. Virilio, Paul. “A Topographical Amnesia.” Visual Culture Reader . Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 1998. 108–22.
3. Jewish and Christian Transformations
HEALING WOUNDS: REFLECTIONS ON ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL AND INTERFAITH PARTNERSHIP IN POLAND Edward K. Kaplan Brandeis University If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated. —Abraham Joshua Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity 113
The site of these reflections is an international, interfaith conference on the Jewish philosopher and prophetic voice, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), held at the University of Warsaw in June 2007. Āis meeting was conceived and organized by Stanislaw Krajewski, a Jew and professor of philosophy, to commemorate the hundreth anniversary of Heschel’s birth, to enhance relations between Jews and Christians in Poland and in North America, and hopefully, to heal old wounds. As the author of a two-volume biography of Heschel, I was invited to participate. After Warsaw, several of us went to the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, a small city not destroyed in the war. Grateful for the opportunity to meet other religiously-committed scholars of Heschel from several countries, I was nevertheless deeply ambivalent. During these eight days in Poland filled with Jewish content, I was forced to confront my negative “imaginary” of Poland and the (predominantly Roman Catholic) Poles—a web of associations emphasizing their role in the destruction of European Jews. For me, Poland was second only to Germany as a perpetrator of modern antiSemitic barbarism. 1 1 At the conference, I realized that I had not planned to visit Auschwitz, even though one-day excursions to Auschwitz-Birkenau were easy to arrange from Warsaw. I had all sorts of excuses: too many other commitments, the obligation of coming up with some wisdom about the experience, resistance to using the Holocaust to compose my Jewish identity, etc. How would an actual visit affect my imaginary of the death camps? Once in Poland, I realized that for Catholic Poles, as well, Auschwitz was an explosive symbol that required examination in an interfaith (Christian-Jewish) context.
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Born in 1942 in Boston, I am not a Holocaust survivor, nor a child of survivors. Yet I grew up watching television newsreels and film dramas about World War II and developed a vicarious identification with a history of suffering, persecution, and mass murder (see Finkielkraut). Āese childhood impressions were reinforced by studying European history. Āe twentieth-century Jewish experience was gruesome. Āen came Krajewski’s invitation to speak about Heschel in Warsaw. The conference organizer is himself a figure of reconciliation. As a child he received no Jewish education and became assimilated to Polish culture. After the communist period, he began deliberately to construct his post-Holocaust Polish Jewish identity. Krajewski now defines himself as a “Polish Polish Jew”—that is, a Jew born in Poland of Jewish parents. A “deeply involved” Jew, he identifies with his nation and the Polish people despite, and perhaps because of, their shared history of anti-Semitism (Krajewski, esp. 17–28). Krajewski intended Abraham Joshua Heschel to provide common ground for the thirty presenters, about twelve of whom were Polish, and among them three Jews. (Other scholars came from Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Israel, France, Canada, and the United States.) Half of the participants were Jewish and the majority of the Christians were Roman Catholic. Āe Polish organizers were especially keen to recover Heschel as a son of Poland despite his lifelong alienation from the nation in which he was born and in which he entered adolescence (Kaplan, “Heschel in Poland”). I Heschel and Poland Promoters of reconciliation have sought to revive the Hebrew meaning of “Po-lin” (abide there) as a vital source for Jewish life—a term that suggests the positive condition felt by the majority of Polish Jews before the Shoah. Yet this goal seems to defy common sense, for the word “Poland” continues to evoke images of hatred, persecution, or lethal indifference. “Auschwitz” says it all. Heschel himself had every reason to repudiate his homeland. Born in Warsaw seven years before World War I, he had completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. Absorbing the agonies of the Shoah as a refugee in the United States, he never returned to Poland or Germany and his associations remained harsh: “every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated” ( Israel 113).
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For this and other reasons, Heschel’s life fiercely challenged the goodwill of interfaith reconciliation. 2 He was able to leave his home city in July 1939, “just six weeks before the disaster began.” He reached the United States in 1940, eventually establishing himself as a Judaic scholar and writer, teacher, theologian, and, in the 1960s, as an activist. To a distinguished interfaith audience he defined his place in history as a witness: “My destination was New York, it would have been Auschwitz or Treblinka. I am a brand plucked from the fire, in which my people was burned to death. I am a brand plucked from the fire of an altar of Satan on which millions of human lives were exterminated to evil’s greater glory” (“No Religion Is an Island” 235). I knew full well that Heschel’s wounds never healed. Even as a prophetic media figure in his adopted homeland, he remained vulnerable, hypersensitive to other people’s pain but bereft of consolation. Heschel was revered as a representative of Jewish tradition. His mastery of classical sources encompassed Bible, Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophy, Hasidism, and Jewish mysticism. He wrote vibrant books on theology, prayer, the Hebrew prophets, and more, and he achieved public renown in the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. Moreover, Catholics admired Heschel as the American Jewish Committee’s theological consultant during the Second Vatican Council. He worked with Augustin Cardinal Bea who, as President of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, was responsible for the Declaration on the Jews included in Nostra Aetate. Protestants recognized Heschel as an embodiment of Torah by appointing him as Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Āeological Seminary for the academic year 1965–1966. Heschel defined the foundations of Jewish-Christian dialogue in his inaugural lecture at Union Seminary, “No Religion Is an Island”—the principle text of the Warsaw conference. Claiming that the plurality of religions “in this aeon [was] the will of God,” he asserted that both traditions had a cosmic role to play in the mystery of human redemption: “A Christian ought to realize that a world without Israel [the Jewish people] would be a world without the God of Israel. A Jew, on the other hand, ought to acknowledge the eminent role and part of Christianity in God’s design for the redemption of all men” (242).
2 I appreciated Richard Kearney’s favorite quotation from Paul Ricoeur: “What is the best way to know yourself [I would add, and reality]? Āe shortest route from self to self is the other” (qtd. in Kearney 12).
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True interfaith mutuality was theological. Heschel was a literary virtuoso who unswervingly focused on prayer and the centrality of God. For him, the God of pathos (a God emotionally involved with human lives) was necessary to save civilization. His theology of the person as literally, body and spirit, an image of God—what I call his “sacred humanism”—resonated with the Christian understanding of Jesus as divine incarnation. Heschel’s faith, however, derived from the Hebrew Bible, a sacred source shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. On a popular level, too, Heschel’s persona reinforced his power as “Jewish imaginary.” He spoke with a Yiddish accent and, with his beard and long white hair, he “looked like a Hebrew prophet.” An imposing presence despite his short stature, he walked upright and “acted like a Hasidic rebbe” (Shmeruk). Āe Protestant minister William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Heschel’s ally in the anti-Vietnam War movement, called him “Father Abraham” because, as he explained to Heschel himself, “‘you are patriarchal and ecumenical, and because I am sure the original Abraham, father of us all, looked just like you’ ” (qtd. in Coffin 218). Yet Heschel’s charisma was authentic, grounded upon knowledge and experience, and only reinforced by fantasy. His speeches were eloquent, enriched with biblical references that Christians knew and loved from their own liturgy and studies of the “Old Testament.” Heschel was a dramatic reminder of Isaiah and Jeremiah—a projection, perhaps, fostered by the spirit of Vatican II, of a millennial Christian nostalgia for Jesus and for the non-ecclesial, Israelite covenant with God. II
A Dialogical Breakthrough
Āe speakers at the Warsaw conference were committed personally to their religions and placed Heschel in dialogue with other thinkers such as Yeshayahu Liebovitz, Henry Corbin, Edmond Jabès, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. Other papers explored Heschel’s phenomenology of prophetic inspiration, his ethics, his relationship to Christianity and Islam, his early life in Poland, and much more. It was inspiring to see Heschel studies opening up as never before. My paper on “Heschel’s Depth Āeology as Common Ground” examined his emphasis on a pre-conceptual apprehension of the
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divine that precedes formulations of creed or belief, allowing for religious pluralism. “Seeking God’s will together,” interfaith dialogue can emerge from recognition of “the tragic insufficiency of human faith” (Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island” 239–40). An exciting moment occurred in the session on inter-religious relations. Stanislaw Obirek, a former Jesuit priest teaching American Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, gave a bold paper, “Is Christology an Obstacle for Jewish-Christian Understanding?”, based on Heschel’s challenge to a 1967 Congress on the Āeology of the Renewal of the Church: “it is difficult for a Jew to understand when Christians worship Jesus as the Lord, and this Lordship takes the place of the Lordship of God the Creator. It is difficult for a Jew to understand when theology is reduced to Christology.” 3 Citing Walter Ong, Karl Rahner, and other church progressives, Obirek reinforced Heschel’s focus on individual insight and the religious quest as he proposed a new christological interpretation to give space for genuine inter-religious dialogue. During the discussion, Obirek was challenged by Waldemar Szczerbinski of the Institute of Christian Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (and aside from one nun dressed in traditional habit, the only priest at the conference in clerical garb). Author of a book in Polish on Heschel’s philosophy of man and active in the Polish church’s inter-religious program, Father Szczerbinski insisted, almost vehemently, on the centrality of Jesus Christ as Lord as an irreducible element of Christian identity. It was the first time at the conference that such passion had erupted. Āis clash between Szczerbinski’s christocentric fervor and Obirek’s persistent universalism had exposed a major conflict within today’s Polish church—a conflict shared by Catholics throughout the world. We Jews have similar battles between particularism and universality.
3 “The God of Israel” 274–75. The quotation continues: “It is significant that quite a number of theologians today consider it possible to say, ‘we can do without God and hold to Jesus of Nazareth.’” In particular, Heschel refers here to Āomas Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Āeology and the Death of God (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 33. Obirek’s paper will be published along with the other conference papers.
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edward k. kaplan III Jewish Vitality in Poland Today
Āe four days in Warsaw were gratifying. On the day of our arrival, several of us attended a Jewish wedding at the Nozyk synagogue officiated by the American-born chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich. Each morning after discussions at breakfast with other participants we walked to the university and appreciated what seemed to be a youthful, energetic city. We attended a reception at the Warsaw Institute of Judaic Studies, where Heschel taught in 1938–1939 after being expelled from Germany. At a ground-breaking ceremony for a new Museum of the Polish Jews (to be built by 2010 near the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial), Lech Kazynski, president of Poland, and other Catholic and Jewish dignitaries, spoke movingly. My overall feelings about Poland and the Poles were quite positive. To be sure, memories of atrocities perpetrated by the Germans and their collaborators were on my mind, but I soon realized that many of my stubborn prejudices no longer fit the contemporary scene. My positive impressions were reinforced during the train ride to Krakow with some friends from the conference. In Krakow, I stayed four days at the picturesque Alef Hotel and attended the Jewish culture festival in the Kazimierz district of the city. Still, I remained skeptical of the present renewal of Jewish culture in Poland. At the University of Warsaw, the Yiddish program is run by a professor whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Catholic, and her Ph.D. students are not Jewish. The Polish government and private foundations significantly subsidize other efforts to develop Jewish culture, but I still doubted their “authenticity.” But what is Jewish culture in a country which lost over ninety percent of its Jewish citizens? My negativity was offset somewhat by a lively discussion about Judaism sponsored at the Interfaith Institute of Ecumenism and Dialogue at the Pontifical Academy of Āeology in Krakow. 4 While it is true that Poland’s sparse post-Holocaust Jewish population is not itself sufficient to nurture a dynamic renewal, the Jewish Culture Festival, which, in its seventeenth year was organized primarily by non-Jews, lasted longer than a week. It featured authors like Āe discussion, which occurred on 29 June 2007, featured Harold Kasimow, professor of religious studies at Grinnell College and a student of Heschel’s, whose book (2006) was recently published in both English and Polish, with a response by Piotr Sikora, assistant professor of theology at the Pontifical Academy of Theology. 4
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Aharon Appelfeld and included guided tours of Jewish museums, cemeteries, well-restored synagogues, workshops on Hasidic music and dance, paper cutting, films, and more. Tourists came from France, Germany, other European countries, and North America; there were even Hebrew-speaking visitors from Israel. A turning point occurred for me at a concert by Leopold Kozlowski, a small, white-haired man brimming with energy, known as “the last Klezmer of Galicia.” He accompanied on the piano several singers of Yiddish songs. Āe master of ceremonies told jokes and introduced the artists in Polish to the Polish-speaking audience. Everything seemed to excite “my nostalgia for nostalgia.” 5 Here in Krakow, sixty years after the Holocaust, artists with names like Renata Swierczynska, Andrzej Rog, Kasia Zielinska, Katarzyna Jamroz, were performing sentimental Yiddish songs such a “Oyfn Pripetshik,” “Khatskele,” “Az der Rebe Tanst,” and “Belz” that even I knew as kitsch, but which were also examples of real Jewish popular culture—performed by mostly nonJews!6 I felt I had no right to judge. Raised in an affluent suburb of Boston in a strongly Jewish but culturally assimilated family, I had discovered Yiddish films and theater on Second Avenue in New York during my graduate years at Columbia University (1964–1970). Āere I indulged my yearning for what I imagined to be the rich emotional life of shetl Jews from which I descended. Āat popular Jewish culture, however, contributed significantly to my lifelong study of Heschel and the values he represents. Here in Krakow I was released from my suspicion of non-Jews devoted to Jewish culture—whether in Poland or anywhere else. Āese interfaith encounters in Poland provided unique opportunities to confront significant spiritual, ethical, and identity problems. If Heschel’s wounds were not ultimately healed, at least those of my negative imaginary have given way to a hopeful future. Reinforced was my trust that the common ground of Abraham Joshua Heschel, an authentic child of Central Europe who transplanted the Hasidic spirit to America, will continue to help us focus, separately and together, on urgent struggles to achieve faith, integrity, and peace.
5 6
I believe the phrase was coined by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. For information on Kozlowski’s CDs, see <www.austeria.pl> and <www.klezmer.pl>.
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edward k. kaplan Works Cited
Coffin, William Sloane, Jr. Once to Every Man. A Memoir . New York: Atheneum, 1977. Finkielkraut, Alain. Āe Imaginary Jew . Trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Israel: An Echo of Eternity . New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969. ———. “No Religion Is an Island.” Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity. Ed. Susannah Heschel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. 235–50. ———. “Āe God of Israel and Christian Renewal.” Moral Grandeur 268–85. Kaplan, Edward K. “Abraham Joshua Heschel in Poland: Hasidism Enters Modernity.” Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 13 (2000): 383–98. ———. “Heschel’s Depth Āeology as Common Ground.” Abraham Joshua Heschel Conference. University of Warsaw, Poland. 25–27 June 2007. ———. Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 . London: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. “ ‘Under my Catholic skin’: Āomas Merton’s Opening to Judaism and the World.” Merton and Judaism: Holiness in Words: Recognition, Repentance, Renewal. Āe Fons Vitae Āomas Merton Series. Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2003. 109–25. ——— and Samuel Dresner. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness . New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Kasimow, Harold. Āe Search Will Make You Free: A Jewish Dialogue with World Religions [Poszukiwanie was wyzwolii Judaizm w dialogu z religiami swiata ]. Krakow, Poland: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2006. Kearney, Richard. Interview. “Āe God Who May Be.” CBC Ideas transcript. Broadcast 20 and 27 February, 6 March 2007. Krajewski, Stanislaw. Poland the the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew. Krakow, Poland: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2005. Obirek, Stanislaw. “Is Christology an Obstacle for Jewish-Christian Understanding?” Abraham Joshua Heschel Conference. University of Warsaw, Poland. 25–27 June 2007. Shmeruk, Khone. Personal interview. 29 March 1990.
DESIRE AND THE DESIRABLE: NICHOLAS DE CUSA’S INTERFAITH IMAGINATION Fred Dallmayr University of Notre Dame In recent times, philosophy has rejoined the lifeworld. Partly under the pressure of modern psychology and psychoanalysis, philosophy has leĀ its empyrean heights and become attentive (again) to the welter of human feelings and emotions. Most prominent among these emotions is the ever-present urge or impulse called “desire.” No doubt, philosophical attention to emotions and above all to desire is commendable and enriching. Yet, care must be taken lest philosophy loses its way and becomes drowned in (what is called) “emotivism.” The need for caution is evident in the case of desire. Just because it is so readily accessible or such a widely felt impulse, there is a danger that its meaning slips from our grasp. For, if we just stay with the obvious—the fact of desire, or that we desire what we desire—thinking quickly gets stranded. If we are satisfied with just saying “we desire” or “we desire what we desire,” this seems to be the end of the story. And today, in ordinary or common-sense discourse, this is oĀen the end. In our age of consumerism, human beings are defined as desiring creatures, as beings who crave or desire to satisfy their desires—in fact, as beings who desire to have more and more goods and obtain emotional satisfaction from having these goods. But can this really be the end of the story? Surely, humans are not only desiring, but also thinking and judging beings. As philosophers we remember an older tradition which distinguishes between what we desire and what is truly “desirable.” In some traditions—for instance, a certain kind of Platonism and Kantianism—desire and the desirable are sharply differentiated and even segregated, to the point that a gulf is erected between the seemingly good (found in the Platonic “cave”) and the really good and truly desirable (outside the cave). Yet, in this case a problem arises. For, if the focus is placed entirely on the “really good” and “truly desirable,” the dimension of ordinary desire is likely to be sidelined or dismissed as spurious and misleading. But how can something be really “desirable,” if it is not also somehow desired?
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To be sure, desire or the “desired” and the “desirable” are not simply the same. Yet, notwithstanding their difference, there must also be some kind of linkage or passageway between them. We know of such a linkage in the work of Aristotle who distinguished but also connected desire and virtue (orexis and arête). Among more recent philosophers, John Dewey provides some helpful guideposts. In an essay on the “Moral Struggle,” Dewey writes—in a nearly Kantian vein—that “the heart of the moral struggle” is the opposition between desire and duty. We may distinguish, he notes, between actual desire as satisfaction and a desire “based on the idea that the end is desirable—that it ought to be desired.” However, going beyond Kant, the same essay insists that the desirable must also “appeal” to the human heart and mind, such that duty may “awaken” human desire and guide it toward the desirable (372–3). In the following, I want to turn to another thinker who, while distinguishing desire and the desirable, also forged a passage-way between them. The thinker is Nicolaus of Cusa, also called Cusanus (1401– 1464), and the passage in his case is ultimately the way of love—that is, the way of loving and being loved and the linkage between them. In his study devoted to his work, Ernst Cassirer maintained that Cusanus can rightly be considered “the first modern thinker” (10, 13). As I shall try to show, however, Cusanus was also a “more than modern” thinker, someone able to speak to us today (in, what some call, our “postmodern” time). Basically, as it seems to me, at the heart of Cusanus’s lifework is an existential transformation or pedagogy: a practical as well as philosophical journey animated by love (traditionally expressed as amor Dei intellectualis ). In many ways, his entire life can be seen as a restless journey propelled by a sincere desire for learning and an intense love for the “desirable,” goodness and truth. For present purposes, I want to follow him on part of his journey, focusing on two major aspects: his emphasis on experiential learning, in the ordinary lifeworld, and his concern with inter-religious harmony and peace. I A Layman’s Pedagogy In many of his writings, Cusanus privileges the outlook of the ordinary layman, the man of the street or the market place ( idiota). No fewer than three of his important texts carry the term “layman” in their titles: Āe Layman on Wisdom, Āe Layman on the Mind / Spirit, Āe
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Layman on Experiments (Idiota de Sapientia, Idiota de Mente, Idiota de Staticis Experimentis) . This emphasis is philosophically significant at all times—and especially in our modern and contemporary era. In large measure, modern Western philosophy has been “professionalized” or transformed into an academic discipline; what is called “analytical philosophy,” above all, is almost entirely a discourse confined to academic logicians and epistemologists. Concerns voiced by ordinary people on the street, by contrast, tend to be sidelined as ignorant chatter unworthy of serious attention. The privilege accorded to the layman is beautifully articulated in the dialogue titled Āe Layman on Wisdom (Idiota de Sapientia). Cusanus first sets the stage, saying: “A poor untutored layman [pauper quidam idiota] met in the Roman Forum a very wealthy orator whom he smilingly though courteously addressed in the following manner” (a manner clearly reminiscent of Socrates in the market place): I am quite amazed at your pride, for even though you have worn yourself out with continual study of innumerable books, yet you have not been moved to humility. The reason is that the “knowledge of this world,” in which you believe to excel, is actually foolishness in the sight of God; it puffs men up, whereas true knowledge humbles them. I wish you would realize this because it is the treasure of all happiness.
