'THAT art thou': 'Behold but One in all things'—God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.
The Mind is no other than the Buddha, and Buddha is no other than sentient being. When Mind assumes the form of a sentient being, it has suffered no decrease; when it has become a Buddha, it has added nothing to itself.
Huang-Po
All creatures have existed eternally in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.) Eternally, all creatures are God in God.... So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less.
Suso
The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life. Our created essence and our life are attached to it without mediation as to their eternal cause.
Ruysbroeck
89
When is a man in mere understanding? I answer, 'When a man sees one thing separated from another.' And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: 'When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.'
Eckhart
There are four kinds of Dhyana (spiritual disciplines). What are these four? They are,
- first, the Dhyana practised by the ignorant;
- second, the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning;
- third, the Dhyana with Suchness for its object;
- fourth, the Dhyana of the Tathagatas (Buddhas).
Tathāgata (Pali: [tɐˈtʰaːɡɐtɐ]) is a Pali word; Gautama Buddha uses it when referring to himself or other Buddhas in the Pāli Canon. The term is often thought to mean either "one who has thus gone" (tathā-gata), "one who has thus come" (tathā-āgata), or sometimes "one who has thus not gone" (tathā-agata).
What is meant by the Dhyana practised by the ignorant?
It is the one resorted to by the Yogins who exercise themselves in the disciplines of Sravakas and Pratyekabuddhas (contemplatives and 'solitary Buddhas' of the Hinayana school), who perceiving that there is no ego substance, that the body is a shadow and a skeleton which is transient, impure and full of suffering, persistently cling to these notions, which are regarded as just so and not otherwise, and who, starting from them, advance by stages until they reach the cessation, where there are no thoughts. This is called the Dhyana practised by the ignorant.
What then is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning? It is the one practised by those who, having gone beyond the egolessness of things, beyond individuality and generality, beyond the untenability of such ideas as 'self,' 'other' and 'both,' which are held by the philosophers, proceed to examine and follow up the meaning of the various aspects of Bodhisattvahood. This is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning.
What then is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning? It is the one practised by those who, having gone beyond the egolessness of things, beyond individuality and generality, beyond the untenability of such ideas as 'self,' 'other' and 'both,' which are held by the philosophers, proceed to examine and follow up the meaning of the various aspects of Bodhisattvahood. This is the Dhyana devoted to the examination of meaning.
When followers of Zen fail to go beyond the world of their senses and thoughts, all their doings and movements are of no significance. But when the senses and thoughts are annihilated, all the passages to Universal Mind are blocked, and no entrance then becomes possible. The original Mind is to be recognized along with the working of the senses and thoughts—only it does not belong to them, nor yet is it independent of them. Do not build up your views upon your senses and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon your senses and thoughts; but at the same time do not seek the Mmci away from your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Reality by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, them, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment.
Huang-Po
Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds, may be thought of, in René Guénon's phrase, as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy.
The creature, as creature, may be very far from God, in the sense that it lacks the intelligence to discover the nature of the divine Ground of its being. [72]
But the creature in its eternal essence—as the meeting place of creatureliness and primordial Godhead—is one of the infinite number of points where divine Reality is wholly and eternally present.
Because of this,
- rational beings can come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground,
- non-rational and inanimate beings may reveal to rational beings the fullness of God's presence within their material forms.
The poet's or the painter's vision of the divine in nature,
the worshipper's awareness of a holy presence in the sacrament, symbol or image—these are not entirely subjective.
True, such perceptions cannot be had by all perceivers, for knowledge is a function of being; but the thing known is independent of the mode and nature of the knower.
What the poet and painter see, and try to record for us, is actually there, waiting to be apprehended by anyone who has the right kind of faculties.
Similarly, in the image or the sacramental object the divine Ground is wholly present.
Faith and devotion prepare the worshipper's mind for perceiving the ray of Godhead at its point of intersection with the particular fragment of matter before him. Incidentally, by being worshipped, such symbols become the centres of a field of force.
The longings, emotions and imaginations of those who kneel and, for generations, have knelt before the shrine
create, as it were, an enduring vortex in the psychic medium,
so that the image lives with a secondary, inferior divine life projected on to it by its worshippers, as well as with the primary divine life
which, in common with all other animate and inanimate beings, it possesses in virtue of its relation to the divine Ground.
The religious experience of sacramentalists and image worshippers may be perfectly genuine and objective; but it is not always or necessarily an experience of God or the Godhead.
It may be, and perhaps in most cases it actually is, an experience of the field of force generated by the minds of past and present worshippers and projected on to the sacramental object where it sticks, so to speak, in a condition of what may be called second-hand objectivity, waiting to be perceived by minds suitably attuned to it.
