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Ladies and gentlemen, none of us living in Greenwich Village, where there are so many Chinese and Italian restaurants, can have failed to observe that spaghetti and noodles are served in both, which we see to indicate an influence in one direction or another.
And when we think of the Marco Polo expedition to China in the high Middle Ages, I think we can guess where the spaghetti came from.
I suppose when one is eating spaghetti, then, the thoughts that occur to mind might be termed the influence of Oriental forms on the Western mind.
There are no end of subtle influences of this thought that might be indicated, but I'm not going to speak of those.The appearance of the Jesuits in Peking in the early 17th century sent influences back to the West.
And it has been suggested by Joseph Needham, in his great work on science and civilization of China, that the thought communicated by the Jesuits may have influenced Leibniz in the formulation of his philosophy.
This, however, is again a rather subtle and slight influence.The really great movement of oriental ideas into the West began with the arrival of an adventurous young Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, in India, 1755.
And by curious coincidence, this was precisely the moment of the triumph of the ideals of reason and the Enlightenment in Europe.
And so a kind of counteraction began, stemming from the East, which met with the disposition of the Romantics at the end of the 18th century.
With the publication of Charles Wilkins' translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1785, and then four years later of Sir William Jones'
beautiful translation of the great Indian play, the Shakuntala, the gates were opened and the influence of the East on the Western mind began in full earnest.
Now, the first thing we have to do is determine here, and I will try to summarize very briefly the point, what the main points are in Oriental thinking that have worked a strong influence on Western thought.
In order to make this clear, I shall have to describe what seems to me to be the main ideas involved here.The first point to keep in mind is this.
For the Orient, whether India or the Far East, the ultimate truth, the ultimate essence of being and of the world transcends description.It transcends all images.It transcends all thought.
At the very opening of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, the book of the virtue of the way of truth, the very opening aphorism is, the truth that can be named is not the ultimate truth.
And this corresponds precisely to a theme that continually occurs in the Indian Upanishads.He who thinks he knows, does not know.He who knows that he does not know, knows all that can be known.
Because in this matter, to know is not to know, and not to know is to know.Now this is taken very seriously.
And if you will think about the matter, you will yourself realize that the ultimate being, the ultimate truth, the ultimate nature, thought, and entity of anything that you can conceive of is unknown to you, including yourself.
And yet, and this is the next point, that which is transcendent, that which transcends, lies beyond all description. all thought is at the same time immanent.It is within all things, because it is the very nature and essence of all things.
And now we may think of this ultimate which is transcendent and immanent, we may think of it as divine.It is that to which the adjective divine is most properly applied.In the Orient, then, the world is divine.
Divinity and the world are not separate from each other.Whereas in the Occident, in the traditional religious teaching of the Occident, divinity and the world are not identified with each other. Divinity resides elsewhere in what we call God.
God created the world, which is not God, and is therefore not divine.In fact, in the great Judeo-Christian Muslim tradition, which is the great religious context of the Western world, God and the world are different from each other.
God may inhabit the world.God created the world and may inhabit the world.But you cannot identify the divinity of God with the divinity of the world.
Whereas eastward of Iran, in the world of India, in the world of China, the world of Japan, the world of Hinduism, Buddhism, the wonderful oriental religious form Divinity is a dimension of our own existence here.
One becomes aware of this in Oriental art in particular.When Michelangelo, in the Sistine Chapel, painted that wonderful figure of God the Father creating Adam, He did not imagine that divinity resided in the ceiling where he painted his picture.
The picture was a reference to a divinity somewhere else, and to something that had happened somewhere else.On the other hand, when you go into that wonderful temple cave in the harbor of Bombay,
Elephanta, this great deep cavern which was carved by the chisels of artists into a mountainside, with the columns left and carved beautifully, pretending to hold up this great mountain.At the deep back wall is an immense image showing God.
It is an image with three faces The central face representing eternity, out of which all stems.The face at the right is a masculine face.The face at the left, a woman's face.
The pair of opposites, which originally are one, spring from one source and show themselves as opposites.This is an image of the divine giving forth the pairs of opposites whose interplay constitutes the activity and life of the world.
But as you stand before that image, you realize this is not like the image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo, a reference to a divinity who is somewhere else.This is precisely a revelation
and emanation of the divinity that is the essence of that stone itself.All things are divine.All things are Brahma things.But we don't see that divinity when we look at them with our normal secular consciousness.
That image simply says to us, look again and realize that what you are experiencing here in this image is a clue to the very essence of this stone itself.And that essence is your essence.
So that this divinity that you're looking at is not only a revelation of what inhabits the stone, it is a revelation of that same essence inhabiting yourself.It is simultaneously outside and inside, and it was in the artist too.
He brought forth in stone the very essence of his own essence.Suddenly, you realize, as you're looking at this thing, now I'm going to use the term in the Oriental sense, so don't be shocked.You're looking at God.
