God: from West to East and Back Again
(Capítulo da obra A Questão de Deus na História da Filosofia, vol. 1, coord. M.L.
Xavier, Lisboa, 2008)
Scott Randall Paine
University of Brasilia
Introduction
1.
2.
3.
4.
God in Aquinas: A What That is a Who
a. A Detected Existence
b. An Unplumbed Essence
c. A Surprising, Personal Greeting
The Hindu Brahman: a What and then a Who
Buddhist shunyata: Atheism or just Negative Theology?
The Chinese Tien: Who Lives in the Sky?
Conclusion
Introduction
If we in the West could lift our minds above debates between theists and atheists, Jews
and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants regarding the question of God’s existence,
nature and ultimate ontological status—at least for a moment—and look for God in the
religions of the East, we might make some discoveries that could help us understand our
own queries in a larger context. The superficial impressions we gain are not much help
in themselves at understanding the religions in question, but they are where we must
begin. Hinduism may appear to the untutored Westerner to be but a pantheism gone to
seed, Buddhism a godless program of psychological methods of concentration and the
native traditions of the Far East to be but hospitable blends of Taoist, Confucionist and
Buddhist views of a cosmos of surging powers, meridians of energy and crowds of
nature divinities—but those impressions, as misleading and partial as they are, invite
corrections which can make us think more realistically about even our own Western
ideas regarding divinity.
1
I wish in this essay to begin with a few reflections on the Semitic notion of a
personal God, which has developed and passed into our Western consciousness, and
which is still today a subject of heated contention. I then propose to question the Hindu,
Buddhist and home-grown Far Eastern traditions on this very matter, that is: Can we
find any hints of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 1) in the Vedas and in the
multiple Hindu traditions they nourish? And despite apparent disinterest in God, can
we nonetheless find traces of him, however indirectly, 2) in the life and example of the
Buddha and in the hundreds of millions of his followers today? And, finally, 3) in the
great sky of China, peered into through a symbiosis of scriptures of the Taoist and
Confucionist canons (to which the ferment of Buddhism is added) and the multifaceted
wisdom about ourselves and the world they present us with, is there any plausible
linkage with the Pure Act, the Self-Thinking Thought of Aristotle and Aquinas or with
Him who speaks through the burning bush in Exodus?
I offer these reflections only as exploratory ponderings, approximate suggestions
inviting correction and complementation, results of my own years of study on matters of
East-West understanding and of extensive travel in Asia and the Middle East. I intend
them to be helpful and catalytic, rather than exhaustive or conclusive. Of this much I am
sure: even a rudimentary understanding of how the East also, in certain ways,
approaches the mystery of God can only help a Westerner understand his own approach
in a more discerning way. But it will only be by fully appreciating the differences and
the difficulties that we can espy whatever commonalities may be present. Indeed, even
today’s atheists could stand to have a more adequate understanding of what they do not
believe in.
I am venturing in some ways unconscionable generalizations, as “the West” is
hardly as monolithic in its views of God as I am outlining here, nor are the three great
Oriental traditions I use as representatives of the East either so uniform in themselves or
so inclusive of a number of significant minor traditions as to exhaust the non-Western
approaches to divinity. Still, on the validity of a personalist, Semitically inspired view
of God, supplemented by a Greek articulation of a supreme intelligence (especially in
Aristotle), as predominant in the Occident—in both those who believe in him and those
who don’t—and of a non-personalist understanding of ultimate reality (beyond
personhood and attendant attributes) which holds sway, in different ways, in the Orient,
2
we can presume general consensus. My use of Thomas Aquinas as spokesman for the
Western view is not meant to suggest that his metaphysics of the person is shared by all,
but rather that his approach is profoundly typical of the West, and thus serves to
highlight the contrasts I propose to discuss.
I will not address here arguments for or against the existence of God, or even
arguments against the arguments. That is to say, I am not concerned here with showing
if and how the ontological argument, Aquinas’ five ways, or modern arguments based
on a dynamism of the human spirit offer coherent grounds for bringing a mind to assent
to God’s existence; or if and how appeals to the progressive conquests of science,
manifest injustice and evil in human affairs or the misdeeds committed in the name of
religion offer sufficient grounds to doubt his existence. Similarly, I will not speak about
arguments directed at both these attempts and which insist that either to assert that God
exists or to assert that he does not are equally vacuous uses of language, maintaining
that neither theist nor atheist really knows what he is talking about. All this is of
interest, but not to us here. I am instead addressing how God is viewed by those who do
accept his reality, and even by most who do not, particularly in the West, and looking
for analogues or contrasts in some traditional views of transcendence native to the East.
1. God in Aquinas: a What and then a Who
a. A Detected Existence
Thomas Aquinas makes a bold statement in his Disputed Questions on Power, one
which modern atheists, and even more so agnostics, might do well to take note of. He is
probably the most celebrated “God-talker” in the West, having generated hundreds of
pages of scholastic reflection on theology, dipping both into natural experience and
reason as well as faith in a supernatural disclosure as legitimate sources. But what he
says, as he approaches the summit of theological discourse and tries to draw up a kind
of conclusive lesson about our knowledge of God, may take the more ambitious of
aspiring knowers of God by surprise: “This is the ultimate in human knowledge of
God: that one knows that one does not know God.” 1
3
We must remind ourselves that Thomas had already assured us that it is quite
possible to know that he is; our cognitive inadequacy shows up when we ponder who
and what he is. This statement of Aquinas goes further than merely to highlight how so
many of the divine attributes are negative (for instance, to say he is eternal is just to
negate time of him; to say he’s infinite is to negate limit; to say he is simple is to negate
composition). He is saying more than this, as we shall see in a moment. Nor are we
relieved of the impact of his statement by limiting its pertinence to our philosophical
knowledge, and not that obtained through divine revelation. It is precisely about God as
known both through the meager but crucial deliverances of philosophy and the far more
searching lights of divine revelation that Thomas advises us to take cognizance of our
ignorance.2 We grow in knowledge and (consciousness of) ignorance of God pari
passu.
