Category Archives: Sufism
Politics and Religion
The two basic points are 1) every religion has a valid political dimension 2) every religion has suffered from being harnessed to political interests which have no basis in religion.
Buddhism has a valid political dimension. The Buddha gives clear advice to rulers in the Kutadanta and Cakkavatti-Sihanada Suttas. Islam and Judaism have more obvious political dimensions because both Mohammed and Moses were law-givers. The Qur’an and Torah both provide the bases for legal systems to govern polities of various shapes and sizes.
The Qur’an and the Torah both combine the eternal and the temporal, and this reveals the nature of politics. God is eternal and Truth is eternal, but the actual, temporal conditions in which man finds himself are far from God. Man must find a way back to God so, through the prophets, God reveals His spiritual truths and His laws for good-living.
Politics is an aspect of humanity’s collective striving for good. In our political activity we should be guided by the religious truths to which we are the heirs, but we must not make the mistakes of over-literalism, dogmatism, sectarianism, etc. which have so bedevilled our civilisation.
Within the Islamic world the Islamist tendency over-emphasises the political dimension of Islam at the expense of the spiritual. Because it is has lost connection with the loving aspect of God it is prepared to contemplate or perform violence and terrorism to accomplish its sectarian goals. Islamism has more in common with Trotskyism than it does with Islam.
Although Islamism is a corruption of Islam, this does not mean that Muslims should withdraw entirely from the political sphere. On the contrary, it is important that Muslims who are in touch with the spiritual heart of their religion should be socially and politically engaged, in order to reduce the space available to Islamists. Muslims have an important role to play combating the ever-strengthening tide of greed, materialism, addiction, violence and environmental destruction. Organisations like Christian Aid provide an example of how religious people can make vital contributions if they engage with the key political issues of our time.
What Is The Self?
June 2008
A Swiss couple on vacation in India found a beautiful picture in a store. They bought it, and in order to protect the picture the store-keeper rolled it up and slotted it into a long cardboard tube.
The couple continued to travel around India and so for the rest of their journey they had to carry the tube everywhere they went. It was long and awkward, and they were forever trying to protect it, to stop it getting bent or dented as they climbed into buses, or clambered out of rickshaws.
Eventually they took the tube home to Switzerland where they opened it, only to discover that the store-keeper had deceived them — he had never put the picture inside. All the time they had been carrying around an awkward tube, trying to protect it, when really it was empty!
At first they were angry, but then they laughed.
The Meaning of Life
February 2009
Dear Friend,
You wrote:
We can apply the Zen debate between sudden and gradual awakening to the question of faith, refuge and salvation. My local vicar in Sussex once told me that there is a difference between salvation and sanctification. Salvation is sudden and occurs the moment you give your life to Jesus. Sanctification is the gradual process that follows. Perhaps the act of faith is necessarily a sudden shift to the objective perspective, whereas the assessment of our faith is part of the gradual subjective process. In this sense, in one moment of pure faith we are already outside samsara. Sure some Pure Land teacher must have said this? And if this moment of pure faith occurs at the point of death, perhaps this means we lock into the objective perspective – forever, or until we freely decide we need to work on our subjective side again.
Your thoughts resonate with some of my recent contemplations. In the film ‘The Meaning of Life’ by Monty Python there is a scene in which a group of corporate executives discuss the meaning of life in the boardroom:
Exec #1: Item six on the agenda: “The Meaning of Life” Now uh, Harry, you’ve had some thoughts on this.
Exec #2: Yeah, I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren’t wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Exec #3: What was that about hats again?
This idea of bringing the soul into existence by a process of guided self-observation with the assistance of an outside spiritual energy does indeed seem to me to be the meaning of life. Its relationship to salvation and sanctification might be as follows:
Salvation corresponds to initial baptism / baptism of water. At this point one enters religion and receives the protection of God. However, one has not yet been sanctified. Sanctification corresponds to baptism with the holy spirit. This latter baptism is normally associated with the Pentecost. The Catholic Catechism describes what was granted to the Apostles at Pentecost as the “full Outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (i.e. sanctification).
In between initial baptism (salvation) and baptism with the holy spirit (sanctification) is the baptism of fire. This confusing stage is the process of transforming the soul from its raw to its cooked state or, to use Rumi’s specific form of this of analogy, transforming the wheat of the soul into cooked bread:
The heart’s like grain, and we are like the mill.
Say, does the mill know why it whirls around?
The body’s stone, the waters are the thoughts –
The stone says “Oh the water understands!”
The water says “No, ask the miller, please –
He sent the water downhill — ask him why!”