In elaborating on an alternative path to wisdom, the layman does not dismiss book learning per se, but only to the extent that books are treated as final authority in lieu of actual experience. As he adds, reprimanding the orator (and academic philosophy in general): By relying on books, “you trust in [external] authority and in this way you are deceived; because someone has written a text, you are ready to believe. But”—and here comes the layman’s (and Nicolaus of Cusa’s own) cri de coeur—“I want to tell you that wisdom cries out in the streets, and her very cry indicates how she dwells ‘in the highest’ [ habitat in altissimis]” (Unity and Reform 101–2; translation slightly altered). The last comment already reveals the uncanny quality of the layman’s “street-wise” wisdom, its peculiar mundane-transmundane character (if one wishes, its ontic-ontological status). The further course of the dialogue draws layman and orator steadily into the depth of this street-wisdom—a depth announced a few pages aĀer the opening exchange with these words: “The highest wisdom consists in knowing how, in similes, the unattainable may be reached or attained unattainably [ attingitur inattingibile inattingibiliter ].” Here we are suddenly
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no longer simply on the street, but on a road filled with ordinaryextraordinary surprises. It is Cusanus’s very own road—although one charted by many earlier travelers. In her bilingual (Latin-German) edition of Āe Layman on Wisdom , Renate Steiger draws attention to a host of intellectual and religious precursors. As she points out, ever since the time of St. Augustine, the term “laypeople” ( homines idiotae) was applied to individuals speaking and writing in a simple, vernacular idiom. The term was taken over by some of the large mendicant orders of the Middle Ages; thus, Francis of Assisi described himself and his followers as “laypeople” ( idiotae). The orientation reached its pinnacle in the non-monastic lay movements of the late Middle Ages connected with the devotio moderna, and especially in the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer (where both Cusanus and later Erasmus received formative instruction). The movements, in turn, were inspired by some of the great mystical thinkers of the past, stretching from Dionysius the Aeropagite, Johannes Gerson and Meister Eckhart to Bernhard of Clairvaux and the Imitatio Christi.1 Returning to Cusanus’s text Āe Layman on Wisdom , the linkage of the sensible and supersensible, the mundane and transmundane is forcefully underscored in the layman’s claim that wisdom cries in the street, but simultaneously dwells “in the highest” ( in altissimis ). The same nexus is subsequently reaffirmed and endorsed by both interlocutors in the dialogue. As the layman observes, the “highest” is actually nothing else but “infinity”—but an infinity which is not divorced from, but somehow intimated or anticipated in all finite phenomena and experiences. The text at this point unleashes a veritable torrent of seeming paradoxes which all center around this uncanny intimation: the supersensibility of the sensible, the infinity of the finite, the desirable intimated in desire. What is involved here is not a simple contradiction nor an esoteric paradox but the circumstance that all phenomena and experiences presuppose, as their condition of possibility, a kind of groundless ground serving as their inexhaustible horizon. Since this ground is inexpressible in all formulations or propositions, “there can never be an end to attempts at expressing it, because in
Steiger xii–xiv, xvi. Steiger also draws parallels between Cusanus’s text and Heinrich Seuse’s Horologium sapientiae as well as Johannes Tauler’s life history styled as a “dialogue between a doctor and a layman” (xx–xxi). In addition, she finds inspiration for Cusanus’s text in St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum (xxiii). 1
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all thought that remains unthought whereby and by virtue of which everything is” ( Unity and Reform 106; translation slightly altered). What needs to be noted is that, in Cusanus’s presentation, the sensible is never simply expendable in favor of the supersensible, the finite in favor of the infinite, desire in favor of the desirable—something which would transform his thought into abstract, quasi-Platonic speculation. Rather, sensation remains the preamble or gateway to learned ignorance or “unknowing knowledge”—just as, in hermeneutics, pre-understanding always is the condition of understanding and pre-judgment a condition of judgment. “Wisdom,” the layman asserts boldly, “is a matter of tasting [ sapientia est quae sapit ], and nothing tastes better to the human intellect than wisdom.” In fact, “one should never consider anybody wise whose words are based only on hear-say rather than actual tasting.” Rather than being a purely deductive exercise, wisdom is predicated on this kind of “internal relish and taste”— which does not mean that it is reducible to taste experience. Cusanus, through the words of the layman, at this point develops the important notion of “fore-taste” or pre-gustation (akin to hermeneutical pre-understanding). Because it dwells in the highest, he notes, wisdom “is not [fully] tastable in any relish or taste. Therefore, it is tasted untastably”—which does not remove it from all tasting. “To taste in an untastable manner”, he adds, “is, as it were, to savor something from afar as, for example, we could say by the aroma of something that we get a fore-taste [ Vorgeschmack, praegustatio] of it.” To be sure, this fore-taste or desire does not amount to a full grasp of the desirable but only to an intimation or cue—and yet it is an indispensable cue in the pursuit of ignorant wisdom, because without this cue we would not know what to look for and where: If the sweetness of wisdom could not be “tasted with an inner relish, it would not be able to attract us so powerfully.” Thus, the desirable draws the desire toward it. In the words of Cusanus: Just as the aroma of something sweet-smelling or the odor of a precious ointment draws us to come nearer, so “the eternal and infinite wisdom resplendent in all things invites as, through a certain fore-taste of its effects, to hurry toward it with a wonderful desire [mirabili desiderio]” (Unity and Reform 106–7). Following the desire for wisdom, the human intellect steadily draws closer to, and eventually finds what it is looking for—and actually much more—because divine wisdom is not just an increase in cognitive knowledge but a leap into something vaster and inexhaustible, namely, unknowing knowledge or “wise ignorance” which is a synonym for
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infinite life. Human intellect or spirit, the layman observes, “moves toward wisdom as toward its own proper life. And it is sweet-tasting to the spirit continuously to ascend to the font of life, even though the latter is inaccessible (in its infinity). For, to live steadily in a more happy way means: to ascend to life [ ad vitam ascendere ].” Cusanus through the layman at this point draws an explicit parallel between the desire for wisdom and the lover’s love for the beloved object or person—a love which is inexhaustible and continuously beckons the lover on: “If someone loves something because it is lovable, he is delighted to find that the beloved object or person contains infinite and inexpressible motives of love [hence is infinitely desirable]. And this is the lover’s most joyful experience when he comprehends the incomprehensible loveliness of the beloved.” As Cusanus adds, navigating briskly along the chiasm or interface of the sensible and supersensible: “The lover would never delight so much in his/her love if the beloved were something simply comprehensible or manageable—as compared with the situation where the lovability of the beloved is utterly immeasurable, indeterminable, and incomprehensible.” For “this is the most joyful comprehension of incomprehensibility.” What the text here adumbrates or glosses is the notion of a gustation or nourishment which sustains not only finite or mortal but immortal life, a notion familiar from many biblical passages as well as from Christian liturgy: “Wisdom is the infinite and inexhaustible food of life from which our spirit lives eternally, because it is unable to love anything other than wisdom and truth.” 2 What needs to be remembered here again is that the movement toward wisdom and immortal life is not merely an abstract intellectual exercise—a cognition of the desirable as an abstract essence or idea—but a complete existential engagement involving body, soul, and mind. To this extent, the movement has also a practical-ethical significance, disclosing a profound layman’s pedagogy. The gist of
2 Unity and Reform 107–8; translation slightly altered. In a nearly Heideggerian vein, Cusanus continues: “Every spirit seeks aĀer ‘being’ [ omnis intellectus appetit esse], and being means to live, and living means to understand, and understanding means being nurtured on wisdom and truth” (108). In the introduction to Āe Layman on Wisdom , Renate Steiger points to biblical passages speaking of the “manna” (Exodus 16:4) or “milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8), and also to Psalm 34:8: “Gustate et videte, quoniam suavis est Dominus.” See her edition of Nicolai de Cusa, Idiota de Sapientia xxxi.
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this pedagogy is that the divine or immortal life cannot be possessed, appropriated, or controlled; instead, loving the divine involves a selfsurrender or self-abandonment of the lover in favor of the beloved. Together with a long line of ethical teachings (stretching back to the ancients), Cusanus speaking as the layman perceives self-surrender or abnegation of selfishness as the key to ethical life. While selfishness or self-centeredness is the source of vice and moral corruption, turning lovingly or caringly to what lies beyond oneself is the seedbed of virtue and righteous conduct. “That which we have from our own” (or from our selfishly desiring selves), layman-Cusanus affirms, “are our vices, whereas the fruits of eternal wisdom are none but good things [non nisi bona ].” Accordingly, the spirit of wisdom does not inhabit a selfish person who is a “slave to sin” nor a soul inclined toward evil; rather, it dwells in a “purified field” (purged of selfishness) and in its own cleansed image as in its “sacred temple” ( in templo sancto suo ) (Unity and Reform 112). II Toward Concord Among Beliefs Nicolaus of Cusa’s writings are a treasure trove of startling insights—a trove too vast to be fully canvassed in these pages. One thing, however, which emerges clearly in all his writings, including those cited above, is the animating spirit pervading them: a spirit of goodwill, friendliness, and reconciliation. Particularly important for contemporary thought is the accent on knowing unknowledge or “learned ignorance”—a perspective capable of making headway in some current philosophical conundrums, especially those relating to “foundationalism” and “non-foundationalism.” By placing ultimate reality beyond rational knowledge or cognitive grasp, Cusanus takes a stand against a dogmatic foundationalism that claims to have an authoritative grasp of truth. At the same time, however, by not abandoning the yearning for and “fore-taste” of ultimate truth, his work provides a bulwark against an equally dogmatic relativism (oĀen coupled with skeptical self-indulgence). Since, for Cusanus, people can only strive for truth without being able to possess it, his outlook entails the need for tolerance and mutual recognition without indifference or agnosticism. This is the dimension where Cusanus’s work speaks to us today with particular eloquence: the domain of interfaith harmony and cross-cultural understanding. In our age of globalization when different faiths
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and cultures are more and more closely pushed together, cultivation of mutual understanding and respect is urgently required to counteract the danger of civilizational (and sometimes religiously inspired) violence. Cultivation of such harmony was one of Cusanus’s central, life-long commitments—a commitment fueled by multiple tensions and antagonisms festering during his own time. The basic motivation undergirding this commitment was his philosophical and theological “relationism” (not relativism): the conviction that truth or true knowledge cannot be seized or monopolized by a dogmatic authority, but is best promoted through the interrelation between distinct perspectives (with each sincerely searching for the truth). The upshot of this conviction is an unorthodox and innovative conception of the relation between the “one” and the “many,” where the “one” serves only as a common loadstar but not as the domineering master of the “many.” In the words of Norbert Winkler: “The starting point here is no longer a compact substance to which the quality of a relation needs to be added as an accident; rather, the very being of an entity resides in its infinite relationality (which can never be exhaustively mapped).” 3 The first occasion for Cusanus to test the viability of this outlook came in 1431–32, at the time of the Church Council in Basel. At the opening of the Council, partly in response to corruption scandals in Rome, the so-called “conciliar movement” was at the height of its influence and popularity. Called as a legal adviser to join the Council, Cusanus immediately proceeded to formulate an ambitious new vision of church governance: a vision which would grant considerable power to the bishops while accepting the Pope as presiding officer or primus inter pares . This vision was the gist of his first major treatise which instantly gained him broad recognition: De Concordantia Catholica (On the Concord of the Church ). Reacting to the divisions tearing Christianity apart, the treatise boldly defended the idea of a universal church council, viewed as the publicly “assembled body of Christ,” in which bishops and Pope together would guide the affairs of the church on the basis of a collegial and amicable consensus. As Cusanus observed in the Preface of his book: “In trying to promote a general concord, I need to take into account the entire assembly of faithful people which we call the Catholic Church as well as the various related parts of that Church.” This task requires that proper attention be given
3
Winkler 104–6. Compare also my Dialogue among Civilizations 31–47.
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to “the distinctive character and structure (of the Church) and existing relations between its members so that finally we can envisage a loving and harmonious concord among all, which alone can secure the wellbeing and eternal salvation of that assembly.” 4 In the end, Cusanus’s conciliatory intervention came to nothing. As debates in Basel turned increasingly polemical and divisive, Cusanus leĀ the conciliar fold and joined the papal party—a shiĀ of allegiance which many observers (not without some justice) have deplored as a surrender to pragmatic politics. Irrespective of questions surrounding his conciliar engagement, there can be no doubt about the cardinal’s continued commitment to religious harmony during the rest of his life. The next major demonstration of his irenic outlook came two decades later, in the immediate aĀermath of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (in 1453). In that same year, Cusanus published a text which is rightly viewed as a crucial stepping stone toward religious ecumenism: his De Pace Fidei (On Interreligious Harmony). The book is not a doctrinal tract but rather takes the form of a wide-ranging conversation among religious and philosophical leaders representing no fewer than seventeen major religions and cultures around the world. The goal of the conversation is not the imposition of a dogmatic unity but rather the achievement of peace among religions and cultures despite their outward differences. Referring explicitly to the violence surrounding the fall of Constantinople, the introduction of the book appeals fervently to God, as the Creator of all things, to “rein in the persecution, raging now more than ever because of different religious rites.” The antidote to the raging violence could only be found in the true spirit of faith which alone can transcend inter-religious animosities ( On Interreligious Harmony 3–7). The conversation recorded in the book ranges over many important religious themes—whose complexity exceeds the scope of these pages. The common tenor pervading the discussions is the primacy of sincere faith over rituals, of the need to love and search for the hidden God over the comfort of habitual practices. A major religion dealt with in the book—and in many ways its catalyst—is Islam. As it happens, Cusanus had been interested in Islamic theology and practices for quite some time. Already at the time of the Council of Basel
4 Qtd. in Heinz-Mohr and Eckert 42–4; my translation. For a complete English translation see Nicholas of Cusa, Āe Catholic Concordance .
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he had obtained for his own study a twelĀh-century translation of the Qur’an together with other texts relating to Muslim doctrine. Following his departure from Basel, he traveled on a papal mission to Constantinople in order to guide the Byzantine Emperor and Orthodox Church leaders back to Italy for interfaith deliberations; on that occasion he also encountered numerous Muslims. 5 In light of this background, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 held for Cusanus not only a geopolitical, but also an intense personal significance. Tellingly he did not join in the clamor for revenge and violent retribution which the event unleashed throughout Europe; nor did he support the ongoing “demonization” of Muslims in general and Turks in particular—an attitude surely unpopular with many of his contemporaries. Together with some of his friends, especially John of Segovia, he even advocated the convening a top-level Muslim-Christian conference where grievances would be aired. Despairing of the prospect of such a conference, he decided to put down on paper his vision for inter-religious harmony: his De Pace Fidei . With the completion of this text the issue for Cusanus was not laid to rest. Less than a decade later (in 1460), he began an intensive scholarly exploration of the teachings of Islam; the result was a three-volume study titled Cibratio Alkorani (Sifting the Qur’an). In opposition to polemical texts virulently denouncing Islam as ungodly, Cusanus’s study aimed to offer a more balanced explication of the Qur’an—although apologetic accents are not missing. As he states in the study’s preface: “It is our aim, by relying on the gospel of Christ, to ‘siĀ’ [cibrare] the book of Muhammad and to demonstrate that his book in many respects supports and corroborates the gospel (if such corroboration were needed) and that, where there is divergence, this proceeds from ignorance or ill will” ( Cibratio Alkorani 13; my translation). In its entirely, the work is again much too complex to permit detailed review at this point. In the present context it must suffice to draw attention to the guiding spirit animating the entire text: the spirit of “devout interpretation” ( pia interpretatio), that is, an interpretation
5 The interfaith deliberations took place at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (in 1439) and produced a short-lived success. In a later autobiographical statement, Cusanus recalls: “When he was 37 years old, Pope Eugenius IV sent him to Constantinople, and he conducted the Greek Emperor, the Patriarch and 28 archbishops of the Eastern Church back with him. They then at the Council of Florence accepted the faith of the Roman Church” (qtd. in Biechler and Bond xi).
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which, guided by faith, seeks in the texts of an alien faith glimpses of a shared yearning for the divine. Listing a number of exegetical rules operative in Cibratio Alkorani, Jasper Hopkins properly emphasizes the faith-dimension of reading. Pia interpretatio, he writes, is not simply a neutral analysis; nor is it the same as “charitable construal, though it involves such construal in the sense of interpreting the Qur’an’s teachings in such a way that through them God is glorified.” Centrally, in Cusanus’s sense, devoutness of reading means “an interpretation that gives glory to God and bears witness to Christ.” 6 The practice of devout or (at least) friendly reading in Cusanus’s case was not restricted to Islam or Abrahamic religions, but occasionally extended farther East into Asia. As indicated before, his De Pace Fidei presented a nearly global ecumenical conversation, including among its participants representatives of such distant cultures as the Persian, Chaldean, and Indian. It is known that the cardinal was familiar with Marco Polo’s reports about Asian, particularly Chinese, customs which at the time attracted considerable attention in Europe. Above and beyond these direct references, however, one can detect an affinity between some of Cusanus’s views and various Asian philosophical perspectives. Thus, the assumption of a deeper layer of experience antedating and pre-shaping human cognition bears some resemblance with the Indian notion of brahman, especially as this notion has been developed in so-called “Vedantic” philosophy. The key concept of “non-dualism,” emphasized by the school of “Advaita Vedanta,” might in fact be fruitfully compared with the cardinal’s accent on “not-other” (non aliud). Still, to prevent the equation of “non-dualism” with simple fusion or identity, Cusanus always insisted on the need to approach the divine humbly and with a loving spirit—an outlook approximating that of the Indian school of “modified non-dualism” (VishishtAdvaita, associated with Ramanuja). Regarding the cardinal’s conception of learned ignorance and non-contradiction (or coincidence of opposites), one can readily find affinities with Buddhist teachings,
Hopkins 50–1. Hopkins’s text also contains chapters on fervently anti-Muslim writers, such as Ricoldo of Montecroe and John of Torquemada (the contemporary of Cusanus and fellow-cardinal). The reference is to Cibratio Alkorani, Book 1, Chapter 7, 54–5. 6
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especially the teachings of the Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna and his delineation of a “middle way” ( madhyamika) between opposites. 7 In De Venatione Sapientiae , composed a year before Cusanus’s death, we find a statement which might have been penned by the Asian philosopher but is actually ascribed to a Neoplatonic thinker. “As Dionysius (the Areopagite) correctly stated,” we read there, “with regard to God it is imperative both to affirm and to deny opposing propositions”—which may allow us to come to know the truth “unknowingly” or attain the divine “unattainably” ( De venatione sapientiae 98–9). The transgression of opposite propositions applies also to the conundrum of immanence and transcendence—where Cusanus denies both the coincidence of Creator and creatures and their radical otherness, citing the statement of St. Paul in Acts 17:24–28 to the effect that God is not available in human “shrines” but at the same time is “not far from each one of us . . . for we are indeed his offspring” (Tu qui es 42–3). Another one of his later writings, titled De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God ), offers a “non-dualist,” or perhaps “modified nondualist” formulation of the relation between humans and the divine. As the text points out, we are only able to “see” or have a vision of the divine because we are first of all seen or “envisaged” by the divine. “You, Lord,” we read, “are where speech, hearing, taste, touch, reason, knowledge and understanding are the same and where seeing is one with being seen, and hearing with being heard, tasting with being tasted, and touching with being touched.” This relation between seeing and being seen, desiring and being desired is equivalent to the bond of love—which is a proper point on which to conclude these pages because Nicolaus of Cusa’s entire work is ultimately nothing but a sustained paean to the love of God: You have shown yourself to me, Lord, as in the highest degree lovable, for you are indeed infinitely beloved. But . . . unless there were an infinite lover, you would not be infinitely beloved, for your being infinitely loved corresponds to the power of loving infinitely. Hence, you my Lord, are love: a love that loves and a love that is beloved, and also the love that is the bond between the two. ( Unity and Reform 149, 161)
7 See Ramanan 141 and also Kalupahana. In the Buddhist tradition, compare also Kitaro 221–25 and Yusa 211–19. Regarding Indian philosophy, and especially “Advaita” and “Vishisht-Advaita” Vedanta, see Deutsch, Bhatt, and Carman.
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Works Cited Bhatt, S. R. Studies in Ramanuja Vedanta . New Delhi, India: Heritage Publishers, 1975. Biechler, James E. and H. Lawrence Bond. Introduction. On Interreligious Harmony . By Nicholas of Cusa. ix–xlviii. Carman, John B. Āeology of Ramanuja . New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Cassirer, Ernst. Āe Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy . Trans. Mario Domandi. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Dallmayr, Fred. Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction . Honolulu HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1968. Dewey, John. “The Moral Struggle or the Realizing of Ideals.” Outlines of a Critical Āeory of Ethics . Āe Collected Works of John Dewey: Āe Early Works . Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Vol. 3. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. 372–81. Heinz-Mohr, Gerd and Willehad Paul Eckert. Das Werk des Nicolaus Cusanus . Cologne, Germany: Wienand Verlag, 1963. Hopkins, Jasper. A Miscellany on Nicholas of Cusa . Minneapolis MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1994. Kalupahana, David J. Nagarjuna: Āe Philosophy of the Middle Way . Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. Nishida, Kitaro. “‘Coincidentia Oppositorum’ and Love.” Trans. Michiko Yusa. Cusanus-Rezeption in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts . Regensburg, Germany: S. Roderer Verlag, 2005. 221–5. Nicholas de Cusa. Āe Catholic Concordance . Trans. Paul E. Sigmund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Cibratio Alkorani—Sichtung des Korans . Ed. Ludwig Hagemann and Reinhold Glei. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1989. ———. De venatione sapientiae—Die Jagd nach Weisheit . Ed. Paul Wilpert and Karl Bormann. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 2003. ———. Idiota de Sapientia—Der Laie über die Weisheit . Ed. Renate Steiger. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1988. ———. On Interreligious Harmony [De Pace Fidei ]. Trans. and ed. James E. Biechler and H. Lawrence Bond. Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. ———. Tu quis es (De principio)—Über den Ursprung . Trans. and ed. Karl Bormann. Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 2001. ———. Unity and Reform: Selected Writings of Nicholas de Cusa . Ed. John Patrick Dolan. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962. Ramanan, K. Venkata. Nagarjuna’s Philosophy . Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975. Steiger, Renate. Introduction. Idiota de Sapientia—Der Laie über die Weisheit . By Nicholas de Cusa. vii–xxxviii. Winkler, Norbert. Nikolaus von Kues zur Einführung . Hamburg, Germany: Junius Verlag, 2001. Yusa, Michiko. “Nishida Kitaro and ‘Coincidentia Oppositorum’—An Introduction.” Cusanus-Rezeption in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts . Regensburg, Germany: S. Roderer Verlag, 2005. 211–19.
PROMISES OF ADVENT: NORTH AND SOUTH Eileen Rizo-Patron Binghamton University Here in time we make holiday because the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But if it happens not in me what does it proĀt me? —Meister Eckhart
The opening lines of Richard Kearney’s “Enabling God” deliver the nugget of an argument that can be found traversing his works on the religious imagination: “The title of this essay,” he writes, “can be read both ways. God enabling us, us enabling God. As such, it affirms the freedom alleged to characterize our relationship to the divine as a mutual act of giving” (39) 1—i.e., as the possibility of creative reciprocity. Kearney’s critical target in this piece is the metaphysical and scholastic concept of God as self-subsisting act, self-causing cause, or one who holds the totality of power. Even after deconstruction, he sees the notion of omnipotence rearing up its head again, as in JeanLuc Marion’s reading of the gospel scene of the Annunciation where Mary’s conception of Jesus is regarded as a matter of “ when” rather than “if ” (40).2 If it is a foregone conclusion that Mary will say yes—at the divinely appointed time—this, in Kearney’s reading, profoundly modiĀes the character of her freedom. So he proceeds on the premise that God—out of love for human beings created in His image—has withdrawn any such control or determinative power over us. Inspired by Nicholas of Cusa, among others, he proposes instead to rethink God as posse—namely, as a “gracious and gratuitous giving that possibilizes love and justice in the world” (41, 49). Such giving, as I read
See also Kearney’s account of the “Poetics of a Possible God” in Āe God Who May Be (100–11) and his Strangers, Gods and Monsters (228–32). 2 Kearney here paraphrases Marion, noting that he does not consider the possibility of Mary saying “no” to the call of the Angel. Cf. Marion, “Impossible” 22. 1
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it, consists essentially in the gift of free will, which can alone enable us to love (or, by implication, to choose not to love). By so doing, God appears to have entrusted the possibility of good and evil to humankind—suspending jurisdiction over our response to his gift of divine love. Kearney then goes on to explore some of the key features of this enabling God, as it reveals itself to us poetically, by engaging in an exercise of “imaginative variation” that traverses what he calls “three concentric hermeneutic circles”: scriptural, testimonial, and literary. Kearney’s investigation of the posse thus becomes progressively ampliĀed—from an initial focus on biblical texts, to confessional testimonies of the divine posse experienced in the everyday, to poetic texts that extend the range of reference beyond theism or atheism to entertain an unlimited variety of epiphanic experiences. If these circles are concentric in that they gradually amplify the range of reference, one wonders whether such concentricity implies that the scriptural circle is necessarily primordial while the testimonial and literary are derivative upon it, if only by allusion. Or could one say that each of these hermeneutic circles is equiprimordial—i.e., as independent and potentially originary as any of the others? In Kearney’s notion of concentricity, one indeed senses the latency of the ancient paradox that “God is the circle [sphere] whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere,” 3 even though the hermeneutic range here allegedly extends beyond “theism” as such into the natural and secular planes. In a rather ludic vein that extends the “immunity of poetic license” that Kearney claims in his essay, I propose here to include a fourth hermeneutic circle criss-crossing the others—the “pictorial circle”— which can also be unexpectedly fruitful when it comes to exploring the manifold manifestations of an “enabling God.” I begin this study, then, by examining two contrasting readings of the Annunciation scene in early Renaissance paintings of Northern Europe, with the purpose of reflecting on their implications for our everyday life vis à vis insights by modern poets such as Levertov and Rilke on the imaginary of “annunciation.” Lastly, to complement the East-West axis running across this issue on the inter-religious imagination, I invite the reader
3 This ancient saying (often attributed to St. Augustine, but traceable to the Hermetica or even to the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles) first appears in a twelfthcentury book entitled Āe Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers . See Poulet 25. The Hermetica actually renders this Godly “circle” as a “sphere.” (see Copenhaver xlvii).
