One of the curious privileges of being an
editor is the task of perusing journals with points
of view wildly different from your own. So from
time to time I look at some conservative Christian
publications just to see what's going on at the
other end of the religious spectrum. They generally
stir in me the same fascinated horror that GNOSIS
no doubt provokes in them.
These magazines often express the fear that
the West is being subjected to a wave of
proselytism from Asian religions, notably Hinduism
and Buddhism. (When we talk about the "East" in
this issue, for the most part we will be talking
about these two traditions.) Conservative
Christians seem to regard yoga and meditation as a
fifth column from the inscrutable Orient, which is
cleverly using our penchant for fitness and
relaxation to implant its nefarious ideas into our
unsuspecting brains. This threat has awakened the
attention of the Pope himself, who in his recent
best-seller warns the faithful against Buddhism's
"negative view of the world."(1)
If this sinister infiltration started at a
particular time and place, it would have to be the
1893 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago,
which played host to Swami Vivekananda, a disciple
of the great sage Ramakrishna. Ihla F. Nation's
article in this issue describes some of the effects
Vivekananda and his successors have had on Western
seekers, but it may be useful to give some
background to his coming.
To some extent Vivekananda's way had been
paved by H.P. Blavatsky, whose writings, published
mostly in the 1870s and '80s, presented a digest
(not, perhaps, always rigorously accurate) of
Eastern teachings and whose Theosophical Society
inspired a resurgence of pride among Indians in
their own culture.
It would, I think, be very difficult to
understand the work of Blavatsky and her successors
apart from the historical currents of their age.
Chief of these was the apparent political and
cultural triumph of the West. At the time of
Blavatsky's death in 1891, a quarter of the globe
belonged to the British alone, and the European
powers were busily gobbling up the remaining bits
of Africa and Asia that had so far kept their
independence. In the wake of European gunboats and
traders came the missionaries, who sought to leave
their own stamp on the local cultures.
I will not play the fashionable game of
berating Western colonialism and imperialism. Nor
am I impressed by the fantastic and sentimentalized
views of "traditional" cultures prevailing today.
But it is true that the pressure of the West
weakened and demoralized those who upheld the
traditional ways of the East. And this pressure
came, curiously enough, at the very time when
Western intellectuals had become disillusioned with
Christianity. Throughout the nineteenth century,
philosophers including Schopenhauer, Emerson, and
Nietzsche were turning to Eastern texts to feed
their insights.
It was the accomplishment of people like
Blavatsky and Vivekananda to reverse the current of
Western dominance in its forms of missionary
Christianity and "scientific" materialism. They
wanted not only to restore native pride in the
tremendous riches of Asian civilization, but to
satisfy the West's hunger for its wisdom.
Hence if there has been a wave of proselytism
from the East over the last century - and I would
agree there has - it has emerged partly in reaction
to Christianity's own efforts to propagate itself
in alien soil. (At least the Easterners have had
the courtesy to leave their guns at home.)
As a result of this avid cross-fertilization,
Hindu and Buddhist ideas have leaked into popular
consciousness. Deepak Chopra beams from the covers
of a dozen New Age magazines; you can buy
"ayurvedic" shampoos and face creams; and people
now joke about "past lives" as they used to joke
about St. Peter and the pearly gates. So it
behooves us to stop and take a look at the impact
Eastern spirituality has had on the West.
Most significantly, perhaps, the Eastern
traditions have revived our interest in spiritual
experience and practice - something that had almost
been lost in the West. After the Enlightenment,
mainstream Christianity and Judaism came to glorify
the rational, ethical dimension of their faiths at
the expense of the mystical and contemplative.
Meditative traditions were shunted aside, and
prayer came to resemble exactly what Christ said it
shouldn't be - "vain repetitions" of stock
formulas.
In the 1950s and '60s, disillusioned with the
aridity of contemporary religion, Western seekers
began to investigate practices like Zen sitting and
Transcendental Meditation. The Western faiths were
slow to respond, but today, a generation after
Eastern religion first hit mass consciousness,
Christianity and Judaism have managed to rummage
around in their attics and unearth, say, the Prayer
of Jesus, or the Jewish meditation practices of
teshuvah and hithbodeduth. One even comes across
occasional hybrids like "Christian yoga."
Eastern teachings, then, have goaded the
Western traditions to shake off some of their dust
and engage with a living spiritual dimension.
Sometimes, as Sam Webster's article in this issue
suggests, Eastern religions have offered useful
pointers on attitude and technique. On the other
hand I can't claim to be terribly awed by the
wholesale importations of Hinduism and Buddhism
that I've come across here. (This may explain why
I'm editing a magazine on Western rather than
Eastern inner traditions.)