The miller says: “Bread-eater! — should this cease
To move, say then, what would the baker do?”
Perhaps sanctification is when the baker puts his seal of approval on the cooked bread, before serving it to his customers?
Dear Matthew,
I remember the Monty Python scene about the soul from when I saw it in the cinema. It intrigued me then. They almost certainly got it from Gurdjieff. It was an important idea for me at the time, but graudually I found it reinforcing a type of self-grasping and causing tension. What I like about Mahamudra and the wisdom teachings in general is that our fundamental nature is already pure and in a sense enlightened. We need to relax into our enlightened (and eternal) nature rather than create it through effort. Gurdjieff”s teaching on the soul gave me the feeling that I needed to create my own immortal nature, and thus increased unnecessarily the tension an over emphasis on self power creates. I realize now I misunderstood the teaching. Have you heard of the two types of Buddha lineage which Geshela taught in Great Mother of the Conquerors, the naturally abiding lineage and the developing lineage? As the names suggest, the naturally abiding lineage is something we’ve already got, and refers variously to the emptiness of our mind, the clarity of our mind, or the clear light mind. The developing lineage is what grows through spiritual practice. I like to see soul as a pattern or order that gradually emerges out of our chaotic “uncooked” nature, the fully developed soul being symbolized by the Deity within his mandala that embraces the whole universe, having fully transformed chaos into cosmos. I might have got this idea from you. The development of soul is therefore closely related to the accumulation of merit, which I sometimes see as a song or chant that begins with a lone voice but graudually brings together an entire football crowd.
I think you could argue that until our soul pattern has reached a certain degree of stability there is no individuality within us that can reincarnate. Specific actions have been created which lead to specific effects, and on this causal contiuum we can impute an I linking the two, and therefore speak about rebirth, but this is not the same as a reincarnating soul.
Gurdjieff taught that soul is created through self-remembrance and conscious suffering. Self.remembrance seems to correspond to the mindfulness and alertness of vipassana, and concious suffering to the practice of patience as described in How to Solve our Human Problems. These two practices do seem to me to be the basis of any genuine spiritual practice on the self-power side.
Comparing Buddhist and Muslim Attitudes to Scripture
Please note the limited scope of this article, as it does not compare attitudes towards ‘secondary’ literature such as hadith in Islam and Abhidharma and Mahayana Sutras in Buddhism.
It can be useful to compare the roles that scripture plays in different religions, for example Buddhism and Islam.
Muslims are united in their belief in the Qur’an as their definitive scripture. The Qur’an is the revelation that Mohammed received from God via the angel Gabriel. The Qur’an is definitive, but there are four classical schools of Qur’anic interpretation, and Muslims disagree over the scope for ongoing interpretation. ‘Moderate’ scholars such as Tariq Ramadan argue for a relatively wide scope for interpretation compared to ‘fundamentalists’.
In Buddhism there is some debate over which scriptures are authentic. The Theravada tradition denies the authenticity of Mahayana scriptures such as the Perfection of Wisdom and Lotus Sutras which are central to Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. (For a Sutra, authenticity means that it was spoken or authorized by the Buddha himself.)
The earliest Sutras (or Suttas) were written in the Pali language, and preserved by the Theravada school in the Pali canon. The Buddha did not write down the teachings himself, nor is it likely that they were transcribed by any of his immediate disciples. Instead they were transmitted orally for a number of generations until the Buddhist Sangha decided it was important to preserve them in writing.
