Beyond the experience of duality

Universal Wisdom

The religions of the world are meeting today in a way they have never done before. Each religion grew up in a particular cultural setting, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Taoism and Confucianism in China, Judaism and Christianity in Palestine, Islam in Arabia. But in the course of time each religion grew and extended its influence. Hinduism remained largely confined to India, but the meeting of Aryan people from the north with the Dravidian and other indigenous people from other parts led to a continuous growth and enrichment of their religion, which gave it a universal character. Likewise. the two opposite traditions of Taoism and Confucianism in China led to the growth of a profound, universal wisdom which united the whole of China. Buddhism, beginning in India, spread to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, and then with the growth of Mahayana doctrine to Tibet, Korea, China and Japan. Judaism and Christianity both began in Palestine, but Judaism spread in the “diaspora” over the Middle East and Europe and north Africa and eventually the whole world. Christianity spread first of all westwards over the Roman Empire and eastwards over Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia and as far as India and China, while in the West it became the dominant religion of Europe and America. Islam, beginning in Arabia, spread westwards to north Africa as far as Spain and eastwards over Syria, Turkey and Iraq to Iran, India and Indonesia.

With this geographical extension there took place an extraordinary development of doctrine. The primitive Vedic mythology developed in Yoga, Vedanta and Tantra into an elaborate system of mystical philosophy, moral discipline and an immense ritualistic religion. The earlier Buddhist doctrine, with its limited view of individual salvation in Nirvana, evolved into the Mahayana doctrine of universal salvation, with the Bodhisattva making a vow not to enter Nirvana until every living being has been saved. Judaism developed in the Talmud an elaborate system of law and later in the Kabbala a subtle mystical doctrine. Christianity, under the influence of Greek philosophy and Roman law, developed a vast system of ritual and doctrine which shaped the history of Europe and America and extended to the European colonies in Asia and Africa. Most remarkable of all in some ways the primitive religion of the Quran, from its contact with the civilization of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran, developed a sophisticated culture, and by absorbing the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle produced its own unique philosophy and theology. 

But in spite of this extraordinary expansion of each religion, it is only today that these different religious traditions are beginning to mix freely all over the world and are seeking to relate to one another, not in terms of rivalry and conflict but in terms of dialogue and mutual respect. One of the greatest needs of humanity today is to transcend the cultural limitations of the great religions and to find a wisdom, a philosophy, which can reconcile their differences and reveal the unity which underlies all their diversities. This has been called the “perennial philosophy”, the eternal wisdom, which has been revealed in a different way in each religion

The perennial philosophy stems from a crucial period in human history in the middle of the first millennium before Christ. It was then that a breakthrough was made beyond the cultural limitations of ancient religion to the experience of ultimate reality. This reality which has no proper name, since it transcends the mind and cannot be expressed in words, was called Brahman and Atman (the Spirit) in Hinduism, Nirvana and Sunyata (the Void) in Buddhism, Tao (the Way) in China, Being (todn) in Greece and Yahweh (“I am”) in Israel, but all these are but words which point to an inexpressible mystery, in which the ultimate meaning of the universe is to be found, but which no human word or thought can express. It is this which is the goal of all human striving, the truth which all science and philosophy seeks to fathom, the bliss in which all human love is fulfilled. 

It was in Hinduism, or rather in the complex religion which later became known as Hinduism, that the first great breakthrough occurred. In the Upanishads in about 600 bc the ancient religion based on the fire-sacrifice (yajna) was transformed by the rishis (seers), who retired to the forest to meditate, and who were concerned in this way not with the ritualistic fire outside but with the inner fire of the spirit(Atman). The ancient Brahman, the hidden power in the sacrifice, was discovered to be the hidden power in the universe, and the spirit of man, the Atman, the inner self, was seen to be one with Brahman, the spirit of the universe. A little later Gautama Buddha, discarding alike the mythology and the ritual of the Vedas, pierced through with his mind beyond all phenomena, which he described as transient (anitta), sorrowful (dukka) in the sense of giving no lasting satisfaction, and insubstantial (anatta), having no basis in reality, to the infinite, eternal, unchanging reality which he called Nirvana. In China the author of the Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Power of the Way),whatever its origin may be, was able to go beyond the conventional moral philosophy of Confucius and discover the nameless mystery which he called the Tao, as the subtle source of all wisdom and morality. In Greece Socrates and Plato, going beyond all previous philosophers, who had tried to find the origin of the world in a material form, whether water, air or fire or the four elements together, awoke to the reality of the mind as the source alike of the material universe and of the human person. Finally the Hebrew prophets, rejecting the gods of the ancient world, revealed the presence of a transcendent Being, whose only name was “I am” as the supreme person, the Lord of the universe. Thus in India, China, Greece and Palestine at almost the same time the discovery of the ultimate reality, beyond all the changes of the temporal world, dawned on the human race.

In the course of time these unique insights were developed by philosophers and theologians over a period of more than a thousand years into great doctrinal systems. In India Sankara in the eighth century ad unified the system of Vedanta and set it on the course of further development in the different systems of philosophy which have gone on growing to the present day. In Buddhism, Nagarjuna, the Brahmin philosopher from South India, devised a logical system which was to provide a basis for the Mahayana doctrine of China and Tibet. In China, Taoism and Confucianism, interacting over the centuries, developed the Neo-Confucian system which dominated China until the coming of Marxism. In Greece the new vision of Socrates and Plato led to the growth of the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and became of decisive importance in the growth both of Christianity and of Islam. The Greek fathers, Clement, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, building on the mystical insights of St Paul and St John, developed a profound mystical theology under the influence of Neoplatonism, which was to flower in the great mystical tradition of the Middle Ages. Finally in Israel and in Islam the religion of the patriarchs and the prophets underwent a vital transformation, as it encountered the cultural tradition of Greece and the oriental world.

In each religion therefore we can trace the development of a comparatively simple and unsophisticated religion into a subtle and complex system of philosophy, which shows a remarkable unity underlying all the differences. This philosophy, which prevailed in almost all parts of the world until the fifteenth century, was rejected in Europe in the sixteenth century and a new system of philosophy based on the findings of western science has taken its place. But the philosophy of western science itself has now begun to disintegrate, as a result of the new scientific developments in relativity and quantum physics. As a result the world today is left with no basic philosophy which can give meaning to life, and we are in danger of losing all sense of meaning and purpose in human existence. When to this is added the devastating effect of western technology on the ecology of the planet, which threatens to destroy the world, on which we depend for our very existence, it can be seen that the need of a philosophy, a universal wisdom, which can unify humanity and enable us to face the problems created by western science and technology, has become the greatest need of humanity today. The religions of the world cannot by themselves answer this need. They are themselves today part of the problem of a divided world. The different world religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have themselves to recover the ancient wisdom, which they have inherited, and this has now to be interpreted in the light of the knowledge of the world, which western science has given us.

It is hoped that the texts which have been gathered together in this volume, illustrating the basic insights of the perennial philosophy, may provide a source book for the new vision of reality, which the world is seeking today. It does not pretend to be a work of scholarship for academic study. It is rather a collection of texts in convenient translations which illustrate the fundamental wisdom underlying the religious traditions of the world. People today have to grow accustomed to reflecting on the scriptures of the world religions. No religion can stand alone. Each has undergone a long evolution in the course of history and today we realize that religions are interdependent. Each religion has its own unique insight into ultimate truth and reality. As we meditate on these texts, our vision is enlarged. We see our own religion in a new light and we begin to discern how humanity today could grow in mutual understanding, towards that unity which is our common goal. This demands a certain detachment from our own culture and religion, a recognition of the changing elements in each religious tradition and an opening of heart and mind to the transcendent truth, which is revealed in every genuine religious tradition. At the same time we have to take account of the changes which western science, whether physics, biology, psychology, sociology or metaphysics, has brought to our lives. It is only the patient meditation on the texts of the perennial philosophy which can give us the insight which we need and enable us to discern the changes which must take place in our lives. Only then can we hope to realize the deep unity which underlies all our human differences and recover our sense of solidarity with this vast universe, which has been given us as our home and for which we are responsible.

The Origin of Religion

The study of comparative religion, especially of pre-historic and tribal religion, such as Mircea Eliade has undertaken,1 can enable us to go behind all the later developments of religion and discover the basic experience from which all religion springs. Rudolf Otto in his The Idea of the Holy,2 has come near to uncovering this hidden source of religion. Human beings, faced with the vastness of this mysterious universe, awaken to what he calls mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is first of all a “mystery”. Human beings, faced with the presence of the unknown, could not but be filled with awe, not simply with fear of the unknown, but with a sense of the vastness, the unfathomable immensity of the world around them. The world was fearful – tremendum – but also fascinating – fascinans. It forced one to try to explore it, to fathom its immensity. It awoke desire, longing, yearning for something inexplicable. Later more sophisticated people have felt the same sense of awe in the presence of nature. Especially in the romantic movement in England and Germany in the nineteenth century this sense of the primordial mystery was awakened in both poets and philosophers. Even before this, Pascal with his mathematical genius was led to cry out: Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m ’ejfraye – “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid” – and Kant could rise above all the abstractions of his philosophy to acknowledge his awe in the presence of “the starry firmament above and the moral law within”.

This acknowledgement of the dual character of the mystery is extremely important. We have inherited from Descartes and the scientists of the seventeenth century a belief in a world divided into a physical world outside us and an inner world of subjective experience – what Descartes called res extensa – “extended substance” – and res cogitans – “thinking substance”. But we are discovering today that this division is illusory. Actually the division goes back beyond Descartes and western science to the Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries bc. It was then that the rational, analytical mind first began to awaken and the idea of the division between mind and matter arose. Before that time humanity as a whole enjoyed a unitive vision of reality. However far we go back in comparative religion, we find a common sense of the universe as an integrated whole. Humanity was conceived as one with nature and with the universal Spirit pervading the human and the physical world, plants and animals, earth and sky and sea. This is the primordial vision of the universe reflected in all ancient religion.