And even before we fully recover from this epistemological humiliation, we
would do well to recall that even the created order of things, produced by this virtually
unknowable God, does not readily deliver up its underlying blueprint to the human
mind. “The essential principles of things are unknown to us.”3 The dark shadow of the
divine mystery seems to cast a penumbra into what that very mystery created, and our
mind finds itself wanting of light even when it comes to penetrating the intimate secrets
of contingent creatures. Far from the impression of ambitious and exhaustive detail
about God one might form from wielding the sheer bulk of the Summa Theologiae, its
actual methodology is rather one of deliberate indirectness (the very criterium divisionis
used by Thomas to divide the three parts: God known indirectly as principle—Part I; as
end—Part II; and as means—Part III; but never as He is). Instead of taking us down
discursive roads into the depths of the divine mysteries, Thomas—with almost Kantian
application—cordons off one region of divinity after another, leaving us with multiple
cognitions of what God is not, but precious little about what he is; and then when he
crowns our docta ignorantia, it is with a crown of thorns, as he utters that final
doxology cited above, which proclaims that our highest theological acquisition seems
more an echo of Montaigne’s “que sais-je?” than a list of gnoseological conquests
following a confident syllogistic ergo. However, there is one consolation, for this
awareness of our ignorance regarding God is itself a positive acquisition: our highest
knowledge of him is to know that we don’t know him. And that is truly to know
something of utmost importance.
4
Thomas’ God, like Carlyle’s universe, is hardly but a “great unintelligible
perhaps”. 4 True, our unaided intellect can blaze no easy rational trails into the divine
essence, but there are a few viae, a few paths, by which reflective thought can follow
certain cosmic traces of divine causality right up the chain of acts to an Existence. Not
to an Essence, but to an Existence. But as mentioned, we shall not pronounce here upon
the famous Five Ways in which God’s existence echoes into the mind according to
Thomas’ celebrated analysis.5 Still, there is far more even to the much misunderstood
first two ways than just imagining God at the end of miles upon miles of dominoes,
giving the first kick. Facile dismissals of these arguments by those who have never
made an effort to grasp what metaphysical resolutio meant to Thomas as a method of
philosophical knowing, or how much natural philosophy and preparatory metaphysics is
presupposed in their formulation, or how reduced and didactically simplified they
appear in view of the manual for beginners they are written for, have been effectively
countered elsewhere.6
It is of interest to us here that each of the viae leads us not to the God of the
Bible (at least not in the self-revelatory mode he assumes there), but only to a label we
give to something or someone we cannot see, but “what we understand to be, or call
God” (…hoc omnes intelligent Deum ...quam omnes Deum nominant, …hoc dicimus
Deum.7). We give this first mover, this first cause, this most necessary being, most
perfect and intelligent entity a name8: God (theos, Deus, Gott, Dieu, Iddio, etc.), but
though it is a name cast up in the face of a clearly ascertained Existence, the precise
nature that is doing the existing remains heavily veiled. Now before I am cautioned that
Thomas does indeed do more than just hold forth on what God is not, but also seconds
the Aristotelian characterizations of God as Pure Act, Self-Thinking Thought, Unmoved
Mover, and other so-called “pure perfections”, and indeed insists that the best positive
philosophical title for God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens 9 (Subsistent Being Itself), we must
take note of another matter that bears directly on knowing something essential about a
perceived existence.
b. An Unplumbed Essence
5
If astronomers knew about the existence of the recently demoted “planet” Pluto
years before its discovery, due to the gravitational effects it manifested on other, already
known celestial bodies, we can speak of having discovered the existence of something
which was still, to a large degree, unknown in its essence. In a converse example, a
zoologist can define the essence of a dinosaur with even genetically informed precision,
all the while quite assured (and perhaps comforted) by the fact that they do not now
exist. One day there may be a cure for arthritis or cancer, but if there is, it may well
involve the concoction of a new chemical compound, the essence of which, once
existent, is discovered to be effective. All of our queries about what was, what wasn’t,
what is, what could be, what will be, what can never be, etc., dance around the varied
tensions between essence and existence. Thomas’ metaphysical reflections come to a
unique focus when he concludes that all created beings, even angels, are earmarked by a
real distinction between these two principles.10
We cannot be completely in the dark about God, otherwise we would literally
know nothing of what we were talking about. There are those attributes which God
shares, analogically, with all his creatures, such as unity, goodness and truth, or with
some of them, as intellectuality and indeed personhood (to which we will return); and
then there are those which regard God’s relation to creation and which are, nonetheless,
incommunicable to his creatures, such as omnipotence and omniscience. Precisely the
unique relation between essence and existence in God, which is at once
incommunicable to creatures (insofar as only God can be this way), but which is also
the basis for his ability to communicate esse (the act of being) to creatures in creation,
is, for Thomas—and this is the real message of the expression Ipsum Esse Subsistens—
that in him, since there is no distinction at all between his essence and existence, his
essence is to exist. He exists by nature.