“According to a generally accepted ancient tradition, the first attempt to agree the form of the Buddhist textual tradition, what was remembered as the authoritative ‘word of the Buddha’, took place some three months after the Buddha’s death at the town of Rajagriha in northern India when 500 arhats took part in a ‘communal recitation’ (samgiti). This event is commonly referred to in modern writings as ‘the first Buddhist council’.” (from ‘The Foundations of Buddhism’ by Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press 1998, p40)
Gethin goes on to say:
“the notion of a fixed canon of Buddhist scriptures is somewhat problematic. And we must be careful not to impose inappropriate notions of ‘canon’ and authenticity – derived say from Christianity [or Islam] – on the Buddhist tradition. Even in the accounts of the first Buddhist council we are told of a monk who, on hearing the recitation of the Buddha’s teaching by the 500 arhats, declared that he preferred to remember the teaching as he himself had heard it from the Buddha.” (ibid, p46)
This latter comment is interesting because, although the two are held to be mutually supportive, Buddhism prioritizes direct personal experience over scriptural understanding. It is one thing for scriptures to be authentic, it is another to have an authentic realization of Dharma. Correct scriptural understanding is excellent, but deep personal experience is truly liberating. The Theravada monk Ven. Analayo writes:
“The philosophical setting of ancient India was influenced by three main approaches to the acquisition of knowledge. The Brahmins relied mainly on ancient sayings, handed down by oral transmission, as authoritative sources of knowledge; while in the Upanishads one finds philosophical reasoning used as a central tool for developing knowledge. In addition to these two, a substantial number of the wandering ascetics and contemplatives of that time considered extrasensory perception and intuitive knowledge, gained through meditative experiences, as important means for the acquisition of knowledge. These three approaches can be summarized as: oral tradition, logical reasoning, and direct intuition. When questioned on his own epistemological position, the Buddha placed himself in the third category, i.e. among those who emphasized the development of direct, personal knowledge.” (from ‘Satipatthana – the direct path to realization’ by Analayo, Windhorse 2003, p44)
Whilst emphasizing the priority of direct, personal knowledge:
“the Buddha once illustrated the dangers of relying entirely on one’s own direct experience with the help of a parable. In this parable, a king had several blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. When questioned on the nature of the elephant, each blind man gave an entirely different account . . . Although what was experienced by each of the blind men was empirically true, yet their personal direct experience had revealed only part of the picture. The mistake each made was to wrongly conclude that his direct knowledge gained through personal experience was the only truth, so that anyone disagreeing must be mistaken. This parable goes to show that even direct personal experience might reveal only a part of the picture and therefore should not be grasped dogmatically as an absolute ground for knowledge. That is, emphasis on direct experience need not entail a complete rejection of oral tradition and reasoning as auxiliary sources of knowledge.” (ibid pp.45-46)
In comparison to the Buddhist scriptures, the interval between the Qur’an being spoken by the Prophet and written down by his followers was much shorter:
“An inner circle of his followers wrote down verses of the Qur’an as they learned them from the Prophet and there are records of there being a total of twenty-nine scribes for this. By the end of the Prophet’s life (632 CE) the entire Qur’an was written down in the form of uncollated pieces . . . The standard Muslim account is that, during the second year after the Prophet’s death (633 CE) and following the Battle of Yamama, in which a number of those who knew the Qur’an by heart died, it was feared that with the gradual passing away of such men there was a danger of some Qur’anic material being lost. Therefore the first caliph and successor the the Prophet, Abu Bakr, ordered that a written copy of the whole body of Qur’anic material as arranged by the Prophet and memorized by the Muslims should be made and safely stored with him.” (from ‘The Qur’an’, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford University Press 2004, pp.xv-xvi)
The Qur’an is the source of authoritative knowledge in Islam, but understanding the Qur’an also implies a commitment to understanding the world and one’s own soul. William C. Chittick says that the Qur’an:
“tells us repeatedly that God creates the world by speaking. Just as the Qur’an and other scriptures are collections of God’s “signs” or “verses” (ayat), so also the whole universe is a vast collection of God’s signs and verses. In effect, God creates the universe by revealing three books – the universe, the human self, and scripture. In each book he displays his signs and writes out his words. Once we understand that reality is configured by speech, we see that the human task is to read and understand what has been written and to follow the instructions. The interpretation of the Qur’an is the foundation and fruit of all Islamic sciences, and it has always entailed the simultaneous interpretation of the universe and the soul. Every Muslim, by accepting the Qur’an as God’s Speech, has accepted the responsibility of understanding what God is saying . . . Every soul will answer for its own reading, not only of scripture but of the other two books. And, given that the soul’s understanding is written out in itself, the soul’s own book is the all-important determinant of its destiny . . . The crux of knowledge, then, is to understand one’s own soul.” (from ‘Ibn Arabi – Heir to the Prophets’ by William C. Chittick, OneWorld Publications 2005, pp57-58)
What Remains Is God
“The things we normally see do not exist” is one of the phrases for which Geshe Kelsang Gyatso would most like to be remembered. it is a wake-up call to us all, heartfelt advice that we should integrate into our daily lives and our way of perceiving the world.
The reason why “the things we normally see do not exist” is because the things we normally see appear to exist inherently, independent of their parts and the minds which perceive them. During his Universal Compassion teachings in Summer 2008, Geshe Kelsang explained how we can overcome our ignorant grasping at inherent existence. He described how we should analyze with wisdom the way things normally appear to our minds. The following paragraphs are my edited notes from his teaching:
“What does it mean to search for things with wisdom? Through wisdom we develop the sincere wish to understand the way things really are, which is called ultimate truth. With this wish, if we search for things, then we are doing so with wisdom. This is called an ultimate search.