How desirable this kind of experience really is will have to be discussed in another section.[73] All that need be said here is that the iconoclast's 우상 파괴 contempt for sacraments and symbols, as being nothing but mummery with stocks and stones, is quite unjustified.
The workmen still in doubt what course to take,
Whether I'd best a saint or hog-trough make,
After debate resolved me for a saint;And so famed Loyola I represent.
The all too Protestant satirist forgot that God is in the hog-trough no less than in the conventionally sacred image.
'Lift the stone and you will find me,' affirms the best known of the Oxyrhinchus Logia of Jesus, 'cleave the wood, and I am there.'
Those who have personally and immediately realized the truth of this saying and, along with it, the truth of Brahmanism's 'That art thou' are wholly delivered.
The Sravaka (literally 'hearer,' the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to con templatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation.
Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons.
However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself.
Mo Tsu
Sāvakabuddha is a Pali term (equivalent to Sanskrit: Śrāvakabuddha), used rarely in Theravada Buddhism, to refer to an enlightened disciple of a Buddha.
When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance.
Prunabuddlia-sutra
74]
The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its full-ness—to its heights we can always reach—when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing,' says the Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe.
Sri Auroindo
'To its heights we can always come.' For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means.
To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer world of minds and things and living creatures.
It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without.
And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life.
Where there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression.
But when the hope is to know God inclusively—to realize the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities, but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental.
Mortification becomes more searching and more subtle; there is need of unsleeping awareness and, on the levels of thought, feeling and conduct, the constant exercise of something like an artist's tact and taste.
It is in the literature of Mahayana and especially of Zen Buddhism that we find the best account of the psychology of the man for whom samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, are one and the same.[ 75]
It is in the literature of Mahayana and especially of Zen Buddhism that we find the best account of the psychology of the man for whom samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, are one and the same.[ 75]
More systematically perhaps than any other religion, the Buddhism of the Far East teaches the way to spiritual Knowledge in its fullness as well as in its heights, in and through the world as well as in and through the soul.
In this context we may point to a highly significant fact, which is that the incomparable landscape painting of China and Japan was essentially a religious art, inspired by Taoism and Zen Buddhism; in Europe, on the contrary, landscape painting and the poetry of 'nature worship' were secular arts which arose when Christianity was in decline, and derived little or no inspiration from Christian ideals.
'Blind, deaf, dumb!Infinitely beyond the reach of imaginative contrivances!'
In these lines Seccho has swept everything away for you—what you see together with what you do not see, what you hear together with what you do not hear, and what you talk about together with what you cannot talk about.
All these are completely brushed off, and you attain the life of the blind, deaf and dumb. Here all your imaginations, contrivances and calculations are once and for all put an end to; they are no more made use of. This is where lies the highest point of Zen, this is where we have true blindness, true deafness and true dumbness, each in its artless and effecfless aspect.
Seccho - The great Tang Dynasty Zen Master
Above the heavens and below the heavens!
How ludicrous, how disheartening!'Here Seccho lifts up with one hand and with the other puts down. Tell me what he finds to be ludicrous, what he finds to be disheartening. It is ludicrous that this dumb person is not dumb after all, that this deaf person is not after all deaf; it is disheartening that the one who is not at all blind is blind for all that, and that the one who is not at all deaf is deaf for all that.
'Li-lou does not know how to discriminate right colour.' Li-lou lived in the reign of the Emperor Huang. He is said to have been able to distinguish the point of a soft hair at a distance of one hundred paces. His eyesight was extraordinary. When the Emperor Huang took a pleasure cruise on the River Ch'ih, he dropped his precious jewel in the water and made Li fetch it up.
[76]
But he failed. The Emperor made Ch'ih-kou search for it; but he also failed to find it. Later Hsiang-wang was ordered to get it, and he got it. Hence,
'When Hsiang-wang goes down, the precious gem shines most brilliantly;
But where Li-lou walks about, the waves rise even to the sky.'
When we come to these higher spheres, even the eyes of Li-lou are incapable of discriminating the right colour.
'How can Shih-kuang recognize the mysterious tune?' Shih-kuang was the son of Ching-kuang of Chin in the province of Chiang under the Chou dynasty. His other name was Tzu-yeh. He could thoroughly distinguish the five sounds and the six notes; he could even hear the ants fighting on the other side of a hill. When Chin and Ch'u were at war, Shih-kuang could tell, just by softly fingering the strings of his lute, that the engagement would surely be unfavourable for Ch'u. In spite of his extraordinary sensitiveness Seccho declares that he is unable to recognize the mysterious tune. After all, one who is not at all deaf is really deaf. The most exquisite note in the higher spheres is beyond the hearing of Shih-kuang. Says Seccho, I am not going to be a Li-lou, nor a Shih-kuang; for
'What life can compare with this? Sitting quietly by the window,
I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go.'
