religious thought?
A religious truth is essentially an experience; it is not an opinion.
C. G. JUNG CW18 par.692
The problem with 'religious truths' is that they are not truths in the same sense that, if you step off the pavement without looking, say, you may very well not enjoy the outcome. Religious truths are, indeed, experience; however experience is (a) NEVER shared but always individual, and (b) is inevitably mitigated by previous experience. Experience itself is (to quote A. N. Whitehead) simply "experientially initiated potentiality for further experience", which is to say that - rather than 'seeing is believing' - what actually happens is that you see only what you already believe or can already understand based on an accretion of previous instants of experiences you deem similar or dissimilar.
Thirdly, there is also the distinction between intellectual understanding (which, according to the Tibetans, is like a patch: it tends to fall off when you most need it), experience (which fades like clouds, leaving little but opinion in its wake) and genuine realisation (which is as vast and all-encompassing as space).
My own yardstick for judging 'truths' is precisely this idea of vastness and all-encompassingness. Any ideological "truth", religious or other, which excludes more than it contains is of a lesser nature... Not necessarily untrue, but merely a step toward that greater truth that includes it.
At the age of 12, the great teacher Sachen Kunga Nyingpo had a visionof Mañjushri, bodhisattva of penetrating insight, who said to him:
If you're attached to the concerns of just this life, you are not a practitioner;
If you're attached to cyclic existence and its confusions, you are no renunciate;
If you're attached to your own goals and personal well–being, this is not the enlightened attitude of compassion;
If you cling to anything at all, that is not the ultimate view.
These four lines are considered by Tibetan Buddhists of all schools to be one of several such brief expositions by great masters that actually essentialise the entire path.
The concerns of just this life are the domain of those who have not yet entered any spiritual path. Their concerns are - at base - survival of the individual in turms of nourishment, shelter and safety, and survival of the species in terms of procreation and the safety and stability of the group.
As we all know, these 'truths' are a 24/7 job.
As long as the fluctuations of fortune affect you profoundly, and you are blown hither and yon by the eight worldly winds of praise and blame, good fortune and bad fortune, renown and lack of recognition, happiness and sorrow, you will actually continue to be pushed around by them. And as long as you are being pushed around by hopes and fears concerning what's outside of you, there is no time for learning the actual nature of the mind.
This is not to say that the actual nature of the mind does not HAVE these concerns, but rather, that the mind itself is so vast and profound, that these become no more than the tiniest ripples on the least wavelet on one infinitessimal section of its surface.
As the Niguma quote that starts this blog says:
If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation,
What can you achieve by applying an antidote?
Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them
But are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.
Until you reach a point where the well-being of others becomes more important than your own, your attitude is still pretty cramped - goldfish bowl - everything relates to you... MY happiness, MY progress, MY discomfort, MY likes and dislikes, etc., etc., ad infinitum nauseamque.
Compassion - karuna in Sanskrit, nying-je or t'ug-je ('lordly heart'or 'lordly enlightened mind') in Tibetan - is simply the attitude that others are obviously suffering quite as much as you are and that therefore you should find out the correct way to help in such a way that first their immediate needs are met, and then their profounder doubts and insecurities are calmed...
As HH Dalai Lama says, all this really needs to get it going is ordinary human intelligence and ordinary human kindness. A mere step in this direction of itself opens up the pathway to further refinement of your own attitude, to futher purification of your obscurations of conflicting emotion and primitive beliefs about reality.
Finally you reach a point where you may walk with both hands free, where your kindliness and concern know no bounds, where you genuinely rejoice in the good fortune of those around you and are immediate in responding to their suffering, and where you have no attachment to what you consider near and dear or distant and alien, no point of view to thump, no truths to drive home... You just help... In the knowledge that "truths" are useful as markers, direction-pointers and goads along a path, perhaps, but that the path itself - the REAL path - is ultimately ineffable, inconceivable and totally beyond all 'effort' or 'truth' or 'realisation'...
If this is what Jung means by a 'religious truth', then yes, I agree.
As a postscript to this, I'd like to point out the existence of an extraordinary book by HH Chogye Trichen Rinpoche concerning the abovementioned quatrain by Mañjushri. Presented in the form of a detailed commentary upon the 'song of experience' composed by Sachen Kunga Nyingpo's son, Jetsün Dragpa Gyälts'en, concerning the application of this text, it examines the practical meaning and application of each line in detail, and should come as a timely caveat to anyone who considers him or herself a 'Buddhist', or - even more so! - 'practitioner'.