It's not a picture of God, but he's there.It's your essence.It's the stone's essence. Now the artist might have rendered another image, might have rendered the image of the great goddess, mother of the world, who is also God.
And in other caves in India, in other works of art in India, you may see her too, abundantly inflected, shown in many forms.She also is the essence of the universe.
So this picture, male or female, is not the ultimate essence itself, because, as I said in the beginning, the essence transcends all imaging.The image is a reference beyond itself to what is the essence of itself, to what's imminent in itself.
So this is the great thing that I would say distinguishes Oriental thought, Oriental religiosity, from the thought and religiosity of the West.
When the Westerner reverently prays, his hands are held up in solicitation or reverence to something outside himself.You know that when the Oriental is down to pray, they're inward to what's the very essence of himself.
And so when we say, who created the world? we can well say, that which I am, in essence, created the world.And this thing can be inflected in many ways.It's a wonderful, mysterious, tantalizing wonder.
And it is the expression of that wonder, the manifestation of that wonder, which gives the charm and magic to Diorio.Now, curiously,
I've said that our point of view is different from that of the traditional East, and that it distinguishes the world from the God that made it.
Nevertheless, these two points of view, that of the Orient and that of the Occitan, are descended from a single tradition.The archaeology of the past 40 or 50 years has made it very clear
that the civilizations of the Orient and the civilizations of the Occident are sister civilizations.They have derived from a single great tradition.
Specifically, this tradition originates with the invention of grain agriculture and cattle breeding, stock breeding, in the Near East, in the Fertile Crescent area, about 6,500 B.C.
Specifically in that area and from that area, the whole great mythos of the tilling of the soil and the reaping of the crops from the bosom of Mother Nature, Mother Earth, and the ritual of the fertilization of that wonderful Mother from the Lord of the Heavens or the Water God of the Nile, all of this
mythology, which is a rich, wonderful mythology, the mythology on which the civilizations of Orient and Occident are equally grounded, these have derived from a single source.
By 2000 BC, these traditions had reached the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.However, it was about in the middle of the second millennium BC
that a distinction began to be quite apparent between the directions of the two worlds—the Eastern world introspectively directed, the Western world outwardly directed.
And the idea of God and world as being separate from each other is already present at that time in the Mesopotamian mythology, whereas in the but it's probably the earlier idea of the identity of world and divinity remains.
Now we may say, to summarize, that the Oriental tradition is essentially visionary, poetical.When a Hindu says, the world is the dream of the sleeping god Vishnu, the dream appearing in the form of a great cosmic lotus from the navel of the God.
He does not believe that literally the world is a lotus growing from the navel of a deity.And when that same man says the world is the manifestation of the dance of Shiva, he does not believe that in a very literal way the world is Shiva's dance.
But when a rabbi or priest or minister says, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree, Eve was drawn from the rib of Adam, the serpent tempted Eve, there was a fall in the garden, all of this was generally interpreted quite literally.
Historically, there is in the Western tradition an essentially concrete, historical way of interpreting myths.
Consequently, when, at the time of the Renaissance, the scientific approach to nature developed, and it was found that these biblical images and biblical histories were not concretely true, there was a great intellectual disturbance
in the Western mind.Giordano Bruno was literally burned at the stake for doubting the literal interpretation of the Bible.
And Galileo, a few years later, was threatened with precisely the same stake by precisely the same Inquisitor for declaring that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system. contrary to Holy Scripture.
To anyone used to interpreting myth poetically, in the visionary way, as representing support for systems of sentiment, support for meditations about the depth and mystery of being, this whole quarrel between science and religion in the Western world
is ridiculous.It is just as silly to say that God did create the world that way as to say that he didn't.Think of criticizing poetry in that manner.So it was that when at the end of the 18th
The Oriental ideas and ways of interpreting these myths, which are the analogs of our myths, began to appear in the Western world.It was a great refreshment to certain intellects here, and served as a great expanding and releasing force.
And now I think that this is an important and interesting fact. The people who were most strongly influenced were not theologians, nor were they classical or academic philosophers.
They were literary men, they were artists and poets, and they were maverick philosophers.Think of the names of Goethe, Blake, Wagner, and then in our country, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau.
Carlisle sent a copy of Charles Wilkins' translation of the Gita to Emerson.They're enthusiastic about it.Emerson has poems about Brahms, of course.The whole transcendentalist movement in Boston was influenced by this.
One more very interesting influence. In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy wrote her great work, Science and Health.Christian science is really a reading of the scripture in oriental terms.The idea of fundamental Christian science of God
the infinite person as the only true reality, which is the essence of all beings and all things, precisely the oriental concept of Purusha, of this great spirit that I'm talking about.
And the notion that sickness and sin are simply mistaking the unreal for the real, and that health and proper adjustment can be acquired by recovering center, this is basic Oriental thought.
In her case, it was applied essentially to matters of physical health and spiritual health.She read, when she was herself sick, the opening verses in chapter 9 of Matthew Gospel about the man sick with the palsy.
