Jnani and the WestIntroduction

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 HeraclitusPythagoras

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 revealsAnd 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 discretionIn 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 comeTo the free Upper Air, then shalt thou beDeathless, 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 awakethere is one common Kosmos, but to those whosleep 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 isnecessary to reckon some as such or whetherHeracleitus justly rebuked Hesiod for regardingsome as favourable and some of no account, notrecognising 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 'Wouldthat 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 asmen 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 aman 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 itpossible to hold permanently onto the same mortal substance. But by sharp, keen and quick changesit is scattered and brought together again, not inthe past or the future, but at once it combines anddisperses 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 researchmore than any man, and by selecting these writings,made a reputation for wisdom, which wasmerely 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'sopinions 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 ofsacrifice: those of men who have been whollypurified, such as rarely happen to one man, as Heracleitus said, or even to very few men: andthere are others which befit those who are stillfettered to the body, material and corporeal,connected by change. (v.78)

He is saying that the man who is wholly purified is very rare, and this is of course one reason why there can be no popular understanding of the fully realised jnani condition. But he makes a useful definition of the unenlightened state: that one is "fettered to the body", and even more interesting, that one is "connected by change". This shows once again that Heraclitus is very aware that impermanence is a key idea in the pursuit of transcendence, an idea that was central to the Buddha's thought.

SocratesIntroduction

Socrates was born in 470 BCE and was executed in 399 BCE for "impiety and corrupting the morals of the young". We have seen that interpretations of Pythagoras and Heraclitus as jnani Masters, and hence as lost buddhas, are at the very least consistent with known facts, and in the case of Heraclitus can be argued in some detail from his Fragments. Socrates is a different case however, because on the one hand we have an abundance of written material, from Plato and from Xenophobe, while on the other hand an authentic Socrates is much harder to retrieve from it. What is attempted here is a kind of "spiritual archaeology" using our buddha-archetype as a template to lay over the historical material. The problem lies with the characters of Plato and Xenophon, — in the first case we have a literary and philosophical genius whose "record" of the life and sayings of Socrates are clearly a loose interpretation, while in the second case we have a reliable historian with a maddening habit of drawing a veil over just the moments we are most interested in: Socrates' thought as expressed in dialogue.

The obvious question, why are we not considering Plato himself as a "lost buddha", needs answering first of all. Plato is often referred to as "divine" and is a central figure in the Neoplatonist tradition, a Western jnani tradition that runs as an intertwining of spiritual influences with the development of Christianity. Yet an immersion in the Platonic oeuvre reveals the mind of a philosopher (in the modern sense) not a jnani, moreover a philosopher with a strong literary emphasis, as has his much more recent heir, Nietzsche. A detailed argument, drawing on a wide reading of the dialogues is required, but for now all that can be said is that the evidence in the Republic and Laws point to a mind engaged with questions of society and not with questions of transcendence. Karl Popper has also argued that the Republic is fascist in its conception, and there is also a eugenicist thinking to be found in it. It is also clear that in Laws Plato comes up with legislation that would have convicted any man like Socrates, an irony considering that it was the execution of Socrates by the state of Athens that made Plato so distrustful of the new democracy and led him to formulate Laws.

Nevertheless, all that is transcendent in Socrates' thought comes to us via Plato, and it is Plato's vivid literary gifts in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium that have immortalised Socrates as martyr, and planted in our minds the analogies with Christ and Mansur.

S. Abhayananda, in his History of Mysticism is quite certain of Socrates as spiritual genius, and even mentions evidence in Aristoxenus (c. 330 BC) that Socrates met a number of Brahmins in the Athens of his day. His discussion has some similarities with that presented here, but his starting point is an inner conviction:

To many, the figure of Socrates remains a mystery, but to the knowers of God, his teaching and manner of his life are clear as crystal, and he is dearly beloved; for only those who have trod the same path and realized the same Truth can know how pure was his soul and how wonderful his task in life and death. (History of Mysticism, p. 99)

Plato

The gifts of Plato have brought Socrates alive for us, but at the same time it can be argued that Plato, as a highly intelligent and self-motivated man, had his own agenda. Put simply, we need to be aware that in many of the so-called Socratic dialogues we are not reading about a recorded historical event, but an invention of Plato to fit his purpose. At times his purpose may well have been to illuminate Socrates' admittedly obscure and contradictory sayings to the very best of his abilities, but we must often suspect, particularly with the later dialogues, that Plato had long forgotten such an intention, and is simply putting words into his Master's mouth. One clue that supports this view is that Plato is almost never present in these dialogues, whereas the more simple-minded Xenophon uses no such sophistry. One could interpret Plato's absence as modesty, and indeed he has set the tone for much polemic writing through Western history, including Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but with this device he removes much contextual detail that would convince us of his intentions. Our method here, as already stated, is to lay the Buddha-archetype as template over the collected works, and see what emerges as a portrait of a man rather than an analysis of his doctrines. The results can be summed up as follows: we find that in some places Socrates emerges as a first-order jnani Master operating as clearly as the Buddha did, and using many similar devices, whereas in other places Socrates is putting forward ideas that are quite improbable for a Buddha of whatever personality. We have mentioned these, for example the fascist and eugenicist ideas in the Republic.

However the most implausible element is the one best known in the West as Socrates' chief legacy, the "Socratic dialogue". Plato has managed to convince us that the Socratic method was based on reasoned argument or dialectic, reaching knowledge unattainable through other methods. On closer examination however we find that the leaps in logic and gulfs of assumption create nothing like a reasoned argument but an entirely manipulative process of convincing the participant of the intended, though initially unstated, view of Socrates (or is it Plato?). A clue to nature of these dialogues is a complaint by Meno that Socrates has numbed his lips and mind, as though Socrates was a stingray. The Pali canon reveals the Buddha operating in a similar way, by pursuing a line of argument that has at its root little logic, or even blatant contradiction and paradox, until the fortunate victim almost groans that they are "numbed" and certainly defeated. Plato may have used this device of the apparently rational dialogue in his later work to argue certain of his own agendas, but the jnani Master uses the device for quite different reasons, and they have little to do with demonstrating the validity of the proposition under debate. The mental "numbness" is just another way of saying that the discursive intellect is brought to silence, at which point the real work of the Master begins: to slip into the heart of the disciple.

So is there evidence that Socrates had made his way into the hearts of his disciples? We will let an unlikely character, the future king and tyrant Alcibiades, tell us just how powerfully this "stingray" operated (we note that historically Socrates is remembered as a gadfly rather than a stingray):

I swear by all the gods in heaven that for anything that had happened between us when I got up after sleeping with Socrates, I might have been sleeping with my father or elder brother. ... On the one hand I realized that I had been slighted, but on the other I felt a reverence for Socrates' character, his self-control and courage; I had met a man whose like for wisdom and fortitude I could never have expected to encounter.---Whenever I listen to him my heart beats faster than if I were in a religious frenzy, and tears run down my face, and I observe that numbers of other people have the same experience.---He is the only person in whose presence I experienced a sensation of which I might be thought incapable, a sensation of shame; he, and he alone, positively makes me ashamed of myself. ... The Socrates whom you see has a tendency to fall in love with good-looking young men, and is always in their society and in an

ecstasy about them. ... , but once you see beneath the surface you will discover a degree of self-control of which you can hardly form a notion, gentlemen. Believe me, it makes no difference to him whether a person is good-looking; he despises good looks to an almost inconceivable extent nor whether he is rich nor whether he possesses any of the other advantages that rank high in popular esteem; to him all these things are worthless, and we ourselves of no account, be sure of that. He spends his whole life pretending and playing with people, and I doubt whether anyone has ever seen the treasures which are revealed when he grows serious and exposes what he keeps inside. However, I once saw them, and found them so divine and precious and beautiful and marvellous that, to put the matter briefly, I had no choice but to do whatever Socrates bade me.---But our friend here is so extraordinary, both in his person and in his conversation, that you will never be able to find anyone remotely resembling him either in antiquity of in the present generation, unless you go beyond humanity altogether, and have recourse to the images of Silenus and satyr which I am using myself in this speech. ... Anyone who sets out to listen to Socrates talking will probably find his conversation utterly ridiculous at first, it is clothed in such curious words and phrases, the hide, so to speak of a hectoring satyr. He will talk of pack-asses and blacksmiths, cobblers and tanners, and appear to express the same ideas in the same language over and over again, so that any inexperienced or foolish person is bound to laugh at his way of speaking. But if a man penetrates within and sees the content of Socrates' talk exposed, he will find that there is nothing but sound sense inside, and that this talk is almost the talk of a god, and enshrines countless representations of ideal excellence, and is of the widest possible application; in fact that it extends over all the subjects with which a man who means to turn out a gentleman needs to concern himself. ---I may add that I am not the only sufferer in this way; Charmides the son of Glaucon and Euthydemus the son of Diocles and many others have had the same treatment; he has pretended to be in love with them, when in fact he is himself the beloved rather than the lover. (from the Symposium)

We have an impression from this description of Socrates of an extraordinary man with an extraordinary strength of purpose, but who baffles most who come into contact with him, except those who come to love him. He appears to speak in contradictory ways, and "pretends to be in love" with his followers, "pretending and playing with people", but despite this, he is the "beloved". This is all consistent with buddhahood, and Alcibiades' assessment of him shows Socrates' real nature to be that of a deeply religious man. Let us look at some more general pointers to Socrates as fully-realised jnani Master.

The Trial and Execution

The trial and execution of Socrates has parallels, in religion and mysticism, with that of Jesus and Mansur (a 10th century Muslim martyred in Baghdad), to give just two examples. Socrates was indicted on two counts: impiety, and corrupting the morals of the young. Plato devotes four dialogues, Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, to the events leading up to his trial and execution. That a man in ancient times was executed for blasphemy of some kind or another is no proof of course that he was a jnani. However the way in which Socrates defended himself (in the Apology), and the way in which he faced death (in the Phaedo) are extraordinary, and suggestive of a man who has transcended all identifications with self. His defence was remarkable, for he made no attempt to counter the charges in a manner that would have led the court to leniency; his offer of a counter-punishment likewise calculated more to irritate than to ameliorate the death-sentence, and his calm, even joyful, acceptance of his sentence was compounded by refusals of offers to escape. Even the manner in which he took the hemlock was remarkable, and was commented upon by the executioner (who generally faced understandable hostility and complaints from those he delivered the hemlock to).

Fits of Abstraction

Another, entirely different, piece of evidence for Socrates' status as jnani lies in the several accounts of his "fits of abstraction". The term has been put in quotation marks because we have come to use it in connection with Socrates without any clear idea of what it means, or what alternative terms we could use. In the West this term could mean anything from what was intended by the old-fashioned "brown study" (an absent-minded state that required perhaps a vigorous interruption to recall its owner to his or her surroundings) to "catatonic schizophrenia" (a state of complete unresponsiveness lasting for days, months or years, as with Nietzsche in his latter days). In their commentaries on Socrates Bertrand Russell uses the term "cataleptic trance," and Richard Maurice Bucke used "catalepsy." However, in the context

of the spiritual his states may better described by the terms samadhi (Indian) or satori (Japanese) both of which mean a state of ecstatic union.

If Socrates' states were short in duration, and it was relatively easy to bring him out of them (snapping one's fingers, shouting, or even, as legend has it, the emptying of a chamber-pot over him by his wife) then the former terms, "fits of abstraction" or "brown study" might be appropriate. If the duration of these states were longer and accompanied by a clear deterioration in mental health, then "catatonic schizophrenia" might be appropriate. However, what the reports tell us are of states lasting from several hours to a day, where all attempts to reach him failed, followed by no adverse mental or physical effects. These reports have more similarities with the spontaneous samadhis so well-documented (for example) of Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. In other accounts we hear of Ramakrishna "rigid as a corpse" for days on end. Plato assumes that Socrates was either lost in thought, or needing to solve a problem during these states: we never hear however of the particular train of thought or solved problem resulting from a specific episode.

Voices

A related phenomenon in Socrates' life seems to have been his hearing of a "divine voice" or daimon. Plato does not report these as directly linked to his "fits of abstraction", and they may have been a quite separate phenomenon. Socrates tells us that he heard this voice since childhood, and also mentions, in the Phaedrus that it only tells him to desist from something, never telling him what to do. This is problematic as evidence for the jnani, in that it might fall into the occult category. If the voice were that of an independent, autonomous, disembodied being such those posited by Steiner, or of an angel as described in many traditions, then it would be an occult phenomenon. On the other hand it may have been Socrates' own intuition, and related more to the way that he also took note of his dreams (as in the case of those that prompted him to write poetry while awaiting execution).

Socrates' Teachings on Immortality

Socrates' utterings are relatively consistent on the immortality of the soul, presenting a system that is almost a standard model of reincarnation with karmic consequences. Little adjustment is required for this model to fit Hindu or Buddhist thinking, and it is possible, given Abhayananda's assertion that Socrates met wandering Brahmins, that it came from the East (though Pythagoras is a more likely source). As mentioned earlier, however, reincarnation is essentially an occult topic, and not direct evidence of transcendence, other than it might inform the understanding of immortality. The clear conviction of the sense of immortality is evidence however, because timelessness is an essential transcendent quality.

Socrates as Master / Midwife

That Socrates was a Master of some kind or other is in little doubt, in the sense that Athenians of a certain type were drawn to him, and in some cases were devotees. More usually the picture presented of him is as a Master in the sense of an academic, a philosopher, or a rhetorician whose grasp of his subject was so profound and so compelling as to draw those to him who wished to learn these subjects. We have an image in the West of such an individual, quite divorced from a religious context, for whom it is right and proper to give such respect. The key quality of such an individual is intelligence, so a figure like Einstein, Marx, Freud or Jung fit the picture, and it is only natural that in a secular age we assume Socrates' attraction to be of the same kind. However the descriptions in both Plato and Xenophon are quite consistent with Socrates as jnani Master .

Closely connected to the possibility of interpreting the actions of Socrates and his associates as that of Master with disciples is the image handed down through antiquity of Socrates as "midwife". One of the scholars of Plato, Burnyeat, makes a typically Western assumption in this comment: "The necessary background to the picture of Socrates as midwife, without which the whole elaborate fancy would lose its sense, is of course the metaphor of the mind giving birth to ideas it has conceived." In the context of Socrates as jnani Master a quite different interpretation can be put on the metaphor: Socrates is midwife to the spiritual birth of his disciples. In this case it is not concepts that are born in the minds of the disciples (though these will naturally arise) but a spiritual awakening more properly associated with a silence of the mind.

