By the late Professor Robert C. Zaehner, Oxford University
This essay has been used as a “Handout” in Dr. Nolan’s World Religions courses since the early 1970s. It was published in a non-technical encyclopedia that is now out of print.
The religions of the world may be roughly divided into two types - the prophetic and the mystical. Each type derives ultimately from one nation, the prophetic from the Jews, the mystical from India. In addition, China must count as an independent religious phenomenon which, however, belongs to the Indian 'type' by which it was profoundly influenced.
To the prophetic type of religion belong Judaism itself and its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. These religions all originated in the Near East, Christianity spreading mainly throughout Europe. Islam replaced it in Asia Minor and North Africa, but its greatest expansion was towards the East when it displaced Zoroastrianism in Persia and made deep inroads into India and beyond. If we speak of 'prophetic' religion as 'Western,' we must remember that Islam constituted an integral part of this 'Western, block, not of the 'Eastern.' The great religious divide is not the Bosphorus which, separates Europe from Asia, but the Hindu Kush which separates the lands of the Muslim Iranian nation from India on the one hand, and the Gobi Desert which separates them from China on the other. Thus, if we persist in using the words 'Eastern' and 'Western' we must understand that in the religious context we mean Europe and the Middle East by 'Western'; India and the Far East by 'Eastern.'
God as He or It
In prophetic religion the first assumption is that of a personal God who rules the universe and who communicates his will to man through Prophets and Lawgivers. This God is directly and personally concerned with the right ordering of this world and with the right and 'righteous' relationships he wishes to exist between man and man: hence he is the Law giver par excellence, operating in time and space in a concrete situation the center of which is man. …he manifests himself in act. As Pascal said, 'he is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned.' He is a personal and 'living' God who manifests his will in history.
The God of 'Eastern' religion is the God of the philosophers a - so much so indeed that to call him God at all can only mislead, for he is not a person, it is a principle: it is the principle of unchanging Being which is jet the source of all becoming, the stillness that is yet the source of all activity, the One from which all multiplicity proceeds. In Chinese it. is called the Tao, the 'Way,' in the Indian languages it is Brahman, unchanging, One, dependent on nothing, free.
All religions aim at 'salvation' of some sort, and this implies that there is both something or someone which can be 'saved' and also something from which it can be saved. For prophetic religion this 'something' is usually sin or evil, for the mystical religions it is the human condition as we know it, subject to birth and death, old age and decay - the tyranny of time and of this world in which we live. This longing to have done with life as lived and experienced on earth are typically and admirably expressed in an ancient Hindu prayer:
From the unreal lead me to the real!
From darkness lead me to the light!
From death lead me to immortality!
Immortality and the 'real' are one and the same thing: they are not of this world, for they are what does not and cannot change. 'Immortality' does not mean 'life everlasting,' for it does not last at all: it just is. It is the real as contrasted with the unreal, the eternal as contrasted with the transient. The essential experience is that of the 'salvation,' or rather 'liberation' of the soul from the bondage of time, space and matter.
What then is the nature of the soul if by this word we understand that thing in man which can be so liberated? It is emphatically not what Christians understand by that word: it its not the responsible element in man which can be 'saved' or 'damned' because salvation and damnation are the reward and punishment allotted to the doers of good or evil deeds. The 'soul' or, as the Hindus prefer to call it, the 'self,' cannot be saved or damned because it has nothing to do with 'doing,' only with 'being.' 'Doing' in Sanskrit is karma, and it is karma which binds you to the never-ending round of impermanent existence. 'Liberation' means to have done with 'doing' and having in order that you may simply 'be.'
This Space Within the Heart
Brahman is Being: Brahman is consciousness: Brahman is joy. So too, you and I, in our inmost selves, are Being, consciousness, and joy. We do not know this because we are ignorant of the true nature of things: we identify ourselves with body, senses, mind, the 'ego,' or even with what we in the West call 'soul,' of which consciousness is an essential part. This is to fail to see things as they really are; and as liberation means also to free oneself from a false view of things.
Brahman is the same changeless principle which both pervades the universe and dwells in the consciousness of every man. To 'become Brahman' is to realize that one's true being is independent of this world, of mind and emotion and feeling just as much as of the body and its desires. To 'become Brahman' means to realize that the point without magnitude within the human heart is the same as the ground of the cosmos:
As wide as is this space around us, so wide is this space within the heart. In it both sky end earth are concentrated, both fire and wind, both sun and moon, lightning and the stars, what a man possesses here on earth and what ha does not possess: everything is concentrated is this (tiny space within the heart).
This is what is usually called pantheism; but it does not mean that everything is indiscriminately and indifferentiably divine, but that all things are divine in the sense that the sums eternal spirit, Brahman, is fully present in them all.
'Liberation' means to experience the presence of this unchanging being both in yourself and in all Nature - hence it is possible to say that one's inmost self and the highest Brahman are one: 'This finest essence -- the whole universe has it as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: That you are.'