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to take a leap into the Southern Hemisphere in the second part of this essay to explore some of the hermeneutic mutations that the promise of advent has undergone in the transcultural Andean Renaissance of the twentieth century. I
European Hermeneutics of the Promise of Advent
Readings of Annunciation in Flemish Renaissance Paintings One of the key questions raised by the Annunciation scenes that we will revisit in this essay concerns the hermeneutic relationship of human being to the divine posse or dunamis pneumatos—another term Kearney deploys from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and Romans to evoke the possibilizing and enabling power of Spirit (41). Of particular interest in the early Flemish paintings of the Annunciation in Europe’s Renaissance is the fact that Mary is consistently portrayed as areader4— with written text in hand—not surprising perhaps, considering that these paintings were produced around the time of the invention of the Gutenberg press, which popularized books among the common laity. 5 My overall wager here is that the reader portrayed in these Annunciation scenes alludes tacitly not only to the female subject but to an idealized meditative reader. For what is captured in each case is a speciĀc attitude toward the voice of the Spirit revealed in the Verbum (although with signiĀcant variations, as we shall see)—an attitude of reverent and attentive listening, a spiritual acoustics that can by no means be restricted to gender or occupational specialization. Indeed, the settings in Flemish interpretations of the Annunciation widely range from the ecclesiastical to the domestic (e.g., from Jan van Eyck’s High Gothic scene to Joos van Cleve’s 1525 bourgeois rendering), showing incipient signs of the imagination’s centrifugal movement during this period from the scriptural to the poetic everyday, so vividly traced into modernity in Kearney’s “Enabling God.” In what follows, I will limit myself to focusing on two interpretations of the Annunciation taken from altarpiece panels by Gerard David (c. 1460–1523) and Robert 4 This includes renderings of the Annunciation by Flemish painters such as Robert Campin, Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Gerard David, Joos van Cleve. See Losh’s fascinating study of Renaissance women as readers. 5 The Virgin Mary has been sometimes portrayed holding a spindle, as in the Annunciation by Theophanis Strelitzas (d. 1559) exhibited in Stavronikita monastery at Mount Athos. Mary’s object of concentration varies in artistic depictions throughout history.
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Figure 1 . Gerard David. Āe Angel of the Annunciation , 1506. Panel of a polyptych. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Figure 2 . Gerard David. Āe Annunciation , 1506. Panel of a polyptych. Metro politan Museum of Art (Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Campin, the “Master of Flémalle” (c. 1375–1444). I will discuss these two paintings in reverse chronological order, for reasons which will become apparent below. Gerard David’s painting of Āe Annunciation (1506) consists of 6 two extant panels from what is believed to have been a polyptych: the left-hand panel shows Archangel Gabriel making his momentous announcement (Āg. 1), while the one on the right features Mary at the moment of divine conception (Āg. 2). Archangel Gabriel and Mary are thus found occupying contiguous—yet strangely discontinuous—spaces, suggesting the inherent dimensional rift or veil between spiritual and human realms. While the angel’s side is well illuminated (sunlight shines through the window and the angel’s tunic is bright), a deep darkness pervades the side of Mary’s private thalamus,7 where she has apparently retired to read and meditate. Not only do her clothes match the darkness of the heavy drapes over her bed, but the shuttered windows create the impression of a dark night enveloping Mary’s bedchamber (the illusion of a dimensional rift hence extending to the realm of time). Only the floor tiles in Mary’s room seem to match—in color and pattern—the tiles on the angel’s side, though steps can be seen leading downwards from Mary’s thalamus to what is presumably the angel’s side of the room. Still, even here, there is an invisible “break” in perspective (or a missing panel). Despite these spatio-temporal ruptures, the Archangel seems to gaze right through the divide, addressing himself directly to Mary. With scepter in one hand, he can be seen raising his right hand and Ānger, delivering God’s promise of advent as if giving an order, or telling her what is going to happen (recalling Marion’s previously mentioned reading of the gospel scene). Mary’s gaze, meanwhile, is not even turned towards Gabriel. She seems bedazzled by the abrupt arrival of the Holy Spirit as a dove in a Āery orb into the space of her deepest intimacy. This flash of illumination in the midst of darkness has appar-
In a 1951 essay on Gerard David’s Āe Annunciation , Margaretta Sallinger suggests the possibility that these panels conformed the outer pair of wings or external door panels of a larger altarpiece (227). 7 The word “thalamus” comes from the Greek, meaning a woman’s secret room or inner chamber. In botany it refers to “the receptacle of a flower,” and in anatomy, to a part of the brain where new nerves appear to shoot out. 6
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ently prompted her to drop her book and cross her heart—as if suddenly seized by the Spirit of the Verbum in a moment of epiphany and transĀguration, here symbolized by the halo of light that now issues from her head, echoing the dove’s powerful glow. In Gerard David’s painting we thus have an example of divine conception interpreted as a fait accompli , showing Mary apparently overtaken by what Marion has termed a “saturated phenomenon”—an excessive or sublime intuition that leaves the intellect speechless, 8 a gift to which Mary cannot but submit in the realization that the impossible prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold, a virgin shall conceive”)— has been fulĀlled. The scene of the Annunciation in the central panel of the triptych conforming the Mérode Altarpiece (1425–1428) by Robert Campin, “Master of Flemalle,” tells a rather different story (fig. 3). This scene is set in a well-lit bourgeois sanctuary with open windows and a water basin for puriĀcation in the background. Here we Ānd Mary seated rather awkwardly between her desk and a church pew, in a brilliant red dress, with more than one text at hand: the book she reads, an illuminated book on the table, and an open scroll (who knows what other writings are hidden in her satchel). This Mary is a scholar. A humble Angel Gabriel (carrying no scepter) appears in a pleading posture on the opposite side of her table, gently summoning the virgin to heed his message. The scroll hanging from the edge of the table is lightly nudging her arm, as an implicit extension of the angel’s hand across the table. But Mary is giving the angel a sidelong look, seemingly deferring her response while she checks out his message over against the scriptures.
8 A certain tension can nevertheless be detected between the notion of a “saturated phenomenon” and the gospel narrative of Annunciation in Marion’s reading. We Ānd a privileged example of a saturated phenomenon, he tells us, in the experience of amazement which “strikes us before we know or entirely grasp the thing.” His claim is that any phenomenon that amazes arises “without announcing or explaining it” (“Saturated Phenomenon” 199). Yet both Mary’s annunciation and divine conception seem to occur, paradoxically and despite divine prophecy, as pure events in Marion’s terms: humanly unforeseeable on the basis of past experience, not exhaustively comprehensible on the basis of the present, nor reproducible on the basis of a foreseen future (204). The problem of the relation between the pure event of a “saturated phenomenon” and the “horizon of the human” in Marion’s account is matter for further discussion that exceeds the limits of this piece.
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Figure 3. Robert Campin. Annunciation, c. 1425. Central panel of the Mérode Altarpiece. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Streaming in on a ray of light through the oeil-de-boeuf behind the angel, meanwhile, a tiny child bearing a cross can be detected. But the baby has barely made its way into the room where the lady sits by the pew. This Mary has not yet given her consent. (The candle flame next to her has just been blown out, perhaps by the breath of spirit coming in through the window. Yet the rising smoke and flower stem are curiously tilted in the opposite direction from which the angel and the light ray have entered.) Even more unusual about this rendering of the Annunciation scene is that no “dove” appears above Mary’s head, as in most of the other paintings where divine conception is depicted as a fait accompli.
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Several scholars have read Robert Campin’s Annunciation scene as if Mary is not yet even aware of the angel’s presence in the room—so engrossed is she in her reading (Losh 9, 21). 9 But this painting could otherwise be read as capturing the subtle instant of a divine plea, and the interval of human deferral. As contrasted with the scene in Rilke’s “Love Poems to God” where a poet appears urgently knocking on God’s door (Rilke, Book of Hours , qtd. in Kearney, “Enabling God” 39), this painting shows the divine patiently tapping on the door of the human soul. But given the artist’s pictorial elongation of the interval of deferral , the point of Campin’s scene (as contrasted with David’s or Marion’s hermeneutics of the Annunciation) appears to be Mary’s exercise of her freedom to do her research and check things out at her own pace—suggesting that the “ when” of conception may after all be an “ if”—since time is the realm where human freedom reigns. Mary could conceivably have chosen to postpone her response indeĀnitely. Modern Meditations on the Annunciation In a modern poem entitled “Annunciation,” British-born American poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997) similarly highlights, and further unfolds, the implications of the freedom humans enjoy in the face of life’s annunciations. The first section of her poem sets the stage of a classic Annunciation scene, but the second section, which I quote below, poses its key challenge to the reader: Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm open from darkness in a man or woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue.
9
See further Lane and also Harbison.
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God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes. (verses 15–31)
Our lives, Levertov suggests, are informed by annunciations. Some people are entrusted with astonishing talents, others visited by blessings or opportunities in the guise of crises. Yet not understanding the call, many of us use such gifts or challenges for narrow, self-serving ends. More often than not, such annunciatory moments (however modest) go unheeded. Or perhaps they are kept at bay by some sense of discomfort or embarrassment. We recoil from them, she notes, in fear and “with relief.” Still, God lets us continue our everyday lives. Yet this means we have allowed a gift and promise of advent to vanish from our sight. No awakening takes place. A chance for the divine to take flesh in our lives deferred. One question nonetheless persists after we have entertained these various readings of the “annunciation”: How is it that we readers are able (if we are able) to recognize a divinely inspired call when it comes, as opposed to being beguiled by voices or texts from some other-thandivine origin? Is a poetic word or image, one wonders, always tantamount to the divine? How is it that we can ascertain, for instance, the provenance of some New-Age spiritual text or, for that matter, of certain passages from the Bible, the Koran, the Hermetica, the Tantras, the Gnostic gospels, the Kabbalah, the Mahayana? In an essay entitled “Speech and Religion: The Word of God,” Michel Henry attempts to address this problem by invoking the notion of the “immemorial” which, he wagers, resides in us, “giv[ing] us the possibility of understanding—by recognizing it—every conceivable authentic memorial [artwork, voice, or text] as the memorial of the Immemorial” (239). Is he suggesting that we are innately empowered through some kind of gratuitous feeling, or “auto-affection of Life” (233), to recognize an authentic spiritual expression? His emphasis on the word “ re-cognize” of course implies we have sometime, somewhere, already known (cf. Plato’s anamnesis), and that all we need do is learn to attune ourselves to recapture that pure and pristine condition of knowing. Would such capacity to discern the call of goodness or truth be a key feature or endowment of posse or the “enabling God” in Kearney’s account? Or is there a condition to our attaining such discerning attunement—some prior work to be done? How could Mary, for instance, be sure that the angel who appeared to her was not a hallucination, or Lucifer in disguise, fanning her ego? (Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece seems to pose that very question by depicting a brief
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interval of skepticism in her reception of Gabriel’s message). Roman Catholic doctrine tells us, of course, that Mary was immaculately conceived—a grace that would grant her clear access to divine truth. But it is not insigniĀcant that in many early Renaissance renderings of the Annunciation—not only by Robert Campin (Āg. 2) but also by Jan Van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and others—we Ānd a basin with water, suggesting a prior need to purify the soul that it might become less opaque, better able to understand. 10 Let me return to this question of discernment via another brief detour. In a moving poetic essay, “Verbum Ineffabilis,” Anita Doyle also notes that Mary is “nearly always depicted as reading at the moment of her impregnation by the Spirit” (42). This image, she claims, has broad cosmological implications beyond its “archetypal rendering of an event that occurred two thousand years ago.” Most signiĀcantly, she adds: “It tells us that the living word in contact with a state of fecund emptiness draws spirit into the world of form . . . This is how the Word becomes flesh, how spirit is materialized and matter spiritualized” (42–3). The implication here is that a deeply meditative reading praxis may itself be an incipient way of helping usher in the promise of the kingdom, hand in hand with such loving acts as responding to the cry of a neighbor or sharing our bread with the poor. Otherwise said, a sensitive and responsive way of reading the Word/World (two faces of an ever-unfolding Logos) might be one way of participating in what Rilke once called the “history of a great pregnancy,” assisting in the coming prima vera —the terrestrial parousia envisioned in his Letters to a Young Poet (61–3). One might even propose, in the spirit of a hermeneutics of posse, that Doyle’s allusion to a state of “fecund emptiness” that draws spirit into the world of form invites a radical reinterpretation of the Platonic khora (widely debated in recent years) 11—not necessarily this time as the indifferent abyss or barren desert suggested by the deconstructive
In Meister Eckhart’s mysticism (see Eckhart 40–6), and in other Western mystical traditions—not to mention Eastern—the suggestion goes even further, i.e., that we must learn to silence our minds and empty our souls. In Eckhart’s words: “You must know that God is born in us as soon as all our soul-powers, which hitherto have been tied and bound, are absolutely free (and passive) and when the mind is stilled and the sense troubles us no longer” (43). 11 A vivid account of recent hermeneutic debates on the Platonic khora among philosophers Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, John Caputo, and Richard Kearney can be found in Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters 193–211. 10
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commitment to “destinerrance” ( Strangers, Gods and Monsters 202– 203, 282 nn. 19–21), but simply as the humble yet ever-open seat of the soul, potentially renewed at every moment as the portal of our very breath12 (understood in the sense of “ pranayama” evoked in Kearney’s essay above). So doing, we are admittedly taking hermeneutic liberties with the Platonic khora. Yet the innately ambiguous nature of this pre-cosmic receptacle, one could argue, calls for such elemental thinking-dreaming, “bastard reasoning” ( Timaeus 52b–c), or poetic reverie, rather than for its denial or—much less—for a strictly empirical or logical interpretation. To carry the spirit of poetic reverie with its exercises in imaginative variation further yet, one might venture to rescue the often-overlooked Āgure of khora as “winnowing sieve” in Plato’s Timaeus (53b) and juxtapose it with the notion of “potential fecundity” that informs the readings proposed by Doyle and Kearney ( Strangers, Gods and Monsters 211), each in their respective ways. Stressing this “winnowing” Āgure admittedly risks unsettling current conceptions of khora by suggesting the possible presence of a discriminatory function within the all-embracing receptacle of being. For, paradoxically, such an image implies the cosmic receptacle’s active agency in sifting through possibilities so as to seize on what is most fruitful at any given time and place, in its contingent encounters with the Verbum (textual, dialogical, or phenomenological). Indeed, had not Rilke himself been hinting at such a selective feature in the mystery of divine impregnation when he wrote in Letters to a Young Poet : “As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him” (62)? If this reading of khora (as an intelligent kind in its own baffling right) is viable, the question remains: How do we reconcile Doyle’s notion of the fecund emptiness of a soul capable of drawing spirit into the world of matter, on one hand, with the discerning capacity of that very soul, on the other? Both these capacities could be understood as gratuitous endowments of posse, as suggested in Kearney’s essay, or perhaps even in Henry’s notion of the auto-affection of Life. Still, we might ask, how does a soul empty itself while simultaneously sifting
12 Khora could be understood eschatologically, in this sense, as the potential site of messianic time. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1921 essay, “Theological-Political Fragment”: “. . . at the heart of every moment of the future is contained the little door through which the Messiah may enter” (155f; qtd. in Kearney, “Enabling God” 43).
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through wheat and chaff? How is an active discerning attitude reconciled with pure openness? So understood, the potential fecundity of khora would no longer be a matter of indiscriminate receptivity. Might it then be that discernment serves a heuristic role, so that only once the soul—with the cleansing aid of intellect—has reĀned its capacity to re-cognize a voice that comes from the heart will it have attained the ripeness needed to empty itself, allowing its critical stance to be transmuted into a welcoming one, and thus to become a resonant vessel of spirit? Or simply, perhaps, as Gaston Bachelard will suggest in Āe Poetics of Reverie , It must be admitted that there are two types of reading: reading in animus and reading in anima. I am not the same man when I am reading a book of ideas where the animus is obliged to be vigilant, ready to criticize, ready to retort, as when I am reading a poet’s book where images must be received in a sort of transcendental acceptance of gifts. Oh! To return the absolute gift which is a poet’s image, our anima would have to be able to write a hymn of thanksgiving. (65)
Such a hermeneutic mystery, and the transĀguration of the reader it may bring in its wake, cannot but echo—even on a secular, horizontal plane—the wonder in Mary’s “MagniĀcat” (Luke 1:46–55), her hymn of praise in response to the gift of incarnation. II
Andean Hermeneutics of the Promise of Advent
While we allow the rhetorical questions that have arisen regarding the relationship between reader and divine posse to continue reverberating in the background, let us imaginatively translate ourselves to the South: an often overlooked hemisphere when it comes to hermeneutic reflections on wisdom traditions. But before elaborating on the “transcultural” Andean Renaissance within which the artworks we will now revisit have emerged, let us begin by pondering the mystery of advent in a painting by a little-known contemporary Peruvian artist, Ana Zegarra (Lima, 1960–). This painting offers an abstract but highly suggestive reading of the dunamis pneumatos in a musical setting that, from the outset, invites a reader to leap beyond its visual imagery into acoustic space (Āg. 4). An initial glance at Zegarra’s piece reveals that several of its basic elements allude to imagery drawn from European Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation scene: Angel and Virgin meeting in cloistered
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Figure 4 . Ana Zegarra (Peruvian artist). Anunciación, c. 1985. Oil on canvas, 62” × 50”. Private collection, Lima, Peru. Photograph: Melissa Cárdenas, 2007.
space, with the traditional oeil de boeuf window up above (Āg. 3) and geometrical patterned tiles down below (Āgs. 1 and 2), along with the notable presence of an unrolled scroll (Āg. 3) and an enigmatic Bird in the room (fig. 2). These symbols are all rendered in this scene, however, in terms of musical poiesis.
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The lady sitting on the stool is playing on what appears to be an Andean harp, 13 while the bald musician that flies into the scene—recalling Angel Gabriel—is blowing on a duct flute that closely resembles an Andean pinkillu.14 Since this trespasser exhibits no visible wings, he could well represent the spirit of St. Sebastian, often shown in Andean iconography bearing a wooden pinkillu tied to his back. 15 The Andean flute’s onomatopeic -illu ending (>Quechua: “the music of tiny wings in flight”)16 is signiĀcantly used only for those objects that evoke an aural vibration so subtle that it can penetrate deep into the heart, piercing the thin walls between spirit and matter. Dressed in a plain frock, hair cropped to the scalp, the lady is an epitome of humility. She could be a patient convalescing from a critical illness (stripped of beauty and youth) or a cloistered nun, not unlike the Virgins of the Sun who were committed to the acllahuasis during the Inca Empire in the service of their God. In any case, the prevalence of pale hues—common to the western flank of the Andes and the deserts of coastal Peru (as contrasted with the brilliant colors that abound in its fertile jungles, east of the Andes)—underscores a sense of barren emptiness. The lady is nonetheless wholly surrendered to the moment. Unlike Campin’s scholarly virgin (who appears to be holding the angel at bay with her sidelong look), Zegarra’s lady decisively faces the angel (or the supersensible realm of a music to come, and always coming) as she extends open hands into the void, ready to pluck an impossible
13 Stringed instruments were unknown in South America until the Spaniards arrived. The Andean harp—with its diatonic boat-shaped resonance box—is derived from the European harps introduced after the Spanish Conquest and creatively adapted to the artistic sensibilities and needs of Andean natives. It takes after certain forms of the un-pedaled Celtic harp, but the Andean harp is larger. Broad at the bottom and narrow at the top, its bellied body has four large openings. Its tones can be heard at vast distances in the Andean mountains. More information can be found online (see Ferrier). 14 The high-pitched pinkillu is a post-colonial Andean flute made of wood, cane, or bone with a beveled mouthpiece, much like the pre-Hispanic quena, except that it has an internal whistle device, and no need for an embouchure (Stobart 238). 15 St. Sebastian was a Roman soldier martyred with arrows while tied to a tree for declaring his Christian faith—as shown in European iconographic tradition. The Andean iconography of St. Sebastian “tied to a flute” portrays the native belief in the shared power of pinkillu flutes and trees to transmit the regenerative, healing forces of inner earth ( uku pacha) onto the earth’s surface ( kay pacha). (Stobart 237–38) 16 José María Arguedas elaborates on the signiĀcance of the - illu or -yllu suffix in a chapter devoted to a singing top named zumbayllu (> Spanish zumbar: “to hum,” and Quechua yllu) in his novel Deep Rivers (64–6).
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tune—impossible because of the absence of harp strings, or even a musical score. The scroll unfurling before the oeil de boeuf (no doubt an allusion to the unrolled parchments in Annunciation scenes which indicate Isaiah’s prophecy of the virgin birth) is blank. The score and the script in Zegarra’s scene remain to be written. Yet closer examination reveals further peculiarities. Although Zegarra’s harp is clearly a descendant of the late Renaissance Spanish harp, or the Celtic harp, 17 what initially appear as simple scratches on the harp’s wooden belly turn out to be delicate etchings of an Inca bearing pots, making ritual offerings to the Sun, a peacock, vicuñas, birds drinking the nectar of flowers, etc.—details which, along with the harp’s large belly and its four sound holes, conĀrm the instrument’s identity not only as an Andean harp but, in fact, as the single surviving Arpa-Mate (engraved-gourd harp) from 16th-century Peru.18 Thus, beyond being an extension of the virgin’s own resonant body, this instrument lends itself to be read as a symbol of Andean Earth (Pachamama), the living matrix of Andean culture, ever open to the improvisational influx of Spirit. Most strangely, the tuning pegs on the harp’s upper neck, with no strings attached, appear like virtual seeds streaming directly towards the lady’s face in a wavy line as if to be inhaled—suggesting a mode of spiritual nourishment or insemination via the simple rhythms of breathing (fortuitously echoing the notion of khora as portal of our very breath). All the while, the proĀle of the enigmatic Bird carved on
17 The European harp’s provenance from the ancient Kora harp in turn reveals the multiple traversals that have left their mark on art and ritual practices around the globe. Celtic harpist Alison Vardy writes that while the Irish are generally credited with bringing the harp to Europe, some scholars believe the harp was initially “brought to Europe from Egypt by the Phoenicians in pre-Christian times as a trade good. The paths of the Phoenicians can be traced by the distribution of the harp. Versions of the Kora harp exist from the Mediterranean Basin to Northern Europe to cultures around coastal Africa and up to the Island of Madagascar. The harp may have arrived in Europe as well with successive Indo-European migrations from Southwest Asia.” (see Vardy). 18 Historian Pablo Macera writes in his essay “El Hallazgo del Arpa-Mate” about his discovery of this rare engraved-gourd harp from Spanish Colonial times. The description of his Ānding corresponds exactly with the harp in Zegarra’s “Annunciation”. Not only does Macera analyze each of the engravings on the harp’s body (revealing the cross-fertilization of Andean and European iconic motifs and musical-religious cultures) but he also shows that its belly represents a “corncob”—fruit of Pachamama—built from a total of thirty-two gourds, in diminishing sizes from bottom to top, symbolizing individual grains of corn (Macera 66).
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the harp’s apex, facing the lady, presides over the scene as if affirming the role of Spirit in this unlikely event. 19 One cannot tell whether the virtual seeds are issuing from the Bird’s hidden heart or from the angelic flute cutting through it like one of St. Sebastian’s arrows. The very ambiguity of this surreal scene plunges the viewer into a state of contemplation, as if lured into acoustic space . . . to listen to its posse. When the Spanish colonized Central and South American territories in the sixteenth century, their imposition of Christianity upon native populations was accompanied by the prohibition of any expression of “pagan” beliefs and religious practices. Such one-sided cultural transmission is what anthropologists in the Americas have coined “acculturation.” Over the course of centuries, however, Andean peoples had been absorbing the European religious influence in secretly creative ways, assimilating the worship of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, for instance, into their own notions of the divinity of the Sun, Mother Earth, or the role of the Virgins of the Sun in consecrating the link between divine and human realms in the Inca Empire. This subtle appropriation can be detected in the details of Zegarra’s musical-pictorial interpretation of the Annunciation, which at Ārst glance may appear as an example of acculturation from Northern cultures. Yet during the twentieth century such creative assimilation began to take the form of self-conscious artistic and cultural practices, under the rubric of “transculturation,” Ārst coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 ( Contrapunteo 86). One example of this practice can be appreciated today in the art of the portable altarpiece ( retablo) that has flourished in Ayacucho, Peru, as seen in the work of artisan Nicario Jiménez Quispe. Most remarkable about Jiménez’s retablo of the “Divina Pastora” (color plate 22), for instance, is the depiction of Mary as Pachamama spinning yarn. This Earth Mother appears 19 In addition to the “dove” of Annunciation, the prophetic-healing context of Zegarra’s emblematic bird evokes the figure of a “calandra lark” (often cited in Andean novels), with its astonishing inter-religious/medical history. In an article entitled “The Healing Bird,” J. L. Couper describes the long iconographic itinerary of this bird— known for its power to announce either healing or death (depending on whether it appears facing “towards” or “away from” the patient)—tracing its origins back to the Vedic haridruva which cured jaundice. Over time, this Āgure became the Persian salandre (a prophetic dove-like bird associated with King Xerxes’s golden bird), eventually mutating into the classical Greek charadrios, the caladrius of medieval bestiaries, and the middle French calandre. Today this bird shows up as the “calandra lark” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (2002).