When one reaches this stage of realization, seeing is no-seeing, hearing is no-hearing, preaching is no-preaching. When hungry one eats, when tired one sleeps. Let the leaves fall, let the flowers bloom as they like. When the leaves fall, I know it is the autumn; when the flowers bloom, I know it is the spring.
Having swept everything clean before you, Seccho now opens a passage-way, saying:
'Do you understand, or not?
An iron bar without a hole!'
He has done all he could for you; he is exhausted—only able to turn round and present you with this iron bar without a hole. It [77] is a most significant expression. Look and see with your own eyes! If you hesitate, you miss the mark for ever.
Yengo (the author of this commentary) now raised his staff and said, 'Do you see?' He then struck his chair and said, 'Do you hear?' Coming down from the chair, he said, 'Was anything talked about?'
What precisely is the significance of that iron bar without a hole? I do not pretend to know. Zen has always specialized in nonsense as a means of stimulating the mind to go forward to that which is beyond sense; so perhaps the point of the bar resides precisely in its pointlessness and in our disturbed, bewildered reaction to that pointlessness.
In the root divine Wisdom is all-Brahman; in the stem she is all-Illusion; in the flower she is all-World; and in the fruit, all-Liberation.
Tantra Tartva
The Sravakas and the Pratyekabuddhas, when they reach the eighth stage of the Bodhisattva's discipline, become so intoxicated with the bliss of mental tranquillity that they fail to realize that the visible world is nothing but the Mind. They are still in the realm of individuation; their insight is not yet pure. The Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, are alive to their original vows, flowing out of the all-embracing love that is in their hearts. They do not enter into Nirvana (as a state separate from the world of becoming); they know that the visible world is nothing but a manifestation of Mind itself.
Condensed from the Laizkavatara Sutra
A conscious being alone understands what is meantTo those not endowed with consciousness the moving is [unintel] ligible.If you exercise yourself in the practice of keeping your mind unmoved,The immovable you gain is that of one who has to consciousness.If you are desirous for the truly immovable,The immovable is in the moving itself,And this immovable is the truly immovable one.There is no seed of Buddhahood where there is no consciousness.Mark well how varied are the aspects of the immovable one,And know that the first reality is immovable.Only when this reality is attainedIs the true working of Suchness understood.
Hul Neng
These phrases about the unmoving first mover remind one of Aristotle. But between Aristotle and the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy within the great religious traditions there is this vast difference: Aristotle is primarily concerned with cosmology, the Perennial Philosophers are primarily concerned with liberation and enlightenment:
- Aristotle is content to know about the unmoving mover, from the outside and theoretically;
- the aim of the Perennial Philosophers is to become directly aware of it, to know it unitively, so that they and others may actually become the unmoving One.
This unitive knowledge can be knowledge in the heights, or knowledge in the fullness, or knowledge simultaneously in the heights and the fullness.
Spiritual knowledge exclusively in the heights of the soul was rejected by Mahayana Buddhism as inadequate. The similar rejection of quietism within the Christian tradition will be touched upon in the section, 'Contemplation and Action.'
Meanwhile it is interesting to find that the problem which aroused such acrimonious debate throughout seventeenth-century Europe had arisen for the Buddhists at a considerably earlier epoch.
But whereas in Catholic Europe the outcome of the battle over Molinos, Mme Guyon and Fénelon was to all intents and purposes the extinction of mysticism for the best part of two centuries,
in Asia the two parties were tolerant enough to agree to differ.
Hinayana spirituality continued to explore the heights within,
while the Mahayanist masters held up the ideal not of the Arhat, but of the Bodhisattva, and pointed the way to spiritual knowledge in its fullness as well as in its heights.
What follows is a poetical account, by a Zen saint of the eighteenth century, of the state of those who have realized the Zen ideal.79
Hakuin Ekaku (白隠 慧鶴, January 19, 1686 – January 18, 1769) was one of the most influential figures in Japanese Zen Buddhism. He is regarded as the reviver of the Rinzai school from a moribund period of stagnation, refocusing it on its traditionally rigorous training methods integrating meditation and koan practice.
Abiding with the non-particular which is in particulars,Going or returning, they remain for ever unmoved.Taking hold of the not-thought which lies in thoughts,In their every act they hear the voice of Truth.How boundless the sky of contemplation!How transparent the moonlight of the four-fold Wisdom!As the Truth reveals itself in its eternal tranquillity,This very earth is the Lotus-Land of Purity,And this body is the body of the Buddha.
Hakuin
Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else from which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.
Eckhart
Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself.
Eckhart
My inner man relishes things not as creatures but as the gift of God. But to my innermost man they savour not of God's gift, but of ever and aye.
Eckhart
Pigs eat acorns, but neither consider the sun that gave them life, nor the influence of the heavens by which they were nourished, nor the very root of the tree from whence they came.