Mircea Eliade has shown how among tribal people today there is a common understanding of a cosmic power which manifests itself alike in nature and in man.3 It is called mana among the Melanesian islanders. It manifests itself in the whole creation but especially in any extraordinary phenomena such as thunder or lightning or a tempest, and in human beings who have exceptional powers, such as a shaman or a chief of a clan, and again in the spirits of the ancestors or the souls of the dead. This power is present in the whole universe, but breaks out, as it were, in certain people and in particular events. This gives rise to a belief in a divine world, a world of spirits, which govern the course of nature and are responsible for the fertility of the earth and the changes of the seasons. These beings are said to be endowed with infinite prescience and wisdom. The moral law, and often the tribal ritual, are said to have been inaugurated by them. All this, as Mircea Eliade insists, is not the result of rational, logical deduction but comes from the experience of the “sacred”. It is given immediately to consciousness as humanity discovers itself and takes cognizance of its position in the universe. They are not products of the conscious mind but experiences of the whole person, mediated through the rituals and customs of the tribe and revealed at the time of initiation.

We come here upon the fundamental difference between the mind of western man and that of the people of the ancient world. I say “western man”, because this development is typical of a male patriarchal culture. Ever since the time of ancient Greece, the human being in the west has been described as a “rational animal”, that is, an animal being with body and soul, of which the faculty of reason is considered to be the highest power. For modern western people the rational, analytical, logical, mathematical mind is considered to be the typical faculty of human understanding and no knowledge is considered to be scientific which does not depend on this. Yet this mode of knowledge is largely a product of the last three centuries in the west and was unknown to humanity in the thousands of years of its early history. As Jacques Maritain has pointed out,4 the intelligence of primitive man, that is, of human beings before the age of reason, was under the primacy of the imagination. The imagination, the image-making faculty, is the mode in which most people even today come to know the universe. We all form images of people and of things around us, and it is through these images that we come to know the universe. Jung has shown how it is through the images or archetypes of the unconscious that all human beings from the earliest times have come to know the universe, and the typical mode of expression of the imagination is the myth. It is in the myth that the source of all knowledge and religion is to be found. The mind of people in India today is still shaped by the great myths of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, shown on television, as they were once recited and dramatized in all the villages of India; and Christian people all over the world still live by the great myths of the Bible – the Creation and the Fall, the Exodus and the Promised Land, the Messiah and his Kingdom. In these great myths a profound wisdom is contained, a wisdom which guides and shapes human existence, but it is a wisdom in which reason is implicit not explicit. Reason proceeds by abstraction, by “drawing out” the rational concept from its embodiment in the imagination. The wisdom of a great poet, a Homer, a Vergil, a Dante, a Shakespeare is an imaginative wisdom, a wisdom which grasps reality not in abstract concepts but in concrete images. It is so also with the great scriptures of religion, the Vedas, the Quran, the Bible. In all of them Reality is made known, is revealed, not in the concepts of abstract reason but in the living language of the imagination, which touches not merely the analytical mind but the senses, the feelings and the imagination. The basis of all myth is to be found in symbols. A symbol is defined as a sign by which reality is made present to human consciousness. The most obvious example of this is the word. What distinguishes a human being from an animal is the capacity for speech. Every human child has this capacity and if left to itself will create its own language. This accounts for the amazing variety of languages among primitive people. Every little tribe will have its own language and it is only very slowly, even today, that a common language can be established. Now words in their original sense always represent concrete reality. It is only at a very late stage – we have seen in the first millennium before Christ – that abstract thought arises and words come to represent abstract ideas. In the early stages of human existence words represent – that is, make present to consciousness – concrete reality. Consciousness itself is simply the capacity to represent – to make present to oneself – the world which we experience through our senses. This is why the Hebrew, especially in the Psalms, always uses concrete terms and will say for instance: “My tongue shall praise you with joyful lips.” But in fact, all ancient language is concrete in this way. Words make present to consciousness the concrete world which surrounds us. This is why myth is the typical language of archaic thought. The myth makes present in concrete terms the reality of the world, which the human person encounters. The “archetypes of the unconscious”, of which Jung speaks, are simply concrete images of the world encountered in human consciousness. It is from these archetypal symbols, arising in the unconscious and brought into consciousness by the myth, that all human knowledge arises, and abstract ideas are only the refinement by the human reason of these primeval images. But in coming into consciousness, these images are illumined by the intelligence. They give meaning to life and enable human beings to understand – to “stand under” and so give focus to – the world in which they live.

In every advanced language a distinction is made between reason and the intellect, between ratio and intellects between dianoia and nous,and in India between the manas and the buddhi. The manas is the measuring mind, from the root ma, found in the “moon” which measures time, and “matter” which measures space. But beyond the manas is the Buddhi, the source of light (the Buddha is the enlightened one), the intelligence which has in-sight, which “sees into” reality. The seers of the Vedas were called rishis because they had this insight. The intellect is the faculty which “knows”, which does not merely “conjecture” or form a hypothesis, but which grasps the real by direct reflection on itself. The human mind, beyond the power of reason, has the power to reflect on itself, to know itself in its acts. We all reflect on our actions and on our experience day by day and this reflection gives us direct knowledge of our selves and our environment. Reason can then develop this knowledge by logic and analysis and mathematical theory and so evolve a scientific method, but the whole structure of science depends on the initial knowledge, the original knowledge of the self in its reflection on its acts. Descartes was right in a sense in saying: “I think, therefore I am”, but he was wrong in limiting thought to reason. To think is to reflect on oneself, to grasp oneself in the totality of one’s being in the world.

It is here that the function of the imagination is found. The imagination reflects the world not by means of abstract concepts but by images which make reality present to us in its concrete existence. It was this that led Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria to speak of the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception, a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I am’”. The whole creation is an act of imagination in the divine mind, an image of the eternal reality, which becomes present to us in this form. In the same way Wordsworth could speak of “imagination which in truth/ is but another name for absolute power/ and clearest insight, amplitude of mind/ and reason is her most exalted mood”. In the western mind as a whole the imagination has been seen as an inferior power, always subordinate to higher power of reason. But Wordsworth, like Coleridge, and Goethe saw the imagination, that is, the creative imagination in art and poetry, as above the normal exercise of reason.5 In the great poet, as in the prophets and seers of religion, the logical reason is transcended and becomes the instrument of a higher faculty of the mind. Today we are recognizing the difference between the right and the left brain, and realizing that the left brain with its linear thinking is only a part of the greater brain which gives insight into the total reality.

This has given us a new insight into the meaning of the ancient myths and the values of primitive religion. The people of ancient times did not think with a small part of their brain, as we have learned to do. They experienced the world in its totality with the totality of their being. A myth is not a fanciful story about the beginning of the world or some supposed divine event. It is the concrete presentation of the reality of the world as manifested in the imagination and engaging all the faculties of the human being. To understand the myth one had to be initiated into a total way of life and through it discover the meaning of human existence. Today we are searching for a myth which will give meaning to our lives, now that the myth of western science has betrayed us. Western science created the myth of a universe of solid bodies moving in space and time, obeying mathematical laws, but this myth has collapsed. As science itself has discovered, we know now that matter is energy, and time and space are concepts by which we try to organize our perceptions of the material world. The universe appears as a vast ocean of energy organized by an intelligence, of which our human intelligence is a reflection. We are coming back therefore to the ancient understanding of matter as energy – dynamis in Aristotle’s terms – organized by intelligence (nous) in the shape of “forms” or “morphogenetic fields” as Rupert Sheldrake has called them,6 which structure the universe. This is very near to the understanding of the perennial philosophy found in Greek and Arabian philosophers and the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. The intelligences forming the universe came to be known in Christianity as angels; and in Greece, as India today, as gods.

The concepts of gods and angels are strange to us now, but this is only because western science has tried to persuade us that the universe is composed of dead matter subject to mechanical laws. In reality, as we are discovering again, the universe is a living organism, undergoing continuous evolution, and informed by intelligence at every level. We are thus recovering the sense of the universe composed of powers and presences, which touch every aspect of our lives, both physical and psychological. This takes us back to the understanding of ancient, tribal people, as Christopher Dawson has noted, “Primitive man does not look upon the external world in the modem way as a passive, mechanical system, a background for human energies, mere matter for the human mind to mould. He sees it as a living world of mysterious forces greater than his own, which manifest themselves both in external nature and his inner consciousness”.7 This is the real world which we all inhabit and which the perennial philosophy has made known to us.

It is generally understood today that this universe began in an explosion of energy at an intense heat which, as it cooled down, developed into particles of matter such as photons, protons, electrons, and these gradually coalesced so as to form atoms and molecules, which structured the material universe. But these atoms and molecules have been found to be structured with mathematical precision and the material universe can be seen to obey mathematical laws. This means that there is an intelligence at work in matter. Mathematical laws are known by intelligence, and if the human intelligence finds mathematical laws at work in the universe, it must mean that something akin to human intelligence is present in matter from the beginning – unless all science is based on illusion. This has always been the view of the perennial philosophy. Aristotle and the Arabian philosophers spoke of the stars as “intelligences”, that is, they recognized in the stars the presence of intelligent powers which govern the universe. In the Christian tradition these intelligences or “cosmic powers” came to be known as “angels” or “messengers”. That is, they were seen as the agents of a cosmic intelligence, a universal power, which was responsible for the organization of the universe.

This again takes us back to the beginning of history and of all religion. Though most people have recognized many “gods”, that is powers or spirits, operating in the universe, there is a universal tendency to reduce all these powers and spirits to one supreme power and spiritual presence. This is found in almost all African religions, where a supreme creator God is recognized above all the spirits of ancestors and other beings which dominate the world, though in practice little attention may be paid to him. But as Mircea Eliade again has shown, the presence of a “skygod”, a “divine, celestial being, creator of the universe, who guarantees the fertility of the earth by the rains which it sends”, is found in all parts of the world. This being was known in the Vedas as Dyauspita, the “sky-father”, the letter “d” being found in all Aryan languages as in Zeus (gen dios) in Greece, and Jupiter (diupiter) in Latin, the letter “d” becoming “sk” in Norse. So everywhere we find the presence of a sky-father, and when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he could find nothing better than to say: “Our Father in heaven” (Greek ouranos, the sky).