This 'Highest Self' is usually regarded as far transcending anything that can be called personality; and the experience of identity with this impersonal absolute means the loss of anything you can call 'I,' the dissolving of the hard contours of personal existence into the wide expanse of unqualified being, just as a river loses its identity once it flows into the featureless ocean. And yet in the ancient Hindu texts Brahman is not always conceived of as being simply the changeless One behind the ever-changing many, for it sometimes appears as the creative ground of the universe, the "Lord" of the universe.
This is indeed the great unborn Self which consists of understanding... In the space within the heart lies the Ruler of all, the Lord of all, the King of all. He neither increases by good works nor does he diminish by evil ones...For it is he who makes him whom he would raise up from these worlds perform good works, and it is he again who makes him whom he would drag down perform evil works. He is the guardian of the worlds, the sovereign of the worlds, universal Lord. Let a man know: He is my Self.
Here the identification of the essence of man and the Absolute which is at the same time God is complete. This is not the Judaeo-Christian God who stands over against you as a judge, it is not even the 'Kingdom of God' that 'is within you;' it is a God who transcends all personal gods and yet is identical with you as you exist in eternity. Moreover, this is not something that must be accepted on faith alone, it is something that all can experience if their dispositions are right and if they are suitably trained. It may sound absurd, but it is an experience that is attested all over the globe and at all stages of human development. Once experienced, this vision of the one undying reality behind all that comes to be and passes away cannot be doubted, for to have glimpsed it, if only for a moment, brings the conviction that death itself is an impossibility. The danger is that it introduces you into a world where all action is transcended and in which there can therefore be neither good nor evil. This too is the experience which the Buddhists call 'Enlightenment.'
The Hindus were and are incurable metaphysicians. Though all admit that this experience is not explicable in words, this did not prevent them from trying to explain it philosophically. Some said it proved that all things are inseparably one and that all multiplicity is an illusion: others went to the other extreme and claimed that there are two orders of being - the eternal and the transient - and that liberation means no more than the final separation of the eternal element from all that is not eternal. All this the Buddha rejected as being irrelevant to the saving experience itself which for him meant the 'snuffing out' (Nirvana) of all worldly existence and the actual experience of 'what is unborn, does not become, is not made or compounded.' This Nirvana, the blowing out of the flame of life and of anything we are pleased to call a 'self' (for the Buddha will have nothing to do with a 'self' of any kind whether individual or universal), is the realization of the Changeless. This again is an experience that may be had here in this life: it is something that is present in all of us. For most of us it is hidden away so that we do not even suspect its existence.
The Buddha, however, is there to show us the way, the Noble Eightfold Path which is the only sure way to the cherished goal and which is based on a strict morality of selflessness and self-abnegation.
The Prison of the World
Both Hinduism and Buddhism see salvation as a release from this world into an unconditioned form of existence in which all change and all action are transcended. That is because they believe in the transmigration of souls, the endless repetition of lives more or less miserable to which, but for the possibility of 'liberation,' there would be no foreseeable end. Their tendency is to see this world as a prison from which the spirit of man must escape. The Chinese did not believe in transmigration, and their attitude to this world is therefore very different. The Supreme principle is the Tao -the 'Way' - the 'way' things work, that is; and man's salvation consists in his attuning himself to and uniting himself with this Tao. Since the Tao is the principle that makes things what they are, man must not resist it. Like Brahman the Tao is the single reality that operates in all things, though remaining still and unperturbed itself all the time. Hence to be at one with all things is to be at one with the Tao, and through the Tao to share in its immortality. For these Taoists Nature and Spirit are one; you do not have to renounce Nature, only your individual 'self.' Once that is done you will see Nature itself miraculously transformed in the eternal light of the Tao; you will see all things still as separate, but yet in a far deeper sense as one.
When Buddhism came to China it too was transformed: the original rigid separation of eternity from this world of space and time, was abolished. The result was Zen in which 'enlightenment' is seen much as the Taoists and early Hindus saw it - as the realization of the interconnectedness of all things in the one absolute 'ground." Enlightenment may come after long practice either gradually or quite suddenly. The experience, as with the Hindus, is one of Being, heightened consciousness, and joy. In it there is nothing that a Christian would recognize as God; it is simply the discovery of a changeless principle within yourself, it is your own true being which no one, not even God, can take away from you. 'Salvation' lies squarely in your own hands: and in this surely lies the attraction of Zen and the whole ‘Eastern’ tradition to post-Christian man. In China this mystical trend, the keynote of which is always unity, left its mark on what until 1905 was the official religion of China - Confucianism – which had previously been concerned very much with this world and with ethics. Despite the mystical influx, however, Confucianism never ceased to mainly interested be in the right ordering of society in this world rather than in individual escape from it. That, it thought, was the higher selfishness; but among the 'Eastern' religions Confucianism was the odd man out.