“When we search for things that we have lost such as our car we are searching for things with ignorance. This is called a conventional search. If we lose our car we believe that the car we normally see is lost, but this car does not exist! This is ignorance. Then we believe we have found the car that we normally see. This is also ignorance! We should know that although we see things, our way of seeing things is mistaken.
“When we see a car we see a car within its parts. In reality a car does not exist within its parts because neither the individual parts nor the collection of parts is the car. If we search with our wisdom eye we will not find the car. We will realize that it does not exist in the way we think. We will realize the emptiness [Sanskrit: shunyata] of the car. We meditate on this single-pointedly for as long as possible until we develop deep familiarity.
“In the same way we see our body. Whenever we see our body we see it within its parts. In reality our body does not exist within its parts, because they are the parts of the body not the body itself, however there is no body other than its parts. Through understanding this we will perceive the emptiness of our body.
“In the same way when we see our self we see our self within our body and mind. In reality our self does not exist within our body and mind because they are our possessions and our self is the possessor. However there is no self other than our body or mind.
“We can apply this to all phenomena. Then we will realize the emptiness of all phenomena. We should meditate on this and hold it without forgetting.”
(For more detailed teachings on emptiness, please refer to Heart of Wisdom by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, available from www.tharpa.com)
In a separate teaching Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has said that the mind which is completely mixed with the emptiness of all phenomena can validly be called God (see my article God and Buddhism). So, when the veils of illusion are removed, what remains is God.
In a poem called The Theophany of Perfection by Ibn Arabi, God addresses the disciple, revealing the veiled truth behind “the things that we normally see”.
“Oh, my beloved! How many times I have called you without your hearing Me!
How many times I have shown myself without your looking at Me!
How many times I have become perfume without your inhaling Me!
How many times I have become food without your tasting Me!
How is it that you do not smell Me in what you breathe?
How do you not see Me, not hear Me?
I am more delicious than anything delicious,
More desirable than anything desirable,
More perfect than anything perfect.
I am Beauty and Grace!
Love Me and love nothing else
Desire Me
Let Me be your sole concern to the exclusion of all concerns!”
(quoted in An Ocean With Shore by Michel Chodkiewicz, State University of New York, 1993)
Can We Attain Liberation In This World?
In his Lojong teachings Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that we can see this world as a Pure Land of Buddha, because for a Lojong practitioner every situation provides a perfect training opportunity. However in his Mahamudra teachings Geshe Kelsang emphasizes the impurity of this world.
During his Mahamudra teachings in the summer of 2007 Geshe Kelsang taught about sleep. He said that sleep is a subtle mind which causes sense awareness to cease. While awake we use our five sense awarenesses but
“these sense awarenesses, normally, for ordinary beings, always perceive inherently existent forms, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile objects”.
These are the five objects of desire.
“We are like flies, always wanting, seeking these objects.”
Our mind is always grasping at these objects, therefore we have no opportunity to experience inner peace during waking, instead we experience unpleasant feelings such as worry, attachment, anger and dissatisfaction.
“We are like a negative person during waking.”
When we sleep our gross minds such as our sense awarenesses cease. All the problems we experience during waking cease. Deep sleep activates our very subtle mind, which functions to perceive emptiness (shunyata), but we cannot recognize it because we have insufficient mindfulness. Therefore we need to train in Mahamudra meditation to activate our very subtle mind during waking. This involves trying to replicate the sleep process by causing our sense awarenesses and other gross minds to cease. (Please see Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s books Mahamudra Tantra or Clear Light of Bliss for a detailed explanation.)
Geshe Kelsang says that the path to liberation taught in Mahamudra Tantra is different from that taught in Sutra, because in his Sutra teachings the Buddha never mentions subtle or very subtle minds. In fact, in the Sutras the Buddha teaches that liberation (nirvana) can be attained by working with our normal (i.e. gross) perceptions. For example, in the Rohitassa Sutta (Samyutta-Nikaya (I, ii, 3.6)) Rohitassa, the some of a god (deva) asks the Buddha if there is some place
“where, lord, does one not get born, nor grow old, nor die, nor leave one’s sphere for another, nor get reborn? Now is one able, lord, by walking to come to know the end of the world, or to see it, or to get there?”. The Buddha replies that there is no such place, but that “it is in this fathom-long carcass [i.e. the human body], friend, with its impressions and its ideas that, I declare, lies the world, and the cause of the world, and the cessation of the world, and the course of action that leads to the cessation of the world.”