This raises an important point. When people in the ancient world spoke of “heaven”, they meant both the sky – the firmament on high – and the power and the presence of the sky. We have grown accustomed to separating the material aspect from the spiritual. We think of the sky as a material phenomenon, a vault, a space, however we may describe it, which has been emptied of all spiritual reality, of power and intelligence. But for the ancient world there was no separation between mind and matter, between the phenomenon and the numenon, the material world and the power and intelligence which governed it. This division is due partly to the influence of Greek philosophy, especially Plato, but also to that of the Hebrew mind in the Bible. The people of Israel originally believed like other peoples in many gods, as can be seen in the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, which is plural. But gradually they were taught to believe in one supreme God, Yahweh, and worship of no other god was tolerated. But this led to a separation of God from the created world; a dualism was introduced, perhaps under Persian influence, which separated God from nature and left the natural world without any divine presence in it. It is this that has led to the western view of nature as an inanimate being separate from God, which has brought such disaster to the world today.

The Vedic Mythology

Religion in India took a quite different direction. The Vedas are generally supposed to have been brought to India in the second millennium by Aryan people, akin to the Greeks and Romans, from the west. The Vedic seers themselves look back to patriarchs of ancient times from whom they received this wisdom and no one can say from where it came. But this is not of great importance. The word Vedameans knowledge (from the root vid, to “see” or “know”) and the Vedas are held to be eternal (nitya). Like all ancient people they believed that the source of their religion did not come from the temporal world, the world of passing phenomena, but from the eternal. The Vedas were also said to be sruti (from the root sr, to hear). They were not invented by man but “heard” or “seen”; that is, they came by direct inspiration (though through a human instrument). They were also said to be apauruseya – without human authorship. This reminds us that all authentic knowledge comes not from the senses but from the mind, the intelligence, which reflects the divine intelligence, the source of creation. Though knowledge normally comes through the senses and through the whole apparatus of the brain, its source is in the mind itself, the intelligence with its capacity for self reflection, which gives knowledge not only of itself but also of its source in the universal, cosmic intelligence. It is this which we find in the Vedas – the rishis, the “seers”, were accustomed to reflect on themselves, and in meditation to discover the source of their knowledge, the prime intelligence or cosmic consciousness, from which human consciousness is derived. It is in the Vedas that we can best trace the passage from the ancient world of mythology, when the human mind was under the dominion of the imagination, to the philosophical understanding of ultimate truth and reality, which emerged in the Upanishads in the sixth century before Christ. The seers of the Vedas began like all ancient people with the belief in many gods, or powers and presences, both in the world of nature and in the human being. But from the earliest times they tended to see beyond all these gods to the one Reality, which lay behind them. A famous verse in the Rig Veda says: ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti – “the one being the wise call by many names”. It was this “one being” which haunted the mind of the Vedic seers, so that all “gods” were seen as but “names and forms” of this one Reality.

This one Reality came to be known in course of time as Brahman. The word brahman comes from the root brh, to grow or swell, and it seems first of all to have been applied to the mantra, the sacred word, which rose in the mind of the priest who offered the sacrifice. The centre of the Vedic religion was the fire-sacrifice, the yajna, in which a ritual altar was built and offerings made in the fire. Agni the god of fire was believed to consume the offerings. But Agni was not only the physical fire but the fire in the mind of the priest who offered the sacrifice. He had a physical body with his “flaming hair”, but he was also the “god who knows”, the priest who carried the sacrifice to the gods. In other words, Agni was the name of the primal energy in the universe, of which fire is the most obvious form, but he was also the energy of the mind, the intelligence, which orders the universe. Finally he becomes a symbol, like all the gods, of the primordial power and wisdom which shapes the universe. It was in this way that the brahman, the sacred utterance through which the sacrifice was enacted, became a symbol of the divine power, present in the sacrifice and in the whole universe and in the mind of man.

The Vedic myth develops this concept of Agni as the divine fire (or energy) in the universe into the story of the conflict between Agni and Vrata. Vrata represents the contrary force, the power which holds humanity captive and imprisons the mind in the hard rock of matter. Later Agni was replaced by Indra, originally, like Yahweh in Israel, a god of thunder – the power of the sky-god – but later recognized as the Lord of the gods, the power of the mind. In the story of the myth Indra with his thunderbolt (vajra) breaks through the hard rock at the base of the mountain and sets free the waters and the cattle imprisoned there. Indra here represents the divine mind, the supreme intelligence, which breaks through the hard rock, the dark matter, of the unconscious and sets free the waters, symbol of the life of the mind, and the cows, symbol of the fertility of consciousness. Cows in the Vedas are always symbols not only of fertility but of light. The dawn is said to release the cows from their pen with the rising of the sun.

Jeanine Miller in her book on the Vedas8 has shown how the Vedic seers in their meditation were able to transcend the limits of conventional religion and discover the hidden source of religion in the divine mind. The human mind has been subject from the beginning to the senses and the imagination. But always there is a hidden power in human nature which can transcend the senses and the imagination and open the human being to the intelligence which transcends the conscious mind. This breakthrough beyond sense and imagination occurred in the first millennium before Christ and the human mind awoke to full consciousness, to the experience of ultimate reality. Each of the great religions of the world, building on this foundation, established a way of life by which humanity could be set free from the forces of the unconscious and attain to truth and reality. But in the sixteenth century in the west this movement was reversed. The human mind began again to subject itself to the material world. The object of science became not to know the supreme reality and to understand the material world in its light, but to explore the material world in the light of a limited human reason – limited to the observation of phenomena. The result has been that scientists today are cut off from the sources of knowledge and confined to the knowledge of phenomena interpreted by the rational mind.

Karl Popper, one of the leading philosophers of science, in his book with John Eccles on The Self and its Brain,9 has tried to go beyond the materialism of western science. He recognizes three “worlds” or spheres of reality – the physical world observed by the senses and scientific instruments, the mental world of human reason, which analyses the physical world, and the world of “mental objects”, that is scientific theories which must have reality, because they are seen to act upon and transform the material world. But he still remains imprisoned in the world of reason and can conceive of no knowledge, which is ultimately not due to “conjecture” and “hypothesis”. But this undermines the whole basis of science and can only lead to universal scepticism. He acknowledges that human beings have the power of reflection, so as to form a self, a self-reflective being. But he does not see that this power of self-reflection is the basis of all certainty, and therefore of all science. I do not “conjecture” to my own existence or to that of a physical world. I know myself and the world in a direct act of self-reflection. I am present to myself and the world around me by direct experience, that is, by a reflection on myself in the act of my existence, I not only know that I exist; I know that I know. To know oneself is to experience oneself and one’s world immediately. This is the basis of all human knowledge and of all properly human existence.

It is true that I do not know my “essence”, that is, what I am. It is here that reason comes in and scientific conjecture and hypothesis, and such knowledge is always growing. But the knowledge of my existence and that of the world which I experience is given by direct intuition (“seeing into”). The reason why the western mind cannot grasp this is because it has been accustomed for centuries to observe external phenomena and to imagine that all knowledge comes from the senses. It has lost the art of meditation. But many scientists today are beginning to recover this lost art, of which David Bohm is the most eminent example. Apart from being an expert physicist, he is also a disciple of Krishnamurti and learned the practice of meditation. Meditation consists precisely in learning to go beyond the senses and the reason, which works through the senses, and to observe the action of the mind itself. It is then that one discovers the source of the mind, the ground of consciousness. David Bohm has described this in terms of the implicate and the explicate order.10 What we normally observe is the explicate order of the world, the world “unfolded” to human consciousness. But when we enter into meditation we go beyond the manifold world of sense and reason (that is of all “scientific” knowledge) and discover the world not explicated through the senses but in its original state of “implication”. The world is found in the self and the self in the world.

The Wisdom of the Upanishads

It was this experience of the self in its ground or source, in its original being, which was the discovery of the Upanishads. They called this self atman from the root an (as in animus and anima) to “breathe”. In meditation it is through the breath that one learns to go beyond the senses and the mind. By concentrating on the breathing all images and thoughts and feelings are brought to rest, and then in the silence, in the emptiness of all thought, the knowledge of the spirit dawns, the pure consciousness from which all conscious knowledge comes, the source of the activity of the mind. The Isa Upanishad speaks of seeing the “self” or “spirit” in all beings and all beings in the “self”. It then goes on to show the danger of dwelling either on transcendence, that is consciousness of a transcendent reality above this world, or on immanence, that is experience of the world as immanent in human consciousness. It is only when we learn to see the immanent (the material world) in the transcendent (the divine) and the transcendent in the immanent, that we find the truth. Both materialism and idealism can lead us astray. It is the consciousness which transcends the opposites and all dualities that reaches the truth.

The Kena Upanishad gives a beautiful example of how the problem of polytheism was solved in the Vedic tradition. The three gods, Agni, Vayu and Indra, the powers of fire and of the air and of thunder, win a victory which they attribute to themselves. But Brahman, the supreme reality, appears to them and shows that they owe all their powers to him, or to “that”, which has no form or name. The discovery was made that the “gods” are nothing but names and forms of the one Reality beyond name and form. This is a lesson for all religions. Each religion tends to exalt one particular name and form, Yahweh or Allah or Christ, above every other name and to forget that the supreme Reality has properly no name or form. It transcends all human understanding. This was discovered in the course of time in each religion, and we shall see how in each of them a process took place which led to the transcendence of all limitations and the recognition of one supreme truth or reality, which has no name. In India this was the achievement of the Upanishads. We can see it most clearly in the Katha Upanishad, where Nachiketas, the young man in search of truth, goes down to the world of the dead, thus dying to the world, as every seeker of the truth must do. Death, the guide to life, teaches him to leave everything behind and instructs him in the truth of the Atman, the spirit who is “difficult to be seen, who has entered into the dark, who is hidden in the cave, who dwells in the abyss, as God” and thus awakens him to the eternal truth, the mystery hidden at the heart of the world. It is this journey into the darkness, to death, which we all have to undergo, if we are to experience re-birth to life eternal.

The Mundaka Upanishad speaks of this mystery in terms of light, but it is in the Mandukya Upanishad that the most penetrating insight is given into human consciousness. There a distinction is made between the waking state of normal consciousness, the dream state and the state of deep sleep. But beyond these states of consciousness is the “fourth state”, the state of transcendent consciousness. It is this which is the goal of human existence. We have all to learn to transcend our present mode of consciousness, with its dependence on the senses and the imagination, and to experience the state of transcendent wisdom. This is a state which cannot be described. We have to experience it to know what it is. Yet it is present all the time in all human consciousness and every religion seeks to open the way to it. But as long as we remain in our present mode of consciousness, we cannot know the truth. Religion can point to it and show the way but only direct experience can convince us of the truth and lead to final liberation.

