IV.

The Ways of Liberation

In Asia there are certain clearly recognized types of spiritual experience that occur in the West only incidentally and with a minimum of recognition by the official religious traditions. These types of experience should not always be identified with mysticism, or the sense of union with God, which may occur often in a theistic and religious context. It therefore seems best to use the term “ways of liberation” to describe these forms of spiritual experience, for all are concerned with liberating human consciousness from ideas and feelings brought about by social conditioning, that is, by the very systems of convention that a religion, in the usual sense of the term, guarantees. These ways should not be considered antireligious, however, for they seek not so much to destroy religion and convention as to use them without being bound by them. They endeavour to go beyond the view of the world acquired through the use of thought and language; they consider that this view overemphasizes the divisions and differences of things and tends to make people neglect their inseparability from the total universe. Among the principal ways of liberation are those found in Hinduism (notably Vedanta and Yoga), Buddhism, and Daoism.

A.

Hinduism

Within the cultural complex of Hinduism, which may be considered panentheistic, are a number of equally legitimate darshana, or points of view, which the individual may adopt. The most notable are Vedanta, based on the teachings of the Upanishads, a body of poetic scriptures; and Yoga, a way of meditation believed indigenous to India. Both Vedanta and Yoga are concerned with liberation from the world, which is considered an illusion of reality.

Ordinarily, neither Vedanta nor Yoga is studied until a man has reached the middle of life, has established himself in his caste, which may be considered his role or vocation, and is ready to transmit his social duties to his sons. Thus, Vedanta and Yoga usually are not taught to children, as are the Scriptures and beliefs of such a religion as Christianity, but only to mature adults fully disciplined in the ways of society. These ways involve precisely giving up one's role and person and leaving the task of maintaining one's social obligations in order to prepare for death. The reason is that death is held to be a calamity when it comes to a person who still believes that he or she is a separate individual.

According to Vedanta, the idea that the world is a multiplicity of distinct things is considered maya, or an illusion, resulting from the conventional way of thinking. Because maya has the original meaning of “to measure”, the world is thought to be measured or marked out by those divisions and classifications of human experience that words and ideas make possible. To describe a complicated curve, one must measure it as if it were a series of distinct points. Similarly, to describe and think about nature, one must break it up into manageable units or terms, that is, things and events. This procedure, however useful, gives the strong impression that events are separable from one another, that one could happen without another, and that pleasure could exist without pain or life without death. A similar impression prevails concerning the separability of things.

Vedanta maintains that all distinctions are relative to each other and that opposites such as the knower and the known, the subject and the object, are distinctions as inseparable as the two faces of a coin. In other words, the world can be separated into independent things only in thought. In concrete fact the world is an inseparable unity or, more exactly, a nonduality, for unity is also a thought or idea existing only in relation to the idea of diversity. The true state of the world is neither unity nor multiplicity. The state of the world is rather immeasurable, indescribable, and indefinable.

A man may therefore recognize that in his deepest consciousness (Atman, in Hinduism) he is not this separate individual but Brahman, or the indefinable totality. He has been led, however, to consider himself as a separate being by the necessarily divisive character of thinking. It cannot be said what Brahman is, because the basic reality of the world does not belong in any class to which a word can be attached. Even though Brahman cannot be grasped in words and ideas, it can, however, be experienced, and the realization of this experience is the function of Yoga. This realization consists in the so-called unification of consciousness, that is, in the temporary renunciation of all divisive thinking and in the abandonment of all ideas and concepts about life. The world then may be experienced in its original, real, and inseparable state.

This type of experience is not, as might be supposed, sheer blank-mindedness, just as the concrete fact of nature is neither the collection of separate things that thought conceives nor mere empty space. If the student of comparative religions were to ask a Christian and a Vedantist for their ideas of what is ultimately real, the Vedantist would either be silent or say what is not, whereas the Christian would describe the positive attributes of God such as his love, wisdom, and intelligence. The student might therefore assume that the latter acknowledges a God who exists positively and the former a God who is almost nothing at all. He or she could conclude that Vedanta is a religion with an impoverished idea of God, failing to see that because it does not use the language of religion it cannot be a religion.

Two distinct ways of talking are used to characterize spiritual experiences. The religious way resembles trying to describe colour to a blind person by saying what colour may be compared to, for example, to variations of temperature. The way of liberation resembles trying to describe to the blind person what colour is not. Both ways of speaking would be valid. A religion expresses the ultimate reality in particular terms such as those of human thought and imagination, and thus its view of God is determined and definite. A way of liberation sets thought aside in favour of direct experiencing and feeling, and thus its view is indeterminate and indefinite.

