Shimmering Mirrors

Patrick Laude

Description

In this pioneering work of comparative metaphysics, Patrick Laude delves into Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish concepts of Reality and Appearance to offer a uniquely lucid exploration of metaphysical representations of reality, relativity, appearance, and illusion. Laude includes discussions of the Absolute and the Relative in Hindu Advaita Vedānta, Kashmiri Śaivism, Sufi wahdat al-wujūd, and Madhyamaka Buddhism; the metaphysics of salvation in Buddhist and Christian traditions; and the metaphysics of evil and the distinction between Reality and Appearance in the Jewish Kabbalah, Śaivism, Christian mysticism, and the Sufi school of Ibn al-'Arabī. The book explores how a discerning and subtle apprehension of the relationship between Reality and Appearance may help contemporary readers and seekers respond to the acute predicaments of contemporary religious and spiritual consciousness.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Shimmering Reality: Contemplative and Mystical Concepts of Relativity

2. Christian and Buddhist Insights into a Metaphysics of Salvation

3. On the Good beyond Good and Evil

4. On Hindu Bhedābheda and Sufi Barzakh

5. Knowing the Unknowable: Upāya and Gods of Belief

6. Transmutation, the Sacred Word, and the Feminine

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Mysticism
• Comparative religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Metaphysics