It is in a later Upanishad, the Svetasvatara, that we find the most comprehensive answer to the whole question. It begins by asking: “What is the source of the universe? What is Brahman? From where do we come? By what power do we live? Where do we find rest? Who rules over our joys and sorrows?” It then lists the various answers which have been given to these questions. “Shall we think of time, or of the nature of things, or of a law of necessity, or of chance or of the elements?” Having rejected all these answers, which modern science has given to the problem of life, it goes on to say: “By the yoga of meditation and contemplation the wise saw the power of God” – the devatmasakti, literally “the power of the spirit of God” – hidden in his own creation. “It is he who rules over all the sources of this universe, from time to the soul of man.” This illustrates precisely the approach of the Upanishads to the basic problems of life. It is by the “yoga of meditation and contemplation” that we come to the deepest understanding of life. Science and philosophy can only take us so far, dependent as they are on the senses and the rational mind. But in meditation we go beyond the senses and the rational mind and encounter the source of reality, the divine power hidden in creation and in the mind. This is the insight which gives knowledge of the truth and sets us free.

The Svetasvatara Upanishad then goes on to describe the three worlds – the world of matter, the world of mind or the soul, and God, the ruler of all. But it goes on to say that God, the world and the soul are all contained in the mystery of Brahman. For many people today the personal God, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, is a problem, since he so obviously reflects the limitations of the human mind. But in India from the earliest times it has been recognized that the personal God, whatever form he may take, is a reflection in the human mind of the one, transcendent reality, the Brahman. In the Svetasvatara Upanishad there is a magnificent revelation of a personal God, who here comes to be identified with Siva. He is said to be pure consciousness, the creator of time, all powerful, all knowing, the lord of the soul and of nature, but he is also the loving protector of all, the God of love. But at the same time he is recognized to be a form of Brahman, of the supreme mystery which transcends human understanding. We shall see how in each religion, in spite of the dominance of the personal God, this insight is always to be found.

The Revelation of the Personal God

It is in the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, that the great revelation of the personal God in India is to be found. The Bhagavad Gita appears in the great epic poem, the Mahabharata, which was composed between 400 bc and ad 400. It belongs not to sruti, the revelation of the Vedas, but to the later development of religion in India known as smriti (from the root smr, to remember). In it Krishna is revealed as the form of the personal God. The source of the Krishna legend is not known. There is more than one Krishna mentioned in earlier times. But by this time he has come to be seen and worshipped as the one supreme God, the creator of the universe, the source of all wisdom and the power of salvation. In the Gita a clear distinction is made between the divine nature of Krishna, his invisible spirit, and his visible nature, manifested in all creation. The language used may often seem pantheistic – “I am the taste of living waters, and the light of the sun and the moon.” But one must always remember in reading Hindu texts that, though the language may be pantheistic, seeming to identify God with nature, the actual doctrine is “pan-en-theistic”, that is a belief that God is in everything. As Manikkar Vasakar, the great Tamil mystic, put it: “You are all that is and You are nothing that is.” A great deal of misunderstanding has been caused by labelling Hindu doctrine “pantheistic”. But in reality it is a constant witness to the profound fact that God is in every being, as the ground of its existence, and the great insight of the Upanishads, as we have seen, was the recognition of this one supreme reality as the ground and source of all creation and of human existence. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna is exalted as the personal God, the “friend of all”, dwelling in the heart of every creature and offering salvation – that is final liberation – to all who call on him. Yet at the same time this personal God who reveals himself as love, is one with the infinite Brahman, the eternal spirit who sustains the universe. This revelation of the personal God in the Bhagavad Gita, like that of Siva in the Svetasvatara Upanishad, has to be compared with that of Yahweh in the Jewish tradition and that of Allah in Islam, and finally we have to see how they all relate to the mystery of the Trinity in Christian tradition. 

The Challenge of Buddhism 

Buddhism presents the greatest challenge to all religions, especially to those which believe in a personal, creator God. Gautama Buddha coming at the end of the Vedic period (563-483 bc) rejected all the traditional beliefs and practices of religion. The Vedic gods, the ritual sacrifices, the Brahmin priesthood and the whole caste system, which has provided the religious basis of Hindu society ever since, were all rejected in favour of a negative philosophy, which might be considered a sort of nihilism. The great insight of Buddha was into the transitoriness of the world. “All is passing (anitta), all is sorrow (dukka), all is unreal (anatta).” This was the basis of Buddha’s teaching. The end of all things is nirvana, the “blowing out”, the extinction of all being, the eradication of all desire. It might be said that this was the most radical philosophy ever propounded. It strikes at the root of existence as we know it. Yet behind this negative philosophy there is a profound insight. Nirvana is the end of all becoming, of all desire, of all that makes life worth living for most people. Yet when all change and becoming has ceased, when all desires, all “clinging” to life, has come to an end, there is an experience of absolute bliss. This was the experience of Buddha, as he sat beneath the Bo tree. He entered into deep meditation. He allowed all movement of the senses to cease, put an end to all desire, and then in the silence and solitude of the mind he experienced the bliss of pure consciousness. He entered into the depth of the soul, the ground of consciousness, and there found the peace, the joy, the fulfilment for which he had been seeking. This is the message of Buddhism today. As long as we remain engrossed in the world of the senses, ever seeking the fulfilment of our desires, we can never find peace. All over the world today, as in all Asia in the past, this message of “enlightenment”, of inner peace, is being heard. The teaching of Buddha was handed on by his disciples by word of mouth and only came to be put into writing after several centuries, but the essential teaching has come down to us particularly in the Dhammapada, the Path of the Law. 

The teaching of the Dhammapada is clear. It is not the body or the senses but the mind which is the cause of all human problems and it is the mind which is also their cure. As long as the mind attaches itself to thoughts and feelings and desires, it is carried away into a world of illusion and becomes subject to passion and desire. But when the mind withdraws from the impressions of the senses and realizes its own inherent nature, it experiences inner joy and peace and fulfilment. The note of joy sounds all through the Dhammapada, the joy of those who have renounced passion and desire and all attachment to the material world, and have found inner peace and freedom, and who know the truth. The western mind has concentrated its attention on the material world, to understand its working by science, to control it by technology and to make life in this world as attractive as possible. It has succeeded beyond all its dreams in analysing matter down to its minutest particles, in exploring the furthest limits of time and space, in unifying the human world and creating a standard of life which has never been known before. But all this has been done at the cost of polluting the earth, the water and the air, of destroying innumerable species of plants and animals, and of using up the resources on which human life depends. All this is the result of following a philosophy which made the knowledge and control of the material world its goal. The western world has now to undergo a metanoia, a change of mind, which will enable it to recover the ancient wisdom, the perennial philosophy, on which human nature actually depends. 

Buddhism, first in the Hinayana tradition and then in the Mahayana, is one of the sources of this eternal wisdom. Buddha broke through the bondage of the human mind to the senses and the material world and set it free on the path of truth and peace. Buddhism may seem to be a religion without God or creation or a soul, but Buddha set the human mind free from its attachment to the body and the material world and opened it to truth and life. There is no God in Buddhism and no Creator, but there is in the peace of Nirvana infinite wisdom and infinite compassion, and what else do we mean by “God”? This is the challenge which Buddhism presents both to the religion and to the science of the west. Buddha saw that all the images and concepts of “God” and all the rituals and practices of religion have no value, unless they are sustained by the mind, which goes beyond all images and concepts, and realizes its true nature, not as dependent on the body and senses but as the source of the life of the body and the intelligence of the brain. Western science has grown up under the illusion that there is a material world “outside” the mind. It is now slowly learning, what the perennial philosophy has known all along, that the world, which appears to be outside us, is inconceivable apart from the mind which observes it. It was the experience of physicists in the present century working with quantum physics, which finally made it clear that the world which the scientist observes is not reality in itself but reality exposed to human consciousness, to the mind and the brain of the scientist. 

It was this discovery of the independence of the mind from the senses for which Buddha was responsible. In the early Hinayana tradition the emphasis was on the practical aspect of this discovery. Buddha saw humanity imprisoned in the world of the senses like people trapped in a burning house, and his aim was to set them free, to teach them by the “eightfold noble path” how to be free from the pain, the sorrow of this world. His was a message of salvation for suffering humanity. Everything depends on the Knowledge of the “four noble truths”, of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the way to the end of suffering. This way depended essentially on knowing the nature of the mind, and it was the exploration of the nature of the mind which led to the great development of Mahayana doctrine. This development took place many years after the passing of Buddha, but one may hold that it was implicit from the beginning. There is a vast literature of Mahayana doctrine, not only in Sanskrit but also in Tibetan and Chinese, but beneath all its complications there is an essential truth proclaimed in it and it is this that we need to understand. We have chosen the treatise on the Awakening of Faith by Ashvaghosa as an example of it, but perhaps this quotation from the Lankavatara Sutra can indicate its essential message. 

When all appearances and names are set aside and all discrimination ceases, then that which remains is the true and essential nature of things, and as nothing can be predicated of the nature of essence, it is called Suchness (tathata) of Reality. This Universal, undifferentiated, inscrutable Suchness is the only Reality, but it is variously called Reality (<dharma), Body of Reality (dharmakaya), Noble Knowledge (arya jnana), Noble wisdom (arya prajna). This Dharma of the image – lessness of the Body of Reality is the Dharma which has been proclaimed by all the Buddhas, and when all things are understood in full agreement with it, one is in possession of perfect knowledge (prajna) and is on the way to the attainment of the noble knowledge (arya jnana) of the Tathagatas (that is, the Buddhas, who have “attained to that” or reached the goal of Reality). This is the essential teaching of the Mahayana, which, as we shall see, is found alike in Hindu, Chinese and Greek philosophy, that when we pass beyond the “discriminating” or analytical knowledge of science and philosophy, we come to the knowledge of reality itself in pure consciousness. 

