Jnani and the West

Jnani and the West

Introduction

The concept of jnani has implications not just for the spiritual life of the West, but for its entire intellectual and religious history. We shall make a journey from the ancient Greece of Pythagoras through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the modern secular world, and even consider what a post-secular society might entail. We bring to bear the distinctions and issues discussed in the site so far, and show that the jnani / bhakti and the via positiva / via negativa dichotomies, despite their ultimate oneness, can illuminate our spiritual past in a new way.

The Lost Buddhas of the West

The Buddha Archetype

One of the characteristics of the discursive intellect is to "multiply entities" as William of Occam put it. The fully-realized jnani lives outside of the intellect, using it when appropriate, and enjoying it as much as any other of the human capacities. The Western intellect has known very little of the balancing perspective that the jnani traditions of the East have had in reigning in the excesses of the discursive intellect. Any scholar in a Buddhist country will be aware of the concept of 'no-mind', and will not necessarily see it as anti-intellectual. We find an early divergence in the West in this respect, as the early jnanis were treated to an over-intellectualisation, first from outside, and then it seems from the inside, that is to say that the only language they could use was scholarly and philosophical.

Somebody with a Western intellectual training, or even a smattering of Western history, may find it a difficult concept that familiar Western names can be reinterpreted as examples of the jnani or fully-realised jnani type. The effort here is not to fit our examples into a Procrustean bed, but to show that the essence of their teachings is jnani or to be more precise, fits well with that great jnani archetype, the Buddha. In doing so the richness of the differences must survive. Are we in danger of "compacting entities" by calling individuals other than Siddhartha Gautama a 'buddha'? In fact it originated as a generic term, and what we are doing here is to restore the universality of it. At the same time we shall draw out the differences that different personalities bring to buddhahood.

It is important to understand that the journey being made here is from a contemporary template of the fully-realised jnani, drawn in the first instance from Masters such as Ramana Maharshi, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Douglas Harding and Osho, back in time to help us understand the historical Buddha. By working from the contemporary composite image of an Enlightened One, we can read the Pali canon in a particular way, eliminating the mythological, supernatural and formal elements, until we arrive at the Buddha archetype presented here. At the same time we become aware of the man Siddhartha Gautama's personality and predilections; i.e. all the forces that came into play when he chose words and analogies to describe the indescribable.

We also note that the historical Buddha was, as far as we can tell, using a language and metaphor that was strongly via negativa. As we apply the Buddha archetype to Western figures throughout history we shall "subtract out" the differences that a more via positiva approach would have on language and metaphor. However the real reason that these individuals have not been seen as Buddhas is not because of the position in the spectrum that they lie on between via negativa and via positiva, but because the West has never had a language of jnani.

The Lost Buddhas

The Western figures that we shall look at as "lost Buddhas" comprise: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Eckhart, Spinoza and Whitman. There are many more possible candidates of course, but if the argument can be made in these cases, then it will open up a new perspective on a whole range of individuals.

Of our seven examples the first four are Greeks, and are remembered as 'philosophers.' There may have been a time when 'philosopher' and jnani could have been interchangeable terms, but, as we shall show, the divergence between East and West on the this matter takes place with Plato. Eckhart we note is remembered as a Christian mystic, Spinoza as another philosopher, and Whitman, the most thoroughly lost of our lost Buddhas, as a poet. In the first instance however it is the distinction between jnani and philosopher that will be investigated.

One might ask, what about the lost Buddhas of the East? Even within Buddhism the original universality of the appellation 'buddha' has been lost, with it more usually applied to a host of deities that represent aspects of Buddha-nature To say of Hui-Neng (the sixth Zen Patriarch) that he was a Buddha would be relatively unconvincing to many Buddhists, to say nothing of applying the term to Ramana Maharshi for instance. Yet this is just what is needed some would say, and indeed this is the thesis of Andrew Rawlinson in his Book of Enlightened Masters, that the Western adoption of Eastern religions has allowed this cross-fertilisation of ideas way beyond what was possible in the East.

Our analysis of the seven examples will rely little on the conventional Western scholarship that abounds for each one, but neither is it meant to contradict what has gone before. Fully realized jnanis in both East and West are often complex characters and their lives may contribute to many other fields than that of transcendence. However, as an additional perspective on these individuals new ideas open up about Western history, and new ideas open up on what it means to be a Buddha.