Whatever cogency adheres to so-called ontological arguments surely finds its
power here, if not its final justification. We creatures are contingent (we can not be),
but in order to be at all, even contingently, we must have some share in that great
necessity of God’s being, and that we do by not being able not to be now [sic], once we
are. The principle of non-contradiction is finally a statement of this very fact.
Furthermore, creatures are, as creatures, because Some-thing(-one) is, as creator. I bring
all this up because the whole question of ascertaining the existence of God, however
6
indirectly, involves by the very nature of the inseparability of divine essence and
existence, something of his essence. He “who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no
man has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim., 6,16), is still detectable as existing, and if
existing is his nature, you cannot be entirely out of contact with that nature if you know
it is “there”.
“Subsistent Being Itself”—there are worlds of implications about our
knowledge of God in that most compact and concise surrogate for a divine definition.
Philosophical projects of pantheism, monism, panentheism, Berkeleyism, German
Idealism, and, paradoxically, even atheism (a connection for which I politely beg leave
to write a separate paper), draw whatever plausibility they have from the fact that God’s
very be-ing has a mysterious mode of continuity/discontinuity with created be-ing. It is
not the same, but neither is it entirely other. Depending on the philosophical
temperament and personal background one brings to the question, the continuity might
for some make the universe look divine, and then for others make the assertion of the
existence of a non-cosmic reality seem unnecessary (God is really not outside of the
cosmos anyway). Conversely, the discontinuity might make the universe look fragile
and illusory, or make it seem to be but the outer dimension or projection of a
transcendent being, which alone is.
But as we cannot even ask if something exists without at least a minimally
informative nominal definition, so when we say God exists we are already claiming to
know something, however diminutive and approximate, about his essence. “For from
the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their
Creator.” (Wisdom, 13, 811) That Old Testament confirmation of a “perceived”
Existence, along with St. Paul’s, (“Ever since the creation of the world his invisible
nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made.” Romans, 1,20), lend a Biblical voice to the common sense
ascertainment we have all heard (and probably performed) as we look around at the big
world and suspect there is something even “bigger” behind it. The philosopher may
slightly shift the perspective and say that, however you divide it, analyze or extrapolate
it, the universe simply does not explain itself. And yet it seems impregnated with
meaning, and whenever the voice of the scientist tends to minimize this, the voice of the
poets grows even louder.
I suspect that it was much more poetic instinct than
7
philosophical analysis which led the Greco-Roman world to finally embrace the strange
message that came out of Jerusalem.
c. A Surprising, Personal Greeting
A category central to the Abrahamitic, or Semitic, traditions is revelation,
apocalypse. Although the idea is in the same family of notions as that of manifestation
(a concept more germane to Neoplatonism and Eastern thought), there is a difference,
and the difference is personal. We might say that the deities of the great mythological
systems of the world (the Celtic, Nordic, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, Mesoamerican, etc.) can be understood as manifestations of forces of nature, great values,
perhaps even transcendent realities (spirits, angels, demons, etc.), but we do not find a
prominent motive of their features and acts in a desire to reveal themselves to us and
enter into communion with human beings. The traditions in Abraham’s lineage insist
that God is intent on either communicating with us (Judaism and Islam) or even, in
addition to this, on entering into communion with us (Christianity). A divine initiative
purports to be at work which is more than just metaphysical—it claims to be free, thus
personal and purposive.
One of the closest approaches to this in the Hindu tradition is perhaps in the
Bhagavad Gita, chapter 11, when Vishnu, through his avatar, Krishna, responds to
Arjuna’s entreaty: “I desire to see Thy Ishvara-Form, O Supreme Purusha. If, O Lord,
Thou thinkest me capable of seeing it, then, O Lord of Yogis, show me Thy immutable
Self”.12 Though not without elements suggestive of the celestial visions of the Hebrew
prophet Ezechiel, the Transfiguration of Jesus in the Gospel, or the apocalyptic Christ
revealed to John at the beginning of the Book of Revelation, the subsequent showing
forth of the cosmic Deva in the Gita is much more of a kaleidoscopic manifestation of
how Brahman is in all, and all in Brahman, than a personal disclosure of an ultimate
subjectivity inviting intimate communion. I highlight the difference not as between
good and bad, or even necessarily good and better, but between one view of God and
another. At the very least, we have apples and oranges here.
In closing these loose reflections on Aquinas’ understanding of God, let us
consider one more distinction likewise pregnant with implications. As the
8
essence/existence distinction is applied to God (in a way that is totally sui generis, since
finally it proves to be an identity), its implications can be resolved within philosophy
itself. Notwithstanding the resounding relevance of Ex. 3,14 where God self-identifies
as He Who Is, the distinction is drawn out by Aquinas in predominantly metaphysical
rather than Biblical or theological terms. The other distinction I refer to is perhaps not
so partisan at first blush: that between nature and person. A small library has been
written on how this distinction first arose, in all its significance, in the Trinitarian
controversies of the early Christian church. The early Fathers attempted to explain the
divinity attributed to the Father, the Son and the Spirit in Scripture in a way that
preserves an inviolate monotheism, and to explain the dual nature—divine and
human—evident in Christ’s quite singular person. Theological consensus is usually
forthcoming on the unavailability of the Trinity and the Incarnation, as intrinsic
mysteries, to natural reason, strain as it may. But the notions of nature and person
themselves, as those of essence and existence, are philosophical; nowhere does the
Bible define them, presuming we have philosophers for these labors.