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enthroned under a cosmic rainbow, flanked on either side by the Sun God ( Inti) and the New Moon ( Mama Quilla ), under the protection of the Condor ( Wamani)—the Mountain Spirit that bridges earth and sky.20 In his prologue to Ortiz’s book, Bronislaw Malinowski hailed the practice of transculturation as “a process in which both parts of the equation end up being modiĀed. A process in which a new composite and complex reality emerges” (Contrapunteo 5, my translation). Literary critic Angel Rama would later elaborate on it as a force that acts critically, not only upon the influences of foreign cultures but also upon the inherited matrix of native traditions. Transculturation thus moves on a double-double axis: acknowledging the cultures involved in the exchange as composed of sedimented values that have shaped people’s worldviews over generations, while simultaneously corroborating the living energy that moves within each, enabling them to transcend any mere aggregate of norms, behaviors, or beliefs ( Transculturación Narrativa 33–4). The narrative art of Jose Maria Arguedas (which we shall now briefly visit), is often cited as an exemplar of transculturation in twentiethcentury Latin American literature, 21 not only in that it transforms the artistic and religious traditions of the colonizing Spanish culture by incorporating them into the Andean sacred cosmovision but also, as we shall see, in that it transforms native myths themselves, elevating them from their regional-historical to universal poetic dimensions. An ethnologist by profession, Arguedas ventured out with a team of fellow ethnologists into remote Andean villages in the early 1950s to collect scattered oral accounts of an ancient myth that was in danger of
20 Retablos are portable altarpieces that people carry with them as devotional objects when they travel. The Ayacuchan retablo—an Andean amalgam of indigenous and Medieval-European cultures—is a syncretic evolution from the capilla de santero (saint box) introduced into Peru by the Spanish Conquistadors when they came to South America in the sixteenth century, unable carry their churches on horseback. Nowadays, retablos (made of painted wood and clay Āgurines) are also used to make critical depictions of socio-political scenes. See Damien and Stein 1–11 passim. 21 Other examples of “literary transculturation” include novels by Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Miguel Angel Asturias. Rama contrasts the “transculturation avant-garde” in Latin America with the “cosmopolitan avant-garde”—represented by Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others—which remains more faithful to mainstream European models ( La Novela en América Latina 106–17 passim).
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sinking into forgetfulness among the younger indigenous generations: the myth of Inkarrí. Despite some factual vagueness in the accounts of the village elders, all accounts shared an idealized memory of the Inca leader (described as the Sun’s son), the nature of his demiurgic powers, and his work. But the core component in all versions was the trauma of the conquest: the beheading of the Inca by his Spanish counterpart. Although no one is sure where the Inca’s head lies buried, many believe that the Inca’s immortal head is secretly producing the germination of its own body in the Andean underground ( uku pacha), spinning new hair and limbs out of its skull as it absorbs the bittersweet juices and songs of the earth. When Inkarrí’s body is fully grown—one account goes—he will break through the ground ( kay pacha) and rise again to wield his civilizing influence over peoples or to bring on the Ānal judgment (“Puquio” 154–56). The myth of Inkarrí has since been often interpreted in a militant light—Inkarrí being regarded as a socio-political Āgure expected to come to vindicate the Andean race over against the lingering colonizing forces of the Western world (Rowe 81). 22 But in the narrative hermeneutics of Andean ethnologist José María Arguedas, the Āgure of this son of the Sun—while that of a justicer—is never that of a raging avenger. 23 Instead, through a series of lyrical reveries launched in his autobiographical novel Deep Rivers (1957), Arguedas elaborates on key elements of the myth, which portray Inkarrí tenderly as an embryo of peace secretly ripening in the heart of the Andean soul/soil (uku pacha) (“Puquio” 158). This unlikely image makes its chimerical entrance in the hostile world of an Andean boarding school for boys as a gift in the guise of a little coconut-top (Sp. coco: “skull”) that sings through its hollowed eyes when it spins, emitting a sweet yllu sound capable of cutting through the elements and hardened hearts ( Deep Rivers 68ff.)—thus earning the name of zumbayllu among students, along with the status of a dance partner and alter-ego (color plate 23). Although the outbreak of a plague in the region will ultimately 22 Rowe in turn cites from Juan Ossio’s Ideología mesiánica del mundo andino: “The millennium in the Andean world presents itself as none other than a symmetrical reversal of the actual order” (Ossio xxiii, qtd. in Rowe 81, my translation)—i.e. the reversal of the colonization of Andean peoples since the Spanish conquest. 23 In a letter during a time of political turmoil in Peru (1969), Arguedas expressly urged his university students to channel their desire for justice, life’s ardent sap, “ as Inkarrí would, with lucidity and ‘without rage’ ” ( Zorro 241–42, my translation and emphasis).
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force the protagonist to bury his beloved zumbayllu (not deemed quite ripe yet to withstand the unwholesome onslaughts of the world), the acoustic fellowship it awakens among students from feuding racial and social groups—transĀguring the atmosphere of the boarding school (89)—seems to herald, in its own small way, the poetics of a possible god and its “sacred dance-play” so beautifully celebrated as well in Kearney’s Āe God Who May Be (107). In this tacit transĀguration of the Andean Inkarrí from a partisan cultural avenger to a latent god thought to be ripening in the uku pacha of our hearts, Arguedas’s work may thus be read as elevating the myth of the expected “return of Inkarri” to the intimate yet cosmic level of a parousia not unlike Rilke’s, through the creative transculturation of both Andean and Christian notions of the second coming. Later, in his posthumous novel El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo (1971),24 Arguedas offers another provocative reinterpretation of the “promise of advent”—this time from the perspective of a transcultural reader-writer, in the modern Andean context. The tragic testimonial narrator here serves not only as witness to the apparent dissolution of Andean spiritual traditions, values, and culture in the melting pot of Western modernity, epitomized by the industrial city of Chimbote, but his voice is also that of prophet, hermeneut, or angelos (Gk. “messenger”),25 announcing the advent of a new era towards the novel’s end, even while placing his entire faith on the reader as potential (if fragile) vessel for the fulĀllment of that promise. Indeed, at the tail end of his novel’s “Last Diary? ” 26—right before the death of its author—Arguedas unexpectedly addresses the novel’s foreign protagonist Maxwell as you (the reader), stressing the need for each of us to work on ourselves if we hope to understand and become open to the import of that message. Much as the reader of Renaissance Annunciation paintings is reminded—through the presence of a water basin in Mary’s sanctuary (Āg. 2)—of the need for self-emptying or inner24 Translated passages from El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo are mine in this essay. Cf. Barraclough’s Āe Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below . 25 It may not be fortuitous that Arguedas chose the name of “Gabriel” for the protagonist in his most Dantesque novel, El Sexto (1961), named after a Peruvian penal complex notorious for its progressive tiers of punishment. 26 Between the novel’s chapters about the collective decay of the industrial town of Chimbote, the author interpolates personal “diaries” as he struggles against his own illness through writing.
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cleansing in the hope of becoming a true vessel for the Word of God, so are readers of Arguedas’s last novel urged to burn the vermin that tend to get lodged in our hearts and minds, if we hope to become healthy recipients and fruitful bearers of that promise ( Zorro 236). All Arguedas can do in that farewell novel, however, is to hurl his last spark of faith into the winds of the future and hope it lands on fertile soil—a seed given him to give away, enriched. And the symbolic Bird that hovers over this Andean “annunciation” scene—if not a dove—is a “calandra of Āre” symbolizing the liberating god that would ultimately inspire Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s theology in the early 1970s: 27 One historical cycle seems to be drawing to a close in Peru . . . while another is just beginning to open. We sense the closure of the cycle of the “consoling calandra lark” [i.e., religion as “opium for the masses”]—of the whip and forced labor, of impotent hatred and mournful funeral “uprisings,” of the fear of God and the predominance of that God and its protegés, its fabricators. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the approach of a new cycle of light . . . the cycle of the “calandra of Āre,” the liberating god. Aquél que se reintegra . (Zorro 235) 28
As a god of healing and enabling possibility, this kenotic god stands in stark contrast to the inquisitor god of coercion and punishment that reigned in the collective imagination in Andean regions since the Spanish conquest (Āg. 5). Arguedas’s narrative-poetic vision in the late 1960s can thus be said to anticipate Kearney’s distinction (discussed at the outset of this essay) between the all-powerful God of Western metaphysics and the loving God of posse who needs and enables us, here and now, in our secular lives (“Enabling God” 49–50). What Father Gutiérrez’s theology will highlight, in its turn, is the urgent socio-political dimension of our response to the annunciation and promise of the Gospels—
27 Founder of “liberation theology” in Latin America, Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., wrote a book entitled Entre las Calandrias on Arguedas’s annunciatory image (see note 19, on the inter-religious healing history of the calandra lark). 28 Arguedas’s phrase “ Aquél que se reintegra ” has been purposely left in Spanish in this quote. One possible translation is “The one who returns.” Barraclough renders it as “The God who is coming back into action” (Āe Fox 259), while Inda and Eagleson translate it as “Him who restores” in Gutiérrez’s A Āeology of Liberation (269, cited below, with Spanish phrase re-inserted). Neither of these translations quite captures the sense of the reflexive verb phrase “se reintegra ,” which connotes the self-giving re-integration of divine spirit into matter—in our midst and in our hearts.
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Figure 5. Nicario Jiménez Quispe (Ayacucho, Peru). Entre las Calandrias, wall altarpiece (retablo de pared ). Created for the book cover of Entre las Calandrias (1990) by Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. Photograph: Enrique Moncloa.
namely, our response to God’s plea for compassionate action, and our help in redeeming this world. Thus amplifying and playing on the often-muffled contrapuntal tune in Mary’s “MagniĀcat” (Luke 1:50–53), Gutiérrez will leave us on this note: The annunciation of the Gospel . . . has a consciousness raising function, i.e. a politicizing function. But this is made real and meaningful only by living and announcing the Gospel from within a commitment to liberation, in concrete, effective solidarity with people and exploited social classes. Only by participating in their struggles can we understand the implications of the Gospel message and make it have an impact on history. The preaching of the Word will be empty and a-historical if it tries to avoid this dimension. It will not be the message of the God who liberates or, as José María Arguedas once put it, “ Aquél que se reintegra .” (Āeology of Liberation 269)
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Works Cited Arguedas, José María. Deep Rivers. Trans. Frances H. Barraclough. Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1978. Trans. of Los Ríos Profundos . Buenos Aires, Argentina: Losada, 1958. ———. “Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change.” Trans. Frances Barraclough. Yawar Fiesta. Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1985. 149–92. Trans. of “Puquio, una cultura en proceso de cambio.” Revista del Museo Nacional [Lima, Perú] 25 (1956): 184–232. ———. El Sexto. Lima, Perú: Mejía Baca, 1961. ———. El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo . Lima, Perú: Editorial Horizonte, 1983. Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Reverie. Trans. Daniel Russell. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1969. Trans. of La Poétique de la rêverie . Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960. Barraclough, Frances Horning, trans. Āe Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “Theological-Political Fragment.” 1921. One Way Street . London: NLB, 1979. “Calandra lark.” Webster’s Āird New International Dictionary, Unabridged. MerriamWebster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (19 Mar. 2010). Copenhaver, Brian P. Hermetica: Āe Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation with notes and introduction . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Couper, J. L. “The Healing Bird.” South African Medical Journal 78.8 (1990): 485–489. Damian, Carol and Steve Stein, eds. Popular Art and Social Change in the Retablos of Nicario Jiménez Quispe . Lewiston NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Doyle, Anita. “ Verbum Ineffabilis.” Parabola: Āe Magazine of Myth and Tradition 20.3 (1995): 41–43. Ferrier, Claude. Arpa Peruana . 11 Sep. 2007 . Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Āeology of Liberation . Trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. New York: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1973. Trans. of Teología de la liberación, Perspectivas. Lima, Perú: CEP, 1971. ———. Entre las Calandrias . Lima, Perú: CEP, 2003. Harbison, Craig. “Vision and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting.” Simiolus (1986): 87–118. Henry, Michel. “Speech and Religion: The Word of God.” Phenomenology and the “Āeological Turn” 217–241. Janicaud, Dominique et al. Phenomenology and the “Āeological Turn”: Āe French Debate. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy 15. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Kearney, Richard. “Enabling God.” After God. Ed. John Manoussakis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. 39–54. ———. Āe God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion . Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. Strangers, Gods and Monsters . New York: Routledge, 2003. Lane, Barbara. Āe Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Āemes in Early Flemish Painting. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Levertov, Denise. “Annunciation.” Selected Poems. Ed. Paul A. Lacey. New York: New Directions Publications Corp., 2002. 162–63. Losh, Elizabeth. “Between the Angel and the Book: The Female Reading Subject of Early Modern Flemish Annunciation Painting.” 20 Jan. 2001. University of California, Irvine. 9 Dec. 2006 .
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Macera, Pablo. “El Hallazgo del Arpa-Mate.” Debate 13 (1981): 65–69. Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Impossible for Man—God.” Villanova Conference on Religion and Postmodernism. Villanova University, Villanova PA. April 2004. ———. “The Saturated Phenomenon.” Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Phenomenology and the “Āeological Turn” 176–216. Trans. of Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française. Paris, France: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991. Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart: Āe Man From Whom God Nothing Hid . Ed. Ursula Fleming. SpringĀeld IL: Templegate Publishers, 1990. Nicholas of Cusa. “On the Summit of Contemplation.” Selected Spiritual Writings . Trans. H. Lawrence Bond. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. 293–303. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar . Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978. Ossio, Juan. Ideología mesiánica del mundo andino . Lima, Perú: Ediciones de Ignacio Prado Pastor, 1973. Plato. Timaeus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Āe Collected Dialogues . Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Poulet, Georges. Les Métamorphoses du Cercle . Paris, France: Flammarion, 1979. Rama, Angel. Transculturación Narrativa en América Latina . Mexico City, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982. ———. La Novela en América Latina: Panoramas 1920–1980 . Bogotá, Colombia: Procultura, S.A., Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1982. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet . Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Rowe, William. Mito e ideología en la obra de Arguedas. Lima, Perú: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1979. Sallinger, Margaretta. “An Annunciation by Gerard David.” Āe Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin n.s. 9.9 (1951): 225–29. Stobart, Henry. Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes . London: Ashate Publishing, 2006. “Thalamus.” Āe Shorter Oxford English Dictionary . 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002. Vardy, Alison. “Celtic Harp History III.” Alison Vardy: Solo Celtic Harpist . July 16, 2009.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Raghu Ananthanarayanan is a master yogi who studied with Yogacharya Krishnamacharya and T. K. V. Desikarchari. He is also a post-graduate in engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He taught at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram for a decade and published a book entitled Learning Ārough Yoga . Raghu is also a trustee of the Chennai-based Koothu-P-Pattarai, a renowned theater group that has developed a method of reĀective inner work called Learning Theater. An expert in organization design and management systems, he has applied his understanding of yoga and human processes to a management context in his book Āe Totally Aligned Organization . Raghu has been passionately attempting a convergence between Indian traditional wisdom and modernity, devoting himself to the transformation of the organizational culture of several leading organizations. He is one of the founders of Sumedhas, Āe Academy for Human Context and a visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has also taught at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand and the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. Mary M. Anderson is an artist and scholar writing her doctoral dissertation in Christological aesthetics at Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard Divinity School, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Maine College of Art, and is currently a visiting professor of art and critical studies in the graduate program at Massachusetts College of Art. She received a Tata Summer Research Grant from the South Asia Initiative at Harvard University for her field research in India at the Ajanta and Ellora caves (2007). She has published essays on art and theology, including a review of After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (ed. John Manoussakis) in STUDIES. An Irish Quarterly Review (2007), “Thy Word in Me: On the Prayer of Union in St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle,” Harvard Āeological Review 99.3 (2006), “In the Stride of an Utterance, ” MFA Thesis Catalog, Massachusetts College of Art (2006), and “Discomedusae,” Kindle & Swag: The Samstag Effect, University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide (2005). As a visual artist, she is the
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recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (1998), a Fulbright Grant (Scotland, 1996), a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1995), the Marguerite and William Zorach Fellowship at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1995), and residencies at the Ucross Foundation (1997), the Millay Colony for the Arts (1997), and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (1996). She is currently an interdisciplinary dissertation fellow at the Humanities Center at Harvard University. Bettina Bäumer, born in Austria, has lived and worked in India (Varanasi) since 1967. She is a scholar of Sanskrit; Indian philosophy and art, with a specialization in Silpasastra and the temple architecture of Orissa; and above all in Kashmir Saivism. She has been coordinator of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Varanasi and is currently President of the Abhishiktananda Society in Delhi, and a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Since 1995, she has been teaching as a visiting professor at the universities of Vienna, Berne, and Salzburg. She has authored five books in German, plus a number of books and scholarly articles in Sanskrit and English. She is also the editor of Kalatattvakosa: A Lexicon of Fundamental Concepts of the Indian Arts (3 vols.). She became a disciple of Swami Lakshman Joo in 1986 and has been teaching Kashmir Saivism and its texts for a number of years. Martin Cohen teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago for his thesis A Hesitant Dionysos: Nietzsche and the Revelry of Intuition . His article is a revision of a paper presented when he was a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. Catherine Cornille is Associate Professor of Comparative Theology at Boston College. Her research and publications focus on historical and theological challenges of the encounter between religions and cultures. She is editor of the series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts, and her recent publications include Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (ed., Orbis, 2002) and Āe Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (Crossroad/Herder & Herder, 2008).
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Francis X. Clooney, S.J. , a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Society of Jesus, has taught at Harvard Divinity School since 2005. He was previously Professor of Comparative Theology at Boston College, where he had taught since 1984, after earning his doctorate in South Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago. His primary areas of scholarship have been theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India, and the developing field of comparative theology—a discipline distinguished by attentiveness to the dynamics of theological reading and writing in light of traditions other than one’s own. He has also written on the Jesuit missionary tradition, particularly in India, and is interested in the dynamics of dialogue in a postcolonial world. Professor Clooney is the author of numerous articles and books, including Fr. Bouchet’s India: An 18th-Century Jesuit’s Encounter With Hinduism (Satyam Nilayam Publications, 2005); Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford University Press, 2005); and, most recently, Jesuit Postmodern: Scholarship, Vocation, and Identity in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2006). He has just completed two books: Beyond Compare: A Hindu, Christian Insight Into Radical Surrender (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming) and Āe Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Āree Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus (Peeters Press, forthcoming). Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are Āe Other Heidegger (1993); Beyond Orientalism (1996); Alternative Visions (1998); Achieving Our World (2001); Dialogue Among Civilizations (2002); Peace Talks—Who Will Listen ? (2004); and Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents (2005). Shirley du Boulay was for many years a producer of religious programs for BBC television. Since leaving, she has worked as a freelance writer, doing some journalism and writing biographies of Cicely Saunders, the Founder of the Modern Hospice Movement, Desmond Tutu, St. Teresa of Avila, Bede Griffiths and Swami Abhishiktananda. She has also written a book on pilgrimage, Āe Road to Canterbury , and edited an anthology of Swami Abhishiktananda’s writings. She is currently writing a book with the working title, Āe God Instinct .
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Chandan Gowda is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion, National Law School of India, Bangalore. He Completed his doctoral dissertation in sociology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests are in the areas of Indian culture, social theory, and Kannada cinema. His publications include numerous academic and newspaper articles and English translations of Kannada fiction. He is presently at work on a book on t he cultural politics of state formation in modern Mysore. Fanny Howe grew up in Boston and moved to California when she was seventeen. Since then, she has written many novels, poems, and essays. She has won two NEA awards, a California Council for the Arts Award, a Guggenheim, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Award, among others, and has taught at Tufts University, Columbia, and MIT. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, San Diego. A new collection of poems, Āe Lyrics , is due out from Graywolf Press in 2007, as well as a translation from the Polish of poems by Henia and Ilona Karmel called A Wall of Two (University of California Press). Her most recent publications were Economics (Flood Editions), Āe Wedding Dress and Gone (University of California Press), On Āe Ground (Graywolf Books), Āe Lives of a Spirt/Glasstown (Nightboat Books), Radical Love (Nightboat Books), and Tramp (Vallum Press in Canada). She was twice nominated for the International Poetry Award from the Griffin Poetry Prize, also in Canada. Edward K. Kaplan is Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities and founding chair of the Program in Religious Studies at Brandeis University. In addition to his work in French literature, he has published essays on Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. His book, Holiness in Words: A. J. Heschel’s Poetics of Piety (State University of New York Press, 1996), was published in a French translation in 1999. Volume one of the first intellectual and cultural biography of Heschel, co-authored with the late Samuel Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Prophetic Witness (Yale University Press, 1998), is now available in paperback. The second and final volume of his biography, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 (Yale University Press), has recently appeared. Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University
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College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and the University of Nice. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited fourteen more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Higher Education Authority of Ireland, and Chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. As a public intellectual in Ireland, he was involved in drafting a number of proposals for a Northern Irish peace agreement (1983, 1993, 1995). He has presented five series on culture and philosophy for Irish and/or British television and broadcast extensively on the European media. His publications include a trilogy on “Philosophy at the Limit”—featuring On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (Routledge, 2003)—and his most recent book Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia Univerity Press, 2009). The present volume, co-edited with Eileen Rizo-Patron, is part of a broader undertaking on inter-religious hospitality, now continuing with a series of conferences on the Guestbook Project, available online at guestbookproject.com. Caroline Mackenzie studied fine arts in London and later worked for twelve years in India where she discovered a creative use of symbols and living rites. It was also in India that she re-discovered the Gospel, sharing in the efforts with other Christian artists striving to express their faith through the symbols of their Indian heritage—a new language in which to tell the parables of the Gospels. Caroline is primarily a sculptor and designer of sacred space. Her paintings explore the inner world through myths and symbols, and she gives lectures and has published articles on cross-cultural themes in India and Europe. John Makransky is Professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College and a teacher (lama) in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. A practitioner of Tibetan meditations of compassion and wisdom for thirty years, he has explored new ways of making these accessible to people of all backgrounds and faiths. He teaches meditation at workshops and retreats sponsored by the Dzogchen Center throughout the United States. John is also senior faculty advisor to Kathmandu University’s Centre for Buddhist Studies in Nepal and co-chair of the Buddhist ReĀection Group in the American Academy of Religion.