Thomas Tralierne
[80]
Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of a monarch, in her husband's chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you.
You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you can never enjoy the world.
Till your spirit fihleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels;
till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table;
till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made;
till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own;
till you delight in God for being good to all;
you never enjoy the world.
Till you more feel it than your private estate,
and are more present in the hemisphere,
considering the glories and the beauties there,
than in your own house;
till you remember how lately you were made,
and how wonderful it was when you came into it;
and more rejoice in the palace of your glory than if it had been made today morning.
Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright,
Yet further, you never enjoyed the world aright,
till you so love the beauty of enjoying it,
that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.
And so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it that you had rather suffer the flames of hell than willingly be guilty of their error.
The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it.
The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it.
It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it.
It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it.
It is the Paradise of God.
It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before.
It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven.
When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not. 81
How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.
Thomas Tralierne
Before going on to discuss the means whereby it is possible to come to the fullness as well as the height of spiritual knowledge, let us briefly consider the experience of those who have been privileged to 'behold the One in all things,' but have made no efforts to perceive it within themselves. A great deal of interesting material on this subject may be found in Buck's Cosmic Consciousness. All that need be said here is that such 'cosmic consciousness' may come unsought and is in the nature of what Catholic theologians call a 'gratuitous grace.'
One may have a gratuitous grace (the power of healing, for example, or foreknowledge) while in a state of mortal sin, and the gift is neither necessary to, nor sufficient for, salvation. At the best such sudden accessions of 'cosmic consciousness' as are described by Buck are merely unusual invitations to further personal effort in the direction of the inner height as well as the external fullness of knowledge.
In a great many cases the invitation is not accepted; the gift is prized for the ecstatic pleasure it brings; its coming is remembered nostalgically and, if the recipient happens to be a poet, written about with eloquence—as Byron, for example, wrote in a splendid passage of C/zilde Harold, as Wordsworth wrote in Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.
In these matters no human being may presume to pass definitive judgment upon another human being; but it is at least permissible to say that, on the basis of the biographical evidence, there is no reason to suppose that either Wordsworth or Byron ever seriously did anything about the theophanies they described; nor is there any evidence that these theophanies were of themselves sufficient to transform their characters. That enormous egotism, to which De Quincey and Keats and Haydon bear witness, seems to have remained with Wordsworth to the end. And Byron was as fascinatingly and tragi-comically Byronic after he had beheld the One in all things as he was before.
theophany, (from Greek theophaneia, “appearance of God”), manifestation of deity in sensible form. ... The mark of biblical theophanies is the temporariness and suddenness of the appearance of God, which is here not an enduring presence in a certain place or object.
82
In this context it is interesting to compare Wordsworth with another great nature lover and man of letters, St. Bernard. 'Let Nature be your teacher,' says the first; and he goes on to affirm that
One impulse from the vernal woodWill tell you more of man,Of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can.
St. Bernard speaks in what seems a similar strain. 'What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks.'
And in another of his letters he says: 'Listen to a man of experience: thou wilt learn more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach thee more than thou canst acquire from the mouth of a magister.'
The phrases are similar; but their inner significance is very different.
In Augustine's language, God alone is to be enjoyed; creatures are not to be enjoyed but used—used with love and compassion and a wondering, detached appreciation, as means to the knowledge of that which maybe enjoyed.
Wordsworth, like almost all other literary Nature-worshippers, preaches the enjoyment of creatures rather than their use for the attainment of spiritual ends—a use which, as we shall see, entails much self-discipline for the user.
For Bernard it goes without saying that his correspondents are actively practising this self-discipline and that Nature, though loved and heeded as a teacher, is only being used as a means to God, not enjoyed as though she were God.
The beauty of flowers and landscape
- is not merely to be relished as one 'wanders lonely as a cloud' about the countryside,
- is not merely to be pleasurably remembered when one is lying 'in vacant or in pensive mood' on the sofa in the library, after tea.
The reaction must be a little more strenuous and purposeful. 'Here, my brothers,' says an ancient Buddhist author, are the roots of trees, here are empty places; meditate.' 83
The truth is, of course, that the world is only for those who have deserved it;
for, in Philo's words, 'even though a man may be incapable of making himself worthy of the creator of the cosmos, yet he ought to try to make himself worthy of the cosmos.
He ought to transform himself from being a man into the nature of the cosmos and become, if one may say so, a little cosmos.'
For those who have not deserved the world, either by making themselves worthy of its creator (that is to say, by non-attachment and a total self-naughting), or, less arduously, by making themselves worthy of the cosmos (by bringing order and a measure of unity to the manifold confusion of undisciplined human personality), the world is, spiritually speaking, a very dangerous place.
That nirvana and samsara are one is a fact about the nature of the universe;
but it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls far advanced in spirituality.