Once philosophy has delivered the notions of person and nature to the
theologian, we witness the evolution of the most metaphysically charged discourse in all
of theology: De Deo Trino (On the Triune God)13. We cannot here, of course, even
begin to explore the rich conceptual outline Aquinas gives us of the variously contoured
boundary-line between God as revealed and God as hidden, limned with notions such as
divine processions, eternal generation, spiration, divine notions, and perhaps the
intellectual jewel of the treatise: the idea of a divine Person as a subsistent relation. For
the purposes of this essay, the only matter that needs to be underscored is that in our
theological approach to God, understanding him to be personal is as high as it gets.
There is no divine nature—even a hidden, super-transcendent, overarching
one—which is not inalienably also and in a most intimate and absolute way personal.
The suggestion that the personal dimension—whether on the ontological level of person
as subject of being, or the psychological level of person as subject of acts of knowledge
and will—is but an accommodation God makes when dealing with creatures is one
utterly foreign to the Abrahamitic religions. Symbols and accommodations there are
(God appearing in the thunder, or displaying human emotions in Scripture; or God
depicted as a hand, or an old bearded man, or a dove, in art) but being personal is not
9
one of them. We haven’t the space here to address what Muslims and Jews may object
to in the Christian idea of a Triune God, but let it be said that even the Christians
understand their Trinity to be, paradoxically, an even higher form of affirming the
oneness of God than just to say “one”. The Giver-Given-Gift, or Lover-Beloved-Love,
or Knower-Known-Knowledge, or Generator-Generated-Generation are only so many
ways to affirm that the one undivided essence is possessed threefold—in a triad that is
not mathematical, but metaphysical—which shows forth Life, Word and Love of the
One who says “I am He Who is”, and is all the more monotheistic “because” of it.
It is the purpose of this essay to make a few enquiries as to how God is
understood, typically, in the West and whether we can find him also in the East. Thus,
the implications of introducing personhood into our talk about God have shown how our
characteristic Occidental understanding of God as a “He” (I am prescinding here from
the question of gender issues regarding God) is rooted in an understanding of revelation
as a free, personal act on the part of God. How is Ultimate Reality presented to us east
of the Middle East?
2. The Hindu Brahman: a What first, and then a Who
As one travels through India, visiting one of the thousands of temples dedicated to
Vishnu, Shiva or Shakti (Brahma, part of the trimurti triad with the first two, has only
one well-known temple in Pushkar), spotting numerous statues of the elephant-god
Ganesha and the monkey-god Hanuman, and hearing also habitual English-language
references to “God” in the singular (without perceived contradiction), one might find it
odd for anyone to claim that ultimate reality, for Hinduism, could be anything but
personal. But not a few representatives of Indian philosophy, specifically of the more
metaphysical Vedanta darshana (point of view, school)—and in that current of the
school which follows the most influential of all Indian philosophers, Shankara (turn of
8th cent.)—would tell us that when you get down to absolute, unadulterated reality,
divinity per se, all personality and all he-ness or she-ness must be stripped away as but
lower-echelon accommodations to our limited minds and imaginations.
Perhaps the most landmark text of this stripping away of everything that is not
truly divine, truly absolute, we find in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, where a teacher
10
is questioned by his students about the nature of God, and the teacher begins to itemize
the negations, “not this, not this” (in Sanskrit, neti neti). Certainly there are significant
analogues to this in the Christian mystical tradition, notably in St. John of the Cross’
Ascent of Mount Carmel, where he ticks off the things we must leave in order to attain
to God, apparently echoing the upanishadic mantra, but in Spanish: nada, nada, nada.14
But we would upset the Spanish mystic if we suggested that the Personhood of God also
be checked off as a hindrance as we ascend the mount. Obviously one must be careful
not to caricaturize a tradition not one’s own. If only lower, sentimentalized notions of
personhood were to be eliminated, lower ideas of the ego as focus of attachment and
pride, concordance could be reached between East and West. However, I suspect the
matter is not so easily resolved.
One of the most relevant precisions made in Vedantic doctrine is that which
distinguishes two “sides” or dimensions in the Absolute, which is called Brahman (not
to be confused with the particular deity Brahma above): there is Brahman saguna (the
Absolute with attributes) and Brahman nirguna (the Absolute without attributes). Only
the latter is, in the fullest sense, absolute. The former is invested with all the symbols,
particular vestments, avataras (“descents” or popularly—though not entirely
accurately—“incarnations”), mythologies, subordinate (and only partially true)
teachings, colors, divisions, etc. which make the Absolute somehow accessible to lower
sensibilities (such as ours). Interesting to us here is that one of these attributes is
precisely personhood. All the Hindu divinities mentioned in the previous paragraph and
with them all purportedly 30 million other gods and goddesses, are at best masks and
manifestations of the one, non-personal and absolute Brahman nirguna. This Absolute
is not a he, but a what—although we should perhaps qualify the last statement,
inasmuch as the intelligent Vedantin will counter that the very distinction what/he does
not apply either when referring to the nirguna Brahman, so that it would be truer to say
that it is neither a he nor a what. This retreat, however, has no effect on the irreducible
fact that one still cannot say of the Absolute that personhood is of its innermost,
inalienable nature, and that fact alone leaves the Semitic traditions with one of two
options. After all, they insist that it is the absolute and ultimate God who has revealed
Himself to us and interacts with him on a personal basis that is not an accommodation
but an innermost act of love. Although it would be unfair to attribute a high profile of
11
this distinction to all forms of Hinduism, past and present, it is prominent enough
among Western exponents of the Vedanta to serve as a relevant issue of comparison.