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Hannah Bigelow Merriman holds a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied the intersection of theology, community transformation, and visual art. She has worked to promote cultural dialogue through the arts in diverse educational and religious settings. Her drawings and installations have been shown in Bostonarea galleries and juried exhibitions at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. She currently serves as Creative Director for the Global Oneness Project, a special initiative of the Kalliopeia Foundation dedicated to lifting up emerging consciousness of global interconnectedness. James Morley received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in 1988. He has held teaching positions in Connecticut, India, and England and has recently returned to his alma mater, Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he is a Professor of Clinical Psychology teaching courses in psychopathology, phenomenology, and the psychology of yoga. His research interests are in the application of existential phenomenology to imagination, psychopathology, human development, and religious experience. James W. Morris is currently Professor of Theology at Boston College and has previously taught Islamic and religious studies at the universities of Exeter, Princeton, Oberlin, the Sorbonne, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies. His research and exploration of living spiritual traditions have taken him to Iran, Afghanistan, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Southeast Asia. Professor Morris publishes and lectures widely on many areas of religious thought and practice, including the Islamic humanities (poetry and music), philosophy and theology, Sufism, the Qur’an, Shiite thought, and the use of cinema in spiritual teaching. His most recent books include The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ‘Arabi’s “Meccan Illuminations” (2005); Ostad Elahi’s Knowing the Spirit (State University of New York Press, 2006); Orientations: Islamic Āought in a World Civilisation (2004); and Āe Master and the Disciple (2001). Albert Nambiaparambi, C.M.I. , earned his Masters Degree in Philosophy and Theology from the Papal Athenaeum in Pune, and was ordained Priest on March 19, 1959. In 1963 he earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Rome, and returned to work in India. A pioneer and veteran in the field of inter-religious and cultural activities,
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Fr. Nambiaparambil has since taken a leading role in the promotion of inter-religious harmony across the world, in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi. He organized the World Conference of Religions in 1981, 1991, 1996 and 2000 in Kochi, and served as secretary of the World Fellowship of Inter-Religious Councils in 1993, in Kanyakumari. His publications in English include Āe Ethics of R. M. Hare (1963) and, most recently, Pilgrims on the Seashore of Endless Worlds (2002). He has also published a number of poetry books in Malayalam. In addition, Fr. Nambiaparambil has edited the Guidelines for Inter-Religious Dialogue, and several volumes of proceedings from the Kerala Philosophical Congress. Joseph S. O’Leary holds a doctorate in patristic theology from Maynooth College, Ireland. He also studied at the Gregorian University, Rome, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. Resident in Japan since 1983, he collaborated in the work of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nagoya, and has taught since 1988 at Sophia University. His books on fundamental theology, Questioning Back (Minneapolis, 1985), Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh, 1996), and L’art du jugement en théologie (forthcoming) show the inĀuence of Madhyamaka Buddhism. Eileen Rizo-Patron earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in 2006, with a thesis entitled Ārough the Eye of a Needle: Hermeneutics as Poetic Transformation . She is currently working for the Catholic University in Lima, Peru, as Coordinator of an International Congress on Andean Hermeneutics to be held in June, 2011. Her areas of specialization include the philosophy of imagination of Gaston Bachelard, and the narrative poetics of Andean writer José María Arguedas. Eileen has published articles on various facets of Bachelard’s hermeneutics in the Boston College journal Religion and the Arts , and is presently publishing a translation of his work on the philosophy of time, Āe Intuition of the Instant (Northwestern University Press, 2010). She worked as a visiting scholar in the Philosophy Department at Boston College from 2006 to 2007, during which time she served as Assistant Editor for the special issue of Religion and the Arts on the “Inter-Religious Imagination.” With Richard Kearney, she is co-editor of this revised edition by Brill Publishers (2010).
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Jyoti Sahi is an artist who has worked nearly his entire career for the Church in India, designing churches, illustrating books, and teaching. In 1986 he started an Art Ashram in a Dalit Christian village on the outskirts of Bangalore, with the idea of relating Christian Art in India to the theological issues being discussed in the context of Indian cultures. His interest in the relation of Christianity to Hinduism is deep-rooted: his father Shanti Sahi came from a Hindu family in Punjab, and his Christian links come through his British mother Marjorie Newman. Jyoti studied art in the 1960’s at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he met Dom Bede Griffiths who suggested he visit him at his Saccidananda Ashram upon his return to India. Jyoti was at Jurisumala for about three years, where he met his wife Jane Sadler who comes from a Quaker background. Father Bede married them in 1970, and in that same year he moved to Bangalore to work at the National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Center, which had been set up in 1968. He has been connected with this center ever since, and has been involved in the “inculturation” process in the relation of the Church to Indian cultures. Joseph A. Samarakone , O.M.I., is a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and is the Acharya of Aanmodaya Ashram near Kancheepuram in South India. Originally from Sri Lanka, he has lived in India since 1976. He has been active in the areas of inter-religious dialogue and the “inculturation” of Christianity in India. Siddhartha is a writer and cultural critic. One of his concerns has been the renewal of Hinduism to incorporate a strong sense of social justice and ecological concern. He has written two books and many articles on cultural, social, and spiritual themes. He lectures regularly on issues pertaining to “culture and sustainable development,” “ecospirituality,” and “inter-religious dialogue.” He founded the eco-social ashram called FireĀies just outside the city of Bangalore. FireĀies is an ashram without a guru and is concerned with personal transformation, social change, and ecological connectedness. Large numbers of university students, NGO’s, and spiritual thinkers from around the world frequent FireĀies ashram. He can be contacted at <sidd173@ gmail.com>. For more information on FireĀies, please visit the website: <www.fireflies.org.in>.
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Maqbool Ahmed Siraj works for the BBC World Service in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. He is a post-graduate in journalism from the University of Madras. He co-edits the English monthly periodical Islamic Voice, a journal devoted to the Islamic cause and understanding between various faiths and cultures. He also writes for Deccan Herald, an English daily from Bangalore, and several other periodicals. He frequently lectures at several institutes in and around Bangalore on subjects of Islamic interest, Indian politics, and interfaith dialogue. The author can be reached at <[email protected]>. Simon Sleeman. O.S.B., has been a monk of Glenstal Abbey in Ireland for over thirty years. Formerly headmaster of the Abbey school, he is currently Bursar for the Glenstal Abbey community. Steffen A. J. Stelzer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He received his Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin, did research at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and at Harvard, and taught at Johns Hopkins. His areas of specialization are, among others, the connections between rationality and revelation, different types of ethics, and concepts of the transmission of knowledge (comparative analyses of Western philosophical and Islamic models). Swami Tyagananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and spiritual head of the Vedanta Society, Boston. He is the Hindu chaplain at Harvard and MIT. He has translated and edited ten books, including Monasticism: Ideals and Traditions (1991) and Āe Essence of the Gita (2000).
INDEX OF TERMS/TOPICS acoustics, acoustic: awakening 207–208; and expansive consciousness 228–229; fellowship 466; f ollowing 28; o f the gaze 204; o f language 259; o f the other (see listening); space 459, 463; spiritual 7, 92, 449; o f stillness 293; a s Stimmung 371–372; traversing heartmatter-mind 208, 229, 461, 465 action (praxis): Advaita and 37n1; compassionate 8, 10, 11, 249, 380, 457, 468; as di vine service 37n1, 39, 269, 304, 461; Dur ga as sub ject of 167; emptiness and 374; eco-s ociopolitical 11, 41–42, 268, 392; F arabi on 314, 315; Ga ndhi on 11; Ghazali on 305; G od returning to 467n28; habitual 287; “ HaĀz” as call t o responsible 320–321n19; ineffective without healing 104; imagina tion as 397; in tention and 108; as karma 39; kundalini and 287; in I ndian cinema 125; no n-attachment to fruits of 105; as ob edience (‘ibadat) 304, 364; p receded by rahmat in Islamic practice 319n17; r eading as 457; as r esponse to divine plea 467–468; ritual 96; sanathana dharma as enabling 90; s eeds of 154n8; o f spiritual benefactors 386n3; y ogic 55, 58 Advaita: Abhishiktananda and 213–216; Aquinas and 200; a nd art 79; in Upanishads 205; b eyond name and form 21; B uddhism/Taoism and 9n1; Christianity and 20, 139; do ctrine of 139n4, 198, 200; etymo logy of 205; Grant on 20, 198; a nd John’s Gospel 139; Maharshi and 205–206; mo diĀed (Cusa/Ramanuja) 443; R ambachan on 37n1, 42; s acred space o f 19; S hankara on 98, 200; as T ruth/not religion 20n5; Varaprasadam on 139; Vedanta school 443; wis dom/humor 278–279 advent: in Andean art/hermeneutics 459–467; deferral of 455–456; in European art and hermeneutics 449–455; Levertov on promise/
challenge of 456; o f light in M ahayana 416; of sight 396–397; p romises of 449–468; transcultural mutations 449; vessels of 467 aesthetics, aesthetic: as Atma v idya (education of Self) 65, 65n11; o f cosmic sexuality 162; Dalit and Lalit 71; of dhvani 64–65, 172, 231, 400; and divine freedom 226–227; no ndualistic 219–231, 399n6; elemen tal 221–223, 229; a nd ethics 397, 399; feeling (bhava) 102, 220–231, 399–403; Islamic (Ibn ‘Arabi) 315–318; Indian (Bharata) 221, 399–401; of mandala and mandorla 51; metaphysical (Abhinavagupta) 219–231, 400–403; as m ystical-sensory 219; and perceptual sublimation 228–229; play in 231; o f rasa 219–229, 399–403; of representation (Plato/ Aristotle) 397–399; r evelatory dialectic in 395, 403, 404; s ensitivity (sahrdaya) 88, 219, 222, 226, 228, 229, 230; Trika 219, 223, 226, 228; W estern hermeneutics and Indian 172–173; whole/part principle in 224–225; as worship 221–226 altar, altarpiece: on the “Annunciation” 450–455, 456; o n the “Five Elements” at St. Helen’s Church 173, 185; cr oss at Glenstal Abbey 106; as harmika (Vishvakarma cave) 418, 418n41, 420; as retablo of Andean advent 468; retablo of Divine Shepherdess 463, 464n20; o f Satan at Auschwitz 427; o f Shiva-lingam at Gokarna Cave 160 angel: of Annunciation (Gabriel) 447n2, 452–455, 456; as her meneut/ angelos 466; a nd Lote tree 342, 348; as musician/flautist 459–463; o f Qur’anic revelations (Gabriel) 340–341, 350–351; of rahma in “Allegory of Drunkenness” 319, 326; R umi on 350–351 archetype, archetypal: collective 177; cosmic musical (Qur’an) 320; o f descent into underworld (Jesus, Savitri, Inkarri) 3, 52–53, 73–74,
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464–466; elemental 186; o f intercession (Kardiotissa) 404; J ung on 48–49; o f laborer (yoked Jesus) 52; of personal resurrection (risen Lord) 183; p overty as 77; o f psychic forces 145; o f Self 43, 201; o f spiritual impregnation (reading Mary) 457; vs. stereotype 77; o f Vedic satpurusha 23 art: autonomy of 403; Ande an-Christian 14, 459–463; a pophatic/kataphatic 29; Buddhist 28–29, 162, 410–420; as darshan 7; as dis cipline 43; E uropean Renaissance 51, 448–455; t he feminine in religious 53, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 119, 142, 158, 159, 162, 162n21, 171, 177, 186; hermeneutics and 172; H induBuddhist-Jain 29, 148–140, 163, 410; Hindu-Catholic 163–191; H induChristian 43–75; a nd inculturation 168–172, 177; f olk Indian 71, 77; inter-religious 42–77, 167–188, et passim; Islamic 322–325; J ewish/ Hasidic/Yiddish 7, 431; as li turgy 10n2; narrative 5, 29, 47, 73, 124, 135, 342, 349, 350, 464, 467; as prayer/meditation 44–45; a nd psychotherapy 177–178, 188; as sublimation 48; Tantric 77, 159–163; transcultural 14, 459, 463–464, 464n21; as y oga 43–75 Atma: and Brahma 280, 285; co ntained in Paramatma 97, 416n39; em bodied as Jivatma 97, 157–158, 416n39; in heart-cave 416n39; la tent in all li ving beings 275; as S elf underlying Ego 280; Vidya (education/experience of) 65 bhakti: Dalit saints and 36; H indu medieval saints and 75; influence on Sikhism 335–336; K abir and 27, 75, 333; as pa th of devotion 39–40, 75; as poetic tradition 76; raga/rasa in context of 229; a nd SuĀ teachings of Guru Nanak 336; y oga 195n7 (s ee also marga) bird: archetype of spirit 186; do ve in Christian art 174, 186, 452, 460, 463; hamsa in H indu art 4, 6, 186; metamorphic P’eng (Chuang-Tzu) 297; of prana 274; p rophetic/healing calandra lark 460, 463n19, 467; as Paramahamsa (Great Swan) 283; as Purusha/Prakriti (Upanishads) 290–291; symbol of “resurrection”
in Easter mask r ituals 186; as Viswadarshan (Shankarakurup) 267; Wamani in Ande an art 464 bodhisattva: o f compassion 377, 418; circle of 390, 390n5; r eader as 379; as spiritual benefactor 386, 386n3; o f wisdom 379, 418 body: alchemical 73, 157n12; a ttitudes/ gestures 55; Aurobindo on 292–293; Buddha’s numinous (dharma-kaya) 377, 390n5; o f Christ as Ch urch 133n2, 440–441; as co mmunal energy (sambhoga-kaya) 390n5; cosmic 47, 155n9, 158; cr eative (nirmana-kaya) 390n5; of cruciĀed Christ 66, 76, 77, 200, 409; de ath/rebirth of 58; o f Devi 236–237, 239, 241; in dialogue 252–253; dualist views of 19, 141, 154, 158; as f orm (rupa-kaya) 377; as fountain/source 68, 77; F rancis on 15; germinating 465; gloriĀed/transĀgured 51, 64; as host 76, 252–253; H usserl on 153–154n8; a nd imagination 55, 68, 161; as jivatma 58, 157n11, 158; Merleau-Ponty on 150–156, 159–165; mystical 23, 131; as na ture’s consciousness 153n8; no urished by prana 47; sacramental 253; as shr ine 40, 158; sub tle 159, 161; in T antrism 157–165; in tra nscendental idealism 152; as tr ee/seed 47, 55, 58; as v ehicle 55, 157; as wa y of seeing (darshana) 58; wound/wounded 66, 68, 77; as world flesh 155–156; in yogic asanas 52–64, 148 ( see also incarnation) boundary: between matter/spirit 340, 342–344, 450; as co ntinuity 406–407; criss-crossed 4; as guide 349, 451; language 248; lo te tree as 339–351; paradox of 340, 345–347, 349–351; religious 4, 268; T antric transgression of 236–237; o f thought 345 Brahman: a nd akasa 222; Atman and 280, 285; Aurobindo and 292; “b efore the waters” 281; cr eation god 215; Cusa and 443; a nd Āve elements 276; in Hindu trimurti 4, 215; imm utable/ impersonal 291–292; J esus and 19, 213; joy in 282; K abir on 29; lig htning and 205; Natya Shastra and 400n7; as Paramatma 415n39; a nd rasa 401n13; understandings of 90; as uni versal energy 229; w orlds equated with 281 Brahmanism, Brahmanic: Ellora caves and 411; H induism and 97, 416,
index of terms /t opics 483 416n39; quietude of 293; Tantric transgressions of norms 236 Buddhism, Buddhist: on compassion 258; and foundationalism 370; Mahayana 7, 367–379, 383, 390n5, 410, 413, 416, 444; a nd multiple-belonging 9; meditation 38–392; as non-partisan religion 25; T ibetan 382, 383n2; Vajrayana 383n2, 390n6, 410n28, 416 Catholicism, catholic: Abhishiktananda as 19; Ak bar’s outlook 335; a nd art 167–189; Bishops Conference in I ndia 130, 251; co nversions 139; C usa on 440; and dual religious belonging 4, 9; Grant and 197–201; Ib n ‘Arabi and 316; iconography 4; in ter-religious rituals 117; I rish 142; o f Merton 391, 432; in P oland 425–427, 429, 430; o n salvation 257; S haivite 2, 9; sp iritual/ pastoral crisis of 367n1; tradi tion of Mary in 235; o n unconditional love 387, 388n4, 391, 392 cave (guha): as aperture/wound 68; apophatic/kataphatic art in 28–29, 148n2, 149, 163, 167; Atman in 193; birth/awakening of holy Āgures in 15, 17, 18, 29, 67, 68; B uddhist (Vishvakarma) 395, 403, 410–420; center of centers 19; o f heart 1, 3, 7, 14, 15, 20n5, 21, 76, 77, 78, 103–104, 193, 194, 273–281, 371, 416, 418; image of world 415n38; in ter-religious encounter site 1, 28, 30, 103, 144, 148, 162, 395, 410n27; in ter-textual readings of 6; in timate immensity of 411; mandala as 78; L e Saux’s retreat in 210–218; a mid misery 193; mystical 78; Pla tonic 433; s acred space 159–160, 167, 210; under world entry 74; Upanishads on 193, 274ff, 416; well-spring within 19; as w omb/tomb 78, 416 ( see also space) chakras/cakras: energy centers of subtle body 47, 161, 236; mandala patterns 47; muladhara 221, 287; as phenomenological tools 161; p ierced by kundalini 286–287; as tr uth wheels in Buddha’s preaching gesture, 414, 414n36; as w orlds within Devi 236 child: archetype of Self 43; b irth as advent of light 416; Christ 404–409; as gold embryo (Rig Veda) 68n13; ico n of love 409; ico n of sacriĀce 408n25; image of Logos 405; I nkarrí as 465;
Kardiotissa and 5, 404–409, 416, 420; Krishna as 91; in M ackenzie’s “Lion Lady” series 179; p reĀguring Christ’s passion and cruciĀxion 405, 408, 409, 454; M aharshi as 204; G rant as 197–202; Savitri as 73; a nd serpent 48n4, 74 Christianity, Christian: aim of history in 259; as converting religion 257; foundationalism 370; and proselytizing 138, 139; as religion of love 258; o n the Trinity 255–256; v ocation of proclamation or dialogue 252 Christology: Grant on 200; in J ewishChristian relations (Obirek) 429, 429n3; as s ource vs. f unction of Pneumatology 137–138 cinema, Ālm: A Beautiful Mind 381–382; Ā e BOSS 126n3; et hical parameters in Indian 125–126; Mungaru Male 125; popular imaginary in 125; public/testimonial narrative in 124; Yajamana 125 circle: of birth/death 195, 257; o f bodhisattvas/communion 389, 390; calligraphic Zen-Buddhist 295; Christ-centered 260; co ncentric/ hermeneutic 448; o f dance 170, 187; eucharistic 173–174; G od/Self as 411, 448 (see also sphere); inter-religious 8, 250–251, 266; o f Islamic soul journey 344–347; mandala as 49; p resent in bindu 47; Vishvakarma stupa as cen ter of 416; “Vitruvian man” contained in 66 communalism: 35, 123; s ecularist critique of 124 (s ee also fundamentalism) communion: 14, 19, 135, 208, 249; of bodhisattvas 389; wi th chakras (Ramakrishna) 286; a mong fellow pilgrims 268; in ter- 253, 264; in John’s gospel 387; o f saints 386n3; as sambhoga-kaya (radiant buddha form/realm) 390; t asting rasa as 401; Universal Kingdom of 136–138 ( see also Eucharist) compassion: acts of 11, 39, 468; boddhisattvas of 377, 410, 418; Buddhist wisdom and 378, 378n12, 410n28; eye of 396; a t heart of Christian Gospel 380; f or the stranger 391; social 100 ( see also love, option for the poor) conversion: Abrahamic faiths and 257–259; of Apostle Paul 139; in
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biblical language 131; o f Cardinal Newman 139; C atholic-Hindu 139; and/or conversation 19, 255, 256; empathy and 109; o f hearts/acts 12; between Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism 258; Holy Spirit as guide t o 139; inculturation versus 136; of Jesus 134; of self-perspective 266–267; a nd “uniqueness” 258 cross: as bearing the negative 371; equal-axis 106; medi tation on 48; Stations of the 52, 55; T ree of the 47; yoga as wa y of the 51–63; M ary facing scene of the 244 ( see also verticality, horizontality) Dalit: aesthetics 71; and bhakti tradition 36; deĀned 65, 71; ha rvesters 4; and Hindu caste system 36, 169; and humility (humus) 71; a nd inculturation 169; J esus 68–69, 76; vs. Lalit 71; le aders/poets 37, 41; a nd liberation theology 37; M adonna 69–71; shamanic mask r ituals of 185; theology 65, 76, 169 dance: African-Christian 173; b etween inner Self/cosmic Lord 199; cir cles (inter-religious) 169–171, 186–187; drama (kathakali) 270; H asidic 431; Indian tripadam as 53; Natya Shastra on 221; P entecostal 4; as p lay of the possible god (Kearney) 466; religion as s ource of 96; o f Shiva (as pure creation) 78, 198, 204, 403n15; touching divinity via 88; sp inning (zumbayllu) 465; S uĀ 265 darkness: Eastern vs. Western concepts of 44; as ex clusion from heavenly kingdom 134; a nd the feminine principle 77; as J ungian shadow 181n1; Kardiotissa’s mantle/womb of 405, 408; L ord risen from 176; physical vs. sp iritual 270; S elf beyond 201; of sin/death 135; o f Shiva-lingam sanctum 19, 215; o f unawakened heart 195; as “ unreal” in Asatoma prayer 270; of Virgin’s thalamus 452–453; o f Vishvakarma stupa as w ound 418; as wondrous vastness 266 darshan: as sacred manifestation 7, 203, 206–208; as wa y of seeing 58; as world vision (vishwa-) 266–267 desire: as attachment 380; a nd consumerism 322, 433; in C usa