The Chinese Way

The Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way and its Power, as Arthur Waley translates it, is perhaps the most mysterious book ever written. Its author is unknown, its date is unknown, and its meaning is uncertain, and yet it presents what has been called “perhaps the most profound conception which has ever entered the human mind”. The earliest tradition is that it was written by Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius. He is said to have been born in 602 bc and to have died at the age 160 in 442 bc, but many scholars today question his very existence and claim that the book was written in the third or fourth century bc and was the work of more than one author. This is all to the good, as the exact date and authorship of the book are not important. It belongs essentially to that great breakthrough in human consciousness which occurred in the first millennium before Christ, and is a supreme example of that great mystical tradition which underlies all religion. The Tao Te Ching begins by affirming, as the Upanishads and Buddha had done, that the ultimate reality has no name – “Tao, the Way, is the ‘by-name’ which we give it”. Yet this in itself is significant. Both Hinduism and Buddhism speak of ultimate reality as Brahman or Nirvana in metaphysical terms, but the Chinese, with their more practical character, prefer to speak of it as the Way. Tao is the “rhythm” of the universe, the “flow” of reality, more like the “ever living fire” of Heraclitus or the field of energies of modern physics. Its character is the union of opposites, the Yin and the Yang, the passive and the active, the female and the male. This leads in Chinese philosophy to a profound sense of the complementarity of all existence. The western world, based on the Hebrew and the Greek, thinks in terms of opposites, of good and evil, truth and error, black and white. Its way of thinking is logical, based on the principle of contradiction. But the Chinese mind, and with it the eastern mind as a whole, thinks more in terms of complementarity. It is aware of the Unity which transcends and yet includes all dualities, of the whole which transcends and yet unites all its parts. But we need to remind ourselves that the west also attained to this insight in the great Christian philosopher, Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of the Roman church, who spoke of the coincidentia oppositorum – the “coincidence of opposites”. 

The Tao Te Ching is always aware of this unity behind the multiplicity of the world, but it is a dynamic unity. “There was something”, it says, “formlessly fashioned, which existed before heaven and earth. Without sound, without substance, dependent on nothing, unchanging, all pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the Mother of all things under heaven. Its true name we do not know. Tao is the by-name which we give it.” It is significant that it is called the Mother. We have grown up in a patriarchal civilization and our images of God, the supreme reality, are all masculine. The Hebrew people, from whom the western world received its religion, belonged to a patriarchal culture and saw their God in masculine terms, consciously reacting against the cult of feminine deities, among the surrounding peoples. But the Tao is essentially feminine. It is the Root, the Ground, the Receptive. The most typical concept in the Tao Te Ching is that of wu wei, that is “actionless activity”. It is a state of passivity, of “non-action”, but a passivity that is totally active, in the sense of receptive. This is the essence of the feminine. The woman is made to be passive in relation to the man, to receive the seed which makes her fertile. But this passivity is an active passivity, a receptivity which is dynamic and creative, from which all life and fruitfulness, all love and communion grow. The world today needs to recover this sense of feminine power, which is complementary to the masculine and without which man becomes dominating, sterile and destructive. But this means that western religion must come to recognize the feminine aspect of God.

The Tao is compared to water, which “is excellent in benefitting all things” (the source of all fertility) “and always takes the lowest place”. “There is nothing weaker than water, but for overcoming things that are hard and strong, there is nothing that can equal it, nothing that can take its place.” This is the virtue of humility, the poverty of spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, to which the kingdom of heaven belongs. This leads to the paradox of the value of emptiness. “We make pots of clay,” it is said, “but it is the empty space in them which makes them useful. We make a wheel with many spokes joined in a hub, but it is the empty space in the hub which makes the wheel go round. We make houses of brick and wood, but it is the empty spaces in the doors and windows that make them habitable.” This again is the value of “non-action”, what Gandhi called ahimsa. According to the Tao Te Ching a country should not be ruled by violence or by any action on the part of the ruler. The more the state is organized, the more resistance it encounters. “A large kingdom must be like the low ground towards which all streams flow. It must be a point towards which all things under heaven and earth converge. Its part must be that of female in its dealings with all things under heaven. The female by quiescence conquers the male; by quiescence gets underneath.” This is a strange paradoxical view of human society, but may it not be that of which the world today stands in need? 

A favourite symbol for the Tao is the Uncarved Block, that is the Original Nature. That is the Root, the Ground of being, the Centre on which all things converge. It is identified with the Void and the Quietness, all alike being terms which point to the hidden mystery of the universe. So it is said: “Push far enough towards the void, hold fast enough to the Quietness.” This in turn is called the mystic female. “The Spirit of the Valley”, it is said, “never dies. The gateway of the Mystic Female is called the root of heaven and earth.” And again it is said: “Can you in opening and shutting the heavenly gates [that is, the gates of consciousness] always play the female part?” This may sound very paradoxical and unreal, but for centuries now the western world has been following the path of Yang – of the masculine, active, aggressive, rational, scientific mind – and has brought the world near to destruction. It is time now to recover the path of Yin, of the feminine, passive, patient, intuitive and poetic mind. This is the path which the Tao Te Ching sets before us. 

The Monotheism of India 

The breakthrough in human consciousness which took place in India and China in the first millennium, also appeared in Greece at the same time. The Greek philosophers from Thales onward in the sixth century before Christ were the first people in the west to develop a strictly rational mode of thought. In the fifth century this movement came to a head in Socrates and Plato, who established the rational mind as the criterion of truth and morality. Unfortunately, the Greeks were always inclined to stop short with rational thought expressed in concepts and judgements. But there was always a deeper movement of thought which went beyond the rational mind. Plato himself acknowledged that we must see in Egypt the source of the more mature wisdom of the west. In Egypt the god Thoth, known in Greece as Hermes Trismegistos, the Thrice-Great Hermes, was conceived as the source of a profound spiritual wisdom, which was preserved in Greece in what is known as the Hermetic tradition. This was a genuine mystical tradition, which was able to transcend the rational mind and discover the source of all wisdom and knowledge in the Nous, the intuitive mind, which itself was seen to derive from a primordial principle beyond human understanding. This insight was developed in Neoplatonism, especially by Plotinus in the third century ad. This philosophy, which reflects the same insight as the Hindu and Buddhist masters, was to have a profound influence on the religion of the west, affecting especially Islam and Christianity, both of which developed a mystical tradition akin to that of Hinduism and Buddhism in the east, and forming an essential part of the philosophia perennis, the universal wisdom at the base of all religion. 

But before we consider this mystical tradition in western religion, we need to reflect on the development of a pure monotheistic religion in India. The Bhagavad Gita, as we have seen, had laid the foundation of faith and devotion to a personal, creator God. In the course of time this religion of bhakti, of fervent love and devotion, spread all over India and in the Middle Ages developed in the Sant movement into a form of pure monotheism. For the Hindu, the personal God was normally conceived in a human form as an avatara, a “descent” of God, in the form of Rama or Krishna or some other being. But in the Sant movement the personal God was conceived as totally without form, infinite, eternal, unchanging, transcending the universe yet immanent in it and revealing himself to his devotees as an immanent presence in the heart. The great exponent of this religion was Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, which though largely confined to India yet contains within itself the principles of a universal monotheism. What is remarkable about this religion is that though it stems from Hinduism, it was able to transcend the limitations of traditional Hinduism and embrace elements of Islam, especially of Sufi doctrine, and include both Hindus and Muslims among its followers. What is still more important, it could transcend caste and include out- castes among its saints. In this way it became a truly universal religion. It was able also to transcend the dualism implicit in most monotheistic religion.

In order to uphold the transcendence of God, the supreme Being, monotheists feel impelled to see the world as separate from God. Thus religions tend to fall either into dualism or into monism. In order to avoid saying that God and the world are Two, the monist will deny the reality of the world and hold that all multiplicity is an illusion. But the monotheism of Guru Nanak and all authentic religion holds that God, the absolute Reality, is both transcendent and immanent. The world has no reality in itself – as such it is mayay an illusion – but its reality is from God and in God. God – or Brahman or Tao or whatever name we give to the absolute reality – exists in himself, and the universe and humanity exist only in relation to the one Reality. This is the doctrine of Guru Nanak. God, the eternal Truth, is manifested in the creation and in the human mind, but yet remains transcendent beyond word and thought. Knowledge of God comes through meditation on the universe and the human heart, but only the grace of God, the divine illumination, can reveal the hidden mystery. We give extracts from the morning, noon and evening prayer of Guru Nanak from the Adi Grant as an example of his spiritual legacy, together with some hymns of other later Gurus, and of Kabir who combined the Hindu and the Muslim traditions, and the cobbler Ravidas. There are six words which express the true nature of Guru Nanak’s religion. The first is Sabad (Skt Sabda), the Word. God the transcendent Mystery is ineffable but he expresses himself in his Word, which is revealed in all creation and makes itself known in the human heart – the man or manas of Hindu tradition. This Word is said to be anahat that is “unheard” in the sense that it is an interior word. The Word in turn is expressed in the Name (Nam). This is the content of all God’s revelation, reflected in all the creation and made known in the human heart. Both the Word and the Name are revealed by the Guru. The Guru is a key concept of Sikh religion as of Hinduism, but it must be understood primarily of the inner guide. The external Guru, whoever he may be, exists only to awaken the disciple (the Sikh) to the Guru within, the inner light and truth. The Guru reveals the will of God, the hukam, which is the divine order in nature. To discern this divine order beneath all the changing phenomena of the world is to know the Truth (Such, Skt.Sat), and this in turn is a gift of divine Grace (nadar). Here we have a complete philosophy for the world today. We look out on the world around us, the world both of nature and of humanity, and beneath all the violence and conflict we discern a divine order, which is the truth, the reality behind all appearances. This discernment of the divine will comes to us through the guidance of the Guru, whoever he may be, who awakens us to the inner light, the word of truth within, and enables us to know his “name”, the character, the person, of the indwelling spirit, and all this comes to us by the “grace” of God. This contact with the supreme mystery guides and directs our life, if we empty ourselves, surrender our ego (the haumai) and allow the divine truth (the Sach Khand) to take possession of our being. 

