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It was stated that the "extent" of an assignee's right was an ambiguous term. The nature of the one Reality must be known by one's own clear spiritual perception; it cannot be known through a pandit (learned man). Similarly the form of the moon can only be known through one's own eyes. How can it be known through others ? Who but the Atman is capable of removing the bonds of igno- rance, passion and self-interested action ? . . . Liberation cannot be achieved except by the perception of the identity of the individual spirit with the universal Spirit. It can be achieved neither by Yoga (physical training), nor by Sankhya (speculative philosophy), nor by the practice of religious cere- monies, nor by mere learning. . . . Disease is not cured by pronouncing the name of medicine, but by taking medicine. Deliverance is not achieved by repeating the word ' Brahman,' but by directly experiencing Brahman. . . . The Atman is the Witness of die individual mind and its opera- tions. It is absolute knowledge. . . . The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and of Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity. The identity of Brahman and Atman is affirmed in hundreds of sacred texts. . . . Caste, creed, family and lineage do not exist in Brahman. Brah- man has neither name nor form, transcends merit and demerit, is beyond time, space and the objects of sense-experience. Such is Brahman, and ' thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness. Supreme, beyond the power of speech to express, Brahman may yet be apprehended by the eye of pure illumination. Pure, abso- lute and eternal Reality such is Brahman, and 'thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness. Though One, Brahman is the cause of the many. There is no other cause. And yet Brahman is independent of the law of causation. Such is Brahman, and ' thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness. . . . The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand) the desire for personal separ- ateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginning- less time. It creates the notion, 'I am the actor, I am he who experiences.' This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separ- ateness is called Liberation. It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman. When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition (i.e. when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred), knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him. The wise say that this threefold way is like an' iron chain, binding the feet of him who aspires to escape from the prison-house of this world. He who frees himself from the chain achieves De- liverance. Shankara In the Taoist formulations of the Perennial Philosophy there is an insistence, no less forcible than in the Upanishads, the Gita and the writings of Shankara, upon the universal immanence of the transcendent spiritual Ground of all existence. What fol- lows is an extract from one of the great classics of Taoist litera- ture, the Book of Chuang Tzu, most of which seems to have been written around the turn of the fourth and third cen- turies B.C. Do not ask whether the Principle is in this or in that; it is in all beings. It is on this account that we apply to it the epithets of supreme, universal, total. ... It has ordained that all things should be limited, but is Itself unlimited, infinite. As to what pertains to manifestation, the Principle causes the succession of its phases, but is not this succession. It is the author of causes and effects, but is not the causes and effects. It is the author of condensations and dissipations (birth and death, changes of state), but is not itself condensations and dissipations. All proceeds from It and is under its influence. It is in all things, but is not identical with beings, for it is neither differentiated nor limited. Chuang Tzu From Taoism we pass to that Mahayana Buddhism which, in the Far East, came to be so closely associated with Taoism, bor- rowing and bestowing until the two came at last to be fused in what is known as Zen. The Lankavatara Sutra, from which the following extract is taken, was the scripture which the founder of Zen Buddhism expressly recommended to his first disciples. Those who vainly reason without understanding the truth are lost in the jungle of the Vijnanas (the various forms of relative knowledge), running about here and there and trying to justify their view of ego-substance. The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb), which is not the realm of those given over to mere reasoning. . . . Pure in its own nature and free from the category of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled Buddha-womb, which is wrongly apprehended by sentient beings. One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures, One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities. The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water, And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon. The Dharma-body '(the Absolute) of all the Buddhas enters into my own being. And my own being is found in union with theirs. . . . The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame; Like space it knows no boundaries, Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness. It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it; You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it, And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way. You remain silent and it speaks; you speak, and it is dumb; The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it. Ywig-chia Ta-shih I am not competent, nor is this the place to discuss the doc- trinal differences between Buddhism and Hinduism. Let it suffice to point out that, when he insisted that human beings are by nature 'non-Atman the Buddha was evidently speak- ing about the personal self and not the universal Self. The Brahman controversialists, who appear in certain of the Pali scriptures, never so much as mention the Vedanta doctrine of the identity of Atman and Godhead and the non-identity of ego and Atman. What they maintain and Gautama denies is the substantial nature and eternal persistence of the individual psyche. 