The first option left by this distinction to the Semitic view of things is that
Yahweh of the Old Testament, Allah of the Koran, and the Triune God of the New
Testament are just three more articulations of saguna Brahman, and that, therefore, they
are as relative as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu and Shakti, and must be abandoned if one is to
turn to the divine essence in its highest, purest reality. Now one might suggest that just
as the Vedantins, in the Indian tradition, penetrate through to the deity without
attributes, likewise there are Cabbalists in Judaism, Sufis in Islam and Eckhartian
mystics in Christianity who make similar distinctions. No doubt, but these latter
movements are marginal in the respective traditions and even suspect, precisely in their
attempts to reach something “deeper” than the very personal God who presents himself
in the respective scriptures. The Vedanta, on the other hand, although variously
interpreted (as in the readings of Ramanuja and Madhva, who diverge pointedly from
that of Shankara), still presents its fundamentally Shankarian construal of the Vedic
truth as the most accepted and influential metaphysical exposition of the sanatana
dharma (the perennial teaching) of Hinduism, and the impersonal Absolute finally
prevails.
The other option would suggest that greater discernment is needed in
differentiating between, on the one hand, accommodations in a necessary manifestation
and, on the other, loving condescension in free acts of creation and salvation. It might
be that the Vedantic analysis of the myriads of divinities as pedagogical vehicles of
transmission of higher truth is accurate indeed regarding the role of Shiva and the
avatars of Vishnu, for example. It could even be admitted that the roles played by angels
and indeed prophets, in the Biblical tradition, is comparable to the role played by those
pedagogical divinities. But it may be that the analysis does not apply to the God of the
Bible, and for reasons that even Hindu teaching might suggest.
If the Brahman nirguna is the Godhead without attributes, the Unknown God
(one thinks of St. Paul’s remarks regarding the shrine to an unknown god in Athens, in
Acts 17), one can read such absence of attributes as purporting something beyond all
possible knowing in an absolute sense. And it is this reading which the Shankarian
12
Vedanta seems to embrace. But I suggest one could also read it as a higher species of
hiddenness: the hiddenness which persons bear in their heart of hearts: things no one
will ever know about them, unless they choose to reveal them. In other words, if the
Godhead not only allowed personifications as mythological vehicles of its numerous
aspects for purposes of accommodation and education, but were also in itself deeply
personal (indeed, how could personifications be effective vehicles if there were no root
of personhood in the Godhead whose aspects were thus vehicled?), then why would
there not be an infinite dimension of intelligence and freedom within the innermost
bosom of Brahman which also could reserve some knowledge of itself to itself only,
unless it were one day to resolve, freely, to make it known. Such an unnecessary, but
by no means impossible free “development” within Brahman nirguna is what, finally,
the word revelation means in the Semitic tradition.
It should not be overlooked, however, that in the Hindu tradition Brahman
saguna, in its uppermost reaches, already points to the one God, as explicated in the
strong Ishvara (personal god) tradition in India, one source of common references to
God when English is spoken. This “Lord of the Universe” does come closest to a
Western idea, as do others, such as Prajapati (lord of creatures), Bhagavan (exalted
one), titles present in the Vedic scriptures. However, the accommodating nature of even
such titles is brought home by the prevalent popular tradition of the Ishta-Deva
(beloved, or chosen deity), that is, one of any of a number of gods chosen by a
particular population or family as their personal or familial god. The plurality of
possible Ishvaras seems to underscore that any and all of them are still but symbols
thrown up in the face of the intrinsically impersonal.
Two differences remain clear. One is that the God of the Bible is not easily
assimilated to any of these singular Hindu deities. The unambiguously “jealous”
characterization of the God of the patriarchs and prophets is not easy to match with the
more “sociable” protagonists of the various epics and tales of the gods of India. A
second difference is that all of these personalized properties must be dropped if one is to
try and think of God in himself. But this personal quality is held on to tenaciously by
the Semitic believer as the most inherent divine reality of all, to be purified of all
created limitation and misunderstanding, to be sure, but personal nonetheless.
13
If it is at least possible for a Vedantin to accept that Brahman nirguna could
surprise us all, and that such is the best way for an Indian to view the Semitic God of
revelation, it could be that there would be no need for an irreconcilable opposition
between Hinduism and Christianity in terms of their views of God. It could be that the
latter’s claim is simply that the great and remote Absolute beyond the reach of symbols
and forms was unknown and unknowable indeed, until in a certain corner of the earth
He surprised us all and began to talk.
3. Buddhist shunyata: Atheism or just Negative Theology?
Among those who know little of the vastness and multidimensionality of the Buddhist
tradition, it is not uncommon to hear remarks to the effect that Buddhism is more of a
philosophy than a religion, and that anyway, since religion usually has something to do
with God, Buddhists don’t believe in one to begin with. It is thus sometimes called a
form of atheism. As it is not our purpose here to explore, in detail, the many forms of
Buddhism any more than of Hinduism, we shall focus upon this last suspicion, since it
bears directly on how God figures, or not, in the perspective of wisdom inaugurated by
Siddhartha Gautama so long ago.