For ordinary, nice, unregenerate people to accept this truth by hearsay, and to act upon it in practice, is merely to court disaster.
All the dismal story of antinomianism is there to warn us of what happens when men and women make practical applications of a merely intellectual and unrealized theory that all is God and God is all.
And hardly less depressing than the spectacle of antinomianism is that of the earnestly respectable 'well-rounded life' of good citizens who do their best to live sacramentally, but don't in fact have any direct acquaintance with that for which the sacramental activity really stands.
Dr. Oman, in his The Natural and the Super-natura4 writes at length on the theme that 'reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal'; and in a recent volume, Science, Religion and the Future, Canon Raven applauds Dr. Oman for having stated the principles of a theology in which there could be no ultimate antithesis between nature and grace, science and religion, in which, indeed, the worlds of the scientist and the theologian are seen to be one and the same.
All this is in full accord with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and with such Christian teachings as St. Augustine's Ama et fcc quod vis and Father Lallemant's advice to theocentric con-templatives to go out and act in the world, since their actions are the only ones capable of doing any real good to the world. 84
But what neither Dr. Oman nor Canon Raven makes sufficiently clear is that nature and grace, sam.sara and nirvana, perpetual perishing and eternity, are really and experientially one only to persons who have fulfilled certain conditions.
Fac quod vis in the temporal world—but only when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart and your neighbour as yourself.
If you haven't learnt this lesson, you will either be an antinomian eccentric or criminal or else a respectable well-rounded-lifer, who has left himself no time to understand either nature or grace.
The Gospels are perfectly clear about the process by which, and by which alone, a man may gain the right to live in the world as though he were at home in it: he must make a total denial of selfhood, submit to a complete and absolute mortification.
At one period of his career, Jesus himself seems to have undertaken austerities, not merely of the mind, but of the body. There is the record of his forty days' fast and his statement, evidently drawn from personal experience, that some demons cannot be cast Out except by those who have fasted much as well as prayed.
(The Curé d'Ars, whose knowledge of miracles and corporal penance was based on personal experience, insists on the close correlation between severe bodily austerities and the power to get petitionary prayer answered in ways that are sometimes supernormal.)
The Pharisees reproached Jesus because he 'came eating and drinking,' and associated with 'publicans and sinners'; they ignored, or were unaware of, the fact that this apparently worldly prophet had at one time rivalled the physical austerities of John the Baptist and was practising the spiritual mortifications which he consistently preached. The pattern of Jesus' life is essentially similar to that of the ideal sage, whose career is traced in the 'Oxherding Pictures,' so popular among Zen Buddhists.
The wild ox, symbolizing the unregenerate self, is caught, made to change its direction, then tamed and gradually transformed from black to white. Regeneration goes so far that for a time the ox is completely lost, so that nothing remains to be pictured but the full-orbed moon, symbolizing Mind, Suchness, the Ground.
But this is not the final stage. 85 In the end, the herdsman comes back to the world of men, riding on the back of his ox.
Because he now loves, loves to the extent of being identified with the divine object of his love, he can do what he likes; for what he likes is what the Nature of Things likes. He is found in company with wine-bibbers and, butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas. For him, there is complete reconciliation to the evanescent and, through that reconciliation, revelation of the eternal.
But for nice ordinary unregenerate people the only reconciliation to the evanescent is that of indulged passions, of distractions submitted to and enjoyed. To tell such persons that evanescence and eternity are the same, and not immediately to qualify the statement, is positively fatal—for, in practice, they are not the same except to the saint; and there is no record that anybody ever came to sanctity who did not, at the outset of his or her career, behave as if evanescence and eternity, nature and grace, were profoundly different and in many respects incompatible.
As always, the path of spirituality is a knife-edge between abysses. On one side is the danger of mere rejection and escape, on the other the danger of mere acceptance and the enjoyment of things which should only be used as instruments or symbols. The versified caption which accompanies the last of the 'Ox-herding Pictures' runs as follows:
Even beyond the ultimate limits there extends a passage-way,By which he comes back to the six realms of existence.Every worldly affair is now a Buddhist work,And wherever he goes he finds his home air.Like a gem he stands out even in the mud,Like pure gold he shines even in the furnace.Along the endless road (of birth and death) heunto himself.In all circumstances he moves tranquil and ufied.
86
The means whereby man's final end is to described and illustrated at length in the section on 'Mortification and Non-attachment.' This section, however, is mainly concerned with the disciplining of the will. But the disciplining of the will must have as its accompaniment a no less thorough disciplining of the consciousness. There has to be a conversion, sudden or otherwise, not merely of the heart, but also of the senses and of the perceiving mind. What follows is a brief account of this metanoia, as the Greeks called it, this total and radical 'change of mind.'
metanoia - change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion.