Plato has Socrates expound at length (over four pages in fact) on the midwife image in the Theatetus, and it is a strikingly bold and outrageous passage concluding with: "It is quite clear that they have never learned anything from me; the many fine discoveries to which they give birth are of their own making. But

to me and the god they owe their delivery." This assertion that Socrates knows no more than his disciples is typical of him, and has resonance with the concept of "beginner's mind" in Zen. For a philosopher in the modern sense to assert that they knew nothing would be to undermine their position, but for a jnani Master it is a reflection of their inner silence.

Xenophon

The portrait of Socrates from Xenophon is, as already mentioned, much more likely to be accurate than whatever we gain from Plato. In fact Xenophon recounts in a matter-of-fact way details of Socrates' life that Plato never does in his dialogues. Our great loss here is that Xenophon, though drawn to Socrates as an example of the "good" rarely conveys his verbal exchanges in any length or detail. Scholars have assumed that Socrates' thought was simply too lofty for the down-to-earth Xenophon, but our analysis would suggest that the dialogues, while containing some penetrating insight to be sure, were more like a Zen Master's highly obtuse diatribes.

Xenophon's portrait shows us a Socrates who is visible (i.e. always amongst people), temperate (in all things, and in a highly considered manner), humorous (hilariously so at times, as when he calls himself a pimp, and when he engages in a beauty competition with a friend called Critobulus), engaging (in the sense of reaching out to actual and potential disciples), democratic (despite his association with aristocrats and tyrants), interested (in human affairs), and positive (he teaches piety through gratitude for a munificent universe).

In Xenophon, unlike in Plato, we find that Socrates uses what is known much later as the "argument from design" to instil piety in his followers, and this is used on Euthydemus, taking up the whole of section 4.3 of the Memoirs of Socrates. This is too long to quote in full, but some of the positive and almost prayerful tone is captured in this passage:

And what of the fact that they [the gods] have equipped us with senses appropriate to the different kinds of beautiful and beneficial objects that surround us, so that by means of these senses we can enjoy all good things? And the fact that they have implanted in us reason, which enables us to think about and remember our sensations, and so discover the beneficial effects of each class of objects and devise various means for enjoying what is good and avoiding what is bad for us?

In another parallel with Jesus, we find Socrates visiting a prostitute (or so we are meant to assume from the fact that she maintained a large household solely from the favours of wealthy men; perhaps 'courtesan' would be a better word). This is described in section 3.11 of the Memoirs, and finishes with the following exchange:

Theodote said, 'Why don't you help me in my hunt for friends, Socrates? 'I will, believe me', said Socrates, 'if you persuade me.' 'How can I persuade you?' 'You'll look to that yourself,' he said, 'and you'll find a way, if you need any help from me.' 'Then come and see me often,' she said. 'Well, Theodote,' replied Socrates, poking fun at his own avoidance of public life, 'it's not very easy for me to find the time for it. I have a great deal of public and private business that keeps me occupied and I have some girlfriends too, who will never let me leave them by day or night, because they are learning from me about love-charms and spells.' 'Do you really know about them too, Socrates?' she asked. 'Why do you suppose that Apollodorus here and Antisthenes never leave me? And that Cebes and Simmias come to visit me from Thebes? You may be sure that these things don't happen without a lot of love-charms and spells and magic wheels.' 'Lend me your magic wheel, then, so that I may spin it first for you.' 'Certainly not,' he said. 'I don't want to be drawn to you; I want you to come to me.' 'Very well, I will,' she declared. 'Only mind you let me in.' 'Yes, I'll let you in,' said Socrates, 'unless I have someone with me that I like better.'

Socrates' "girlfriends" are, of course, his disciples, and we can read this passage as the good-humoured "fishing" for a new disciple that spiritual Masters are continuously engaged in. Socrates is clear that she must come to him and not the other way round though.

We also have a possible reference in Xenophon to one of Socrates' "fits of abstraction", or, in our terms samadhi. Socrates is talking about dancing:

'... Don't you know that the other day Charmides here caught me dancing at daybreak?'

'Yes, indeed I did,' said Charmides, 'and at first I was astonished and afraid that you were out of your mind, but, when I heard you explain it to me in the way that you are doing now, I went home myself and well, I didn't dance, because I've never learned how, but I waved my arms about, because I knew how to do that!'

If, and I grant that this is a big if, Socrates was prone to the kind of samadhi so well-documented in the case of Ramakrishna, then we can expect him to sometimes be still (as recorded in Plato) and sometimes to move in rapture, perhaps to 'wave' his arms about. Given that samadhi has not been widely understood in the West, and that it is rare occurrence anyway, we can expect both that witnesses may confuse it with dancing, and that Socrates may have encouraged this view because he had no other way of explaining it, or did not want to dwell on it.

Socrates and the West

A much more detailed study of Socrates as a Buddha is possible, given the amount of textual material available, but the extracts discussed here must at least establish its plausibility. In fact many historians have pondered why Socrates did not form the basis of the religion of the West instead of Christ, given his vigorous teaching method and eventual martyrdom. We can ask this question now in a slightly different way: why did not Socrates form the basis of a religion like the Buddha did?

There must be two parts to answer this question. Firstly, Socrates never formulated a doctrine like the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path, or to put it another way, a "dharma" or teachings did not acquire a coherent form and life of their own as they do in Buddhism. Neither did Socrates form a "sangha" or religious community, as Pythagoras did for example. Secondly, the spiritual ambience of Plato's Athens at approximately the same time in history as the Buddha's India was utterly different. Although, as we suggest, there had been other great jnani Masters such as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, they were either persecuted, unpopular, or found to be obscure. In the Buddha's India on the other hand there was a millennia-old tradition of transcendence, and a religious openness that has always marked this culture. The Buddha found hundreds if not thousands of individuals ready for his message, though we note that not all was plain sailing as several attempts were made on his life.

We have made the point before that the life and death of Socrates can be seen as the crucial point of divergence in the spiritual life of East and West. A great jnani Master was lost at this point, not because he was martyred, but because his chief apologist, Plato, presented him to Western history as a philosopher, and as far as we can tell, used Socrates to promote his own views. We note of course that the spiritual ambience of the time was already out of alignment with who Socrates really was (if we accept this thesis), but this point in history marks a point of no return. All successive buddhas (i.e. non-devotional Masters) born in the West have since been misinterpreted, or 'lost'. We will see later on how the rise of Christianity as a bhakti religion reinforces the relegation of the buddhas of the West to obscurity, even when they are Christian.

PlotinusPlotinus

While Buddhism flourished in the East, spreading as far West as modern-day Iran and East into China, the period after Socrates' death finds no great jnani religion appearing in Europe. It was with the death of another great spiritual Master, Jesus, some five hundred years after Socrates' martyrdom, that the seeds of the great religion of the West were planted. Christianity was eventually propagated in the same way as Buddhism, as the state religion for an empire, though the methods used were very different and have had a profound effect on the difference in the social expression of the two religions. As with Buddhism the empire in question had a number of minor sects to choose from to form the state religion, but before Constantine made the momentous decision about Christianity these sects flourished equally across Europe. In was in this environment that Plotinus was born, in 205, and died, in 270. He is the first of our lost buddhas of the West to leave behind a substantial corpus of writings, known as the Enneads.

The Encyclopaedia Brittanica finds a striking similarity between the Enneads and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, but it was unlikely that he Plotinus knew of them, being exposed rather to the ideas of Plato and Manichaean sects.

Most of what we know about Plotinus comes from his disciple Porphyry, who tended to concentrate on his later years, partly because Plotinus said very little about himself. Hence we are not even sure in what country he was born or anything about his early life, until he went to Alexandria at the age of twenty-eight to study philosophy. This apparently reduced him to a state of depression until he found a teacher called Ammonius Saccas. When Plotinus heard him he said, "This is the man I was looking for" and stayed with him for eleven years. All of this is related in Western tradition as being in the context of philosophy, and Plotinus as philosopher, and his Enneads as a work of philosophy. But even before examining the Enneads, we can plausibly reinterpret Plotinus's early life as the kind of spiritual search that the Buddha undertook. If Ammonius was a better philosopher than those in the Alexandrine academy, then why was he not teaching there? One explanation would be that he was a jnani Master himself (though no details of his life or teachings are known) and as such would operate outside of academia.

What then lies in Plotinus's great work, the Enneads, that suggests he was a buddha? The starting point for such an investigation lies with the concept of the One introduced by Plotinus into the stream of Greek thought at this point, a conception that lived on and had an influence in Christianity, as we shall see. But Plotinus's concept of the One is not theistic, for despite the piety and sublimity of his prose, it is not a devotional work. Neither on the other hand is it a pure jnani teaching like the Buddha's, containing as it does speculative, philosophical, cosmological and occult elements. What we find however are sections that are pure jnani, that is they describe a unitive state and a path to that state not in terms of speculation, but in the language of one who has experienced it directly. We will now look at the common ground with the Buddha, but note at the outset that the point of departure is more apparent at first glance than the commonalities, this difference to be found in the Buddha's absolute refusal to be involved in speculative thought and the construction of cosmologies.

Plotinus wrote in Greek, and, as usual, we are subject to the mindset of the translator. Because of the resonance of the concept of the "One" with the Christian God that later became the universal spiritual language of the West, there is a temptation to translate the "One" as "God" or "Father". Unless we are Greek scholars ourselves we cannot judge the relative merits of different translations, but for the purposes of demonstrating a resonance between Plotinus and the Buddha (and more generally the language of jnani) we have chosen the translation of Elmer O'Brien, which avoids the Christian terminology of "God" and "Father" to be found in the translation of Stephen Mackenna. Here is the opening section of the "Three Primal Hypostases":

How is it, then, that souls forget the divinity that begot them so that—divine by nature, divine by origin—they now know neither divinity nor self?     This evil that has befallen them has its source in self-will, in being born, in becoming different, in desiring to be independent. Once having tasted the pleasures of independence, they use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away from the origin. And when they have gone a great distance, they even forget that they came from it. Like children separated from their family since birth and educated away from home, they are ignorant now of their parentage and therefore of their identity.     Our souls know neither who nor whence they are, because they hold themselves cheap and accord their admiration and honor to everything except themselves. They bestow esteem, love, and sympathy on anything rather than on themselves. They cut themselves off, as much as may be, from the things above. They forget their worth. Ignorance of origin is caused by excessive valuation of sense objects and disdain of self, for to pursue something and hold it dear implies acknowledgement of inferiority to what is pursued. As soon as the soul thinks it is worth less than things subject to birth and death, considers itself least honorable and enduring of all, it can no longer grasp the nature and power of the divinity.     A soul in such condition can be turned about and led back to the world above and the supreme existent, the One and first, by a twofold discipline: by showing it the low value of the things its esteems at present, and by informing—reminding!—it of its nature and worth. (Enneads, V,1,1)

This beautiful passage has many resonances with Buddhist thought, for example where it points out that a preoccupation with "things subject to birth and death" leads one away from the One. In a Western context, as we have pointed out, the tendency is to assume that the "One" is the Christian God (or for that matter the Judaic or Muslim God), but in a Buddhist context there is no difficulty in reading it as "nirvana" or "buddha-nature". In fact some Buddhist traditions emphasise that all beings have "buddha-nature" and that it is not a question of a supreme attainment, but simply recognising and returning to it, as suggested in this passage. The other obvious quality of the above passage is that Plotinus has a teaching or path, equivalent to the Dhamma (Dharma) of the Buddha, and, we note, Plotinus corrects himself that the role of Master is not to inform the disciple of the nature and worth of their soul, but to remind them — echoes of Socrates.

Plotinus is quite clear that the world of things, the world of birth and death, is too highly valued, a concern that the Buddha expresses through his term "impermanence". In this sense Plotinus is following the via negativa, but not through a sense of sin or guilt as can be found in some Western traditions. He makes this point a little later in the same Ennead:

     If it is soul that makes us loveable, why is it that we seek it only in others and not in ourselves? You love others because of it. Love, then, yourself. (Enneads, V,1,2)

This warmth and positive approach is typical of Plotinus and, like the Buddha, he promises Enlightenment in this lifetime, soon in fact:

So divine and precious is the Soul, be confident that, by its power, you can attain to divinity. Start your ascent. You will not need to search long. Few are the steps that separate you from your goal. Take as your guide the most divine part of the Soul, that which "borders" upon the superior realm from which it came. (Enneads, V,1,3)

What makes Plotinus's teachings closer to the Buddha's than conventional Christian teachings is the central jnani concept that transcendence is for the ordinary person, and is not reserved for divine beings. "You can attain to divinity" is the starting point for Plotinus, and his confidence in our abilities is the mark of a great Master. It is the emphasis by Plotinus on the mind as method, rather than the heart, that makes him a jnani Master. In the above passage he is introducing us to his concept of the Intelligence, the "most divine part of the Soul", a perspective that the great bhakti Masters would merely smile at.

Let us turn for a moment to Porphyry's brief account of Plotinus's life to see what there is in it that might be consistent with that of a buddha, or jnani Master. This single paragraph stands out (note that the extracts from Porphyry's Life of Plotinus are from Mackenna's translation):

     Thus he was able to live at once within himself and for others; he never relaxed from his interior attention unless in sleep; and even his sleep was kept light by an abstemiousness that often prevented him taking as much as a piece of bread, and by this unbroken concentration upon his own highest nature. (Life, 8)

This is a quite beautiful characterisation of the spiritual Master: that he lived "at once within himself and for others." In the later Buddhist traditions this would be the quality of a Bhodisattva, one who lived for others, or to be more precise, one who saw the buddha-nature in others and strove continuously to help them realise it. Porphyry tells us that several men and women "of position" were so impressed with the holiness of Plotinus that they entrusted their children into his care along with all their inherited property:

     He always found time for those that came to submit returns of the children's property, and he looked closely to the accuracy of the accounts: 'Until the young people take to philosophy,' he used to say, 'their fortunes and revenues must be kept intact for them.' And yet all this labour and thought over the worldly interests of so many people never interrupted, during waking hours, his intention towards the Supreme.     He was gentle, and always at the call of those having the slightest acquaintance with him. After spending twenty-six years in Rome, acting, too, as arbiter in many differences, he never made an enemy of any citizen. (Life, 9)

Plotinus held meetings with his followers, open to all-comers, that Porphyry calls "Conferences." Plotinus seems open to all questions and considerate of other views in the Conferences, though many (probably most) misunderstood him:

     The fact is that these people did not understand his teaching: he was entirely free from all the inflated pomp of the professor: his lectures had the air of conversation, and he never forced upon his hearers the severely logical sub-structure of his thesis. (Life, 18)

Neither shall we explore the "severely logical substructure" of Plotinus's teachings. Instead, here is a brief glimpse into Plotinus's own experience:

It has happened often. Roused into myself from my body—outside everything and inside myself—my gaze has met a beauty wondrous and great. At such moments I have been certain that mine was the better part, mine the best of lives lived to the fullest, mine identity with the divine. Fixed there firmly, poised above everything in the intellectual that is less than the highest, utter actuality was mine.