And Jesus said to him, Thy sins are forgiven thee.And the scribes thought this man blasphemes.And Jesus, reading their thoughts, said, Which is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee, or take up thy bed and walk?
He said, Son, take up thy bed and go into thy house. And the man got up and went to his house.And then the text says, "...and all there marveled to see what power God had given to men."
Mary Baker Eddy read that in the light of her Oriental readings, and the whole of the Western Scripture opened up to her in terms of the divinity of man and the divinity of the world.
Now there was another very important movement that started in the same year, 1875.Mary Baker Eddy was in Boston.Madame Blavatsky was in New York.In that same year, Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York City.
Now, the Theosophical Society, if I may try to summarize this situation very briefly, and perhaps too glibly, the Theosophical Movement may be said to be a translation of Oriental ideas into Western language.
Not into Western terms, into Western language.In this movement, certain Oriental ideas are accepted which have not been generally accepted by Western thinkers.
And I would not include these ideas among those that have significantly influenced Western thought, but I shall name them in order to distinguish for you what seem to me to be the non-essential from the essential ideas that have influenced the mind of the West.
One notion that is essential to theosophy and to oriental thought, in India at any rate, is reincarnation.
The idea that the soul reincarnates from life to life, that in each life you learn a lesson, so to say, and having digested that lesson, are prepared to learn a deeper, more difficult lesson in the next life.
And through this succession of lives, you finally come to the wonderful realization that the forms of this world are but inflections of that one transcendent and imminent principle, which is the very essence of yourself.
With that, you are released from further birth.You see, this idea is not one that belongs in our tradition, and it cannot be grafted into the tradition.But the essential idea that the world
is the manifestation of a divine essence, and that divine essence is yours to be known, this is included in Christian science without the idea of reincarnation.
Another essential idea that exists in the Orient is that of karma, the idea that in one life you inherit the effects of the acts performed in an earlier life. If you are suffering now, it is because you caused suffering to others in an earlier life.
One of the very good effects of this idea is that you don't blame other people for your ills.Freud has taught us to blame our father and mother, and other people have taught us to blame, let's say, capitalists or communists or fascists.
But the Hindu doctrine is, blame yourself in an earlier lifetime.This leads to a nice sort of classic attitude toward the sufferings that you're undergoing.
But the idea of karma is so closely linked to that of reincarnation that it could not be accepted in the Western thinking structure.
Another thought that is fundamental to theosophy is that the great teaching is in the mind, in the keep, of wonderful mystical masters who live in the high Himalayas in Tibet.This has given a curious occult character to the whole doctrine.
It is these secret masters who carry the doctrine and communicate it and maintain it for the world.In the ideology of Mary Baker Eddy, on the other hand, it is Christ who is the carrier and revealer of the doctrine.He is the shower of the way
the revealer of man's unity with the divine principle.Well, now, these two systems originating at the size of the same year, 1875, one in Boston and one in New York, have had enormous influence on many, many people.
And I would say they represent the movement of Oriental ideas into the West on a religiously toned level. These are religiously toned ideologies and have had enormous influences.
Very recently, still another system of influences has proceeded from the Orient to the West.And this comes from the work of psychoanalysis.Starting with Freud, who found that the dreams and images of the unconscious
were projections of the dynamics of the psyche and were simply manifestations of the illusions and fears and desires of the individual, it has been realized that this is precisely the ideology of Hinduism and Buddhism.
When the Buddha sat under the tree of illumination and was going past the illusions of the world to come to the truth, the true realization, he was tempted by two powers.Two powers who were the two aspects of a single power.
These powers were desire and terror.Desire, the Sanskrit word is karma, meaning love.Terror, the Sanskrit word here is mara, meaning death. This being, Karma Mara, tempted the Buddha first by displaying before him his beautiful daughters.
And the Buddha, immobile, did not even have the thought, I exist.And so he could not have the thought, I desire those women.And when the tempter had failed there, he brought his army against the Buddha.
And the Buddha, who did not have the thought, I exist, did not have the thought, I am afraid to die.And so in both efforts, this monster failed.The idea is that all of us are continually reacting to our fears and our desires.
And these are based on illusions.We fear what is not to be feared.We desire what is not to be desired.
Because we, who are fearing and desiring, are identifying ourselves with our mere temporal manifestation, whereas our true being is that eternal principle which never was born, which never will die, and is divine.
Well, there is enough parallelism here between desire and fear, as represented in the Buddhist system, and eros thanatos, desire and aggression.
as represented in Freud, to make it clear, I think even in this brief comment, that there is a relationship between the two systems.
And there is now an enormous literature of psychological and psychoanalytic analysis, showing the parallels between Oriental and psychoanalytic thought.Both systems interpret the psyche as a dynamism
Pathways with Joseph Campbell is a production of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the Mythmaker Podcast Network.It is produced by Tyler Lapkin, executive producer John Booker, all music exclusively provided by APM Music.
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