It only remains to add that the God of Guru Nanak, though personal, has no human form. He is formless – nirankar. In other words he is like the nirguna Brahman of Hindu tradition, that is “without attributes” or beyond all human expression. Yet he expresses himself in his Word, his self-manifestation in creation, by which he becomes saguna with attributes, revealing himself in human nature and making known his “name”. His Name again, like his Word, is not a particular name; it is the universal Name, the content of the divine revelation. This is an austere religion. There are none of the satisfactions of a man-like God, with whom human beings can relate. He is approached by bhakti, that is, loving devotion, but it is the devotion of total self-giving, and the union between the human and the divine – the sahaj –is a mystical union which cannot be expressed in words. It is here that the Nath tradition, the theory of yoga, which was part of the Sant religion, enters in. For the yogi, union with Brahman was not a theory or a doctrine which could be expressed in words. It was an experience of the person in the depth or ground of its being. Thus religion ends as it began, in mystery. It is the meeting of the transcendent mystery at the heart of the universe with the mystery hidden in the heart of humanity. It is the passage beyond the space-time universe, beyond human reason and understanding, beyond the created world into the uncreated, timeless, spaceless reality which is life and truth and love. 

Semitic Monotheism

When we turn to the monotheism of Judaism and Islam, we encounter different approaches to the same reality. Both religions stem from a very primitive society, polytheistic and polygamous, consisting of petty tribes for whom war was the normal way of settling disputes and in which women were subjected to men. It was the great achievement of each religion that it was able to rise to the conception of one God, all powerful and all knowing, the creator of heaven and earth, that is, of the spiritual and material universe. This God was a “righteous” God, upholding the moral law, and a “holy” God, demanding total submission (Islam) on the part of his followers. In both religions their God was held to be “merciful and compassionate”; these are, in fact, the primary attributes of God repeated daily in the opening prayer of the Quran. But the mercy and compassion of God were held to be strictly reserved to those who believed in him; the rest were condemned to everlasting punishment. It is this moral dualism in the Semitic religions which has caused so much trouble in the world, and this in turn is based on a metaphysical dualism. God is wholly transcendent, separate from the world, and though his mercy and compassion may draw his faithful followers to him, the division between God and humanity can never be overcome.

There can be no doubt that this dualism springs from the very primitive conditions in which each religion originated. Yahweh was the “Lord of hosts”, that is, of the armies of Israel, who led them in war against their enemies. In the same way Muhammad had to fight for his followers against the clans who defied them. Thus violence and conflict were built into each religion from the beginning, and their God inevitably reflected the mind of his followers. Both in Israel and in Islam this policy of war and conquest was able to build up a people, uniting many tribes and clans, and eventually many nations and peoples, in a religious community which has been able to resist all the forces of disruption through loyalty to their faith in the one God, to whom they have entrusted their lives. Still more remarkable has been the way in which they have been able to construct a doctrine and a discipline, which has brought them into contact with the great tradition of wisdom in India and in Greece, which we have been studying.

Islam and the Sufi Doctrine

In Islam this was the work of the Sufi mystics. Within a hundred years of the death of Muhammad an ascetic movement arose in Islam, influenced, no doubt, by the Christian monks encountered in Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia, which became known as Sufism from the woollen garment (suf) which they wore. As Islam spread westward across north Africa to Spain and eastward to Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, it encountered both the philosophical tradition of Greece, especially of Neoplatonism, and the refined poetic and artistic culture of the Middle East. It was then that a spiritual movement awoke in Islam which was to develop one of the most profound forms of the perennial philosophy which has ever been known. The Sufi mystics drew out the symbolic meaning of the Quran much as the Christian mystics developed the symbolism of  the Bible. We give the text from the Quran on the Light, which inspired many of the mystics, especially Al Ghazali (1058-1 m), who wrote a profound commentary on it. Al Ghazali exercised the greatest influence on the development of Sufism, since being one of the leading doctors of Islam he converted to Sufism and made it acceptable to the orthodox Muslim. He left us the story of his conversion, of which we print the most important part. But the person in whom the mystical doctrine of Islam found its most perfect expression was the “great sheik”, Ibn al Arabi. Born in Spain in ad 1165, he travelled through north Africa to Mecca and the Middle East and finally settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240. He was not only a profoundly learned man but was the subject of mystical experiences and divine revelations. His great work The Meccan Revelations contains 2500 pages and has not yet been translated. His smaller work, The Bezels of Wisdom, has recently been translated into English and reveals a mind of extraordinary intellectual power. In other words, he is an example of a mystic who is also a philosopher, and can give a coherent and intelligible form to his mystical insight.

The basic principle of his philosophy is his conception of the Oneness of Being (Wuhdat al wujud). According to this principle all difference, distinction and conflict are but apparent facets of a unique reality. In other words he reached the same understanding of ultimate truth and reality which had been reached by the great Hindu and Buddhist philosophers. The dualism inherent in orthodox Islam was overcome and Islam learned to speak the language of the universal wisdom. This “Oneness of being”, in which all opposites are reconciled, is the supreme insight of the perennial philosophy. It cannot be known by reason, but where the heart is opened in faith to the supreme Reality, it is known with intellectual clarity. Ibn al Arabi calls this principle al haqq, the Reality, while the personal God, Allah, is the form of the Reality when conceived in relation to the created world. Ibn al Arabi speaks of the “God created in belief” to distinguish this form of God from the Reality which embraces God and the world in one. The problem for all monotheism has been how to reconcile the one absolute, supreme Reality, the personal God, with the created world of time and space, of change and becoming. For orthodox Islam the human being is a Slave (abd) of God, created separate from God and for ever incapable of sharing the divine nature. But for Ibn al Arabi a link was found between the human and the divine in what he calls the “isthmus” (barsakh). This was what is called the Perfect Man (al Insan al Kamil). The Universal or Perfect Man is the archetypal man. In Sufi theory every created being has its archetype, its “idea”, in the all-creating mind, and the archetypal man is the being in whom the form or nature of man is revealed. In a beautiful image he is said to be the eye by which the divine subject sees himself and the perfect mirror which reflects the divine light. We have to recognize that beyond the individual human mind, which reflects through the body and its senses, there is always the universal mind, the source of truth, of logic and mathematics, of metaphysical and moral insight. This is the source of all certainty in human experience. This is the buddhi of Hindu tradition, the prajna of Buddhist tradition, the nous of Greek tradition. It is interesting to notice that Ibn al Arabi uses the word khayal, which has been translated “creative imagination”. This recalls the power of Imagination which we observed in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Goethe, the power to “mirror” the creation. It is by this power of Imagination that the divine mind mirrors the creation and the creation reflects the divine mind. The Perfect Man therefore is the image in which the divine being reflects the creation and created being reflects the mind of God. Following Islamic tradition, Ibn al Arabi sees in Muhammad the image of the Perfect Man, but he also has the interesting idea of the “saint”, as one who sees beyond the God “created in belief” to the ultimate truth and the reality, from which the prophet and apostle derive their mission.

Jewish Mysticism – The Kabbala

Israel like Islam began as an extremely primitive religion. Its God, Yahweh, was a tribal god, who was responsible for the massacre of the first-born of a whole people and who led the armies of Israel in the invasion of Palestine, where they were commanded to destroy the cities and kill both men, women and children. Yet from this barbarous religion there emerged under the leadership of Moses a profound doctrine of God, as the creator and Lord of the universe, who was “holy”, and “righteous”, the author of the moral law. The problem, however, remained, that as their God was exalted in holiness, the opposing power in the universe came to be projected as a power opposed to God in the form of Satan. Originally Satan, as in the Book of Job, was one of the “sons of God”, but in the course of time, perhaps under the influence of Persian dualism, he came to be seen as an independent power of evil, the devil (the diabolos or destroyer who “throws apart” or divides the world as opposed to the symbol, the symbolon, which “throws together” or unites the world). This created a fundamental moral dualism in Judaism, which led to belief in an eternal reward for the “righteous” and eternal punishment for the “wicked”. Yet in Judaism as in Islam a remarkable doctrine emerged in the Middle Ages, particularly in Spain, in the form of the Kabbala, in which, like the Sufis in Islam, the Jewish mystics were able to transcend this dualism and enter into the main stream of the universal wisdom which had come down from India and Greece.

The supreme Reality came to be known in the Kabbala as En Sof, the “Infinite”. In this infinite, eternal Reality, a division arises, which is nothing less than the emergence of self-consciousness. It is from this self-consciousness of the Eternal that creation arises. In the infinity of Being there is an infinite variety of possible beings, finite forms or manifestations of the one infinite Being. These original forms of being were conceived in the Kabbala as emerging from the ten Sefirof the ten spheres of divine manifestation, a kind of spiritual universe, which preceded the manifestation of the created universe. This constituted the archetypal world from which the created world, as we know it, is derived. In a view which reminds us of the “void” (sunyata) of Mahayana Buddhism, the source of this manifestation of the infinite was conceived as “nothingness”. This nothingness is the abyss of being, the divine darkness of a later tradition, from which all forms of manifestation emerge. It is interesting to find that the origin of manifestation is to be found in a “point”, in which the whole creation was originally folded up. This reminds us of David Bohm’s conception of the universe being the explication, the unfolding, of the implicate order, in which the whole creation was originally “folded up”.

In the Jewish tradition this source of the manifestation of the infinite was identified with the Wisdom (hokhmah) of God. In this eternal wisdom the essences or ideas, the archetypes, of all created being, are held to exist. Once more we come upon the fundamental idea that before the material space-time world comes into existence, it is conceived in the mind of the infinite and eternal Being. In the divine Wisdom all the forms or ideas of created Being exist in an undifferentiated state. The principle of differentiation by which the separate forms of being – both material and human – come into existence is known among the Sephiroth as Bina, the Intelligence. Once again the Intelligence or Intellect, the Nous, is seen as the source of division, of analysis, which separates the individual being from its matrix, the divine mother, who conceives the creation in her womb. But this “point” from which all creation comes, is a dynamic point, which is compared to a fountain. It is the mystical Eden, the Paradise, from which the waters of the divine life flow over the creation. All these streams of divine life are held to fall into the “great sea”, the Shekhinah, the symbol of the divine presence in creation. It is of great interest that the Shekhinah was conceived as feminine, so that the Kabbala was able to overcome not only the dualism of God and creation, but also the dualism of male and female, and to recognize a feminine aspect in God. As one of the Kabbalists declared: “If one contemplates things in mystical meditation, everything is revealed as one.”