     But then there has come the descent, down from intellection to the discourse of reason. And it leaves me puzzled. Why this descent?     Indeed, why did my soul ever enter my body since even when in the body it remains what it has shown itself to be when by itself? (Enneads, IV,8,1)

This passage, apart from an insight into his interiority, raises a useful point about terminology. Plotinus calls this highest state, which we could call "nirvana" or the "non-dual state" in a Buddhist or Hindu context of transcendence, "intellection". At least this is the word that both O'Brien and Mackenna have chosen in their translations, having no recourse to Eastern vocabulary. Here is where the gulf of understanding lies between East and West, and which we are attempting to repair with the concept of jnani. Let us look at a couple more extracts which indicate something about Plotinus's experience (we are indebted to O'Brien for pointing out the personal nature of these passages):

The chief difficulty is this: awareness of the One comes to us neither by knowing nor by the pure thought that discovers the other intelligible things, but by a presence transcending knowledge. When the soul knows something, it loses its unity; it cannot remain simply one because knowledge implies discursive reason and discursive reason implies multiplicity. The soul then misses the One and falls into number and multiplicity.---To obtain the vision is solely the work of him who desires to obtain it . If he does not arrive at contemplation, if his soul does not achieve awareness of that life that is beyond, if the soul does not feel a rapture within it like that of the lover come to rest in his love, if, because of his closeness to the One, he receives its true light—his whole soul made luminous—but is still weighted down and his vision frustrated, if he does not rise alone but carries within him something alien to the One, if he is not yet sufficiently unified, if he has not yet risen far but is still at a distance either because of the obstacles of which we have just spoken or because of the lack of such instruction as would have given him direction and faith in the existence of things beyond, he has no one to blame but himself and should try to become pure by detaching himself from everything.     The One is absent from nothing and from everything. It is present only to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from the One when it is in that state in which it was when it originated from the One. Thus will The One be "seen" as far as it can become an object of contemplation. (Enneads, V1,9,4)

Although expressed in the third person, Plotinus is clearly writing from his inner experience of the unitive state (moksha, liberation, nirvana), using the analogy of the lover, and incidentally defining the role of the Master as one who gives "direction and faith in the existence of things beyond." But we note, despite the mention of love, it is detachment that is put forward as the most potent method for apprehending the One. All the same, Plotinus quite naturally uses love again to indicate the happy state of entering the One, calling it the Good in this passage:

Therefore must we ascend once more towards the Good, towards there where tend all souls.     Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean, in what sense it is beautiful. As good, it is desired and towards it desire advances. But only those reach it who rise to the intelligible realm, face it fully, stripped of the muddy vesture with which they were clothed in their descent (just as those who mount to the temple sanctuaries must purify themselves and leave aside their old clothing), and enter in nakedness, having cast off in the ascent all that is alien to the divine. There one, in the solitude of self, beholds simplicity and purity, the existent upon which all depends, towards which all look, by which reality is, life is, thought is. For the Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being.      Seeing , with what love and desire for union one is seized—what wondering delight! If a person who has never seen this hungers for it as for his all, one that has seen it must love and reverence it as authentic beauty, must be flooded with an awesome happiness, stricken by a salutary terror. Such a one loves with a true love, with desires that flame. All other loves than this he must despise and all that once seemed fair he must disdain. (Enneads, I,6,7)

Those with a Christian background might be wondering why we cannot simply replace the 'One' and the 'Good' with the Christian God, and read these passages in that light. We will draw out the implications of this idea later on, but for now it is important to remember that Plotinus lived in a Rome where Christianity and Judaism had yet had little impact. The "One" of Plotinus is the goal of jnani aspirations, whereas the "God" of Christianity is the goal of bhakti aspirations. In the long run there is no difference of course, but paradoxically, to remove these distinctions in the long run, we first have to make them crystal clear. We may even find that the "One" of Plotinus becomes the bridge of understanding between the Christian "God" and the Buddhist "nirvana."

Once again, in this brief introduction to the life and thought of Plotinus, we find a portrait that is at least consistent with buddhahood, or that of a jnani Master. When we include the breadth of his interest and writings we note a very Western characteristic that runs through the jnanis we have so far examined: an interest in the knowledge of the day. Set against the Buddha as revealed in the Pali canon, we can see this as an inclination to the via positiva in thought at least, though in many other ways a renunciative lifestyle is an essential part of the teachings. It may be this combination of a transcendent teaching with a love of learning that prevented the pre-Christian jnanis of the West from creating a religion in the way that the Buddha did. Although learning and scholarly activity of all types sprang up in later Buddhism, the Buddha himself had created a religious movement that was essentially anti-intellectual, and could thus appeal to the many citizens who had no aptitude, opportunity or inclination for learning. Of course, what really made Buddhism a popular religion was the introduction of puja or devotional practices, which it absorbed from the various existing traditions in the different regions of its expansion.

Plotinus praises "detachment" as we saw, but his place on the via positiva / via negativa spectrum is worth considering in a bit more detail. Plotinus devotes a whole treatise called "Against the Gnostics" to refuting their main arguments, particularly that the world itself is corrupt or fallen. True, Plotinus regards the acquisition of a body by the soul as a "descent", an idea common in antiquity and taking various forms including the story of the expulsion from Eden. But he does not like the extreme view of the descent as original sin, a fall into evil, and a matter for lamentation, as we see in this passage (translation, Mackenna):

To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, [a reference to Plato's Phaedrus] we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some one moment, why not before that?     We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consists only in its forgetting the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it create but from the things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline: any inclination would be towards its Prior; in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way?     What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating? Glory? That would be absurd — a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.     Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe?     And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time. (Enneads, II,9,4)

This defence of the manifest world is not yet the celebration of Walt Whitman, but it is positive indeed when placed alongside the Buddha's indifference to it. From Porphyry's account we gain a sense of Plotinus's presence as benign, a quality also ascribed to Whitman. And is it a coincidence that O'Brien should end his introduction to the Essential Plotinus with this quote from Whitman: "This is no book, cammerade. Who touches this touches a man ..." This sentiment also goes to the heart of our approach to Plotinus, and all the great spiritual teachers we have touched upon:— to recreate their benign presence.

Neoplatonism

Having identified four great Western jnani Masters, or "lost buddhas"; Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates and Plotinus, we would be surprised if a spiritual tradition had not grown up that perpetuated something of their teachings, and we find it of course in Neoplatonism. Our analysis suggests in fact that Plato was the weakest link in this chain, not because of an inferior intellect, but because his intellect overshadowed his direct experience of jnani. That he has lent his name to this religious tradition should alert us to its inherent contradictions, at least from the perspective of jnani.

Neoplatonism forms a jnani undercurrent in the West after the rise of Christianity. If, as we shall explore later, Christianity is the tree of bhakti in the West, then Neoplatonism is the jnani vine that wraps itself around the branches and sometimes even seems to be the visible part.

It is not certain that Neoplatonism would have been the force that it was without Plotinus, but there is no doubt that he avidly used all the elements of the Greek inheritance, even if it was to refute some of them.

Hence a common misconception that his ideas derive in some way from Plato. For sure the outer form and use of metaphor may come from Plato, but Plotinus has his own inner illumination, and simply uses the material to hand. He lives in an ambience where this was natural for any religious or thinking person to do so, and Porphyry tells in his account of the common practice for the sensitive and thoughtful individual to seek out the "philosophers" of the day. What makes a striking contrast with the Buddha is the unusual insistence of the Buddha in rejecting the spiritual language of his day, though he cannot do it fully of course.

With the gradual decline of the Roman Empire and the ascendancy of the Catholic Church as a unifying religious force across Europe, the spiritual and intellectual ambience of Plotinus's time changed dramatically. Most of the Neoplatonist texts, including the Enneads, were lost, or survived only in Muslim strongholds of culture and learning. It was not until the Renaissance that Neoplatonism recovered its vibrancy, and the lost texts were gathered and translated, mainly due to the efforts of Marcilio Ficino and the Florentine Academy that he founded. A few Neoplatonist texts and traditions did survive and influence what is now called the Dark Ages, including Plato's cosmological work the Timaeus, and Plotinus's Beauty.

We will see in a later section how Neoplatonism as a jnani tradition within the bhakti context of Christianity helped to shape some of the crucial historical transitions in Western history.

EckhartHistorical Background

We jump now a thousand years from the time of Plotinus in the third century to that of Meister Eckhart in the thirteenth century. Johannes Eckhart was born in 1260 in Germany, acquired the title of 'Meister' when the degree of Master of Theology was conferred upon him in 1302, and died in 1327 in France.

We shall demonstrate many similarities between Plotinus and Eckhart, at least the central qualities of a jnani Master, but the spiritual and intellectual ambience that Eckhart found himself in was utterly changed from the 3rd century Rome of Plotinus The Roman Empire had adopted Christianity as its state religion after Constantine, and although the Empire itself waned, its progeny, the Roman Catholic Church, grew and became the sole spiritual and intellectual context over the long period of the Middle Ages.

The early Middle Ages, also known as the Dark Ages, was a period of frequent warfare during which the intellectual and spiritual life that was typically pursued in the cities and city states from the time of Athens became almost impossible. During this time Christianity became the universal religion, sweeping aside its early competitors which included Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeanism. Early Christianity owed some of it character to these other religions, but in our analysis its chief quality was that of a devotional or bhakti religion. While Buddhism, the great jnani religion of the East, had a fervently anti-intellectual stance at its core, the equivalent in the West, Neoplatonism, was a religion of the learned, and hence in the early Middle Ages almost disappeared, as the cities and seats of learning disappeared or shrank. Where Buddhism could appeal to the ordinary people through its rejection of learning and its adoption, particularly in the Mahayana, of puja (devotional practices), Christianity was a religion aimed at the ordinary people from the start, and gave the spiritual life of the entire Middle Ages its prime quality: one of piety.

The spiritual and intellectual ambience of Eckhart's time are not Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Socrates, but St. Paul, St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and of course the only Book of consequence: the bible. At this point we shall not speculate on the nature of Jesus himself, but observe simply that it was Paul who effectively created the early Christian religion. Unlike Plato he was a simple man, and it is in the temperaments of Paul and Plato that we discover why Christ became the focus for a world religion whereas Socrates did not. Where Plato set up an elite Academy for erudition and study, Paul created a sangha or community united by their love of a martyred Christ and a caring for each other. Christ is their first object of devotion, extended upwards to an anthropomorphised God similar to that of the Jews, and downwards to the poor and downtrodden of humanity. This was always a people's religion where the intellectuals and jnanis that were born into the Christian world of the Middle Ages were out of place, unlike those in the Hellenistic world. It is one of Christianity's earliest thinkers, Augustine, who both fitted perfectly into the emerging new religion, and shaped it more strongly in its own image.

Augustine (354-430) lived some one hundred and fifty years after Plotinus, and not long after the adoption

of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman empire by Constantine. Augustine had been for ten years a Manichaean, after being disillusioned with which, he dabbled for a while with Neoplatonism and then firmly chose Christianity. His Confessions show a highly intelligent man who is nevertheless a bhakti by instinct. In Neoplatonism he simply could not find the devotional qualities he was looking for, neither for a Christ-equivalent, nor for a personal God, nor for the poor and oppressed the active caring for whom was seen as a devotional practice. Furthermore, his delight in the works of Paul were matched by a conviction that prayer was more than sufficient, and that an intellectual edifice of understanding such as Plotinus's or Plato's was unnecessary. It is absurd to suggest that a single man would shape the intellectual and spiritual life of a region as big as Europe or a period of so many centuries, but Augustine's inward-looking piety became the hallmark of the Early Middle Ages.

But the rise in power and wealth of the Catholic Church eventually led to the establishment of monasteries, whose initial purpose was conducive to prayer, piety, and silence, but which became before long conducive to study and scholarship. It was the works of Aristotle that first marked a revival of interest in the Greek period, and as the ancient works were gradually rediscovered, the suppressed intellectual energies of Europe found a new confidence to turn outwards from God and to catalogue, taxonomise, and even praise His works. We find a different kind of philosophy at work here compared to the Hellenistic one, a work, to become known as Scholasticism, that is subservient to a fiercely devotional simplicity of life and thought. Scholasticism reached its pinnacle in the works of Thomas Aquinas, published around the time of Eckhart's birth. Aquinas produced one of the great Summa of medieval thought (a kind of encyclopaedia), devoting considerable space to one of the Schoolmen's unique intellectual pastimes, proving the existence of God. Aquinas himself can be considered as a person of intense jnani inclinations, and it is said that after a lifetime of scholarly works he had a first-hand experience of the divine (we might call it a satori) after which he regretted everything he had written.

It is in Eckhart, rather than Aquinas, that we have the best illustration of how a jnani genius, one who's starting point was realisation, not erudition, struggled with his bhakti environment. The struggle is symbolised by his eventual excommunication by Papal bull in 1329, though he died shortly before he received it. The papal Inquisition had been active for almost exactly a hundred years at this point, and the universal atmosphere of suspicion that this created was part of Eckhart's Europe, though more pronounced in the south.

It is worth taking a short detour to consider the question of religious freedom here. In India, both in the Buddhist religions, and in the jnani sections of Hinduism, we might say that compassion is the dominant religious emotion, whereas in Europe during the rise of Christianity it was love. Although this is a tremendous generalisation it is still worth pursuing, pointing out that as compassion grows cold it becomes indifference, a quality that Westerners found conspicuous in the East, while as love grows cold it becomes control. Hence we could say that the perversion of the spiritual impulse of love in Christianity became religious intolerance and a persecution of heresy, embodied in the various forms of Inquisition that persisted from 1231 to 1834. India simply has no equivalent, though some would argue that the suffering arising from institutionalised indifference to poverty was endemic. We simply don't find a word for heresy in Indian spiritual literature, and its first appearance in Buddhist texts seem to be in China.