434–444; dualist notions of 279; Durga and male 167; a nd duty (Dewey) 434; as emo tion 433; a nd Eros 289; as f oretaste 437; F rancis on 14; fundamentalist 124; f or goodness, truth, wisdom 240, 275, 437–439; for healing 168; ho ly 14; K abir on 28; and love (HaĀz/Cusa) 319, 322, 434; and the desirable 434–438; li ved body and 155; as orexis vis-à-vis arête (Aristotle) 434; a nd pleasure in Tantra 236; in Pla to/Kant 433; R amakrishna’s daemonic 289; in Saundarya Lahari 236, 239, 240, 246; vs. “ seedlessness” (Husserl) 154n8; s exual 236; sp iritual heart and 193; in Stabat Mater 243, 244, 246; sub ordination of individual 125, 439; uni versal 109 Devi: chakras within 236; as Di vine consort 235; as naga (Gokorna temple) 159; p hysical description 237; in the Saundarya Lahari 8, 235–241; as not-Shiva 239; as S upreme Power 235, 238 dharma: of Buddha 294, 373n9, 376; deĀnitions of 90; as d uty 331n4; -kaya (luminous body) 377, 390n5; -mudra (Buddha hand gesture) 148, 414, 418; Hua-yen tradition on the relativity of 374; in separable from sangha (spiritual community) 379; as k ey of Indian culture 400; in Mahabharata 331n4; as r esponsibility 41; sanathana89, 90, 258; a nd Saundarya Lahari 237 dialogue: among equals 259, 263; Buddhist-Christian 387, 393; as celebration 253–254; G rant and 20; Hindu-Christian 12–15, 24, 198–201, 255, 268; H indu-Muslim 25, 330–335, 337; inter-religious 131, 251–253, 428, 261; intra-religious 261–262; I slamicChristian 251, 263, 441–442; J ewishChristian 427–429; missio n of 252; openness in 248; p ilgrimage in 249–269; vs. “proclamation” 252; as sakala, sahrdaya, samvada (Upanishads) 87–88; “ this is m y body” in 253; a nd tolerance 263 discernment: as Buddhist vipassana 376; conditions 220, 456–457; o f goodness 389, 456; a s distillation 220, 282, 283, 288, 458; as ha rmonic awakening 207; heart as s eat of 14; heur istic role of 459; as khora’s “winnowing
index of terms /t opics 485 sieve” 458–459; o f meanings 221; as reflective judgment 324–325; as sattarka in Sa iva yoga 220n2; in Sankhya 87; o f Spirit’s presence 131 (see also understanding) discipline (sadhana): art as sp iritual 43; as balance of wisdom/compassion in Mahayana 378; o f descent (Aurobindo) 74; o f divine ascent (Ghazali) 308; o f imagination as obedience 358–361; indep endent of religion (Maharshi) 10n2; o f interreligious imagination 397; as lo vemaking (Ramakrishna) 286–287; personal (niyama) 98; in pranayama 282; religion as 96; as sequela prophetae in I slam 359; in V ajrayana cult 410n28; Yoga Sutras as p ractical/ spiritual 149 drama: cathartic power of 188; a nd dance 265; samsara as 221; w orld ( jagannatya) as 221, 223 ecology, ecological: interconnectedness, responsibility, spirituality 42, 65, 76, 77, 100, 103, 143, 152n7, 169, 174, 177, 185 elements, elemental: and Brahman 276; in B uddhism 372; in “ Canticle to Brother Sun” 75; in Cha rvaka materialism 87; c lassical material 11, 87, 276, 349, 465; as cosmo theandric tattvas 221, 222; Āre/flame 4, 349; as forms of divine energy 229; prana as most vital among 282; rasa as 226, 400; in t he Timaeus (Plato) 458; f rom wounds of Jesus 66 empathy (einfühlung): aim of 108, 121; critical role of 121; Dil they on 108, 109, 113, 114; a nd “excluded others” 119, 391; exotopy and 120; hermeneutic critique of 110; Husserl on 108; imagina tion and 107–120; nature’s 65; pa rticipation and 115–117; postmodern critique of 110; as reconstruction 109; S cheler on 111, 114; S tein on 114–115; sym pathy and 107, 111–113; as tra nsposition 108–111; van der L eeuw on 109–110 (see also understanding) emptiness (sunyata): ba rren/fecund 457, 461–462; as b egging bowl/holy grail 69n14; as b ourne of thought 375–376; in B uddhist Heart Sutra
(Mahayana) 6, 367, 369, 375–376; as cure for nihilism 371n8; as cr itical sword 371; a nd Dalit Madonna 69; as dwelling mode vs. t erminus 298; as form 28, 291, 373; f ormless 369; a nd fullness (punya) 69, 71; a nd humility 71; and kenosis 372; N hat Hanh vs. Suzuki on 374–375; as “ nothing holy” (Bodhidharma) 294–295; as womb of Buddhahood 413; a nd yogic detachment (Aurobindo) 291 eschatology: absent in B uddhist sunyata 380; of barzakh in Qur’an 355; o f New Testament 380; in r eading of khora 458n12; in Stabat Mater 244 ethics, ethical: action 11; co re of Hindu secularism 41; C usa and 438, 439; ecology and 41–42, 152n7; Ghazali o n 305; imagination 124; im plications of Heschel’s work 428, 431; in terpersonal (yama) 98; mo dels for global culture 200; and modern education 126; Nehru on 41; pa rameters in I ndian Ālm 125; Vaastu design a nd 88–89n1 Eucharist: as Christian-Hindu liturgy/ sadhana 22, 129; in da nce rituals (African-Christian and Āe yyam) 173–174, 187–188; as ex clusive to the baptized 118, 264; in J esus’s Last Supper 387; as s ource of dialogue 252–253; as tra nscendent function of mandala 174; Van Gogh’s “potato eaters” as m ystical 10n2 ( see also communion) evil: in dualistic consciousness 78; emptiness and 374; f orces 126; of Holocaust 426–427; in J udeoChristian tradition 77, 141; a nd Kali 77; in kathakali drama 270; knowledge of good and 47; N hat Hanh on 374– 375; Plotinian-Augustinian view of 375; possibility of 448; o f selĀsh desire 439; systemic 37 femininity, feminine: architectural form and 173–174, 405, 408, 411; contemplative/practical dimensions of 70–71; as cosmic f orce 162; da rkness/ destruction and 77, 119; di vine expressions of 53, 71, 119, 158–162, 186, 235–245; in E astern/Western religious art 168–186; a nd ecology/ nature 77, 177; in E uropean/Andean Renaissance art 449–463; f ertility symbols and 77, 159, 405–416, 418,
486
index of terms /t opics
452–454, 457–463; as he aling space 73–76; harrowing of hell b y 74; in liturgy 177; in medie val hymns (Tantric/Catholic) 235–246; in N ew Age spirituality 142; st ereotypes of 77; the Sun as 73n16; T antric emphasis on 158–163 (s ee also prakriti, Shakti) freedom: domain of perfect 380; o f human/divine artist 227; as rasa 227; in time 455 fundamentalism, fundamentalist: desires 124, 370; H indu party 123; I slam painted as 25; ma rket 40; p olemic expressions 133–134; p rotestant 89; religious 123, 135; s ecular 40 ( see also communalism) Gnosticism, Gnostic: symbolic systems 49, gospels 456 God: as Abba (Father) 3, 131, 134, 135, 264, 388; as Allah 321, 341, 361, 363; born in time 447, 457n10; as cir cle/ sphere 346, 411, 448; as Cr eator 429, 441; de ath of 245–246, 429n3; enabling (posse) 447, 448, 449, 456, 467; entreating 455, 468; as last r efuge 83, 92; hidden/la tent/possible 68n13, 441, 465, 466; imma nent/transcendent 444; impersonal vs. p ersonal 39; as inĀnite love 388, 444; as j usticer 21, 200, 465, 467; Ishvara (as in telligence) 87; of Israel 134, 427–428; as “ Ka” in Rig Veda 68n13; lib erating 467, 468; as male dei ty 245; na ming the unnameable 27, 39; met aphysical (causa sui/omnipotent) 447, 467; as Mother 3–4, 77, 124, 139–140, 163, 235–241; only One in I slam 256; in Panentheism 10n2; o f pathos 428; return to 92; silen t 246; st anding with the poor 40; as L ight 54, 461, 463; as stra nger 5; Trinity/Trimurti 4, 255, 406n24; va rying ideas of 91; will of 427, 429; as Y ahweh 134; y oga as hospitality to 46 ( see also Wo rd) Hadith: 303, 307, 309, 315, 317, 304n2, 320 healing: art and 48, 186, 463n19; Buddhist wisdom and 371, 381–393; ecological and socio-political 65, 467; feminine space as 73–76; I ndian folk 147; as in tegration (Jung) 52n9 186;
inter-religious 6, 12, 425–431; o f leper (by Elisha/Jesus) 134; li turgy and 186–188; the negative “imaginary” 425–431; serpent as 48; Theyyam rituals 185–186; as t est of spirituality 104; tree/flute as 461n15; as p ower of sacred wound 4, 66, 68; w ounded healer’s 66, 431, 466–467; y oga as 92 heart (hridaya, kardia, qalb): as apex of Islamic ascent 318; b irth of 395–421; in Buddhist Heart Sutra 367–380; burning 29, 46; ca ve of 14, 19, 45, 418; change of 104; eq uanimity of 381–392; eye of 339; o f Father’s love 409; F rancis Acharya on 14; o f imagination as sp iritual laboratory 104; of the Kardiotissa 405; le arning/ knowing by 367; mandala as symbol of 78; as mind/b ody junction 45, 367n2; as m ystical qalb 29; in Qur ’an 27, 318; as s eat of buddhi 194; as site of friendship 46–47; as su preme consciousness 223; Vedantin imagery of 275; y oga of 46 Hermes: birthplace of 15; caduceusbearing 48; disguis ed as stra nger 5 hermeneutics, hermeneutic: of advent 447–468; of art 47–51, 148, 148n2, 172–177, 318–324, 347–350, 404–419, 448–463; and beauty 102; a nd Bakhtinian exotopy 5, 120; cir cles of 448; c lassical Indian 102, 133, 133n2; critique of transposition 110; cross-reading in 5–7; co ntextual in/ Ādelity in 138; E astern aesthetics and Western 172–173; o f the heart 6, 7, 30, 371; a nd imagination 5, 118–120; of khora 457n11, 458; language limits in 164; as list eningdigesting-embodying the Word (Indian) 102, 133, 133n2; na rrativepoetic 465; a nd phenomenology 150, 164–165; o f posse 449, 457; pre-understanding in 437; o f religious experience 150; r omantic 107, 108; si tuatedness of 2, 30; o f suspicion 92; a nd transĀguration 459; understanding others as d ynamic 110, 120 (see also interpretation, reading, understanding) Hinduism, Hindu: as amalgam of traditions 89–97; a mbiguity/fluidity of terms in 39, 90–91; co diĀed as a
index of terms /t opics 487 religion by Jesuits 89; a nd Islam in the Indian subcontinent 329–337; open-source 10, 35–42; p hilosophical traditions of 86; as sanathana dharma 89–90, 258; a nd secular spirituality 41; tolerance as no te of 263; vie ws on incarnation 157 Hindutva movement: and cultural nationalism 36, 329, 337 Holy Spirit: 22n6, 135–136; b rooding over world 199; as do ve 174, 186, 452; issuing from Jesus 137; in M ary’s “Annunciation” 409; as s ource/mother of Creation 136, 137; in T rinity 406n24 (see also Pneumatology, Christology) horizontality, horizontal: as address to others/nature 42, 270; axis in cr oss symbol 106; Chr ist/Gandhi emphasis on 105, 123; dismiss ed in s ome vertical models 42; in tegral to vertical spirituality 106; as s ecularity/secular action 40, 459; s ocially transformative 105 (see also secularity, verticality) iconography, imagery: Andean 462–466, 468; Buddhist 370, 378, 388–390, 410–419; Catholic-Vedantic 4; Christian 49, 71, 76, 183, 449–461, 467; Christian-Andean 459–463, 466–467; Hindu-Jain-Buddhist 148–149; Hindu-Christian 4, 49, 55–65, 68–73; H indu-Muslim 4; Islamic 307, 343, 345–346; R ussian Orthodox 416n10; Tantric 145, 159, 161, 162n20 iconoclasm, iconoclastic: Buddhist/Zen attitude as 370; co ntroversy 44; in Christian Scripture 370; N icephorus of Constantinople against 405, 405n12 image: archetypal 23, 43, 48–49, 52–53, 77, 145, 177, 183, 201, 207, 308, 320, 404, 457; a uditory/musical 7, 459, 460–462; educative value of (Aristotle) 399; elemental 173, 175–176, 185–186; empowering/transforming 78; essential ambiguity of 77–78, 173, 323, 458, 463; in ter-religious 4, 8, 138, 149, 463n19; J ungian shadow178, 181, 183, 186; li turgical 12, 173–177, 185–188; mandala 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 66, 78, 161, 170, 174; mandorla 49, 51; as medi tative
tool 43, 44, 48, 161, 390; nega tion of 44; onomatopoeic 461, 461n16 ( see also archetype, iconography) imagination: auditory 7, 28; B uddhist 410–419; centrifugal 449; co llective 169, 467; cr eative 27, 63, 169, 171, 185, 189, 318; as darshan 7; di vine (khiyal) 28,320, 323–324; no ndualistic 78; em bodied 55–65, 186; and empathy 117–121; et hicalpolitical 124, 397, 399; vs. fancy in Coleridge 45–46; as f ollowing 358; Hindu classical/folk 71, 169; as home/host 76; Ib n ‘Arabi on 27, 318, 360–361; imaginal vs. imaginary in Corbin 45, 356, 361; inc lusive/ democratic 123–126; as inmagination 363; and intellect 303, 308, 315–325; inter-religious 1, 4, 5, 19, 24, 27, 28, 103, 106, 107, 111–114, 117, 130, 202, 235, 381, 397, 432, 449; I slamic 27–28, 303–327, 355; K earney on 447; of likeness 354–363, 398–402; limitable/unlimitable 357–358; lo cus of Islamic 359, 361; m ystical 5; a nd obedience 353, 358, 361; o pen to otherness 118–119; as p re-conceptual intuition 7, 14–15, 428–429; p rophetic 46, 364; r eader’s transĀguring 323, 325, 466; r ooted in sattarka 220; sacramental 104; s ecularist 124; a nd translation 6, 27; a nd transcendence 361; unbalanced 356; under standing symbols via 339–340, 351; no n-verbal 189; as v essel of Spirit 55; as yetzer 45; yoga of 45–46, 55–65, 78 immanence: as category 155; in C usa 444; as diast olic cycle 297, 320; dualism of transcendence and 19; kataphatic sensitivity for 29; m ystery of divine 29; in tradi tional yogic teleology 287 ( see also transcendence) incarnation: Abhishiktananda on 19, 217; art as 43; Christ’s liberating message of 19; as essential sacrament 217; gift of; 459; as illusion/misfortune (in Vedanta) 157; negated 371; as re-incarnation (punarjanma) 255 ( see also body) inculturation: deĀnition of 136; distinc t from conversion 136; in I ndia after Second Vatican Council 21, 128, 130, 132, 168, 169, 172, 188, 199, 254, 265; Grant as p ioneer of 21, 199–201;
488
index of terms /t opics
and inter-religious belonging 136; resistance/need in t he West 169, 178, 189 (see also transculturation) integration: in Aurobindo’s “integral yoga” 52n9, 290, 292; diast olic cycles of 297–298, 320, 467–468; in J ungian psychotherapy 48–49, 79, 178; mandala structure and 48–49, 174; of opposites in y oga 45, 47, 73, 78; of self in Cla irvaux 76; o f religious traditions 136, 171–172, 186, 188, 265; vs. sacriĀce of energies 288 interpretation: of advaita (Rambachan) 37; of advent/annunciation 449, 452, 463, 466; ca nonical, organized, orthodox 96, 98, 152; as co nscious understanding 49; co ntextual ranges of 449; C usa on devout 442–443; disputed Upanishadic 279–281; o f Farabi’s work 314n11; f unctional 375; of khora 457–458; le vels (in Tantraloka) 231; minimalist 373; multiplicity of Islamic theological 315–316; multi-valent (of art) 172–173, 174; m usical/pictorial 463; new christological (Heschelinspired) 429; as “ only game in t own” (Fish) 164; o pen-ended 99; p oetic vs. strictly logical 458; o f Qur’anic qawas (bow) 344–346; S uĀ-rule of 357; violent outcomes of 330 ( see also hermeneutics, translation) Islam, Islamic: 25; architecture 51; classical humanities 303–325; as converting religion 257; a nd cultural blending 27, 335; D alrymple on 25–26n9; dialogue wi th Christianity 27, 441–442; o n divine “breath” (Ibn ‘Arabi) 317; o n divine Love (rahmat) 319n17; on God as o ne 256; he art (alqalb) 27, 29, 318; imagina tion 27, 28; Kabir and 27; K hilafat and Wahhabi mis-readings of 25; la nguages 331; legacy on Indian subcontinent 25–27, 329–337; and multiple belonging 9; political ideologies of 303; p yramid of religious understanding (Ghazali) 27, 307–308, 316–318; as r eligion of peace 258; s chools of 27; shahada 9n2; stages of 308, 318–325; as sur renderillumination 117, 304 Jainism, Jaina, Jain: in cave art/sculpture 1, 9, 28–29, 144, 163, 410; founding
as a pan-religious faith 25; India as birthplace of 264, 329; influence on Gnostic symbolic systems 49; integrated into Yoga Sutras 149; monks in B atik design (Sahi) 13; mother-goddess 163; p hilosophy 224; symbolic imagery of 148n2; Tantrism and 157–158; o n whole/part principle 224 journey, pilgrimage: art as 177–184, 188; to the cross 52; t o enlightenment (Rinpoche) 383; f ueled by love (Cusa) 434; t o the heart 1–29, 282; in interfaith dialogue 127–140, 249–270; of Le Saux 218; o f liberation (Exodus) 168; of the Magi (Eliot) 395, 410, 421; Mohammed’s mystical night 339–350; Ramakrishna’s 285; as q uest for spiritual awakening/fruition 140–145, 177–184, 194, 356; v ertical (Tantric homunculus) 286–287; as w orship (Akbar) 332 Judaism, Jewish: as converting religion 257; and depth theology 14; H asidism 427; and Hebrew Bible 428; H eschel on 14, 427; a nd Holocaust 425n1; the “imaginary” 424, 428; o n Indian subcontinent 329; a nd the Inquisition 26; Kabbalah/Kabbalism 156n10, 456; kosher ritual 336n11; o n love 372; Passover 23; in P oland 424–431; relation to the divine 117; tw entiethcentury experience 426; S econd Vatican Council and 427; w orld-time vision 258–259; y ogis 9 ( see also Heschel) karma: as entrapment in birth/death cycle 195n9; H indu doctrine of 256, 336; misconstrued as “credit/debit” 294; as pa th of action (marga) 47–48; nishkama (action unattached to its fruits) 105; as yoga of work 51, 170, 195n7 kenosis: contrasted with Buddhist sunyata 372; o f divinity in/through flesh 22n6; as emptying of womb/ cave 413; as inner h umility 55; J esus’s baptism as 139 khora/chora: and “bastard reasoning” 458; as “ chorion tou achoretou” 416n40; debates on 457n11; f ecundity of 457, 459; in Pla to’s Timaeus 457–458; as p ortal of breath 458, 462; as si te of messianic time 458n12;
index of terms /t opics 489 and Vishvakarma stupa 416; as “winnowing sieve” 458; as w omb/ embryo 416 ( see also emptiness) kundalini: Aurobindo on 290; ener gy/ force 55, 161, 286–287; K abir’s songs and 333n5; R amakrishna on 286; serpent as sym bol of 55, 287; in Tantric practice and literature 236, 286–287; y oga 48, 55 ( see also chakras, yoga) language: Abhinavagupta and 227–228; academic/conceptual 154n8, 164–165; of art 167–168; b oundaries and limitations of 11, 164, 205, 249, 255–256; celebratory 254; c hiasmic (Merleau-Ponty) 156; d ualistic 155; faith- 255–256, 269; flowering 270; games 255–256; in stress (Hopkins) 64; inter-faith 254, 263, 270; K abir’s barrier-breaking 333; ki tchen vs. religious 255–256; a nd music in Indian cinema 125; a nd pedagogy 126; and pictures 260–261; p oetic/ evocative 63, 221–223, 259; p olitical 124; of praise in h ymns 224, 239, 241; and prejudice 263; p ossessive/ proprietary 259; Qur ’anic 349; o f “reĀnement” in y oga 285; r eflective 153–154n8; sectarian vs. sug gestive 259; symbolic/mythic 77, 178; of transcendence/verticality 270; Wittgenstein on 255–256 liberation: as beginning of realization (Aurobindo) 291; as H indu moksha 41, 331n4; h uman/historical 23; inconceivable 369; jo yful 372; as nirvana 291, 295, 298, 410n28; pathways to (margas) 39, 40; a nd perfection 245, 290; s ocial 468; from suffering 371, 414n36 ( see also liberation theology) liberation theology: in the Andean world 467–468; G utiérrez as f ounder of 467n26; a nd Exodus theme 169; Rambachan as H indu proponent of 37; socio-political context of 37, 199, 468 (see also Gutiérrez, Rambachan, theology) lingam, linga: multiple signiĀcance of 91; m utations through the ages (Āre-stone) 216; as r ising from female yoni 17; as s exual symbol 94–95; o f Shiva 19, 28, 145, 161, 215; as st age of
evolution in Sa nkhya 95; w ord origin in Sankhya 95 listening: as attentiveness 92, 133, 449; to authentic testimony (apta vachana) 98; Biruni’s wide-ranging 310; t o breath in pranayama 274; as Ārst stage in Indian hermeneutics 102, 133; in Heart Sutra 376, 378–379; L ao Tzu on 84; to others 84, 92; as pa rticipation 241; to posse 463; t o Spirit/the Word 92, 133, 449 liturgy: drama as 185; E aster 22, 185–188; external/internal 217; o n food of eternal life 202, 438; a nd inculturated art 188; in ter-religious 5, 8, 22, 264; M aundy-Thursday 187; o f music/silence 18; f rom Old Testament 428; of Trinity 217 Van Gogh’s paintings as 10n2 ( see also eucharist) love: as compassion 8; C usa on 438; as devotion (bhakti) 76; as dialogue 252; of/for the divine 76, 439; a nd eros 289; o f fellow beings 382; in perception 380–391; as p erfection of human nature 406; unco nditional 383, 389; wisdom and 382 ( see also desire) marga: as path of action (karma) 39, 40, 105; path of devotion (bhakti) 27, 36, 39, 75, 76, 229, 333; pa th of inquiry (jnana) 39, 40, 195; karma-bhaktijnana not mutually exclusive 40; a nd liberation 39; as y oga 195n7 maya, illusion: deĀned 91; duality as 278; as “ mansion of fun” (Ramakrishna) 288; suffering as 77; sustained by Divine Reality 291; in Vedanta 288 Marxism, Marxist: Al Farabi and 313; dream of classless societies in 249–250; Wahhabi and SalaĀ variants of 315 meditation: art as 44; in co ntemplation of mandalas/works 43, 404, 455; effect of desires on 280; F rancis on Hindu-Christian 14–15, 15n4; guided 381n1; Husserl’s epoche as 151; in Katha Upanishad 275; in ter-religious 259, 266; as nirodaha in P atanjali’s yoga 151, 151n5; p urifying perception via 385–387; a nd self-discipline in Vajrayana Buddhism 410n28; as self-emptying 207; sp iritual heart as center of 193–195; t heistic 193;