Pythagoras and Heraclitus

Pythagoras

Some say that the term "philosopher", lover of wisdom, was first introduced by Pythagoras, who lived from approximately 580 BCE to 500 BCE. Tradition has it that he was a "trainer of souls" rather than a philosopher in the modern sense of the word, though nothing certain is known about him, not even whether the famous theorem of Pythagoras derives from him or his school. The scraps of knowledge that we have, and the traditions that survived him, are quite consistent with his having been an Enlightened Master however . If we suggest that his orientation may have been jnani with a considerable via positiva element, then his school, the interest in music and mathematics, and the legends about him fit very well.

Western scholarship is rooted in the idea of cause and effect, insisting that ideas must have sources outside the individual, so much has been made of the idea that Pythagoras learned the concept of reincarnation from Hindus (there probably were Brahmin travellers in the Greece of his day). Others believe that Pythagoras travelled widely in Egypt and possibly the far East, before settling in southern Italy in 532 and establishing his school.

Only one text survives that may indicate something of his teachings, known as the "Golden Verses of the Pythagorean"', sometimes attributed to a disciple called Lysis. Here are the last few verses:

But courage! Men are children of the Gods,
And sacred Nature all things hid reveals
And if the Mysteries have part in thee,
Thou shalt prevail in all I bade thee do,
And, thoroughly cured, shalt save thy soul from toil.
Eat not the foods proscribed, but use discretion
In lustral rites and the freeing of thy soul:
Ponder all things, and stablish high thy mind,
That best of charioteers. And if at length,
Leaving behind thy body, thou dost come
To the free Upper Air, then shalt thou be
Deathless, divine, a mortal man no more.

We can see that the tone of the Verses is jnani from the suggestion that the "mind" is the best charioteer, and the emphasis on the deathless in the last line is consistent with a commitment to the transcendent.

Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) gave a lecture series on the Golden Verses, published in two volumes, that is full of interpolations not necessarily supported by historical evidence, yet is plausible and consistent. Osho was particularly interested in the acceptance of art and science within spiritual communities as an adjunct to the traditional methods of meditation, and found in Pythagoras an archetype of this wider approach (we would say via positiva). It is worth mentioning that Osho used a different translation to that quoted from above, which lends itself slightly better to this interpretation, reminding us that we are at the mercy of the translators.

Because so little is certain about Pythagoras, he can be claimed as a "philosopher" in the modern sense, or by the occultists, or, as suggested here, and in keeping with Osho's interpretation, as a great jnani or lost buddha. His community or sangha was approximately contemporary with that of the Buddha, but the impact on history quite different. The spiritual context of India and Greece in the sixth century BCE was utterly different, and it is here that the divergence in spiritual development begins to take shape. Instead of Pythagoras becoming the archetype for the West, it found in Plato a system of thought more admirable, and so a train of events was set in motion.

Heraclitus

Heraclitus, 540 - 480 BCE, is the second of our so-called "philosophers" from ancient Greece and has left behind writings known as the "Fragments of Heraclitus". As is usual in the study of philosophy, his ideas are considered as formal propositions about truth, or to be more specific in this case, cosmology. Hence he is remembered for proposing that "fire forms the basic material principle of an orderly universe," to give one example. However, his fragments can be interpreted as the teachings of a jnani Master with a largely via negativa emphasis, though his ease with the conflict he observes makes him useful for a via positiva teaching. We have a number of clues that support this interpretation, including his nickname 'the Obscure', his habit of referring to himself in the third person, and the aphoristic nature of the Fragments. He starts with this simple point (note that the order of the Fragments may have nothing to do with the order in which Heraclitus himself may have wanted to lay them out):

It is wise, listening not to me but the Logos, to agree that all things are one. (v.1)

The unitive principle announced here is a good basis for assuming a transcendent teaching. He also uses the metaphor of sleep to indicate that people in the unenlightened state miss the true reality that is ever-present to them:

Heracleitus says that for those who are awake
there is one common Kosmos, but to those who
sleep each turns aside into his own world. (v.23)

This is an important idea in the teaching of transcendence, because the opposite is usually assumed. The "sleep" that he is referring to is the loss of presence in a sea of future-oriented desires and identifications. Although, paradoxically, these desires and identifications are society-based and common to all of us, they actually maintain the fiction of a separate self, and hence "each turns aside into his own world".