Eckhart

So what happens when a great jnani, a buddha of the West, is born into the late medieval world, an exclusively Christian world almost a thousand years in the making? For that is how we see Eckhart, and that is how we see his struggle: that of a jnani genius operating in an overwhelmingly bhakti context. But first we need to establish his jnani credentials, which we can do by starting with one of his most famous tractates, On Detachment:

I have read many works of both heathen masters and prophets, and books of the Old and New Testaments, and have sought earnestly and with the utmost diligence to find out what is the best and highest virtue, with the aid of which man could be most closely united with God, by which man could become by grace what God is by nature, and by which man would be most like the image of what he was when he was in God, when there was no difference between him and God, before God had created the world.     And when I search the Scriptures thoroughly, as far as my reason can fathom and know, I just find that pure detachment stands above all things, for all virtues pay some regard to the creatures, yet detachment is free from all creatures. Hence it was that our Lord said to Martha: "One thing is needful", that is to say, he who wished to be untroubled and pure must have one thing, namely detachment.     The teachers praise love most highly, as St.Paul does when he says: "In whatever tribulation I may find myself, if I have not love, then I am nothing." But I praise detachment more than all love. First, because the

best thing about love is that it forces me to love God. On the other hand, detachment forces Got to love me. Now it is much nobler that I should force God to myself than that I should force myself to God. And the reason is that God can join Himself to me more closely and unite Himself with me better than I could unite myself with God. That detachment forces God to me I can prove by the fact that everything likes to be in its own natural place. Now God's own and natural place is unity and purity and they come from detachment. Hence God must of necessity give Himself to a detached heart. (Selected Treatises and Sermons, p. 156)

With only a few changes, much of this could come from Plotinus, and we note that Eckhart had read the "works of both heathen masters and prophets". We remember that Plotinus praises detachment in "The Good or the One"; with Eckhart we have a clear statement that detachment is above love, in contradiction to Paul, but a sure sign of the pure jnani temperament. In fact it contradicts not just St Paul but the whole development of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. We are not suggesting however that Eckhart derives his thought from Plotinus, because Eckhart's emphasis on detachment is so far-reaching that it can only come from his inner experience.

We might also comment on the use of biblical reference by Eckhart in the above passage, where he cites Jesus saying to Martha: "One thing is needful." The passage comes from St. Luke chapter 10, verses 38-42, where Martha busies herself with serving while her sister sits with Jesus. The passage concludes with Jesus' words: "and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her." In a bhakti context we would interpret the "good part" as the devotion she shows to the Master, but somehow Eckhart has turned it into detachment. Such a flexible interpretation of biblical passages to support Eckhart's views is common in his writings, and indicates more that he simply lacked suitable jnani texts in the public domain than either poor scholarship or dishonest intent.

We also note in the above passage that not only is Paul contradicted, who shaped the religion of Christ in the first place, but that Christ is not needed either. Later in his essay On Detachment Eckhart even removes the central Christian practice, prayer. First, a few more thoughts on detachment:

     Now you might ask, what is detachment, since it is so noble in itself? Here you should know that true detachment is nothing other than this: the spirit stands as immovable in all the assaults of joy or sorrow, honour, disgrace or shame, as a mountain of lead stands immovable against a small wind. This immovable detachment brings about in man the greatest similarity with God. For if God is God, He has it from His immovable detachment, and from this detachment He has His purity, His simplicity and His immutability. And therefore, if man is to become like God, as far as a creature can possess similarity to God, it must be by means of detachment. (Selected Treatises and Sermons, p. 159)

We might accept that Eckhart's emphasis on detachment, and the way that he places it higher than love and all the other Christian virtues, is consistent with the jnani temperament, and we may also suspect by now a leaning to via negativa that would align itself with the Buddha's thinking. But Eckhart's theistic language could suggest a substantial difference. The use of the word "God" separates Eckhart from the early Western Masters we looked at: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plotinus, who were not familiar with the theistic language of the Jews. Could we replace all references to "God" in these passages from Eckhart with "the One," and all uses of "He", "His", "Himself" with "it," "its" and "itself"? If we try it then, for sure, they read more like Plotinus than Eckhart, but the real difference is a change from an active principle to something more passive. If "God" is changed to "the One" then He, or it, becomes more passive in the exact proportion that the aspirant becomes more active, i.e. we recognise the emergence of the typical jnani characteristic, the spiritual will. But Eckhart himself recognises the active principle in the conventional Christian "God" as problematic and often talks instead of Gottheit as a higher and less active principle which is usually translated as the "Godhead," but could also be understood as "Godliness." "Godhead" as a noun still has the misleading implication of an entity that one might approach, as one approaches other entities, whereas "Godliness" is more of a quality. Let Eckhart explain:

God and the Godhead are as different from each other as heaven and earth --- Creatures speak of God — but why do they not mention the Godhead? Because there is only unity in the Godhead and there is nothing to talk about. God acts. The Godhead does not. --- The difference between God and the Godhead is the difference between action and non-action. (Sermons)

Bearing this in mind let us look at another extract from On Detachment:

Hence, if the heart is to find preparedness for the highest of all flights, it must aim at a pure nothing and in

this there is the greatest possibility that can exist. For when the detached heart has the higher aim, it must be toward the Nothing. [now follows an analogy with a wax tablet---] In the same way, when God wishes to write on my heart in the most sublime manner, everything must come out of my heart that can be called "this" or "that"; thus it is with the detached heart. Then God can work in the sublimest manner and according to His highest will. Hence the object of the detached heart is neither this nor that.     But now I ask: what is the prayer of the detached heart? I answer that detachment and purity cannot pray. For if anyone prays he asks God that something may be given to him, or asks that God may take something away from him. But the detached heart does not ask for anything at all, nor has it anything at all that it would like to be rid of. Therefore it is free from all prayer and its prayer is nothing else than to be uniform with God. On this alone the prayer of detachment rests. (Selected Treatises and Sermons, p. 164)

To see prayer as mere supplication is a mistake that only a jnani would make. But while Eckhart introduces the "Nothing", a term that Buddhism would recognise (though more usually called "Emptiness") we cannot avoid the active nature of Eckhart's God. This is a bhakti concept, as is the use of the word "heart" where a Buddhist, or Plotinus for that matter would use "mind." But this is the point, we are now in a theistic world, a heart-oriented religion, and unless one is to utterly baffle one's audience one has to use the language of the time. Plotinus used a language of learning, and this colours his message and outlook, Eckhart uses a language of devotion and that colours his message and outlook.

Let us take a look at Eckhart's life to see if we can come closer to the man. Unfortunately, due to the Papal bull which proclaimed the "errors" of Eckhart's work, both his own writings and any contemporary accounts of him were removed from the normal process of historical preservation. It was only in the 19th century that scholars began to piece together his life, indeed it was only at this point his place and date of birth became known. Two series of writings by Eckhart were discovered, one in German and one in Latin, and a century of scholarship went to and fro in attempts to authenticate the documents. The essay On Detachment for example was first touted as prime Eckhart, then discredited, and only more recently reinstated as his authentic work. The more recent breakthrough was to realise that the transcripts of Eckhart's trial, which he attended some of, contained detailed copies of his more contentious writings, and this allowed verification of other documents.

Within all this what is sadly lacking is an account of Eckhart the man, like we have for Socrates by Xenophon, or for Plotinus by Porphyry. All we know of his life are the formal externals of his Degree in Theology, and the various posts he held as theologian and spiritual guide. From his Latin writings we find a man entirely at home in the Scholastic tradition, writing for example an equivalent but shorter Summa in the vein of Aquinas. It is in the German prose, as in our extracts, that Eckhart pours out his fresh and vital ideas on the spiritual life, ideas and terminologies that have had influence up to the present.

To examine Eckhart at greater length would be a delight, but for now we will just consider the question of the via negativa / via positiva distinction in connection with his teachings. As we have seen it is rare to find an extreme example of either path, so it is a question of teasing out where the balance lies, or what aspect of a life and teaching lie where. Eckhart's praise of detachment from the "creatures" (a term that was by now well-established) indicates a via negativa, but there are via positiva elements in his cultural context that he is not immune to. Firstly, like Plotinus, he wrote philosophical treatises, the Latin works that were meant to be read by the scholars and theologians — we can see this as an active engagement in the world that the Buddha shunned. Secondly, the Christian concept of active love, which means good works of various kind, were endorsed by Eckhart.

Let us leave Eckhart with a last extract, one that shows the pure jnani expression of transcendence:

In that breaking-through, when I come to be free of my own will and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally.---     When I stood in my first cause, I then had no "God", and then I was my own cause. I wanted nothing, I was empty Being and the only truth in which I rejoiced was in the knowledge of my Self. Then it was my Self I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted and so I stood empty of God and every thing. (Sermons)

We see that the fully-realised jnani living in a theistic bhakti tradition has no choice: ultimately he even has to dispense with God.

Christian Jnanis

We have already pointed out that the Schoolmen created a tradition within Christianity that went against its purely devotional core, and that must have had a jnani impulse behind it. By Eckhart's time Scholasticism had created within Christianity an endeavour that was neither a vibrant jnani teaching, nor could it support the common people in their devotions, nor yet was it able to pursue its goals of knowledge through a genuinely scientific method. Even within its limited scope for innovation its intellectual fruits, including some of Thomas Aquinas's ideas, were considered with suspicion by the Church. Later on Aquinas's thought was adjusted and reinstated as Catholic doctrine, known as "Thomism," but, as mentioned earlier, at the end of his life he rejected his own learning. According to Abhayananda on December 6th 1273 he attained an inner realisation, outside of discursive reasoning, which led him to remark: "Compared with what has been revealed in me, all my writings are as mere straw!" Unfortunately we know nothing more of his illumination.

But is is a later figure, that of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), who can be considered, like Eckhart, to be one of Christianity's great jnanis, or lost buddhas. Although confined to a largely theistic language, Cusa combines the intellectual vigour of Aquinas with the inner realisation of Eckhart, and provides a useful contemplation for us on the relationship between the silence of self-realisation and the development and use of the intellect. In this his instincts are like Plotinus, and in his background we have an emerging Renaissance. This passage from his great work "On Learned Ignorance" is taken from Abhayananda's Mysticism, and we are indebted to him for it:

Reason strives for knowledge and yet this natural striving is not adequate to the knowledge of the Essence of God, but only to the knowledge that God --- is beyond all conception and knowledge.     --- That wisdom (which all men by their very nature desire to know and consequently seek after with such great affection of mind) is known in no other way than that it is higher than all knowledge and utterly unknowable and unspeakable in all language. It is unintelligible to all understanding, immeasurable by all measure, improportionable by every proportion, incomparable by all comparison, infigurable by all figuration, unformable by all formation, --- unimaginable by all imagination, --- inapprehensible in all apprehension and unaffirmable in all affirmation, undeniable in all negation, indoubtable in all doubt, inopinonable in all opinion; and because in all speech it is inexpressible, there can be no limit to the means of expressing it, being incognitable in all cognition ... (Mysticism p. 324)

There can be no doubt that this is a jnani text because it starts with the assumption that men "by their very nature desire to know", which both ignores the bhakti orientation and quite possibly the female gender. In the way that this passage progresses we are reminded of Buddhist writings which, having their origin in the Buddha's own reluctance to intellectualise, often list negations. But the real origin of this style and sentiment is in the work of a much earlier jnani of Christian history, Dionysius the Areopagite, often referred to as the pseudo-Dionysius because of some confusion of identity. He was most likely a Syrian monk of the sixth century and is known for his Theologica Mystica, a mystical work that emphasises the "Divine Darkness". Dionysius is the source in Christian theology of the Christian via negativa, the term that we have appropriated and given a new though related meaning.

Dionysius may have been a Neoplatonist, but it is certain that his work had a great impact on medieval Christianity and shows its influence as much in Eckhart as it does in Cusa. The great medieval mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing takes many of these metaphors of darkness and ignorance to describe the inner space in which God is known. In more general jnani terms we have a teaching of transcendence which does not have its origin in Jesus, but in the lost buddhas of the West.

ChristianityJesus

We have made a jump from Plotinus to Eckhart which involved an utter contrast of ambience and prevailing world-view. The great jnanis that we examined up to and including Plotinus lived in a polytheistic or non-theistic world, at least in a world where the Judaic concept God had little currency. It is the extraordinary life and death of one man, Jesus, who was to change that.

But the real Jesus is difficult to come by, partly because few reliable texts remain, and partly because of two thousand years of interpretation and re-interpretation. However we can ask two questions about him: was he largely jnani or bhakti, and where was the balance of via positiva and via negativa in his thinking? Given our claim that Christianity is a bhakti religion we might expect to understand Jesus as bhakti or, if

not, revise our idea about Christianity.

Jesus taught in the Judaic ambience, using the language of the Judaic God, and this is a good point to reflect further on what that means. The average Westerner, even after a secular intellectual framework established as far back as the seventeenth century, thinks of religion in terms of the Judaic God. We even find the popular science writings of the 1990s which aimed to find links between science and religion do so almost always in terms of this view of God. It is not unfair to characterise it as an anthropomorphic God, in comparison to the "One" of Plotinus, the "brahma" of Hinduism, or the "nirvana" of Buddhism. The God that became the focus of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is always a "He" rather than an "it", and in the popular view at least is a being. This doesn't make much sense in a jnani religion of transcendence, but fits perfectly with a bhakti orientation, where God becomes the focus for the devotional impulse. Hence if Jesus exhorts us to love God with all our heart and all our might and all our strength, we can take this as evidence of his bhakti orientation.

But an entirely different view of Jesus arises from the Gospel of Thomas. This is a Gospel not found in the Bible, though it was widely read and circulated in the third century. It is part of the Nag Hamadi texts, discovered in 1945, part of what is known as the Coptic Gnostic Library, and is attributed to Didymos Judas Thomas, revered in the early Syriac church as apostle and twin brother of Jesus. It is a reminder of the scarcity of reliable information about Jesus, that while it is mentioned in the New Testament that he has a brother or brothers, we do not hear of a twin brother. The text consists of 114 verses, most of which begin with "Jesus says," and is a dense exposure to the sayings and dialogues of Jesus, some of which are already familiar from the canonical gospels. Because it is devoid of events and their descriptions we have no supernatural elements to deal with, making the text more accessible to the modern mind. And what do we find on a sensitive reading? A man speaking in paradoxes, a man a little like Heraclitus. Perhaps the best know verse is this:

Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the All. From Me did the All come forth, and unto Me did the All extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find Me there." (v.77)

To find a similar sentiment from the Masters of the world, we would have to look to Krishna's statements in the Bhagavad Gita. In Jesus and Krishna we have Masters who are not obviously bhaktis themselves, yet present themselves as objects of devotion. Otherwise we can read the Gospel of Thomas as a largely jnani text, where Jesus never mentions the Judaic God. His metaphor is rather that he, Jesus, has come from the Father, and has been given "some of the things of My father"; and that the Kingdom of Heaven is all around and within one.

The Gospel of Thomas is worthy of study quite independently of any knowledge of Christianity. But it has had little impact on the historical development of the religion, which in the first instance was due to St. Paul.