It is safe to say that in none of the principal branches of the Buddhist tradition
(Theravada, and of the polymorph directions sired by the Mahayana: especially Pure
Land, Zen and Vajrayana, or Tibetan), does the monotheistic notion of one God play an
appreciable role. However, to say that this discovery justifies calling them atheists is
problematic on at least three accounts: 1) atheism, like theism, is a Western term, the
former deriving its sense entirely from a negation of the latter. This polemical context is
not reproduced in India in the same way. Polemics there were, as Buddha denied the
authority of the Vedas and the necessity of caste distinctions, but though these denials
brought him in conflict with Hindu orthodoxy, he was not additionally alienated by a
critique of God, or of any of the Hindu gods, for that matter. Only later would Buddhists
(in first millennium A.D. India) quarrel with Hindu Ishvara representations. But for the
Buddha himself, whether God or gods existed or not was of no concern to him. It was a
non-issue, relevant only to the extent that practitioners of his dharma should be warned
of the futility of such discussions. 2) Moreover, paradoxically, if you visit a broad
14
representative sampling of Buddhist temples from all the aforementioned currents (with
few, though significant, exceptions), you will be struck by something which seems to
give the lie to any allegation of atheism: an abundance of statues of quite obvious, and
at times obtrusive, deities, gesticulating and sometimes glaring at devotees from their
temple pedestals. Mahayana Buddhists, in particular, tend to outdo themselves in this,
with the break-off tradition of Zen constituting a significant exception, but the other
break-off tradition of Vajrayana being an over-the-top confirmation. There seems to be
some need, and some justification, for such emphatic depiction of personal deities—
hardly reconcilable with a programmatically atheist ambience. 3) On a more
philosophical side of things (and whether or not Buddhism is only philosophical, it
certainly is also philosophical), a distinction is to be made between alleging the matter
of God’s existence to be irrelevant or unknowable, and declaring him not to exist at all.
This last, for the Buddha, would be just as strident an offence as to affirm God’s reality.
If one insists on using Western labels, the names ‘non-theist’ or even ‘agnostic’ might
be more appropriate.
We need not dwell here on the abundance of Mahayana divinities and the
multiple buddhas and bodhisattvas who obtain quasi-divine status in the prayers of
many Buddhists. There was a great deal of mutual influence in the centuries in which
the Hindu bhakti traditions of Vaishnavism and Shaivism and the emerging Mahayana
Buddhists cohabited in northern India (much of the first millennium AD), and certainly
a great deal of this seeming re-hinduization of Buddhism (and, some Hindus would
protest, buddhicization of Hinduism) can be attributed to this cross-pollination. At the
very least, it exhibits the strong tendency of human religiosity to focus its devotion on
the personal.
The last-mentioned reservation, however, is even more pertinent when asking
about Buddhism and the one God. To deny that God can be known, as we have seen, is
hardly atheism. Neither is it atheism to deny that we can even know whether or not he
exists. Such disclaimers merely situate us on one side of a famous philosophical debate.
Although it is hard to generalize about such a diversely articulated tradition as the
Buddhist—at least when one ventures beyond the Four Noble Truths—still, when we
inquire about the nature of “ultimate reality” (about as close as a Buddhist can get to
15
inquiring about God), one notion has asserted itself as generally programmatic for
Buddhist thought: shunyata (emptiness).
If we made a small list of the notions which turn up inevitably in most any
exposition of Buddhist doctrine, we can see the impact they would have on the idea of a
subsistent, absolute Being: shunyata (emptiness), anatman (the non-existence of a
self—any self-identical and abiding monad of existence), pratitya-samutpada
(interdependent origination, the radical interdependence of all things and the absence of
any fixed point of reference or causality), and, as the goal of all illumination, nirvana
(literally, the “quenching”, or “despiration” of the flame of desire). Already in the
Theravada Pali Canon we read: “The world is empty (sunya) of a Self and anything
belonging to a Self.”15 The great Mahayana philosopher (arguably the most influential
of all Buddhist thinkers), Nagarjuna (2nd/3rd centuries AD), made this notion, together
with pratitya-samutpada, the cornerstone of the Buddhist view of reality.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” proclaims Solomon at the opening of the book
of Ecclesiastes. The word vanity, of course, comes from the Latin for emptiness. St.
Paul affirms that “the form [‘scheme’] of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7,31). For
the Abrahamitic traditions, God is in a way the world is not, and the latter’s existence is
necessarily transient, and in a very real sense “you can’t get there from here”—that is,
you cannot think your way to God’s nature from created nature, but only to his
existence (as shown above). A broad swath of Western thinking about God has fanned
out, particularly in Eastern Orthodox theology, in what is known as apophaticism, or
“negative theology”. We saw above how powerfully it makes itself felt even in the
otherwise ostensibly “cataphatic” (affirmative) theology of Thomas Aquinas. A rereading of Clement of Alexandria, Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa,
Gregory Palamas and a host of others in the theological and mystical traditions of
Eastern Christendom might bring one to wonder if they are eastern in a more than
geographical sense. Or is this to see things perhaps backwards?
