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Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism

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c o m m o n g r o u n d between i s l a m a n d b u d d h i s m<br />

In terms of <strong>Islam</strong>ic spirituality, the very thought of tawhīd on the<br />

mental plane can itself become an obstacle in the path of spiritual<br />

realization of tawhīd, a realization which is predicated not just on the<br />

elimination of all mental constructs, but also on the extinction of individual<br />

consciousness. Any concept—even true ones—will entrench<br />

that consciousness, <strong>and</strong> thus is ‘wrong’ from the higher point of view<br />

of the reality which transcends all concepts. Buddhist conceptions of<br />

the Absolute are thus fashioned according to this paradoxical requirement:<br />

to conceive of the Absolute in a way which reveals the ultimate<br />

inadequacy of all concepts, <strong>and</strong> which focuses all spiritual aspiration<br />

on making a leap from the plane of finite thought to the plane of infinite<br />

reality. Another way of putting this is to say: ‘Those who seek the<br />

truth shouldn’t seek anything’. 49 Seeking a ‘thing’ will ensure that the<br />

truth of all things will not be found. Even having a view of a ‘thing’,<br />

will prevent one from ‘seeing’ all things:<br />

No view is seeing<br />

Which can see all things;<br />

If one has any views about things,<br />

This is not seeing anything. 50<br />

This attitude may be summed up succinctly in the words which<br />

come a few verses later: ‘divorcing the concept of things’. 51 It is<br />

not the ultimate nature of things that is negated, rather, what is<br />

negated is their susceptibility to adequate conceptualization: that<br />

ultimate nature can be delivered or glimpsed only in a flash of<br />

pure, supra-conceptual, awareness. So the best teaching, the best<br />

‘concept’, is that which predisposes one to this mode of intuitive<br />

cognition, which arises more out of a state of inner being than of<br />

formal thought. The ultimate Reality, far from being negated in<br />

this perspective, is affirmed in the deepest way in which it can be<br />

affirmed: by negating all that can in any way claim to be the Real<br />

on the level of thought <strong>and</strong> language, ‘name <strong>and</strong> form’ (namarupa):<br />

in <strong>Islam</strong>ic terms: lā ilāha illa’Llāh. To apply the distinction<br />

of Nāgārjūna between ‘conventional truth’ (samvrti-satyam) <strong>and</strong><br />

‘ultimate fruit’ (paramārtha), one might say that ‘divorcing the<br />

concept of things’ is a process which must lead from the domain of<br />

relative truth, where the concept of things is a veil, to the domain<br />

49. This is from the Vimalakirti Scripture, as cited by Cleary in ibid., p. 35.<br />

50. Ibid., p. 376.<br />

51. Ibid., p. 377.<br />

56

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