"what he demanded of people was metanoia, repentance, a complete change of heart"
It is in the Indian and Far Eastern formulations of the Perennial Philosophy that this subject is most systematically treated.
What is prescribed is a process of conscious discrimination between the personal self and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the Buddha-womb or Universal Mind.
The result of this discrimination is a more or less sudden and complete 'revulsion' of consciousness, and the realization of a state of 'no-mind,' which may be described as the freedom from perceptual and intellectual attachment to the ego-principle.
This state of 'no-mind' exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation.
To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit.
'When no-mind is sought after by a mind,' says Huang-Po, 'that is making it a particular object of thought. There is only testimony of silence; it goes beyond thinking.' In other words, we, as separate individuals, must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it. Similarly, in the Diamond Sutra we read that if a Bodhisattva, in his attempt to realize Suchness, 'retains the thought of an ego, a person, a separate being, or a soul, he is no longer a Bodhisattva.'
Al-Ghazzali, the philosopher of Sufism, also stresses the need for intellectual humbleness and docility. 'If the thought that he is effaced from self occurs to one who is in fatia (a term roughly corresponding to Zen's "no-mind," or mush in) , that is a defect. [87] The highest state is to be effaced from effacement.'
There is an ecstatic effacement-from-effacement in the interior heights of the Atman-Brahman; and
there is another, more comprehensive effacement-from-effacement, not only in the inner heights, but also in and through the world, in the waking, everyday knowledge of God in his fullness.
A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfil the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.
Eckhart
The Perfect Way knows no difficulties,Except that it refuses to make preferences.Only when freed from hate and loveDoes it reveal itself fully and without disguise.
A tenth of an inch's difference,And heaven and earth are set apart.If you wish to see it before your own eyes, Have no fixed thoughts either for or against it.To set up what you like against what you dislike—This is the disease of the mind.When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood, Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose.Pursue not the outer entanglements, Dwell not in the inner void; Be serene in the oneness of things, And dualism vanishes of itself.88When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion, The quiescence so gained is ever in motion.So long as you tarry in such dualism,How can you realize oneness?And when oneness is not thoroughly grasped,Loss is sustained in two ways:The denying of external reality is the assertion of it,And the assertion of Emptiness (the Absolute) is the denyingof it.
Transformations going on in the empty world that confronts usAppear to be real because of Ignorance.Do not strive to seek after the True, Only cease to cherish opinions.
The two exist because of the One;But hold not even to this One.When a mind is not disturbed,The ten thousand things offer no offence....
If an eye never falls asleep,All dreams will cease of themselves;If the Mind retains its absoluteness,The ten thousand things are of one substance.
When the deep mystery of one Suchness is fathomed,All of a sudden we forget the external entanglements;When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness,We return to the origin and remain where we have alwaysbeen....
One in all,All in One—If only this is realized,No more worry about not being perfect!89When Mind and each believing mind are not divided,And undivided are each believing mind and Mind,This is where words fail,For it is not of the past, present or future.
The Third Patriarch of Zen
Jianzhi Sengcan (Chinese: 鑑智僧璨; Pīnyīn: Jiànzhì Sēngcàn; Wade–Giles: Chien-chih Seng-ts'an; Romanji: Kanchi Sōsan) is known as the Third Chinese Patriarch of Chán after Bodhidharma and thirtieth Patriarch after Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha.
He is considered to be the Dharma successor of the second Chinese Patriarch, Dazu Huike (Chinese: 大祖慧可; Pīnyīn: Dàzǔ Huìkě; Wade–Giles: Ta-tsu Hui-k’o; Romanji: Taiso Eka). Sengcan is best known as the putative author of the famous Chan poem, Xinxin Ming (Chinese: 信心銘; Pīnyīn: Xìnxīn Míng; Wade–Giles: Hsin-hsin Ming), the title of which means "Inscription on Faith in Mind".
Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God's order.
de Cawsade
The seventeenth-century Frenchman's vocabulary is very different from that of the seventh-century Chinaman's. But the advice they give is fundamentally similar. Conformity to the will of God, submission, docility to the leadings of the Holy Ghost—in practice, if not verbally, these are the same as conformity to the Perfect Way, refusing to have preferences and cherish opinions, keeping the eyes open so that dreams may cease and Truth reveal itself.
The world inhabited by ordinary, nice, unregenerate people is mainly dull (so dull that they have to distract their minds from being aware of it by all sorts of artificial 'amusements'), sometimes briefly and intensely pleasurable, occasionally or quite often disagreeable and even agonizing. For those who have deserved the world by making themselves fit to see God within it as well as within their own souls, it wears a very different aspect.
