by Tang Huyen

"To me, the Highest is not personal, not a substance, not any specific content in whatever form, but just the openness and transparence that allows everything to shine forth without obstruction."

How much one thinks according to a certain religion, more specifically according to its worldview, depends on how much one buys into its ideology. One can be exposed to its tenets, in plain language its beliefs, and one can come to accept some of them and perhaps reject the balance, but such an acceptance can be superficial, until one buys into its "underlying logic," and then one is committed to it, even if one comes to reject its tenets in content. The underlying logic of Buddhism is the conventionalist theory of language and thought, and the underlying logic of Christianity is the essentialist theory of language and thought. If one buys into the essentialist theory of language and thought, one is a card-carrying Christian, even if one comes to reject its beliefs in content. Such a commitment tends to be deep-rooted and hard to remove, and its owners may or may not be aware of it at all, until somebody points it out to them. Even if their owners rebel against Christianity in content, they tend to keep it (the essentialist theory of language and thought) as part of the core of their thinking, and this can continue for the rest of their lives, so to speak in the underground mode, which merely makes it all the more influential.

Mother Teresa is an interesting case. She badly wanted God (Christ to her) to come to her, and she consulted with high-level Catholic authorities about how to get that done. They and she uniformly took a very aggressive and unyielding approach, in that they held a very strict and rigid concept of him, and then expected him to come to her in exactly that form and no other way. Basically they took an essentialist approach to God (Christ), and were dead sure that their view of him was correct, and had no "give" about it. From the outside looking in, it seems that they were arrogant and presumptuous in the extreme. At any rate, an essentialist view can also be directed upward and not just downward.

European mysticism tends to come from Stoicism, even after Stoicism got absorbed by Neoplatonism, from Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry. Plotinus (who met with Indian sages and learnt yoga from them in a Greek military expedition to Western Asia) and Porphyry were ardent anti-Christians, but their mysticism became the foundation of Christian mysticism. Plotinus attacked Stoicism, but borrowed massively from it, and reinterpreted it in Platonic and Aristotelian terms. Almost all the great Christian mystics borrowed massively from Plotinus and Porphyry, and their negative theology became the orthodox foundation of much of Christian theology (and not just Christian mysticism). Early modern European philosophers, like Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, borrow massively from Stoicism, even if they do not disclose that fact (Leibniz almost admits it, and Hegel is ostensibly influenced by Stoicism, but Kant, who is hardly seen as Stoic, is also profoundly Stoic). So Stoicism is the single biggest influence on European philosophy, theology and mysticism, and it entertains quite some similarity with Buddhism and Daoism.

Buddhism disappeared from India in the twelfth century, but had been decaying for some centuries before that. However before disappearing, it influenced Hinduism, and Hinduism from then on is almost like Buddhism but seen from a certain perspective. Buddhism talks not so much about things (de re) as about the discursive mind (de intellectu), and when one approaches Buddhism as if it was about things, then it suddenly flops over to Hinduism. Almost the whole Hinduist worldview is instantly intelligible when one looks at it as a de re interpretation of Buddhism.

European negative theology and Hinduism can both be seen as de re interpretations of Buddhism. They are superposable to each other, with some transformations (in the geometric sense).

What is relevant here is the mystical approaches common to them. Basically, they as a bloc are the reverse to Mother Teresa's. They involve making oneself small, in front of God or whatever one's highest is (awakening, Nirvāṇa, suchness, thusness, Buddha-nature or whatever), to drop one's norms and standards, to release one's certainties and fixities, and to open up to what is outside of them and beyond them. Mother Teresa sought to impose herself on her God, in her terms, but almost everybody else does the opposite, in dropping one's norms and standards and opening up to what is outside of them and beyond them. The diversities come from interpreting such an approach in de re or de intellectu terms, in personal or impersonal terms (the Christian God is personal, the God of Stoicism is impersonal). Many European mystics have to phrase their mystical experiences in terms that are acceptable to their religions, but when one scrutinises what they say, often what they say is almost straight Stoic talk, flimsily dressed up in theistic terminology, to protect the innocent.

The universalist outlook seeks merely to help and avoids imposing oneself on those one ostensibly tries to help. It is a weaker, less intense version of the above mystical approaches. If one takes a hard line on orthodoxy, people tend to turn away and one cannot help them. The content of dogma means less than how one applies it, and one can impose it (or one's interpretation of it) or open up in resonance to some universalist openness and transparence. It happens that some religions — Stoicism, Daoism and Buddhism — teach such opening up to openness and transparence explicitly, and also explicitly downplay their dogmatic content relative to it. In front of such opening up to openness and transparence (if one is receptive to it), any dogmatic content is going to pale in significance. Transcendence may or may not mean anything other than merely that.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 29 June 2008, in the "Reverse faith (was Re: An enabler with full stop)" thread, in response to Richard Corfield. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

This is one of Tang Huyen's most expansive comparative religion posts. Three claims deserve attention. First, the "underlying logic" thesis: one can reject Christianity in content while remaining a structural Christian (holding the essentialist theory of language). Second, the Stoicism lineage: Plotinus and Porphyry — both anti-Christian — built the mystical architecture that Christian theology absorbed wholesale; Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel are covert Stoics. Third, the de re/de intellectu axis: Hinduism is Buddhism misread as being about things rather than about the discursive mind, and European negative theology is Hinduism's sibling on that same misreading. The Mother Teresa case study cuts the other direction: here is someone who practiced an essentialist mysticism, demanding God arrive on her terms, which TH reads as the opposite of the mystical tradition's own logic (making oneself small; releasing certainties; opening up). The final paragraph identifies Stoicism, Daoism, and Buddhism as the traditions that teach opening to openness explicitly — the only difference from theistic traditions being that they do not dress it up. Compare "Reverse Faith" (June 2008) and "The Perfect Box" (July 2008).

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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