St.Paul

St. Paul originally persecuted the early Christians, approving of the stoning to death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, for example. His famous "Damascene conversion" some time after Jesus' death turned him into early Christianity's most vigorous evangelist, earning some hostility with his conviction that the new religion should not be limited to the Jewish people. In the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's letters, we discover the basis of the new religion in love and its expression inwardly to God and outwardly in acts of caring and kindness. In our terminology Paul creates a social spirituality, fringed with supernatural claims about Christ's miracles and resurrection, and with the transcendent goal which is so evident in the Gospel of Thomas greatly muted.

The early spread of Christianity through the efforts of St.Paul and others was remarkable, and in its appeal to ordinary people and in its understanding of suffering found an audience whose world was both harsh and spiritually remote. The persecution of the Christians under the Roman Empire for over three hundred years left its mark, as did the sudden conversion of Constantine, to parallel that of Paul. Suddenly a religion, comprising a network of churches and devotees used to a persecuted and underground existence, was effectively given the power of an empire.

One of the first events within the life of the now-recognised religion was to formulate its teachings in a way that the Emperors of the time could approve of. Partly because of the way that the Roman Empire operated, and partly because of the violence experienced against it in its first three hundred years, the context is laid here for the issue of heresy that dogged Christianity through its history. The comparable

development of Buddhism as the state religion of an empire almost as extensive as the Roman one, was quite free of this problem.

As a religion however one essential difference was to mark Christianity from Buddhism. However remote the original teaching of Enlightenment had become in the various branches of Buddhism as it compromised the Buddha's message for popular consumption, the prospect of individual attainment was retained. In the Christianity of Paul only one man could claim that "I and my Father are one," and that was Jesus. When Eckhart and the other Christian mystics came to the same realisation (not intellectually but in its essence) there was a difficulty. This is not to say that amongst a large group of Buddhist aspirants, such as in a Tibetan monastery of old, the breakthrough by one individual would necessarily be recognised and welcomed by all; human nature is human nature.

Augustine

Roman Emperors were not able to adjust Christian doctrine to their liking with impunity however, and there was considerable negotiation on many issues. Legend has it that a wife of one of the Emperors made sure that reincarnation was declared a heresy at one point, because she feared the karmic consequences of her cruel life. The development of Christian thinking certainly took arbitrary turns and twists such as this one, but there were also great spiritual thinkers who shaped the church and its beliefs, one of them being St. Augustine. We have mentioned already his loss of faith in Manichaeanism, a religion he had followed for ten years, his dabbling with Neoplatonism, and his eventual adoption of Christianity. His reasons for choosing it over Neoplatonism are interesting, and relevant to our understanding of Christianity as a bhakti religion. He devotes quite a part of Book VII of Confessions to detailing what he considers lacking in Neoplatonism, for example:

None of this is contained in the Platonist's books. Their pages have not the mien of the true love of God. They make no mention of the tears of confession or the sacrifice that you will never disdain, a broken spirit, a heart that is humbled and contrite, nor do they speak of the salvation of your people, the city adorned like a bride, the foretaste of your Spirit, or the chalice of our redemption. In them no one sings No rest has my soul but in God's hands; to him I look for deliverance. I have no other stronghold, no other deliverer but him; safe is his protection, I fear no deadly fall. In them no one listens to the voice which says Come to me all you that labour. They disdain his teaching because he is gentle and humble of heart. For you have hidden all this from the wise and revealed it to little children. (Confessions, p. 156)

Augustine finds the same fault with Neoplatonism that William James finds with the "religion of the healthy minded", a lack of the sense of sin and shame, redeemed in the love of Christ. In the first instance Augustine cannot find what he is looking for in Neoplatonism because he seeks a bhakti religion not a jnani one. But he identifies for us, even in the title of Confessions, a need to tackle sin and suffering that is not necessarily anything to do with bhakti. For sure the devotional stance is a subordinate one in some sense, but guilt and sin are not necessarily part of this, and we find little of either in Rumi or Ramakrishna. We might speculate that the sheer cruelty of the Roman world, epitomised by the Games (which even the so-called barbarian destroyers of the Empire immediately abandoned), evoked its opposite, an active sense of guilt and shame. While devotion does ease the sense of guilt and shame, we also find in the emerging Christian religion a moralising which takes an unfortunate interest in the suspected guilt of others. This may appear as a mild evangelising, as it does in Augustine, or the horrors of the Inquisition in later times.

But Augustine is an educated and intelligent man, and his bhakti is correspondingly tempered. Indeed he is quite explicit that he left Manichaeanism because its leading bishop, Faustus, could not answer his questions on astronomy, adhering instead to the handed-down doctrines that no longer tallied with newer observations of the planets, stars, and eclipses. Hence, although the Christianity that Augustine helped into existence in the Middle Ages was anti-learning, the Schoolmen of the later period could draw on Augustine's undoubted intellectuality and instinct for enquiry as justification for their project.

Christian Bhaktis

Augustine may have had a bhakti leaning, but we don't see in him the full bhakti characteristics that we examined in Ramakrishna or Jellaludin Rumi. The Christian world does have its bhakti geniuses however including the medieval Englishman, Richard Rolle (approx. 1300 - 1349). At the age of nineteen or thereabouts he ran away from home, possessed like Ramana Maharshi with a spiritual urge that was incompatible with his family life, and took refuge in a church. The Constable of the county spotted Rolle's spiritual talents, and it is a sign of the general piety of that age that this man, otherwise reputed to have a ruthless character, gave Rolle the initial means to enter the spiritual life. Rolle lived the rest of his life as a

hermit. He is known to history for his book The Fire of Love, the very title of which tells us of a bhakti persuasion. Here is an extract:

In a truly loving mind there is always a song of glory and an inner flame of love. They surge up out of a clear conscience, out of an abundant spiritual joy, out of inward gladness. Small wonder if a love like this wins through to a perfect love. Love of this sort is immense in its fervour, its whole direction Godwards, totally unrestrained in its love for him. It cleaves to Christ without the opposition of silly thoughts; it rejoices day and night in Jesus, never distracted from him, never seduced by evil, never deceived by 'dead flies', or driven off by them from the fragrance of the ointment. The world, the flesh, and the devil leave him unmoved, however violent their attacks; he tramples them underfoot, accounting their strength nothing. There is no tension in his fervour, but there is vigour in his love; there is sweetness in his song, and a warmth about his radiance; his delight in God is irresistible, his contemplation rises with unimpeded ascent. Everything he conquers; everything he overcomes; nothing seems impossible to him. For while a man is striving to love Christ with all his might he knows it to be true that within him is eternal life, abundant and sweet. (The Fire of Love, Chapter 17)

Rolle goes on to say that "Philosophers have laboured much, yet they have completely disappeared," showing that he has as little patience for the jnani types as they for him (we find Eckhart often exercised against the emotional and ecstatic outpourings of the bhaktis that Rolle exemplifies). Rolle shows another trait that marks the bhakti, the painful yearning and longing that accompanies the loss of the beloved, i.e. those times when the ecstatic love seems as remote as the rains in an African drought:

Nothing is more pleasant than praising Jesus; nothing more delectable than hearing him. For hearing rejoices my mind, and praising lifts me to himself. And when I am deprived of these things I sigh in my need, for then I hunger and thirst, and know myself bereft. Yet when I feel the embrace and caress of my Sweetheart I swoon with unspeakable delight, for it is he — he whom true lovers put before all else, for love of him alone, and because of his unbounded goodness! (The Fire of Love, Chapter 26)

In the next example Rolle suffers even more:

     But, alas, what am I to do? How long have I to wait? To whom shall I flee to enjoy what I am longing for? For I am needy and famished, tortured and afflicted, wounded and wan because my Love is not here; for this immense love torments me, and the hope deferred afflicts my soul. (The Fire of Love, Chapter 25)

Although we don't find this painful longing so developed in Ramakrishna, it is one of the hallmarks of the Sufi and Muslim bhaktis, along with all the metaphors of lovers and love-making. The kind of devotion that Rolle describes is extremely difficult for the secular mind to empathise with, the main stumbling block being that his object of devotion is Jesus. The difficulty here is that we use the same word "love" for a romantic attachment which has a clear object, and for a spiritual love which in the first instance is an objectless love. Because Rolle grew up in a Christian context there forms an object for the love, in this case Christ, whereas for a man like Chaitanya (15th century Bengali saint), who grew up in a Hindu context, Krishna became his object of love. It would be hard to argue this case with the secular person or even with Rolle and Chaitanya, but when we really try and penetrate the cause and effect in operation here no other explanation has a universal touch to it. Many great spiritual Masters have understood that the spiritual love of their disciples will be directed towards the them, but know in reality that it is the eternal in them that is the source of attraction.

Thomas a Kempis (1379 - 1471) is the probable author of a greatly-loved devotional work called The Imitation of Christ, sometimes considered to be the most important Christian work outside of the bible. We find in it the same longing for God (or Jesus) as in Rolle, and the same sense of desolation when bereft of that sweet love. In St John of the Cross (1542 - 1591) that we find another expression of this longing, characterised by him in the title of his book The Dark Night of the Soul. The book opens with this poem, called Song of the Soul:

Into the darkness of the nightWith heartache kindled with love,O blessed chance!I went out unobserved,My house being wrapped in sleep.

In the darkness, and yet safe,By secret ladder and in disguise,O blessed chance!

In darkness, and in secret, I crept out,My house being wrapped in sleep.

Into the happy nightIn secret, seen of none,Nor saw I aught,Without other light or guide,Save that which in my heart did burn.

This fire it was that guided meMore certainly than the midday sun,Where he did wait,He that I knew imprinted on my heart,In place, where none appeared.

O night, that led me, guiding night,O night far sweeter than the dawn;O night, that did so then uniteThe lover with his Beloved.

On my blossoming breast,Alone for him entire was kept,He fell asleep,Whilst I caressed,And fanned him with the cedar fan.

The breeze blew from the battlements,And then it tossed his hair about,With his fair handHe touched me lightly on the neck,So in a swoon were my senses left.

I lay quite still, all memory lost,I reclined on my Loved One's breast;I knew no more, in my abandonmentI threw away all care,And left it all forgotten among the lilies fair.

This extraordinary poem reminds one of the lyrical passion of Rumi, of the "felicity" of Traherne, and even of the robustness of Whitman. That the author should caress God, who falls asleep on his breast, is bolder than any of the love-mystics of this age, and furthermore he is careless of "He" or "he" (assuming this is not an error of transcription or translation). But John then starts his commentary with a warning that "the soul that speaks these words is actually in that state of perfection." The rest of the book, the commentary, is divided into two sections, the first on the Dark Night of the unspiritual part of the man, and the second on the Dark Night on the spiritual part. Nothing of the felicity of the poem appears in his commentary, which goes into the tiniest details of the aspirant's sins, faults, obstacles, and errors on the way. We cannot quite call it moralising, or hectoring, but the dwelling in such morbid detail on the negative qualities of the Dark Night make it a text that appeals little to the modern mind.

But we forget the context of John's life: the religious suspicion and intolerance epitomised by the Spanish Inquisition. His involvement with the Discalced Carmelites of Teresa of Avila, who had sought him out as confessor to her nuns, led to him being kidnapped and imprisoned for a few days until his release was ordered by a sympathetic Papal nuncio. On the death of this man, his successor, who had no liking for Teresa's order, had him arrested and tried for disobedience. The trial took place in Toledo, seat of the worst phases of the Inquisition a hundred years previous. He was flogged, found guilty of the charges and imprisoned in terrible conditions, fed on virtually nothing and humiliated and beaten daily. It is during this period that he wrote the poems including the one above from The Dark Night of the Soul. After nine months he escaped to peace and tranquility, where he wrote the commentaries on his poems.

There are countless other great Christian bhaktis, each speaking with their own voice, and yet part of the mixed ambience of the medieval and late medieval period, the gifts and genius of devotional love set in an atmosphere of intolerance. The great bhaktis had no easier time of it than the great jnanis of the Christian era, the main difference being that they had an accessible language to express their inner

experience.

SpinozaContext

One of the consequences of Europe's sad history of religious persecution was the exodus of Jews from Spain and Portugal from 1391 onwards. The forcible conversion of the Jews to Catholicism led to an enduring suspicion and continued harassment of the conversos and in 1622 the parents of Spinoza left Portugal for the religious freedom of the new-founded Republic of the Netherlands. Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Sephardic Jewish community many of whom had reconverted from Catholicism to Judaism. A key event in the life of this community was the case of Uriel D'Acosta whose ambivalences about faith resulted in several excommunications and re-admissions to the Amsterdam Jewish community, culminating in his eventual suicide. Spinoza was only eight at the time, but grew up in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Where Eckhart might be the least "lost" of our Western "buddhas" and perhaps even the closest to the Buddha in some aspects of his thought, Spinoza is another example of a great Western jnani lost because his work is now understood as philosophy; for example the Encyclopaedia Brittanica lists him as "Dutch-Jewish philosopher, the foremost exponent of 17th century Rationalism". Since the scholarly reconstruction of Eckhart began in the mid-nineteenth century his reputation as a spiritual teacher has grown, but Spinoza's contribution is mostly understood to be confined to philosophy, as is Plotinus's. Some consider Spinoza to be the first philosopher of the modern age, but this title usually goes to René Descartes, a precursor in many ways to Spinoza, and with evident jnani inclinations in his life and work. Of the two we have chosen Spinoza because, once one has dug below the formal surface of his work, it becomes clear that his spiritual intensity is the greater.

First we need to take a short look at the period in which Spinoza lived, the 17th century, a time that can be seen as a turning point for the civilisation of the West. The year 1600 saw the execution of Gordiano Bruno for heresy by the Inquisition, the publication of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Gilbert's scientific essay On the Magnet. Galileo, Kepler and Newton created the scientific advances which formed the basis of modern science, the Royal Society was established in England and provided the impetus for the broadening of scientific investigation; and the philosophical mindset that encompassed and supported the scientific venture was created by Bacon and Descartes. The political philosophy of Hobbes and Locke emerged in response to the scientific ethos, the thirty years war ravaged Europe, and the English Civil War did the same for England. New literatures emerged with Molière, Milton, Bunyan and Racine, and early in the century the King James translation of the bible into English appeared; in the later part Pascal published his Pensées. New religious movements sprang up including the Quakers in England, founded by the extraordinary character of James Fox, and Jansenism in France. As we shall see, the character of the age was as religious as its precursors, but all the seeds were sown for the eventual triumph of secularism.

In addition two writers appeared whose most significant works were not published in their lifetimes or centuries, but who are important for our understanding of both the jnani temperament and for via positiva in the West: Thomas Traherne and Baruch Spinoza.