Could it not rather be that the existence of a strong apophatic tradition in
Christianity, where belief in revelation and unquestionable personal theism is
paramount, gives us pause before considering similarly negative approaches to the
divine in Asia to be atheistic? Vladimir Lossky, the eminent Russian Orthodox
16
theologian of the 20th century, said of these Christian authors that they did not “ see, in
apophaticism, revelation but the receptacle of revelation; they arrive at the personal
presence of a hidden God. For them the negative way is not resolved in a void where
subject and object will be reabsorbed; the human person is not dissolved but has access
to a face to face encounter with God, a union without confusion according to grace.”16
In other words, the option should be left open that even Buddhist negativity
regarding the question of God could be seen in terms more epistemological than
ontological. Perhaps they stand rather with Kant in denying that we can know at all that
most ultimate “thing in itself” that is God, and with Wittgenstein in bidding us be still
about that regarding which we have nothing of pertinence to say. And perhaps they can
at least see the coherence of the Abrahamitic assertion that one can only become
cataphatic about God if you believe the he himself became so in revelation.
4. The Chinese Tien: Who Lives in the Sky?
“Chinese philosophers, both ancient and modern, have been interested primarily in
ethical, social, and political problems… Basic metaphysical problems, such as God,
universals, space and time, matter and spirit, were either not discussed, except in
Buddhism, or discussed only occasionally, and then always for the sake of ethics.” 17 In
this way, the respected Chinese philosopher Wing-Tsit Chan highlights the relative
absence of the “God problem” in Chinese thought. Native Chinese religion too holds no
conspicuous monotheistic convictions. Some names used to refer to the sky itself as
divine were Shangdi (Lord-on-high) and Tien (Heaven), but these never occupied
positions either as central or as universal as God in the Semitic traditions.
In the 17th century, Jesuit missionaries in China (most prominent among them,
Matteo Ricci), impressed by the fund of wisdom inherent in the Far Eastern traditions
(and perhaps intrigued by the Latin and Romance language conflation of the notions of
‘heaven’ and ‘sky’), petitioned Rome to allow the Catholic liturgy to acknowledge God
also under such “celestial” titles, but to circumvent fellow-Christian suspicions of
reducing God to an earlier Far Eastern deity, the Jesuits proposed the name Tienzhu
(Lord of Heaven). This, along with planned integration of non-impetrative ancestor
17
veneration and special homage to Confucius, was hoped to become a means of allowing
greater approximation between the Biblical message and the native legacy of the
Chinese mind.18 All this was finally proscribed by Rome in the mid-18th century for
reasons we cannot go into here. We shall never know what a different course modern
Chinese history may have taken, had this and other suggestions of those missionaries
been put into practice. The “rites controversy” around this matter surely made evident
the difficulties inherent in any attempted approximation of Eastern divine beings, even
those considered the highest among all, to an expressly revealed, personal God of
Abrahamitic inspiration which excludes, as a matter of principle, any other beings
except his own creatures.
Despite the obvious suggestiveness of the thousands of religious statues in
China, already mentioned, it is to the sky, the heavens, that the Chinese looks when
considering ultimate reality, and in that sky it is the way, the Tao, which carries things
on through time in a wonderful order that invites human emulation, as the masculine
sky interacts with the feminine earth. The short but resounding text of the Tao-te Ching,
attributed to Lao-tse, is perhaps the single most representative work that addresses the
one Tao in a way that invites comparisons, or at least instructive contrasts, with the
Semitic God. Although composed in apparent isolation from the Hindu and Buddhist
traditions, we can hear both the “negative theology” reminiscent of the latter,
A way that can be walked is not The Way
A name that can be named is not The Name
Tao is both Named and Nameless
As Nameless, it is the origin of all things
As Named, it is the mother of all things…
and the triadic echos reminiscent of the former,
Tao gives life to the one
The one gives life to the two
The two gives life to the three
The three give life to ten thousand things19.
Even a brief overview of the complex conjuncture of traditions which led the
Chinese to call their country the “Land of the Three Teachings” (Taoism, Confucianism
and Buddhism) is not possible in this essay. But in our attempt to identify the presence
of some analogue to the Western God in the Far East, we may note that the Tao-te
18
Ching seems to identify the very Tao with Tien—that is to say, the Way of Things with
the Sky, the Heavens. And this latter, as the missionaries intuited, might be assimilable
not only to the residence of the Father “who is in heaven”, but in some measure to the
Father himself. To give only one of many possible examples, we will close with a
reference from the Taoist canon.
In the Ling-pao Ching (Classic of the Sacred Jewel), which forms the doctrinal
basis of one influential school of Taoism, the existence and supremacy of one god is
declared. These scriptures (dated to the 3rd-5th centuries AD) are traditionally traced
back in their ultimate origins to the beginning of time and to Yüan-shih t’ien-tsun (the
Celestial Venerable of the Primordial Beginning). To him is attributed the creation of
heaven and earth, the primordial revelation and a residence in the highest of the
heavens, the “Heaven of Jade Purity”. Sometimes he is considered to be without
beginning, the supreme being and even the principle of all being. 20
Maybe if the forward-looking projects of the early Jesuits had been put into
practice, this “Land of the Three Teachings” may have added the Christian dimension as
it did the Buddhist, and become a land of four teachings. If that were ever to happen, it
would only be because out of the vast canopy of the Far Eastern sky which generates
the great Way of things, one came to see a God who stepped forth from the vault of the
heavens as if he had just unlocked the vault of a treasure, walking that Way indeed, but
showing another way through it and beyond it.