This is not to say that these venerable
religions have nothing to teach us. Clearly they
have. And the various attempts to prove the
inferiority of Hinduism or Buddhism to Western
faiths strike me as wholly unconvincing. Alan Watts
put it well: "The Christian who maintains that,
say, the doctrines of the Vedanta or of Mahayana
Buddhism are inferior to his own, must not forget
that he bases his judgment on standards which he
has acquired from Christianity - so that his
conclusion is foregone, or, more plainly,
prejudiced."(2)
All the same, Eastern religions, as they have
been established in the West, often seem less like
a carefully prepared feast than a half-digested
mass in the stomach of a ruminant. This is not for
lack of fundamental knowledge or good will, but
there are several issues that complicate the
process.
In the first place, there is simply the
problem of making the tradition understood. Any
teaching is prone to oversimplification as it is
transmitted, and the problems are complicated when
there are enormous cultural distances to traverse.
One example is reincarnation, which, many people
will tell you, is a central doctrine of both
Hinduism and Buddhism.
Not quite. Buddhists don't even believe that
there is a "self" to reincarnate. They view
successive "incarnations" not so much as an
individual identity choosing a sequence of bodies
but more like a wave in the ocean whose momentum
generates similar waves: the actions of one life
create a certain inertia that carries over into
another.
Much the same is true of Hinduism, at least
according to the early twentieth-century
Traditionalist Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, profiled in
this issue. He went so far as to say that "no
doctrine of reincarnation . . . has ever been
taught in India." According to Coomaraswamy, a man
only "reincarnates" in the sense that he lives on
in his descendants; otherwise the Hindu scriptures
teach that there is "one and only one transmigrant"
- "the Lord . . . .the Supreme and Solar Self,
Atman, Brahman, Indra." who is one and who lives in
all beings perpetually.(3)
Transmission of doctrine is a major problem,
but it is a comparatively simple one. A much deeper
issue faces the "missionaries" of Eastern
religions: namely, determining what in their
traditions is essential and what is outward form,
well-adapted to one time and place but
inappropriate for another.
The most obvious instance is the guru-disciple
relationship, which in the East is a well-tested
means of imparting knowledge and maintaining a
lineage. As Ihla Nation's article shows, this has
very often not been the case here. Is it because of
our own weakness and depravity, or, as Ram Dass has
suggested, because the East simply hasn't sent its
best people over? Both may be true. But let me
offer another explanation.
From infancy, Americans are inculcated with
the belief that "all men are created equal." If we
have often fallen short of this ideal in our
history, it still remains embedded in what Jung
might have called the "racial stratum" of the
American psyche.
Devotion to the guru violates this core
belief. The idea that some people have higher
spiritual attainment than others, and may be able
to transmit it by way of direct contact, is not the
issue here. But worshiping an ordinary (or for that
matter extraordinary) individual goes directly
against this basic notion of the equality of all
human beings. If Americans repudiate this
principle, they tend to lose a certain inner
compass that is not easily restored. Hence the
difficult and often disastrous manifestations of
the guru-disciple relationship in the West.
This is not to say that absolute equality is a
prerequisite in the American spiritual scene, or
that there have not been many sincere and upright
Eastern teachers who have settled here. My point is
simply this: Imparting a teaching must take some
regard of the cultural context. Certain elements
may have to be emphasized, while others may have to
be curtailed. To carry out this brief while
remaining faithful to the teaching's essence is
delicate work indeed. I am not sure that the
proponents of Hinduism and Buddhism have
accomplished this goal; some do not even seem to
see that it is needed.
All of which leads to the overwhelming
question: where do East and West meet? Do they
share a genuine common ground? Or are there
irreconcilable differences that no amount of talk
about toleration and brotherhood can ultimately
overcome?
You can't really write magazine articles
unless you are fond of gross overgeneralizations.
So you will, I hope, indulge me as I permit myself
a few about the differences between Eastern and
Western spirituality:
* In the East, the Absolute is often depicted
in impersonal terms, such as the Hindu notion of
Atman or the Buddhist "no-self." The West, by
contrast, tends to see God as ultimately personal
and capable of relating to his creatures in a
personal way. (This notion of an impersonal
Absolute, combined with the human need for personal
devotion, may well explain the form that devotion
to the guru has taken in the East. In the West, the
highest devotion tends to be reserved for God.)
* The East, with its notion of kalpas and
yugas - immeasurably long but nonetheless finite
eons that recur like the seasons - emphasizes the
cyclical nature of time. In the West (with the
possible exception of Paganism), time is viewed in
a much more linear fashion: the Last Day will mark
"the end of time."