Work

When the modern mind encounters Descartes' Discourse on Method or Spinoza's The Ethics it tends to either dismiss them because the subject of God is such a central issue, or "bracket out" such references, assuming that the works can be understood in an entirely secular way. An example of this is the abiding notion that Descartes created a duality in his res cogitans and res extensans (mind and matter); whereas in his writings his arguments depend entirely on a third entity, God, by which the first two are related. However, we are more interested in the "God" of these discussions than any formal contribution to philosophy, and our central issue with Spinoza is whether his "God" is that of a bhakti or a jnani. A useful clue is given by Samuel Shirley in his translator's preface to The Ethics:

     Although Spinoza gives repeated warning that his 'Deus' is far from the anthropomorphic conception of God prevalent in the theology of his time, the reader will find it difficult to bear this constantly in mind. It is not until Ethics, Pr.14,I, that God, by definition, is shown to be identical with the infinite, all-inclusive, unique substance, and thereafter it is all too easy to lose sight of this, as the religious overtones of the word

'God' keep asserting themselves. So Spinoza's frequent use of the phrase 'Deus sive Natura'—God, or Nature—is intended as a salutary corrective. For Spinoza God is all Being, all Reality, in all its aspects and in all its infinite richness. (The Ethics, p.23)

This should alert us not only to the jnani orientation of Spinoza, but to a streak of via positiva in his thinking as well. The introduction to the same edition, by Seymour Feldman, reminds us that the German poet Novalis described Spinoza as a "God-intoxicated man," a description more usually attributed to the bhakti type. Richard Maurice Bucke cites Spinoza as one of the less-certain cases of "cosmic consciousness" (Bucke's general term for the attainment of transcendence), less certain only because there is no specific account of a transition into illumination. Bucke is telling us that we have to discover Spinoza through his texts, which is what we shall do in an attempt to settle the bhakti / jnani and via negativa / via positiva issues.

The Ethics is not the place to start however, but his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Neither were published in his own lifetime, and of the two, the second was not completed. But it contains Spinoza's account of his journey of discovery, not as Bucke would have liked in terms of a sudden illumination from the beyond, but, more like the account in Descartes' Discourse on Method, in terms of his aims and principles. Like almost all the great bhaktis and jnanis that we have discussed, he saw that he needed to find a source of joy that was beyond the transient, the impermanent, and the conditioned world, the so-called pleasures of which brought only anxiety in their wake. His ruminations on this issue are almost identical to the Buddha's, but with one exception: as he grew in his resolve and success in his venture he saw that:

the acquisition of money, sensual pleasure, and esteem is a hindrance only as long as they are sought on their own account, and not as means to other things. If they are sought as means, they will then be under some restriction, and far from being hindrances, they will do much to further the end for which they are sought, as I shall demonstrate in its proper place. (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 11)

This sentiment is in marked contrast to the jnanis and bhaktis of the Christian tradition that we have looked at, reminiscent in fact of the wholly maverick Thomas Traherne (born in fact just five years after Spinoza). In this next extract we have a further indication that we may have a case of via positiva; it also includes a terse jnani statement of transcendence:

     But human weakness fails to comprehend that order in its thought, and meanwhile man conceives a human nature much stronger than his own, and sees no reason why he cannot acquire such a nature. Thus he is urged to seek the means that will bring him to such a perfection, and all that can be the means that will bring him to such perfection is called a true good, while the supreme good is to arrive at the enjoyment of such a nature, together with other individuals, if possible. What that nature is we shall show in its proper place; namely, the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of Nature. (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 13)

Briefly noting a felicity about this statement that matches Traherne, it is of interest that he would like this enjoyment to be in the company of "other individuals, if possible". In fact he continues with the idea that he wants to bring as many as possible "to think as I do", and proposes a social order favourable to his end, including rules for living together. His prospects for achieving a social goal like this were remote in the extreme, as he was treated with suspicion on account of his ideas, and was even excommunicated from his Jewish community. His philosophy was later described as "the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable, the most absurd", or as a "hideous hypothesis," before Goethe and Coleridge made rescued his popularity. Spinoza's confidence and his intent at least match the Buddha's in creating a religious community or sangha. And in his assertion that the supreme good is "knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of Nature" (our italics) we have a jnani statement.

But is has to be admitted that Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect soon loses its way in a morass of technicalities concerning perception and knowledge. Despite this it notes the properties of the intellect in terms of the infinite and the eternal. If Spinoza in his being had rest in the infinite and eternal, or if at least these particular ideas had an experiential basis then we might suggest that he is at least aware of his Buddha-mind or Buddha-nature, as such qualities of mind can be described (incidentally we can ask just the same question of Descartes). If we now turn to The Ethics we find that it is in fact suffused with references to the infinite and the eternal, and to a God that is those things, and also a God to be loved and who "loves himself with an infinite intellectual love" (Proposition 35). This phrase alone alerts us to an utterly original expression of the spiritual-intellectual (i.e. jnani) life, and a short immersion in The Ethics will prove maddening, frustrating, and tantalising. It simply has so little relation to any other spiritual or

philosophical work (though of course one can trace a host of influences) that one embarks on a turbulent sea without engine, compass or any idea of a destination. In Thomas Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is for the "solitary and elect". Spinoza concludes The Ethics by saying "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." He is referring to the goal of the spiritual life, as Jesus was, but it is also true of his book.

Richard Maurice Bucke says of Leaves of Grass that it grew slowly on him, initially leaving no mark, but on subsequent reading displaying small pockets of light, until the whole lit up for him. In practice it is easier to selectively quote from Leaves than from The Ethics and still convey its flavour, but we have no choice but to select some passages from The Ethics, and merely suggest that for those with the right kind of mind a longer immersion will light up the entirety. The text is laid out as a pseudo-Euclidean argument consisting of an intertwined sequence of Propositions (the central ideas), Corollaries (related ideas), Scholia (commentaries), Postulates, Definitions and Axioms, but as Bertrand Russell points out the Propositions and Scholia (plus the occasional Appendix) are most worth reading. Even Russell, committed to the entire project of Western philosophy, admits that the "proofs" in Spinoza's Euclidean style of exposition are mainly spurious, where he would never do so for the Socratic dialogues. Yet we cannot suggest as with Socrates and the Buddha that Spinoza wished to 'numb' the minds of his readers — it is a great shame that we have no records of his conversation to help us in this matter.

Here is an impressionistic distillation of The Ethics, each fragment being selected by an instinctive rather than a rational process. Part I of The Ethics is called "Concerning God":

     By God I mean an absolutely infinite being; that is, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence. (Definition 6, I)

     God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists (Proposition 11, I)

     There can be, or be conceived, no other substance than God. (Proposition 14, I)

     Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God. (Proposition 15, I)

     Some imagine God in the likeness of man, consisting of mind and body, and subject to passions. But it is clear from what has already been proved how far they stray from the true knowledge of God. These I dismiss, for all who have given any consideration to the divine nature deny that God is corporeal. (Scholium to Proposition 15,)

     God acts solely from the laws of his own nature, constrained by none. (Proposition 17, I)

     Furthermore, I have something here to say about the intellect and will that is usually attributed to God. If intellect and will do indeed pertain to the eternal essence of God, one must understand in the case of both these attributes something very different from the meaning widely entertained. For the intellect and will that would constitute the essence of God would have to be vastly different from human intellect and will, and could have no point of agreement except the name. (Scholium to Proposition 17)

     God is the immanent, not the transitive causes of all things. (Proposition 18, I)

     God, that is all the attributes of God, are eternal. (Proposition 19, I)

     God's existence and his essence are one and the same. (Proposition 20, I)

     All things that follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must have existed always, and as infinite; that is, through the said attribute they are eternal and infinite. (Proposition 21, I)

     Nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way. (Proposition 29, I)

     Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case. (Proposition 33, I)

--- For many are wont to argue on the following line: if everything has followed from the necessity of God's most perfect nature, why does Nature display so many imperfections, such as rottenness to the point of putridity, nauseating ugliness, confusion, evil, sin, and so on? But, as I have just pointed out, they are easily refuted. For the perfection of things should be measured solely from their own nature and power; nor

are things more or less perfect to the extent that they please or offend human senses, serve or oppose human interests. As to those who ask why God did not create all men in such a way that they should be governed solely by reason, I make only this reply, that he lacked not material for creating all things from the highest to the lowest degree of perfection; or, to speak more accurately, the laws of his nature were so comprehensive as to suffice for the production of everything that can be conceived by an infinite intellect, as I proved in Proposition 16. (Appendix to Chapter 1)

This last passage contains the simplest and most direct argument for the perfection of existence, that everything we perceive as imperfect is only from our own perspective and not from the object in question. This way of seeing things can be called sub specie aeternitatis, that is "under the form of eternity", a phrase that Spinoza uses later on and has entered the language through him. We may remember that Heraclitus, though using a different expression of it, also saw the idea of imperfection as merely bound up in our preferences (indeed there is much that is Heraclitean in Spinoza). In these extracts so far, Spinoza has made God absolutely central, his chief qualities that of infinity and eternity, all things as existing solely in God, and all events predestined. Part II of The Ethics is titled "Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind," and here are some extracts:

     I now pass on to the explication of those things that must necessarily have followed form the essence of God, the eternal and infinite Being; not indeed all of them—for we proved in Proposition 16 Part I that from his essence there must follow infinite things in infinite ways—but only those things that can lead us as it were by the hand to the knowledge of the human mind and its utmost blessedness. (Introduction to Part II)

     By reality and perfection I mean one and the same thing. (Definition 6, II)

     Thought is an attribute of God; i.e. God is a thinking thing. (Proposition 1, II)

     The idea of God, from which infinite things follow in infinite ways, must be one and one only (Proposition 4, II)

     All must surely admit that nothing can be or be conceived without God. For all are agreed that God is the sole cause of all things, both of their essence and their existence; that is God is the cause of things not only in respect of their coming into being (secundum fieri), as they say, but also in respect of their being. But at the same time many assert that that without which a thing can neither be nor be conceived pertains to the essence of the thing, and so they believe that either the nature of God pertains to the essence of created things or that created things can either be or be conceived without God.; or else, more probably, they hold no consistent opinion. I think that the reason for this is their failure to observe the proper order of philosophical enquiry. For the divine nature, which they should have considered before all else—it being prior both in cognition and in Nature—they have taken to be last in the order of cognition, and the things that are called objects of sense they have taken as prior to everything. Hence it has come about that in considering natural phenomena, they have completely disregarded the divine nature. And when thereafter they turned to the contemplation of the divine nature, they could find no place in their thinking for those fictions on which they had built their natural science, since these fictions were of no avail in attaining knowledge of the divine nature. So it is little wonder that they have contradicted themselves on all sides. (Scholium to Proposition 10, II)

We notice again Spinoza's positive outlook: that the human mind is characterised by its "utmost blessedness" and that reality and perfection are the same. In his argument against materialism in the Scholium to Proposition 10 he tells us that the fictions used to construct natural science are no use in "attaining knowledge of the divine nature." The problem with Spinoza is that he seems to write from knowledge of the divine nature, presenting us with a logical proof of it. He may have been entirely earnest in his belief that such an attainment is possible by following his arguments, or he may have deliberately hidden his illumination behind the mask of pseudo-logic (after all Whitman deliberately hid his illumination behind the metaphors in his poetry). Let him continue:

     All ideas are true in so far as they are related to God. (Proposition 32, II)

     A true idea in us is one which is adequate in God in so far as he is explicated through the nature of the human mind (Cor.Pr.11,II). Let us suppose, then, that there is a God, in so far as he is explicated through the nature of the human mind, an adequate idea, A. (Proof to Proposition 43, II)

     It is not in the nature of reason to regard things as contingent, but as necessary (Proposition 44, II)

     It is in the nature of reason to perceive things in the light of eternity (sub quandam specie aeternitatis). (Corollary 2 to Proposition 44, II)

     It is in the nature of reason to regard things as necessary, not as contingent (previous Pr.). Now it perceives this necessity truly (Pr.41,II); that is, as it is in itself (Ax.6,1). But (pr.16,I) this necessity is the very necessity of God's eternal nature. Therefore it is in the nature of reason to regard things in this light of eternity. Furthermore, the basic principles of reason are those notions (Pr.38,II) which explicate what is common to all things, and do not explicate (Pr.37, II) the essence of any particular thing, and therefore must be conceived without any relation to time, but in the light of eternity. (Proof to Proposition 44, II)

     Every idea of any body or particular thing existing in actuality necessarily involves the eternal and infinite essence of God. (Proposition 45, II)

     The knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God which each idea involves is adequate and perfect. (Proposition 46, II)

     The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God. (Proposition 47, II)

As we are not primarily interested in logic, reason or proofs, we can explore Spinoza's statements in terms of how they reveal his own mind, or interiority. Spinoza only has direct access to Spinoza's mind, so when he tells us that "The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God" we are learning about his own illumination, or it is largely meaningless (Gandhi for example denied that the human mind could apprehend the imperishable). It can also be read as a statement of the jnani goal, but what it lacks entirely is a pedagogy, or a route to this transcendent condition, if we are to make this assumption about him. It is a serious assumption, certainly, because we place him in the same position as the Buddha. What we immediately note when we make this juxtaposition however is that where the Buddha regard "things as contingent" (in his doctrine of co-conditioned origination), Spinoza sees them as necessary, i.e. Spinoza sees the same issue through the eyes of via positiva.

Spinoza concludes Part II with a tacit admission that he is presenting a doctrine rather than an enquiry:

     My final task is to show what practical advantages accrue from knowledge of this doctrine, and this we shall readily gather from the following points:

1.   It teaches that we act only by God's will, and that we share in the divine nature, and all the more as our actions become more perfect and as we understand God more and more. Therefore this doctrine, apart from giving us complete tranquility of mind, has the further advantage of teaching us wherein lies our greatest happiness or blessedness, namely, in the knowledge of God alone, as a result of which we are induced only to such action as are urged on us by love and piety. Hence we clearly understand how far astray from the true estimation of virtue are those who, failing to understand that virtue itself and the service of God is happiness itself and utmost freedom, expect God to bestow on them the highest rewards in return for their virtue and meritorious actions as if in return for the basest slavery. (Concluding Scholium to Part II)

There is little in this that a Christian would argue with, other than a surprise at the circuitous route that Spinoza took to get there. True, there is the confidence that we "share in the divine nature" without the corresponding caveat in mainstream Christianity, that of original sin, but we could easily imagine Eckhart or St John of the Cross agreeing with this summary, or even stating it themselves. So this is a good moment to look back on these extracts and ask how anthropomorphic is Spinoza's God? Given that he several times makes clear that God is a "being", and that he has a Jewish background, from which the very concept of an anthropomorphic God arises, could we completely de-anthropomorphise his God without changing his meaning? We saw that to use the term "The One" or "The All" with Eckhart would leave a readable text, but would remove something of the active nature of Eckhart's God. With Spinoza we don't have this problem, and in fact Spinoza so often uses "God or Nature" instead of "God" that he does the work for us. By removing the word "God" entirely from Spinoza's text and using the Plotinian "One" for example we are left with a work that is jnani and almost Buddhist. As already pointed out, Spinoza's via positiva gives his work a very different emphasis and implication to the Buddhist ideal however.