It must be emphasized that this is in no sense a form of pantheism. For pantheism the world in its diversity and multiplicity is conceived as God. This is clearly opposed to any forms of monotheism. For the Kab- balist, on the other hand, as for the tradition of the perennial philosophy as a whole, the world is conceived as one with God only when it is known in its original unity in the divine mind before any form of multiplicity or diversity appears. We have to recognize that the world of phenomena, of things as they appear to the senses and the rational mind, as western science is beginning to discover, is an illusion, while the Reality is that which gives existence and meaning to phenomena, and that Reality is what monotheists call God. It is interesting that the Kabbala also develops the doctrine of Man as the Image of God and conceives Adam Kadmon, the Original Man, like the Perfect Man of the Sufi Tradition and the Purusha of Hindu tradition as the image of God. We can therefore see how in each religion an identical doctrine emerges, which can rightly be called the Universal Wisdom, or what in India is called the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion.

The Holy Trinity and the Body of Christ

Christianity emerged as a separate religion from Judaism only by slow stages. Jesus of Nazareth was born of a Jewish family, said to have been descended from the line of David. He grew up as a Jew, speaking Aramaic and studying the Jewish scriptures, no doubt in Hebrew. His mind and character were formed according to Jewish tradition and he thought and spoke in terms of the traditional religion of Israel. He accepted the Law of Moses as a sacred inheritance and interpreted his own life and destiny in the light of the prophetic revelation. He made his own the Jewish expectation of a Messiah, who would redeem the world and reveal God’s final plan of salvation. In particular he saw in the “suffering servant” of Isaiah the figure of his own person and destiny, and in the Son of Man of the book of Daniel, who was to come in the clouds of heaven and usher in the kingdom of God, the sign of his own calling to establish the kingdom of God. As the fortunes of Israel declined and their country was conquered first by the Babylonians, then by the Persians and Greeks, and finally by the Romans, the hopes of Israel turned towards a divine intervention, which would put an end to the present world and inaugurate a new age. Such was the expectation of Israel at the coming of Christ.

But rooted, as he was, in the tradition of the Law and the Prophets, Jesus yet felt himself called to break with the traditions of Israel in many ways. There was first of all the custom of the observance of the Sabbath. This had become very restrictive and often defeated the very purpose for which it had been instituted. Again and again Jesus is seen rejecting the strict observances of the sabbath and declaring that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”. This applied to the whole observance of the Law. The Law of religion was relativized and made subordinate to the one, universal law of love of God and of one’s neighbour. But this inevitably changed Jesus’s attitude to people under the law. He deliberately associated with “sinners”, people who were prevented by their status or occupation from observing the law. This led him to show compassion to prostitutes and to a woman caught in the act adultery. This led him in turn to break down the barrier between the Jew and the Samaritan, an ancient religious division which had divided Israel in two. Finally he came to the point of accepting women – even a Samaritan woman – on terms of equality with men. It is difficult for us to imagine the effect of this revolutionary attitude on the people of his time, but one can understand how it brought him enemies on every side, particularly among those who upheld the Law. Thus the whole problem of religion and morality today was focused in Jesus’s life as a Jew, in his time.

But a problem remains in trying to interpret the life and teaching of Jesus today. Jesus himself spoke Aramaic (a Semitic dialect akin to Hebrew) and his message was given to a small group of disciples in Palestine. As the Christian community spread outside Palestine to the cities of the Roman Empire, the disciples, who were no longer Jews, spoke Greek, and the life and teaching of Jesus was recorded in what is called the New Testament – as distinguished from the Old Testament of Jewish religion – not in Aramaic but in Greek. As a result we know only of the life and teaching of Jesus through the gospels, which were composed during the second half of the first century in Christian communities, which inevitably interpreted them in the context of their own situation. It cannot be denied that an authentic portrait of Jesus as a man and of his basic teaching comes down to us in the four gospels – four distinct accounts written under different circumstances, yet all basically consistent with one another. Yet the differences remain and how much each account was influenced by the situation and circumstances of the writer, it is impossible to say. 

This is especially evident when we come to consider the relation of Jesus to orthodox Judaism. In Matthew’s gospel, which was always considered to be the first gospel and clearly has an Aramaic background, the Jewish impact on Jesus’s teaching is very clear, especially in the harsh judgement on “sinners”, where we are continually reminded of their being cast into the “outer darkness” with “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. It is possible that Jesus used such language, but it is much more probable that this is a Jewish interpretation of his teaching with the pronounced dualism of traditional Judaism. At any rate in Mark’s gospel, which most critics now regard as the earliest, and which was probably written in Rome, the centre of the “gentile” world, this element scarcely occurs, and Luke, who also writes from a Hellenistic perspective, presents above all the compassionate character of Jesus, as seen, for instance in the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. This becomes extremely important for our understanding of Jesus today. There is nothing more alienating than the concept of a vengeful God condemning people to eternal punishment. This concept seems to be an inheritance from a Semitic monotheism, which was unable to overcome the dualism inherent in this system of thought.

When we turn to the fourth gospel, probably composed in Ephesus at the end of the first century, we are in another world. Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, was a centre of what is known as gnosticism and the fourth gospel bears every sign of being composed in this milieu. Gnosticism took many forms, Hellenistic, Jewish and Christian, but essentially it was a form of gnosis an awakening to the ancient wisdom, the divine knowledge or jnana in Hindu terms, which came down through Persia and Egypt to the west. Much of it became very debased in the process, but a spark of wisdom or transcendent knowledge remained. It is this which we find in the fourth gospel. In the prologue the writer speaks of Jesus as the Word or Logos of God, thus linking him with the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoic philosophers, but also with the Wisdom of the later Writings of Judaism. After the Law and prophets the Jewish scriptures included the Writings, in which they drew on the ancient wisdom of Egypt and Babylonia and thus extended the horizon of their thought. In the wisdom literature of the Old Testament we encounter an authentic witness to the ancient tradition of Wisdom, and the fourth gospel places the life and teaching of Jesus in this context. It is above all a symbolic story. The writer has no hesitation in altering times and places, putting the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, for instance, instead of at the end. In this he is simply recovering the ancient tradition of symbolism, in which the symbol is seen as a sign under which reality becomes present, and reveals its deeper meaning.

In the fourth gospel all the words and actions of Jesus are given this symbolic character. Jesus himself is a symbol of God, a sign by which the divine mystery makes itself present and becomes known. The western mind is accustomed to abstract thought, by which truth is communicated through universal concepts but, as we have seen, in the ancient world reality was made known through concrete symbols – a symbol being precisely a sign by which reality is made present to human consciousness. In the fourth gospel therefore Jesus’s words and actions are all seen as “signs”, by which the divine Reality, the absolute Truth, makes itself present to those who are capable of receiving it. It is not addressed to the rational, analytical, scientific mind, which will always miss its meaning. It is revealed to the deeper intuitive mind, the nous or intellects or rather beyond the mind to the centre of the human person, the spirit, the pneuma of St Paul, the atman of the Hindu tradition, which is the true Self, the inner reality of the human being.

It is of particular importance that in the fourth gospel the Logos, the Word, is said to have “become flesh”. There is always the danger that Reality should be reduced to an abstraction. It can become a universal idea, which, however profound it may be, does not touch the “flesh”, the concrete reality of the human person. This is the peculiar revelation of the fourth gospel, that the Reality, the Truth, the Word, is revealed in the flesh and blood of a human being, who sheds his blood on the cross and rises to eternal life in the flesh. This does away for ever with the view that this world of flesh and blood, of suffering and death, is unreal in the light of the perennial philosophy. The world of science is an unreal world: it is a world of sense phenomena and mental abstractions. But in the real world, while the reality of sense experience and rational knowledge is not lost, it is taken up into the world of personal being, of the whole, from which sense and reason derive their reality. This is the world of the fourth gospel, as of all the forms of ancient wisdom. It is the world which we know, when we cease to be dominated by the rational mind and allow the light of the eternal truth to shine in the heart. Jesus in the fourth gospel is seen always open to this divine light: “You shall see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” The angels are, of course, the manifestations of the divine presence (like the Sephiroth in the Kabbala) and the Son of Man is the eternal Man, the primordial Person, who is present in Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus in the fourth gospel refers himself at every stage to his source in the Father. The Father is the Source, the Origin, the One. Jesus receives his being from the Father. He is God (theos) from God (ek tou theou). Gradually through the gospel this relationship of Jesus to the Father is unfolded. He is the Way that leads to the Father, the Truth that reveals the Father, the Life that flows from the Father. He tells the Samaritan woman that “the Father seeks those who will worship him in spirit and truth” and speaks of a “fountain of water springing up to eternal life”. He feeds the hungry with bread and speaks of a “bread that comes down from heaven”. Always the reference is to the transcendent reality, the one Light, the one Life, the Source of all. He speaks of giving his “flesh for the life of the world”, of “eating his flesh and drinking his blood”. All this is spoken of the flesh and blood of eternal life, for “my flesh is meat indeed, my blood is drink indeed”, that is, in truth, in reality, not under temporal appearances. This language is almost impossible for people to understand today. We have come to mistake the appearances of the spatio-temporal world for reality, and it is hard for us to see behind the appearances to the Reality which is always there.

It is important to emphasize this dependence of Jesus on the Father. A custom has grown up of speaking of Jesus as God, but this is quite contrary to the usage of the New Testament. In the New Testament, almost without exception, the word “God” is reserved to the Father – the Source and Origin of all. Jesus never speaks of himself as God, but emphasizes all the time his total dependence on God. “The Son can do nothing of himself but only what he sees the Father doing.” “I can do nothing on my own authority.” When he was accused of making himself God, his reply was not that he was God, but that it was said in the Old Testament “you are Gods and all of you sons of the most High”, thus emphasizing that the divine life is offered to all, while he is the one “whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world”. Yet with this total dependence on the Father, Jesus receives everything from the Father, the Father has “given all things into his hands”. This is the deep meaning behind this language of Father and Son. The Son is the image, the self-expression, the self-consciousness of God. As the earlier gospels of Matthew and Luke had recorded: “No one knows the Son but the Father and no one knows the Father but the Son”, and they add “he to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”.