490
index of terms /t opics
Tibetan Buddhist 381–387; as wa y of awakening (vs. a rgument) 13, 375, 381, 384, 392 metaphysics: A bhinavagupta’s aesthetic 226–229; of manifestation 223; o f Qur’an/hadith 317 Mother: archetype 404; as a rchitecture 408; of buddhas 376, 378, 379; continuity with Child 406; as D alit Madonna 69–73; as D evi 235–241, 244, 245, 246; E arth 58, 74, 463; L ord Shiva as 139; as Heart Sutra birthing reader-bodhisattvas 379; K ali as da rk 77, 124; K ardiotissa 5; M ary 26n9, 43, 44, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246; mater of God 404; as Pachamama 462; r oot of rahma 324; vir gin as 405 music: Abhinavagupta and 219, 229; as archetype of creation (Qur’an) 320; in HaĀz’s poetry/painting 320, 322, 325–326; of harp/flute 461; H asidic 431; in I ndian cinema 125; as poiesis 460; and realm to come 461–462; a nd receptivity to ultimacy 229; tra versing spirit/matter 461; as wa y to divinity 88; in Z egarra’s Annunciation 459–463 (see also song) mystery (mysterium): o f Buddha nature in b eings 384, 390; o f Christ in biblical/non-biblical scripture 22n6; of dialogue a nd communion 249, 265; o f God 197; “ guru” as bearing a 68; her meneutic 459; Hindu contemplation of divine 13, 129, 130; o f incarnation 21, 248, 447; of the Mass 171; nega tive theology and divine 370; P aschal/Passover 22n6, 23, 136; o f human redemption 427; of surrender and illumination (taslim or islam) 304; o f threshold in Islamic tradition 339, 341, 342, 347; of transcendent immanence 29; tremendum et fascinas 8–9, 266–268, 270; the wound as 68 mysticism: A bhinavagupta’s aesthetic 219–230; denigrated 289; Dio nysus the Areopagite’s 444; o f everyday epiphany 10n2; a nd imagination 5; Indian 219; I slamic 349; J ewish 427; Meister Eckhart’s 457n10; Muhammad’s theophany and Christian 348–349; nega tion of images in apophatic Christian 44; s ecrets of Tantric 232; S uĀ 350
myth, mythology: in cinema 124, 126; of creation in Rig Veda 68n13; o f Devi in Saundarya Lahari 239–240; of divine Hindu triad (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva) 215–216; o f elephant god Ganesha 116; as exp lanation of a dream world 281; o f Inkarrí (Andean) 464–466; Jung on link b etween unconscious mind a nd collective 178; Ramayana epic as hist ory and 331n3; of rasa as under ground river 400; o f Savitri (Hindu) 53, 73–74; tripadam in Indian 53 narrative, story: anecdotal 249–270; autobiographical 126–139, 305, 442n5, 465; Andean 464–467; b iblical 47; biographical (on Grant) 197–201, (on Le Saux) 203–218, (o n Lord Krishna) 332, (o n Mohammad) 351, (on Nash) 381–382, (on Heschel) 425; Buddhist jataka 29; cinematic 124, 125, 381–382; confessional 167–188; F rench (Tournier) 5; g ospel 135, 451n8; hadi th 342; historical 25, 329–338; jo urney 1–30, 126–139, 141–145, 167–188; murals 29; m ystical 342–351; m ythic 73–74, 73n15, 464–465; p ictorial 349; testimonial 124, 466–467; transcultural 464, 464n21; o f wisdom traditions 5 nationalism: cultural 40, 330; H indutva 10; in I slamist political ideologies 303; religious 11; vs. inc lusive secularism 40 (s ee also communalism/ fundamentalism) obedience: forced 362; as “ gladly following” 363; a nd imagination 353, 358, 361; a nd love 362–363; o f/to the Prophet 360, 361 option for the poor: in Basava 38, 40; in Gandhi 39; as g oal 269; in G ospels 199, 468; in G utiérrez 467–468; in Rambachan 37 ( see also liberation theology, Dalit) orthodoxy, orthodox: as formal system of interpretation 152; G reek 5; Guru Nanak’s denunciation of Islamic/Hindu 336; in ma instream Indian thought 156; vs. o pen-source Hinduism 97; as o rganized religion 98; Russian 416n40; as t heological dogma or doctrine 8; y oga/
index of terms /t opics 491 phenomenology as dist ancing from 150 orthopraxis: contrasted with orthodoxy 8 (see also action) other (the): 5; concern for 111; co ntext of 109; as co nstitutive of self 110; entering the universe of 111; L ao Tzu on listening to 84; L evinas on 106; lifeworld of 108; r eligious 107–120 painting: Chinese 82; as cosmic uni ty in manifoldness (jagaccitra) 223; D eccani 25n9; emptiness and 376; as imi tation 223, 398; a nd liturgy 10n2, 173–188; as metaphor in A bhivanagupta’s metaphysics 223; a nd/of music 459–463; and/of poetry 28, 74, 303, 318–325; and psychotherapy 177–184; Renaissance 448–455; w hole in e very detail of 225 ( see also art – Ande an, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Jewish) pedagogy: Akbar’s culturally interactive 334; Cusa’s layman’s 434–439; F arabi’s practical-political 314; Ghazali ’s multi-leveled spiritual 306–309; inclusive imagination and moral 126; subtle-body concepts as t ools for phenomenological 161; Tantric 158n14 Pentecost, Pentecostal: dove 6; Āre 6, 174; Dalit harvest dance 4 perception: Abhinavagupta on aesthetic sublimation of 228; chakras as o rgans of 290; as co nditioned projection 281; of divine signs/logos 303–304; and emptiness 373; as ill usion 288; impure/pure 281, 383n2, 350, 381–392; and incarnation 154; a nd mundus imaginalis (Corbin) 356; phenomenology of 164, 221; o f religion as p erspectival (Ghazali) 307; representation and 399, 402; theophany and 348–350; tr i-partite structure of image- 357 perichoresis: of material/spiritual form 396; in H oly Trinity 406n24 phenomenology: B iruni’s sociohistorical/religious 309–313; exist ential 147, 164; a nd hermeneutics of religious experience 150; Husserl’s earlier vs. la ter 152–154, 156; Husserlian epoche and yogic nirodaha 151–153; of imaginary experience
161–162; incarnational (MerleauPonty) 147, 153–156, 159; a nd limits of language 153–154n8, 155, 164; of perception 164, 221; o f prophetic inspiration (Heschel) 428; r eality in 158; r esolution of dualisms in 155–156; sexuality in 164; as s omatic spirituality 150; Tantrism and 147, 158; theological turn in 456, 469; transcendental idealism and 152; y oga and 147, 148, 150–165 Pneumatology: vis à vis Chr istology 137–138; and universal communion 138 poetics, poetry: of Abhinavagupta 219, 225, 227–228; o f annunciation 448, 455–456; Aristotle on 399, 402n14; Bachelard on 396, 411, 420, 459; bhakti tradition in H indu 76; B harata on 221; b iblical love 76; o f Coleridge 45; cultural blending in I slamic 27, 303; dalit 41; o f emptiness in T ibetan 376; of HaĀz (ghazals) 303, 308, 319–323, 325; o f Hopkins 64, 65, 201; of Ibn ‘Arabi 317; K abir’s Hindu-SuĀ 4, 5, 27, 75, 333; I ndian/Hindi 26n9, 65, 76, 332, 335, 400n8, 402; M irabai’s mystical 27; M ohammad Jaisi’s Padmavath 332; Plato’s critique of 398; of posse 448, 466, 467; o f reverie 458, 459; o f Rilke 321n21, 448, 457, 458; of Rumi 350; S hankarakurup’s Viswadarshan 266–267; S haivite mystical 17; S uĀ 335, 339; of Tagore 65; Tamil 140, 337 politics, political: call of interfaith encounters beyond 103; co nnotations of “Hinduism” 89; dimen sion of the Gospel-promise 467–468; dogma tism and 101; imagina tion 124; a nd Hindu liberation theology 37; a nd horizontal spirituality 42; in terreligious prejudice not reducible to 123; la nguage 124; a nd religious fundamentalism 123; r eligion as 93; and religion in I ndia 11, 36, 101; transformation contingent on change of heart 104; as v ocation of public leaders 37, 104, 123, 392, 468 prakriti/prakrti: as feminine activity/ principle 159; as flesh/matter 15; as symbol of nature/life 293; in T antric creative cosmology/art 162; as Vedantic eating bird 291
492
index of terms /t opics
pranayama: yoga of breathing 15, 93, 98, 161, 273–284, 458 ( see also yoga) prayer: art as 44; o f Assisi 8, 252, 266; Christian contemplative 15; effort and grace in 304; H eschel on 428; Hindu Gayatri Mantra as 54, 54n10, 55, 73, 129; B uddhist Heart Sutra as 367; inter-religious 259; sur render in Muslim 117; f or true perception/ understanding (Muhammad) 303–304; Upanishadic asatoma 15n4, 270 puriĀcation: as aid to understanding 456–457, 459; b reathing and 274; as burning/cleansing/emptying 126, 154n8, 220, 294, 403, 413, 439, 467; in Campin’s “Annunciation” 453; as exorcism/incineration of the daemonic 295; a nd emotional health 195; and ethical life (Cusa) 439; a nd enlightenment as t erminus 294; a nd humility 267; in sufficient on Islamic path 359; Saundarya Lahari as Tantric 237, 241; via silence 213; in Stabat Mater 246 purusha/purusa: as Buddha/ masculinity in Tantric art 162; as erotic/adventurous in Aurobindo 292; and human liberation 23–24, 154n8; as S elf seated in t he heart (Upanishads) 276; as V edantic bird/ witness (Upanishads) 291, 293; as “seedlessness” (Yoga Sutras) 154n8; as Word/Spirit 15 rasa: Abhinavagupta on 219–229, 400, 400n8; as aest hetic experience 220, 222; in B harata’s Natya Shastra 399; and divine bliss 402; as li ving principle 400; kno wn by art/ not nature 401–402; me anings of 400; kinds o f 227; pa radoxical communion/detachment in 401; relation with bhava 400–401; s eer’s birth by tasting 401; as S hakti’s freedom 227; S hiva-principle of 222; and spiritual sensibility 229; as uni ty in multiplicity 401; vis à vis Pla tonic representation 399, 402; in V edas/ Upanishads 400 reading: in animus/anima (Bachelard) 459; being’s Book (HaĀz) 320; and breathing 274; cr oss-scriptural 22; devout/friendly (Cusa) 442; o f inter-
religious imagery 4, 6–7, 463; as praxis 457; as religious experience (Dilthey) 114; transcultural 466; Virgin Mary as 455, 457 ( see also hermeneutics) reĀnement: of appearances in Lalit aesthetics 71; o f Buddhist wisdom for healing (vs. j udgment) 371; o f prana and internal senses 161n16, 282, 283, 285; Ramakrishna’s parody of 285; of soul’s discernment 459 (s ee also puriĀcation) relativism: dangers of religious 259; vs. inter-religious “relationism” 22n6 religion: A brahamic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) 36, 90, 258; Ak bar and 334, 334n7; as da ily ritual and discipline 96; di viding/uniting 250; ecological/global challenges of 99–100; and ecumenism 148; f rozen/flowing 106, 330; Ga ndhi and 123; Ghazali o n 305–309; and healing 1, 92; as “he art of a he artless world” 104; H induism not a 89; ho rizontal/vertical planes of 105–106; as indi vidual experience 93; institutional/collective dimensions of 90, 93, 94, 96–99, 101–104; K abir and 333n5; as “ opium for the masses” 467; and politics 93, 123, 467–468; post-enlightenment return of 92; pyramidal model of 307; as s ource of music/dance 96; tra nsversality of 6–7; wounding/violent 92; as y oga 97–98, 148ff (see also spirituality) renunciation, renunciant (sannyasa, sannyasi): 18, 211n5, 216; o f nature 279 resonance (dhvani, sahrdaya): a nd Atma v idya 65; o f body-harp-spirit 462; as dhvani 64–65, 78, 172, 231; as empathy with nature/others 65, 107, 116; as ha rmony of heart (sahrdaya) 88; as im plied meaning/suggestion 231; incarnational 406; o f knowing and loving 387; la tent 119; p rojected via exotopy 120; rasa as b ackbone of 400, 400n8; o f revelations across wisdom traditions 2, 6, 21, 22, 116, 342n4; semantic/symbolic enrichment via 6 representation: a bstract methodologies of 164; Ar istotle on 399; awakening/ affective function of 402; as dialec tical concealing/revealing 396, 403, 413,
index of terms /t opics 493 418; dramatic/poetic 401; em pathic (Stein) 115; etymo logy of 397, 402; as illusory/idolatrous 403; o f interiority 395, 405; m ythical 118; in Pla to 398, 399, 402; o f Qur’anic worldview 319; and rasa (Bharata, Abhinavagupta) 399–400, 401, 402; religiosity of 395, 397, 403; vs. sym bol 404n19; o f ultimate reality 119 sacrament, sacramental: Church as (in Lumen Gentium) 135; cosmos (Aquinas/Sankara) 21; as e veryday world 19–20; I ncarnation as 217; nature (in pa nentheism) 10n2; negation of (in B uddhism) 370; as outward manifestation of inner grace 404; religions as 127–128; r ituals 23, 104; theology 127 ( see also Eucharist) Saivism/Shaivism: A bhinavagupta and Kashmir 219, 223, 225; o n freedom/ will 226–227; C atholic 9, 12; no ndualism in K ashmir 219, 223, 226, 228, 232, 233 samadhi: as awakening to Self 58, 63, 64, 205; b eyond canonical interpretation 98; as c yclical dissolution 298, 299; a nd Husserl’s “seedlessness” 154n8; 285, 289; as immersion in t he inĀnite (nirvikalpa) 285, 289; M aharshi’s 205; as mystical absorption 98, 284, 376; Ramakrishna’s daemonic reversal of 284–289; Socrates’s 284n1; as summi t of virtuous life 376; in t ension with prajna 378; as tra nscendent release vs. restoration of senses 151–152n6; wisdom embedded in p rior 376 samsara: as birth/rebirth cycle 257; as dance/drama (natya) 221; as o cean of sorrow 83, 237; as sw eetness lost t o nirvana 295 ( see also suffering) Sankhya/Samkhya: a ncient Indian religious system 149, 220, 224; as atheistic spirituality 90; dis cernment in 87; in tegrated into Yoga Sutras 149; Patanjali’s dualism 294; as s ource of word lingam 95; and Western philosophy 86; o n whole/part participle 224; vis-à-vis Yoga 86–88, 90, 95 secularism, secularity, secular: on communalism 124; eq ual treatment of all r eligions in 263; ex emplars
of ethical/spiritual 41; facili tating interfaith dialogue 263; a nd opensource Hinduism 41; in sp irituality 41, 148–150; as w orldly plane 448, 459, 467 (see horizontality) service: (s ee action) serpent: archetype of life force 48, 55; in bhujanga asana 55, 57; as caduceus symbol 48; a nd child 48n4, 74; compared to Son of Man 55; c ursed (Genesis) 66; as f eminine fertility symbol 159; as gua rdian of Jungian shadow 181n1; a nd inner w orld of feeling (D.H. Lawrence) 143; lifted up (Exodus and John’s Gospel) 48, 55; and kundalini yoga 48, 55; as Naga in H indu-Buddhist art 159, 415; as S hiva’s animal vehicle 161; skin (as sub tle body sheath) 159; spinal (McEvilley) 156n10 ( see also verticality/horizontality) shadow: copy/reflection as 280; d uality as 280; imagina tion’s cosmic p lay as (Ibn ‘Arabi) 318; J ung on the 181, 181n1 (see also darkness) Sikhism, Sikh: 9; as b lend of Islam/ Hinduism 25, 37–38, 329, 335, 336; egalitarian/unorthodox 336; Ga ndhi as 24, 36; G uru Nanak as f ounder of 335; India as b irthplace of 264, 329; Kabir and 333n5; in no rthwest India and Pakistan 329; shr ines in Amr itsar 336; spirit of humility in 336n9 Shakti: as body energy (Aurobindo) 290; as chit- (consciousness force) 292; cosmic f orce 162; as da ncing on divine immutability (Aurobindo’s dualism) 293; f emale face o f divinity 17; joy (ananda) of 291; Sa vitri as 74; in Tantric vision (Padoux) 236 Shiva/Siva: 225, birth of 15; cosmic dance of 403n15; -L ingam 19, 28; male face o f the divine 17; -P arvati marriage 28 (s ee also lingam) song, hymn, chant: by Abhinavagupta 225; Canticle to Brother Sun 75; as Hindu bhajan 252; in ter-religious 39; Lumen Christi and Gloria 18; M ary’s Magnificat 459, 468; Saundarya Lahari 235–241; to Shiva as Sacr ed Mother in Tamil 2–3, 4, 139–140; a nd silence in adoration 188; Stabat Mater 241–245; of thanksgiving 459; Vedic 207;
494
index of terms /t opics
Yiddish 431; o f zumbayllu 465 ( see also music) sound: as aboriginal sign o f spirit 7; as aesthetic resonance (dhvani) 64–65, 219; as b eatiĀc energy 229; as cosmic element 222; di vinity latent in 88; in Kabir’s kundalini practice 333n5; philosophical implications of 78, 172, 189; in pranayama 274; o nomatopoeic -yllu 461, 465; as rasa 400; a nd sensory excitement 228; o f Shiva’s drum/conch 204; tra nslatability of 7; Vedic archetypal 207; o f Word/Om 14, 85 (see also acoustics, music) space (akasa): acoustic 84, 459, 463; of advaita 19; a rchitectural 88, 411; as Brahman 29, 222; as co ntext 30, 120; as darshan 7; as dist ance 346, 347; as guha 2, 14, 15, 17, 18, 74, 74n19; healing 73; o f the heart 14, 19, 45, 418; o f iconic mediation 404; of interfaith convergence 12; o f khora 457–458; ineffable/inĀnite 18, 29, 409; as inner immen sity 411; as mandala 48; as o pening to the other 69, 76, 89, 103, 144–145, 458; p rivate/sacred 69, 345, 418, 452, 460; p ublic/liturgical 171, 177, 178, 185, 187, 188; r uptured 452; theatrical 221–222; vast/min ute 195, 278; as “ Way” (Lao Tzu) 69; as womb of creation 43, 69, 76, 222 ( see also emptiness) sphere: God as 346, 448, 448n3 ( see also circle); heavenly 321, 343; o f Islamic thought 309; mo ther as 69; northern/southern hemi- 448–449, 459; of religious practice 306, 311; Vishvakarma as hemi- 418 spirituality: and art 172; ashra mic 75; atheistic 90, 92; B iruni’s phenomenology of 311; Chr istian monastic 49; cosmic/met acosmic dimensions of 73; eco logical 76, 143; of emptiness 376; er os and 287n4; feminine 177; a nd healing 92, 104; Ib n ‘Arabi and Catholic 316; inclusive 3; I ndian non-dualistic/ pluralistic 19, 129, 149, 203; a nd inner transformation 49; in teriority in Eastern 142; K abir and 75, 333n5; Krishnamurti’s 90; a nd liturgy 177; New Age 169; p rivate 105; s ecular 41, 148–150; s exuality in Tantric 162;
Shaivite 127; s omatic 153; Vedantin 9, 281; vertical/horizontal 105; y oga as form of 92 spiritual laboratory: body as 157; Hinduism as 89, 144; imagina tion as 104; India/Indian subcontinent as 2, 9, 81, 148, 185, 329–337 suffering: and art 77, 178, 181; as Buddhist dukkha 65, 154n8; in Christian art 65; in ter-religious imagination and 103; o f Jesus 68, 243; as maya in I ndian culture 77; o f nature/creation 50, 65; a nd salvation in Stabat Mater 242, 245; as samsara 83, 237; s ocio-cultural oppression and 36, 65, 467–468; t he wound and 66; Yoga Sutras on 95 SuĀsm, SuĀ: on angels and humans 351; and dual-belonging 9; influence of Tantric yoga on 156n10; K abir and 71, 333n5 sun: as archetype of divine Light 54–55, 307, 334, 464; A ssisi’s Canticle to 4, 75; classic Hindu salutations to 4, 52–53; in Gayatri Mantra 54–55, 73; Inkarrí as s on 464–465; o f Justice 58, 62; Savitri as da ughter of 4, 73–74; virgins of 461, 463; as V ivasvat (Bhagavad Gita) 54; w orship 52, 54, 334; and yogic awakening 73 surrender: in Cusa 439; in I slam 117, 304; of lover to beloved 439; a nd ethical life 439; o f self 78 Tantra, Tantrism, Tantric: art/imagery 77, 149, 159–163, 236; b ody/subtle body in 157, 158, 159, 161; B uddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Taoism and 158; cosmic sexuality in 158–159, 162, 236; deĀnitions 157, 236; ex egesis 220; as experiential ontology 164; t he feminine in 157–159, 162, 290; as f olk yoga 147–165; “intensity” in 228; as lo om/ weave 155n9; medi tation 158, 158n14; and Mediterranean spiritualities 156n10; mysticism 232; Natya Shastra and 229; a nd phenomenology 147–164; reality in 158; r itual emphasis of 236; and Saiva Agamas 219; Saundarya Lahari as 235–237, 241; shr ine 159–161; traditions 228, 237; a nd Trika 228; worship 162n21, 236; Yoga Sutras and 149
index of terms /t opics 495 theology: Adam and Eve in Chr istian/ Islamic 335; Chr istian 101, 198, 368; Buddhist wisdom vis-à-vis Christian 368, 370–371; C usa on Islamic 441–442; Dalit 65, 76, 169; d epth (Heschel) 14–15, 428–429; o f “fulĀllment” 3, 18; Ghazali a nd Islamic kalam 305n4, 307; G rant’s alternative 20, 199–202; o f liberation 37, 168, 199, 467–468; and missionary ecclesiology in India 137; negative 370–371; o f panentheism 10n2; r enewal of Christian 368, 371, 429; r ooted in c ulture/history 368; Sacramental (trans-religious) 127, 137; o f Savior’s healing 77; S hiva’s mythology and 239; Tantrism vis-à-vis patriarchal 162n21 ( see also liberation theology) time, temporality: Benjamin on messianic 458n12; as cr eative instant 102, 317, 319n17; def errals in 455–456; eternity born in 447; h uman freedom in 455; K ali as 77; line ar (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) vs. sp iral (Hindu) 259; ob jective Newtonian 153n8; as u psurge of “now”/zero point (Husserl) 153n8; in Yoga Sutras 95 transcendence: and divine immanence 15, 19, 20, 297, 444; imagina tion and 361; of inter-religious animosities 441; as syst olic wave 297 ( see also immanence) transculturation: vs. acculturation in t he Americas 463; in Ande an-Christian art 30; as cr itical/creative practice 464; of idea of messianic return 466; literary exemplars of 464, 464n21; Malinowski on 464; Or tiz on 464; Rama on 464; in retablo art (Jiménez) 463 (see also inculturation) transĀguration: of Buddha 418; o f Christ Jesus 44, 55; o f Inkarrí 466; o f Mary in D avid’s “Annunciation” 453; of lote tree/spectator 348; o f reader/ text 459 transformation, change: of attitude 459; Chuang-Tzu on 297; o f collective atmosphere 465; C usa’s pedagogy of 434; f rom darkness into light 73; drama and 188; in ter-spiritual 12; divinely-initiated (lote tree/ Mohammed) 344, 345, 348; Ib n ‘Arabi’s writing and 317; J ewish and