* Nearly all traditions view the human
condition as radically problematic, believing that
something somewhere has gone terribly wrong. The
West usually frames this issue in moral terms: the
story of the Fall in Genesis, for example, suggests
that our present unfortunate state comes from
rebelling against the will of God. In the East,
this imperfection tends to be viewed in cognitive
terms - ignorance, maya, avidya (avidya being the
"primordial loss of awareness" that is the ground
of all manifest existence).
As I say, these are generalizations. After
all, many Hindus feel tremendous devotion to gods
like Krishna and Ganesh, while Meister Eckhart's
Godhead and the Ain Sof of the Kabbalists are quite
impersonal. Mahayana Buddhism seems to expect a
kind of metaphysical apocalypse in the
"deliverance" of all sentient beings from samsara.
And Socrates, in many ways the founder of Western
philosophy, insisted that all evil is merely
ignorance.
In any event, I would say that these issues
are superficial compared to what is perhaps the
fundamental difference between these two great
religious strains.
Ultimately East and West differ most radically
in their assessment of the real. In Eastern
scriptures, the real is constantly described in
terms of what is eternal and unchanging; the
physical world, with its transient forms and
sensations, is merely a shadow. The West describes
reality in almost exactly the opposite terms: it is
what we can touch and see and hear. If something
can't be perceived by the senses, it's "unreal."
(And that may include the perceiver.)
Again you can cite counterexamples, like the
various schools of Hindu empiricism as well as
Plato's celebrated image of the cave in the
Republic, which seems to assert what I have
described as the Eastern view. Nonetheless in a
broad sense I think the distinction holds. If it is
true, it explains a great deal.
If we take the Eastern perspective seriously,
for example, and ask what is eternal and
unchanging, what is constantly present, it is, as
Ati Akarta's article on Advaita Vedanta points out,
the sense of an "I" perceiving. If we pursue this
idea as far as we can, we may find that even though
individuals apparently come and go on the stage of
manifestation, this eternal unchanging "I" remains
- and is ultimately the same for all of us. (This
may be why Coomaraswamy said reincarnation isn't
taught in India.) A Buddhist probably wouldn't even
call it an "I"; he might simply speak of "mind"
perceiving everything. At any rate the core of
attention rests on the subject, the consciousness
that perceives.
The Western inquiry, on the other hand,
focuses almost all its attention on the object -
what we experience as the material world. Even
Christianity emphasizes the ultimate reality of the
world and God's deep love for it. ("For God so
loved the world . . .") The subject, by contrast,
is a mere spook haunting the corporeal machine;
many Western philosophers today don't even believe
it exists.
It's quite true, of course, that both East and
West have paid lip service to the idea of ultimate
Unity. But they've generally done so while subtly
upholding their own perspectives. For the East,
materiality is often dismissed as "illusion," while
the West frequently sneers at what it considers to
be mere "subjectivity."
At any rate these tendencies suggest why the
East seems introverted and "spiritual" to us, while
we seem extraverted and materialistic to them. It
also explains the strengths and weaknesses of each
civilization. Buddhist psychology and
phenomenology, for example, make their Western
equivalents look like the scribblings of clever
undergraduates, while Western science and
engineering have reached pinnacles the East has
scarcely dreamt of.
Of modern esotericists, the one who probably
best understood this issue was Rene Guenon, whose
discussions of "essence" and "substance" at least
resemble what I'm saying here.(4) Ironically,
though, the insights of Guenon and his followers
have been so clouded by rage against the modern
world - which has committed the unpardonable sin of
not being as they think it ought to be - that they
fail to draw the obvious conclusion: that these two
perspectives may and even must be reconciled.
Instead they have simply condemned one (the
Western) and decided to sit around and wait for its
collapse.
This ultimate cataclysm ending our ill-starred
"Age of Kali" may or may not take place. Personally
I'm not going to wait for the apocalypse to solve
my problems for me. And in any case I think it's
more promising to strive for some reconciliation of
these two perspectives.
What will accomplish it? The Christian might
point back to the love between God - the ultimate
"I Am That I Am" - and the world. Others, like
Tarthang Tulku (interviewed in this issue), might
suggest that we question our very notions of
"subject" and "object." These are promising
directions to look in. But if I am at all right,
this is a large endeavor, one that will be worked
out across epochs and civilizations, not in a
magazine article. My own hunch is that if we delve
deeper into this problem, we will be led toward the
mysteries of Hermeticism. That, however, will have
to wait for our next issue.
Notes
1. Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of
Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 88ff.
2. Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 21.
3. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers:
Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), pp. 15, 66-67.
4. Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity and the
Signs of the Times, trans. Lord Northbourne (Ghent,
N.Y.: Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1995 [1945]),
pp. 19ff. et passim. Guínon, of course, refused to
identify the "traditional" notion of substance with
mere vulgar physical matter.
(c) copyright 1995 by Richard Smoley
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