Looking at a few more extracts we see Spinoza in aphoristic mood (a style found in Pascal and Nietzsche):

     Hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and may on the other hand be destroyed by love. (Proposition 43, III)

     Hatred that is fully overcome by love passes into love, and the love will therefore be greater than if it had not been preceded by hatred. (Proposition 44, III)

For men are wont to form general ideas both of natural phenomena and of artefacts, and these ideas they regard as models. So when they see something occurring in Nature at variance with their preconceived ideal of the thing in question, they believe that Nature has then failed or blundered and has left that thing imperfect. So we see that men are in the habit of calling natural phenomena perfect or imperfect from their own preconceptions rather than from true knowledge. For we have demonstrated in Appendix, Part I that Nature does not act with an end in view; that the eternal and infinite being, whom we call God, or Nature, acts by the same necessity whereby it exists. (Preface, Part IV)

     Knowledge of good and evil is nothing other than the emotion of pleasure or pain in so far as we are conscious of it. (Proposition 8, IV)

     Whatever we endeavour according to reason is nothing else but to understand; and the mind, in so far as it exercises reason, judges nothing else to be its advantage except what conduces to understanding. (Proposition 26, IV)

     We know nothing to be certainly good or evil except what is really conducive to understanding or what can hinder understanding. (Proposition 27, IV)

     The mind's highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest virtue is to know God. (Proposition 28, IV)

     The good which every man who pursues virtue aims at for himself he will also desire for the rest of mankind, and all the more as he acquires greater knowledge of God. (Proposition 37, IV)

Spinoza's point that the more one acquires "knowledge" of God, the more one wishes this blessing on others is reflected in Buddhism as the Bodhisattva ideal, where one strives for the enlightenment of others. But in the next extract Spinoza reminds us again of his via positiva outlook :

     I make a definite distinction between derision (which in Cr.II said is bad) and laughter. For laughter, and likewise merriment, are pure pleasure, and so, provided that they are not excessive, they are good in themselves (Pr.41,IV). Certainly nothing but grim and gloomy superstition forbids enjoyment. Why is it less fitting to drive away melancholy than to dispel hunger and thirst? The principle that guides me and shapes my attitude to life is this: no deity, nor anyone else but the envious, takes pleasure in my weakness and my misfortune, nor does he take to be virtue our tears, sobs, fearfulness and other such things that are a mark of a weak spirit. On the contrary, the more we are affected with pleasure, the more we pass to a state of greater perfection; that is, the more we necessarily participate in the divine nature. (Scholium to Proposition 45, IV)

Spinoza goes on to list good food and drink, blossoming plants, dress, music, sporting activities, theatres "and the like" as "nourishment" to the various parts of the body. The idea that greater pleasure leads us to greater perfection and to a greater participation in the divine nature is a rare sentiment indeed in the religious life, and shows again Spinoza's originality. Yet something of this must also come from the great Jewish tradition of the love of life, and the enjoyment of its pleasures. The Christian ideals of self-mortification and penance are not Judaic, except in that one extremely influential Jew, St. Paul, had reason to repent. We finish our selections on the subject of the love of God:

The mind can bring it about that all the affections of the body—i.e. images of things—be related to the idea of God. (Proposition 14, V)

He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so the more he understands himself and the emotions. (Proposition 15, V)

This love towards God is bound to hold chief place in the mind. (Proposition 16, V)

He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return. (Proposition 19, V)

This love towards God cannot be tainted with emotions of envy or jealousy, but is the more fostered as we

think more men to be joined to God by this same bond of love. (Proposition 14, V)

God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love. (Proposition 35, V)

The mind's intellectual love towards God is the love of God wherewith God loves himself not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explicated through the essence of the human mind considered under a form of eternity. That is the mind's intellectual love towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself. (Proposition 14, V)

Taken as a group this set of propositions, almost a poem of divine love, represent one of the greatest statements of love from a Western jnani in the cultural context of a theistic language. We have pointed out at the beginning that jnani and bhakti reach exactly the same point in the end, where the heart of the bhakti is illuminated by spiritual intelligence, and the mind of the jnani illuminated by spiritual love; Spinoza one of the finest examples of the latter that we could wish for.

Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) often regretted that D.H.Lawrence and Frederich Nietzsche had not been born in India, because he thought that in spiritual climate conducive to the transcendent both men would have attained — they had the insight and the passion. It is an idle, but overwhelmingly tempting thought: in what place or time could Spinoza have brought about his desire, a sangha or community which could have heard and profited from his teachings? For it is sure that 17th century Holland, despite its relative tolerance, was far from such a place. The answer must be in a world where secular freedoms had been guaranteed long enough for the spiritual longings, even if of a very few people, to acquire the hunger for a new Spinoza. In the next section we look at how the understanding of jnani and the related issues presented here can help us understand the triumph of secularism in the West.

The Rise of SecularismIntroduction

The purpose of this section is to identify the factors that brought Western culture from piety to secularism. With an increasing leisured class that could read, the influence of the men of letters, in particular the French philosophes, had an increasing impact on culture in Europe, notably in the Enlightenment period of the 18th century. The intelligentsia led the flight from piety to secularism because of three historical trends:

Faith had become identified with oppression because of the Inquisition and other religious persecutions

Literal interpretations of spiritual metaphor, particularly the anthropomorphism of God, had been re-emphasised by the Reformation

Science was providing a new world-view.

All of these trends can be examined from our ideas on jnani and the other distinctions made here.

The Inquisition

We have no desire to dwell on what was an unfortunate episode in human history, but the understanding of the Inquisition is vital in understanding how the secular world took shape. The Inquisition took many forms in different countries, but its duration, from 1231 to 1834, effectively lasts from the end of the Middle Ages well into the Enlightenment. The beginning of the Inquisition was marked by the brutal repression of the Cathars or Albigensians in the thirteenth century. This was a popular Christian sect that held Manichaean views, and its adherence to poverty, vegetarianism, and the belief in reincarnation were a threat to the Catholic Church. Its views on poverty were in themselves not heretical, but were promoted in combination with a criticism of the Church for its worldliness and corruption.

In the 15th century the Spanish Inquisition gained authority from the Roman Catholic Church to deal with Jews and conversos (Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, as in the case of Spinoza's parents), and, along with its chief inquisitor, Thomas de Torquemada, came to symbolise the worst of religious persecution. Although its horrors were later exaggerated by the Protestants, it is believed that during Torquemada's tenure some 2,000 so-called heretics were burned alive.

The influence of Inquisitorial persecutions on the fabric of society should not be underestimated, with suspicion and denunciation an ever-present reality. It is a destructive human capacity that can emerge at any time in history and in any place, and has nothing to do with religion in the first instance. For example, an understandable revulsion against paedophiles in England in the year 2000 erupted in a form of mass-hysteria with the beating and intimidation of both genuine paedophiles and quite innocent victims, including a doctor whose house was vandalised because vigilantes had mistaken the word 'paediatrician' for 'paedophile'. Likewise Nazi persecutions had a secular basis, and we understand that life under Stalin fostered a regime of suspicion and denunciation for the Russian people that was not unlike the Inquisitorial purges. But the effect of the Spanish Inquisition, and all the religious persecutions of the Christian era, was to inextricably link religion with intolerance based on spurious notions of heresy. Queen Isabella of Spain first favoured the Jews for their contribution to the state, but then persecuted them for reasons not dissimilar to Hitler. Such a move always received a measure of popular support if its victims are wealthy and "different." Religious differences in the post-medieval climate were sufficient cause for state-sponsored torture, murder, and the confiscation of property.

But beyond the inevitable political, or one could say tribal, aspects of religious persecution there lies a deeper tragedy, which is that the most spiritually gifted of individuals are the most likely to be denounced. Even within closed religious orders, human nature being what it is, jealousy exists when one person sees to have made more "progress" than another, or is favoured by a spiritual teacher. We can see this across the world, and Buddhism is no exception either. Spiritual gifts are varied as we have pointed out, and in particular the display of those gifts we have termed occult or esoteric, and which led to accusations of witchcraft, could bring swift vengeance. The fact that so many women were mutilated or killed as a result is one of the most shameful aspects of this period of Western history. If we were to adopt Jung's concept of a collective unconscious, without necessarily giving this theory the full weight of psychoanalytical credence, then we can suggest that the secular mind still bears the pain of these wounds and reacts from them.

To be hurt in the most sensitive areas of one's being, whether sexual, romantic, or spiritual, is to produce irrational hostilities and exaggerated responses to situations which are no longer threatening, as any psychoanalyst will know, and this is undoubtedly a quality of the secular mind as it struggled to assert itself. But we can also learn something constructive about the spiritual life from the long and tragic episode of the Inquisition and other religious persecutions in Europe. Where the spiritual life is seen as a kind of progression, with attainments along the way and even an ultimate attainment such as "enlightenment," it will foster jealousy and the potential for the concept of heresy and eventually persecution. Hence, if we are to learn from history, we need to avoid the presentation of the spiritual life in terms of achievement, a point we shall return to later.

The Renaissance

We have several times mentioned Scholasticism as an early outlet for the jnani impulse in Christianity. In an intensely devotional context the jnani type with the typical mind-orientation of enquiry and will was permitted a range of intellectual pursuits which had as their goal the greater glory of God. Hence one of the stranger products of Christianity during this period, the arguments that represented "proofs" of the existence of God, the chief one of which is known as the "argument from design". These have had a great impact on the perception of religion down to this day, but, on closer examination are something of an absurdity. For the bhakti a "proof" of God is unnecessary, as we have seen. For the bhaktis God is "proved" as much by his presence, which bring about the tears and ecstasies of love, as by his absence, which is almost as sweet, causing the love-struck devotee a pain so real and overwhelming that any question of logical proof would be absurd. For the jnani the concept of God is not really needed in the first place. In addition we find that the Schoolmen have few intellectual sources to draw on, these being mainly Aristotle and Augustine. If Plato is an adumbration of the jnani genius of Socrates, then Aristotle doubly so. What Aristotle brings of course is the embryo of a scientific outlook, but the Schoolmen, despite many close shaves, did not quite stumble across the basis of the scientific method. This was to come much later.

Scholasticism reached a peak with Aquinas, or a dead-end as many came to think in later periods. Although it was invaluable in reconstructing some of the works of ancient Greece and in developing the methods of scholarly research, and perhaps in honing the intellectual tools of the age it lacked one essential element: experience. It could not become a vibrant jnani tradition because the central experience of jnani was effectively unknown to it, and it could not become a fledgling science because the central activity of science, observation, was unknown to it. By divorcing itself largely from experience of either the inner world or the outer world Scholasticism demonstrated the aridity of a purely intellectual

process.

It was in the Renaissance that a new confidence in man's relation to Nature took place, and an enquiry began that was based in observation. At the same time the great writings of Neoplatonism, including Plotinus, were rediscovered and translated into Latin. If Scholasticism had Aristotle at its root, then the Renaissance ideals had Plato at their root, and, coming closer to a genuinely jnani religious thinking, actually posed the greater threat to the Church. The influx of a broader Hellenistic literature allowed the development of modes of thinking that lay outside Catholic orthodoxy, and became known as Humanism, which in turn developed into the Reformation. Many of the seeds of the secular revolution were laid in the Renaissance, but we can see this in a slightly different light. In Marcilio Ficino's Florentine Academy a vigorous Neoplatonism sprang up, and with it the possibility of a genuinely jnani context for the spiritual life. Ficino was himself a priest, and attempted a synthesis of Neoplatonism with Christianity that had a lasting influence in Europe.

But the Renaissance holds an interesting tension for us, in that it faced in two direction: the Hellenistic past, and a Humanistic future. This can be epitomised in the jnani interests of two of its greatest artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo. While Michaelangelo was attracted to the Platonic Academy in Florentine, and its pursuit of the Greek thinkers including Plato and Plotinus, Leonardo rejected the ancients in favour of a revitalised empiricism. In his notebooks we have the earliest argument for a faith in observation as the way to unlock Nature's secrets and to understand the place of the self in the world. It is no accident that he was an artist, because it is the artist who looks at the world in an analytical way, continuously challenging the assumptions of the mind. Leonardo could not yet be called a scientist however because, although he had the right instinct about the empirical (and this was in contradiction of the Greek outlook), he did not have the mathematical basis or rigorous methods of measurement.

The Reformation

The influx of Hellenistic thinking into the Christian world of the Renaissance began the pressure on the Catholic Church as sole arbiter of orthodoxy. But even without outside pressures the structure of the Church had the seeds of its decay sprouting in the masonry; a quite natural corruption through wealth and power that unchallenged dominion brings. This had been criticised by the Albigensians in the 13th century, but by the 16th century had become blatant and intolerable. One crucial issue, the purchase of indulgencies which gave sinners so-called absolution and lined the pockets of the clergy, became the wedge that split the Church open. A revolt against the Catholic church by Martin Luther and John Calvin led to a new form of Christianity, Protestantism, which became a rival of such magnitude that, after a period of nearly one and a half thousand years, there became two Christian authorities instead of one.

This might have little implication for the eventual rise of secularism were it not for an important dynamic in the schism: literalism. In seeking to challenge the authority of the Church Luther and Calvin gave priority to the text of the bible as the source of doctrine. The Catholic church had for centuries been able to develop a range of interpretations of the biblical texts, many of which which were creative and a valuable progression of spiritual understanding. This process naturally shaped the bible, in terms of what was included and excluded, and the way that terms were translated. By taking a literal interpretation of a document intimately shaped by Roman Catholicism, the Protestants missed an opportunity for fresh spiritual thinking, one that might have incorporated the humanistic jnani outlook of the Renaissance. Part of this literalism was of course to reinforce the anthropomorphic image of God, instead of loosening this image with the metaphors of Plotinus for example.

Hence this turning point in the history of Christianity had little in it to provide an outlet for the jnani temperament. If anything the Reformation and the Roman Catholic response made it harder for the jnani to find a language for a non-devotional spirituality; neither was the new literalism conducive to a revived form of Scholasticism. Instead a new venture had begun that absorbed those of intellect: science.