Conclusion
The 21st century has opened, unexpectedly, with a flurry of debates about the existence
or non-existence of God. Perhaps never before has the whole world been shaken quite
so much by the idea of God—often enough, on the one hand by fundamentalist
believers, on the other, by equally fundamentalist detractors. Even God’s strongest
advocates in the West admit that, in the final analysis, the Deus absconditus continues
to be mysterious even after revelation—perhaps even more so. Still, it is clear that not
only confessional atheists are sadly uninformed about the true nature of the knowledge
of God the Semitic traditions have claimed to possess, but even believers are more often
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than not out of touch with the most astute teachings of their best theologians. If we
make a brief and admittedly superficial visit to the Hindus, Buddhists and Far
Easterners with whom we share the earth, we can hope at the very least to be
reawakened to the deeper dimensions of our own Western tradition.
In the prevalent Western view, out of the cloud of unknowing of Brahman
nirguna, that which was most unknown and mysterious of all—a free, personal being—
is believed to have made himself known. God is understood as Someone who stepped
out of the darkness and introduced himself. Secondly, the inadequacy of human thought
to truly conceive of ultimate reality, easily prey to prioritizing a negative theology,
seeing the Absolute as empty of all permanence and true entity, gives way to a pleroma,
full of significance, a God speaking a Word in place of an inarticulate void. God is
encountered as Someone who talks to us. Finally, the sky above us—source of light,
warmth, air and water (in short, source of life)—taken quite naturally by traditional Far
Eastern instinct to be divine itself, is the place where God dwells (“Our Father, who art
in heaven…”); even if the “up” suffered a demotion due to initial extrapolations of
heliocentrism, later extensions of relativity have made the choice of a point of reference
relative to begin with. So why not choose the framework of our common experience, as
cultures everywhere have naturally done? Continue to fall down, without apologies to
Copernicus; look up at the stars, and let the beauty and mystery of the sky remind you
why it is also called the heavens. A Mystery Manifest, a Void Filled and a Sky
Populated—it could be that the Westerner will travel back from his journey to the East
only to rediscover the West.
De Pot., q. 7, a. 5, ad 14m: “Hoc est ultimum cognitionis humanae de Deo; quod sciat se Deum nescire.”
Contra Gentiles, I, c.5, n.3: “Est etiam necessarium huiusmodi veritatem ad credendum hominibus
proponi ad Dei cognitionem veriorem habendam. Tunc enim solum Deum vere cognoscimus quando
ipsum esse credimus supra omne id quod de Deo cogitari ab homine possibile est: eo quod naturalem
hominis cognitionem divina substantia excedit, ut supra ostensum est. Per hoc ergo quod homini de Deo
aliqua proponuntur quae rationem excedunt, firmatur in homine opinio quod Deus sit aliquid supra id
quod cogitare potest.”
3
Com. In Aristotelem de Anima, I, 1, nr. 15. “Principia essentialia rerum sunt nobis ignota.” A
penetrating commentary on this is to be found in Joseph Pieper’s The Silence of Saint Thomas, transl. J.
Murray/D. O’Conner, Chicago: H. Regnery, 1957.
4
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 1843.
5
Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, “An Deus sit”.
1
2
20
For example: Quinque sunt viae, Studi Tomistici 9, org. L. Elders, Cittá del Vaticano, 1980; “The Five
Ways” in The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: from Finite Being to Uncreated Being, J.F.
Whippel, Washington D.C.: CU Press, 2000, pp. 442-500.
7
Concluding phrases in the five ways, S.T. ib.
8
The etymology of ‘god’ is unclear, suggesting, as such unclarity often does, that the idea is so original
and primordial that the word that expresses it is one of man’s first words—thus without derivation. Still,
of possible candidates, the indoeuropean ghau- , which means ‘invoke’, is the strongest, and would also
support our thesis that this was he who was named, called upon, addressed, but not necessarily known.
9
ST, I, q. 11c and passim.
10
“In solo Deo esse et essentia sunt idem realiter”, ST, I, q 2, a 1; q. 3 a.4, and passim.
11
I use the RSV translation of Bible texts.
12
Srimad Bhagavad-Gita, vv. 3-4, transl. By Swami Swarupananda, Kolkata, 2004.
13
For example, in Thomas’ most complete treatment: ST, I, qq. 27-43.
14
In any edition of the Ascent of Mount Carmelt , for example: Bk. 1, ch. 13 and Bk. 3, ch.1.
15
Samyutta-Nikaya, IV, 54, ed. L Feer, London, 1884-98.
16
Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, transl. I./I. Kesarcodi-Watson, Crestwood: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, p. 32.
17
Wing-Tsit Chan, “Syntheses in Chinese Metaphysics”, in The Chinese Mind, ed. Charles A. Moore,
Honolulu: Univ. Press Hawaii, 1967, p. 132.
18
See D.E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West:1500-1800, Lanham, MD:
Rowman/Littlefield, 2nd ed. 2005, pp. 81 f.
19
Tao Te Ching, transl. By Jonathan Star, New York: Penguin, 2001, verse 1, p. 14; verse 42, p. 55; we
have followed Star’s preference for the transliteration of Tao with ‘t’.
20
See, for example, Stephen Bokenkamp: “Sources of the Ling-pao Scriptures” in Michel Strickmann,
ed., Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, vol. 2: 434-486. Brussels: Institute Belge des
Hautes Études Chinoises, 1983.
6
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