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438466835
• Langue: English

Extrait

SHIMMERING MIRRORS
SHIMMERING MIRRORS
Reality and Appearance in Contemplative Metaphysics East and West
PATRICK LAUDE
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Laude, Patrick, 1958– author.
Title: Shimmering mirrors : reality and appearance in contemplative metaphysics East and West / Patrick Laude.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051109 (print) | LCCN 2017039127 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466835 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466811 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Religions. | Contemplation. | Metaphysics. | Philosophy and religion.
Classification: LCC BL80.3 (ebook) | LCC BL80.3 .L378 2017 (print) | DDC 200—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051109
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The attitude of staying in a deep valley while avoiding great mountains, or loving emptiness while hating existence is just like the attitude of going into a forest while avoiding trees. But one should be aware of the fact that green and blue are identical in essence, and ice and water are identical in origin; a single mirror reflects myriad forms, and parted waters will perfectly intermingle once they are reunited.
—Wōnhyo
If there were no water whose wet nature were unchanging, how could there be the waves of illusory, provisional phenomenal appearances? If there were no mirror whose pure brightness were unchanging, how could there be the reflections of a variety of unreal phenomena?
—Tsung-mi
Just as earth, water, etc. get reflected in a clean mirror even so all events and objects of the world get reflected unmixed in the one Lord Himself.
—Abhinavagupta
Māyā is like a magic fabric woven from a warp that veils and a weft that unveils; a quasi-incomprehensible intermediary between the finite and the Infinite—at least from our point of view as creatures—it has all the shimmering ambiguity appropriate to its half-cosmic, half-divine nature.
—Frithjof Schuon
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Shimmering Reality: Contemplative and Mystical Concepts of Relativity
2 Christian and Buddhist Insights into a Metaphysics of Salvation
3 On the Good beyond Good and Evil
4 On Hindu Bhedābheda and Sufi Barzakh
5 Knowing the Unknowable: Upāya and Gods of Belief
6 Transmutation, the Sacred Word, and the Feminine
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
My deep gratitude goes to Alex Minchinton and John Paraskevopoulos for their thorough reading of the manuscript, as well as their substantive and editorial work and remarks. Many thanks also to André Gomez, Jean-Pierre Lafouge, Patrick Meadows, and Reza Shah-Kazemi for their intellectual support, advice, and editorial suggestions at several stages of my work on this book.
I also wish to thank the Faculty of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar for awarding me two Faculty Research Grants in support of my research on this book.
My sincere thanks to Daniela Boccassini and Carlo Saccone, editors of Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei , for their kind permission to reproduce an earlier version of chapter 6 , and to Roger Ames, editor of Philosophy East and West , and the University of Hawaii Press, for allowing me to reproduce the essay “Shimmering Reality: The Question of Metaphysical Relativity in Mystical Theology” as chapter 1 of this book.
Finally, a first version of chapter 2 of this book, copyrighted with the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, was used with the kind permission of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research and Springer.
Introduction
Why write a new book on metaphysics in contemplative traditions and, first of all, what is to be understood by those terms? Leaving aside, for now, the discussion of the intended meaning of the adjective contemplative, it may be in order to point out that metaphysics is not uncommonly considered today a matter of “unreal” speculations, something like an obsolete luxury in a world of scientific “hard facts” and sociopolitical imperatives. In this respect, one of the major sources of misunderstanding lies no doubt in the literal implications of the Greek prefix meta . Whether it be understood, in the Aristotelian sense, as referring to a matter of sequence, that is as pertaining to that which comes after physics, or—as is more often the case—as alluding to a domain situated beyond physical reality, it remains at any rate true that metaphysics can hardly arise as a priority in a world in which the tendency to treating “the urgent as essential” tends to translate, arguably, into forgetting “the urgency of the essential,” to paraphrase Edgar Morin’s felicitous formula. 1 Much of contemporary thought and action is predicated upon the sense that metaphysics may be dealt with later, when what matters first and foremost has been settled. Many have even gone a step farther in arguing that metaphysics may remain postponed indefinitely since it deals with a beyond that is deemed out of reach, if not illusory, and above all undecidable as demonstrated, in their eyes, by the diversity of its historical forms and concepts. As the reader will have opportunities to infer from many pages of this essay, those widespread contemporary perceptions may be evaluated as misreadings of metaphysical teachings, since it is quite apparent that the latter have been articulated by their contemplative proponents as being as pertinent to the here as to the beyond, as relevant to the now as to the later.
Aristotle referred to metaphysics as the science of being qua being, while some contemporary thinkers have also characterized it as the knowledge of universal principles, although it cannot properly be defined since it has no limits. 2 Both statements are very rich in meaning. That metaphysics deals with being qua being simply means that it considers that which is the very precondition for anything else. It is not as much concerned with beings as it is with being as such, or with Being, should one deem it necessary to capitalize the term to distinguish it unequivocally from beings, in the ways in which Thomism contrasts esse and ens, or in the manner Heidegger understands the distinction between Sein and das Seiende. Even understood in the most universal and non-delimited manner, being can be, and has been, experienced, understood, conceptualized or expressed in different ways, including through the very absence, or negation, of its concept. While definitely not an object that could be analyzed and reified as a being, “being,” or “Being,” has variously been approached as Act, Stream, Presence, Light, or even as Consciousness and Subject, in all cases a reality more intrinsic to beings than themselves, to paraphrase Augustine’s famous mystical intimation, intimior intimo meo, in Confessions 3:6. While stating that it is not an object, nor even the Supreme Object, we are suggesting that Being is presumably not fathomed, nor is most often even truly considered, by ordinary religious consciousness. This is so to the extent that the latter is generally content to understand it, for better or for worse, as the largest, highest, most powerful being, or Being as first being among all beings. In doing so, it all too often fails to sense that Being springs forth at the very source of any and all beings, as testified by the intuitions and formulations of a number of traditional metaphysicians, albeit in very different contexts and languages, and sometimes with divergent spiritual intents. This is precisely why metaphysics could also be considered as the science of the universal since it encompasses everything in light of that which gives reality to the whole of existence. It could be proposed, therefore, that metaphysics is simply the science of reality in its most encompassing sense, or the science of reality as such, or that of Reality.
Now, reality, whether understood relatively or absolutely, has been thoroughly questioned as a normative concept with the advent of postmodern moods of thinking and living. In our world perhaps more than ever there is widespread skepticism about any universal concept of reality, and it is widely held, practically if not theoretically, that what is “illusion” for one is “reality” for another, and conversely; and this is as true for collectivities as it is for individuals. The demise of modern ideologies is not for nothing in this state of affairs, as it highlighted the end of the so-called grand narratives which were founded on fundamental and systematic concepts of reality. The result is that reality has been more and more understood in terms of individual representations, when it is recognized as having any validity at all. Moreover, the exponential development of so-called virtual reality has contributed to blurring the lines between the immediate sense of ordinary reality, such as had been mostly shaped by materialism and positivism, and that which, until recently, would have been deemed to be nothing but an illusory universe of technological and mediatic productions. This expansion and pandemic use of the virtual world has thereby opened wider the doors to a diffuse postmodern skepticism over the very notion of reality.
In spite of these developments, or perhaps because of them, perceptions of reality and appearance still shape the existence of contemporary