Christian 423ff; lack of meaningful 142; of mind/perception in y oga 86; personal 100, 179, 241; o f relations to self, society, nature 41; s ociopolitical 105; spiritual/global 104 ( see also verticality, horizontality) translation: of Arabic terms relating to imagination 355, 357–358; C atholic crisis and lack of memorable scriptural 367n1; cr oss-reading and 6; as cultural-blending 335; in Em peror Akbar’s court 334–335; o f Hindu texts into Persian 25, 26n9, 332, 335; Ib n ‘Arabi and 316, 317; f rom poetry to painting 318–325; o f Ramakrishna’s Kathamrta 285–287; o f Sanskrit sacred epics into Bangla 337; S uĀ-rule of 357 tree: as axis mundi 6; b odhi 58, 418; body as 47, 55; B rahman as 29; chaitya as s acred 411; o f the cross 47; healing 461n15; J esus as vine 47; o f Knowledge/of Life 47; L ote (sidrat) 6, 339–351; of Paradise 6, 47; shajarah (blessed/cursed) 348; suffering 50; thorn bush (Exodus) 6; tra versing ukupacha and kaypacha 461n15; universal (Ibn ‘Arabi) 346; in Vriksha asana 58, 59 Trinity: H indu trimurti and Christian 4, 7, 12; no t in I slamic faith-language 256, 264; perichoresis of Christian 406n24; and tripadam symbolism 53; understanding the liturgy (Abhishiktananda) 217; Virgin Mary as dwelling of 406n24 ultimacy, ultimate aim: Aurobindo on 293; in B uddhism 383, 390n5; in Charvaka, Sankhya, Vedic philosophies 87; o f creation/history |in Christianity 259, 405; Cusa’s interfaith approach to 439; o f dialogue 252; o f enlightenment 289–293; in H aĀz 320–321n19; as human responsibility/choice (Farabi) 315; of Islamic spirituality (Ibn ‘Arabi) 317, 318; as moksha in H indu yoga 41, 154n8; P rophet Mohammed as 359; of all q uesting in A quinas 9; questioned 283, 287, 289, 292, 293, 299 understanding: beauty and 46; conditions of 120, 304, 437, 456–457,
496
index of terms /t opics
459; creative 120; cr itical 309, 311, 312n9; cross-cultural 120, 156n10, 313, 331, 439; o f divine Eros 400n10; of divine gender 240; o f ecstatic worship 115; ec umenical/irenic 316; empathic 65, 108–121; exist ential 154; exotopy and 120; exp eriential/ theoretical 112, 216, 397; fa ilures of 1, 93, 162, 164, 263; f oretaste and 15, 437; heart- 376; her meneutic 120, 133n2; imagination and 119–121, 398; intellectual 116; in ter-religious x, 107–120, 263, 311, 429; in tuitive 115; as jnana 39; obst acles to 257–260, 429; of others 110–113, 118, 120; participatory 117, 118; as p rologue to action 314; o f self 5, 45, 120, 260, 261; of sorrow 83, 86, 114; y oga as way of 46 Vedanta: Advaita 20, 443; a nd Christian incarnation 20; o n forgetting Atman 196; inter-religious message of 24; Krishnamurti and 86; as lif eaffirming 37; a nd mayic illusion 288; Ramakrishna movement 9, 24; no ndualism vs. Trika 223; S elf as wi tness in 293; Sa nkara and 200; Upanishads on 274; y oga psychology in 194 verticality, vertical: addressed to the “Other” 270; as as cent/descent 290, 321, 345–347; vs. horizontality 42; integral with horizontality 105, 106, 459; and kundalini sublimation 48, 285, 286–287; R amakrishna’s abstention from 286n3, 287; supplanted by daemonic diffusion 290; of transcendence 270, 321–322, 459; of Vishvakarma pillars/stupa 414, 418 (see also cross, horizontality) virgin: as archetype of intercession 244–245, 404–406, 408, 463; as architecture of love 405, 408, 409; bearer of sorrow 243, 245, 409; birth 245, 461; o f chora 416n40, 462; in I saiah’s prophecy 451, 462; as Kardiotissa 404–407; M ary as not-God 245; mo ther yet ever- 243, 405; as m usician 459–463; o f Passion 395, 405, 406; as r eader/scholar 449, 453, 457; in renaissance art 449–455, 459–463; as sp inner 449n5, 463; o f Stabat Mater 243–245; o f the Sun 461,
463; as t extile-loom 407; as T rinity’s dwelling 406n24; w omb of 405–407, 462; worship of 463 ( see also Mother) wisdom (prajna, sapientia): as Buddhist prajna 376; C usa on lay sapientia 435–439; as dis cernment in m ystical union 376, 459; em ptiness as in sight of 379; as f ood of immortal life 438; as heart-understanding 376; a nd human senses (sapere) 29; a nd love (HaĀz) 325; Manjusri as b odhisattva of 379, 418; mo ther of Buddhas as perfection of 367, 378, 379, 383; in Prajnaparamita scriptures 383n2; in tension with samadhi 378; as summi t of virtuous life 376; tra nscendental 383n2; as tra nsmuted wine 321 Word (of God): in contact with emptiness 457; dialec tic as Kerygma and 403n17; enr iched by understanding 133n2; F rancis on 14, 15; in Gayatri Mantra 54; H indu Om 85, 91; I ndian classical hermeneutics of 133, 133n2; o f John’s Gospel and Om 13–14; K abir on Brahma as 29; as all-inclusive/unfolding Logos 304, 457; made flesh 43; as Seed 174; s eeds of 261; as unr eachable mysterium in Taittiriya Upanishad 267; as Vac 133, 232, 236; as Verbum ineffabilis 457; and World 457 yoga: aims of 86, 154n8, 294; a nd art 43, 44, 75, 148–149; asanas 55–64, 148, 161; o f ascent/descent 19, 74; ashtanga 133; a ttention in 99; Aurobindo’s integral 4, 52, 52n9, 74; awakening jivatma 58, 73; bhakti 195; of breathing (pranayama) 15, 58, 93, 98, 161, 273–284; Chr istian 43, 79; deĀned 46, 51, 52n9, 55, 73, 78, 86, 151, 294; d uality/unity in 46, 78; Eliade on 49, 148; etymo logy of 51; t he feminine in 71–73; f olk vs. transcendental 152–153; G od in 87; hatha 158, 273, 281; a nd healing/health 74, 92, 150; o f the heart 43, 45, 46, 76; o f imagination 45, 55; in ter-religious/cultural 90, 149–150; o f Jesus 51–52, 76; Jung and 52n9; karma 51, 195; kundalini 48; jnana 195; medi tative practices 48–49, 89; P atanjali on
index of terms /t opics 497 149, 151, 294; p henomenology and 151–152; psychology and 86, 149; and reĀnement of internal senses in 161n16; and religion 92–93; as r eturn to nature via r enunciation 279; as sacriĀce 58; as spiritual discipline (sadhana) 43, 58, 149; Sa iva 220n2; and Sankhya 86–88, 90, 95; s chools/ teachers of 85–86; Surya Namashkar
52–55; Tantric 147–165; a nd transformation of nature 55, 58, 64, 65, 73 ( see also Yoga Sutras) Zen: Bodhidharma as pa triarch of 295; the “enlightened ordinary” in 297; Suzuki’s practice of 375; u tterances 370 Zoroastrianism, Zoroastrian (Parsi): 25, 329, 334
INDEX OF NAMES/TITLES 1 Corinthians: 23, 449 2 Corinthians: (3:6) 370 1 John: (4:16) 252 1 Kings: (18:20–40) 134 2 Kings: (5:1–19) 134, (5:15) 134 2 Peter: (1:19) 43 Abhinavagupta: 219–230, 400; Abhinavabharati by 219, 228; Dhvanyaloka Locana by 219, 230; Paratrisika Vivarana by 220; Tantraloka by 220, 227–230 Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux): 12, 17–22, 24, 52, 100, 169, 203–218; Āe Secret of Arunachala by 20n5, 31, 205, 207–211, 213–216, 218; Ascent to the Depth of the Heart 210, 212–213, 216–218 Acts of the Apostles: (10) 138; (4:12) 258; (17:24–28) 444 Akbar, Emperor: 25–27, 26n9, 331–332, 334–335, 334n6–7 Amaladass, Anand, S.J.: 64, 172; Philosophical Implications of Dhvani 78, 172, 189 Amaladoss, Michael, S.J.: “Double Religious Belonging and Liminality by” 136, 140 Anandavardhana (Ananda Vardhana): 64, Dhvanyaloka by 219 Angelos of Crete: Kardiotissa and Child by 404, 406, 407, 409 Aquinas, Saint Thomas: 9, 21, 27, 198, 200 Arguedas, Jose Maria: 461n16, 464–468; Deep Rivers by 461n16, 465; on Inkarrí 464-466; “ Puquio” by 465; El Zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo 465n23, 466–467 Aristotle: 398, 398n3, 399, 402; Poetics by 402 Armstrong, Karen: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet by 340, 351 Augustine, Saint: 436, 447, 448n3; Confessions by 372 Aurobindo (Ghose), Sri: 73–74, 289–294; On Himself by 290; Āe Synthesis of Yoga by 79; Savitri: A Legend and a S ymbol by 79; On Yoga II by 290 Averroes (Ibn Rushd): 27 Avicenna: 27, 313
Bachelard, Gaston: 396, 411, 459; Poetics of Reverie by 459, 469; Poetics of Space by 396n1 Bakhtin, Mikhail: 120, 120n2, 120n3; Āe Dialogical Principle by (ed. Todorov) 121 Baltoyianni, Chrysanthe: 420 Basava: 38, 40 Bateson, Gregory: Mind and Nature by 64, 78 Benjamin, Walter: 458n12; 469 Bhagavad Gita: on karma yoga 51; (4:1–3) 54; 58, 267, 275; tra nslation into Persian 335 Bharata Muni: Natya Shastra by 221, 399n7; 400–401 Biruni (Abu Rayhan al-Biruni): 308–313 Bodhidharma: 294–295, 297 Borges, Jorge Luis: on the cruciĀed face 296, 296n16 Brahmachari Amaldas: Surya Namashkar 51n7, 52, 55; Yoga and Contemplation by 78 Bruno, Giordano: and the Christian Inquisition 26 Buber, Martin: 292n8, 298 Buddha: on “brahmin” 84; Dhammapada by 84; S hakyamuni 388 Campin, Robert: Mérode Altarpiece on the “Annunciation” by 453–455 Cassirer, Ernst: on Nicholas of Cusa as “Ārst modern thinker” 434 Chuang-Tzu: 295, 297; ChuangTzu: Bas ic Writings by 299 Clairvaux, Bernard: 76, 436 Clooney, Francis X.: Divine Mother, Blessed Mother by 235 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: on imagination vs. fa ncy 45; Biographia Literaria by 46, 78 Coomaraswamy, Ananda: 43, 43n2, 69n14; Dance of Shiva by 78 Corbin, Henry: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi by 364; and Heschel 428; o n “imaginal” vs. “imaginary” 45, 45n3; o n imagination and distance 356, 361, 362; o n Islamic cosmology 356; Mundus Imaginalis by 78, 356, 364 Council of Ferrara-Florence (1439): 27, 442n5
index of names /titles 499 Cusa, Nicholas of: 22n6, 434–445, 447; Āe Catholic Concordance by 441n4; On Inter-religious Harmony by 441; Āe Layman on Experiments by 435; Ā e Layman on the Mind/Spirit by 434; Ā e Layman on Wisdom by 434, 435, 436, 438n2; mo diĀed dualism of 444; on devout interpretation 442–443; on posse 447; Sifting the Qur’an 442; Unity and Reform by 438–439; On the Vision of God by 444 Dalai Lama: 12 Dalrymple, William: 25–26n9; “The Most MagniĀcent Muslims” by 31 David, Gerard: diptych on the “Annunciation” by 450–453 Dilthey, Wilhelm: 108, 113, 114 Dionysius the Areopagite: 444 Doyle, Anita: on fecund emptiness 457–458; “Verbum I neffabilis” by 457 Du Boulay, Shirley: Āe Cave of the Heart: A Biography of Swami Abhishiktananda by 203
Ghazali (al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid): 304–309; “The Deliverer from Error” by 305; “ The Scale of Right Action” by 305 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang: 64 Grant, Sara: 9, 17, 20, 21 22, 22n6, 23, 23n7, 24, 197–202, Toward a n Alternative Āeol ogy: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian by 31, 202 Griffiths, Father Bede: 3, 4, 12, 43, 52, 52n8, 100, 128, 129, 140, 169 Gutiérrez, Gustavo: 12, 467, 468; A Ā eology of Liberation by 467n28, 468, 469; Entre las c alandrias by 467n27, 468, 469
HaĀz of Shiraz: ghazal on divine imagination 28, 325–346; as p oetic peer/translator of Ibn ‘Arabi 317–318 Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita Hrydaya): 367–380, 416 Hederman, Mark Patrick: 10n2; Symbolism by 31 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 367, 376 Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time Eckhart, Meister: on divine birth 43, by 121; a nd Cusa 380n2; o n Dasein 447; mysticism of 436, 457n10 154; on empathy 110; exist ential Eliade, Mircea: phenomenological understanding of worldness 154; style of inquiry 150n4; o n spiritual “Letter on Humanism” by 380; o n transformation 49; o n yoga 148, “loving enabling”/”the power of the 148n1; Yoga: I mmortality and possible” 377n11; o n Seinsdenken 376; Freedom by 79, 165 on Stimmung 371 Eliot, T.S.: “Journey of the Magi” by Henry, Michel: 456; “Speech and Religion” by 469 395, 410, 421 Hermetica (ed. Copenhaver): 346, 351, Ephesians: (1:23) 15 448n3, 456, 469 Exodus: (7:18–12) 48; (3:2) 342; (3:15) Heschel, Abraham Joshua: 425–431; 6; (16:4) 438n2; (3:8) 438n2 “The God of Israel and Christian Renewal” 432; Israel: An Echo of Farabi (al-Farabi): 313–315 Eternity by 425, 432; “ No Religion Fish, Stanley: Is Ā ere a Text in this is an Island” by 427, 432; W arsaw Class? by 164, 165 Conference on 428–429 Francis Acharya: 12–15, 24; Hiriyanna, M.: Art Experience by 65, 79 Meditation: H indu-Christian Meeting Hopkins, Gerald Manley: on “inscape” Point by 31 and “instress” 64; a nd Rabindranath Francis of Assisi (Saint): “Canticle to Tagore 65; Poems and Prose by 79, Brother Sun” by 75; Prayer of 8, 252, 266 202; “No worst there is no ne” by 201 Husserl, Edmund: 108, 109, 151, Gadamer, Hans-Georg: 173 152, 153, 153–154n8, 156, 161, Gandhi, Mohandas K.: 11, 12, 24, 36, 376; Cartesian Meditations by 151, 38–39, 100, 104, 105, 123, 392 151–152n6, 165; Ideas I by 162n18, Gandhi, Ramachandra: 39, 124; Sita’s 165; Phenomenology of Internal Time Kitchen by 126 Consciousness by 153n8, 165; o n Genesis: on work (27:40) 51; G od’s “seedlessness” 154n8 curse on the serpent (3:15) 66
500
index of names /titles
Ibn ‘Arabi: 27, 315, 315n12, 316; on imagination 360; “ Meccan Illuminations” by 322; p rose of 318; as “translator” between divine Signs/ Books/Source 317 Isaiah: (9:14) 51, (53:5) 66, (7:14) 453 Jaisi, Malik Mohammad: Padmavath by 332 James: seed of spiritual dimension in the heart (14) 15 Jeremiah: on the wound (30:12) 66 Jesus Christ: as archetype of Self 43, 201; birthplace 15; as B rahman 19, 213; Buddha and 388n4, 393; as c hild 43, 404–410, 454; co nception of 447; conversion of 134; as dalit 68–69, 76; descent into hell 53; despa ir of 114; as di vine incarnation 428; a nd “evangelist mandate” 138–139; as fellow pilgrim 46; as Ānal a im of creation/history 259, 405; a nd Jewish tradition 372; G rant on 197–201; and horizontal spirituality 105; iconoclastic 370; ido latrous reiĀcation of 21–22, 197; inc lusive kingdom of 135; as in ter-religious teacher 3, 134; on love 387; as “ only savior” 258–259; as prophet 340, 342n4; as r edeemer 131n1; revelation of God in 112; as Sacrament 127; as Sa t Guru 129; as Satpurusha 23; as S eed 58; a nd Shiva 19; in Stabat Mater 242–245; as stranger 5, 46; as S un 52–53; Vi a Crucis of 52, 55; as V ine tree 47; as Way 3, 22, 257; as w ounded healer 4, 66–68, 76, 77; a nd yoga 4, 46–47, 51–53, 55–64 Jiménez Quispe, Nicario: “Divina Pastora” by 463, “ Entre las C alandrias” by 468 Job: 5 John, Gospel of: (3:14) 48, 55; (12:24) 58; (16:7) 3, 139; (19:34) 66; (4:23) 135; (19:23) 407; (13–17) 387; (19:27) 408, (19:26) 409 John Paul II, P ope: 6, 131, 140; a nd “Attitude Towards the Church towards Followers of Other Religions” 131; and “Day of Prayer for Peace” at Assisi 137; Redemptor Hominis by 131n1, 140 Jung, Carl Gustav: Aion by 181; o n archetype of Self 43; Integration of the Personality by 52n9, 79; o n mandala
meditation 48–49; o n neurosis 178; on organized religion 101; phenomenological inquiry of 150n4; psychotherapy of 74; o n the shadow 181n1; a nd spiritual transformation 49 Kabir Das: and bhakti 75, 333; biographical sketch 333n5; as critic/satirist 333–334; H induIslamic belonging 27, 38–39, 333; One Hundred Poems 79; spiritual humanism of 75; syncr etism and universal language of 333; o n welcoming the “guest” 4, 5, 75 Kaplan, Edward K.: “Heschel in Poland” by 426; Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness by 432, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America by 432 Kearney, Richard: 1–31, 161, 427n2, 458; Anatheism by 22n6; “ Enabling God” by 447–452, 455, 467; Strangers, Gods, a nd Monsters by 447n1, 457n11, 458; Āe God Who May Be by 447n1, 466; Āe Wake o f I magination by 162n18 King, Martin Luther: 12, 104 Krishna, Lord: 17, 22, 29, 54, 91, 112, 117, 152, 181, 267, 275, 332 Krishnamurthi, J.: 83, 84, 90 Lao Tzu: 69, 84; Ā e Way and its Power by 69, 79 Lawrence, D. H.: “The Novel and the Feelings” by 143, 146 Levertov, Denise: “Annunciation” by 448, 455, 456; Selected Poems by 469 Levinas, Emmanuel: 106 Leviticus: (26:13) 51 Lipps, Theodore: 108, 113; “ Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense Feelings” by 121 Lotus Sutra: on Buddha’s response to suffering 378 Luke, Gospel of: (11:29) 58; (7:1–10) 134 (4:27) 134, (1:35) (2:35) 409 Mahabharata: Bhishma in 58; on goals of life (artha, kama, dharma, moksha) 331n4; translations of 25, 331, 337 Maharshi, Ramana: 9, 18, 38, 203–206, 209, 213, 216, 217, 218 Makransky, John: Awakening Ā rough Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness by 381
index of names /titles 501 Marion, Jean-Luc: 23n6, 447, 447n2, 452, 453, 453n8, 455; “ The Saturated Phenomenon” by 470 Mark, Gospel of: (7:24–30) 134, (10:18) 370 Marx, Karl: critical philosophy of 92; o n religion 104, 467 Matthew, Gospel of: (6:5–12) 3; (11:29–30) 51; (12:39) 58; (15:21–28) 134; (8:11–12) 134; (11:11) 135; (28:19) 138; (8:20) 188 McEvilley, Thomas: 156n10, “An Archeology of Yoga” and “The Spinal Serpent” (Ā e Shape of Ancient Āoug ht) by 156n10, 165 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: incarnational phenomenology of 147, 152–165; on chiasm/flesh of the world 156; Phenomenology of Perception by 165 Merton, Thomas: 391; Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by 393 Mohammed, Prophet: ascension (mi’raj) of 308, 339; b iography of 340, 351; la nguage of 344; nig ht journey (isra) of 340–341; p rayers of 303–304; p roximity to the inĀnite 339–351; Qur’an/Hadith as tradi tions of 340; as r eceptacle of God 359; in Seerahpuranam 337; t heophany of 349 Muhammad, Sultan: “Earthly and Heavenly Drunkenness” by 28, 308, 318, 322–325 Nagarjuna: 368, 375, 444 Nanak Dev, Guru: founder of Sikhism 333n5, 335–336, 336n9 Nash, John: 381–382, 386, 387; A Beautiful Mind (Ālm) on 381 Natya Shastra (Bharata Muni): 221, 399, 399n7, 400 Nhat Hanh,Thich: 6, 12, 279; o n evil 374–375; Ā e Heart of Understanding by 380 Nussbaum, Martha: 11n3; Ā e Clash Within by 31 Obirek, Stanislaw: 429, 432 Ortiz, Fernando: o n transculturation 463; Contrapunteo by 464 Otto, Rudolf: 150n4; Ā e Idea of the Holy by 267, 271 Panikkar, Raimundo: 54n10, 79, 221, 256; Āe Vedic Experience by 79 Patanjali: 294; Yoga Sutras by 149, 294
Paul, Apostle: on children of God 444; conversion of 139; o n creation’s travails 65; o n dunamis pneumatos 449; on letter vs. sp irit of the Word 370; on the mystical body 23 Plato: anamnesis in 456; “ cave” allegory in 433; ide alism of 156n10; o n khora 457, 458; o n representation/ resemblance 398, 399, 402, 403; Republic 314, 398; Sophist 398; Symposium 289, 296n15, 323, 324; Timaeus 458 Poulet, Georges: 448n3; Les Métamophorses du Cercle by 470 Portrait of an Artist as a Y oung Man (James Joyce): 367 Psalms: (34:8) 438n2 Pulaver, Maulavi Umaru: Seerahpuranam by 337 Qur’an/Koran: 304n2; (41:53) 303, 303n1; (5:54, 2:38, 62, 112) 321, 321n19; (2:41, 5:44) 322n22; (53:16) 341; (24:35) 355; (57:3) 359; (18:110) 359; (50:16) 363; C usa on 442 Rahner, Karl: 141, 146, 429 Rama, Angel: La Novela en A mérica Latina by 464n21, 470; Transculturación Narrativa en America Latina by 464, 470 Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: 9, 21, 24, 38, 39, 100, 283–288, 289, 298–299; Kathamrita by 285–287 Ramayana: 331n3; translations into Islamic languages 331, 335, 337 Rambachan, Anantanand: 37, 38; Āe Advaita Worldview by 42 Revelation: on welcoming the guest (3:20) 75; (7:9) 135 Ricoeur, Paul: 7, 110, 173, 427n2; Oneself as A nother by 110, 121 Rilke, Rainer Maria: 395, 448, 457–458, 466; “Archaischer Torso Apollos” by 225, 233; elegies o f 321n21; Letters to a Young Poet 457, 458, 470; Book of Hours by 455 Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse: Spirit of Tibet by 383 Romans: (8:19, 22–24) 65; 449 Rumi, Jalaluddin (Mowlana): 350–351, 354, 355, 356, 357, 361 Ruth: 5, 260 Sankara/Shankara, Sri: 1, 8, 21, 82, 98, 200, 201, 235, 237, 280, 402n13; b irth
502
index of names /titles
of 8; a nd Aquinas on the cosmos as sacrament 21; Saundarya Lahari by 8, 235–241 Sartre, Jean Paul: 372; No E xit by 255 Scheler, Max: 111, 114; Āe Nature of Sympathy by 121 Second Vatican Council: on the Church in the modern world 22n6; Dei Verbum by 140; a nd inculturation 21; Lumen Gentium by 140; Nostra Aetate: Declaration of the Relationship of the Church with Other Religions by 12–13, 140, 261, 271, 378n12 Socrates: 284n1, 287n4, 289, 291, 295, 296n15, 398, 435 Song of Songs: 5; on opening the door to the guest (5:2–4) 75–76 Stein, Edith: 108, 109, 114–115; On the Problem of Empathy by 108, 114, 115, 121 Suzuki, T. D.: 374–375, 378–379, 399n6, 411 413n33; Essays in Zen B uddhism by 380; “ Self the Unattainable” and “What is t he I” by 422 Tagore, Rabindranath: Personality by 65 Talmud: 427 Tathagatagarbha Sutra: 388, 389 Todorov, Tzvetan: on exotopy 120n2; Mikhail Bakhtin: Ā e Dialogical Principle by 121 Torah: 427 Upanishads: 14, 15n4, 79, 202, 422; on Advaita 21, 205; o n Atman 195, 195n8, 277; cr eation myths in 281; o n darkness 44–45; on dialogue/truth 87– 88; on ecstasy 94; o n food 202; a nd the Gospel 22; o n guha 274, 415; o n ineffability 267; Isa 45; Kaivalya 274;
Katha 193, 275–282, 416; Kena 205; Krishnamurti and 85; o n lightning/ Brahman 205; p hilosophical portion of Vedas 194n3; o n pranayanma 274–283; on Purusha 276, 291; o n rasa 400, 401; o n buddhi 194; o n the Self 200–201, 277; Svetasvatara 201; translation into Persian 25; Taittiriya 202, 267, 401, 401n13 Van der L eeuw, Gerardus: 109, 110; Religion in Essence and Manifestation by 110n1, 121 Van Gogh, Vincent: paintings as liturgies 10n2 Vedas: Rig 200–201, 251, 400; Yajur 400; Sama 400 Vivekananda (Swami): 6, 24, 38, 124, 164n22, 287, 298; as N arendra 283–285 Weil, Simone: Waiting for God by 107, 121 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 255, 260, Investigations by 271 World Conference of Religions (Kerala, 1981): 10, 249, 256, 270 World Parliament of Religions (Chicago, 1896): 24 Yeats, William Butler: Āe Circus Animals’ D esertion by 321n21 Yoga Sutras (Patanjali): 4, 5, 85, 93, 95, 149, 151n5, 194n3; o n mind-centering (dharana) 194n5; o n nirodaha (1.2, 1.3) 151n5; on seedlessness (1.25, 3.50) 154n8; Surya Namaskar in 4; o n time 95; tra nslation of 304 Zegarra, Ana: “Anunciación” by 459–463