'As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed).' About the existence of the Atman that is Brahman, as about most other metaphysical matters, the Buddha declines to speak, on the ground that such discussions do not tend to edification or spiritual progress among the members of a monastic order, such as he had founded. But though it has its dangers, though it may become the most absorbing, because the most serious and noblest, of distractions, metaphysical thinking is unavoidable and finally necessary. Even the Hinayanists found this, and the later Mahayanists were to develop, in connection with the practice of their religion, a splendid and imposing system of cosmo- logical, ethical and psychological thought. This system was based upon the postulates of a strict idealism and professed to dispense with the idea of God. But moral and spiritual experi- ence was too strong for philosophical theory, and under the inspiration of direct experience, the writers of the Mahayana sutras found themselves using all their ingenuity to explain why the Tathagata and the Bodhisattvas display an infinite charity towards beings that do not really exist. At the same time they stretched the framework of subjective idealism so as to make room for Universal Mind ; qualified the idea of soullessness with the doctrine that, if purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind or Buddha-womb ; and, while maintaining godlessness, asserted that this realizable Uni- versal Mind is the inner consciousness of the eternal Buddha and that the Buddha-mind is associated with 'a great com- passionate heart' which desires the liberation of every sentient being and bestows divine grace on all who make a serious effort to achieve man's final end. In a word, despite their inaus- picious vocabulary, the best of the Mahayana sutras contain an authentic formulation of the Perennial Philosophy a formula- tion which in some respects (as we shall see when we come to the section, 'God in the World') is more complete than any other. In India, as in Persia, Mohammedan thought came to be enriched by the doctrine that God is immanent as well as transcendent, while to Mohammedan practice were added the moral disciplines and ' spiritual exercises,' by means of which the soul is prepared for contemplation or the unitive know- ledge of the Godhead. It is a significant historical fact that the poet-saint Kabir is claimed as a co-religionist both by Moslems and Hindus. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the perse- cuting and make the wars. Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often ' wis"er, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.' For example, how significant it is that in the Indo- European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ' two ' should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonourable) are both derived from 'duo.' The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bevue ('blunder literally 'two-sight'). Traces of that 'second which leads you astray' can be found in 'dubious,' 'doubt' and Zweifel for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing- both-ways, and modern American slang its ' two-timers.' Ob- scurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy 'two* makes another decisive appearance. Here it may be remarked that the cult of unity on the politi- cal level is only an idolatrous ersat for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unifica- tion under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. But excessive privilege and power are standing tempt- ations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty; oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive know- ledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another. Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence. My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself. St. Catherine of Genoa In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself. St. Bernard I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ' O' thoul!' Bayazid of Bis tun Two of the recorded anecdotes about this Sufi saint deserve to be quoted here. 'When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, "Four years." They said, "How can that be?" He answered, "I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one's life.'" On another occasion someone knocked at the saint's door and cried, 'Is Bayazid here?' Bayazid answered, 'Is anybody here except God?' To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same. Eckhart The spirit possesses God essentially in naked nature, and God the spirit. Ruysbroeck For though she sink all sinking in the oneness of divinity, she never touches bottom. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator. And here one cannot speak of the soul any more, for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. There she is no more called soul, but is called immeasurable being. Eckhart The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. Eckhart 'I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.' Or perhaps it might be more accurate to use the verb transitively and say, 'I live, yet not I; for it is the Logos who lives me 9 lives me as an actor lives his part. In such a case, of course, the actor is always infinitely superior to the role. Where real life is concerned, there are no Shakespearean characters there are only Addi- sonian Catos or, more often, grotesque Monsieur Perrichons and Charley's Aunts mistaking themselves for Julius Caesar or the Prince of Denmark. But by a merciful dispensation it is always in the power of every dramatis persona to get his low, stupid lines pronounced and supernaturally transfigured by the divine equivalent of a Garrick. O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee. Between the Catholic mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth, centuries and the Quakers of the seventeenth there yawns a wide gap of time made hideous, so far as religion is concerned, with interdenominational wars and persecutions. But the gulf was bridged by a succession of men, whom Rufus Jones, in the only accessible English work devoted to their lives and teachings, has called the 'Spiritual Reformers. 5 Denk, Franck, Castellio, Weigel, Everard, the Cambridge Platonists in spite of the murdering and the madness, the apostolic succession remains unbroken. The truths that had been spoken in the Theologia Germanica that book which Luther professed to love so much and from which, if we may judge from his career, he learned so singularly little were being uttered once again by Englishmen during the Civil War and under the Cromwellian dictatorship. The mystical tradition, perpetuated by the Protestant Spiritual Reformers, had become diffused, as it were, in the religious atmosphere of the time when George Fox had his first great 'opening' and knew by direct experience : that Every Man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ, and I saw it shine through all ; And that they that believed in it came out of Condemnation and came to the Light of Life, and became the Children of it; And that they that hated it and did not believe in it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. This I saw in the pure Openings of Light, without the help of any Man, neither did I then know where to find it in the Scriptures, though afterwards, searching the Scrip- tures, I found it. |
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