[평범하고, 착하고, 거듭나지 않은 사람들이 사는 세상은 주로 둔하고(너무 둔해서 모든 종류의 인공적인 '유희'로 정신을 흐트러뜨려야 하며, 때로는 짧고 강렬하게 즐거우며, 때로는 또는 꽤 자주 불쾌하고, 심지어 괴로움. 자신의 영혼뿐만 아니라 그 안에 있는 하나님을 보기에 합당하여 세상을 받을 자격이 있는 사람들에게 세상은 매우 다른 면을 입습니다.]
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates at first were the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! 0 what venerable and‑[ ....]
the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared; which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.. And so it was that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of the world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual: In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours.
The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary—the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of man's overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. Sub-human lives and even things are to be treated with respect and understanding, not brutally oppressed to serve our human ends.
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates at first were the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! 0 what venerable and‑[ ....]
the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared; which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.. And so it was that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of the world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
Thomas Tra/zerne
Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual: In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours.
Eckhart
The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary—the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of man's overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. Sub-human lives and even things are to be treated with respect and understanding, not brutally oppressed to serve our human ends.
[하나님이 자연에 계시다는 교리는 중요한 실용적인 추론를 가지고 있습니다.
1] 자연의 신성함과 2] 자연에의 협력자가 아니라 주인이 되려는 인간의 지나친 노력이 죄성과 어리석음이라는 것.
인간 이하의 삶과 사물도 존중과 이해로 다루어야 하며 인간의 목적을 위해 잔인하게 억압되어서는 안 됩니다.
The ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they
might repay his kindness, and said: 'Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating and breathing, while this ruler alone has not a single one. Let us try to make them for him.' Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day. At the end of seven days Chaos died.
In this delicately comic parable Chaos is Nature in the state of wu-wei-----non-assertion or equilibrium. Shu and Hu are the living images of those busy persons who thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; who proudly proclaimed the Conquest of the Air, and then discovered that they had defeated civilization; who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda. In brief, Shu and Hu are devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you, and in the future. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, like all good Taoists, has no desire to bully Nature into subserving ill-considered temporal ends, at variance with the final end of men as formulated in the Perennial Philosophy. His wish is to work with Nature, so as to produce material and social conditions in which individuals may realize Tao on every level from the physiological up to the spiritual.
Compared with that of the Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude towards Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to exploit for their own ends. Like landscape painting, the humanitarian movement in Europe was an almost completely secular affair. In the Far East both were essentially religious.
The Greeks believed that hubris was always followed by nemesis, that if you went too far you would get a knock on the head to remind you that the gods will not tolerate insolence on the part of mortal men. In the sphere of human relations, the modern mind understands the doctrine of hubris and regards it as mainly true. We wish pride to have a fall, and we see that very often it does fall.
To have too much power over one's fellows, to be too rich, too violent, too ambitious—all this invites punishment, and in the long run, we notice, punishment of one sort or another duly comes. But the Greeks did not stop there. Because they regarded Nature as in some way divine, they felt that it had to be respected and they were convinced that a hubristic lack of respect for Nature would be punished by avenging nemesis. In 'The Persians,' Aeschylus gives the reasons—the ultimate, metaphysical reasons—for the barbarians' defeat. Xerxes was punished for two offences—overweening imperialism directed against the Athenians, and overweening imperialism directed against Nature. He tried to enslave his fellow-men, and he tried to enslave the sea, by building a bridge across the Hellespont.
The ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they
might repay his kindness, and said: 'Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating and breathing, while this ruler alone has not a single one. Let us try to make them for him.' Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day. At the end of seven days Chaos died.
Chuang Tzu
In this delicately comic parable Chaos is Nature in the state of wu-wei-----non-assertion or equilibrium. Shu and Hu are the living images of those busy persons who thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; who proudly proclaimed the Conquest of the Air, and then discovered that they had defeated civilization; who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda. In brief, Shu and Hu are devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you, and in the future. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, like all good Taoists, has no desire to bully Nature into subserving ill-considered temporal ends, at variance with the final end of men as formulated in the Perennial Philosophy. His wish is to work with Nature, so as to produce material and social conditions in which individuals may realize Tao on every level from the physiological up to the spiritual.
Compared with that of the Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude towards Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to exploit for their own ends. Like landscape painting, the humanitarian movement in Europe was an almost completely secular affair. In the Far East both were essentially religious.
The Greeks believed that hubris was always followed by nemesis, that if you went too far you would get a knock on the head to remind you that the gods will not tolerate insolence on the part of mortal men. In the sphere of human relations, the modern mind understands the doctrine of hubris and regards it as mainly true. We wish pride to have a fall, and we see that very often it does fall.