Available from Snow Lion Publications, it's called:
Parting from the Four Attachments: Jetsun Drakpa Gyaltsen's Song of Experience on Mind Training and the View by Chogye Trichen Rinpoche
[SNOW LION PUBLICATIONS 2003]
ISBN - 1-55939-193-6
C. G. JUNG CW18 par.692
The problem with 'religious truths' is that they are not truths in the same sense that, if you step off the pavement without looking, say, you may very well not enjoy the outcome. Religious truths are, indeed, experience; however experience is (a) NEVER shared but always individual, and (b) is inevitably mitigated by previous experience. Experience itself is (to quote A. N. Whitehead) simply "experientially initiated potentiality for further experience", which is to say that - rather than 'seeing is believing' - what actually happens is that you see only what you already believe or can already understand based on an accretion of previous instants of experiences you deem similar or dissimilar.
Thirdly, there is also the distinction between intellectual understanding (which, according to the Tibetans, is like a patch: it tends to fall off when you most need it), experience (which fades like clouds, leaving little but opinion in its wake) and genuine realisation (which is as vast and all-encompassing as space).
My own yardstick for judging 'truths' is precisely this idea of vastness and all-encompassingness. Any ideological "truth", religious or other, which excludes more than it contains is of a lesser nature... Not necessarily untrue, but merely a step toward that greater truth that includes it.
At the age of 12, the great teacher Sachen Kunga Nyingpo had a visionof Mañjushri, bodhisattva of penetrating insight, who said to him:
If you're attached to the concerns of just this life, you are not a practitioner;
If you're attached to cyclic existence and its confusions, you are no renunciate;
If you're attached to your own goals and personal well–being, this is not the enlightened attitude of compassion;
If you cling to anything at all, that is not the ultimate view.
These four lines are considered by Tibetan Buddhists of all schools to be one of several such brief expositions by great masters that actually essentialise the entire path.
The concerns of just this life are the domain of those who have not yet entered any spiritual path. Their concerns are - at base - survival of the individual in turms of nourishment, shelter and safety, and survival of the species in terms of procreation and the safety and stability of the group.
As we all know, these 'truths' are a 24/7 job.
As long as the fluctuations of fortune affect you profoundly, and you are blown hither and yon by the eight worldly winds of praise and blame, good fortune and bad fortune, renown and lack of recognition, happiness and sorrow, you will actually continue to be pushed around by them. And as long as you are being pushed around by hopes and fears concerning what's outside of you, there is no time for learning the actual nature of the mind.
This is not to say that the actual nature of the mind does not HAVE these concerns, but rather, that the mind itself is so vast and profound, that these become no more than the tiniest ripples on the least wavelet on one infinitessimal section of its surface.
As the Niguma quote that starts this blog says:
If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation,
What can you achieve by applying an antidote?
Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them
But are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.
Until you reach a point where the well-being of others becomes more important than your own, your attitude is still pretty cramped - goldfish bowl - everything relates to you... MY happiness, MY progress, MY discomfort, MY likes and dislikes, etc., etc., ad infinitum nauseamque.
Compassion - karuna in Sanskrit, nying-je or t'ug-je ('lordly heart'or 'lordly enlightened mind') in Tibetan - is simply the attitude that others are obviously suffering quite as much as you are and that therefore you should find out the correct way to help in such a way that first their immediate needs are met, and then their profounder doubts and insecurities are calmed...
As HH Dalai Lama says, all this really needs to get it going is ordinary human intelligence and ordinary human kindness. A mere step in this direction of itself opens up the pathway to further refinement of your own attitude, to futher purification of your obscurations of conflicting emotion and primitive beliefs about reality.
Finally you reach a point where you may walk with both hands free, where your kindliness and concern know no bounds, where you genuinely rejoice in the good fortune of those around you and are immediate in responding to their suffering, and where you have no attachment to what you consider near and dear or distant and alien, no point of view to thump, no truths to drive home... You just help... In the knowledge that "truths" are useful as markers, direction-pointers and goads along a path, perhaps, but that the path itself - the REAL path - is ultimately ineffable, inconceivable and totally beyond all 'effort' or 'truth' or 'realisation'...
If this is what Jung means by a 'religious truth', then yes, I agree.
As a postscript to this, I'd like to point out the existence of an extraordinary book by HH Chogye Trichen Rinpoche concerning the abovementioned quatrain by Mañjushri. Presented in the form of a detailed commentary upon the 'song of experience' composed by Sachen Kunga Nyingpo's son, Jetsün Dragpa Gyälts'en, concerning the application of this text, it examines the practical meaning and application of each line in detail, and should come as a timely caveat to anyone who considers him or herself a 'Buddhist', or - even more so! - 'practitioner'.
Available from Snow Lion Publications, it's called:
Parting from the Four Attachments: Jetsun Drakpa Gyaltsen's Song of Experience on Mind Training and the View by Chogye Trichen Rinpoche
[SNOW LION PUBLICATIONS 2003]
ISBN - 1-55939-193-6
posted by cloudhand at 12:50 PM
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