The ineffable nature of Ultimate Reality
The story of the elephant and the blind wise men warns us about judgements with blinkers. It's also found in the adage used in IT which says garbage-in-garbage-out. Watch out for iffy inputs. They can skew your judgement. GIGO implies that good or...
By Vithal C Nadkarni, |
The story of the elephant and the blind wise men warns us about judgements with blinkers. It's also found in the adage used in IT which says garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO). Watch out for iffy inputs. They can skew your judgement. GIGO implies that good or un-blinkered inputs can boost the quality of the judgement.
The same holds true for the elephant fable ��� seeing is believing. Conversely, believing without actually seeing something leads to gross error. This position is taken by the noted scholar of comparative religions Karen Armstrong in her new book The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.
In a sweeping survey of religious practices around the world, Armstrong concludes that at their best, most religions use "devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears (what Sri Krishna and Gautama Buddha would call Dukkalayam or House of Sorrows)".
Religion defined thus may be more of certain practices rather than of dogma, belief or theory. In such a scheme, the religious adept ought to be wary of attempts at freezing a living faith or practice into exclusionary rules, Armstrong adds, throwing her weight behind the so-called 'apophatic' tradition. In this nothing about God or Ultimate Reality can be reduced or captured in words.
The best example of such a negative, or more correctly, ineffable (literally unspeakable) tradition is the Sanskrit neti neti (not this not this). In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, students asking questions about the nature of God are told, "The Divine is not this nor is it that (na + iti = neti)."
But neti as shown by the equation in the bracket is not really a denial. Rather, it is an assertion that whatever the Divine may be, when we attempt to capture it in human words, we must inevitably fall short, because humans have inherent limitations of understanding.
Words too are intrinsically limited in their ability to express the transcendent. Thus Vedantic texts shed light on the practice of neti as a tool for Self-Realisation.
A similar concept animates the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta defined as the absence of self-limiting identity in people and things. This too is non-negative. Instead of denying the existence of the soul, the permanence of an entity that remains constant behind the changing bodily and non-bodily components of a living being is denied.
The same holds true for the elephant fable ��� seeing is believing. Conversely, believing without actually seeing something leads to gross error. This position is taken by the noted scholar of comparative religions Karen Armstrong in her new book The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.
In a sweeping survey of religious practices around the world, Armstrong concludes that at their best, most religions use "devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears (what Sri Krishna and Gautama Buddha would call Dukkalayam or House of Sorrows)".
Religion defined thus may be more of certain practices rather than of dogma, belief or theory. In such a scheme, the religious adept ought to be wary of attempts at freezing a living faith or practice into exclusionary rules, Armstrong adds, throwing her weight behind the so-called 'apophatic' tradition. In this nothing about God or Ultimate Reality can be reduced or captured in words.
The best example of such a negative, or more correctly, ineffable (literally unspeakable) tradition is the Sanskrit neti neti (not this not this). In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, students asking questions about the nature of God are told, "The Divine is not this nor is it that (na + iti = neti)."
But neti as shown by the equation in the bracket is not really a denial. Rather, it is an assertion that whatever the Divine may be, when we attempt to capture it in human words, we must inevitably fall short, because humans have inherent limitations of understanding.
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Words too are intrinsically limited in their ability to express the transcendent. Thus Vedantic texts shed light on the practice of neti as a tool for Self-Realisation.
A similar concept animates the Buddhist doctrine of Anatta defined as the absence of self-limiting identity in people and things. This too is non-negative. Instead of denying the existence of the soul, the permanence of an entity that remains constant behind the changing bodily and non-bodily components of a living being is denied.
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