To have too much power over one's fellows, to be too rich, too violent, too ambitious—all this invites punishment, and in the long run, we notice, punishment of one sort or another duly comes. But the Greeks did not stop there. Because they regarded Nature as in some way divine, they felt that it had to be respected and they were convinced that a hubristic lack of respect for Nature would be punished by avenging nemesis. In 'The Persians,' Aeschylus gives the reasons—the ultimate, metaphysical reasons—for the barbarians' defeat. Xerxes was punished for two offences—overweening imperialism directed against the Athenians, and overweening imperialism directed against Nature. He tried to enslave his fellow-men, and he tried to enslave the sea, by building a bridge across the Hellespont.
Atossa. From shore to shore he bridged the Hellespont.Ghost ofDarius. What, could he chain the mighty Bosphorus?Atossa. Even so, some god assisting his design.Ghost of Darius. Some god of power to cloud his better sense.
Today we recognize and condemn the first kind of imperialism; but most of us ignore the existence and even the very possibility of the second. And yet the author of Erewhon was certainly not a fool, and now that we are paying the appalling price for our much touted 'conquest of Nature' his book seems more than ever topical. And Butler was not the only nineteenth-century sceptic in regard to Inevitable Progress. A generation or more before him, Alfred de Vigny was writing about the new technological marvel of his days, the steam engine—writing in a tone very different from the enthusiastic roarings and trumpetings of his great contemporary, Victor Hugo.
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ɛrɛhwɒn/[1]) is a novel by Samuel Butler which was first published anonymously in 1872,[2] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. Butler meant the title to be understood as the word "nowhere" backwards[citation needed] even though the letters "h" and "w" are transposed. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[3]
[ 93]
Sur le taureau de fir, quifurne, souffle et beugle,
L'homme est monte trop tot. NW ne connalt encor
Quth orages en luiporte ce rude aveugle,
Et Ic gai voyageur lui livre son trésor.
And a little later in the same poem he adds:
Tous se sont dit: 'Jillons,' mais aucun n'est le maitre
Et Ic gai voyageur lui livre son trésor.
And a little later in the same poem he adds:
Tous se sont dit: 'Jillons,' mais aucun n'est le maitre
D'un dragon mugissant qu'un savant a fait naitre.
Nous nous sommesjoués a plus fort que nous rous.
Looking backwards across the carnage and the devastation, we can see that Vigny was perfectly right. None of those gay travellers, of whom Victor Hugo was the most vociferously eloquent, had the faintest notion where that first, funny little Puffing Billy was taking them. Or rather they had a very clear notion, but it happened to be entirely false. For they were convinced that Puffing Billy was hauling them at full speed towards universal peace and the brotherhood of man; while the newspapers which they were so proud of being able to read, as the train rumbled along towards its Utopian destination not more than fifty years or so away, were the guarantee that liberty and reason would soon be everywhere triumphant. Puffing Billy has now turned into a four-motored bomber loaded with white phosphorus and high explosives, and the free press is everywhere the servant of its advertisers, of a pressure group, or of the government. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, the travellers (now far from gay) still hold fast to the religion of Inevitable Progress—which is, in the last analysis, the hope and faith (in the teeth of all human experience) that one can get something for nothing. How much saner and more realistic is the Greek view that every victory has to be paid for, and that, for some victories, the price exacted is so high that it outweighs any advantage that may be obtained!
Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave towards her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant. 94 The spoils of recent technological imperialism have been enormous; but meanwhile nemesis has seen to it that we get our kicks as well as halfpence.
For example, has the ability to travel in twelve hours from New York to Los Angeles given more pleasure to the human race than the dropping of bombs and fire has given pain? There is no known method of computing the amount of felicity or goodness in the world at large. What is obvious, however, is that the advantages accruing from recent technological advances—or, in Greek phraseology, from recent acts of hubris directed against Nature—are generally accompanied by corresponding disadvantages, that gains in one direction entail losses in other directions, and that we never get something except for something.
Whether the net result of these elaborate credit and debit operations is a genuine Progress in virtue, happiness, charity and intelligence is something we can never definitely determine. It is because the reality of Progress can never be determined that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to treat it as an article of religious faith.
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[To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance. For them, the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in their advance towards man's final end.]
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<영원의 철학>의 지지자들에게 진보가 불가피한 것인지 아니면 실제적인 것인지에 대한 질문은 가장 중요한 문제가 아닙니다. 그들에게 중요한 것은 남성과 여성 개인들이 <신성한 근원>에 대한 <통일된 지식>에 도달하는 것과, 사회적 환경과 관련하여 그들이 관심을 갖는 것은 진보성이나 비진보성(그 용어가 무엇을 의미하든지 간에)이 아니라, 인간의 <신성한 근원>이라는 최종 목적을 찾아가는 개인을 돕는가 방해하는가 정도이다.
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세진: 물질적 발달은 적당한 선 이상은 필요없고, 사회가 다들 명상을 할 수 있는 구조적 기반을 닥는것이 중요하다는 말로 들린다.