Where the Golden Verses of Pythagoras emphasise the golden mean, Heraclitus is more interested in the opposites or extremes, and understanding life as the tension between these polar opposites. Heraclitus pursues the idea that all is one by first identifying opposites and then stating that they are one, for example:

The good and the bad are one and the same. (v. 29)

The way up and the way down are one and the same. (v.30)

It is quite out of character for a philosopher, in the modern sense, to make such statements, because the art of philosophy as we now know it is to make distinctions. We may also remember that William James chastises Walt Whitman for "mixing up" good and evil, saying that the Greeks liked their "sadnessess and gladnessess unmingled and entire" — clearly he hadn't read Heraclitus. In practice the Greeks contained the full spectrum of human approaches to life, including the philosopher who lived by discursive thought and the jnani who, like Heraclitus, went beyond it.

Heraclitus is not interested in the idea of a "good day" or a "bad day" either, as he points out in this verse:

Concerning days of ill fortune, whether it is
necessary to reckon some as such or whether
Heracleitus justly rebuked Hesiod for regarding
some as favourable and some of no account, not
recognising the nature of each day as being one
thing; elsewhere it has been a matter of dispute.
One day is equal to all. (v.31)

To anyone with a contemporary outlook on philosophy this would be meaningless, but for the jnani this is a natural expression of being-at-one with the universe in the particular context of living outside of time, or outside of "becoming" as the Buddha would say. Once the clamour of future-orientation is gone, then each moment is eternal and unjudged as "ill fortune or of no account"; a frame of mind that the Nature mystics knew very well. Heraclitus has altogether a more sanguine temperament than the Buddha concerning strife, as this verse shows:

Heracleitus censures the poet who says 'Would
that strife might depart from gods and men',
for there would be no harmony without high and
low, nor could there be life without male and
female, these being opposites. (v.40)

It is not better that many things come about as
men wish. Disease makes health pleasant, evil good,
hunger surfeit, and toil rest. (v.41)

This cosmic perspective may have made Heraclitus unpopular in his time, but is essentially the argument we have put forward in the Nature Mysticism section. The Buddha's message, his First Noble Truth, that life is suffering, finds many more ears than Heraclitus' "hidden harmony", but the proposition here is that both were "awakened", and that both men taught from the "one common Kosmos" that they experienced. Their temperaments simply led to a different expression. But, to the discerning soul, the common ground far outweighs the perceived differences; take these simple verses:

I sought myself. (v.100)

It is difficult to contend with desires: whatsoever a
man desires, he pays for with the soul. (v.101)

Heraclitus sought himself, and we would suggest, found himself; he understood, with the Buddha, the problem of desires, and also has a full awareness of the impermanence of the manifest world:

For it is not possible to step twice into the same
river, according to Heracleitus. Neither is it
possible to hold permanently onto the same mortal
substance. But by sharp, keen and quick changes
it is scattered and brought together again, not in
the past or the future, but at once it combines and
disperses and comes and goes. (v.33)

This is a beautiful description of the spontaneity of the human condition! Where the Buddha finds impermanence a matter for regret, Heraclitus celebrates the fluidity of our "mortal substance". What lies in common is the perception of the shifting nature of experience, and the identification with the eternal ground from which we know it. But the passage is obscure, and we can wrest a number of meanings from it in the context of the transcendent; he could for example have been talking about reincarnation. Obscurity, contradiction and paradox are the language of the mystic, not in order to obfuscate, but because the teachings of transcendence have to be seeds, hence the use of aphorism or poetry (Whitman found that he contradicted himself, so did Osho). Here is Heraclitus again:

We both step and do not step into the same river;
we both are and are not. (v.38)

We may recall the Buddha's use of contradiction in his interaction with Magandiya. In the next passage Heraclitus is berating Pythagoras for his "research", ending with a statement on the holding of opinions that fit very well with the Buddha's remarks to Magandiya:

Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, practised research
more than any man, and by selecting these writings,
made a reputation for wisdom, which was
merely much learning, an inferior art. (v.50)

Much learning does not teach a man to have sense,
or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras,
also Zenophanes as well as Hectataeus. (v. 51)

It is quite fitting that Heracleitus believed men's
opinions to be children's playthings. (v. 52)

Heraclitus shares with the Buddha a disdain for learning, though we should not take his criticism of Pythagoras too seriously. It has been a mark of the buddhas throughout history that they are often disinterested in the teachings of others: we find it in the Buddha's dismissal of his contemporary Mahavira (last of the great Jain Masters), Krishnamurti's dismissal of Osho, and here we find it in Heraclitus's dismissal of Pythagoras. We finish with a fragment where Heraclitus distinguishes between the Enlightened and ordinary state:

Therefore I distinguish between two forms of
sacrifice: those of men who have been wholly
purified, such as rarely happen to one man, as
Heracleitus said, or even to very few men: and
there are others which befit those who are still
fettered to the body, material and corporeal,
connected by change. (v.78)