In the Sutras the Buddha therefore recommends, as a path to liberation, meditative practices which work with our normal sense perceptions and mental awarenesses, such as the four ‘close-placements of mindfulness’. (For more information on these close-placements please read the book Satipatthana – The Direct Path to Realization by Ven. Analayo.)
The idea that this body is a suitable basis for achieving liberation is in accordance with the Abrahamic religions. At the core of all of these religions is God’s creation of Adam and Eve in His own image or form. According to Muslim tradition God fashioned man from clay and then breathed life into him. Muslims believe that man has a privileged place in creation because God taught man “all the names” (Qur’an:2:31).
“To say that God created man in his own form implies that man’s meaning is designated by God’s all-comprehensive name, which denotes both the Essence and all the divine attributes. When the Qur’an says God taught Adam “all the names,” this means that he taught him all the names of God and creation. These names designate God as the One/Many, the single Essence that comprehends all reality, what Ibn ‘Arabi commonly calls “the Divine Presence”.” (from Ibn ‘Arabi – Heir to the Prophets by William C. Chittick, OneWorld 2005, p74).
It is because God taught man “all the names” that man has the potential to achieve perfection (i.e. liberation).
Fantastic and Crap
A Buddhist monk once asked me to comment on a particular retreat center in Spain. I said that in my opinion it was “fantastic and crap”, which made him laugh. It was fantastic because there was a palpable, magical spirituality about it. it was crap because it had many of the tedious problems associated with human communities such as poor communication, wasted effort and resources, project delays etc. Little did I know at the time that I was later going to build my joke into a whole philosophy — but here goes!
The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is the truth of suffering, the unsatisfactory nature of life. The entire realm of existence is said to be pervaded by unsatisfactoriness. Even our moments of pleasure and happiness have an unsatisfactory quality about them. The third Noble Truth is the truth of cessation. It is possible to achieve a True Cessation of suffering. This True Cessation is Nirvana, and only Nirvana is peace. This fundamental teaching of Buddhism describes a yawning chasm between our current state of suffering – samsara – and the holy state of Nirvana. The fourth Noble Truth is the path to get from samsara to Nirvana.
In his deconstruction of all conceptual categories, including the four Noble Truths themselves, the 2nd century CE Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna showed how neither samsara nor Nirvana exist inherently, from their own side. They are both empty of inherent existence, which means that they are dependent-related phenomena. They both depend upon mental imputation.
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s teachings on the Tibetan Lojong tradition imply a way in which we can see this world as both faulty and perfect. At the heart of the Lojong tradition is the teaching on Exchanging Self with Others, which is described in detail in the article A Place Where We Cannot Be Harmed. If we fully exchange self with others then, although there continues to be suffering, we are no longer be harmed by it. From this point of view we have achieved Nirvana while remaining in the world.
In his oral teachings in 2008 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explicitly stated that even for the trainee Lojong practitioner this world is like a Buddha’s Pure Land, because it enables us to experience the perfect conditions we need in order to advance on the path (to generate renunciation, bodhichitta and wisdom realizing emptiness). From the point of view of the Lojong practitioner the world is both perfect and faulty at the same time. It is faulty because there is suffering in it, but it is perfect because if we exchange self with others then we are able to transform suffering into the path to enlightenment. For Lojong practitioners whatever conditions we encounter are perfect for our practice. As Geshe Chekhawa says:
“Do not rely upon other conditions. Apply the principal practice at this time.” (quoted in ‘Universal Compassion’ by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso).
In theistic religion there is a similar gulf between the perfect state of the Creator and the faulty, suffering state of the creatures. Because of this gulf many mainstream Muslim scholars insist on God’s transcendence rather than immanence with regard to the created world. They say that to argue that God is immanent in the created world is to deny both God’s unity and perfection.
On the other hand, the great Sufi Muslim scholar Ibn ‘Arabi argued that we need to investigate reality with two eyes: reason and imagination. With reason we will, as the other scholars say, discover God’s incomparability (Arabic: tanzih) with his creation and therefore we will understand the truth of transcendence. But if we explore with imagination we will discover God’s similarity (Arabic: tasbih) to his creation, and so we will understand the truth of immanence.
“Ibn ‘Arabi’s contribution was to stress the need to maintain a proper balance between the two ways of understanding God.” (Ibn ‘Arabi – Heir to the Prophets by William C. Chittick, OneWorld Publications, 2005, p19).
By viewing the world with the eye of reason we see that it is crap! By viewing the world with the eye of imagination we see that it is fantastic! But we don’t want to suffer from double vision. We want to develop a unified vision which is able to handle conventional and ultimate reality at the same time.