B.

Buddhism

Buddhism, the doctrine of Gautama Buddha, arose as a clarification and reform movement of Hinduism.

In many ways the objectives of Buddhism are the same as those of Vedanta and Yoga. Gautama Buddha, however, avoided giving even the barest name to that which is ultimately real, both in its universal aspect as Brahman and in its human aspect as the deepest self, or Atman. He felt that such terms were too easily turned into ideas and forms of thought that would detract from direct experience. His teaching was that people suffer because of avidya, or ignorance, of the total relativity of the world of things and events. Thought is avidya because it is a process of ignoring; that is, it cannot focus on any one aspect of experience without ignoring everything else. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit instead of as a whole and leads in turn to grasping (trishna, in Buddhism), or trying to wrest the desirable bits of experience away from the whole; however, because the good is always relative to the bad, this separation can never be accomplished. Similarly, one can never experience a solid without a surrounding space, space and solid being relative to each other. Giving up grasping leads to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which Gautama Buddha refused to define except in negative terms, as the Vedantist defines liberation.

Gautama Buddha's teaching led to a misunderstanding to which Vedanta is likewise prone, namely, that liberation may be sought as an escape from suffering, or as a permanent state of bliss. Later Buddhist leaders, especially those of the Mahayana school, corrected this misunderstanding by pointing out that seeking Nirvana as an escape was still grasping. Thus, their ideal of the wise individual went beyond the older Hindu view of leaving the world, that is, the social world, to prepare for death. It comprised returning into the full activity of society once liberated so that, free from fear, one could devote oneself to acts of compassion for those still in the bondage of maya. Buddhist teaching, however, urges morality and compassion not as a commandment but as voluntary action to which the free person commits himself or herself without hope of reward or fear of punishment. No thought is found in Buddhism of moral conduct as conformity to a divine pattern, for it considers moral standards like rules of grammar, that is, human conventions necessary for social existence but without any absolute authority.

Although Buddha gave no name to what he considered ultimate reality, later Buddhist teachers spoke of the true state of the world as sunyata, or “emptiness”, meaning more exactly, “empty of any definable characteristic” or “unclassifiable”. This philosophical attitude is in no sense equivalent to Western atheism or nihilism, for what is empty is not reality itself but every idea in which the human mind attempts to grasp it.

C.

Daoism

Attributed to the Chinese philosophers Laozi (Lao-tzu) and and Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu), Daoism is the specifically Chinese form of a way of liberation. In certain respects it resembles Buddhism, and Daoist terms were used liberally in translating Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. However, it departs even further than Buddhism from Western views of a religion, being originated by philosophers out of a clearly traceable current of Chinese philosophical sceptisism regarding the utility of intellectual and linguistic discrimination, and having little to do with gods, spirits or cults. Like Vedanta and Yoga, Daoism was adopted ordinarily by older men who had played their part in society according to the basic patterns of convention provided by Confucianism in China. In common with Mahayana Buddhism, Daoism allows for the return of the liberated sage into worldly affairs. Its principal text, the Daodejing (Teaching of Dao), attributed to Laozi, was written as a manual of advice for rulers.

Daoism proper, as found in the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, must be distinguished carefully from the so-called Daoist cult of divination, alchemy, and magic that is Daoist in nothing but name; this is more a survival of native Chinese religion. Pure Daoism has never been organized and has remained the pursuit of independent scholars and philosophers both in China and Japan for more than 2,000 years. It regards the natural universe as the operation of the Dao (“way”), which eludes all verbal and intellectual comprehension. Experience of the Dao is to be realized through guan (“silent contemplation of nature”) and wu-wei (“the absence of mental and physical strain”), which is equivalent to the Buddhist attitude of not grasping. Daoism emphasizes strongly the union of the individual and nature, suggesting that one controls the environment not by fighting it but by cooperating with it as a sailor uses the wind when tacking against it. Daoism is the philosophy underlying jujitsu, the so-called gentle way of defending oneself against an opponent by using the opponent's own strength to defeat him or her. Similarly, it teaches that one should control oneself by trusting rather than opposing one's natural feelings and instincts, by channelling them in the directions in which one wants them to go rather than resisting them.