Hi Thomas
This problem did occur to me while I was writing this post. I don’t think it is (or should be) simply a matter of technique, or that there is a simple distinction between eastern technique and western grace. In Japanese Pureland Buddhism for example there is the distinction between “self-power” (jiriki) and “other-power” (tariki), and of course devotional strands of Indian religion also have their versions of grace.
And I think there is a meeting place in the middle. Consider that serious contemplative orders in Christianity are full of technique in that their whole complex discipline is constructed to prepare the ground for grace. Consider the traditional Catholic mass and other services, with their music, art, incense, formal structures. I wouldn’t be the first to say that all these technologies are there to prepare the ground for grace.
As for the more austere yogic disciplines of the east, it’s true that there’s far less talk of grace or its equivalent, but here I would make two points.
First, ideas of grace are to be found: as I’ve mentioned, even the arch non-dualist Shankara wrote devotional songs; “shradda” or faith is one of the cardinal virtues in Buddhist practice; in Patanjali’s foundational yoga sutras one of the five cultivations is the invocation and reliance on Ishvara, a name for Saguna Brahman, or the personal God.
Second, I think we have to consider the underlying assumption of these traditions: that we’re already in the reality we’re looking for. So properly speaking there can be no instrumental relationship between whatever technique we employ and access to that reality. It’s all preparatory (and as ungraspable as grace). The Buddha’s eightfold path is a good example. It sets out a series of practices, intellectual, ethical, meditational, none of which have a direct cause and effect relationship with the goal of nibbana, which cannot be caused, but only serve to clear the path of obstacles like greed, hatred and delusion. This non-causal aspect of enlightenment is affirmed ever more explicitly in the language of non-duality as Buddhism developed, and is brought out most entertainingly in Zen.
But then there's Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas: the Kingdom of God is spread upon the Earth but men do not see it.
Here you’ve put your finger on where the new atheists are most vulnerable. Dennett says that he views the universe as “super” and “natural” but not “supernatural”. By turns his colleagues will cite the aesthetic impulse, landscapes or a peek through the Hubble telescope as worthy gateways to feelings of awe. The trouble is once they admit to anything like feelings of awe the game is up. They admit that there’s something in our deep experience that can’t be quantified (though they will hedge it around with the explications of evolutionary biology). More importantly I think they admit the primacy of concrete human experience itself, that complex, interdependent axis self/world where everything happens. And for good reason – if we can’t affirm the fundamental site of our humanity, we can’t affirm anything. This is the “yes” we all have to somehow get to, since this is the gateway through which everything passes, whether labeled science, religion or art.
The trouble is Dennett et al would police that site, legislate how and under what circumstances we are to experience awe and like emotions. To do that they impose on a vast complexity the Manichaen distinction science/superstition, and hobble the most intimate and subtle machinery we have for this kind of work: our own body/minds, or as the Buddha said, “this fathom-long body”.
It all comes down to the nature of the “yes”. BB in one of his recent posts noted the importance of choice at the heart of Judaism. It seems to me that choice comes in a series of forms: tribal, ethical, existential, etc., and that in each case we overwhelmingly answer “yes”, choose the tribe over isolation, good over evil, live over death, and that each of these affirmations is taken within a given set of rules, so that each “yes” is freighted with its specific context, and is bound to overlap and conflict at points with other yeses equally freighted.
But this is I think is as it should be, first, because no single yes can ever be enough to sum up the astonishing facts of existence (which after all is non-dual and beyond choice); second, because the yeses are or should be mutually corrective: engagement and renunciation mutually correct, as well as the intimacy of tribalism and the openness of universalism, and so on. And scientific method and subjective experience should also mutually correct.
Here I think we come to a pretty decent definition of “scientism”: it’s that point where science is practiced in a way to overturn this system of checks and balances between formative systems and legislates for the whole, by its own proprietary set of rules.
Characteristically, I’ve seen Richard Dawkins deny the very existence of scientism, let alone the application of the term to himself.
Vimalakirti