The Rise of Science

Both Plato and Heraclitus criticised Pythagoras for 'research', that is for examining and measuring the natural world, and despite the Greek understanding of logic and mathematics, its anti-empirical bias prevented a proper science arising. Scholasticism had neither the freedom of scope nor the basic insight into the empirical method to create a real science, and it is not until Leonardo da Vinci that we have the first articulation of the scientific method. But it was Galileo, who, almost single-handed, created the basis for modern science.

The proper understanding of science takes some training, but is worthwhile for the spiritual aspirant

because it contains within it attitudes and understandings that can help in the spiritual life. In itself scientific knowledge changes nothing about the spiritual however, and we only have to walk with the Buddha for a while to see that his eternal truths are untouched by the so-called "progress" of science. But there are parallels between science and the jnani path which are instructive, the chief of which is the sense of an open-ended enquiry, and the humility to accept the results of that enquiry, however unpalatable. The exhortation "know thyself" sums up this approach.

It is no surprise then that the jnani instincts of half of the Western population, so far repressed or tightly channelled by the Church, suddenly found a new outlet. This is pure speculation of course, but although science had many opportunities to take root in the jnani East, it never did, and perhaps it was the enormous suppressed and collective jnani energies of the West that allowed for its sudden explosion across Europe. The founders of Western science were all religious men, and would have probably been dismayed by the eventual rise of "scientism" if we can use that term to describe the belief that the scientific method, as exemplified in physics, has an application and remit over all of human experience. Spinoza warns explicitly that this approach, starting in the material world, constructs theories incompatible with a knowledge of the divine, and hence leads to its denial.

Amongst the more spiritual of the late 20th century and early 21st century scientists there is a trend to see quantum theory, relativity and chaos theory as re-affirming spiritual values in man, but the arguments are rarely convincing for the hard-nosed reductionists, because of the very point that Spinoza made. Nevertheless there is no doubt that entry into the spiritual life can come through an exploration of science, particularly the "new" sciences just mentioned. Einstein's notebooks show us that he was sympathetic to the God of Spinoza, while otherwise sceptical of the anthropomorphic God, showing again a resonance between science and jnani.

Secularism

Religious persecution, epitomised by the Inquisition, but widespread in other forms and appearing for example in Spinoza's expulsion from his Jewish community, gradually became associated with faith and piety. Voltaire for example thought that the "four happy ages" were those of Plato, of Cicero and Caesar, of the Renaissance, and of the Enlightenment in which time he wrote. The "ages of belief" in contrast were dismal and backward. And, the inevitable conclusion came: they were Christian.

We can see another dynamic in this of course, that the intelligentsia of the 18th century were naturally of a jnani disposition. This is not to say that the bhakti is not intelligent, and in the long run we might be able to say that it is possibly a higher and more felicitous intelligence. But it is not so inclined to learning, and in the new era learning acquired a new status, and a revived energy after the stultified failures of Scholasticism. While the bhakti puts faith and piety ahead of all other considerations, and in Europe this means of course Christian faith and piety, a jnani, once an association is made between piety and persecution, is more likely to reject the whole structure. It was a long process however, but two factors made it more inevitable. Firstly, as we have mentioned, a more literal interpretation of the Bible that was now required made for a more rigidly anthropomorphic God, a religious straitjacket for the jnani that became more intolerable. Secondly, an increasingly scientific account of the world made the personal God of the Reformation implausible on other counts. If scientific understanding was beginning to challenge some of the "facts" of the Bible, what of the rest of it? In an age where a more fluid thinking was possible about "God" (and we must remember that the Judaic "God" had been quite a new concept to most of Europe in the time of Plotinus for example), then Scripture could be understood in a more metaphorical way, as hinting at divine truths. This was no longer possible.

The jnani / bhakti distinction helps us understand the dynamics of Catholic power in another way. Even though, as we explored earlier, there is every possibility that Jesus was more jnani than bhakti, we found that at every turn Christianity attempted to eliminate the non-devotional character of the religion. Very simply, a devotional orientation easily accepts the notion of obedience, and a transference of devotion from God, through Jesus, ever downwards through the Church hierarchy. We know that in the spiritual life devotion to the spiritual teacher is a simple and natural response, but in the context of religious persecution this can be exploited. The jnani temperament as we have seen is more inclined to enquiry and doubt, and to the path of will rather than surrender.

The contradictions of the Enlightenment are subtle however. Where the Catholic church had led the intensely via negativa medieval mind into a tentative via positiva with Scholasticism, and had encouraged the beginnings of science, its reaction to the Reformation was a retreat into the same literalism that the Protestants urged, and Catholicism was forced to see scientific innovations as a parallel threat to its domination of thought and culture. It was ironical then that the scientific and industrial revolutions

flourished in the Protestant countries of the North, and it was this contradiction between Protestant literalism and scientific progress that gave impetus to secularism. Despite the plain-living ideals of the Protestants there was a via positiva character about the industrial revolution, its politics, and its literature.

Secular Buddhas Introduction

Having explored the rise of secularism we can say that it defines itself in the early stages by what it has rejected: the religious world-view of the past. But the spiritual dimension of man does not disappear because cultural conditions change, and we find spiritual genius expressing itself in a totally new way in the secular world, one that does not rely on the religious language or external forms of the past. In this section we take another brief look at Whitman, Jefferies, and Harding as secular buddhas.

We mentioned before that there is no point pursuing the concept of "the lost buddhas of the West" if we have to fit our jnani Masters into the Procrustean bed of Buddhist thinking, broad as it is. The point is more that if we can start to think about Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Eckhart and Spinoza in this way that we take a new and deeper interest in them, for their differences to Buddhist thinking, as much as similarities. We have already noted that the question of via positiva is one natural point of departure, and this is especially true for the three "secular buddhas" that we shall look at. But another issue arises with them: can we understand them in relationship to the Buddha through the additional contextual issues of secularism? The Pali canon shows the Buddha as quite unwilling to use any of his inherited spiritual language, and so the comparison is not as absurd as it might seem. The Buddha's context however was utterly spiritual, which is why he was not 'lost' to mainstream religion whereas Whitman, Jefferies and Harding are.

Whitman

Whitman, more than any other spiritual genius in history raises the issue of via positiva for us, and never so much as when set in contrast to the Buddha. His other great value, brought into the spiritual life from the secular context, was democracy, a concept unknown in the Buddha's time. George Fox and the Quakers showed that it was possible for a social form of the spiritual to evolve without hierarchy, and if a religion had formed about Whitman (whose mother was a Quaker) it would undoubtedly have fostered similar ideals.

But Whitman first and foremost offers a spiritual life that is not in opposition to the material; offers a secular spirituality, where the immensity of our transcendent self is seen in the quotidian, the everyday. And of course, for the same reason it disappeared in popular consciousness, leaving Whitman the most thoroughly lost buddha of our collection.

Jefferies

The unique contribution of Richard Jefferies to the spiritual life of the world is his recognition that Nature, in its fullest expression and detail, was a route to the eternal, speaks of the eternal, and is one with us in the Eternal. Spinoza knew this too, but his was a more remote connection with Nature, more a way of seeing the manifest world as a whole and as expressing eternity in its entirety. Jefferies brings an aesthetic sensibility into the spiritual realm that allows the manifold, specific and exuberant qualities of tree, meadow, sky, sunshine and the human form to sing to him of eternity. As we saw in the section on Nature Mysticism, once alerted by Jefferies to the fullest and transcendent implications of this view of Nature, we can find it in many others.

Harding

To see Harding as a "lost buddha" is unfair on him, at least relative to Whitman and Jefferies whose spiritual contribution is almost utterly unknown today. Harding is represented amongst the Masters of enlightenment in Rawlinson's compendium, and has had an international if tiny audience for over fifty years. But if he is "lost" to us it is for another reason than our secular context: it is because he takes the jnani path further than any Master in history including the Buddha. In the various forms of Buddhism today there is not a great deal of emphasis on what the Enlightened individual can understand themselves to be. The many notions accruing to Buddhism since the Buddha have tended to obscure what the Buddha's reality was to himself, and have offered instead rather distracting and moralistic concepts like the

Bodhisattva ideal. It seems rather egotistical in Buddhism to ask "who am I," let alone contemplate the answer that Douglas Harding offers: the beginning and ending of all things. Buddhism today is more about a long path of purification; even the "sudden" schools of Zen make many assumptions about the qualities of the aspirant. But Harding uses the simple acts of perception to demonstrate our identity with the Void, or the infinite and eternal to use Spinoza's terminology. Having presented us with our complete and utter Enlightenment, he then provides us with a simple structure for understanding us, our world, and our relationship to it. There is no path, no training, no ecstasy, no aptitude needed. It is a spirituality for the democratic age which can be taught in an afternoon. He is a Master because his presence is needed for this understanding (though he denies this vehemently), but even a short time with him is enough — the work of a lifetime then remains to realise the transcendent view he conveys so immediately. For whatever entry into the infinite and eternal we happen to have made, its full flowering in one's personality takes application.

All three examples here are not religious men in the old sense who happen to be obscured by the prejudices of the secular world they lived in; none of them mourned the passing of the old religions (Whitman explicitly praises them in turn yet is convinced that a much greater spiritual life was to come). A study of each is, instead, a pointer to what the spiritual life in a post-secular world might look like.

The Post-Secular SocietyIntroduction

We have seen that the secular world has risen partly out of a reaction to the confines of the Christian world-view, and partly out of new forces shaping society, including science and democracy. In its anti-religious stance it is actively obstructive to the spiritual life, but in its emphasis on personal freedom it is actively enabling to the spiritual life.

The vituperative atheism of a Gore Vidal, or the evangelising science of a Richard Dawkins have an energy that lies outside their subject matter — we suggest that it comes from a largely unconscious reaction to the horrors of religious persecution that have long since vanished. This can be seen as a wound in the collective unconscious of the West, though using such an image does not imply that psychoanalytical theory is the only way to understand it (reincarnation would for example be another). Perhaps some active steps could be taken to heal these wounds, along the lines that "historic wrongs" are being addressed in other spheres. We note that recent Western leaders, particularly more left-leaning statesmen, have been inclined to make public apologies on behalf of their nations, for example in connection with slavery, forcible sterilisation committed in the name of eugenics, atrocities committed in war and colonialism, and the use of ethnic minorities in unethical medical experiments. It would fall largely on the Roman Catholic Church to make apologies regarding the Inquisition, but this would not rule out a host of other religious sects and communities doing the same for other persecutions. We note that some already have, for example in 1998 the Australian Quakers offered a statement of apology for historic wrongs done to the Aboriginal people.

But, in the absence of such proactive steps on a large scale, time heals as well as anything. The question is how long does it take? And what happens when the secular West, having forgotten its own religious history, looks at other parts of the world and sees what it thinks is religious totalitarianism? The reactionary aspect of secularism, that is the part which defines itself by not being religion, only has to look at the Islamic world to reinforce its hostility to the spiritual life. On one side we have this rejection of the Islamic world because of its "fundamentalism," and on the other side Islam sees Western ideals as a very real threat to the spiritual life that enriches its nations and binds its people together. The turbulent history of Atatürk's secularisation of Turkey from its inception in 1924 is an experiment that even in the new millennium has almost daily repercussions, and is highly instructive about the dynamics of the transition from a religious culture to a secular one.

If we imagine a time however when secularism no longer has a reason to define itself in opposition to state-sponsored and state-controlled religion, then its second shaping force, personal freedom, comes to the fore.

Using our distinctions in outlining the deep structure of the spiritual life, then we could say that personal freedom coupled with a revived curiosity about the spiritual would naturally bring into being spiritual contexts that suited all types in the spiritual life. Hence we would see in the first instance the different

emphasis on the social, the occult (esoteric), and the transcendent all having outlets for expression. We would see the different mode of social expression allow for the Shamanistic, the polytheistic, the monotheistic, and the transcendent in the spiritual life. We would see bhakti as much as jnani routes to the transcendent being catered for. And, while the via positiva is quite in keeping with a secular, democratic and technological age, there would be opportunities for the renunciative lifestyle as well. For those with a eye for Nature a Nature Mysticism would grow, and form part of the spiritual basis for ecological awareness.

And of course, we already see all these forms of spiritual expression springing up in the West, though at present having little influence on mainstream culture. What would happen, looking to the future, if this infinitely varied spiritual life, practised in the context of secular freedoms and democracy, did begin to impact on mainstream culture? Well, one possible description for this emerging world would be a post-secular culture.

Towards a post-secular culture

What, some will ask is the difference between a post-secular society and the pre-secular society that we fought so hard to transform? Obviously it cannot be medieval Europe with technology and democracy tagged on. The fundamentally new context would be spiritual diversity rather than spiritual orthodoxy.

It can learn from Postmodernism that there is no single "Grand Narrative", on the other hand it should reject the tendency in Postmodernism to treat the ancient world as only fit for plundering, whether in architecture or in ideas. We need a sympathetic handling of the medieval world, in which we can allow Eckhart, Rolle, and all these spiritual masters to speak to us, just for example. But the biggest leap in Western culture would be the understanding that "God" as an anthropomorphic concept belongs to bhakti, a concept not for accepting or rejecting, but to make one's own to the extent that one recognises one's own devotional impulse.

We can also learn from religious persecutions of the past that we should avoid the presentation of the spiritual life in terms of "attainment." Hence ideas such as we find in Buddhism that everyone has Buddha-nature are constructive. In Douglas Harding too we have the epitome of a spirituality quite devoid of achievement and available to all, just as we are.

Masters

Andrew Rawlinson's encyclopaedic listing of Western Masters is in itself a pointer to the post-secular culture, both in the breadth of spiritual paths represented, and in the even-handed and positive way in which each case is dealt with. But the mark of the post-secular Master would be their recognition of other teachers and teachings, something that so far is very rare. We understand why the Buddha rejected other teachers and traditions; we understand why Krishnamurti even rejected the idea of the Master itself; we understand when bhaktis complain that Spinoza seems like an atheist. At the same time, a merely academic study of different spiritual paths can never replace the Master. He or she, regardless of their teachings, are vital because they live from the infinite and eternal and however we might understand their words, what comes prior to that is a resonance with what they are. If that happens even for a moment, then the "transmission" has taken place, and their teachings simultaneously come alive and cease to matter as concepts, words and doctrines.

Bhakti

The concept of jnani has been presented as almost synonymous with an understanding of the deep structure of the spiritual life. But, as mentioned at the outset, the presentation of jnani found here will have failed if it doesn't bring about an equal recognition of bhakti. Of all the many distinctions made here this is the crucial issue in understanding the religions of the world, and the development of the spiritual life in the West, the rise of secularism, and the hopes for a post-secular world.