This brings out a further dimension in the mystery of the Son. Jesus is not Son in an exclusive sense. Every human being is created in the “image and likeness” of God. Every human being is a capacity for God. Jesus comes to reveal the destiny of all humanity. Jesus speaks of himself in terms of utmost intimacy with the Father. “I am in the Father and the Father in me”, “He who sees me, sees the Father”, “I and the Father are one.” Here we have expressed in the clearest terms the “non-duality” of Jesus and God. He is one with the Father and yet he is not the Father. This is neither monism, a simple identity, nor dualism, a real separation. It is “non-dualism”, the mystery revealed in the Hindu and Buddhist and Taoist scriptures and discovered in Judaism and Islam. Here we are at the heart of the cosmic revelation. Jesus makes this clear when he prays for his disciples “that they may be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us”. This is the destiny of all humanity, to realize its essential unity in the Godhead, by whatever name it is known, to be one with the absolute Reality, the absolute Truth, the infinite, the eternal Life and Light.

But this unity cannot be known without the pain of self-sacrifice; it demands “nothing less than all”. Jesus had warned his disciples: “He who would save his life will lose it; he who will lose his life for my sake will find it”, and he himself took the path of self-sacrifice to the point of death. This was accompanied by a tremendous struggle, when he “sweated blood”, as his human nature rebelled against the pain, humiliation and death, which he had to endure; and he prayed “let this cup pass away”, but immediately added, “not my will but thy will be done”. This is the cost of surrendering the self, the separated, individual self, which has to die, if the true self is to be found. But there was still one last trial for Jesus to undergo. He had been rejected by his own people, condemned by the Roman government, forsaken by his disciples, but he had still to make a final sacrifice. He had still to lose his image of God. As he lay dying on the cross, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is the last trial of every spiritual person, to surrender his image and concept of God and to face the Reality which lies beyond all images and concepts. Only then could he say: “It is finished”. 

When he parted from his disciples Jesus had promised to send them the Spirit (Greek pneuma from the root pnu, to breathe or blow, like the Sanskrit Atman, the Buddhist nirvana, the “blowing out”, the Latin animus and anima, the Hebrew ruah). The Spirit is like the wind or the breath – “no one can see whence it comes or whither it goes” – it is invisible. Jesus had to depart in the flesh to become present in the spirit. In every religion there are rituals and doctrines by which the Spirit makes itself known, but we have always to go beyond all rituals and doctrines to the Reality which they represent. We cannot do without the rituals and doctrines, but if we remain at that level we become idolaters, not discerning the truth. So the Spirit in all religion is the Reality, which gives meaning to all observances. But there is one expression of the Spirit which is more meaningful than all others and that is love. Love is invisible, but it is the most powerful force in human nature. Jesus spoke of the Spirit which he would send as Truth but also as Love. “If anyone loves me, my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our abode with him.” This is the love, the prema and bhakti, which was proclaimed in the Bhagavad Gita, the compassion (karuna) of Buddha, the rapturous love of the Sufi saints. Ultimately a religion is tested by its capacity to awaken love in its followers, and, what is perhaps more difficult, to extend that love to all humanity. In the past religions have tended to confine their love to their own followers, but always there has been a movement to break through these barriers and attain to a universal love. The Universal Wisdom is necessarily a message of universal Love.

Eventually it can be said that the mystery of the Godhead, of ultimate Truth and Reality, is to be found not in a personal God nor in an impersonal Absolute but in inter-personal relationship, or a communion of love. The universe has been called a “complicated web of interdependent relationships” (Capra), and humanity as a whole can be described as a web of inter-personal relationships. Every being seeks spontaneously to express and communicate itself, and the whole universe can be conceived as the mode of expression and communication in space and time of the one infinite, eternal reality. In a human being this expression and communication comes through consciousness which manifests itself in knowledge and love. The supreme Being or absolute Reality therefore comes to be conceived as expressing itself in an eternal Word or Wisdom, which is manifested in the structure of the universe and in the human heart and communicating itself in a Holy Spirit or divine energy, which is manifested in all the energies of the universe and in human beings above all in the energy of love. It is in this way that the Godhead comes to be conceived as a Trinity. The Father, the Ground and Source of being, expresses himself eternally in the Son, the Word or Wisdom, which reveals the Godhead, and the Holy Spirit is the Energy of love, the feminine aspect of God, by which the Godhead eternally communicates itself in Love. All human wisdom and love is a manifestation in space and time of this eternal Wisdom and Love. In Christian tradition the Word of God is conceived to have received its full and final revelation in Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of God to have been revealed in the fullness of love manifested in his sacrifice on the Cross and present in the Church as the Spirit of love, communicated to every Christian.

It is here that the feminine aspect in God is revealed, though it has rarely been recognized in Christian tradition. If the Son is “begotten” of the Father, there must clearly be a Mother in whom he is conceived. In the Incarnation the Son was conceived in the womb of the Virgin overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. 

In Eternity the Son is begotten of the Father and conceived in the womb of the Mother, the Holy Spirit, just as in creation the Father sows the seed of the Word in matter, and the Holy Spirit, the Mother, nourishes the seed and brings forth all the forms of creation. In the Hindu tradition the world comes forth from the union of Purusha and Prakriti, the Male and Female principles, and in Sufi doctrine the world is brought into being by the “Breath of the Merciful”. In Semitic religions the fear of sex as a disruptive force in human life has often led to the suppression of women and a failure to recognize the presence of the feminine in God. But the inclusion of the Song of Songs in the sacred Writings of Israel opened the way to the recognition of the essential holiness of sexual love, as shown in the Christian commentaries on the Song of Songs from the time of Origen in the third century to Sister Bernard in the twelfth. In Hindu and Buddhist tradition sexual love has always been seen as a symbol of divine love. Ibn al Arabi’s expression “Breath of the Merciful” (nafas al rahman) is especially significant, since the word rahman comes from the root rahima, which means the “womb”. The “merciful” is thus conceived as the womb from which all the potentialities in the divine mind are released in creation.

We can thus discern a basic pattern in all the great religious traditions. There is first of all the supreme Principle, the ultimate Truth, beyond name and form, the Nirguna Brahman of Hinduism, the Nirvana and Sunyata of Buddhism, the Tao without a name of Chinese tradition, the Truth of Sikhism, the Reality – al Haqq – of Sufism, the Infinite En Sof of the Kabbala, the Godhead (as distinguished from God) in Christianity. There is then the manifestation of the hidden Reality, the Saguna Brahman of Hinduism, the Buddha or Tathagata of Buddhism, the Chinese Sage, the Sikh Guru, the personal God, Yahweh or Allah, of Judaism and Islam, and the Christ of Christianity. Finally there is the Spirit, the atman of Hinduism, the “Compassion” of the Buddha, the Grace (Nadar) of Sikhism, the “Breath of the Merciful” in Islam, the Ruah, the Spirit, in Judaism and the Pneuma in Christianity. But in each religion this universal truth is embodied in a community, in which it receives a particular structure of ritual and doctrine, which separates the religions from one another. In Christianity the divine revelation in Christ was embodied in the Church. This Church took various forms, as it spread through the Roman Empire and then through Europe and beyond. But at an early stage there arose a conception of the Church as a universal community. This appeared particularly in the Letter to the Ephesians, which stemmed from the same gnostic environment as the fourth gospel. The Letter to the Ephesians takes up from the Letter to the Colossians, which stems from the same milieu, the conception of the pleroma, the “fullness”, corresponding with the Sanskrit pumam. This signifies the absolute fullness of reality, but it is now said that this fullness dwells in Christ – “in him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily”. This is a remarkable text revealing a conception of the “godhead”, as in Meister Eckhart, beyond the personal God, and this fullness is said to dwell “bodily” in Christ, that is, the divine fullness or ultimate reality is present in its fullness in a human being. The Letter to the Ephesians goes on to say that this fullness is found in the Church, “which is his Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all”. We have here the conception of a human community, which embraces all creation, for according to the Letter to the Colossians, in Christ “all things were created, in heaven and on earth . . . all were created through him and for him.” This is a truly cosmic vision embracing the whole created world, which we now know to be an integrated whole, and this forms a Body, a living organism, which is capable of embracing all humanity. We have therefore the conception of a universal community capable of embodying the Universal Wisdom and uniting all humanity in one Body, one living whole, in which the “fullness”, the whole, of the Godhead dwells. 

In practice, of course, the Church has become divided into innumerable little churches, each with its own limited horizon and cut off from the wider religious traditions of the world. But today we are able to see how the Christian churches, while recognizing the values of each Christian tradition, could transcend these divisions, and at the same time open themselves to the values and insights of other religions. Each religion has to undergo a death and resurrection – a death to its historical and cultural limitations and a resurrection to a new life in the Spirit, which would embody the traditions of the Universal Wisdom in a way which responds to the need of humanity today. No doubt we are all very far from realizing this unity, but as the different religions of the world meet today, we are discovering our common heritage and becoming aware of the unity which binds together the whole human race and makes it aware of its responsibility for the whole created universe. The concept of one world, one human race, and one religion based on the Universal Wisdom, has acquired a new significance, as a way to escape from the disastrous conflicts which are dividing the world today.

From Universal Wisdom: A Journey Through the Sacred Wisdom of the World, Bede Griffiths, pp. 7-43 (Harper Collins 1994)

Notes

  1. Mircea Eliade: Patterns in Comparative Religion (Sheed and Ward 1958)
  2. Rudolf Otto: The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press 1923)
  3. Mircea Eliade: Patterns in Comparative Religion (Sheed and Ward 1958)
  4. Jacques Maritain: Sign and Symbol (Sheed and Ward)
  5. cf The Sayings of Goethe: “A man born and bred in the so-called exact sciences, at the height of his analytical reason, will not easily comprehend that there is something like an exact concrete imagination”
  6. Rupert Sheldrake: A New Science of Life (Blond and Briggs 1981)
  7. Christopher Dawson: Progress and Religion (Greenwood Press, London 1983)
  8. Jeanine Miller: The Vedas (Rider and Company, London 1974)
  9. Karl Popper and John Eccles The Self and its Brain (Routledge, London 1990)
  10. David Bohn: Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980)